“Antisemitism isn’t the first name of hate, it’s the family name.”
JVL Introduction
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid gave a speech about antisemitism last year, placing Jew-hatred in the wider context of other forms of abuse.
“Antisemitism” said Lapid, “isn’t the first name of hate, it’s the family name.” Therefore “the fight is not between antisemites and Jews – the fight is between antisemites and everyone who believes in values like equality and justice and human love.”
In these reflections on what Lapid said, Peter Beinart takes him very seriously indeed.
If indeed antisemites, according to Lapid, were also the slave traders who threw people bound together in chains into the sea, what are Jews to make of the nakba?
Wasn’t that also, asks Beinart, when three quarters of a million Palestinians left their homes—either at gunpoint or fear of gunpoint, “a profound act of violent bigotry” – the moral equivalent of antisemitism?
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Thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost.
This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Mon 23 May 2022. Read the original here.
Is Denying the Nakba Antisemitism?
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Well said: “If systematic violence aimed at expelling or dominating another ethnic, religious, or racial group is justified because the people committing it are afraid, then not only was the Nakba justified, but South African apartheid, Protestant domination in Northern Ireland, and the Hutu genocide in Rwanda were justified too”.
Calm, succinct and cogent from Mr. Beinart. There also seems to me currently to be an impulse amongst Zionists and their supporters to build a hermetically-sealed capsule of incontrovertibility around their definitions and analyses, whereby, whatever they say goes, and whoever gainsays their orthodoxy is automatically labelled as anti-Semitic. In addition, the history of the twentieth century is not accepted as contestable history at all, but the version deemed fit for consumption carries the same biblical imprimatur as that of the book of the same name.