![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/eurovision-copy.png\")
\nMy previous post was about the firing of a cartoonist, Dieter Hanitzsch, by the German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung after its editor became concerned \u2013 though, it seems, far from sure \u2013 that a cartoon he had published of Benjamin Netanyahu might be anti-semitic. Here is the image again.<\/p>\n\n
As I argued<\/a> then, the meaning seems pretty clear and uncoloured by any traditional notion of anti-semitism. It shows the danger that Israel, a highly militarised state, will use its win at the Eurovision song contest, and its hosting of next year\u2019s competition in occupied Jerusalem, to whitewash the sort of war crimes it just committed in Gaza, where it has massacred large numbers of unarmed Palestinians.<\/p>\n In fact, the cartoonist is far from alone in highlighting such concerns. The New York Times has reported<\/a> delight among Israelis at the prospect of what they regard as a \u201cdiplomatic victory\u201d as much as musical one. And, according to the Haaretz newspaper, the Eurovision contest organisers have already expressed concern<\/a> to Israeli broadcasters about likely attempts by Israel to \u201cpoliticise\u201d the competition.<\/p>\n Among those responding on Twitter to my post was Naomi Wolf, a US Jewish intellectual and feminist scholar whose body of work I admire. She disagreed with my blog post, arguing that the cartoon was, in her words, \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d.<\/p>\n In our subsequent exchange she also noted that she was uncomfortable with the fact that the cartoonist was German. (For those interested, the complete exchange can be found here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n In the end, and admittedly under some pressure from me for clarification, she offered an illustration of why she thought the cartoon was \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d. She sent a link<\/a> to the image below, stating that she thought Hanitzsch\u2019s cartoon of Netanyahu had echoes of this Nazi image of \u201cthe Jew\u201d alongside an Aryan German woman.<\/p>\n Frankly, I was astounded by the comparison.<\/p>\n Cartoons in Nazi propaganda sheets like Der Sturmer were anti-semitic because they emphasised specific themes to \u201cotherise\u201d Jews, presenting them as a collective menace to Germany or the world. Those themes included the threat of plague and disease, with Jews often represented as rats; or secret Jewish control over key institutions, illustrated, for example, by the tentacles of an octopus spanning the globe; or the disloyalty of Jews, selling out their country, as they hungered for money.<\/p>\n As Wolf notes, anti-semitic cartoonists would give the portrayed \u201cJew\u201d grotesque or sinister facial features to alienate readers from him and convey the threat he posed. These features famously included a large or hooked nose, voracious lips, and a bulbous or disfigured head.<\/p>\n So how did the cartoon of Netanyahu qualify on any of these grounds? There is no implication that Netanyahu represents \u201cJews\u201d, or even Israelis. He is illustrated straightforwardly as the leader of a country, Israel. There is no sense of disease, world control or money associated with Netanyahu\u2019s depiction. Just his well-known hawkishness and Israel\u2019s well-documented status as a highly militarised state.<\/p>\n And there is nothing \u201cgrotesque\u201d or \u201cother\u201d about Netanyahu. This is a typical caricature, certainly by European standards, of a world leader. It\u2019s no more offensive than common depictions of Barack Obama, George Bush, Tony Blair, or Donald Trump.<\/p>\n What follows is not meant as an attack on Wolf. In fact, I greatly appreciate the fact that she was prepared to engage sincerely and openly with me on Twitter. And I acknowledge her point that judgments about what is anti-semitic are subjective.<\/p>\n But at the same time ideas about anti-semitism have become far vaguer, more all-encompassing, than ever before. In fact, I would go so far as to say the idea of anti-semitism has been metamorphosing before our eyes in ways extremely damaging to the health of our political conversations. It is the current mystification of anti-semitism \u2013 or what we might term its transformation into a \u201ckind of antisemitism\u201d \u2013 that has allowed it to be weaponised, limiting all sorts of vital debates we need to be having.