It’s a cold autumn night in Johannesburg. I lie on my bed preparing for my pending aliyah, my laptop resting on my thighs, writing. Suddenly my phone vibrates, I continue, it vibrates again, I focus on these words, the third buzz grabs my attention, and like most of us today I can’t stop myself from running to check the latest notification. Is it work? A friend? Maybe a funny meme worth sharing to the family group? No! It’s a vile message of hate, one I have become all too accustomed to as a Jewish and Israel-rights activist.
Over the past two weeks, there has been a silencing of Jewish voices across platforms with verbal violence that can be described only as a social-media pogrom. The terms used to demonise Israel such as “apartheid”, “genocide”, and “ethnic cleansing” have been meticulously designed to silence Jews. In a world where cancel culture is the modus operandi, the Jewish state is being spun into a web of lies designed to cancel us from the conversation.
What we are experiencing now is nothing new. Jews make up 0.2% of the global population and yet we find ourselves, once again, on the other side of an obsessive, vicious campaign of lies. Every time antisemitism re-enters society, it masks itself as social justice.
It’s sold as speaking truth to power. It functions by turning the Jew into whatever a given society hates or fears most. Under Nazism, the Jew was the race contaminator. Today, when the greatest sins of the world are racism and colonialism, Israel, the Jew among the nations, is being demonised as the last bastion of racist colonialism.
Antisemitism will always be a political question. Atrocities against Jews didn’t succeed because individuals didn’t like Jews, it was because political movements convinced the public that stripping Jews of their rights was in their best interest. To achieve this without any pushback, antisemitism is hidden in plain sight. This is why from the Middle Ages until now, antisemites have said they weren’t antisemitic just anti-Hebrew, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, and of course the all-too-familiar anti-Zionist.
It’s interesting for me that Jews are coined “colonisers”. Native peoples can’t colonise their indigenous homeland and aren’t referred to as foreigners or settlers. The West is attempting to turn history’s most successful indigenous rights liberation movement – Zionism – into settler-colonialism.
It’s proof positive that the far left’s form of antisemitism is rooted in projecting its own white societal guilt from the past onto the Jewish people and our self-determination. Thousands of years of historical and archaeological evidence show that Judaism and the beginning of the Jewish people began in the kingdom of Judea and Israel. After Roman colonisation about 2 000 years ago, ethnic Jews were exiled from their ancestral homeland and subsequently settled in every corner of the world.
In an act of blatant neo-colonialism, the American story is viewed as the universal prism through which all societies must be understood.
Completely ignorant of the specificities of Israel/Palestine, these neo-colonialists fit the square peg of the conflict into the round hole of American history. Jews are bizarrely cast as the white oppressor, and Zionism a movement of white supremacy, while Arabs who look exactly like Israelis are cast as people of colour.
This blind and seemingly ignorant superimposition of American racial politics must not be mistaken for naivety, it’s purposeful and dangerous as it normalises antisemitic attitudes in society.
The effect of this has been seen and experienced by us all with the recent violence. We are living in an era of white versus black, straight versus gay, oppressor versus victim. The allowance for nuance and complexity seems just not to exist anymore. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s not that attacks on Jews in the West are the unfortunate and unintended consequence of the persistent demonisation of Israel, but rather the demonisation of the Jewish state is undertaken so as to re-legitimise attacks on Jews in the West.
Denial is the weapon of choice for many antisemites. They deny the Holocaust, deny the ethnic cleansing of Jews in the Middle Eastern Arab states, and now they deny that we even originated from the Middle East.
With a 500% increase in antisemitic attacks in the past two weeks, the silence of the non-Jewish world is deafening, but history shows us not shocking. On an emotional Monday morning during the conflict, I wrote this on social media to many of my non-Jewish friends who had engaged with misinformation, the spreading of antisemitic tropes or anti-Israel bias: “You sat at my Shabbos table. You listened to us sing ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ on Passover. You ate my apples dipped in honey for a sweet new year. You told me how much you love challah. You love hummus, you love bagels, you love Jewish humour films. You are a humanitarian, an anti-racist. You are against hate. You walk with BLM. You march for gay pride. You love everything Jewish besides for Jewish people. You are silent! Replace the word ‘Zionist’ with ‘Jew’, and one can understand how the Nazis successfully killed 2/3rds of the Jewish population with the help of millions of regular everyday citizens.”
We must no longer try to convince anybody of our humanity. We know our humanity. We are no longer interested in false interpretations of our history. We know our history. In solidarity as a community, we must now say, “No more! In the spirit of our ancestors, we are once again resolved to take charge of the Jewish destiny.”
From generation to generation, we were unwelcome guests in the diaspora. An annoyance to the world like a mosquito buzzing in the dark, and that’s where they are right, we are an annoyance. The non-Jewish world has done everything in its power to isolate us from the orders of society, and time and time again, we revolutionised those very orders.
Abraham with his one G-d, Moses with his ten commandments, Jesus with his second cheek ready for the next slap. Einstein. Kissinger. Kafka. Marx. Herzl. Ben Gurion. Meir. I truly had hoped the rise of intersectionality would chant from corner to corner in solidarity with Jews – “lesson learnt: never again”. But that never happened.
Again, we are alone, but this time not from nowhere, we are from where we always have been, Israel, our home. Zionism has given us as a community the space to be liberated from millennia-long persecution. When we were sold into slavery out of Israel, our ancestors made a promise to one day return us home. We are the ones lucky enough to live their dream. It truly is a miracle of biblical proportions. Cherish it. Nurture it. Am Yisrael chai – the people of Israel live.
- Samuel Hyde is an audio engineer/music producer and a Jewish and Israel-rights activist. He worked at the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre educating youth on antisemitism and its function in society.
