In this seemingly topsy-turvy world we live in, the charge of ‘antisemitism’ and its offshoot ‘antisemite’ have been hurled at anyone who dares suggest that there is something deeply flawed about the State of Israel.
Likewise branded are those who have been protesting against Israel’s winner-takes-all retaliation for the Hamas October 7 massacre.
Strange too, are those who resort to these charges, and the etymological mishmash that’s been made of them. How did it happen, that so many non-Jews feel authorised to use them? People like Andrew Bolt, for instance? Or the Republican House majority in Congress?
To answer these questions, perhaps a nod to history is required.
In 2005, on the State of Israel’s initiative, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 60/7 establishing 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was the day in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated the inmates of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Israel’s aim was not merely to commemorate the liberation and its human rights significance, but to promote knowledge of the Holocaust. A UN-sponsored program was established to this end. Through the many events and participants in the program, with Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem’s central role in the exercise, some greater understanding of what happened in Holocaust, to its Jewish victims in particular, gained wider acceptance – an acceptance that wasn’t as evident in the years immediately after the war.
The brain child of Israel’s department of public diplomacy – its propaganda unit and dispenser of Israeli hasbara- the UN resolution was thus a public relations exercise. Israel already had its own Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrated each May since 1949. But 2005 marked the end of the Palestinians’ second intifada. For Palestinians, the Oslo Accords of 1993 had proved a manifest failure.Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movements had in fact tightened, illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank continued to spread, while the corrupted Palestinian Authority had proved little more than an enforcer of Israeli policy. Palestinians saw that suicide bombing hadn’t worked, and turned from violent resistance towards peaceful means of ending the Occupation instead. Thus began the BDS movement, standing for boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel, which was gaining traction internationally. Needless to say, BDS is reviled by Israel and its supporters, and through their efforts some Western countries have rendered it unlawful.
2005 was also the year when campaigning began for control of the Palestinian Authority’s new legislative council. All havoc broke loose, though, when the following January, Hamas won the election. In a classic divide-and-rule tactic, with Western allies either urging or approving, Israel pulled its settlements out of Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge there, and reinstalled the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority on the West Bank.
We know the rest. For 18 years Gaza has been under siege. In 2008, Hamas launched a barrage of short-range Qassam rockets across the border into southern Israel, to which Israel responded with full-scale bombardment in a heavily disproportionate reprisal. To further its defence, Israel established its ‘Iron Dome’, a high-tech battery-operated system for intercepting and destroying shells that could threaten Israeli populations, especially in the south of the country. Arguably, the Dome’s weakness was the complacency its effectiveness engendered. With a combination of a sense of the Dome’s inviolability and its back-street payments to Hamas for its quiescence, Netanyahu took his eye off the ball. Last October, Hamas seized the moment. Its militants breached the border, unleashing a horrific massacre – a move so easy it’s been suggested that Hamas was as surprised as the rest of us were, including the Israeli military. And if, going on previous responses, Israel’s disproportionate reprisal was to be predicted, it has been far worse than any of us could have imagined. A humanitarian catastrophe amounting to outright genocide.
As in every month of May since 1949, Israel has held the Yom HaShoah – its own Holocaust Remembrance Day. As well as the customary two-minute siren and moment of silence, the commemoration gave Netanyahu the opportunity to put his two cents’ worth on antisemitism:
‘The antisemitism that has been latent in the West since the Holocaust is returning in full force. Today, new accusations are levelled against us, such as committing genocide and starving Gaza. But what genocide are they talking about? We do everything to avoid harming civilians. And what starvation are they talking about? We allow food and medicine into Gaza to prevent a humanitarian crisis. Like in days past, the accusations are not because of what we do, but because of our mere existence.’
To underline the point, he added that, ‘it resembles what happened in Germany in the 1930s, and this time, it’s happening in America in 2024.’
And in his address, Israel’s president Isaac Herzog went as far as bracketing antisemitism with terrorism:
‘To our brothers and sisters in Jewish communities around the world, who are currently under threat and attack – in communities and campuses. I address them from here – from our eternal capital, and say: we stand with you shoulder to shoulder against the onslaught of antisemitism, terrorism, and hatred directed at you in recent days. The State of Israel is with you.’
Of course, such official messages are part of any nation’s mythmaking remit. But as Chris Hedges often says, ‘Israel lies.’ And in the present climate the lies are not only bellicose and incendiary, but galling to a Jew like me who grew up in a time of intense antisemitism. Even after the second world war, when we were learning more and more about the horrors of the Holocaust, antisemitism in all its guises was rampant. Yes, from 1948, when Israel was declared (and Palestinians suffered their Nakba), many European Jews who survived the Holocaust found refuge there. But that was because that Israel was now there to take them, after many Western countries had effectively closed their doors to them.
Here, in my experience, are some examples of what genuine antisemitism is. It isn’t criticising Israel. It isn’t mere ‘discomfort’ on seeing a Palestinian flag, or hearing certain words expressed at a pro-Palestinian rally. It’s limiting the number of Jews admitted to prestige universities with ‘quotas’. It’s marking off certain neighbourhoods as Jew-free in so-called ‘gentleman’s agreements’. It’s closing membership of clubs to Jews. At UCLA, where I went before coming to Australia, university campus student housing was segregated along Gentile/Jewish lines. Jews had been lynched in the American south. In the depths of the Depression, my grandfather, a grocer in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was set upon by the Ku Klux Klan, when the groceries he was giving away to the town’s unemployed ran out. Many prominent Americans such as Charles Lindbergh, or Henry Ford, or Henry Luce, were known antisemites. Authors too could be unthinkingly antisemitic: Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway to name just two.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has figures for an exponential rise in antisemitic incidents over the past months. I’m not examining the figures – numbers aren’t exactly my forte. But it’s curious that so little attempt is made by them, or pro-Zionist organisations like them, to correlate this rise with Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people and its culmination in one of history’s most horrific human tragedies.
One thing is certain, none of us can expect to be ‘safe’ now. Because of Israel.
Sara Dowse
Sara Dowse is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist. Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.