The new antisemitism comes from the right

JVL Introduction

Donald Trump’s recent accusation that a Jew voting Democrat was “disloyal’ or telling Jews that Netanyahu was “your prime minister” are particularly obnoxious examples of “new-normal” antisemitism.

Any public stance critical of Israeli policies or US support is, for the new right, antisemitic. That now includes any support for BDS.

As Mairav Zonszein shows none of this is new. It merely takes to extremes what so many organisations claiming to represent American Jews and their interests—like the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations—have been pushing for years. They have always tried to silence those who criticize Israel or advocate for Palestinian rights.

It is increasingly non-Zionist or liberal Zionist Jews in the West – the great majority of the American-Jewish population, as Zonszein points out – who are now deemed the greatest enemy of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s dismal ethno-nationalisms.

This article was originally published by New York Review of Books on Wed 4 Sep 2019. Read the original here.