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Notes -
What is the Zionist model of antisemitism*?
Matt Yglesias posted what turned out to be a surprisingly hot take that the downturn in public opinion of Israel is a result of Israeli actions, and that the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy.
I was surprised at the pushback. This seems straightforwardly true. There was a great chart I saw a few days ago, which I am unfortunately unable to find, which showed that public opinion of Israel has been approximately this low before. It was in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon and the notoriously brutal siege of Beirut.
Most of the alternative theories fell into two camps.
It’s hard to tell how religious the people in 2. are, but my general impression is, “quite a bit”. Many of them seem to speak of antisemitism as if it were a spiritual fault, another manifestation of the platonic ideal of pure evil. Seen as a spiritual problem, the correct response is to become even more aggressively Jewish. This has the rather large problem of being counterproductive when, e.g. smashing idols goes wrong.
*By “antisemitism” in this post I almost exclusively mean “antizionism”. I use the term to maintain consistency with the pro-Israel literature I am engaging with, not as an endorsement that antizionism = antisemitism.
If you are going to have a specific model of antisemitism, then ideally you should have a model that explains historic instances of it rather than just a single contemporary instance. That it's a result of a downturn in public opinion of Israel as a result of Israel's actions fails to explain pre-1948 antisemitism for reasons I hope are obvious.
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK, neither Yglesias or the proposed alternative theories are a good model. the current wave of antisemitism is basically a coalition between the far-left and Islamists. The older part of the far-left have been playing at this for years, they are not new, and thus there is no rise to explain. The growth of Islamists tracks demographic changes, these types always hated Jews, there's only recently enough of them to be a relevant voting bloc. And the third group of young far-left people (somewhat disproportionately female) can't be explained without explaining why they are both going far-left and anti-Israel. From what I can tell there is nothing so uniquely capitalist about Israel that hatred of Israel is enough to make you go communist too, so the connection is better explained going the other way, perhaps by path dependency regarding still being led by the old far-left... So probably the cold, dead hand of the Soviet Union's reaction to Israel crushing a bunch of Soviet-armed Arabs in 1967 continuing to ripple through history.
I agree. Before the existence of Israel, Jews were collectively accused of spreading communism; spreading capitalism; spreading the bubonic plague; killing Christian babies to make matzo; oppressing people on behalf of the Czar; undermining support for the Czar; and probably a whole bunch of other things.
The basic rule is that whenever something is considered bad, it won't be long before the Jews are accused of it.
And even worse: things which were once considered bad when Jews did them may later come to be considered good, but new infractions will be discovered or invented to pin on Jews so that their perceived moral value among gentiles never improves.
For many centuries, Christians were forbidden to lend money, so if a Christian wanted to borrow money, he had to borrow from a Jewish moneylender (cue centuries of stereotypes about greedy Jews). Over time, Christian countries liberalised and secularised, and now there are just as many gentile moneylenders as Jewish ones, if not more so. But has this resulted in a rehabilitation of Jews in the gentile imagination, or an acknowledgement that it was wrong to stereotype Jews as greedy when in many cases they were completely shut out of many lines of work other than finance? Has it fuck. Gentiles are allowed to engage in the behaviours that resulted in the "greedy Jew" stereotype without incurring any of the associated negative status.
It's such transparently rigged, unfair bullshit.
What you're leaving out of the story is that Jews were also forbidden from lending money at interest (all Abrahamic faiths were, though the only ones trying to stick to it nowadays are the Muslims) they just weren't forbidden from lending money at interest to the goyim. This dynamic is at the root of a lot of the antipathy between the groups.
Right. But we're now at the point where Gentiles feel no qualms about lending money at interest either to each other or to people of differing faiths. Probably there are thousands if not millions of people who've chanted "from the river to the sea" support themselves by lending money at interest.
Group A despises Group B. When asked to explain their antipathy, Group A explains they hate Group B because Group B does Activity X to Group A. Subsequently, Group A decides that Activity X isn't such a bad activity after all, and starts doing it to Group B (among other groups) e.g. a Jewish family who takes out a mortgage with a Gentile-owned bank. However, Group A's antipathy towards Group B doesn't budge an inch.
Doesn't this strongly suggest that Group A's antipathy towards Group B really has nothing to do with Activity X, and it's just a convenient pretext to ostracise a group they wanted to harass for unrelated reasons?
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