Few things are guaranteed to enrage critics of the atrocities being carried out by the Israeli state in Gaza and the West Bank more than the reflex accusation that they are being anti-Semitic. Any effort to distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism seems to fall on deaf ears. Sand quotes a recent Israeli joke: “In the past, an anti-Semite was someone who hated Jews; today, an anti-Semite is someone whom Jews hate.” Why is this?
Sand tells us that his aim is not to produce another study of anti-Semitism “with the suffering of my ancestors serving as an alibi for the fact that I belong to one people that oppresses another”, but rather to examine the origins of the hatred of Jews and to clarify why it has endured for so long.
In this informed and remarkable essay, he explodes many fondly held myths along the way. He favours the term “Judeophobia” partly because anti-Semitism is a modern term coined in the mid-19th century, and anti-Jewish prejudice has much older roots, but also because there is no such thing as a Semitic race any more than an Aryan race, so the foundation of the term is flawed.
Sand describes himself as a post-Zionist historian and socialist. Reprising some of the arguments in his ground-breaking study, The Invention of the Jewish People, published in Hebrew in 2008, he dismisses the misconception that the Jews were an “exiled people”, expelled from Judea.
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Rather, he points out the expansionist pattern of Judaism in the first and second centuries BCE, extending around the Mediterranean region among the urban elites, converting people of many diverse backgrounds. It later spread to the Arabian Peninsula, north Africa, Ethiopia and from Armenia north as far as Kyiv in the Khazar kingdom of the 8th to the 12th centuries CE. It’s not surprising, then, that Israeli geneticists have sought in vain for a “Jewish gene”.
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Sand traces the continuity of Judeophobia from the Middle Ages to the modern day, even among Enlightenment thinkers and modern socialist and anarchist philosophers. Although the legal limitations on Jews eased in western Europe and America following the French Revolution, the emergence of nationalism brought forth a new type of Judeophobia, based on race theory and social Darwinism.
Nationalism, largely invented in the 19th century by “defining in” certain members of society, automatically excludes others, and in many cases, Jews found themselves on the receiving end of racialised theory. And race, as we know today, was always a myth.
Modern Zionism arose as a direct response to race theory, and reflected it. As George Orwell put it in 1945: “Many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely anti-Semites turned upside-down.” At first, there was little support among the Jewish population for the idea of settlement in Palestine, and it was only the Nazi massacre of Jews that brought the Zionist project into practice on any scale.
In the final section, Sand asks: “to what extent has Zionism, born as a distressed response to modern Judeophobia, ended up mirroring it?” This question haunts any of us who have studied the Holocaust/Shoah, because the parallels are undeniable.
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What is Gaza today but a great ghetto where the inhabitants, penned into an overcrowded space, are starved and shot at? The technology is more advanced, but the attitudes – refusing to recognise the humanity of the people being tortured and the use of “bureaucratic” means of refusing aid – are shockingly similar.
And then we come to another sad irony. A few weeks ago, I heard an Israeli minister interviewed on the radio defending the aim to expel Palestinians from the West Bank on the grounds that they were originally Arab settlers who could be sent back to their original lands.
However, Sand argues that these people are in fact mostly descended from the original Judeans (who would, at some point, have been Jewish). He quotes a letter from David Ben-Gurion, founder of the state of Israel, to his friend, Yitzhak-Ben-Zvi, future president of the state, in which he recognised this. The idea that Palestinians were originally incomers has no basis.
There are, and have always been, many Jewish people, among them prominent intellectuals, opposed to Zionism, and who can’t be described as anti-Semites. My late mother, proudly Jewish, was never a Zionist. However, Sand argues that the Israeli army’s “brutal and indiscriminate attack” on the population of Gaza has brought forth some of the old Judeophobic themes.
More marked, though, has been the fact that extreme right-wing movements in Europe and the US have become supporters of Zionism, closely intertwined with unabashed racial Islamophobia. Sand tells us that he has come to agree with Albert Einstein’s observation that it is easier to break the atom than to destroy prejudice.
This is an important book and Sand’s arguments deserve to be heard.
Carla King is a historian and writer
