On antisemitic Zionism

John Ganz, scholar of populisms and other social diseases, deconstructs this unholy convergence. 

... Israel may seem to stir up antisemitism through its aggression and bellicosity. But in some cases it actually neutralizes antisemitism: It puts the Jews in an acceptable context.

Many on the Christian Right don’t particularly care for the Jews, but in so far as Israel is part of their idea of a divine plan, they have a conditional acceptance of the Jews. They “like” Jews because Jews = Israel. This doesn’t always have a religious underpinning, or rather, something else often lurks beneath the religious veil.

Many on the far right may not like Jews in so far as they are liberals, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and so forth, but love Zionism. They say, in effect, “Heck, I may I don’t like Jews, but I love all these soldiers, tanks, bombs, checkpoints, and settlements.” In so far as Jews act as intrepid settlers on the far edge of “Western civilization,” and are appropriately aggressive and brutal with the lesser races, they can even celebrate the Jews. They don’t tolerate a certain degree of settler-colonialism because its being done by Jews who deserve their own homeland after so many years of persecution and ultimately genocide, as liberal Zionists do, but they tolerate Jews only in so far as they are settler-colonists.

They might not state it openly, but the “apartheid” stuff is not so much a pejorative label in their minds as a positive condition for their support. For such people, Zionism “naturalizes” the Jews, it literally and metaphorically gives them a place: rather than being a disturbing alien entity in the midst of a larger society, it makes them a people or even a race like any other. It also transforms Jews, to use a term from apartheid South Africa, into “honorary whites”—even if Israel has a majority Sephardic and Mizrahi population now.

Apartheid South Africa, founded on the basis of a deeply antisemitic ideology, came to cooperate with Israel not just out of realism and mutual self-interest, but because Zionism made Jews recognizable to them: these Jews they could deal with. Just look at how the apartheid government understood Israel: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Zionism also lets antisemites imagine a world without Jews: “Well, they can eventually just go to Israel, I suppose.” Their “Jewish problem,” as it were, is thereby solved.

... Just as some will only extend solidarity to Jews in so far as they are vocally anti-Zionist, there are also those who will only extend solidarity to the Jews in so far as they are Zionists. These are both forms of antisemitism: they treat Jews as not really be full members of the societies they belong to, but as props in their own ideological or racial struggles.

Just say no to making anyone political props!