24.08.23
Editorial Note
After years of neglect, the subject of Left-wing antisemitism has finally attracted serious academic attention. The book Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays was edited by British Professor Alan Johnson and should become a must-read for those concerned about the alarming rise of antisemitism.
The book provides a comprehensive critical guide to contemporary Left antisemitism. As one reviewer notes, “Written by many of this generation’s leading scholars, Mapping Antisemitism is a valuable compilation of learned, deeply insightful analysis of contemporary anti-Jewish hostility prevalent in significant strains of Western political thought…the pernicious link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism within the political left.”
The book makes a clear distinction between the legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism, for which the very existence of the Jewish state is a red flag galvanizing various strands of old and new antisemitic voices. The volume also makes clear that Leftist antisemitism is much more corrosive than right-wing antisemitism because Western society’s “progressive” segments are considered legitimate purveyors of such ideas.
The topics which the book contributors cover include: antisemitic anti-Zionism and its underappreciated Soviet roots; the impact of analogies with the Nazis; the rise of antisemitism on the European continent, exploring the hybrid forms emerging from cross-fertilization between the new left, Christian, and Islamist antisemitism; the impact of anti-Zionist activism on higher education; and the bitter debates over the adoption of the often misrepresented International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism; among other.
Israel Academia Monitor welcomes especially the book’s emphasis on academic antisemitism, the product of generations of scholars both in Israel and the West who abandoned the positivist and objective paradigm of the social sciences. Instead, they embrace the neo-Marxist, critical school of thought in which Israel is viewed as a colonial, neocolonial, apartheid state that subjugates the Palestinians and worse. Over the years, IAM has brought countless examples of Israeli academic activists whose portrayal of Israel is highly antisemitic. As the book notes, many Western academic activists have incorporated antisemitic themes. Ironically, the ongoing case of Jasbir Puar, whose book is taught at Princeton University, alleges that the IDF harvests the organs of Palestinians. Puar, a professor at Rutgers University, has a long history of extreme anti-Israel activism.
Another interesting point in the book that fits the IAM analysis is the confluence of Western and Islamic antisemitism. Of course, this idea is not new, going back to the time of the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopted much of the Nazi propaganda during WWII. Later, Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamist Republic of Iran, incorporated Nazi-like themes to create a vitriolic antisemitic narrative of Israel and Jews. Interestingly, the regime was eager to use radical Israeli scholars to legitimize its antisemitic ideology. For instance, a translation of the books by Ilan Pappe, arguably the most radical Israeli historian (profiled by IAM numerous times), was published in both Farsi and Arabic. Shlomo Sand, another radical historian from Tel Aviv University, was interviewed several times on the Iranian Press TV. As IAM pointed out, Sand, who claimed that Jewish people were an invention of nineteenth-century Zionists, was particularly useful to the Islamists who denied that Jews had any right to Israel.
The book, which is scheduled to come out in October 2023, is expected to make a real impact on the debate on current antisemitism.
A recent example of new Left antisemitism comes in an article published by two Israeli authors, Prof. Ariel Hendel, and Prof. Hagar Kotef, titled “Settler Colonialism and Home.”
The article discusses forms of settler colonialism, such as the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Algeria, and Israel. “Let us look at Israeli homes as an example. These reminders of the constitutive violence are integrated into so much of the Israeli landscape – which is inlaid with ruins of Palestinian past lives: piles of stones that used to be walls of Palestinian houses, collapsing arches, terraces, fig trees, olive groves, hedges of prickly cactuses… All these serve as a ghostly and yet very material reminder of the violence at the foundation of Israeli homes.”
According to the authors, “It was in the 1948 war and its aftermath that Zionism as a housing regime (see Allweil 2016) became a project of direct replacement, depriving the Palestinian population from their own homes and lands, and not only a project of providing homes for Jewish immigrants as part of building a Jewish homeland. Approximately 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the war. Their return was fully restricted, while their homes and properties were taken by the new regime and given to Jewish immigrants, bulldozed to dust, or left to slow ruination.”
The authors then move on to discuss the Arab inhabitants who build houses without obtaining building permits and cases of house demolitions.
