‘Anti-Zionism is a dagger at the heart of the Jewish people’

Whatever happened to ‘Never Again’? After the Second World War, the West vowed that it would not allow the crimes of the Holocaust to be repeated. It promised that it would be vigilant in confronting anti-Semitism. And yet, 7 October 2023 – the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – led not to a mass outpouring of solidarity with the world’s only Jewish state, but to demands to wipe it off the map. Vast swathes of the political and cultural elite have declared themselves to be ‘anti-Zionist’. They have all but sided with Israel’s enemies abroad. And they have, at best, turned a blind eye to anti-Semitism at home.

Times columnist Melanie Phillips returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show for a special live episode to discuss the West’s anti-Semitism problem and much more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Watch the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Is the growth of anti-Zionism in the West symptomatic of the growth of anti-Semitism more broadly?

Melanie Phillips: Anti-Zionism is a polite fiction, designed to conceal the fact that people want to hate Jews. In theory, of course, it is distinct from anti-Semitism. That is, if you take Zionism to be nothing more than a political movement that began in the 19th century. But this is simply no longer the case. Zionism is a movement for the self-determination of Jewish people in their homeland. And no other group on Earth is told, as the Jews often are, that they are not entitled to a homeland.

Self-determination for Jews in Israel is an essential component of Judaism itself. That doesn’t mean that all Jews are Zionists. That doesn’t mean that all Jews want to live in Israel. And it doesn’t mean all Jews support Israel. But it does mean that anti-Zionism, in many ways, is a dagger to the heart of Judaism. It deprives the Jews of their home.

People often respond to this by saying that a lot of Jews are anti-Zionists today and that many Jews were opposed to Zionism at the turn of the 20th century. That is absolutely correct. But there is a tremendous difference between then and now. These Jews were anti-Zionists before the Holocaust and before Israel existed. They made their case before people even began to understand that the Arab and Muslim world was determined to remove all Jews from their homeland. The context now is that anti-Zionism would entail the destruction of Israel – a state that is essential for the continuation of the Jewish people because, crucially, other countries would not take Jews in.

O’Neill: To what extent do you think identity politics feeds into anti-Semitism?

Phillips: The intersectionality doctrine, which emphasises overlapping victim groups, absolutely plays into anti-Semitism by idiotically dividing the world into the powerful and powerless.

However, I started getting really worried about this hatred long before ‘intersectionality’ existed. In fact, this eruption of ‘progressive’ anti-Semitism predates the rise of identitarian ideology by decades. I first became aware of it in 1982, particularly among those on the left. They were all pretending that it was about Israel, when it was really about Jews. This was also around the time that I first heard cries that Israelis were Nazis – a monstrous charge by any rational definition.

The next major eruption of this anti-Semitism was during the Second Intifada, which broke out in 2000. Over a number of years, up to 1,000 Israelis were basically blown to smithereens in pizza parlours and on buses. The young were particularly targeted. In response, Israel went into the West Bank to root out the source of the attacks. Israel was immediately represented as the aggressor and a surge of unbridled anti-Semitism came out of the woodwork.

Anyone who was Jewish was accused of being clannish. Jews were accused of defending the indefensible if they did not explicitly denounce Israel. When I appeared on Question Time in the years after the Intifada began, I was accused of dual loyalty – despite the fact that I had only ever visited Israel a few times at that point to visit my daughter. I often wondered where this outright anti-Semitism came from, but it became so complicated. It was always couched as anti-Israel. Everybody denied that it was anti-Jew, but Jews were clearly being targeted.

O’Neill: Looking back, where do you think this surge in anti-Semitism came from?

Phillips: After the Second Intifada, a liberal journalist said to me that I had got the whole anti-Semitism thing completely wrong. What we were seeing was not anti-Semitism, he said, but ‘relief’ that we ‘don’t have to worry about the Jews anymore’. It was an ambiguous comment, so I asked him what he meant. He said: ‘Well, after the concentration camps, anti-Semitism was completely forbidden. We couldn’t say what we thought about the Jews. Until now.’ He was effectively saying that because Israel is defending itself against mass murder, the Jew had become the Nazi – and with one bound, anti-Semites were free.

I do think that there is something in this. The West really can’t cope with the fact that it was complicit in the greatest crime in human history. Germany was the centre of it, of course, but the Holocaust happened because people turned their faces away from the rampant anti-Semitism at the time. Making the Jew into a Nazi effectively frees the West. After all, if the Jews can become Nazis, then any of us can. And so there was nothing particularly terrible about the Nazis and nothing particularly terrible about our failure to deal with it at the time.

There is a feeling among the Jews that Westerners have had it up to here with the Jewish people. They don’t want to hear about the Jews ever again. They want the Jews out of their heads, out of their consciences and out of their world altogether. And they certainly don’t want to hear about the Jew as a victim. That’s why people ignore anti-Semitism. That’s why people ignore the rape of Israeli women. That’s why you have this attempt to turn the great crime of 7 October into a great crime by Israel.

Nothing is allowed to disturb the narrative that the Jews are responsible for bad things. They are never the victims of bad things. If that narrative is ever challenged, if the Jews were no longer the West’s scapegoat, it would have to take responsibility for its own misdeeds. It would no longer be able to avoid its own moral culpability. That cannot be allowed to happen.

Melanie Phillips was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Watch to the full conversation here: