The current total focus and centring of the problem of anti-Semitism by the political right is the most desperate attempt yet to deny the basic humanity of the Palestinians in Gaza, and to make mass killing first acceptable and then invisible.
Rising anti-Semitism is a problem, a point to which I’ll return. But what it is being used for is exactly the same “acceptable hatred” towards the Palestinians as was directed against the Jews in the 1930s, and which then became explicit exterminism.
Lachlan Murdoch’s speech in Sydney last week on behalf of News Corp staked out in programmatic form what it and much of the right have been doing for the past fortnight: “Let’s be very clear: when it comes to anti-Semitism there is no room for equivocation. There is no fence-sitting. From Brisbane to Broome, from Launceston to Lakemba, anti-Semitism does not belong in Australia. It is our duty to address and tackle it, as it is to address and tackle all forms of hatred.”
Moving on from a nod to addressing and tackling “all forms of hatred”, Murdoch continued:
“Ours is a vital vocation that requires endless focus, reinvention and adaptability, as well as the standard journalistic prerequisites of curiosity and courage. Courage to cover the most difficult stories. Courage to address distressing events such as the horrific October 7 terror attack on Israel. Courage to report on the ensuing war, and courage to expose the disturbing wave of hatred against Jews around the world and in our own communities.”
This sort of statement, with (in this News Corp reporting of it) its total omission of Palestinian civilian deaths and suffering, is the mobilisation of a basic error in thinking, often wilfully made: the special historical character of anti-Semitism in European history is taken as granting resistance to it a special moral character, as if the lives of others were worth less than those of Jews. Or, indeed, worth nothing at all.
Anti-Semitism’s special character is partly due to its long history — the Christian church claimed that the Jews as a people, by their very existence, deny the unquestioned truth of Christ — but more recently due to the unique character of the Holocaust. The latter event has to be faced in its uniqueness; but that can also serve as a “one-stop shop” for moral action. The phrase “never again” was, for a while after the 1980s, used in a general sense; applied to various people under threat of genocide — Tutsi Rwandans, Bosnians, Darfurians — often in retrospect.
Now it has been drawn back to the Jews alone, as Natasha Roth-Rowland documents in her essay “When ‘Never Again’ becomes a war cry”. Jewish people become those whose life and security is an end in itself; Palestinians in Gaza are made into a mere means to that end, a slippage aided by the impersonal high-tech manner of their killing.
The effect of this is to court obscenity. The bombs fall hourly on Gaza, now on the hospitals, and the critically injured are forced onto their feet and in wheelchairs to start what, for some, will be a death march. Meanwhile, increasingly pompous and self-regarding speechifying about the Holocaust feeds off itself.
For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hamas’ specific attack was a harbinger of a new Holocaust. The German government lit up the Brandenburg Gate with “Never again is now” and the Israeli flag, and criminalised pro-Palestinian marches. Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio called for eradication, without making much distinction between Hamas and Gaza citizens. Indeed, a reversal is achieved: indifference to Palestinian suffering and death becomes a virtue, a mark of one’s steely resolve to be a sentinel at the gates of “never again”.
To go one layer further, this reveals the way in which resolute anti-Semitism of a certain type is really a pretext to express exterminatory desires towards another people, in this case the Palestinians. This is some deep regressive joy, drawn back up from the depths of history. The Palestinians serve as a perfect exterminatory object; victims of Europe’s victims, they are a permanent problem, a blockage to the narrative of shame and redemption by which the Western right can give itself meaning and purpose once again.
This is licensing an unbounded hate against the Palestinians. In Florida, Republican state Senator Michelle Salzman, when asked how many Palestinians would have to die, replied: “All of them.” Douglas Murray, a right-wing “decline of the West” commentator, argued — in the Jewish Chronicle! — that the WWII German mass killings of Jews and others in Eastern Europe were somehow less immoral than the Hamas raid, because some German soldiers among the tens of thousands taking part in the killings felt bad about it. In May, Murray had told yet another of the right’s moral decline conferences that the rise of Nazism in Germany should be considered “mucking up”.
Why on earth would this moral disdain for the Palestinians flow towards Nazi apologetics? Because Palestinian hatred is a cultural “slot” of sorts. Who occupied it previously? Why the Jews, of course. Today’s right is indifferent to Palestinian suffering, or actively supportive of their mass killing. The political right of the pre-WWII period was anti-Semitic in the same way.
From 1920, when editor Wickham Steed published Protocols of The Elders of Zion in The Times, the launched years of acceptable anti-Semitism on the right. Some were both anti-Semitic and Zionist. T.S. Eliot set the tone for acceptable ’30s anti-Semitism in his lecture “After Strange Gods”, arguing that what mattered in society “is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable”. G.K. Chesterton suggested that Jews could take public office, but should be made to wear Oriental clothes to communicate their difference. And the establishment right, gathered around figures such as the Duke of Westminster, were all anti-Semitic, as documented by Conservative MP and diarist “Chips” Channon, who noted in 1935:
The atrocities in Germany cause very little excitement really — the latest Jew-baitings, the beatings, the alleged sexual perversions and outrages — who cares?
These were all absolutely common views of the period, which saw varying degrees of anti-Semitism become both a standard view of the middle and working classes, and an absolute political obsession among the elites. Christian traditional civilisation had been wrecked by World War I, a modern, technocratic capitalist world was taking over. The Jews were prominent in finance, science and social policy; their journey out of marginality divided Christian nations against themselves. Assimilating Jews were disliked; so too were Zionists, schemers who wanted to take the Christian Holy Land, and put Bethlehem and Nazareth in a Jewish state.
The Holocaust put an end to the smooth and routinised anti-Semitism of the West, and made the creation of Israel a UN task. The intellectual right reorganised itself, expelling anti-Semites. The Jewish intelligentsia moved from left to right, creating the neoconservative movement.
With postwar Christian civilisation dissolved into liberal humanism, the spirit of Judaism and Israel became the fallback for the right: a living, observed communal faith, with a Spartan nation ready to fight attached.
But there is no doubt that the tier-on-tier of identikit op-eds about “ancient hatreds” as cited, and the “test of who you are” and so on in the right press licensing the unlimited killing of Palestinians, would have been occupied in the ’30s by identikit pieces about how Jewish commercialism was sapping the will of the nation, Jewish bankers had a stranglehold on the economy, and Jewish intellectuals were fomenting communism. This had utterly real effects. When the Jewish refugee ships began arriving from Germany in the late 1930s, Western governments — including that of Robert Menzies — turned them back, to eventually die in the camps.
The continuity of the left is to stand with the oppressed, with some lapses, and continued debate about what the politics of that might be. The current conflict does demand that the revival of anti-Semitism — which has a memetic character in Western culture, for complex reasons — be taken seriously. But that can and must be done in parallel, not as a forestalling of all other solidarities.
The right has a continuity of finding an oppressed people to bully because its needs for a hate-target change. It then seals itself off from any and all moral questioning. It is exemplifying it with its use of the Holocaust as a touchstone for unlimited killing in Gaza, and its prim self-satisfaction in saying “Never again”, a phrase which will license genocides to come.
