Antisemitism is the greatest open secret there is. It surfaces everywhere, yet the moment one tries to point to it, one finds oneself at a loss for words. Not because its substance is unclear, but rather because the very clarity of its appearance seems to cloud perception. For many, it seems all the more difficult to recognize something as antisemitic the more drastically it presents itself. By contrast, one is easily convinced by statistics: there are so-and-so many antisemites, “science” has determined. Even the most intricate antisemitic codes have been deciphered. Entire shelves are now filled with unread treatises on antisemitic conspiracy myths among the anti-Covid milieu or on the structural antisemitism of globalization-hostile angry citizens.
But when a state armed to the teeth, whose raison d’état explicitly consists in resisting imagined Jewish world-domination, and whose leadership simultaneously denies the Holocaust while working toward its continuation—when such a state—of course we are speaking of the Islamic Republic of Iran—finances, arms, and trains terror armies far beyond its borders, whose oft-repeated and loudly declared goal is to kill all Jews and wipe out their state, when these forces then strike, commit mass murder, parade the corpses like trophies through the streets and across the internet to the cheers of their supporters, and the regime that backs them threatens to answer Israel’s countermeasures with a nuclear strike—then, in the respectable middle class, the differentiating and contextualizing begins.
The trivialization of this annihilationist antisemitism is pursued most eagerly by its fans in the West: the pro-Palestinian students, activists, and so-called Kulturschaffende (“cultural workers”), as they have called themselves in Germany ever since the 'Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden' ("Appeal to the Cultural Workers") was published in the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in 1934. They all profess allegiance to the “axis of resistance” against Israel when they loudly demand a Palestine stretching “from the river to the sea”, when they wave the flags of the armies of Allah, or when they mark the offices, apartments, or commercial spaces of actual or alleged Zionists with the Hamas triangle—that is, when they make very concrete calls to murder, which time and again are also followed by deeds, as in the case of the Israel-friendly Berlin bar Bajszel, which repeatedly was the target of arson and other attacks this year.
The trivialization of this annihilationist antisemitism is pursued most eagerly by its fans in the West: the pro-Palestinian students, activists, and so-called Kulturschaffende (“cultural workers”).
“What [the antisemite] desires, what he prepares, is the death of the Jew”, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, thereby giving the simplest definition of what we are still dealing with today. Notably, he does not speak of antisemitism, but of the antisemite—just as Otto Fenichel knew, that strictly speaking, “there can only be a psychology of the antisemite, not of antisemitism”. Sartre is not speaking of some supra-individual structure, but of flesh-and-blood Jew-haters and their desire, which is aimed at death. They may disagree among themselves about the means and paths to achieve this goal. Some work on building the atomic bomb or march off, more primitively armed, into their holy war; others provide the former with discursive cover fire or, under the guise of so-called peaceful methods, aim for the time being not at Jews themselves, but “only” at their state’s destruction: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (or more recently: Defund Genocide) ultimately intends the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. But whoever wants a world without Israel wants Jews to be as defenseless as once before—or as recently in Amsterdam, where Jew-hunts were staged just a month after a Dutch police officer declared that many of his colleagues no longer wished to protect “Jewish” (not—bad enough—only Israeli!) institutions and events, naturally because of “moral dilemmas”. And even the moralizing humanism of today’s Jew-haters is nothing new: “The antisemite, however, has a good conscience”, Sartre already knew, “he is a criminal out of good intentions”.
That “good intention” is often enough acknowledged even by those who claim to be opposed to antisemitism. For whenever the well-meaning students, activists, and “cultural workers” let their hatred of Israel go far enough that it causes a minor scandal, the same questions—feigning puzzlement—always resurface.
First: How can leftists, who supposedly stand for freedom and equality, possibly be antisemitic? As if the Left, since the Gotha Program of the SPD and the Russian Osvoboždenie truda, had actually had the liberation of workers, rather than the liberation of labor, in its program—something that naturally aligned with resentment against parasitic money-Jews. The question also feigns ignorance of the anti-Jewish purges within Communist parties; as if it were not known that it was the Soviet Union and its allies who, in the name of repressive equality among the people’s comrades, persecuted Zionists—branding them sometimes as narrow-minded nationalists, sometimes as internationalist cosmopolitans—and who, far longer and more sustainably than the Nazis once did, spread their propaganda in the Arab world; and as if it had not been leftist terrorists who, in the 1960s and 70s, also in Germany, carried out attacks on Jewish targets and conducted the selection of Jewish hostages during the Entebbe hijacking.
Second, one asks: How can students, who are supposed to strive for truth and goodness, possibly be antisemitic?
