From Erasure to Restoration: Antisemitism and the visual reverberations of a revolutionary pedagogy

“All I am saying is that before the Code Noir and King Leopold’s chicotte roused the outrage of the abolitionists and future antiimperialists, the bodies and souls of their victims must have registered, quite viscerally, the radical transgression of their idea of the human. All I am saying is that the slaves’ revulsion and recorded histories of revolt, from the slave ship and the middle passage to the plantation and Saint-Domingue in 1791, did not, pace Hegel’s preposterous claim, originate in the circumstance that ‘they have come in contact with European views about freedom’” (Ato Sekyi-Out, 2019, 31).

“However intense the hostility between Israelis and Arabs, no Arab has the right to feel that his enemy’s enemy is his friend, for Nazism is the enemy of all the worlds’ peoples.” (Mahmoud Darwish)

When the revolution in Haiti changed the course of history, it also had given birth a new paradigm that would centuries later still shape political strategies. CRL James’ (1989) seminal work The Black Jacobins narrates a key historical event in the struggle for emancipation and first successful mass rebellion of the modern world. This history of the Black Jacobins must be acknowledged as key to any liberation philosophy and analysis of colonialism and racism, as an incredible tale of an oppressed group transforming into free people. For what this ‘free’ actually entails for self-emancipation, and for theories about social change, the ideals of Toussaint L’Ouverture is not an afterthought but its core.[1] In his extraordinary Left Universalism, Ato Sekyi-Otu (2019) proposes “a universalism that is neither unmodified, the stainless product of a-view-from-nowhere; nor one that is vitiated by the open avowal of its particular provenance, preoccupations, even its partisanship” (12). Exercising the recuperation of the universal both against a nationalist (“self-referential”) particularism and a simplistic anti-universalism from part of the left, through an approach that is invested in emancipation for the poor and oppressed, Ato Sekyi-Out not only echoes the freed universal subject but also rejects the Eurocentric enlightenment and imperialistic colonial version of freedom. The claim to a universal morality is linked to the place of subjectivity. The Haitian revolution presented a freed person as a universal subject, regardless of colour for although the rebellion emerged from a race struggle, whether you were part of the slave revolt was more important as the principle base of a new freed identity. A similar link between morality and subjectivity is found with regards to who is enemy and who is friend for the commons amidst liberation struggles. This spirit of a progressive universalism is present when Mahmoud Darwish spoke to the idea of a worlds enemy that was based on the rejection of an opportunist ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ in one’s own struggles. Born from the belief that our ethical constellations carry general significance and that our moral measures have universal value, Darwish’s dictum is a beautiful convergence of Sekyi-Out and James. On the surface, plenty of disavowals of cultural chauvinism and even offering a pseudo-universalism through a global (mistaken for universal) capitalist subjectivity that is deeply ingrained in consumerism. But if we seek a universalism that is entrenched in the progressive moral values yet also expressed through a historical particularity of a people struggling for self-emancipation, this is found in the far more important affirmation of the double critique offered by Ato Sekyi-Out.[2]

The form and praxis of anti-Semitism as racist oppression fluctuates across time and is differently experiences along class formations, and it also mutates as an instrument of other social dynamics. Contrary to Left universalism, “Left-antisemitism” (and “Muslim-antisemitism”) on the contrary, emerged with narrow idea, discussions about the crime of antisemitism are relayed not as the enemy of all, but as the only evil and the ultimate crimes with which nothing else can be compared, and through which any disagreement amounts to culpability with said crimes. The term antisemitic indexes easy to remember formulae and is attached to immoral qualities that suffices for these kinds of peoples and their monolithic cultures. Discourses on antisemitism often rely on Islamophobic and redbaiting tropes; offered through a pre-packaged and ready-to-use (the Holocaust-denying-Arab-Muslim-protagonist) who cultivates a vigorously anti-Jewish culture or the (suspiciously preoccupied with Israel) dodgy Marxist. There is a particular dictionary for the villain and racialised other (“the” Muslim, Black, Arab, Maghrebi) or hegemonic state subject nemesis (“the Leftist”), that dares to be unapologetic in its anti-colonialism.

