Right now in New York we had a couple cases where police grabbed the brother and beat him unmercifully – and then charged him with assaulting them. They used the press to make it look like he’s the criminal and they’re the victim. This is how they do it, and if you study how they do it here, then you’ll know how they do it over here. It’s the same game going all the time.1Malcolm X, “Educate Our People in the Science of Politics,” Malcolm X: The Final Speeches, February 1965, edited by Steve Clark (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992), 90.
-Malcolm X, “Educate Our People in the Science of Politics” (1965)
Bruised-fist grievance politics as an old imperial ruse
Malcolm X was neither the first nor the last to spot this pattern. The fact is that even the worst racists try to appropriate the cause of self-defense, since it is easier to attack from moral high ground.
The pattern is plain. In his book The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin linked it with “what is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood.”2Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 190. This is a well-developed ruse. Reinhold Niebuhr, the classical moralist of US power, saw this ruse as a pillar of what he described as “the imperial supremacy of the white races in the contemporary world.” To Niebuhr’s eyes, racism was strongest where it blurred the line between “the will-to-live and the will-to-power.” Where this line blurs, the moral fervor of a fight for survival can be enlisted in support of imperial domination: “So inextricably are the two intertwined, that the one may always be used to justify the other in conscious and unconscious deception.”3Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 42–43.
This ruse is standard. In the language of the Euro–American far right, the ruse is packaged in the slogans of “white genocide” or “white replacement.” The attempted white-power putsch of January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. was motivated by this falsified narrative of self-defense.4See Robert A. Pape, “What an Analysis of 377 Americans Arrested or Charged in the Capitol Insurrection Tells Us,” Washington Post (April 7, 2021); and Dartagnan, “Study Indicates the Capitol Riots were Motivated by Racism and White Resentment, not ‘Election Theft,’” Black Agenda Report (April 21, 2021), <https://www.blackagendareport.com/study-indicates-capitol-riots-were-motivated-racism-and-white-resentment-not-election-theft>. The story, as told by the neo-Nazis of our time, is that Indigenous, African, and Asian people are preparing to do to Europeans what Europeans did to them. It follows that further white violence is necessary for white survival.
This is hateful nonsense – but it is also typical, understandable nonsense. No oppressor, however brutal, has ever conceded the moral high ground without a fight. False victimhood is one of the most common ways that this ground is claimed. As Domenico Losurdo reminds us: “In the USA, the more ruthlessly the erasure of Native Americans from the face of the earth proceeded, the more repugnantly they were depicted. Discriminatory wars and wars of annihilation against colonial populations, whether external or internal to the metropolis, were justified by dehumanizing them; and this was achieved by sheer invention of ‘atrocities’ or by an inflation and one-sided reading of atrocities actually committed.”5Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2015), 156.Europe’s classical fascists read from the same script when they attacked Jews as the spearhead of “Judeo-Bolshevist” aggression.6See Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, Ma.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018).
In other words, the anti-Palestinian smears of 2021 are twisted, but they are not original. In fact, the smears cannot accurately be understood in isolation. They are as imperial in origin as the warplanes that have terrorized Gaza. As Malcolm X insisted, “it’s the same game going all the time.”
Historically, one of Israel’s services to empire was to make the false victimhood of the powerful sound persuasive – to lend the “reverse racism” ruse legitimacy. In a cruel irony, pro-Israel smear campaigns thus played into some of the most dangerous themes of holocaust “revisionism.” One of the main objectives of holocaust “revisionists” is to disavow Western responsibility for Nazi antisemitism by projecting responsibility for it onto the traditional targets of Western hate. For the notorious German revisionist Eric Nolte, the Nazi holocaust, since it was evil, could not have been Western; it must have been an “Asiatic deed.”7For details on Nolte and the wider revisionism to which he contributed, see Geoff Eley, “Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit, 1986–1987,” Past & Present 121 (1988), 171–208, as well as Losurdo, War and Revolution, and Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe. White supremacy emerges from this narrative all but unscathed. Pro-Israel attempts to depict the targets of Israeli racism as the real antisemites play into this game.8It is from this wider revisionism that pro-Israel smears derive their strength, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin argues in “Benjamin, the Holocaust, and the Question of Palestine,” in The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 79–91. For just how little this style of revisionism has to do with principled memory of the Nazi holocaust, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
They displace antisemitism onto Palestinians, Black-led social movements, and the Third World, twisting the legacy and reality of antisemitism into a moral mandate for Western power.
