The language of intractability and the Gaza War: Conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is historically problematic and misses how much contemporary Israel has become a role model for ethno-nationalists worldwide

Abstract

The 2023 Gaza War quickly became a war of words. In the war over public opinion, support for the lot of the Palestinians or criticism of Israeli government actions alike were put down to an anti-Zionism inspired by anti-Semitism. My purpose is to question this conflation and to suggest that in fact historically and today it has been pro-Zionism that has been inspired more by popular anti-Semitism, a conspiratorial view of the world in which Jewish people figure exclusively as “enemies” of the nations in which they live, rather than the opposite. Zionism, as its early proponents all said, was a solution to anti-Semitism. In creating a Jewish nation state, Jews could be shielded from the animus and consequences of anti-Semitism. In doing so, of course, any Palestinian collective political future would necessarily be compromised. The competing claims to the same territory this entails cannot be resolved by simply adopting “better language.” The language war confuses the real issue at hand: Israelis and Palestinians alike are inheritors of the logic of the territorialized (ethno) nation state imported from nineteenth-century Europe. The historical irony is that Israel is now a “role model” for the populist-nationalists whose political ancestors demonized their Jewish populations as “other” and “disloyal.” This points to the tragedy of the nation state that the Gaza War represents. Shared political space is impossible to comprehend while locked into this logic.