When words lose their meaning, truth is not the only victim
JVL Introduction
Political commentator and academic at the University of Johannesburg, Steven Friedman looks at the assault on free speech and liberal democracy occurring over the crisis in Gaza.
He says simply “This self-inflicted flight from freedom is triggered by the West’s lockstep support for the Israeli state.”
In this article he explains how we have got to where we are today and the process through which the concept of antisemitism has metamorphosed from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel.
We intend to review Friedman’s new book Good Jew, Bad Jew: Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Assault on Meaning on the JVL website in due course.
This article was originally published by Business Day (South Africa) on Tue 7 Nov 2023. Read the original here.
When words lose their meaning, truth is not the only victim
Anti-Semitism is no longer hatred of Jews; it is now failure to accept the biases of Europe’s elites
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I am surprised by the comment that Freud was sympathetic to Zionism. In the wake of the 1929 Keren Hayesod wrotet to prominent Jews asking if they might issue a statement support the Jewish settlers in Palestine.
Freud wrote back declining.
He also made it very clear that he was unsympathetic to the plight of the Jews living in the Yishuv.
“I cannot do as you wish,” wrote Freud. “Whoever wants to influence the masses must give them something rousing and inflammatory and my sober judgment of Zionism does not permit this.”
Freud explained that, while he identified with the goals of Zionism in creating a home for Jews and found a measure of pride in the university that had been established in Jerusalem, he had no understanding of the Zionist movement.
“I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian and Islamic worlds would ever be prepared to have their holy places under Jewish care. It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy.”
As for expressing sympathy for the Hebrew pioneers who had suffered through the riots, Freud felt that “the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.”
Freud closed the letter with about as much sympathy as he started it.
“Now judge for yourself whether I, with such a critical point of view, am the right person to come forward as the solace of a people deluded by unjustified hope.”
https://blog.nli.org.il/en/freud_on_zionism/
Very helpful. It is good to see a discussion of the ‘law of nature’ practised by colonial states. Raoul Peck’s ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ provides ample evidence of this practice.
As for ‘antisemitism’, this term seems to be orientalist in its origins as defined by Edward Said. It would be good if all the semitic linguistic groups, including Arabs, Armenians, Jews and others, benefited from the term’s effect.
This week I discovered that a longstanding (non-Jewish) friend does indeed think our ceasefire marches are probably antisemitic! I’m going to send him this article in the hope that it may open his mind…
Define what it means to be Semitic before you accuse someone of being anti
The answer is in your strapline, Jews always with the oppressed never the oppressor
It is our duty as human kind to be anti oppressor
Marching for a Ceasefire on Armistice day makes perfect sense
Clear, to the point, irrefutable (except of course in the minds of the rabid/calculating Zionists). A singularly sharp example is last week’s piece by one Chesterton (no, not THAT one, or indeed G.K.’s even worse brother, but in “The Article”). C cannot conceive that opposition to Israeli genocidal tendencies – and in the case of BenGvir and Smotrich, clear plans) can be driven by anything other than AS. For him, accusations of genocidal tendencies/plans is especially malicious because of…THAT holocaust…Ian Spencer in the last Weekly Worker (#1466) adeptly analyses the genocidal nature of Israeli attacks on the Gazan population, as well as the fraudulent equation of “democracy is identical with alliance with USA”; worth a thorough read.
A new form of AS has begun to emerge: a tendency to expand a (wholly hypocritical) support for a Palestinian state: some of the NATO establishment spokespersons have allowed the term” secure” to join the term ‘independent’ in the list of desiderata for the sort of Palestinian state they claim to advocate and support. Yet a secure Palestinian state would need to be heavily armed with weapons modern enough to repel and indeed deter, the ‘heroes’ of the Israeli air force, whose sterling work of ‘self-defence’ has slaughtered so many Palestinians female and juvenile or infantile…
So insidious is ”anti-semitism” that it creeps into the phrasing of professedly Zionist commentators and spokespersons – “no ifs, no buts” …they can not be too careful, or they will be denounced by the likes of Gideon Falter, Suella Braverman, ‘Tommy Robinson’, not to mention the Netanyahu brothers, Itamar benGvir and Bezaleel Smotrich (not to mention the later Meir Kahane, lamented by some) for going soft on a final solution of the Palestinian problem…
Mahmood Mamdani (whom I had not previously encountered) makes a very important point. The reason why the Nazi Holocaust is regarded as uniquely horrific among so many other genocides is that the victims were white Europeans. The sense of extraordinary transgression associated with the Nazis derives not from the number of people they killed or their ways of killing them but from their primal sin of treating white people as if they were black.
The unlimited support offered by Germans to Israel (described in an excellent later posting by Deborah Feldman) is often attributed to guilt but I think this is not quite correct. It is more a sort of apology for failing to acknowledge Jews as a fellow master race. This explains their relative lack of concern for their innumerable other victims, in Europe and Africa, throughout the 20th century. It also explains their extreme hostility to Jews who reject the entire master race ideology by supporting Palestinians.
This German approach is congenial to many Zionists. It helps to explain one of the examples in the IHRA definition of antisemitism: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” On the face of it this seems to say that it is antisemitic to equate Jewish Israelis to Nazi Germans. The true meaning is that it is antisemitic to equate Arabs to Jews.