Why is israel hated

Antisemitism, then and now, was simply too useful to be abandoned just because the Jews of the eastern hemisphere had reorganized themselves into a nation-state.

In Soviet discourse, Jewish peoplehood was a very specific sort of threat: a retreat from the progressive project toward the old nationalisms that communism and more to the point, Soviet imperialism sought to eradicate. The USSR invested a great deal of effort in erasing Jewish distinctiveness, systematically persecuting and killing off the Jewish cultural elite and outlawing the study of Hebrew.

It was in Soviet ideology and its response to Jewish nonconformity that antisemitism became anti-Zionist — Israel was the epitome of the distinctiveness they sought to uproot. The Soviet intertwining of antisemitism and anti-Zionism swept through the Arab world to become a dominant paradigm of Arab politics for generations. They could have organized in against any other thing. It was a marvelous time for the Arabs. All their imperial overlords had been involved in this devastating war.

Britain was crawling home. So suddenly the whole Arab world was free. So the handiest thing was to organize [their politics] against the emergence of the State of Israel. They used opposition to Israel as a unifying element among all these disparate and politically dysfunctional countries and leaderships. What explains the linkage on the progressive left in recent years between occasional American police delegations to Israel and US police violence and militarization?

The existence of exchange programs between police departments around the world is seen as evidence enough to claim that without the nefarious influence of Israel, America would have been spared its most recent racial bloodletting and pain. The upshot is clear, and the point must be said plainly in a discourse prone to politicization. The same is true about Jews. Those forms of prejudice have been faced by many others throughout human history.

The antisemitism being debated in Israel over the past two weeks is something else, something apparently unique to Jews: It is the role Jews are forced to play in the political imaginations of non-Jews as the incarnation of and explanation for their deepest fears and most vexing social ills. It is not the idea that Israel is doing wrong, but the idea that Israel, in some deep order of global affairs, is what is wrong with the world. Lapid sought last week to turn the classical Zionist conception of antisemitism away from its call to change the Jews and toward the recognition that the Jew is in a deep sense irrelevant to antisemitism, merely the ideologized object around which antisemitism organizes itself — its target, not its cause.

Yet Lapid did so without offering any clear sense of why the Jew plays that role, of where antisemitism comes from or what distinguishes it from other hatreds. The debate among Israelis over the past week was loud and shallow. It would have been too despairing. In Streetwise Hebrew for the Times of Israel Community, each month we learn several colloquial Hebrew phrases around a common theme.

These are bite-size audio Hebrew classes that we think you'll really enjoy. This month, we're learning phrases on the topic of strength and power. Ready to get tough with us? Facebook Twitter email Print. Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu speaks in the Knesset plenum on July 12, Lapid with his father Tommy in the s. Bundesarchiv bild. Jean-Paul Sartre Wikimedia Commons. Socialist collectives of European immigrants, soon known as the kibbutz, in the early days of the Zionist movement.

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The violence in Israel and in Gaza was the most deadly since and was the first time many students have faced the anti-Jewish sentiments that are often attached to opposition to actions by the Israeli government. And that brought them face to face with the centuries-old dilemma of whether they need to hide their faith to feel safe or if they can be authentically Jewish, Braun said. Read More. Some Hunter College students were at Times Square in New York City for a pro-Israel demonstration when a Jewish man heading to the same rally was beaten and kicked while anti-Semitic slurs were hurled at him.

Filthy Jew. Hamas is going to kill you. Go back to Israel," one man shouted as he attacked Joseph Borgen, who was wearing his kippah or yarmulke, a Jewish head covering. Jewish man attacked in a 'gang assault' in New York City Borgen said he might reconsider wearing his kippah now, something he had never thought about before.

That hard choice is not even an option for some of the students Braun counsels, some of whom wear customary or traditional dress and head coverings that make them easily identifiable. Criticism of Israel often ties in with antisemitic myths and symbols. You may come across hurtful, hateful cartoons about rich Jews or about Israel pulling the strings behind the scenes. Using those images and symbols to criticise Israel evokes memories of persecutions from the past, of the Holocaust.

They fit in with the long history of antisemitism. Antisemitism Criticism of Israel or of the policies of the Israeli government is not automatically antisemitic. Is antisemitism a form of racism? Are all Jews Zionists?