It’s helpful to think of antizionists as akin to addicts, in that, over time, they can’t get sufficiently high off the old anti-Israel canards anymore, and thus continue needing to impute greater degrees of malevolence to the Jewish state in order to maintain the visceral thrill of their belief that they’re fighting pure evil.
The libels of “racism”, “colonialism” and “apartheid” – particularly following the Hamas massacre – were no longer sufficient. So, all it took was a few distorted and fake quotes by traumatised Israeli leaders in the days following Hamas’ pogromists murdered, raped, tortured, and pillaged their way through the country’s south, and they had a new Israeli sin to add to their antizionist cosmology: genocide.
Variations of this charge would be leveled by Guardian contributors 11 times in 13 days, beginning a mere week after Hamas’ mass slaughter of Jews.
Enter Raz Segal, another academic operating within the ideologically closed echo-chamber of antizionist ‘scholarship’, who signed a letter , on Oct. 18th, 2023, by “scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies” warning of Israel’s potential genocide.
He published an op-ed at the Guardian on Oct. 24, 2023, reiterating that the Jewish state was at least laying the groundwork for genocide, in a piece titled “Israel should stop weaponising the Holocaust”. He also insisted, in the piece, that Hamas’ attacks should not be seen as evil, but should properly be understood within the “historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba”.
He further ridiculed claims of victimhood by Israel, who he portrayed as “a powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege.”
Segal returned to the Guardian three days ago, warning readers that, despite the ceasefire, Israel is still committing genocide (“The genocide in Gaza is far from over”, Nov. 28), while adding a new term of abuse, white supremacism, which arguably goes beyond vilifying Israel’s conduct as “genocidal”, by characterising the state’s essence as at odds with the morality of the civilised world.
Though the op-ed is full of factual errors and egregious historical distortions, we’ll narrowly focus on the outlet’s publication of this uniquely grotesque libel:
But the victors of World War II had no intention of coming to terms with [Nazi] white supremacy, because the US, the UK, and France were white supremacist empires themselves. The victors of World War II similarly sought no accountability for nationalism, because they were, all of them, including the Soviets, nationalists and true believers in national “homogenization” as the essential precondition for security and peace. Nowhere was the meaning of such peace, this post-World War II reproduction of nationalism and white supremacy, clearer than in the Israeli state, a self-proclaimed exclusionary nation-state and a self-proclaimed exclusionary settler state – what Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of revisionist Zionism, described in his well-known essay from 1923 as a settler colonial project that can only work with an “Iron Wall.”
While, for instance, the implausibility of the charge that Israel, where the majority of Israeli Jews are of Sephardi, Mizrahi, or other non-European descent, that is “non-white”, is a “white supremacist” state, should be obvious to even the most casual observer, as Adam Lewis-Klein observed, those who overemphasise such face-based rebuttals make the mistake of assuming that antizionists like Segal are operating in good faith.
Those who do so, Lewis-Klein added, fail to understand how “anti-Zionism actually works—as a closed system of accusation, designed to force Jews to disavow their identities.”
Indeed, suggesting that Zionism is a white supremacist state akin to Nazism is a way of framing both Israelis and diaspora Jews as morally beyond the pale – as acceptable targets.
Given the dramatic rise in British antisemitism since the Hamas massacre, we wrote in our complaint to the Guardian’s Readers’ Editor, such incendiary rhetoric – which serves to satisfy their readerships’ insatiable craving for antizionist content – will further inflame already dangerous levels of hostility towards Jews in the country.
Regardless of the outcome of our complaint, the fact that Segal’s white supremacism charge was greenlighted by editors again shows that the institution has little if any moral guardrails which would prevent publishing the most fringe, vitriolic and unhinged content about Jews and the Jewish state – as long as such hate is properly couched in the language of human rights and scholarship.
“Language changes. It modernises and adapts”, the CST’s Director of Policy Dave Rich observed in his 2023 Kristallnacht commemoration speech in Sydney. “The emblematic idea of the current wave of antisemitism is not”, he stressed, “the Nazi slogan ‘The Jews are misfortune’, or the earlier allegation that Jews are ‘Christ-killers’. It is, he added, “that Jews are settlers and colonisers, racists and white supremacists.”
The implication, he concluded, “is that Jewish collective identity is not like other identities: either it is a hollow fraud because Jews are not worthy of calling themselves a people, and therefore are not deserving of the rights that come with that status; or it bears a uniquely malevolent stain that must be suppressed for the good of humanity.”
This is what we talk about when we talk about antisemitism at the Guardian.
