The absurdity of accusing a Semitic people of anti-Semitism
Anti-Palestinian racism is so normalised that Palestinians are not even seen as victims.
Originally posted on my Facebook on 4 March 2023.
“WHAT IS ANTI-PALESTINIAN RACISM?
Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.
Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, Anti-Palestinian racism: naming, framing and manifestations”
Rania Hammad
It's a form of anti-Semitism. It's been edited to absurdity now, but at one time, the Encyclopaedia Britannica admitted this:
"Antisemitism "is especially inappropriate as a label for the anti-Jewish prejudices, statements, or actions of Arabs or other Semites," Encyclopedia Britannica says in its definition of antisemitism.
It is unclear from the article's edit history when this part of the definition was added. Encyclopedia Britannica's online entry does not offer an alternative term for prejudice by Arabs and Semitic people against Jews.
"Although the term [antisemitism] now has wide currency, it is a misnomer, since it implies a discrimination against all Semites. Arabs and other peoples are also Semites, and yet they are not the targets of antisemitism as it is usually understood," asserts the online encyclopedia."
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-695378
But that edit was right. Anti-Semitism was a European racist project that focused on Jews but would not have excluded other Semitic peoples from this racial category. Of course it is inappropriate to use this term to describe hostility of one Semitic people against another (unless inspired by European race-hatred).
This article calls it an "etymological fallacy" but they're the ones being fallacious and denying hisotry and context. The history and context of European anti-Semitism, where this term originated, is RACIAL hatred of Jews because they are SEMITES, and considered inferior to WHITE Europeans due to their non-whiteness. Their racist laws would not have spared Palestinians, other Arabs, or any other Semitic peoples. Anti-Semitism, like all form of racism, is inextricable from white supremacy.
Zionism on the other hand, is a white supremacist, settler-colonialist, genocidal project as all the evidence shows. It is anti-Semitic in considering European Jews to be "whiter" and more civilised than the indigenous people of Palestine. It is anti-Semitic in agreeing with the European anti-Semites that Jews cannot live in Europe, and that a Jewish state was needed to "solve the Jewish problem" (whether that be in South America, Uganda or Palestine).
One only needs to read the founding texts of Zionism, like Theodore Herzl, open one's eyes to Zionist collaboration with anti-Semites and white supremacists both historically and in the present day, and to the rampant, extreme and open racism in Israel today. It is anti-Semitic and self-hating through and through. (See comment below for more detail)
Political hostility towards the state of Israel is not racist; the state of Israel has always been a racist endeavour. Political opposition to the state of Israel is anti-racism. Anti-Semitism is the hatred of Semitic peoples on racial grounds, not opposition to states, laws, and governments on political grounds.
The idea that Palestinians resisting genocide on racial grounds are actually "anti-Semitic" rather than those committing genocide against them is inverting the truth and rendering language a meaningless mess. It's funny that the IHRA (which redefined anti-Semitism to refer to anyone who supports a Semitic people resisting genocide) calls for clarity around the usage of this word by... suggesting removing the hyphen! That's about as much clarity as adding a space in the word "transwoman" (that is, trans-identified man) and for the same purpose - to muddy the waters, rather than to make anything clear. They have to manipulate language to obscure rather than clarify (and shame anyone who uses language clearly) because the simple truth is contrary to this oppressive ideology.
Resist this Orwellian inversion of reality, and fight for the truth. Resist the weaponisation and redefinition of a term, ignoring all history and context, to promote a racist and oppressive project.