It would be a mistake to consider these prevailing framings merely as “polemical”, that would assume a certain exceptionality – whilst actually they have come to present a common conduct in contemporary political public sphere. Thus, these tropes are about more than ignorance and mainly meant to de-politicize a political struggle, and not any but a cause that is positioned at the sharpest end of contemporary imperialism. That explains why these pre-packed variants of antisemitism are frequently deployed by Israel in its public diplomacy (Aouragh 2016) and implemented by many of its allied states in Europe and North America by criminalizing dissent through legislation. Although in the name of anti-Semitism, it is detached from any genuine concern in fighting anti-Jewish racism through a politics invested in grassroots activism. What matters is that these frameworks relate to a wider critique of Israeli settler colonialism and by extension Palestine solidarity not a concern to fight the antisemitism or Nazism as Darwish put it.

This was sharply confirmed in the Spring of 2022 when a collection of revolutionary posters brought a group of people together with Documenta fifteen (art exhibition in Germany) curators. Curated for Lumbung Press, these posters were being prepared as part of anti-colonial and progressive struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Though we were intrigued and excited by the material in front of us, the workshops ensued amidst an upsetting controversy over the supposed antisemitism surrounding Documenta fifteen.[3]

In the light of what we have come to know (solidarity for Palestine officially denounced, critique of Israel successfully problematized by the adoption of IHRA policy and non-violent resistance in educational and art institutions by banning BDS through the highest political echelons), these incredible poster collections would undoubtedly in retrospect be interpreted in the now hegemonic way as antisemitic because the terms according to which we ascribe meaning and symbols related to visuals have fundamentally changed.  It seems unquestionable that antisemitism, or “Anti-anti-antisemitism” (denying the reality of antisemitism or refusing to fight the reality of antisemitism), function as their negative metonyms. Antisemitism is a deadly signifier: it creates permanent scandals, obfuscates nuance, destroys reputations, and dismantles organisations.

The moment antisemitism is gestured, its already too late: it is an adaptable and all-encompassing gesture that says it all. Complex matters don’t have to be put in context, no need to consider the historic weight of imperialism, don’t ask how colonialism has a lasting impact that are mapped onto contemporary racist systems and sentiments. We should therefore ignore that in the 1950s antisemitism was not a cause but a product of conflict in the region; we should also not be reminded that many Jewish progressives or Arab Jews do not fit within Zionist and (pro-) Israel framework. An ethical contract, that in the least should provide discursive accountability when using ugly normative labels, is not required. And it certainly doesn’t matter that a similar definitional option with regards to racism (Islamophobia) is meanwhile denied to other victims of everyday and state racism. In the global north, these are mostly second-class citizens that orbit outside a moral space as undeserving subjects, and with no concrete stake to protect.

There is much to unpack here. What do posters have to do with universalism or antisemitism? This article should be read as a reflection on Antisemitism arose against the backdrop of Israeli state terror and regional conflicts as discussed in The Arabs and the Holocaust in which Gilbert Achcar (2010) develops a strong set of arguments against the notion ‘Arab anti-Semitism’.[4] Though this book is rarely referred to in present, I engage it now to push against the orientalist representations of a single Arab/Muslim discourse regarding Palestine/Israel. Achcar mentions the (then hard to believe) still unfamiliar development of IHRA; it would be an untruth to claim the major backlash that followed a decade later was acknowledged then for what it would become. This introspection is helpful because it provides historical understanding of important intellectual interventions between the 1970s-90s that pushed against broader regression in the analysis of Israel and regional politics. A decline of educational systems and the repression of press freedom signals a dynamic that started in the 1970s when the left underwent repeated defeat.[5] The political vacuum was joined by a noticeable increase of reactionary forces, often backed by former colonial powers and the (prominently with the 1979 Iranian revolution) US. The fact that progressives challenged reactionary tendencies within Arab political discourse (e.g. those entertaining Holocaust-denial), confirms that societies are not static but liable to ideological changes which itself move along political pendulum that always fluctuates in response to intellectual formations, militarisation, social inequalities. Even when their parameters were declared irrelevant during 1980 and 1990s postmodernism or End of history paradigms – Leftist intellectuals tirelessly debated and analysed the political-economic role of imperialism and capitalism. Achcar identifies two important historic and current dynamics that shifted towards Holocaust topics, and how social relations produce political subjectivities. Before I return to the relation between political posters and reverberations of progressive approaches vis-à-vis antisemitism, it’s important to pause and spell out the circumstances for this is a fundamental part of the context that still plays out today.

Firstly, political regression saw the destruction of institutional workers and students’ movements and their social infrastructures in the wake of postcolonial dictatorships (especially in combination with anti-left crackdowns) and this undermined emancipatory progressive universal values for humanist advances. When Palestinian revolutionary forces had grown into a progressive political force over those years, and when progressive Nasserism took a beating reactionary wave came along that saw the Fedayeen ousted from Jordan and PLO expelled from Lebanon. This mattered because Palestinian politics was becoming an intellectual transgressive reference point for the whole Arab speaking region of West Asia and North Africa. In other words, the political devastation of 1967 and 1982 created a general intellectual retreat. Precisely due to its disproportional importance as a progressive bastion weakened considerably, the intellectual decline radiated far beyond. The second dynamic that marks the Holocaust debate goes back further: the 1948 Nakba and violent colonial occupation atalysed crucial political-cultural transformations that should not be underestimated. The creation of the state of Israel dealt a heavy blow to the main ideological currents. As certain Islamists had allied with imperial forces, (most) communist parties followed the political zigzags of Stalin. The fact that CP members hardly engaged helps explains the gap in archival material from that period. The traumatic events led a massive exodus that bore the longest and largest refugee population to this date. But the Nakba is either denied or ridiculed in Israel and largely excluded from most Euro-American curriculum. Especially because it is unresolved it is not a matter of the past. Like an open wound that doesn’t close, this liminality provides an important explanation of the political refusal to use the term ‘Israel’ for instance. Put differently, the denial of the Nakba provokes another denial. It is important to appreciate that for those in forced exile or refugee camps and still hoping to return, this Israel also implies acceptance of the loss of their (street, house, estate, farm) Palestine.

Taken together, the double standards regarding the right to self-determination and violent repression of progressive movements allowed the loss of an important progressive archive that produced far more sceptical horizons;.[6] Taking this toward a lopsided logic: if recognising the Holocaust means accepting a settler-colonial racist state, then the holocaust will be questioned. More importantly, this is part and parcel of the way Arab and Jewish left subjectivities has been relatively easy to deform and flatten. Going back and forth between the present and the early/mid-70s of these posters, we can detect or are confronted with the choices, duties and intentions. To be clear, this article is not invested in cultural analysis or philosophical understandings of aesthetics, yet via the posters I branch out to these broader questions. We revisited these posters collectively – each bringing up different historiographic aspects. While taking serious culture of art in terms of understanding, interpreting and feeling the material artefacts that carries a profoundly emotional resonance which refutes the erasure of essential parts of our collective histories.

A focus on Palestinian solidarity at major events like Documenta fifteen also shows that indignation is racially codified. Riots, anger, and rage are qualified as an inferior feature, in particular when they are about the wrong kinds of victims. This is not only a Palestinian issue. Every historical moment or political context has a deserving and non-deserving class. When mass protests and expression of anger erupted in the USA in 1950s and 1960s, they were reduced to “race riots” by a “mindless mob”. Martin Luther King answered that riots are ‘the language of the unheard’.[7] This is important because it reminds us that even if censored and pushed out of view, those at the receiving end of the silencing know otherwise. Ordinary people across the world are intuitively on the side of the oppressed because they see right through the dehumanisation that they themselves also experience. This is why community (public) opinion is almost the opposite of state alliances with Israel, and why these inversions can be mapped onto the schism between position of most of the Global South and that of the Global North. That the ordinary people know better instinctively makes this manoeuvring even more necessary. In the words of Fanon: ‘to wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of action which is very clear, very easy to understand and which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people.[8]

To follow on from Martin Luther King, what has the state failed to hear, what is the reality that the Lumbung community at Documenta fifteen conveyed that fell on deaf ears? Because the conditions in Palestine are enraging according to any objective or subjective measure, the Palestinian cause is evidently dehumanised. By removing a moral threshold through the antisemitism index, legitimate rage can be reduced to violence. And deemed irrational and uncivilised. This was put painfully clear in the Letter from Lumbung community written response to the report of the ‘scientific advisory panel’ of Documenta fifteen:

The report equates critique of the current violent actions of the Israeli State with hatred. … We reject it categorically. We refuse the intentional political manoeuvre that aims at separating struggles and dividing them from each other—dividing us from each other. We stand together, unconditionally and without hesitation.