The authors claim Israel is attempting to replace the Palestinians. “Thus, the symbolic replacement of the Arab with the Western was itself replaced with a different form of replacement: the replacement of living Palestinians with living Israeli-Jews who come to inhibit the former’s home; be it as part of the more national resettlement after 1948… not only physically replace the natives but also to take their place as the legitimate dwellers of the single home and the homeland.” The authors also claim that “most social struggles in Israel revolve around the question of how the material and social benefits of the massive dispossession of 1948 (the real-estate loot) should be distributed among Jews, while not touching at all on the injustice of acquiring these possessions to begin with.”
The text is full of antisemitic verbiage, blaming the Jews for the misfortune that befallen the Palestinians which they themselves caused; by waging the riots in 1936-9 against the Jews, then their rejection of the Partition Plan, and soon after, waging war against the nascent Jewish State, a war which the Palestinians have lost. Moreover, under the occupation of Egypt in Gaza and Jordan in the West Bank between 1948 and 1967, the Palestinians’ Arab allies did not find the Palestinians righteous for an independent state. But the authors blame Israel and the Jews.
The authors should note that the Balfour Declaration, which the League of Nations adopted, stated that non-Jews should not be harmed while living in the national home of the Jews and also that Jews living in other countries should not be harmed. Yet the Palestinians and their Arab allies breached this arrangement and slaughtered numerous Jews in Palestine and in the Arab world, and as a result, Jews were expelled and absorbed into the Jewish state.
Clearly, the authors reject the Jews’ right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland by calling Jews settler colonialists. The authors deliberately hide facts to appease their Palestinian camaraderie by taking upon themselves antisemitic diatribes. This is precisely what the book on the New Left Antisemitism discusses in length.
References:
Book
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism
The Fathom Essays
Edited ByAlan Johnson
Edition1st Edition
First Published2023
eBook Published6 October 2023
Pub. LocationLondon
ImprintRoutledge
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.4324/9781003322320
Pages352
eBook ISBN9781003322320
SubjectsArea Studies, Humanities, Politics & International Relations
ABSTRACT
Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.
The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents. Fathom journal has examined these questions relentlessly in the first decade of its existence, earning a reputation for careful textual analysis and cogent advocacy. In this book, the Fathom essays are contextualised by three new contributions: Lesley Klaff provides a map of contemporary antisemitic forms of antizionism, Dave Rich writes on the oft-neglected lived experience of the Jewish victims of contemporary antisemitism and David Hirsh assesses the intellectual history of the left from which both Fathom and his own London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, as well as this book series, have emerged. Topics covered by the contributors include antisemitic antizionism and its underappreciated Soviet roots; the impact of analogies with the Nazis; the rise of antisemitism on the European continent, exploring the hybrid forms emerging from a cross-fertilisation between new left, Christian and Islamist antisemitism; the impact of antizionist activism on higher education; and the bitter debates over the adoption of the oft-misrepresented International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
This work will be of considerable appeal to scholars and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1|46 pages
Introduction and Contexts
Chapter 1|10 pages
Introduction to Mapping Left Antisemitism
The Fathom Essays
ByAlan JohnsonAbstract
Chapter 2|15 pages
A New Form of the Oldest Hatred
Mapping Antisemitism Today
ByLesley KlaffAbstract
Chapter 3|12 pages
The Jewish Experience of Antisemitism
ByDave RichAbstract
Chapter 4|7 pages
The Left and the Jews
Time for a Rethink
ByAlan JohnsonAbstract
Part 2|60 pages
Contemporary Left Antisemitism
Chapter 5|8 pages
What Is Left Antisemitism?
