French President Macron: Anti-Zionism is the “reinvented form of anti-Semitism”

French President Macron: Anti-Zionism is the “reinvented form of anti-Semitism”

There is an increasing recognition that most of the anti-Zionist movement, including Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), is the new format for centuries-old anti-Semitism.

The reason anti-Zionists, with few exceptions, seek the destruction of Israel and deny the Jews the right to a homeland in their historic homeland, is because of Israel’s Jewish identity.

As we have posted before, historian Benny Morris documents how the Arab war against Israel’s independence was viewed in the Arab world as a religious holy Jihad:

Morris: What I discovered in the documentation relating to the war, at least from the Arab side, was that the war had a religious character, that the central element in the war was an imperative to launch jihad. There were other imperatives of course, political and others—but the most important from the enemy’s perspective was the element of the infidels who had the nerve to take control over sacred Muslim lands and the need to uproot them from there. The decisive majority in the Arab world saw the war first and foremost as a holy war, but until today historians have not examined the documentation that proves this. In my view, they have also ignored Arab rhetoric of the day, which universally included religious hatred against the Jews, because they thought the Arabs adopted this as normal speech that did not emanate from deep mental resources. They thought this was something superficial, that everyone talked like this. But I am positive the Arab spokesmen in 1948 did go beyond this and clearly and explicitly talked about jihad.

That religious war, according to Morris, continues to motivate anti-Zionism:

GNB: In your view, was the Palestinian rejection of Israel always rooted in Islamism? Was 1948 a jihad?

BM: One of the things I understood from my work in the 1990s, and later, is that Islam plays a major role in the hatred of the Zionist movement by Arabs in the Middle East and in Palestine. It’s not just a political matter of territory; it’s also a matter of religion and culture which opposes the arrival of the infidel and his taking of Muslim holy land.

Sometimes Palestinian rejectionism is more political in nature, while at other times, such as now, Islam playsa major role in Palestinian thinking about the conflict with Israel and the Zionist movement. In 1929 the big riots were all about the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall and how these holy places are being threatened by the ‘infidel Jews’. We’re in one of those times again, partly because the entire Islamic world has radicalized, including the Palestinians. When I was young you could walk in the streets of East Jerusalem and you never see veiled women. Never. So the Muslim Arabs of Palestine have changed over the last 40 years and this is a reflection of what has happened in the Muslim Arab world in general.

You can’t avoid the conclusion that Islam is playing a major role in what’s happening….

Occasionally Israel captured would-be suicide bombers whose vest didn’t work or who were weak-willed and didn’t blow themselves up. Some were from the Fatah, which had began to copy Hamas and send out suicide bombers. When they interrogated the Fatah ‘secular’ suicide bombers, they found that their motivation was exactly the same as the Hamas suicide bombers: religion, the 70 virgins and paradise, and all the rest of it. The secularism of the Fatah is not that deep. It’s maybe a varnish…

It’s not just Arab rejectionism that is motivated by religious hate. We see it in groups like so-called Jewish Voice for Peace (which isn’t actually a Jewish group) which just launched a campaign to blame Israel and American Jewish groups for US police shootings of minorities, even though there is not proof to support such a claim.

Prof. Miriam Elman documented JVP’s “Deadly Exchange” campaign and how it plays on traditional international anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, With “Deadly Exchange” Campaign, Jewish Voice for Peace moves from enabling to promoting antisemitism:

In dozens of posts we’ve highlighted how the anti-Zionist, non-Jewish group “Jewish Voice for Peace” (JVP) enables, legitimizes and mainstreams antisemitism by providing a seemingly Jewish cover for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and similar movements.

But JVP isn’t merely an enabler of antisemitism. JVP also itself is a producer of anti-Jewish animus.

In addition to its pro-boycott activities, JVP has been at the forefront of the effort to stoke racial tension and hatred of Jews through intersectionality theory in which Israel is portrayed as a global oppressor of minority communities and the source of problems that these groups face. The Jewish state thus serves the role in intersectionality theory that the Jews historically have served in international conspiracy theories, and JVP is at the forefront of trafficking and disseminating these antisemitic tropes.

Now, with a national program called “Deadly Exchange: Ending U.S.-Israel Police Exchanges, Reclaiming Safety”, JVP is explicitly stating what in the past it has stated implicitly: Jewish organizations are responsible for the killings of non-white minorities in the U.S. by police.

JVP supports the Chicago “Dyke March” anti-Semites who targeted LGBT Jews carrying a Jewish Pride flag, and Palestinian activists like Bassem Tamimi, who spread claim Israel arrests Palestinian children to harvest organs:

As I documented in my lecture, When Does Anti-Israelism Turn Into Anti-Semitism?, anti-Semitic imagery is central to the anti-Zionist movement, such as this cartoon by Carlos Latuff, who won second prize in the Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest. His cartoons regularly appear in anti-Zionist publications like Mondoweiss.

The result of supposedly anti-Zionist activism is Europe is anti-Semitism, including street harassment of Jews. It’s what I’ve called the “Walking While Jewish” problem. In places like Malmo, Sweden, the theoretical distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has completely vanished. That’s the case in places like Copehagen as well:

Increasingly, political leaders are calling out this anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. When he visited Israel in 2015, then Prime Minister Harper of Canada stated in a speech to the Knesset (Israel’s parliament):

And so we have witnessed, in recent years, the mutation of the old disease of anti-Semitism and the emergence of a new strain. We all know about the old anti-Semitism. It was crude and ignorant, and it led to the horrors of the death camps. Of course, in many dark corners, it is still with us. But, in much of the western world, the old hatred has been translated into more sophisticated language for use in polite society. People who would never say they hate and blame the Jews for their own failings or the problems of the world, instead declare their hatred of Israel and blame the only Jewish state for the problems of the Middle East.

As once Jewish businesses were boycotted, some civil-society leaders today call for a boycott of Israel. On some campuses, intellectualized arguments against Israeli policies thinly mask the underlying realities, such as the shunning of Israeli academics and the harassment of Jewish students. Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state. Think about that. Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: A state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish, as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism. It is nothing short of sickening.

French President Macron just made similar comments about the new form of anti-Semitism. The Times of Israel reports:

French president Emmanuel Macron on Sunday condemned anti-Zionism as a new form of anti-Semitism, in what observers said was an unprecedented statement from the leader of France in support of the Jewish state.

“We will never surrender to the messages of hate; we will not surrender to anti-Zionism because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism,” Macron said an event in Paris marking the mass deportation of French Jews during World War II. He was directly addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attended the event.

During a lengthy and introspective speech commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, a mass arrest of 13,152 French Jews in July 1942 that was part of the Nazi effort to eradicate the Jews of France, Macron forcefully denounced Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

Haaretz has a slightly different translation of the key phrase: “It’s a new type of anti-Semitism” and provides this video with closed-captioning:

The anti-Zionist and BDS movements, and supportive groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, don’t like it when the truth is exposed.

But the evidence is insurmountable, and increasingly being recognized, that in the vast majority of cases, anti-Zionism is simply a ruse for anti-Semitism.

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