Published: 23 April 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
HOW DO YOU WIN against your opponent in the ideological arena? Simple: take a reviled symbol and associate it with him. For example, characterize the left as a bunch of traitors or losers, and remind the public of Chamberlain.
Politics is replete with distorted perceptions, symbols and images, and manipulating these images is a decisive part of ideological warfare. Mixing and confusing symbols has long been a tactic of propagandists of all persuasions.
The struggle against anti-Semitism used to be above the fray of crass politics, but during the last two decades, it has become politicized and subject to the same manipulations suffered by the ideological arena.
In Israel, it has been harnessed by the government as part of a vast campaign intended to whitewash its policies. The whitewashing has given rise to blacklists of Israeli NGOs, academics, artists, journalists and ordinary citizens who have dissented with Israel’s ongoing occupation of the territories and dispossession of Palestinians of their basic human rights.
Dissent is not silenced through formal censorship, but with the assistance of the scarlet letter “A.” Critiques of Israeli policies are easily dubbed as “anti-Zionist,” and anti-Zionism is in turn viewed as a subcategory of anti-Semitism. Ergo, a critique of Israel is anti-Semitic.
Through this syllogism, a critique of Israeli politics (an opinion) is transmuted into an essence and an identity (that of the antisemite), from which no politician or public figure can ever hope to recover.
FULL STORY Between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism: The intellectual's dilemma (Haaretz)
Photo: Demonstrators protest the extension of Jerusalem’s light rail line into the Gilo neighbourhood, over the Green Line, in December 2020 (Ohad Zwigenberg)