Todays’ manifestation of racism is not different from what Martin Luther King notes about riots in the USA or Fanon about the colonised rage. Consider Fanon reflecting on his Concerning Violence “This book should have been written three years ago …But these truths were a fire in me then. Now I can tell them without being burned”. Wallerstein discussed this important side-note [H]e was an angry man and one who used angry language, but it was in fact a very controlled anger. […] the very opposite of spontaneous and unreflecting anger.  Through these historic threads we recognise a pattern of deflection. Bigotry and Islamophobia makes it easier to project onto Muslims/Islam heavy charges (vengeance, enemies of freedom, paths to violence, rejection of modernity), to then render them unworthy of sympathy.[9] I was pulled to a set of posters that displayed the kind of visual indexes (Swastika, Star of David, Kalashnikov, blue and white of Israeli flag) as the attacks on the Lumbung community and the Reprint exhibition at Ducumenta fifteen was raging in the background. According to racialised framework I just outlined, can only mean the condoning of Nazism, proof that Arabs, Muslims, (or their leftist supporters) are Holocaust deniers, their historical timeframe suddenly brought to light their relevance. And I engage with this tough conundrum through the poster collections though without uncritical valorisation.

To unwrap this very compressed objective, I continue to build on Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust (2010) (Section 1) for albeit ignored in debates about new antisemitism, it provides necessary depth.[10] Undoing dehumanisation is a crucial part of the undoing of the continuous violence that enables it. Concealing the violence and injustice of settler colonialism also maintains the ideological paradigms and cultural frames beneath it. To understand this dynamic, we need to also recognise the construction of a Palestine-radical left-Muslim as the all-encompassing subject of what the liberal mainstream supposedly is not. This requires consideration of the influence of structural racism and Islamophobia (Section 2). It shows that the “anti-antisemitism” signifier is an ideological construction that has little or no contribution to the struggle against antisemitism. Anti-Jewish racism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same racist coin. Conversely, the revolutionary posters are not only very attractive they convey a didactic message that strike an important balance between pedagogy and aesthetics. We can appreciate them as both material and vernacular objects. Their style, colours, chants reflect the radical 1960s, some of the posters show how struggles evolve, develop, and elapse. As the emergence of a New Arab Left and revolutionary guerrilla movements are crucial transformations – the negation of the right-wing clichés of reactionary movements or intolerant individuals that are always emphasized in discussions about people from the region – I attempt to unwrap their temporal situatedness (Section 3 and 4). Rekindling with this legacy is an antidote against historical amnesia and helps to push against the dominant frame of antisemitism. As we struggle to make sense of our very strange conjuncture, we need come to terms with the erasure of a left epistemology that had emerged from the region in the 1970s. Serfaty offered important class analysis of Jews and a perspective about local Judaism that is invisible in the debates about antisemitism. It occurred to me that the shifting notion of antisemitism involves expunging difference – that erasing the radical history of Arab and Jewish progressive is an important (missing) piece of the puzzle. Figures such as Serfaty would have helped make sense of the present political contestations. Reversing this erasure this will help understand that progressive Jewish interjections about liberation politics in general, and Palestine in specific, are belittled precisely because they penetrate the hegemonic framework. The flattening of complex histories and (Arab, Left, Jewish) subjectivities through such an erasure is conditional in the defence of Zionism. Antisemitism as political instrument is an overshadowing force, the moralistic paradigms it retains are so vociferous it muzzles all context and ambiguity (Section 5).