BySean MatgamnaAbstract
Chapter 6|8 pages
Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
ByMichael WalzerAbstract
Chapter 7|7 pages
Alibi Antisemitism
ByNorman GerasAbstract
Chapter 8|7 pages
Like a Cloud Contains a Storm
Jean Améry’s Critique of Anti-Zionism
ByMarlene GallnerAbstract
Chapter 9|6 pages
What Corbyn’s Favourite Sociologists Greg Philo and Mike Berry Get Wrong About Contemporary Antisemitism
ByMatthew BoltonAbstract
Chapter 10|7 pages
Antisemitism and the Left
A Memoir
ByKathleen HayesAbstract
Chapter 11|8 pages
Denial
Norman Finkelstein and the New Antisemitism
ByAlan JohnsonAbstract
Chapter 12|7 pages
‘Toxic Gifts’
Israel and the Anti-Zionist Left. An Interview With Susie Linfield
BySusie LinfieldAbstract
Part 3|32 pages
The Soviet Roots of Contemporary Left Antisemitism
Chapter 13|13 pages
Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism
ByIzabella TabarovskyAbstract
Chapter 14|9 pages
Communists Against Jews
The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland in 1968
BySimon GansingerAbstract
Chapter 15|8 pages
The German Left’s Undeclared Wars on Israel
An Interview With Jeffrey Herf
ByJeffrey HerfAbstract
Part 4|26 pages
Left Antisemitism and the Holocaust
Chapter 16|4 pages
Holocaust Inversion and Contemporary Antisemitism
ByLesley KlaffAbstract
Chapter 17|3 pages
Hitler and the Nazis’ Anti-Zionism
ByJeffrey HerfAbstract
Chapter 18|17 pages
Holocaust Falsifiers
Blaming ‘Zionists’ for the Crimes of the Nazis
ByPaul BogdanorAbstract
Part 5|41 pages
Left Antisemitism in Europe and the United States
Chapter 19|13 pages
Reflections on Contemporary Antisemitism in Europe
ByKenneth WaltzerAbstract
Chapter 20|4 pages
The Unwelcome Arrival of the Quenelle
ByDave RichAbstract
Chapter 21|9 pages
A Modern Orthodox-Christian Ritual Murder Libel
St. Philoumenos of Jacob’s Well
ByDavid GurevichAbstract
Chapter 22|13 pages
We Shall Be as a City on a Hill
Trump, ‘Progressive’ Anti-Semitism, and the Loss of American Jewish Exceptionalism
ByShalom LappinAbstract
Part 6|32 pages
Left Antisemitism and Academia
Chapter 23|14 pages
The Meaning of David Miller
ByDavid HirshAbstract
Chapter 24|9 pages
From Scholarship to Polemic? A Case Study of the Emerging Crisis in Academic Publishing on Israel
ByCary NelsonAbstract
Chapter 25|7 pages
Pathologising ‘Jewish Being and Thinking’
Oren Ben-Dor and Academic Antisemitism
BySarah Annes BrownAbstract
Part 7|17 pages
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
Chapter 26|7 pages
On Misrepresentations of the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism
ByDave RichAbstract
Chapter 27|8 pages
Political Antisemitism
A Defence of the IHRA Definition
ByBernard Harrison, Lesley KlaffAbstract
Part 8|63 pages
Theory and Left Antisemitism
Chapter 28|15 pages
Misreading Hannah Arendt
Judith Butler’s Anti-Zionism and the Eichmann Trial
ByRussell A. BermanAbstract
Chapter 29|8 pages
The Pleasures of Antisemitism
ByEve GarrardAbstract
Chapter 30|11 pages
Intersectionality and Antisemitism
A New Approach
ByKarin StögnerAbstract
Chapter 31|27 pages
Left Alternatives to Left Antisemitism
A Conversation Between Alan Johnson and Philip Spencer
ByAlan Johnson, Philip SpencerAbstract
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https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/39771/
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Kotef, Hagar and Handel, Ariel (2023) ‘Settler colonialism and home.’ In: Boccagni, Paolo, (ed.), Handbook on Home and Migration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 158-169.
| Text – Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 1 December 2023. Request a copy |
Abstract
Settler colonialism is a specific configuration of the complex relationship between home and immigration. As an organized migration movement, settler colonialism is a political movement whose main aim is the construction of senses of home and belonging in new territories. Furthermore, as such a movement, settler colonialism is also a massive movement for the construction of physical homes for the colonizing population coupled with the destruction of local homes. Either concretely or more metaphorically, settler colonialism is thus an act of living inside depopulated homes. As a result, legitimacy regimes, legal means and land-use regulations render the homes of the colonized temporary and unstable. But precisely therefore, merely being at home becomes an act of resistance for the colonized. This chapter works through this dialectic of destruction and belonging, presenting the home in the colony as a political site, both of control and of resistance, exploring the political, cultural, economic, symbolic, and affective dimensions of the home in settler-colonial settings.
| Item Type: | Book Chapters |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Settler colonialism; Indigeneity; Israel/Palestine; Home demolitions; State violence; Resistance |
| SOAS Departments & Centres: | Departments and Subunits > Department of Politics & International Studies |
| ISBN: | 9781800882768 |
| DOI (Digital Object Identifier): | https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800882775.00022 |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Jul 2023 09:08 |
| URI: | https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/39771 |
| Funders: | Leverhulme Trust |
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