No: the thing that makes Israel a different case is the eliminationist urge that drives the protests against it. This is a movement that fantasises about a world in which Israel does not exist. As their slogan makes clear, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”. No room for Israel.
The charge against Israel is not just that it occupies Palestinian land and kills Palestinian children, but that it is a colonial, apartheid state and Zionism is a form of white supremacism. It follows that Israel must not exist, because all racism and inequality must be eradicated as part of the struggle to create a better world.
This is an accusation that has been levelled at Jews since the earliest days of Christianity, and has become an important element in the way Western culture has imagined Jews and Judaism. Perhaps this is just a coincidence and the fact Israel is a Jewish state does not influence the way people relate to it. Maybe it is all subconscious anyway. But the land on which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays out is the physical foundation of many of the religious beliefs and cultural assumptions that have shaped our world. Jerusalem matters to billions of people in a way that other places simply don’t: its churches and mosques, even the walls and roads resonate deeply in our culture and Christians, Muslims and Jews have been fighting over them for thousands of years.
This doesn’t mean that most anti-Israel activists are antisemitic. But it’s no surprise their movement attracts people who don’t like Jews: whether they are driving round Manchester shouting “Free Palestine” at Jewish pedestrians or marching through London chanting that “The Army of Muhammed will return” to kill Jews.
Maybe these are just the antisemitic fringes. But this is a movement that is rarely bothered about the antisemites in its midst or at its head. The speaker who got the biggest cheer of all on Saturday was Jeremy Corbyn, introduced as “the real leader of the opposition”. Under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour unlawfully discriminated against Jews — literally the definition of antisemitism — but the anti-racists singing his name seemed not to mind.
It is not only on the streets of Britain that people imagine a world without Israel. Hamas is a radical Islamist movement that quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its founding charter. It is backed by Iran, whose Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who believes “Zionist capitalists” control “all imperialist governments”. Iran’s main proxy, Hizbollah, destroyed the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 86 people, and invented the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The fact Israel is Jewish matters very much to them, and they are the ones actually trying to create this new, Zionism-free future.
Dr Dave Rich is Director of Policy at the CST
Security Trust and author of ‘The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism’
