The antisemitism of Zionism

Since the Bondi attack, I have largely withdrawn from social media and mainstream news coverage. I need mental space. I need to step back from the hysterical politicisation by figures such as former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg and the rest of his Zionist allies. Especially, I need to step back from the term 'antisemitism' which has been used ad nauseum across the political spectrum.

To do that, I need to step away from the present moment and return to first principles. That requires starting with what the term ‘Semitic’ originally meant.

The term 'semitic' was first introduced by the German historian August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781. Schlözer was part of the "Göttingen School of History." He sought a term to classify a group of closely related languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Ethiopic, that had previously been vaguely called "Oriental languages." In the domain of linguistics, Semitic still carries no inherent political or social connotation, except to denote a family of languages.

This linguistic category did not remain neutral for long. In the 1800s, 'scientific' racism attempted to associate biological characteristics with semitic people, as if they possessed fixed biological or genetic traits that together formed a 'race' - a construct that became anthropologically acceptable. This essentialism became the foundation of both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab hatred in Europe. More broadly, this essentialism underpins many forms of intergroup hatred.

The broader mechanism of essentialism is this - essentialism requires an 'outsider' to perceive another group as homogenous - linguistically, culturally, religiously, genealogically and even statistically. The group is rendered homogeneous through selected markers - abstractions that can be reduced to simple and crude stereotypes and symbols.

Crucially, this process operates at a cognitive level. The point about these abstractions is that they cannot be easily refuted by daily experience. Even if "your best friend is Jewish", she can be simply dismissed as anomalous. The corrective of everyday familiarity does not seem to have cognitive traction, perhaps because, in the multitude of stimulus and thoughts, symbols are so potent. It seems humans are able to cope with the cognitive dissonance between the proximate "nice Jewish person" conveniently assigned to the 'personal' and the ultimate "Jews are xyz" something presented as quasi-scientific.

The same pattern appears in other forms of prejudice. When people say "immigrants are the problem", they can mentally separate the immigrant who repairs their car from a group ascribed essential characteristics like "inclined to crime". This same dissonance underlies how antisemitism, and even terrorism, are rationalised.

A historical example illustrates how abstraction works in practice. Nazi propaganda shows this process at its most distilled.

What surprised me when I visited Dachau this year was how banal the concentration appeared to be. The people of Dachau village in the 1930s would not have considered the concentration camp to be sinister - it just looks like a prison. The 'genius' of Goebbels in "Der Ewige Jude" is that he takes what was presented as the most ‘depraved’ religious practice of the Jewish religion - the slaughter of an innocent lamb, as evidence of the 'depravity' of Jews as a whole, despite many Jews of pre-war German not being religious or not following orthodox practices. Many Germans would not even have been aware who was Jewish among them. German Jews were quite well assimilated. So, Jews who acted like other Germans would not have been useful for Goebbels racist intentions.

At this point, the pattern can be stated plainly. We need to understand how the abstraction of groups is critical to the advance of racism and antisemitism. The process begins by selecting an extreme or ritualised practice, such as kosher slaughter, taken out of context, strip it of meaning and rules with no explanation of the history, ethics, constraints, or diversity of practice nor even or its actual prevalence, present it as essence rather than exception, then apply it retroactively to all members of the group.

So, a German teenager growing up with a Jewish friend, quite unaware of her Jewish identity, can be separated, in that in that teenager’s mind, from the bloodthirsty caricature feasting on the blood of innocents. The symbolic compression of German Jews who were secular, liberal, patriotic, and indistinguishable in daily life from their neighbours into one shocking image was highly effective in the 'final solution', especially in a 'failed state' looking for a Saviour.

We need to separate the two major antisemitic perspectives that were prevalent in Europe for centuries. One was European Orientalism that created a stock character of the “Eastern man” as sensual, deceitful, hypersexual, decadent and morally untrustworthy. The work of Jack Shaheen, especially Reel Bad Arabs, shows how consistently Arabs were framed as villains, kidnappers, pirates, seducers and threats to Western women and order.

But here’s the crucial difference. Arabs were imagined as outside the gates, foreign invaders, distant threats. Jews were imagined as 'inside the house', neighbours, colleagues, professionals, but hidden threats.
The imagined Arab might be spoke of as “That man is dangerous.” The imagined Jew - “That man looks like you—but isn’t.”

Because Jews were literate, urban, networked, transnational (diasporic) and disproportionately visible in certain professions, they could not be cast simply as brutes or barbarians. So Europe developed a different abstraction: Not the savage enemy, but the manipulator. This is why antisemitism so reliably generates myths of hidden control, financial domination, media influence, moral corruption or sexual threat (seducing “your women”).

Antisemitism draws power from older Orientalist fantasies about “Semitic” peoples, but becomes uniquely dangerous when those fantasies are applied to a population that is intimate, assimilated, and embedded within European society. That’s why Jews weren’t just hated—they were explained, theorised, pathologised, and systematised.

Jews in Australia resemble pre-Third Reich European Jews in key respects. They are intimate, assimilated, and embedded, but with one critical difference - Zionism. Classic antisemitism works by asserting that Jews share collective responsibility for something, Jews act as a unit, Jews are bound by hidden loyalties and Jews cannot meaningfully dissent from “Jewish interests”. Zionism, as an ideology, asserts the same. Zionists will confidently tell you that "nearly all Jews" are Zionists. They assert that, Jews have an irrefutable claim to land in the Levant, whether a particular Jew even has that desire. They identify "Jew hating Jews" when dissent is expressed. In bald terms, Zionism is profoundly antisemitic.

Even if their assertions were true, does their Zionism imply they support the genocide in Gaza? Does it imply that they agree with the policy of settlers in the West Bank?

In other words, regardless of what dimension you chose as your focus, Jews in Australia are not homogenous. Therefore, it is quite tenable and logical to identify a Zionist who supports the genocide as not being representative of any group of Jews. Without introducing a moral aspect, it simply is wrong. Factually unsustainable. Jews are as diverse as any group and to claim otherwise is antisemitic.

The Bondi attack shows the lethal consequences of this abstraction. The Bondi shooters could not have possibly known what kind of Jew they were firing at. For them, the abstraction of all Jews as Zionist murderers was sufficient justification to kill anyone on the beach. The antisemitism lay not in their objections to genocide but in the assumption that genocide was acceptable to all Jews.

If this analysis is correct, it has implications for how we respond. The way forward in antisemitism is not just to identify and deradicalise extremists likely to turn their ideology and delusion into terror - which our 'intelligence community' has so abjectly failed to do. It is a far greater commission to make all statements that reduce complex groups to monolithic identities outlawed as hate speech and simultaneously, to make all practices by all people and groups subject to public criticism.

Thus, about Bondi, we could say:

The shooters were associated with ISIS, an ideological movement which makes claims about Jews that are clearly and empirically untrue. The antisemitism of these claims is a driver in their murder of Jews. Despite self-proclaimed associations of ISIS with Islam, we must reject utterly the claim that any Islamic group, or any ethnic group, such as the Palestinians, is responsible for the shootings.