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Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?

The debate in Toronto gripped, appalled and surprised

Melanie Phillips

Jun 19

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Anti-Zionism and antisemitism debate, Toronto

Two days ago, a gripping debate took place in Toronto. The latest in the Munk Debates on major policy issues run by a Canadian charitable foundation, Monday evening's event advanced the motion "Anti-Zionism is antisemitism". It was proposed by the writer Douglas Murray and international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff, and opposed by the Guardian journalist Mehdi Hasan and Israeli anti-Zionist Ha'aretz writer Gideon Levy.

In an audience vote before the start of the debate, 61 per cent supported the proposition with 39 per cent opposed. In the final vote, the proposition had 66 per cent support with 34 per cent opposed. You can watch the whole debate here.

I watched this encounter with more than usual interest. In 2019, I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate in London on an identically worded motion. On my side was Einat Wilf, an Israeli former member of the Knesset for the Labour and Independence parties, and our opponents were Mehdi Hasan and the Israeli anti-Zionist academic Ilan Pappé. You can watch that debate here.

The big difference was that, while the Toronto audience was mostly sympathetic to Israel, the London audience was mostly hostile. The vote taken before the London debate showed only 15 per cent in favour of the proposition with 59 per cent against. At the end, 19 per cent supported the motion with 76 per cent against.

On Monday evening, as usually happens at such events, Zionism was misleadingly reframed by the anti-Zionist opposition. For Gideon Levy, who seems to think that the self-determination of a people gets cancelled when Levy decides he disapproves of the people, Zionism was apparently transformed from a heroic escape route for Jewish victims into a diabolical creed of Jewish oppressors when Israel started doing things Levy didn't like. Thus Israel's alleged behaviour was conflated with the right of the Jewish people to have their own country at all.

And as also usually happens at such events, these two anti-Zionists promulgated distortions, falsehoods and blood libels to demonise Israel and its supporters.

Two of these examples were particularly breathtaking. Levy actually described Israel as "the most brutal regime in the world". So to Levy, the sole democracy in the Middle East (which he denies is a democracy) is more brutal than the murderous tyrannies of Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and Hamas. How can such an individual be taken seriously by anyone with a functioning brain?

But it was Hasan who came most spectacularly to grief over an absolute whopper. In his opening statement, he purported to quote Lord Balfour, author of the eponymous 1917 Balfour Declaration in which Britain committed itself to creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Hasan quoted Balfour as "a man who referred to Jews as an 'alien and hostile' people". But Hausdorff then read out what Balfour had actually said — that Zionism would "mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb".

So Hasan had cherry-picked the quote in order falsely to paint Balfour, who had expressed the belief that Zionism would rescue the Jews from antisemites, as an antisemite. After Hausdorff so devastatingly exposed this whopper for all to hear, how could anyone believe anything else Hasan would say?

In outstanding performances, Hausdorff and Murray effectively rebutted the lies, libels and other nonsense produced by Hasan and Levy and mounted a magnificent case for Zionism and Israel. Nevertheless, some canards behind Hasan and Levy's remarks need further unpacking than was possible within the procedural and time constraints of that debate.

In particular, the reason anti-Zionism is an expression of antisemitism, and why it gives rise to attacks on Jews as Jews, can only be understood if antisemitism itself is understood for the unique phenomenon that it is.

Antisemitism is the delusional hatred and fear of Jews, Judaism or the Jewish people. Unlike other prejudices, it has unique characteristics applied to no other group, people or cause. It's an obsessional and unhinged narrative based entirely on lies about the Jewish people; it accuses them of crimes of which they are not only innocent but the victims; it holds them to impossible standards expected of no-one else; it depicts them as a global conspiracy of unique malice and power; and it invests them with diabolical influence over the entire world in order to serve their own interests at the expense of others.

Anti-Zionism has exactly the same characteristics. While criticism of Israel's policies is entirely legitimate, anti-Zionism treats Israel and Jewish national self-determination differently from any other country, people or cause. Israel is demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised in order to bring about its destruction. Israelis are accused of crimes of which they are not only innocent but the victims; they are held to impossible standards expected of no other people, country or cause; Zionism is depicted as a global conspiracy of unique malice and power; and Zionists and Israelis are invested with diabolical influence.