Reposting a comment I made in response to the question, why Jews in Israel oppress Palestinians when they are themselves a persecuted people. The answer lies in understanding the difference between Judaism/Jewishness and Zionism:
"All Jews who follow the religion are anti-Zionist according to Rabbi Dovid Weiss since the Torah explicitly forbids the creation of a Jewish state, it is against the will of G-d. See his amazing interview: "Rabbi Dovid Weiss: Zionism has created 'rivers of blood' | Talk to Al Jazeera"
When Zionism was first thought up in the late 1800s, it was an extreme marginal fringe ideology that most Jews rejected (like the socialist Jews of the Bund labour organisation, they were anti-Zionist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundism). It was conceived by Theodore Herzl (author of "The Jewish State") who agreed with anti-Semites that there is a "Jewish problem" in Europe and proposed Zionism (the voluntary removal of all Jews to a Jewish homeland outside Europe, not necessarily Palestine - Uganda and South America were proposed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Scheme) as a "solution" to this problem. (The subtitle of the book is "Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question"; that in itself makes it anti-Semitic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Judenstaat)
So both the Zionists and the anti-Semitic Europeans agreed that Jews could not live in Europe. Herzl and other Zionists were atheists and did not respect religious Jews; they proposed mass conversion to Christianity as a solution to the Jewish problem - though of course, European anti-Semites thought of Jewishness/Semitism as a racial category, not a religious one. As historian Ilan Pappe says, they don't believe in God but they do believe He promised them Palestine.
If you read Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the trial of the architect of the Holocaust Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, you can see he says he is a Zionist and supports Israel - because the Nazis called the Holocaust "the final solution" and the removal/ethnic cleansing of Jews from Europe was an acceptable "first solution".
Modern day white supremacists and neo-Nazis support Israel and call themselves Zionists, like Richard Spencer who said he is a "white Zionist" who wants a homeland for white people like Israel is a homeland for Jews. There are close links between Israel and the various white supremacist groups in the West, united in their hatred for Muslims which is their priority and common enemy, and in fact, Israelis have gone to fight with Azov batallion. There is an older video on the channel The Convo Couch called "Woman Exposes Truth About Ukraine in French Media" which talks about these Zionist Nazis.
Also remember that the Zionists were the only group that broke the global Jewish boycott of the actual Nazis! They actually collaborated with the Nazis and defend this by saying this helped them save the lives of Jews, when really what they want is all Jews to leave Europe and come to the "Jewish state". See this article: "Edwin Black: When Zionists made a deal with the Nazis"
Zionism is a proud settler-colonialist ideology. It was born in an age when European settler-colonialism was ascendent and hegemonic, and everyone in the mainstream thought it was a good thing. So Zionists saw themselves as "white" settlers colonising "a land without a people" on a civilising mission - though they weren't white enough to live in Europe. It's based on the idea of a the new Jew as muscular, militaristic and masculinist, and they despise the "weakness" of the millions of Jews who went to their deaths without resistance in the Holocaust. An Israeli friend told me that Holocaust survivors are the second or third most hated group in Israel - after Palestinians, and Orthodox Jews. See this illustrative quote:
"Echoing the accounts of other survivors, Roth said that when she arrived, Israelis treated Holocaust survivors as if what happened to them was somehow their fault. “I heard many times that we went like sheep to the slaughter,” Roth told me. Yet, she continued, the Israeli government was happy to take money from the German government for the suffering she and millions of others endured."
- How the State of Israel Abuses Holocaust Survivors
Then you have the Christian Evangelical Zionists in the US, who support Israel (their number 2 issue after criminalising abortion) because they believe in their literalist interpretation of the the book of Revelation that the Apocalypse will come after the Jews go back to the Holy Land. These people are very anti-Semitic because they believe that all Jews who don't then convert to Christianity will burn in the lake of fire. But they are also very powerful in the US and determine foreign and domestic policy.