 

I. Arabs and the Holocaust

The current political contestation is often marked by a sense of hyper-urgency and sometimes shock-effect, despite the click-bait motives on for-profit platforms, there is also the ideological benefit to ignore history by explaining conflicts as pressures of current times. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the product of more than a century of history making. The region’s response to Israel has to be understood as one linked to military violence and land appropriation. But also that the protagonist is a state that always and primarily defines itself as Jewish state that in turn discursively shapes the counter-response. Achcar contextualises religious/political positions about Jews and Judaism in a much more important history, that of European anti-Semitic racism which has a centuries-old fantasy-based hatred of the Jews showing this is different from a relatively more recent hatred about Israel felt among Arabs.[11] The book at once exposes anti-Arab racism and develops strong arguments against the notion of a pervasive ‘Arab antisemitism’. He also untangles progressive Arab interventions and liberation politics from the reactionary forces that did entertain anti-Semitic tropes.[12] He shows how leftist politics shaped movements across key historical moments; from the opportunities they seized to the limitations they faced.[13] He insists that what is referred to as the ‘New’ antisemitism is not a timeless continuation of anti-Jewish opinions being accredited to Islam, but – albeit fuelled by the Arab-Israeli conflict – is part of a deeply ingrained anti-Jewish tradition imported from Europe through Christian antisemitism.[14] He quotes the pro-Israeli scholar Harkabi For Arabs and Muslim anti-Semitism is not a cause but a result;[15] and orientalist Bernard Lewis: “For [European] Christian anti-Semites the Palestinian problem is a pretext and outlet of their hatred”.[16]

Judaism and Islam share many similarities through more than seven centuries Islamo-Judaic civilisation between West Africa, Southern (Iberian) Europe and West and East Asia. Conversely, Judaism is artificially coopted into Christianity and employed as a paradigm by states that merely seven decades ago had the most systemic industrial destruction of its Jewish people. This is not to deny anti-Jewish stereotypes or racism, past or present (and he names and shames Arab Holocaust deniers), but to contextualise why the sentiments in the region that hardly exist as a concept before WWII stem from colonial projects. Nonetheless, even if not dominant, we have to account for how (ethnic, religious, cultural) minorities are subjectified, racialised, and politicised in any given social relation. Yet, strangely, despite the insignificant role in Nazi politics among Arabs, thousands of pages have been written about Arab collaboration with Nazism. For instance, the entry on al-Hussaini in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust is much longer than that of Goebbels, Himmler and Eichmann. If we pause for a moment and process this, it is actually shocking for the cruel reality is that al-Hussaini’s propaganda – however imprudent – had no real impact before, during or after the Nazis were in power. Achcar distinguishes between opportunists, ideological apologists and those acting deliberately. Achcar engages the important study by Philip Mattar who tackled the recurring claim that Amin al-Hussaini – the Mufti of Jerusalem– wholeheartedly identified with the Nazis. Al Hussaini is sometimes described as a proponent or supporter of the mass murder of Jews. And even if there was “fascination from a distance”, al-Hussaini’s tactics were the exact same [just in reverse][17] as that of Churchill who said I would ally with the devil himself against Hitler. The point is that these are not “Arab” or “Muslim” positions, but reactionary views or conservative coalitions.