In 2021, this ruse is finally losing its social force. The links are just too obvious. In the United States, the most prominent spokesperson for classical white supremacy is Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Like Ayelet Shaked in Israel, Carlson has played around with using the term “fascism” in the first person.9See, respectively, Allison Kaplan Sommer, “Israel’s Justice Minister Sprays Herself with ‘Fascism’ Perfume in Provocative Campaign Ad,” Haaretz (March 18, 2019); and Tucker Carlson, Fox News Channel: Tucker Carlson Tonight (March 25, 2021), with video sampled at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H4-IQr-04E>. This April, Carlson made a point of justifying white nationalism in the US by celebrating Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians. It did not take much imagination, since Benjamin Netanyahu had drawn the same parallel. On a 2002 sympathy tour of Texas, Netanyahu argued that a dominant group should expel others with confidence. “You know about this,” he said in Dallas. “This is the reason you have an INS.”10As widely reported: see Ruben Naravette Jr., “Bibi Bombs in Dallas,” Washington Post (April 20, 2002). Extending this parallel in defense of “white replacement” theory, Carlson argued that US white nationalism is as justifiable as Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians.11See, with video, Tim Hains, “Tucker Carlson Cites ADL’s Statements on Arabs in Israel to Defend his Position on Mass Illegal Immigration in US,” Real Clear Politics (April 13, 2021), <https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/04/13/tucker_carlson_cites_adls_statements_on_arabs_in_israel_after_they_call_for_him_to_be_fired_for_racism.html>.
At this point, those who fail to see the overlap between “new antisemitism” and “white replacement” sloganry have not been looking closely. In recent years, Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism has become so extreme as to produce startling comparisons in surprising quarters. Even ardent supporters of Israel have compared the politics of Israel’s parliamentary far right to the politics of the Ku Klux Klan and of Nazi Germany. Increasingly, the only way for Israel’s apologists to shut down criticism of Israeli racism is to shut down anti-racism of any kind. The anti-racist scholar David Theo Goldberg warns that wider efforts to do this are underway.12See David Theo Goldberg, “The War on Critical Race Theory,” Boston Review (May 7, 2021), <http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory>. Historically, however, “new antisemitism” slogans offered a stronger line of attack, in part because Israel kept its anti-Palestinian violence quiet. That era is now over. The power of pro-Israel bullying persists; but we are already witnessing, and must hasten, the collapse of its moral credibility.
The nature and extent of Israeli racism in 2021
One of the worst contemporary contributors to holocaust revisionism is a pro-Israel smear outfit known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). For the IHRA, anti-racism is antisemitism. So too is basic honest thought. We can start, then, with one of the IHRA’s falsified examples of antisemitism: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”13See IHRA, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” <https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism>. For the IHRA, an early purveyor of the scourge of “new antisemitism” was Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
Traditionally, Israel’s main political parties were Labor and Likud. Ben-Gurion led the Labor Party; the forerunner of the Likud Party was a certain Vladimir Jabotinsky. Ben-Gurion often likened Jabotinsky’s politics to fascism and called him “Vladimir Hitler.”14This is recorded in piles of books, not least one written by Jabotinsky’s most loyal biographer: Joseph B. Schechtman, Figher and Prophet: The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1956), 248 Now, this should not obscure the fact that it was Ben-Gurion who organized the main expulsions of Palestinians in 1948. But to highlight the utter incoherence of IHRA revisionism, let us turn from Labor to Likud. Not even Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud Party was sufficiently anti-Palestinian to escape the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The right wing of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, of 2021, celebrates a racist doctrine known as Kahanism. Within Shamir’s Likud Party, right-wing Zionists compared Kahanism to Nazism as a matter of course.
“New antisemitism” slogans offered a stronger line of attack, in part because Israel kept its anti-Palestinian violence quiet. That era is now over.
Historically grounded anti-racists can interpret the lineage of Kahanism in various ways. Meir Kahane, after whom Kahanism is named, was an anti-Black, white-backlash activist in the United States before he moved to organizing Israeli hate squads to attack Palestinians. Word for word, his program replicates Puritan doctrines of anti-Indigenous hate. In Israel, however, memories of Nazism overshadow other anti-Black and anti-Indigenous histories, so Israelis more often compare Kahanism with Nazi antisemitism. Whatever parallel one chooses, Kahanist racism is second to none.
