Branding anti-Racism
Criticism of European anti-Semitism always neglects its context. That is, it mistakes it’s object, frequently construed as being Israel, for being more important than what it has in common with other continental racisms. It is a criticism of the Jewish right to statehood, to political freedom, never an expression of a larger prejudicial impulse towards towards persons of Mideast descent, which attaches itself to different European Semitic communities at different times.
Reading the mountain of op-eds this week about the Aftonbladet affair, I could not help but wonder why, if we were really dealing with a case of anti-Semitism, not a single charge ever sought to place itself within the context of larger trends in contemporary European xenophobia. Was it because of the political persuasions of the persons making the claims, who, even if they are not sympathetic to Arabs, cannot see the similar ideological mechanism that substitutes Muslim for Jew, and vice versa?
Or was it because the critique of anti-Semitism took form before the advent of large scale Muslim immigration to Europe, and never redefined itself to include both peoples? I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially considering the degree to which the critique of anti-Jewish racism became problematized in left circles following the Six Day War. ‘Anti-anti-Semitism’ came to be considered an ideology masking Israeli transgressions against Palestinians.
Anti-Arab racism had to unnecessarily get segregated, independent of European Muslims’ experience of the same basic prejudices as the continent’s former Jewish population. There would be no concentration camps, but there would be facsimiles of everything else: specifically a combination of ghettoization and integration. They would be outsiders within the bourgeoisie, as Max Horkheimer once described Europe’s Jews, as well as perennially itinerant migrant laborers.