So the fact that Zionism is a racist, settler-colonialist, fascist, in fact anti-Semitic ideology that was thought up by atheist Jews as a solution to the Jewish problem in Europe - these ideological roots are the reason why Zionists (who are NOT representative of Jews as a whole and never have been) learn precisely the wrong lesson from the Holocaust - Jewish ethnic supremacy and exceptionalism, rather than the more universal lesson "Never again for anyone". They live in hair-trigger paranoia - Israel is a hugely militarised state where children are indoctrinated to hate Palestinians and believe they are in existential danger in kindergarten, and if you visit Israel you will see 18-year olds doing their army service walking around with loaded machine guns. A deadly combination; there are a lot of parallels between Banderite Ukraine and Zionist Israel. They openly call for genocide of Palestinians ("Arabs" - see "Empire Files: Israelis Speak Candidly to Abby Martin About Palestinians",
) and openly argue that the lesson they learned from the Holocaust is that they have to be strong and kill their enemies before their enemies have a chance to kill them. Basically, that they must turn into Nazis in order to protect Jews as exceptional (chosen) people.
I hope that helps you understand that most Jews have learned the right lesson from the Holocaust ("Never again, for anyone" - and they understand that the Holocaust was simply European colonisers importing genocide to Europe what they had exported to the colonies in the past - the Herero genocide and the use of concentration camps in the Anglo-Boer war; ETA: and don't forget that Hitler was directly inspired by the genocide of the indigenous people of the US) but that Zionists learned the wrong lesson because of their self-hatred and acceptance of fascist narratives like "Jewish problem". The most powerful ZIonists in the world are not Jews but Christian evangelical Zionists - even Balfour was a Christian Zionist."
See also the examples I give in the following posts:
(See Fact #5)
And John Helmer’s excellent article:
"The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18th century and early 19th century.
It quickly became a German racial epithet, used in contrast to Aryan. By the time Adolf Hitler came along, this was the pseudo-scientific doctrine in which the Germans lumped both the Jews and the Arabs into a single category – the inferiors of the Aryans.
That is one of the reasons Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his general staff on aiding the Arab nationalist forces in Iraq, Syria and Palestine in the Wehrmacht’s war plans against the British and the Soviet Union. The pseudo-science of Semitism and Aryanism, and the idea of anti-Semitism which the Germans, together with the British and Americans, adopted in the run-up to World War II was spelled out at Harvard University by an anthropologist called Carleton Coon; he cribbed directly from German academics, turning out papers on the Berbers of Morocco and advancing his racial superiority-inferiority ideas between 1925 and 1939. When the war began, Coon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he demonstrated his keenness for pistol shooting, hare-brained sabotage missions, and homicidal mania. Among his wartime schemes he proposed to remove the Arabs of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) as unfit to rule; replace them with the restoration of the French empire; and kill those French officials whom Coon judged to get his way. He was one of the planners of the assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan, the French military commander, in Algiers on December 24, 1942; Coon’s pistol was the murder weapon.**
American murderers of the Arabs like Coon then — like Israeli murderers of Arabs now — have succeeded in establishing their doctrine of exceptionalism and racial superiority in state policy as the successor to the doctrines of Aryanism and Nazism which were interrupted by Hitler’s suicide in 1945, then the Nuremberg trials concluding in 1946. The crime of racial and cultural genocide became international law in 1948. It was then modified by the new Israeli state doctrine of anti-Semitism: this decriminalised the genocide of the Palestinian people; and outlawed instead media criticism, political opposition, even science for threatening the legitimacy of Israel’s Basic Law of Arab exclusion, and Israeli military operations to enforce it.
In the present war between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas on the Gaza battlefield – “the American project”, as the Russian Foreign Ministry called it in a statement on October 29 *** – the doctrine of anti-Semitism as a race hatred crime is being applied to protect the race hatred crime being perpetrated against the other Semites, the Palestinians.
This doctrine, however, has had a negative impact on the ability of the Israelis and the Americans to wage their war. A fresh Russian analysis of the military intelligence failures exposed by Hamas in its offensive of October 7, illustrates how and why the Israelis failed to anticipate because they underestimated their Arab adversary; and because they regarded him as a racial inferior."
JEWISH ANTI-SEMITISM TOWARDS ARABS WAS HAMAS’S STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY ON OCTOBER 7 — STILL IS*