In 2019, then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought Kahanism into Israel’s governing mainstream. Old comparisons with the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany immediately spread among hardline supporters of Israel.15Kahanist politics were compared with Ku Klux Klan politics as early as 1969 by at least one US Jewish communal leader, due to the anti-Black activity of Kahane’s Jewish Defense League (JDL); the comparison was made by Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, then president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. See “Defense League Scored by Rabbi: He Likens Group to Whites in ‘Robes and Hoods,’” New York Times (May 18, 1969). In the United States, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of the Forward, warned that “Israel’s equivalent of the KKK” had entered government.16Batya Ungar-Sargon, “Netanyahu Just Invited Israel’s Equivalent of the KKK to Join the Government,” The Forward (February 20, 2019). In Israel, Rabbi Benny Lau – “a pillar of religious Zionism,” as the New York Times stressed – repeated the old comparison of Kahanist with Nazi politics. Rabbi Lau reminded Israelis that even Likud under Shamir made this comparison, and he urged that “the public review the comparison MK Michael Eitan made in the 1980s between the Nuremberg Laws and those Kahane sought to enact.”17The first quote is from David M. Halbfinger, “Israel’s Leader Stakes his Fate on Racist Party,” New York Times (February 25, 2019); the direct quotes from Rabbi Lau are from TOI Staff, “Prominent Rabbi Likens Vote for Otzma Yehudit to Backing Nuremberg Laws,” The Times of Israel (February 23, 2019).
Eitan, a Likud MK under Shamir, had simply detailed the similarity between the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws and the Kahanist program. To get a feel for this parallel, one can track Kahane’s rhetoric. In 1985, Kahane delivered the following speech in Haifa. First, he attacked Palestinian citizens of Israel as “roaches,” sanctifying genocidal violence: “We shall either cut their throats or throw them out.” Then he decreed that he would massacre Palestinians as soon as he had control of the Israeli army: “they will come to me, bow to me, lick my feet, and I will be merciful and will allow them to leave. Whoever does not leave will be slaughtered.”18Kahane’s speech was reported at the time by No’omi Cohen in a local newspaper, Kolbo Haifa. This and other passages from it are reproduced in Robert I. Friedman, “The Sayings of Rabbi Kahane,” New York Review (February 13, 1986), <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/02/13/the-sayings-of-rabbi-kahane/>. Time and again, Kahane signed his name to words like these. In books that Kahanist hate networks still proudly distribute, Kahane urged genocide, or in his words, “total extermination.”19Meir Kahane, “The Special Halachic Status of the Palestinians,” in Beyond Words: Selected Writings, 1960–1990, Vol. 7 (Jerusalem: Institute for the Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, 2010), 104.
These politics have swept into the Israeli mainstream. In April 2021, MK Itamar Ben-Gvir took the occasion of his first speech to the Knesset to praise Kahane by name.20Jacob Magid, “Far-Right MK: Meir Kahane Suffered ‘Character Assassination’ by the Media,” Times of Israel (April 26, 2021). Ben-Gvir was elected by Israeli voters who knew that he attended a wedding where “dancing participants stabbed a picture of Ali Dawabshe[h], a Palestinian toddler who had been killed in a settler firebombing attack.”21Tal Schneider, “Anyone but Ben Gvir: One Man’s Mission to Keep a Kahanist out of the Knesset,” Times of Israel (March 17, 2021). What followed, like a train that is never late, was a move from rhetoric to action. Ben-Gvir’s Klanist squads punctuated his speech with firebombing attacks on Palestinians in Jerusalem. “We’re burning Arabs today,” read one Israeli headline, reporting the April 2021 work of Ben-Gvir’s pogromchiks.22Nir Hasson, “‘We’re Burning Arabs Today’: Jewish Supremacists Gear up for Jerusalem March,” Haaretz (April 22, 2021). In their turn, Israeli state forces raided al-Aqsa Mosque and bombarded the Gaza Strip. Ben-Gvir has established himself as a central figure in Israeli media coverage and debates.
