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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The US, the UK, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and now Australia. Over the course of the past two years, Jews have been murdered across five continents, and many other attacks have either been foiled or taken place without loss of life. To gather together to mark the milestones of Jewish life — whether festivals of sorrow and contemplation, like Yom Kippur, the site of an attack in Manchester, or those of joy and optimism, like Hanukkah, now the site of an attack in Sydney — has become an activity fraught with unease.
Equally inseparable from all this has been the conflation of “Israel” with “all Jews, everywhere” and the inevitable whataboutery that meets each of these attacks on the subject of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Something about antisemitism seems to interfere not just with people’s moral compasses, but also their actual compasses. Bondi Beach is not in Israel. It is in Australia. I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of Israel’s war in Gaza because it is beside the point.
First, while some of the perpetrators of these murderous attacks — such as those in Boulder or Washington — claimed that the Gaza war was a motivation, not all are so clear-cut. More importantly, there is no action that Israel, or any other state for that matter, could commit that would make it acceptable for me to commit indiscriminate acts of murder in “return”. Some of those behind these attacks are on the extreme left, but that does not justify someone launching a murderous attack on a Marxist bookshop. All of the known attackers over the past two years have been male, as are the vast majority of terrorists and violent criminals. It would not justify me attacking men when they gather to watch football.
Violent antisemitism is not caused by anything Israel does — Israel merely fills the role that, throughout modern history, had previously been taken by discredited science about race and ethnicity, and conspiracy theories about everything from the banks to the Moon landings.
The depressing truth about human history is that the urge to justify the violent collective punishment of a perceived other is very strong — we will grasp at any tragic event and use it to do so. Any new advance in communications will be deployed to that end. And so it is today: social media has become a fire hose of toxic, racist content, whipped up both by some domestic politicians for their own ends and by external forces.
All of this has created an environment in which antisemitism has been given a fresh lease of life across the world. The active unwillingness of parts of the left — whether in academia, political parties or protest movements — to police its flanks or its language when it comes to the Gaza war creates an atmosphere in which people looking to justify their violent urges will find plenty of opportunities to do so.
But it is not only at that end of the political spectrum that the past two years have seen a consistent failure to police the idea that individual sins should be visited upon whole communities. On much of the global right, crimes by individuals, whether they are immigrants or simply from an ethnic minority background, have been regularly and repeatedly used as an argument not for punishment of the guilty, but for collective retribution against everyone in that perceived group.
The horrific crime of Axel Rudakubana, a single British teenager from an African Christian background, last year was used to justify broader attacks on British Muslims. Discontent with high levels of immigration is treated as a reason to justify attacks on individual immigrants or on ethnic diversity more broadly. Alleged fraud by Somalis in Minnesota is used by President Donald Trump as a way to demonise American Somalis as a class.
Those who ought to stand against this sort of thing engage in frankly specious reasoning about what the “root causes” are or muse that there is a way to defeat racist ideologies that involves more spending or some tax cuts. Anything, really, other than standing up and saying that it is wrong to attack entire groups for the real or perceived crimes of specific individuals.
The taboo on doing this has been badly weakened throughout much of the democratic world, in part through deliberate malice, but also through neglect. An unwillingness on the part of people from across the political spectrum to police their friends and not just their enemies has created the conditions for old hatreds to flourish freely in the 21st century. The human cost of that now reaches across the whole world.