New York New York
Israel’s foreign ministry has accused the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, of pouring “antisemitic gasoline on an open fire” after he reversed a recent order by the outgoing mayor, Eric Adams.
“On his very first day as @NYCMayor, Mamdani shows his true face: he scraps the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lifts restrictions on boycotting Israel. This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire,” the foreign ministry said in a post on X.
Mamdani revoked an Adams-era order that adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which the previous administration said included “demonizing Israel and holding it to double standards as forms of contemporary antisemitism”.
Israel is not the same thing as being Jewish, but that’s not to say that hatred of Israel has no connection at all to hatred of Jews.
Israel is a political entity, a nation, one that is currently led by a far-right political apparatus that is unabashedly racist, and which is actively opposed by a large number of the citizenry under its present leadership.
Anti-semitism is a worldview, an ideology, that is held in deep disrepute — rightly — because it generalizes a heterogeneous group of people — those who identify as Jewish — as universally subhuman or evil. Antisemitism is almost superstitious in that it attributes negative forces to a group of people based on nothing but the almost-arbitrary line between who counts as Jewish and who doesn’t. The fact that the defining line between a Jew and a gentile is virtually impossible to police is just the beginning of a long chain of logical absurdities behind that reasoning.
But ironically, the Israeli state, as it’s seen by its current far-right leaders, actually works to empower antisemitism because it actively works to harden the fuzzy line between Jewishness and non-Jewishness, and, so it believes, between Israeli-ness and non-Israeli-ness.
The argument against anti-semitism in today’s climate rests largely on the fact that Jewishness is NOT synonymous with political alignment with the far-right Netanhayhu regime. Naturally, the Jewish extremists have sought to associate opposition to their strain of Jewishness with antisemitism as a concept because in the confusion around boundaries in the present political situation, that’s the angle that gets them the most clout.
It’s the exact same playbook as the Islamists who plotted to position muslim identity itself as synonymous with a legal right to segregate males and females and to discriminate against gays. We all saw the fallout when the Southern Poverty Law Centre took the position that liberal Muslims were the enemy: they framed moderate Muslims as active bigots for dissenting with, and therefore undermining, the hardline conservative Muslim movement. The uninspected assumption was that more hardline Muslims were more “oppressed” somehow. It was a strange chain of logic that they kinda sleepwalked into, which would not withstand serious scrutiny. (They paid millions in damages after facing lawsuits.)
Same shit with the activists who insist that far-right Israeli Netanyahu-ism is directly analagous to Jewish identity.
I now work in the Jewish neighbourhood in my city, and pretty much all of the Jews I interact with have nothing to do with the Netanyahu-ists. It seems so strange that in broader politics the far right have succeeded in co-opting my friends’ identities for their political goals. They don’t identify with that mess, and it appals me that they should face any kind of splashback discrimination because of it. They’re innocent.