Most strikingly, where Ayelet Shaked and Tucker Carlson have played around with identifying with fascism, Kahanists have played around with identifying with Nazism. Jewish Israeli writers have long documented the identification of a settler fringe with Nazi politics.23After the distinguished Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz made this comparison from an anti-racist perspective, the well-known journalist Amos Oz interviewed a far-right settler who embraced the Nazi label. He said: “That’s right: Judeo-Nazis. Leibowitz was right. And why not? Why the hell not? . . . Fact: Himmler and Heydrich and Eichmann’s grandchildren live well.” This quote is from Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel, translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 94. In 2018, Israel’s leading daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, reported the scene when the grandfather of Ali Dawabsheh, the Palestinian toddler murdered by Ben-Gvir’s constituents, attended a court date for one of the smiling suspects: “‘Where is Ali? Burned! No more Ali! Dead, burned! On the grill, on fire!’ were the jubilant jeers that welcomed Hussein Dawabsheh this week as he was heading into the Lod District Court.” Startled, Yedioth argued that “‘Ali is burned, on the grill’ is a sort of Jewish reclaiming of the furnace.”24Yehuda Nuriel, “The monsters in our midst,” Yedioth Ahronoth (June 22, 2018). Then came the Kahanist lynchings of spring 2021. “We are no longer Jews today,” wrote one Israeli Telegram user: “Today we are Nazis.”25Ali Abunimah and Tamara Nassar, “‘Today we are Nazis,” says Member of Israeli Jewish Extremist Group,” Electronic Intifada (May 19, 2021), <https://electronicintifada.net/content/today-we-are-nazis-says-member-israeli-jewish-extremist-group/33081>. Ben-Gvir resists the Nazi label, but it seems that not all of his constituents do.26For Ben-Gvir’s opposition to being called a Nazi, see Gil Hoffman, “Religious Leader Rabbi Lau: A Vote for Bayit Yehudi is a Vote for Nazism,” Jerusalem Post (February 23, 2019); and Rogel Alpher, “Judeo-Nazis in Prime Time,” Haaretz (April 18, 2021).
Yet the real horror this spring was how the firebombs of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit were followed by the artillery shells of the Israel Defense [sic] Forces (IDF). At the level of language, this can be tracked with Kahanism into Israel’s mainstream. How, Kahane once asked, could he be faulted for saying that “the Arabs in our midst are a spreading cancer”? Kahane wrote that it was enough to “quote Binyamin Netanyahu, who warned the Galilee Arabs of the danger of their becoming part of the ‘cancer of the intifada.’”27Meir Kahane, “The State of Israel vs. Meir Kahane,” in Beyond Words, Vol. 7, 47 & 51. These hateful tropes now align with the politics of the IDF command. The “centrist” Moshe Ya’alon announced as much in 2002 during his tenure as IDF chief of staff. He told the press that Kahane and Netanyahu had been right about Palestinian politics: “I maintain it is a cancer,” he said. He then summarized the IDF command’s disagreement with Kahanism: “Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment, I am applying chemotherapy.”28 “Israeli Army Chief Says Applying ‘Chemotherapy’ to Palestinian ‘Cancer,’” Agence France Press (August 30, 2002).
Once again, the trope of “self-defense” is limitless in application. We can read it in the original US attack on “merciless Indian savages.”29US Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 <https://archive.org/details/DecOfIndy>. We can read it in the original fascist attack on democracy as “a war of the hand against the brain.”30Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 175, <https://archive.org/details/revoltagainstciv00stod>. This was the book that introduced the concept of “Under Man,” or Untermensch, into the fascist lexicon. More recently, we read it from the killer behind the white nationalist massacre of 2019 in El Paso, Texas, who “maintained that his attack was a preemptive action against Hispanic invaders and that ‘they are the instigators, not me.’”31Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 3.
How is anti-Palestinian racism any different? Israel’s current “defense” minister, Benny Gantz, oversaw the killing of 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza in 2014. He has advertised his killings as a point of pride.32For casualty figures, see United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “Key Figures on the 2014 Hostilities,” OCHA (June 23, 2015), <https://www.ochaopt.org/content/key-figures-2014-hostilities>. For Gantz’s boasts, see Yoav Galai, “Israel: How Benny Gantz’s Campaign Has Turned State Violence and Dead Palestinians into Political Capital,” The Conversation (March 27, 2019), <https://theconversation.com/israel-how-benny-gantzs-campaign-has-turned-state-violence-and-dead-palestinians-into-political-capital-113145>. On May 11, 2021, Gantz even sent a video message to Palestinians in Gaza, boasting about “the last time that we met on Eid al-Fitr” and threatening: “Gaza will burn.”33See Tamara Nassar, “Israel Vows That ‘Gaza Will Burn,’” Electronic Intifada (May 13, 2021), <https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-vows-gaza-will-burn>.These are the actions and words of a state that stands exposed before the eyes of the world as a surrogate of US power.
Once upon a time, US diplomats could celebrate Israel’s false victimhood. In 1976, Daniel Patrick Moynihan took the occasion of the bicentennial of US independence to praise Israel as the loveliest symbol of Western power on earth. “In its mortal peril,” Moynihan said, Israel “has become a metaphor for the condition of democracy in the world today.”34Quoted in Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 54. Now as then, Israel does embody the false moralism of its most powerful sponsors. But as the hatreds of Ben-Gvir and Gantz are exposed for the world to see, what was once a point of imperial strength has increasingly become a liability.
