Judaeophobia

It is nonetheless crucial to understand that post-1945 anti-Semitism long ago ceased to be a preserve of the far Right despite the efforts of liberal and leftist commentators to straitjacket Jew-hatred into this narrow focus. Already in the late Forties it was Stalinist Communism which took over the Nazi legacy of attacking Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans" and which resurrected the myth of a world-wide "Jewish-masonic-imperialist" conspiracy-now conveniently relabelled as "Zionist fascism". Indeed, the ideologically most influential versions of postwar European anti-Semitism would henceforth come more frequently from the totalitarian Left than from the radical Right. Though the USSR and the Soviet bloc did recognise and support the creation of Israel in 1948, within four years Communists had turned the word "Zionist" into a term of ultimate opprobrium and anathema serving much the same scapegoat role as it had in classic anti-Semitic rhetoric. Contemporary Trotskyite anti-Zionism has proved itself to be no less virulent in its demonisation of Israel and Zionism, despite the presence of a number of "internationalist" Jews among its leading theoreticians. Indeed, anti-Zionist vituperation on the radical Left has gradually emerged as the functional equivalent of the prevailing Nazi-fascist anti-Semitism of the Thirties. The main difference is that today it is the Israeli state as the "collective Jew" which finds itself in the dock as the "war-mongering enemy of humanity" even as the Arab world implodes amid bloody conflicts, massacres, atrocities, civil wars and revolutions wholly unrelated to Israel.

It is revealing to recall that 19th and 20th-century anti-Semitism had generally operated, at least until 1945, with a negative image of Jews as "Orientals", "Semites", or "Asiatics". Jews were still considered a non-European, non-Western people, belonging to a backward, inferior and alien culture. The vehemence of the Western response to the influx of Ostjuden (internalised by a significant number of assimilated Jews) in the United States, Argentina, South Africa, the United Kingdom, France and Germany was a reflection of this knee-jerk reaction. When the Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke spoke of the Jews as "our misfortune" in 1879 he evoked above all the spectre of trouser-selling Judenjungen (Jew-boys) from neighbouring Poland who, he feared, would one day swarm across the Eastern border to take over the liberal press and stock exchange. For the former liberal turned pro-Prussian nationalist von Treitschke, the nightmare was that the "Asiatic" Ostjuden would one day transform German culture into an eclectic mish-mash-a fear shared by  many of his colleagues on the conservative Right.

Today, Israelis are rarely accused of being too "Semitic" but they are commonly attacked by liberals and leftists for their Western orientation. The Jewish state is seen as being too pro-American in its outlook and often execrated as an outpost of "colonial" oppression, domination, and racism. Israel's "original sin" in the eyes of the Left is its presumed expansionist colonial character, equated with trampling on a supposedly "indigenous" [Palestinian] people. This is the basis for much of the "new" anti-Semitism that has prospered during the last 40 years, since the stunning victory of the Six Day War when Israel acquired possession of previously Arab-annexed "occupied" territories. During these four decades there has been a gradual (and at times uneasy) convergence of "anti-imperialist" Zionophobia from the Left with a proto-fascist jihadi Judaeophobia. Both ideologies are violently anti-Western, "anti-imperialist", anti-Zionist and either implicitly or explicitly anti-Semitic. Each regards the creation of Israel as totally illegitimate-the result of a diabolical "imperialist conspiracy". While the highly artificial construct of Palestinian Arab nationalism has rarely if ever been critically examined by the radical Left, the 3,000-year-old historic roots of the Jewish people in Zion are simply expunged from the record as if they had never existed. This sleight of hand has had disastrous consequences for any realistic appraisal of the conflict.

Post-1945 anti-Semitism in Western Europe, unlike its pre-Shoah predecessors, is (outwardly, at least) no longer predominantly nationalist. It more usually purports to be post-nationalist, except in those parts of Eastern Europe where national consciousness has been reawakened under the impact of globalisation or socioeconomic crisis. Much more common-especially in the West-is the assault on Jewish nationalism, Jewish nationhood and the right of Jews in Israel to determine their own future as a self-governing, independent polity. This cardinal principle of Zionism has become a kind of red rag to many liberal "progressives" and left-wing internationalists who hate Israel as the living antithesis of their own disintegrating vision of a world without borders, nations, religions or ethnic conflicts. The current dramas being played out in Ukraine or the Arab Middle East are a powerful reminder of just how utopian this worldview has proven to be.

Classical anti-Semitism, before the Shoah, proclaimed Jewry to be an existential menace to the internal homogeneity, the Christian values and "racial purity" of the nation. Such mythical claims are no longer fashionable in the West but new slanders projected against the Jewish state enjoy relative immunity. Thus contemporary anti-Zionists, defying all reason or empirical fact, see the nation of Israel as a threat to world peace and the international order greater than Iran or North Korea. This was the verdict of nearly 60 per cent of Europeans only a decade ago, when Israel reached the number one spot in the hit parade of nations supposedly endangering universal tranquillity and brotherhood. There are times today when contemporary Europeans sound as if they were unconsciously echoing pre-1939 fascist myths of "warmongering Jews" or the Communist libels of the Seventies, denouncing the militarist, expansionist "essence" of Zionism. For a growing segment of the Western liberal intelligentsia, it is not theocratic Iran or the barbaric Syrian regime but tiny Israel which should be subject to sanctions and isolated from the community of nations despite its stunning scientific achievements and adherence to democratic values, human rights and the rule of law.