<\/p>\n It is precisely the promotion of a \u201ckind of anti-semitism\u201d, as opposed to real anti-semitism, that has just forced Ken Livingstone to resign<\/a> from the Labour party; that empowered Labour\u2019s Blairite bureaucracy to publicly lynch<\/a> a well-known black anti-racism activist, Marc Wadsworth; that persuaded a dissident comedian and supporter of the Palestinian cause, Frankie Boyle, to use his TV show to prioritise<\/a> an attack on a supposedly “anti-semitic” Labour party over support for Gaza; that is being used to vilify grassroots movements campaigning against \u201cglobal elites\u201d and the \u201c1 per cent\u201d; and that may yet finish off<\/a> Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, currently the only credible political force for progressive change in the UK.<\/p>\n None of this is, of course, to suggest that Wolf would herself want any of these outcomes or that she is trying to misuse anti-semitism. I fully acccept that she has been a strong Jewish critic of Israel and doubtless paid a price for it with friends and colleagues.<\/p>\n But unlike Wolf, those who do consciously and cynically weaponise anti-semitism gain their power from our inability to stand back and think critically about what they are doing, and why it matters. There is an intellectual and cultural blindspot that has been created and is being readily exploited by those who want to prevent discussions not only about Israel\u2019s actions but about the wider political culture we desperately need to change.<\/p>\n In fact, the mystification of anti-semitism is not new, though it is rapidly intensifying. It began the moment Israel was created. That was why a Nazi cartoon \u2013 drawn before Israel’s establishment in 1948 \u2013 could never have been described as \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d. It simply was<\/em> anti-semitic. It attributed menacing or subversive qualities to Jews because they were Jews.<\/p>\n To understand how the current mystification works we need briefly to consider Israel\u2019s character as a state \u2013 something very few people are prepared to do in the \u201cmainstream\u201d, because it is likely to result in\u00a0 allegations of \u2026 anti-semitism! As I observed in my previous post, this has provided the perfect get-out-jail-free card for Israel and its supporters.<\/p>\n Israel was created as the national homeland of all Jewish people \u2013 not of those who became citizens (which included a significant number of Palestinians), or even of those Jews who ended up living there. Israel declared that it represented all Jewish people around the world, including Wolf.<\/p>\n This idea is central to Zionism, and is embodied in its Declaration of Independence; its constitutional-like Basic Laws; its immigration legislation, the Law of Return; its land laws; and the integration into Israel\u2019s state structures of extra-territorial Zionist organisations like the Jewish National Fund, the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency.<\/p>\n It is also why the rationale for Israel is premised on anti-semitism: Israel was created as a sanctuary for all<\/em> Jews because, according to Zionists, Jews can never be truly safe anywhere outside Israel. Without anti-semitism, Israel would be superfluous. It also why Israel has a reason to inflate the threat of anti-semitism \u2013 or, if we are cynical about the lengths states will go to promote their interests, to help generate anti-semitism to justify the existence of a Jewish state and encourage Jews to immigrate.<\/p>\n So from the moment of its birth, the ideas of \u201cIsrael\u201d and \u201canti-semitism\u201d became disturbingly enmeshed \u2013 and in ways almost impossible to disentangle.<\/p>\n For most of Israel\u2019s history, that fact could be obscured in the west because western governments and media were little more than cheerleaders for Israel. Criticism of Israel was rarely allowed into the mainstream, and when it did appear it was invariably limited to condemnations of the occupation. Even then, there was rarely any implication of systematic wrongdoing on Israel\u2019s part.<\/p>\n That changed only when the exclusive grip of the western corporate media over information dissemination weakened, first with the emergence of the internet and satellite channels like Al Jazeera, and more recently and decisively with social media. Criticism of Israel\u2019s occupation has increasingly broadened into suspicions about its enduring bad faith. Among more knowledgeable sections of the progressive left, there is a mounting sense that Israel\u2019s unwillingness to end the occupation is rooted in its character as a Jewish state, and maybe its intimate ideological relationship with anti-semitism.<\/p>\n These are vital conversations to be having about Israel, and they are all the more pressing now that Israel has shown that it is fully prepared to gun down in public unarmed Palestinians engaging in civil disobedience. Many, many more Palestinians are going to have their lives taken from them unless we aggressively pursue and resolve these conversations in ways that Israel is determined to prevent.