The “new antisemitism” as reverse-racism misdirection
The actual history of antisemitism is also a history of racism.
Classical antisemitism presumed an anti-Black and imperial worldview. For the proto-Nazi antisemite Houston Stewart Chamberlain, “the Jew” was “a cross between negro and white man,” a “Semite” who emerged “from the deserts of Arabia” to infiltrate Western civilization.35Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1, translated by John Lees (London: John Lane, 1910), 368. The whole point was to attack European Jews as racial fifth columnists. Spinning off of the standard attack on Jews as “Asiatic,” France’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline urged white supremacist attacks on European Jews precisely because they were “Negroid Jews.”36For Céline’s prattle about the racial war of “Juifs négroïdes contre Blancs,” see Hanebrink, Specter Haunting Europe, 109. In Germany, meanwhile, the Journal of Racial and Social Biology focused on anti-Black racism for decades before adding anti-Jewish racism to its pages in 1935.37See George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 82–83. In other words, actual antisemitism is multi-issue hatred, targeting Jews as allies of the imagined barbarians at the gates of Western civilization. It is to this heritage that the enemy Sieg Heiled in Charlottesville with chants of, “Jews will not replace us.”38See Glen Ford, “American Exceptionalism = Mass Murder,” Black Agenda Report (August 8, 2019), <https://www.blackagendareport.com/american-exceptionalism-mass-murder>.
As the hatreds of Ben-Gvir and Gantz are exposed for the world to see, what was once a point of imperial strength has increasingly become a liability.
The phrase “new antisemitism” – in sharp contrast – refers to anti-racism. It is a classical example of what Frantz Fanon called “verbal mystification,” the wordsmithery with which racism lies its way into virtue.39Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” in Toward the African Revolution, translated by Haakon Chevalier (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 37. The original copy of this classical speech, with its interwoven challenge to colonial and anti-Jewish racisms, is available with other proceedings of the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956) in the June–November 1956 edition of Présence Africaine. It is also a declaration of war on anti-racist memory. In Germany, the attempt to rewrite the history of antisemitism to Western advantage led to the revisionism of Eric Nolte, who argued that Nazi violence was not a Western but an “Asiatic deed.”40See note 7, above. The “new antisemitism” ruse is subtler. But as Peter Novick has shown in his study The Holocaust in American Life, it has nothing to do with principled anti-Nazi memory.41See note 8, above. And it pushes in Nolte’s direction. Even admirers of the ruse stress that its political function is to “dramatize the ideology of the West.”42I quote from a book-length tribute to the ruse; see Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 213.
As anti-Palestinian racism consumes Israeli politics, the “new antisemitism” ruse is radicalizing. Netanyahu was so single-minded in his anti-Palestinian hate that he embraced holocaust revisionism of the crudest sort. It was a spectacular disgrace. Netanyahu literally fabricated evidence in an attempt to shift blame for the Nazi holocaust from Germany onto the Palestinians, earning neo-Nazi praise and a dishonorable mention in Federico Finchelstein’s Brief History of Fascist Lies.43See TOI Staff, “US Neo-Nazis: Netanyahu Is Right About Hitler and the Jews,” Times of Israel (October 23, 2015); and Finchelstein, Brief History of Fascist Lies, 97–98. But this is an extreme example. More often, “new antisemitism” means something roughly equivalent to “reverse racism.”
This line of attack can be dated to the US legitimacy crisis of the late 1960s. White-backlash specialists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan led the way, attacking affirmative action as antisemitic.44See Peter Kihss, “Moynihan Scores Ethnic Quota Idea,” New York Times (June 5, 1968). The basic outlines of this verbal mystification are as follows. While actual antisemitism attacks Jews as non-Western outsiders, “new antisemitism” theory flips the script. It represents Jews as timelessly white and Western, then attacks challenges to white or Western power as anti-Jewish. Generations of anti-racists have exposed this for what it is: a bullying product of what one US Jewish leader denounced as “[t]he white (including, God help us, the Jewish) backlash.”45Henry Schwarzschild, “Jews and Civil Rights,” Jewish Advocate (October 8, 1964).
