Are we exaggerating the extent of antisemitism?

MICHAEL LIFFMAN considers to what extent visceral antisemitic impulses are embedded in the pro-Palestinian movement.

As a secular Jew whose parents were forever grateful for the refuge they found in Australia from Nazi Germany in 1939, I have always thought this to be the safest country in which to live as a Jew. While events since 7 October 2023 have led me to ask if that is still the case, on balance I believe it is.

It is beyond doubt that there has been an increase in disturbing, offensive and even dangerous incidents that can only be described as antisemitic. Many of these derive from the licence social media gives for the expression of enduring views that in earlier times would have found no outlet and little wider support, and from the global drift to polarisation and populism.

The question I am grappling with, however, is to what extent the more widespread escalation of strident manifestations of pro-Palestinian support in recent weeks is indeed evidence of an alarming rebirth of antisemitism, as many now claim.

Certainly, in my view, that support is often naively wrong-headed, historically ill-informed, based on values or intellectual frameworks I don’t share, and captured by polarised and binary thinking. But is that, of itself, evidence of the re-emergence of the deep groundswell of latent antisemitism that has dogged Jewish history for 2000 years?