Anti-anti-Semitism

Anti-anti-Semitism describes a paradox in which the public denunciation of antisemitism may itself help disguise or reproduce antisemitic assumptions. In the account developed here, the term does not settle the dispute between defending Jews and criticizing the State of Israel; it identifies how that dispute is repeatedly organized as a false choice. Both antisemitism and the use of Holocaust memory to shield political action from scrutiny must be confronted, without making either critique a substitute for the other.

From Jewish particularity to a political obstacle

The argument begins with Jean-Claude Milner’s account of European unification. A Europe that aspires to become an open, unlimited political whole must progressively efface divisive historical traditions and legitimizations. The danger is that this apparent openness can make historical limits and specific political claims seem like obstacles to unity. Holocaust revisionism and the moral equalization of victims of the Second World War are presented as consequences of that tendency: suffering is abstracted from its history until distinctions among different experiences of victimization become easier to erase.

Within this setting, the figure of the Jew is recast as a structural obstruction to unlimited unification. The argument describes a displacement: where older antisemitism targeted Jews as an ethnic group, contemporary antisemitism may focus on the State of Israel, presenting Jewish national self-determination as an unacceptable insistence on particularity. This shift allows hostility to present itself as opposition to exclusion or as solidarity with victims. Its political vocabulary changes, but the pressure to make Jewish difference disappear remains.

The account distinguishes this present configuration from earlier forms. In one version of early modern antisemitism, Jews were condemned for preserving a particular way of life rather than dissolving into secular citizenship. In the chauvinist imperialism of the late nineteenth century, the accusation reversed: Jews were cast as cosmopolitan and insufficiently rooted, supposedly threatening the integrity of particular ethnic communities. In the contemporary movement toward a post-national order, the charge reverses again: Jewish attachment to a bounded national identity is represented as an impediment to universal openness. The recurring accusation changes direction because the political order changes the meaning assigned to Jewish particularity.

The contradiction in universal openness

The text also turns its criticism on Milner’s thesis. By presenting Jews as defenders of familial tradition against modernity’s dissolving, non-All society, the thesis risks repeating a familiar antisemitic contradiction: Jews are imagined as agents of universal mingling and the dissolution of identities, yet their own identity is treated as an exception that must remain protected. Jewish appeals to universalist ideals can then be represented as a way of blurring other identities while preserving Jewish particularism. The analysis treats this not as a resolution but as a parallax: the apparent contours of one identity shift depending on which other identities are allowed to remain visible.

The alliance between the United States and the State of Israel is read through a related contrast. Israel, as an ethnic state, is associated with tradition and bounded identity; the United States is associated with a social order in which fixed traditional ties are more readily dissolved. In this interpretation, Israel functions as a concentrated point of reference for the United States’ otherwise unsettled social whole. The relationship thus binds together opposed political principles rather than simply expressing a shared identity.

Two opposed accounts of the conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is described as a site where two sharply opposed interpretations coexist. From one perspective, Muslims remain Europe’s constitutive other, and political or cultural organization among Muslims is quickly treated as a fundamentalist threat to secular values. Within this account, distinctions between antisemitism and anti-Zionism are denied: criticism of Israeli politics is interpreted as a disguise for hostility toward Jews, and European support for peace or solidarity with Palestinians is cast as antisemitism in a new form.

From the opposing perspective, the occupation of the West Bank is understood as a continuation of European colonialism, while invocation of the Nazi genocide of European Jews is criticized as a political instrument used to legitimate expansion. This position insists that the same ethical and political standards must apply to Israelis as to others, and that the image of the Muslim fundamentalist threat itself requires critical examination. Neither account can simply be removed from the debate: the text identifies the coexistence of these opposed views as the central enigma, not as evidence that a safe middle position would resolve the conflict.

Refusing the false choice

The proposed response is to recognize the truth disclosed by both extremes and to read each as a symptom of the other. That does not mean treating their claims as interchangeable. The text identifies antisemitism within parts of the contemporary Left, particularly when Israeli actions in the occupied territories are equated with the Nazi genocide of European Jews in a way that implies Jews have forfeited the right to object to that genocide. It also identifies a tendency among some Zionists to transform the Shoah into a sacrificial guarantee of Jewish exceptional status, such that attempts to demystify it can be treated as antisemitic.

In this latter discourse, the Holocaust may be elevated into an untouchable object of collective identification, a hidden treasure that must not be surrendered. The example given is Elie Wiesel, who treats the Holocaust as religiously comparable to the revelation at Sinai and regards efforts to desacralize it as a subtle form of antisemitism. The analysis does not use this example to deny the reality of antisemitism; it shows how the memory of persecution can also be organized into a political claim that resists scrutiny.

Anti-anti-Semitism therefore names a demand for double recognition: antisemitism persists, including in ostensibly anti-racist political language, and criticism of Israeli policy must not be disqualified in advance as antisemitic. Treating either proposition as a reason to silence the other reproduces the very opposition the concept is meant to expose. Its significance lies in holding the two dangers together, refusing both the denial of antisemitism and the conversion of historical suffering into immunity from political criticism.