The line was that “anti-whitism” was the real problem, and that “anti-Semitism” was just one form that this problem took. I am quoting Nathan Glazer, Moynihan’s longtime collaborator. Glazer blamed racial justice movements: “In every black neighborhood of every city, there have arisen spokesmen who have been intemperate in their attacks on whites, on the ‘power structure,’ on policemen, teachers, social workers, landlords, businessmen, and – where these are Jews – on Jews.”46Nathan Glazer, “Blacks, Jews & the Intellectuals,” Commentary 47, no. 4 (1969), 34. In this story, the US “power structure” had to suppress an “anti-whitism” that was persecuting police.47In callous service to power, Glazer alleged that the Black Panther Party was coming for US police just as the Nazis had come for Jews: “the Black Panthers believe that the gun is the only solution to problems, that policemen are ‘pigs,’ and that to kill them is not murder (just as to kill Jewish ‘swine’ was not murder to Nazis)”; Glazer, “Blacks, Jews & the Intellectuals,” 36. This nonsense deserves no response. For actual analysis of the figure of the ‘pig’ and the Panther response to popular fears of police violence, see Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 135–137.
It was in this context that Kahane learned his first lines. He pushed forward with the “white replacement” logic detectable in the work of Moynihan and Glazer. His story was that Black migration to northern US cities from the former Confederacy was racially invasive. This is how the story sounded: “‘People used to sit on stoops and benches at all times of the day and night,’ said Allan Mallenbaum, a childhood friend of Kahane. ‘Nobody was afraid of crime. You never saw a Black face.’”48Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, from FBI Informant to Knesset Member (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990), 10. Kahane thus preached composite white power as a matter of self-defense. Significantly, Kahane presented his program in celebration of racial whiteness. He said: “The Jew is the weakest link in the white chain and the black militant knows that few non-Jews are concerned with the Jew’s plight. The Jew has always been more liberal than other white ethnic groups. So now most Jewish neighborhoods are integrated and the militant blacks there practice terror.”49As quoted in Stan Fischler, “Not-So-Nice Jewish boys Cause a Stir,” The Sun [Baltimore] (January 24, 1971).
This story was tailored to fit the needs of the dominant US culture. This is plain in Glazer’s denunciation of Black anti-police racism.50See note 47, above. But more than this, Novick shows that US patriots saw their own pioneer history in European Jewish settlement in Palestine. Just before the Palestine expulsions of 1948, the editor of the Boston Herald could liken the dispossession of the Palestinians to the “conquest of the Indians and the inevitable giving way of a backward people before a more modern and practical one.”51As quoted in Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 73. See also Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006). The doctrine of “anti-whitism” as “new antisemitism” was thus versatile. It offered a means of celebrating both anti-Black racism and the pioneer mystique.
The pseudo-religious flair of Israeli racism should not obscure how closely it was modeled on the US example. For its part, US white supremacy also focused on a pseudo-Biblical disparagement of Black people as descendants of Ham.52This legacy is unpacked in Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). But it was the anti-Indigenous example of the United States that cut deepest in Palestine. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz records how the Puritans pioneered anti-Indigenous demonization in the literal sense. No sooner had English settlers arrived in North America than they “identified the Indigenous population as inherently children of Satan and ‘servants of the devil’ who deserved to be killed.”53Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 36.
The result was a distinctive colonial theology. First in New England and then in Palestine, settlers seized upon a line from the Book of Samuel: “Now go, attack Amalek . . . Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”541 Samuel 15:3. While this line is inherently troubling, most religious traditions navigate such lines with extreme caution. The association of “Amalek” with living people is opportunistic viciousness. This settler reading of scripture is foreign to traditional Jewish thought, as is Zionism more generally.55For details on how Zionism and the State of Israel break with Jewish tradition, see Yakov M. Rabkin, What is Modern Israel?, translated by Fred. A Reed (London: Pluto Press, 2016). Yet its transposition from New England to Palestine came easily. One reason is that Protestant white supremacy was framed around the claim that Protestant Christendom was itself the Israel of which the Bible spoke. By 1871, the US magazine Living Age could still celebrate anti-Indigenous violence with this theme: “As the Israelites slew the Amalekites, so did the Pilgrims slay the Pequot.”56As quoted in John Corrigan, “Amalek and the Rhetoric of Extermination,” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, edited by Chris Beneke and Christoper S. Grenda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 70. I refer again with the utmost respect to Salaita, Holy Land in Transit.
