When is anti-Zionism antisemitism? As Professor David Slucki from the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University explains, the history of each is tied to the other, and there isn't always a clear difference between the two.
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00:00 Antisemitism is surging once again, particularly online.
00:04 Using data from Jewish advocacy body the Anti-Defamation League,
00:07 the New York Times reported that antisemitic content soared more than 919% on X
00:13 and 28% on Facebook in the first month since the Hamas attacks of October 7.
00:18 It has been a growing trend over the past few years.
00:22 According to a European Commission report from 2021,
00:25 there was considerable growth in the use of antisemitic phrases across French and German social media accounts during COVID.
00:32 It's a theme that has been replicated across the world,
00:35 echoing a centuries-old narrative where racists use global events as an excuse to attack and scapegoat the Jewish people.
00:42 Antisemitism is a historic phenomenon.
00:52 We call it the oldest hatred because it really goes back to anti-Putin.
00:57 From biblical times, history shows antisemitism developed as Christianity grew with it.
01:03 It is seen in the artworks of the Renaissance,
01:06 where depictions of Christian dominance and Jewish persecution hung in galleries and palaces across Europe,
01:12 time-stamping the suffering.
01:14 How Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or be kicked out of their homes during the Spanish Inquisition,
01:19 pushed into ghettos by the Popes of Rome, or murdered in Germany for perceived conspiracies against Christianity.
01:26 These works reinforce racism through culture as a constant.
01:30 The way we recognise antisemitism today,
01:34 really, we can trace that back to the kind of early to middle 19th century,
01:40 where this pseudoscience emerges, which really follows the revelations of Charles Darwin on the origin of species.
01:49 And Darwin's principles get misapplied to analysing human beings and humanity.
01:55 So what we get with the rise of these kind of ideas is the notion that there are inherent traits linked to your racial makeup.
02:06 It was around this period that a Jewish nationalist movement emerged, Zionism.
02:12 Its founder, a Hungarian journalist named Theodor Herzl,
02:15 believed European antisemitism had grown so bad that Jews would never be allowed to assimilate,
02:21 meaning they needed a homeland of their own.
02:24 At the first Zionist Congress in 1897,
02:27 he and his fellow members agreed that the movement's aim was to
02:30 "establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law."
02:35 Around the time Herzl was developing his movement,
02:38 a German named Wilhelm Mahr had written a paper that Germans were losing out to Jews.
02:44 Along with founding the League of Antisemites,
02:46 Mahr's attempt at intellectualising his racism established some of the tropes that endure to this day.
02:52 So at the same time as the race science part,
02:55 there also emerges this notion that Jews are taking over the world,
03:00 this conspiratorial thinking around Jews and their power.
03:06 And it's nonsense, but it becomes quite popular in certain parts of the world.
03:11 And so this kind of modern antisemitism,
03:15 which revolves around race science and around Jewish conspiratorial thinking,
03:21 it brings Jew hatred into the modern world.
03:26 This transforms antisemitism.
03:29 And it persists to this day.
03:32 The biggest sort of flashpoint is the Holocaust.
03:35 And really that first half of the 20th century,
03:38 when violence against Jews is almost non-stop.
03:44 The violence in the early 20th century saw many Jewish people make 'aliyah',
03:49 a Hebrew term that describes Jewish people moving back to Israel.
03:53 Yet despite having just fought a war to depose the Nazis,
03:56 and decades later the fall of the Soviet Union,
03:58 antisemitism remained entrenched,
04:01 spiking around global events and harming new generations.
04:05 So why does this racist conspiracy hold such sway?
04:08 I think it stems back to the fact that antisemitism is slippery,
04:12 even though in the West antisemitism became less acceptable after the Holocaust.
04:20 It never went away.
04:23 People still, people have not stopped blaming Jews for their problems.
04:28 The rise of social media has played a huge role in the spread of antisemitism.
04:33 You know, with the rise of YouTube, Twitter, TikTok,
04:38 it's just much easier to be confronted with antisemitism.
04:42 You don't have to go looking for it.
04:45 Recently, antisemitism has evolved again.