<\/p>\n And this is why the \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d confusion \u2013 a confusion that Israel precisely needs and encourages \u2013 is so dangerous. Because it justifies \u2013 without evidence \u2013 shutting down those conversations before they can achieve anything.<\/p>\n In 2016 Ken Livingstone tried to initiate a conversation<\/a> about Zionism and its symbiotic relationship with anti-semites, in this case with the early Nazi leadership. We can\u2019t understand what Israel is, why the vast majority of Jews once abhorred<\/a> Zionism, why Israel is so beloved of modern anti-semites like the alt-right and hardcore Christian evangelicals, why Israel cannot concede a Palestinian state, and why it won\u2019t abandon the occupation without overwhelming penalties from the international community, unless we finish the conversation Livingstone started.<\/p>\n Which is why that conversation was shut down instantly with the accusation that it was \u201canti-semitic\u201d. But Livingstone\u2019s crime is one no mainstream commentator wants to address or explain. If pressed to do so, they will tell you it is because his comments were perceived to be \u201coffensive\u201d or “hurtful”, or because they were \u201cunnecessary\u201d and \u201cfoolish\u201d, or because they brought the Labour party \u201cinto disrepute\u201d (Labour\u2019s version of \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d). No one will tell you what was substantively anti-semitic about his remark.<\/p>\n Similarly, when pressed to explain how Hanitzsch\u2019s cartoon of Netanyahu was anti-semitic, Wolf digressed to the entirely irrelevant issue of his nationality.<\/p>\n This is the power and the danger of this \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d logic, and why it needs to be confronted and exposed for the hollow shell it is.<\/p>\n The next stage in the evolution of the \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d argument is already discernible, as I have warned before. It is so powerful that it has forced Corbyn to concede, against all evidence, that Labour has an anti-semitism problem and to castigate himself, again against all evidence, for indulging in anti-semitic thinking.<\/p>\n Corbyn has been on the defensive since a “controversy” erupted in March over his expression back in 2012 of support for street art and opposition to censorship amid a row over a London mural that was about to be painted over.<\/p>\n After he was elected Labour leader in 2015, the first efforts were made to weaponise the mural issue to damage him. The deeply anti-Corbyn Jewish Chronicle newspaper was \u2013 like Hanitzsch\u2019s boss at the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung \u2013 initially unsure whether the mural was actually anti-semitic. Then the newspaper simply highlighted<\/a> concerns that it might have \u201canti-semitic undertones\u201d. By spring 2018, when the row resurfaced, the status of the mural had been transformed<\/a>. Every mainstream British commentator was convinced it was \u201cclearly\u201d and \u201cobviously\u201d anti-semitic \u2013 and by implication, Corbyn had been unmasked as an anti-semite for supporting it.<\/p>\n Again, no one wanted to debate how<\/em> it was anti-semitic. The artist has said<\/a> it was an image of historical bankers, most of whom were not Jewish, closely associated with the capitalist class\u2019s war on the rest of us. There is nothing in the mural to suggest he is lying about his intention or the mural’s meaning. And yet everyone in the \u201cmainstream\u201d is now confident that the mural is anti-semitic, even though none of them wants to specify what exactly is anti-semitic about it.<\/p>\n Much else is rapidly becoming \u201canti-semitic\u201d. It is an indication of how quickly this slippage is occuring that repeating now a slogan of the Occupy Movement from only seven years ago \u2013 that we are ruled by a \u201cglobal elite\u201d, or the \u201c1 per cent\u201d \u2013 is cited as proof of anti-semitism. The liberal New Statesman recently ran an article<\/a> dedicated to proving that the articulation of basic socialist principles \u2013 including ideas of class war and the 1 per cent \u2013 was evidence of anti-semitism.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/wolf.png\")
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\nNazi propaganda<\/h3>\n
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So how exactly is this Netanyahu cartoon \u201ckind of anti-semitic\u201d?<\/p>\nLimiting political debate<\/h3>\n
Israel and Jews<\/h3>\n
A dangerous confusion<\/h3>\n
The Livingstone problem<\/h3>\n
A mural becomes anti-semitic<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/brick-lane-mural.jpg\")
\nThe 1 per cent off-limits<\/h3>\n