In turn, the post-1948 Israel – a settler knock-off par excellence – absorbed US settler theology almost as readily as it absorbed US weapons. By 1956, David Ben-Gurion could refer to the Palestinians whom his militias had expelled into the Gaza Strip as “hosts of Amalek.”57As quoted in David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (New York: Nations Books, 2003), 327. This was violent enough from Ben-Gurion. But when Kahane arrived from New York, he helped Israelis sharpen this theme with the worst exterminism imaginable. If Palestinians are Amalekites, Kahane preached, then Palestinian adults and children should alike be killed as “Hamans, large and small,” by hate squads confident in the knowledge that “the All Mighty decrees that they be cruel.”58Kahane, “Saulism,” in Beyond Words, Vol. 7, 104.
At first glance, it seems ludicrous to claim that opposition to anti-Palestinian cruelty shows insensitivity to the oppression of European Jews. Here too, however, the template had already been drawn. Anglo–American power was second to none in spinning cruelty as compassion. And it had developed a powerful tradition of moral misdirection. This point is flagged by Gerald Horne, one of the leading anti-racist historians in the United States. How, Horne asks, was it possible to whitewash the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence endemic to US history? The racism was barely concealed. How could it be brushed aside in celebration of US liberty? Horne proposes that one “explanation for this abject hypocrisy is that too many could not see beyond the deliverance of poorer Europeans from the barbarism they endured on their home continent to a sympathy with those victimized in the process.”59Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 29. This ruse is a classical feature of settler moralism.
The pseudo-religious flair of Israeli racism should not obscure how closely it was modeled on the US example.
It starts with a truth. Europeans did endure barbarism on their home continent, from English sweatshops to the starving Irish countryside. The ruse then moves to a falsehood: that this justifies violence against Black and Indigenous people in order to deliver Europeans from oppression. Moving from the truth to the falsehood is the work of racist moralism, and making the move sound persuasive is the work of verbal mystification.
Two early examples illustrate how this worked. The first is British. One of the worst outbursts of anti-Black violence from Britain was the massacre of Jamaican laborers in punishment for their rebellion of 1865. The killings were horrific.60For context and details, see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992). To quote briefly from page 302, concerning the horrors of 1865: “When the final tallies of the government’s repression were made, they revealed that a terrible vengeance had been unleased: 439 dead, hundreds flogged, and 1,000 houses burned. . . . Despite orders for restraint, people were flogged with whips made of twisted, knotted wires, and scores were shot or hung after drumhead court-martials. Commanders were quite explicit about the objective of official violence: they intended to instill terror.” Covering for them, distinguished Englishmen alleged that to oppose anti-Black violence was to show disrespect for the English poor. “Carlyle and Ruskin, Kingsley, and Dickens all insisted that it was not worth considering the injustices perpetrated against Jamaican ‘n*****s’ as long as English working men continued to groan under the oppression of the factory system.”’61Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin), 30. The second example is American. In the US, leaders presented the westward assault on Indigenous life as a quest to secure land for the European poor. In the words of another conservative historian, “the concept of America as asylum for the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ was made to serve this muscular version of the national destiny.”62Clinton Rossiter, “The American Mission,” The American Scholar 20, no. 1 (1950–51), 23.
In this historical light, the moralizing logic of Western support for Israel snaps into focus. Imperial moralists were already whitewashing colonial violence by presenting it as a way to help Europeans escape “the barbarism they endured on their home continent.” Then, as Aimé Césaire described it, along came the Nazis and inflicted upon Europe the “crowning barbarism” of modern Western history.63Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. The spectacular viciousness of Nazi racism helped push white supremacy into a legitimacy crisis on a planetary scale.64The results are surveyed in Howard Winant, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). As racism’s legitimacy crisis deepened in the 1960s, US moralists found in Palestine a means of twisting Nazi horrors into colonial frames of reference.65Once again, Novick, The Holocaust in American Life shows how little this had to do with principled holocaust memories, as does, with more impressionistic commentary and a sharpened focus on Palestine, Yitzhak Laor, The Myths of Liberal Zionism (London: Verso, 2009), as originally published by France’s leading anti-racist publishing house: Yitzhak Laor, Le nouveau philosémitisme européen et le ‘camp de la paix’ en Israël (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2007). See also note 8.
Within a US frame, the story of Palestine became a tale of colonial redemption, featuring Palestinians as new “Amalekites” and European Jews as new “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It was a powerful allegory for Western virtue. Construing Israel as a moral force vindicated the entire logic of settler colonialism. Justice once more demanded the brutalization of Indigenous people by settlers yearning to breathe free. The opportunistic benefits were plain. Since the entire Third World supported the Palestinians, anti-colonialism could itself be attacked as a “new antisemitism,” affirming Western tolerance against the foil of Afro-Asian bigotry.66For details on the breadth of anti-colonial support for Palestinians, see A.W. Singham and Shirley Hune, Non-alignment in an Age of Alignments (Harare: The College Press, 1986); Odette Jankowitsch and Karl P. Sauvant, The Third World Without Superpowers: The Collected Documents of the Non-Aligned Movement (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1978–1993); and the more Palestine-focused analysis of G.H. Jansen, Zionism, Israel and Asian Nationalism (Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1971).
