Is it anti-Semitic to criticise Israel?

This article, prepared by the Auckland Jewish Council, is published to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.


No one will deny the historical existence of anti-Jewish hatred and persecution, but few want to believe that it is still prevalent in the modern, post-Holocaust world.

However, the establishment of the state of Israel, a Jewish state, has seen the development of newly disguised anti-Semitism (meaning, in this case, being anti the Jewish people) which takes the form of political criticism of Israel.

In itself, political criticism is a free right reserved by citizens of democracies, and it is irresponsible to label it otherwise. To condemn the political actions of the Israeli state is not, of itself, to be anti-Semitic. Israel's policies, as regards settlements and targeted killings, are legitimate targets for criticism and should be subject to scrutiny as the actions of other countries are.

But if it is complained (as it is) that some Jews are unable to distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, it would seem that this is a widespread phenomenon that non-Jews suffer as well.

After all, why should anti-Israel protest necessitate the defilement of Jewish graveyards, the burning of synagogues, fresh Nazi-themed graffiti at Holocaust camps and memorial sites, or verbal and physical assaults on Jews in Paris and Berlin? How do these acts advance political discourse?

Since the Israel-Palestine peace process collapsed in 2000, and the second Palestinian Intifada began, anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, Canada, Australia and Western Europe have been at their highest level since the Holocaust.

Acts of anti-Semitism reached such proportions in Europe last year that Time magazine felt prompted to devote a cover issue to its resurgence, and a British daily, The Sun, published a full-page article headed "The Jewish faith is not an evil religion".

A June 2002 survey by the Anti-Defamation League revealed that more than a quarter of Europeans were "fairly unconcerned" or "not concerned at all" about this outbreak of anti-Jewish violence.

In addition, 62 per cent of Europeans believed such violence was not a demonstration of anti-Semitism, but rather "anti-Israel sentiment".

This suggests a refusal to accept that European anti-Semitism is enjoying a revival, only 60 years after the Holocaust. Yet European officials have warned their Jewish populations to avoid public displays of Jewishness, instead of promising to protect their Jewish communities.

At the same time, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Israel's Arab neighbour-states, where it is easier to turn a blind eye because almost all Jews were expelled when Israel was established in 1948.

Common themes in the Middle Eastern media, schools and mosques are the infamous "blood libel" (accusing Jews of using the blood of non-Jewish children to make Passover matzahs), the belief in a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, and the vicious fraud that 4000 Jews were absent from the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, because they had been warned to stay at home by the Israeli Mossad.

Tishreen, the government-owned Syrian daily, once claimed that "Zionism created the Holocaust myth to blackmail and terrorize the world's intellectuals and politicians", while Mein Kampf remains a best-seller in the Middle East.

It seems ironic that there is so much concern these days to avoid anti-Muslim or Arab prejudice, including in New Zealand, and yet anti-Semitism receives scant attention.

In the March 2003 report of the UN Human Rights Commission on contemporary forms of racism, 57 paragraphs are devoted to anti-Muslim and Arab prejudice. Anti-Semitism received one paragraph.

In such times, it is important to ask whether the distinction between being anti-Israel and being anti-Semitic has been blurred, and to consider that on occasions, in fact, they are the same thing.

Anti-Semitism can express itself in more subtle forms than the jack-booted persecution or Russian pogroms of the past, and the vandalism and arson of "Jewish property", as well as physical assaults on Jewish people, of recent years.

Is it possible to be prejudiced without even knowing that you are?

Perhaps the most rampant form of the new anti-Semitism is Holocaust inversion; where Israelis are demonised as Nazis and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is compared with Adolf Hitler.

Israel is accused of genocide, despite the fact that it is the Palestinians who dance in the streets when Israelis and Americans are killed by terrorists.

Swastika-covered Israeli flags were on display in recent Aotea Square and Queen Street anti-war parades. Booklets and posters, endorsed by Members of Parliament, are available throughout our universities, parading pictures of terrorists and asking that New Zealanders participate in the "final demise of apartheid Israel".

It is also fashionable, once again, to blame all the world's social ills on the Jews and Israel; including the war on Iraq (Michael Lerner, a left-leaning Jewish activist, was recently prevented from participating in an anti-war demonstration in California because he is Jewish) and worldwide Muslim agitation. According to this view, Israel is to blame for Muslim killings of Hindus in Kashmir, Christians in Southern Sudan and Catholics in the Phillipines.

Today, we witness a distinct tendency towards acceptance of this new anti-Semitism in "polite society", under the guise of political comment. To identify it is to be accused of suppression, as Robert Fisk writes in his article, "How to shut up your critics with the anti-Semitic word".

According to Fisk, the Israeli Government is running "a vicious campaign of slander ... against any journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies". Israel, he claims, uses the term anti-Semitism "with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone ... in an attempt to shut them up".

Meanwhile, political and intellectual circles are contributing towards a climate of anti-Jewish antipathy in which it quickly becomes legitimate to hate Jews.

This begs the question: how does one distinguish between anti-Semitism and political comment?

The distinction: Ask yourself, is it fair political comment to single out Israel for a divestment campaign, to call it a pariah state and have it permanently denied a seat on the UN Security Council, but ignore the occupation by Syria (which currently chairs the Security Council) of Lebanon, Tibet by China, Northern Cyprus by Turkey, and Chechnya by Russia?

How many signs have you seen calling for freedom for these occupied lands, or indeed for independent Kurdish or Armenian states, in the recent anti-war marches?

Even drawing parallels with these occupations fails to recognise that Israel acquired the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the West Bank from Jordan - not through aggressive expansionism, but when it was attacked by those and other Arab states in 1967.

(That is why, contrary to popular belief, there is no UN Security Council resolution requiring Israel to unilaterally withdraw from these lands.)

Nor do such parallels recognise that this territory has been repeatedly offered as an independent state for the Palestinians (as early as the UN Partition Plan of 1947) but that such offers have always been rejected by the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority.

Now ask yourself this: How can the lie that Israel massacred civilians in the Jenin refugee camp (of which Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found no evidence), and Israel's handling of the second Intifada generally, have brought Israel more vilification than the perpetrators of the massacre of 8000 Palestinians in Jordan on one day in 1970; over a million Tutsis in 100 days in Rwanda in 1994; and 7000 Muslims by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica in a couple of hours in 1995?

Why is it that Israel is accused of apartheid when Israeli Arabs (both men and women) have more rights than those living anywhere else in the Middle East?

Apartheid connotes separate development without universal suffrage. Yet Israeli Arabs have members in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), and have equal rights to healthcare, land acquisition, business opportunity and freedom of expression as do other Israelis. The ingredients of apartheid simply do not exist within Israel.

And how should one understand that the Palestinians are so desperate that they resort to suicide bombing, when hundreds of other groups around the world who believe they are being colonised (including the Maori) do not resort to the same means?

Do these facts necessarily make Israel right? No. But it is a double-standard to ignore or condone in one state what Israel is vilified for.

And where a double-standard differentiates between racial or religious groups, it is called prejudice.