David Feldman in The Ideas Letter:
Over the last 100 years, the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against racism have at times appeared inextricably connected, firmly allied in a single fight against bigotry. Today, it is the disconnections that appear most visible.
The standoff is now stark, thanks to divergent responses to Oct. 7, 2023 and its aftermath — to Hamas’s attack on Israel and the killing of civilians and hostage-taking, and to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and the death, displacement, and privation it has brought. These events have not only had grievous consequences for Palestinians and Israelis; they have also been divisive globally. And they have accelerated and amplified a split between anti-racism and anti-antisemitism that was already advanced.
For some, the attack of October 7 was an act of specifically antisemitic terror. “What is this, some pogrom in Lithuania?” asked Amit Halevi, the chairman of Be’eri, a kibbutz that lost 10 percent of its civilian population in the massacre. Others have drawn connections between October 7 and the Holocaust, finding “the antisemitism of extermination” expressed by Hamas today, as it was by the Nazis before.
Yet much of the anti-racist Left presents these events in a different key. In Britain, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign reacted immediately, on Oct.7: “The offensive launched from Gaza today can only be understood in the context of Israel’s ongoing, decades long, military occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land and imposition of a system of oppression that meets the legal definition of apartheid.” Amnesty International denounced Hamas’s attacks on civilians, but it located the roots of the violence in Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza and the discriminatory system it imposes on all Palestinians.
More here.
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