04:48 Some people, like the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
04:52 are concerned that antisemitism is behind criticism of the State of Israel,
04:56 and the political movement that created it, Zionism.
05:00 Zionism wasn't something dreamed up entirely by Theodor Herzl.
05:04 The idea that God promised those lands to the followers of Abraham called the Israelites
05:08 goes back to the Old Testament.
05:10 It took until 1948, when Israel was declared by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion,
05:16 who was then head of the World Zionist Organization.
05:19 The declaration meant there was now one Jewish nation in the world,
05:22 along with the numerous established around Islamic and Christian beliefs.
05:26 However, since this point, the concept of what Zionism is,
05:29 and what it hopes to achieve, has become heavily debated.
05:33 Zionism isn't one thing, and it's never been one thing.
05:37 It's been attached to a whole range of political worldviews.
05:43 There was rarely agreement on what that ought to look like,
05:46 whether that took the form of a nation-state, which was the most prevalent version of it.
05:52 But Zionism was one of many political movements in the pre-Holocaust Jewish world.
06:00 It wasn't even the dominant one.
06:03 But the Holocaust changed things for many Jews.
06:05 The fact that there was nowhere to go,
06:07 establishing a Jewish state in what was then Palestine, came at a huge cost.
06:15 As Israel developed, decades of war marked its foundational years,
06:19 and this difficult relationship with its neighbours continues.
06:23 It sparked war with not only Palestinians, but also surrounding neighbours.
06:32 It saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
06:40 And it's been an intractable quagmire, I guess.
06:46 So there's this kind of, in a way, unsolvable problem between the notion that
06:52 only Israel can shore up the Jews' existence,
06:56 and if you don't have a Jewish state, then that leaves Jews vulnerable,
07:00 versus at what cost.
07:03 And I think that's really the position of many anti-Zionists,
07:06 that the cost of statehood is too great.
07:09 The intractable bargain accelerated both anti-Semitism
07:12 and questioning of Zionist ideals across the globe.
07:15 But is criticism of Zionism criticism of all Jewish people?
07:19 But I really think we should think about it more like a spectrum,
07:23 and there are people on all different positions along the spectrum.
07:27 Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?
07:32 It can be, and this is part of the struggle to define anti-Semitism.
07:39 Many governments, universities and organisations use what is known as the IHRA definition,
07:45 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of anti-Semitism.
07:50 It states that anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews,
07:53 which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.
07:56 It goes on to say,
07:57 "Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."
08:05 And that was adopted by countries, by universities, as the definition.
08:12 And one of the critiques that came out of that was it was a bit too rigid in some ways,
08:19 that it would have a kind of chilling effect on particularly academic freedom and freedom of speech.
08:28 In 2020, to alleviate these concerns, a range of Jewish academics convened the Jerusalem Declaration.
08:34 This attempted to create space between the racism against Jewish people and the acts of the state of Israel.
08:40 On the face of it, it is not anti-Semitic to support the Palestinian demand for justice,
08:45 offer evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state, or boycott or divest from Israeli businesses.
08:52 The quest for definitions has offered no confirmed position.
08:56 You know, we're in a heightened period right now as well,
09:00 where many Jews in places like Melbourne and Australia more broadly feel very vulnerable and very sensitive to anti-Zionism.
09:13 And when I say many Jews, I say that because there's also like a cohort of Jews that identify as anti-Zionism,
09:18 so I don't want to generalise and say Jews feel this way or another way.
09:23 Again, it's a spectrum.
09:24 Instead, communities, hurt and scared, recede further from the difficult conversations needed to be had.
09:30 One of the things that's concerned me locally, you know, obviously I'm very concerned about the unfolding crisis in Israel,
09:41 and particularly in Gaza, but one of the things I've been concerned about locally when I look around
09:46 is the impact that it has on our social cohesion and our ability to connect with one another
09:54 and our ability to have difficult conversations, and these are difficult conversations, necessarily so.
10:01 And I think it starts from a place of empathy, you know, and that's our role at universities also,
10:07 is to teach and model how to have those discussions.
10:12 So I think it comes from a place of understanding why people feel the ways in which they do,
10:19 and seeing them as fully human and imperfect.
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