This is an obsessional and unhinged narrative based entirely on lies about Israel:

The lie that Israel's an apartheid state, when Israeli Arabs have equal civil and religious rights;
The lie of ethnic cleansing, when the Arab population in Gaza and the disputed territories has more than quadrupled since Israel's rebirth in 1948;
The lie that the Israelis are wilful child-killers, when in fact they go to unique lengths to avoid killing civilians in their entirely defensive wars, resulting in a ratio of civilians to combatants killed that's vastly lower than any other country has ever achieved in warfare;
The lie of Israel's human rights violations, when it's the only country in the Middle East where Arab Muslims and Christians, women and gay people can live in freedom and safety;
The lie that the Jews seized and occupied another people's land, whereas the Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land and the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom more than 3000 years ago.

Moreover, the Palestinian cause that's supported by the anti-Zionists itself doesn't pretend that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. On the contrary:

Palestinian incitement explicitly urges its people to murder every Jew;
Mahmoud Abbas hero-worships the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the thirties, Haj Amin al Husseini, who made a pact with Hitler to exterminate every Jew in the entire Middle East;
The Palestinian Authority produces Nazi-style antisemitism, such as the PA sermon claiming Jews were "the fabricators of history, who dance and live on the body parts of others, and on the blood of others…there is no global corruption that their rabbis did not allow…";
The Palestinians regularly claim that the Jews were behind 9/11 and that the Jews control the world's media, finance and US foreign policy;
The head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said: "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say 'the Israeli'."

The next canard, promulgated repeatedly by Mehdi Hasan on Monday evening, was that there are anti-Zionist Jews and Jews can't be antisemites. The first part of that is true; the second most certainly is not.

There have always been anti-Zionist Jews. But there's a great difference between those who argued against Zionism as a theoretical prospect before the horrors of the Holocaust, before the establishment of the State of Israel and before the full extent of the exterminatory Arab and Muslim hostility to the Jewish homeland became known, and those who denounce it today in full knowledge of all those things — and who want to exterminate an existing country.

Yes, a small fringe of ultra-orthodox Jews campaigns against the State of Israel. But they nevertheless pray every day that the Jews should return to live in Zion free of foreign rule. Their beef with the State of Israel is that they think the return is premature and should happen under different conditions. So their issue is basically just a matter of timing. What they do not believe is the core doctrine of anti-Zionism, that the Jews have no right to the land of Israel.

Moreover, some of the worst antisemites in history have been Jews. Karl Marx, to name but one, wrote that Judaism was "huckstering" and that "the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism".

The final canard from Hasan was that, since the whole world hates Israel, the whole world can't be wrong. But the whole world does not hate Israel. Most ordinary people have no view one way or the other.

It's the western liberal elites that hate Israel. It's the anti-western armies of liberal universalists and trans-national institutions and human rights lawyers, the corrupted and amoral world of the UN and its satellites the UN Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice and UNICEF and UNESCO, and the NGOs and the international humanitarian establishment — the entire bubble of self-righteous Kumbaya fantasists and lawfare-waging "human rights" oligarchs and anti-western "anti-colonialists" and the Israel-bashing global south with their hangers-on and "feminists" who deny the rape and mutilation of Israeli women and "humanitarians" who have no human sympathy for Jewish victims, only for their Palestinian attackers — it's these people who all want Israel gone.

"Who boos Oxfam?" cried Mehdi Hasan — after the Toronto audience did just that — as if that clinched the argument that Israel's supporters were beyond the pale. Really? Really? Would that be the Oxfam that allegedly covered up claims that senior staff in Haiti, working after the 2010 earthquake, engaged with prostitutes some of whom were under-age? Would that be the Oxfam whose staff claimed that "colleagues in positions of power" in its Congo office threatened to poison them if they reported their complaints?

Would that be the Oxfam whose funding the UK government stopped in 2021 over further claims of sexual exploitation of the charity's vulnerable clients? Would that be the Oxfam that systematically excuses, sanitises or ignores Palestinian terrorism and instead lays all blame for Palestinian suffering at the door of its Israeli victims? Would that be the Oxfam that has called on the UK government to stop sending arms to Israel so that it can no longer defend itself against the further genocide of the Jews that's openly threatened by its enemies?

Can the whole world really be wrong about Israel? sneered Mehdi Hasan. With that question, he undermined his whole position in this debate. For antisemites have always asked exactly the same question about the Jews. "Since the whole world hates them", cry the antisemites, "doesn't that prove they must be guilty of what they're accused of doing"?

No. What it actually proves is that antisemitism is a unique global derangement. And the current auto-da-fé targeted at Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people — which Mehdi Hasan and Gideon Levy tried further to weaponise in Toronto — is, as they unwittingly demonstrated, precisely the same thing.

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