https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/asperities/anti-semitism-and-western-decline/
One year after October 7, the global reaction to the invasion of Israel by Hamas with all its barbarities has shown us that we are living in national societies and in an international order that are drastically different from those we had previously imagined. After a brief period of shock when all civilised people condemned the rapes and murders carried out by Hamas, the principal political impact over the last year has been a global upsurge of anti-Semitism shown, for instance, in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in New York, London, Berlin, and other cities across the West and—more alarmingly—in some of our greatest universities.
Were these demonstrations anti-Semitic or merely anti-Zionist? There is a logical distinction between the two terms. Some religious Jews have been hostile to Zionism since Herzl, and there was a popular movement of Christian Zionism in nineteenth-century Britain. But since the establishment of Israel in 1948 as a legitimate nation-state born under UN auspices and recognised in international law, reasonable and decent people have been Zionists at least in the practical sense that they accept the existence and legitimacy of the State of Israel. If they don’t—and, of course, some states and peoples don’t—then they’re engaged in a discourse that is fundamentally subversive of international order and a source of constant international tension.
That theoretical distinction is now a non-issue anyway because recent pro-Palestinian protests included plainly anti-Semitic elements. Demonstrators chanted slogans that were genocidal towards Israel and supportive of Hamas, which is avowedly hostile to all Jews. Some of them surrounded, threatened, and physically attacked or restrained local Jews who were wearing kippahs or simply “looking Jewish”. Many of their London victims were almost certainly not Israelis—though they may be soon if the police do not take stronger action to enforce the law equally and to protect both Jewish and other non-Muslim citizens against thuggery and intimidation.
This upsurge of anti-Semitism has surprised a great many people—fewer among Jews than among Gentiles, perhaps—who had thought that anti-Semitism was largely a thing of the past in the Western world. And we should notice the evidence of opinion polls is that most citizens of Western countries do not support the demonstrators and do support Israel. It is a vocal minority—even among Muslims—that expresses hatred of Jews or support for genocidal policies. But it is a more substantial bloc of opinion in universities, cultural institutions, the mainstream media, and the political Left.
What explains this spread of a political virus that until a year ago seemed confined to the extremes of political life? Among many reasons I would suggest three:
1/ The gradual weakening of the taboo against anti-Semitism that has protected the political life of Western democracies since we discovered the hideous evil of the Holocaust in 1945.
2/ Global migration flows that have imported into the West large migrant communities, in particular from the Middle East, which have brought their local quarrels with them.
3/ The Six-Day War. Israel’s victory in 1967 and its continuing dominance of the region (together with its capitalist economic success) have made it, in the eyes of the modern progressive Left, a “settler” colony of the West and thus a force on the wrong side of history. And the Western Left—which is coincidentally enjoying a burst of energy in its wokeist revolution—happens to be dominant in the universities, the media, cultural institutions, and anti-racist NGOs. The alliance between Islamists and Western leftist progressives in support of Hamas has triumphed over their incompatibility on almost everything else.
Let us now turn to the international implications of this global reaction to Hamas’s war. For most of our adult lives the modern international order has had three reference points.
