Since 2011, the Syrian war has caused around 500,000 deaths, causing the exodus of nearly 10 million people. One million Uighurs have been placed by China in “internment camps”. However, the regimes of Bashar al-Assad and Xi Jinping have never faced accusations of genocide before the International Court of Justice. Unlike Israel.
Before the Gaza offensive, fewer than 100,000 Arabs had lost their lives in the various conflicts against Israel. The Iran-Iraq war alone in the 1980s left a million dead. When the Syrian regime dropped barrel bombs on the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, there were no massive demonstrations in Western capitals. Today, seven UN structures are investigating Israel, including a Palestinian rights division or a Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. The United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned Israel twice more than any other nation. For Jake Wallis Simons, the Jewish state and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have long occupied a disproportionate place in the media and debates around the world. In Israelophobia, published in English just before the October 7 attack, the British journalist, editor-in-chief of Jewish Chronicle, considers this to be one of the blatant manifestations of what he calls “Israelophobia”.
The author recalls that Israel is an average state, geographically the size of Slovenia, with a population comparable to that of New Jersey. In terms of democracy, transparency and quality of life, Israel far exceeds other countries in the Middle East. In the latest UN Happiness Report (World Happiness Report 2023), it ranks fourth, far ahead of Jordan (123rd), Lebanon (136th) or Syria (149th). But, as Jake Wallis Simons points out, internally, the country is also “political and social chaos” due to divisions between secular Jews, religious nationalist Jews, strict Orthodox and Arabs. The far right is represented in government, just as it has made inroads in many Western countries. If we must criticize Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, all this does not justify, according to Jake Wallis Simons, the fact that Israel is demonized to this extent.
The three ages of anti-Semitism
For centuries, Jews were hated for religious reasons. In the 19th century, this Judeophobia partly gave way to racial anti-Semitism. But, from now on, it is the State of Israel which concentrates the majority of attacks against Jews. For Jake Wallis Simons, the notion of anti-Semitism no longer allows us to identify the new face of an old hatred. “It is no longer enough to talk about anti-Semitism, because this definition remains anchored in the racial hatred of the last century. […] It is essential to find a new way to identify and respond to this new intolerance. It starts by giving it a name: Israelophobia.”
If traditional anti-Semitism has, since the Shoah, been condemned on both a legal and moral level, it is socially very acceptable to attack the very existence of Israel, or to accuse it of apartheid and genocide. Instead of conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the media or finances, we can say that Israel or the Mossad are pulling the strings. This Israelophobia makes it possible to dodge accusations of racism. A staunch anti-Zionist, former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn was able to celebrate a Passover meal with Jewdas, a far-left Jewish group which calls for “properly getting rid of” Israel.
Delegitimize the foundations of Israel
Israelophobia did not even wait for the creation of Israel in 1948 to spread. Published in 1903, six years after the first Zionist congress, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text invented from scratch by the secret police of Nicholas II, was supposed to prove the infiltration by Jews of governments, the Church or the media in order to establish a world empire. “In a style that would become familiar, this text presented the Jewish desire for self-determination as a plot to take control of the world,” notes Jake Wallis Simons.
Today, this Israelophobia thrives in the new identity and decolonial left. It has its strongholds within academia and the media. In 2021, the New York Times had, for example, devoted its front page to 64 Palestinian children killed, without specifying that at least ten of them had been killed by defective Hamas rockets.
For Jake Wallis Simons, Israelophobia aims to delegitimize the very foundations of Israel, while historically fetishizing the displacement of part of the Palestinian population in 1948. If 700,000 Arabs fled their homes when Israel was created, the author recalls that postcolonial conflicts, born from the painful transition from empires to nation-states, have generated massive displacements. In 1947, the partition between India and Pakistan caused the exodus of 14 million Muslims and Hindus. At least a million people died in the conflict between the two countries, compared to around 16,000 people in the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War. “Who laments the fate of Greek Orthodox Christians, Indian Hindus and Sikhs, Armenians, Irish refugees from the bloody British partition of 1921, or the twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe to Churchill’s instigation after the Second World War? Or even the Jews of the Middle East?” asks Jake Wallis Simons.
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