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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.
What unfortunately lends so much credence to the accusations of the anti-Semites is what when the claims start getting thrown around, almost 'nobody' takes to combatting them to show them why they're factually false. The implied default assumption seems to be that anti-Semites don't actually believe there's a causal arrow between the activities Jews participate in and the negative downstream consequences it stirs up in the societies they inhabit.
I 100% disagree completely with the prescription people like Sam Harris have to anti-Semitism, saying it's just a ridiculous notion to be an anti-Semite (it is) and "we need to tell these people to go fuck themselves." It completely ignores the fact that people actually believe there's a factual foundation to this and the fact that it's never counter-argued or address is often what adds continued fuel to the conspiratorial notions people have.
I think there's value in debunking false accusations, but I doubt it's going to help much. People start with their Jew hatred and then look for reasons to justify it. There are countries out there actually doing the bad stuff of which Israel is falsely accused. Are those countries hated the way Israel is?
No other country on Earth has the pedigree that they do and that's why they've attracted so much attention throughout history, beginning all the way back with the accusation of deicide in the 2nd century A.D. Most people who treat them suspiciously are not rabid anti-Semites but get roped into thinking there's "something to it," because it going unanswered as left conspiracies to fester in their minds.
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