Is anti-semitism on the rise?

national | miscellaneous | news report Friday August 16, 2002 16:06 by Sean Bhean Bhocht - International Socialist Tendency

Socialist arguments against both Zionism and anti semitism

‘One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all [and that Jewish critics of Israel] have a basic complex…of guilt about Jewish survival.’

Abba Eban, Israeli Labour Party, in the Knesset, July 31, 1972

Coinciding with renewed public outrage over Israeli brutality against the Palestinians there have appeared a flurry of newspaper editorials accusing critics of Israel — specifically left-wing anti-Zionists — of being part of a new wave of anti-semitism. Britain’s chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks recently equated any criticism of Israel with a ‘calling into question the Jewish people’s right to exist collectively.’

A prominent Italian liberal, in a book described by the European Observatory on Racism as ‘explicitly anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-immigrant,’ denounced Palestinian sympathizers as ‘anti-semites who would sell their own mothers to a harem to see Jews once again in the gas chambers’. Sharon himself has accused those demanding an investigation of war crimes in Jenin of committing anti-semitic ‘blood libel’.

What are we to make of all this? If there has been a palpable rise in anti-semitism in recent months, then socialists belong in the front lines of an urgent and forceful response. The fate of the Jewish people and of the left have been closely intertwined throughout the history of capitalism.

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