Such deception is traditional colonial fare. As Aimé Césaire warned, when it comes to colonialism, “the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them.”67Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 32. But the “new antisemitism” ruse has now been in use for half a century. Where once it seemed clever, it now seems bizarre. A white liberalism that hides its own deceptive moralizing behind Israeli racism is increasingly not hiding at all. Phyllis Chesler once celebrated the symbolism of Israel by declaring on behalf of the United States: “we are all Israelis.”68As quoted in Sherene Razack, “Geopolitics, Culture Clash, and Gender After September 11,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005), 20. At this stage, such a message can only further plunge US power into a deepening legitimacy crisis.
A McCarthyism in crisis versus the Palestinian freedom struggle
After the neo-Nazi rally of 2017 in Charlottesville, Catherine Squires reflected on the gaslighting lies with which we are constantly flooded. One is pushed to doubt oneself, Squires wrote, “when each new headline or tweet makes one want to rub her eyes to test if it’s just a trick of the light . . . Was it just my imagination that they were marching with tiki torches and making Nazi salutes?”69Catherine R. Squires, “Epilogue Incantation,” in Racism Postrace, edited by Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 284.
Charlottesville, at least, was hard to whitewash. The slogans of “white replacement” fooled no one. Squires continued: “I don’t know if it was scarier when racism was insisting it didn’t exist anymore or when the racists held the tiki torches high to spotlight their faces and they proclaimed their faith in the full glare of CNN cameras.”70Cuires, “Epilogue Incantation,” 285. The same question arises in Palestine, as Israel openly embraces the politics of hate. After Charlottesville, it was impossible to deny the racism of the Trump White House. The bogus tale of Israeli self-defense will take more work to dislodge.
But these things always take time. By the 1960s, it was still possible for US racists to attack anti-Klan activists on the old grounds. “This is how they psycho you,” Malcolm X warned, time and again. “You say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be a Ku Klux Klan in reverse.’”71Malcolm X, “Science of Politics,” 89. In the years ahead, pro-Israel smears of antisemitism will stand exposed as more of the same. The anti-Palestinian tropes will sound just like it sounds when we hear Tucker Carlson agree that racism is, of course, a terrible problem, a problem of “anti-white racism, which is now the only acceptable form of racism in the West,” etc., etc.72Tucker Carlson, Fox News Channel: Tucker Carlson Tonight (March 24, 2021). Carlson, Netanyahu, and the rest are singing in harmony. Amid the Kahanist carnage of May 2021 in “mixed cities,” Israeli president Reuvin Rivlin accused Palestinian citizens of Israel of antisemitic aggression.73See Jonathan Lis, “Rivlin Condemns ‘Pogroms’ by Israeli Arabs, Netanyahu Touts ‘Iron Fist’ to Quell Unrest,” Haaretz (May 12, 2021). As contrasted with the reality detailed by David Sheen, “How a Fascist Party Brought into Israel’s Parliament by Netanyahu Helped Him Start the War he Wanted,” Gray Zone (May 26, 2021), <https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/26/fascist-party-netanyahu-israels-parliament-war/>. In US Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke of “an Islamic invasion into our government offices.”74As quoted in Marianna Sotomayor, “Rep. Green Aggressively Confronts Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Causing New York Congresswoman to Raise Security Concerns,” Washington Post (May 14, 2021). In Britain, the notorious Islamophobe Tommy Robinson meanwhile celebrated Israeli atrocities to the noise of chants including, “may your village burn.”75Asa Winstanley, “At London Israel Demo, Calls to ‘Burn’ Palestinian Villages,” Electronic Intifada (June 1, 2021), <https://electronicintifada.net/content/london-israel-demo-calls-burn-palestinian-villages/33281>.
These types deserve each other.
Meanwhile, the plain fact is that the Palestinian freedom struggle stands on the frontlines of the international struggle against the rising politics of hate. So the lies will continue to come. But the lies are losing their capacity to deceive, and those who continue to reproduce them will only help people of conscience to distinguish friend from foe. The people of Palestine have shown the world what bravery means – it should take more than stale smears to make anyone else flinch. McCarthyisms can only last for so long. It is time to make this one collapse.