This as strikingly clear from the Palestinian poster collection too as they show a much more complex picture, and thereby help rescue a part of history against erasure. It is essential to pause and look back when there is a disproportionate distortion and reclaim a part of history. But also for how it teaches us about a collective and progressive heritage that has weaved valid criticism of Israel and Zionism with progressive anti-racism from the 1960-70s. The Tokyo and Brussel collections survived from one of the richest intellectual episodes of our regions; the posters are cutting-edge in terms of progressive politics that still radiates through them. The openness was created both by the very fresh experience of anti-colonial resistance, inspiration by ongoing liberation struggles (Palestine, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique). The emerging Left movements – with its critical position in trade union and student movements would put them in stark opposition with many of the conservative (postcolonial) states. Many transgressors – feminists, trade unionists, students, and artists – questioned the social order and debated the strategies and tactics for a truly emancipatory project, including questions about identity, minority communities. Those same intellectuals also discussed the difference between Judaism, Zionism, and Israel while these historic episodes should not be romanticised, the impacts of those debates were far more transgressive exactly because they were part of actual political mobilisations and thinking about both the means and ends of revolutions. This is why the subjective flattening and the purging of progressive histories from public memory is crucial with regards to contemporary recollections of earlier eras. The waning of transgressive paradigms and fading of revolutionary horizons is a crucial presentiment of the shift during the 1990s during which the political forces and ideological dynamics worsened with the restructuring into a ‘new world order’, the acceleration of the 2^nd Intifada was the background of this contradictory periods imbued with protest. And this temporal site of analysis is also how the Holocaust discourse transformed in the 1990s into a stable political ecology. A new imperial context (First Gulf war, September-11, Second Gulf war) evolved to the disparaging Muslims as the real the only the true perpetrator of antisemitism in the Global North. But this ‘enemy within’ does more and reminds us why it is unsurprising that the controversy of Documenta fifteen happened in Germany: helped mask European anti-Semitism.

Again, this is why it is important that Dokumenta is held in Germany where the stakes seem so much higher. According to legal and Islamophobia scholars Nahed Samour and Anna-Esther Younes, who is considered a threat to society is extremely racialised in Germany, and triggers exceptional legal measures reserved for the those considered “potentially” dangerous.[18] In Europe, the issue of antisemitism is unswervingly linked to Israel via the history of WW2 but it has actually grown in particularly in close company to Islamophobia. Lean shows in The Islamophobia Industry the many overlapping characteristics across campaigns, blogs, pressure groups between Islamophobic, right-wing Zionism and evangelical Christians, the latter ardent supporters of Israel and not only for Old Testament/Biblical reasons.[19] This double layered racism – cultural dehumanisation and historic erasure – merged with counterterrorism at the centre of this argument.

 

II. Anti-antisemitism: Sacramental stage for Islamophobia

 The merging of Israeli colonial objectives with the ‘War on Terror’ meant that the Palestinian liberation struggle was reduced to antiterrorism. Indeed, ‘counter-insurgency’ became code for horrific practices behind house demolitions, detention of all men of a certain age, and the targeting of civilian spaces and populations.[20] This context encouraged a deepening of anti-Arab sentiments that itself could feed off of anti-Muslim racism. Because extreme militarism is always also followed by louder anti-war protests, the construction of a pro-Palestine-Left-Muslim (read: everything the liberal mainstream is not), becomes even more instrumental. The ‘War on Terror’ allowed Israel to push forward to eclipse all possible international policy frameworks about the Second Intifada. Equating Palestine with terrorism rationalises Israeli colonial occupation more easily. From this follows that the life of a Palestinian or Muslim should not be represented as moral equivalence, as a ‘militant’ it appears less valuable. Just the wrong kinds of victims who deserve neither factual fact nor moral honesty. And when dispensable: bombing cities, assassinating journalists; detaining children; entertaining fascists; inviting far-right leaders; tolerating Holocaust deniers cease to be red-lines. [21]

Lean (2017) notes via Khaled Hroub that Hamas’ views of Jews and Zionism have changed much since its 1988 Charter; adopting a more explicit inclusion of the Holocaust narrative, and supporting the proposition to include the history of the Holocaust in school curriculum.[22]  Typically, none of this is mentioned in Western media. Besides a denial of a colonial context, the reason for this absence relates to the familiar pattern of projecting the other is against change. When the enemy is static it allows for the continuation of racist articulations of the (uncivil) ‘other’. The biased dynamic produces reactionary societal norms such as in the demand that ethnic and religious minority communities condemn what society at large fears; in fact, it has become the key ritual that governs national security. This post 9-11 real-politic is mapped onto systemic racism, which also continues from what the Stop-and-Search treatment of mainly young black men. Framing Muslims as a security liability has produced a tacit acceptance across society: the state must keep us (all the public) safe from harm by policing them, prospective terrorists that are imagined as Muslims. These ideas are determined along moral measures that also delineate shared (communal) culpability. This is why calls to condemn haunt us; follows us; threaten to overwhelm us; silence us as put by Qureshi.[23] As part of the broader hostile environment suspicion of (assumed to be) Arabs and Muslims has deepened. The policing of especially black and brown subjects took a disturbing form with the ‘duty to report’ and engender a culture of “snitching” and bullying.

