Anti-Semitism review: The flaw at the heart of Frederic Raphael’s argument

Richard King on how Raphael’s conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism undermines his account of the history of antisemitism:

Rejecting the argument that anti-Semitism owes as much to the Enlightenment as it does to Christianity, Raphael suggests that the Jews’ original crime was the historically unique one of deicide, which is to say the murder of God Himself. It is this that led to their reputation for treachery and furnished the world with a reliable scapegoat for everything from epidemics to economic catastrophe.

From the death of Jesus to the Black Death, it is on the heads of the Jews that blame falls – a trend that reaches its apogee with the “stab in the back” myth of post-First World War Germany and the “last crusade” of Nazism (a subject so large, as Raphael notes, that its history has a history of its own).

All of this is perfectly sound. But Raphael runs into serious problems when he tries to expand the phenomenon of Jew-blaming to include criticism of modern Israel. For while it is undoubtedly true that the miasma of anti-Semitism surrounds much dark talk about the Israel “lobby”, and true too that many liberals and left-wingers are apt to downplay the anti-Semitism extant within the Muslim community for fear that they will sanction anti-Muslim prejudice, it is not true to say that Israel is “the sole licensed target for unguarded malice” in the West.

Disproportionate our emphasis on Israel may be, but this imbalance stems as much from a desire to highlight Western hypocrisy as it does from any loathing of “the Judas state”. As for Raphael’s suggestion that the images of Palestinian children injured or killed in the Gaza war were a modern version of the “blood libel” according to which Jews used the blood of Christian children to make the matzo bread eaten at Passover – such a thought is unworthy of an intelligent author.

Though Raphael is right to say that anti-Semitism and “anti-Zionism” cannot always be neatly separated and that criticism of modern Israel is not without its sinister elements, his determination to make these things identical is profoundly wrong-headed. Intended or not, its effect is to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s crimes against the Palestinians into the expression of Jewish identity. Many are the Jews (not all of them “self-hating”) who would regard that proposition as evil.

Source: Anti-Semitism review: The flaw at the heart of Frederic Raphael’s argument