Anti-Zionism and antisemitism - the difference and why it matters - video Dailymotion

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When is anti-Zionism antisemitism? As Professor David Slucki from the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University explains, the history of each is tied to the other, and there isn't always a clear difference between the two.

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00:00 Antisemitism is surging once again, particularly online.

00:04 Using data from Jewish advocacy body the Anti-Defamation League,

00:07 the New York Times reported that antisemitic content soared more than 919% on X

00:13 and 28% on Facebook in the first month since the Hamas attacks of October 7.

00:18 It has been a growing trend over the past few years.

00:22 According to a European Commission report from 2021,

00:25 there was considerable growth in the use of antisemitic phrases across French and German social media accounts during COVID.

00:32 It's a theme that has been replicated across the world,

00:35 echoing a centuries-old narrative where racists use global events as an excuse to attack and scapegoat the Jewish people.

00:42 Antisemitism is a historic phenomenon.

00:52 We call it the oldest hatred because it really goes back to anti-Putin.

00:57 From biblical times, history shows antisemitism developed as Christianity grew with it.

01:03 It is seen in the artworks of the Renaissance,

01:06 where depictions of Christian dominance and Jewish persecution hung in galleries and palaces across Europe,

01:12 time-stamping the suffering.

01:14 How Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or be kicked out of their homes during the Spanish Inquisition,

01:19 pushed into ghettos by the Popes of Rome, or murdered in Germany for perceived conspiracies against Christianity.

01:26 These works reinforce racism through culture as a constant.

01:30 The way we recognise antisemitism today,

01:34 really, we can trace that back to the kind of early to middle 19th century,

01:40 where this pseudoscience emerges, which really follows the revelations of Charles Darwin on the origin of species.

01:49 And Darwin's principles get misapplied to analysing human beings and humanity.

01:55 So what we get with the rise of these kind of ideas is the notion that there are inherent traits linked to your racial makeup.

02:06 It was around this period that a Jewish nationalist movement emerged, Zionism.

02:12 Its founder, a Hungarian journalist named Theodor Herzl,

02:15 believed European antisemitism had grown so bad that Jews would never be allowed to assimilate,

02:21 meaning they needed a homeland of their own.

02:24 At the first Zionist Congress in 1897,

02:27 he and his fellow members agreed that the movement's aim was to

02:30 "establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law."

02:35 Around the time Herzl was developing his movement,

02:38 a German named Wilhelm Mahr had written a paper that Germans were losing out to Jews.

02:44 Along with founding the League of Antisemites,

02:46 Mahr's attempt at intellectualising his racism established some of the tropes that endure to this day.

02:52 So at the same time as the race science part,

02:55 there also emerges this notion that Jews are taking over the world,

03:00 this conspiratorial thinking around Jews and their power.

03:06 And it's nonsense, but it becomes quite popular in certain parts of the world.

03:11 And so this kind of modern antisemitism,

03:15 which revolves around race science and around Jewish conspiratorial thinking,

03:21 it brings Jew hatred into the modern world.

03:26 This transforms antisemitism.

03:29 And it persists to this day.

03:32 The biggest sort of flashpoint is the Holocaust.

03:35 And really that first half of the 20th century,

03:38 when violence against Jews is almost non-stop.

03:44 The violence in the early 20th century saw many Jewish people make 'aliyah',

03:49 a Hebrew term that describes Jewish people moving back to Israel.

03:53 Yet despite having just fought a war to depose the Nazis,

03:56 and decades later the fall of the Soviet Union,

03:58 antisemitism remained entrenched,

04:01 spiking around global events and harming new generations.

04:05 So why does this racist conspiracy hold such sway?

04:08 I think it stems back to the fact that antisemitism is slippery,

04:12 even though in the West antisemitism became less acceptable after the Holocaust.

04:20 It never went away.

04:23 People still, people have not stopped blaming Jews for their problems.

04:28 The rise of social media has played a huge role in the spread of antisemitism.

04:33 You know, with the rise of YouTube, Twitter, TikTok,

04:38 it's just much easier to be confronted with antisemitism.

04:42 You don't have to go looking for it.

04:45 Recently, antisemitism has evolved again.

