The right is using the fight against anti-Semitism to dehumanise Palestinians and justify slaughter. The right was routinely anti-Semitic for decades. Now it’s anti-Palestinians. The object may change, but the desire to bully and victimise remains. The current total focus and centring of the problem of anti-Semitism by the political right is the most desperate attempt yet to deny the basic humanity of the Palestinians in Gaza, and to make mass killing first acceptable and then invisible.
Rising anti-Semitism is a problem, a point to which I’ll return. But what it is being used for is exactly the same “acceptable hatred” towards the Palestinians as was directed against the Jews in the 1930s, and which then became explicit exterminism.
Lachlan Murdoch’s speech in Sydney last week on behalf of News Corp staked out in programmatic form what it and much of the right have been doing for the past fortnight: “Let’s be very clear: when it comes to anti-Semitism there is no room for equivocation. There is no fence-sitting. From Brisbane to Broome, from Launceston to Lakemba, anti-Semitism does not belong in Australia. It is our duty to address and tackle it, as it is to address and tackle all forms of hatred.”
Moving on from a nod to addressing and tackling “all forms of hatred”, Murdoch continued:
“Ours is a vital vocation that requires endless focus, reinvention and adaptability, as well as the standard journalistic prerequisites of curiosity and courage. Courage to cover the most difficult stories. Courage to address distressing events such as the horrific October 7 terror-attack on Israel. Courage to report on the ensuing war, and courage to expose the disturbing wave of hatred against Jews around the world and in our own communities.”
This sort of statement, with (in this News Corp reporting of it) its total omission of Palestinian civilian deaths and suffering, is the mobilisation of a basic error in thinking, often wilfully made: the special historical character of anti-Semitism in European history is taken as granting resistance to it a special moral character, as if the lives of others were worth less than those of Jews. Or, indeed, worth nothing at all.
Anti-Semitism’s special character is partly due to its long history — the [Roman] Christian church claimed that the Jews as a people, by their very existence, deny the unquestioned truth of Christ — but more recently due to the unique character of the Holocaust. The latter event has to be faced in its uniqueness; but that can also serve as a “one-stop shop” for moral action. The phrase “never again” was, for a while after the 1980s, used in a general sense; applied to various people under threat of genocide — Tutsi Rwandans, Bosnians, Darfurians — often in retrospect.
Now it has been/is being drawn back to the Jews alone, as Natasha Roth-Rowland documents in her essay “When ‘Never Again’ becomes a war cry”. Jewish people become those whose life and security is an end in itself; Palestinians in Gaza are made into a mere means to that end, a slippage aided by the impersonal high-tech manner of their killing.
The effect of this is to court obscenity. The bombs fall hourly on Gaza, now on the hospitals, and the critically injured are forced onto their feet and in wheelchairs to start what, for some, will be a death march. Meanwhile, increasingly pompous and self-regarding speechifying about the Holocaust feeds off itself.
[Guy Rundle, Crikey 16 November]