I was at first unable to locate the definition that the BBC cites with the tag “OED” in any of the various shorter print editions of that dictionary accessible to me. The mystery was solved when it was pointed out to me11 that the BBC’s definition comes from the online version of the OED and is in fact the first definition that appears in the online entry. The definition given in the complete, and therefore presumably definitive, print version of the OED12 is rather different. It reads, in part (omitting examples of usage): “Anti-Semitism. Theory, action or practice directed against the Jews. Hence anti-Semite, one who is hostile or opposed to the Jews, anti-Semitic.”
According to this longer and more considered definition, antisemitism, though it may consist of individual hostility to Jews, can take other forms. In particular, it can take the form of practices, actions, or theories. These are all, as it happens, things characteristic of collective or political life. Political parties—and for that matter, citizens committed to a common liberal political or moral outlook—evidently can and do subscribe to theories, engage in practices, or put into effect actions—all of which, according to the full OED definition, may be (or may not be; it remains to be seen, case by case) antisemitic.
In light of the complete OED’s more considered definition, then, the simple retort to the BBC’s and Baroness Chakrabarti’s suggestion, that—in effect—antisemitism is one thing and anti-Zionism another, would seem to be that what the term antisemitism covers in everyday English is not one thing but rather a variety of things.
V
Of the OED’s triad—theory, action, practice—the most important is, plainly, theory. In politics, after all, theory, in the form of an analysis of how society functions, and hence of how it might for the best be changed or conserved, is a major factor both in the direction of day-to-day political practice and in the choice of favored outcomes.
It seems equally clear that antisemitism is in one of its standard forms a theory. It is the theory, or political fantasy, that Jews are conspiratorially organized to exercise secret control over the world in order to pervert the energies of non-Jewish society into the service of sinister Jewish ends. Antisemitism of this type peddles, among many other delusive notions, the idea that “the Jews” are the real agents behind vast and dangerous forces threatening world peace.
In pursuit of that thought, let us return for a moment to Ambassador Bernard’s unwise remarks at Barbara Amiel’s reception. While the phrase “that shitty little country Israel” might be considered undiplomatic, I do not, myself, find it particularly antisemitic. One might be led to say the same thing of England, or even of France, neither of them particularly large tracts of territory by global standards, and both of them well equipped with local habits and customs highly irritating to foreigners, doubtless including some ambassadorial ones.
What I do find antisemitic about Bernard’s remarks, and profoundly so, is the thing he then went on to say, which practically no contributor to the chorus of indignation at the time seems to have noticed. Once again I cite Gross’s report: “‘Why,’ he asked, ‘should the world be in danger of World War Three because of those people?’”
On the sour breath of this question can be detected the authentic odor of antisemitism in the mode of theory, or better, political fantasy. At the point when it was asked, in 2001, there was as compared to many moments in the preceding half-century little need to worry about an outbreak of “World War Three.” So far as any dangers to peace existed in embryo, they involved powers far greater than Israel and conflicts for the most part remote from the Middle East: the possibility of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, of a recrudescence of the recent wars in the territories of the former Yugoslavia, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea, and so on. But to Jacques Chirac’s ambassador to London, these perfectly genuine threats to world peace paled into insignificance beside the imaginary one posed by “those people”: the Jews.
Antisemitism of this kind, the kind that poses as an explanatory theory about who really possesses the power to determine world events, is among other things, the lethal kind—the kind that accounts for the Holocaust. One does not, after all, set out to extirpate a people from the face of the earth because one happens to dislike or despise them on an individual basis. One takes such a step because one sees them as constituting, collectively, a threat so serious that it can be countered in no other way than by their total removal from the world scene. Hitler and his circle did not set the Final Solution in motion because they viewed Jews individually as a tribe of hucksters and vulgarians given to pushing their noses into social circles in which they neither belonged nor were welcome. They did so because they seriously believed the real enemy of the Third Reich to be not America, or the British Empire, or the Soviet Union but the vast Jewish conspiracy that, they supposed, secretly controlled these—only seemingly independent—powers through its control of world capitalism.
As we shall see, it is nowadays widely believed in mainstream liberal circles that that kind of antisemitism was a delusion peculiar to the German National Socialist Party—one that largely disappeared with its fall and survives today only in a few obscure neo-Nazi groupuscules. Those who believe this believe in consequence that the only kind of antisemitism we need to bother about nowadays is what I shall call—to distinguish it from the theoretical kind—“social” antisemitism: the kind that indeed consists, in the words of the BBC’s version of the OED, in “hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people” taken individually. It is this that persuades them, as we have just seen, that the anti-Zionism currently so popular on the liberal left of Western politics can have nothing to do with antisemitism.
It is often asserted, both by Jews and by others, that social antisemitism has greatly declined in Western societies over the seventy years that have elapsed since the end of World War II. That is broadly—though somewhat patchily—true. What I shall argue in this book, however, is that social antisemitism is by no means the only kind we have to worry about today. As I shall show in what follows—and as many others have noted—antisemitism as a political fantasy concerning the mysterious, demonic, and conspiratorial power of “the Jews” to determine world events has enjoyed a political rebirth since September 2001. All that has changed is that “Zionism”—understanding by that term the State of Israel together with its Jewish supporters (though not, as we shall see, its far more numerous non-Jewish ones)—has taken over, in effect, the role traditionally assigned in antisemitic theory to the world Jewish conspiracy. In that new form, antisemitism as a delusive political theory is once again as active in the political life of the West as it has been at any time over the past two millennia.
Unfortunately, that political rebirth has taken place chiefly on the left. The left has, of course, its own traditions of antisemitic theorizing. These theories were specific to the left and in any case not particularly active or influential during the greater part of the twentieth century. But what the French ambassador’s remark exemplifies, as we shall see in what follows, is a straightforward transfer from one end of the political spectrum to the other of what used to be the exclusively right-wing fantasy that the Jews are to be blamed for most of the evils besetting the world and, among other things, for being the main force pushing the world toward war.
In short, I shall argue in this book that those who presently complain of a revival of antisemitism in sections of the British Labour Party, in American academia, and for that matter in the wider drift of liberal opinion in the Western world do not for a moment, pace the BBC, suppose that problem to consist only in the entertaining, by individuals who may or may not happen to be on the left, of private attitudes of “hostility and prejudice” toward anybody who happens to be Jewish.
On the contrary, they take it to consist also, and most importantly, in a revival, largely on the left this time, of antisemitic theory: of belief in the ancient fantasy of a collective Jewish threat to