04:48 Some people, like the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,

04:52 are concerned that antisemitism is behind criticism of the State of Israel,

04:56 and the political movement that created it, Zionism.

05:00 Zionism wasn't something dreamed up entirely by Theodor Herzl.

05:04 The idea that God promised those lands to the followers of Abraham called the Israelites

05:08 goes back to the Old Testament.

05:10 It took until 1948, when Israel was declared by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion,

05:16 who was then head of the World Zionist Organization.

05:19 The declaration meant there was now one Jewish nation in the world,

05:22 along with the numerous established around Islamic and Christian beliefs.

05:26 However, since this point, the concept of what Zionism is,

05:29 and what it hopes to achieve, has become heavily debated.

05:33 Zionism isn't one thing, and it's never been one thing.

05:37 It's been attached to a whole range of political worldviews.

05:43 There was rarely agreement on what that ought to look like,

05:46 whether that took the form of a nation-state, which was the most prevalent version of it.

05:52 But Zionism was one of many political movements in the pre-Holocaust Jewish world.

06:00 It wasn't even the dominant one.

06:03 But the Holocaust changed things for many Jews.

06:05 The fact that there was nowhere to go,

06:07 establishing a Jewish state in what was then Palestine, came at a huge cost.

06:15 As Israel developed, decades of war marked its foundational years,

06:19 and this difficult relationship with its neighbours continues.

06:23 It sparked war with not only Palestinians, but also surrounding neighbours.

06:32 It saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

06:40 And it's been an intractable quagmire, I guess.

06:46 So there's this kind of, in a way, unsolvable problem between the notion that

06:52 only Israel can shore up the Jews' existence,

06:56 and if you don't have a Jewish state, then that leaves Jews vulnerable,

07:00 versus at what cost.

07:03 And I think that's really the position of many anti-Zionists,

07:06 that the cost of statehood is too great.

07:09 The intractable bargain accelerated both anti-Semitism

07:12 and questioning of Zionist ideals across the globe.

07:15 But is criticism of Zionism criticism of all Jewish people?

07:19 But I really think we should think about it more like a spectrum,

07:23 and there are people on all different positions along the spectrum.

07:27 Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?

07:32 It can be, and this is part of the struggle to define anti-Semitism.

07:39 Many governments, universities and organisations use what is known as the IHRA definition,

07:45 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of anti-Semitism.

07:50 It states that anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews,

07:53 which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.

07:56 It goes on to say,

07:57 "Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."

08:05 And that was adopted by countries, by universities, as the definition.

08:12 And one of the critiques that came out of that was it was a bit too rigid in some ways,

08:19 that it would have a kind of chilling effect on particularly academic freedom and freedom of speech.

08:28 In 2020, to alleviate these concerns, a range of Jewish academics convened the Jerusalem Declaration.

08:34 This attempted to create space between the racism against Jewish people and the acts of the state of Israel.

08:40 On the face of it, it is not anti-Semitic to support the Palestinian demand for justice,

08:45 offer evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state, or boycott or divest from Israeli businesses.

08:52 The quest for definitions has offered no confirmed position.

08:56 You know, we're in a heightened period right now as well,

09:00 where many Jews in places like Melbourne and Australia more broadly feel very vulnerable and very sensitive to anti-Zionism.

09:13 And when I say many Jews, I say that because there's also like a cohort of Jews that identify as anti-Zionism,

09:18 so I don't want to generalise and say Jews feel this way or another way.

09:23 Again, it's a spectrum.

09:24 Instead, communities, hurt and scared, recede further from the difficult conversations needed to be had.

09:30 One of the things that's concerned me locally, you know, obviously I'm very concerned about the unfolding crisis in Israel,

09:41 and particularly in Gaza, but one of the things I've been concerned about locally when I look around

09:46 is the impact that it has on our social cohesion and our ability to connect with one another

09:54 and our ability to have difficult conversations, and these are difficult conversations, necessarily so.

10:01 And I think it starts from a place of empathy, you know, and that's our role at universities also,

10:07 is to teach and model how to have those discussions.

10:12 So I think it comes from a place of understanding why people feel the ways in which they do,

10:19 and seeing them as fully human and imperfect.

10:22 [Music plays]

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Anti-Zionism and antisemitism - the difference and why it matters

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