As the authors of the letter from the Lumbung Community collective stated This [newly crossed] line marks a racist drift in a pernicious structure of censorship. […] For months we have continuously faced smearing attacks, humiliations, vandalism, and threats in major media outlets, as well as in the streets and in our spaces. […] What is even scarier is the normalized dismissal of these actions.[24] The racism feeding such debates fully legitimates the refusal to assume responsibility for acts by individuals and apologies on command. Moreover, it’s a set-up because we cannot speak without first verifying our humanity.[25] But if it is already someone decoded as a terrorist, radical, antisemite, etc. what remains of this humanity? In the UK, from where I partly write this, the focus on deradicalization, and surveillance transpired clearest with Prevent (2016), and this opened the door to IHRA (2020), and together these allowed for a climate in which we saw the submission of the National Union of Students in the UK (NUS) through the Tuck report (2023).[26] Such policies were (forcefully) imposed in higher education as an ideological tool. The aggressive enactment worked by threatening the withdrawing funding to universities as legislated by Tory MP Williamson under Boris Johnson and sadly docilely obeyed by many VCs. The same Islamophobic stigma that operates here also prohibits that Swastikas risk being decoded as condoning as I show below. But what if instead it is a condemnation of the violence of settler colonialism? what the David star on the posters intended to reference a state rather than religious community? These possibilities are precluded, as we see later.

Is this all about fighting racism and battling anti-semitism anyway? This supposed calling out of ‘anti-anti-semitism’ depends on a particular definition as the crux of what came to be a new ‘truth’ about the fight against antisemitism. This imaginary perception doesn’t fit reality and is about Israel than about Jewish people. That’s why, deep down, the discourse demonstrates a kind of apathy. Lapidot demonstrates that it focuses on a certain perception of Jews, and even in its official focus on hatred toward Jews, there is no real relation to real Jews.[27] His extensive engagement with the scholarship of anti-Semitism clarifies the division between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia – between Arab and Jew – and that has generated the notion “anti-anti-Semitism”. Moreover:

[S]omething inessential, beyond love and hate, beyond anti- and philo-. The anti-anti- is in this sense, beyond binary logics, where negation of negation means affirmation, a double negation that means stronger negation, anti-anti- that is more negative—not to say more exterminatory—than anti-.[28]

This begins to makes more sense when the targets in specific helps: “to uphold the division between Jew and Arab, between Jew and Muslim is to reproduce the origins of racism and at once”.[29] Citing Judaken, Lapidot argues that anti-antisemitism reverses the “dictums of antisemitism without problematizing the axiology and doxology that underpin antisemitism.”[30] In other words, there is a clear disconnect “between the history of anti-Semitism and the current struggle against it.”[31]

Yet, the fact a lot of “anti-anti-semitism” critique mimics what it seeks to resist is not random, a whitewashing of the past clearly serves to close off any critical debate.[32] As Qureshi testifies, his effort to put political events within wider historic context as ways to understand what could prod the actions of someone like “Jihadi John” (Mohammed Emwazi, a British Muslim who joined ISIS in Syria in 2014) are completely legitimate – in fact necessary. But the irrationality of racism is also that this was immediately assumed as agreeing with said action. However bizarre, it’s so important not to regard it haphazardly. These framings are extremely functional to policies that have the power to invalidate organisations and indict individuals, as seen with the organisation Cage (that Qureshi was part of), as well as with the scandals over Documenta fifteen. That this ideology serves to silence especially those that are standing in solidarity with Palestine is not irrelevant. Organising the politics of silencing is a simple way to describe the outcomes of policies like Prevent and IHRA. Overextending the category of antisemitism to include anti-Zionism complements official Israeli state strategy. The ideologic workings take particular root with a concept like “new antisemitism”. But not only does it obfuscate empirical evidence, Salaymeh identifies this as part of a longstanding coloniality trinity.[33] Put differently, caricaturing opposition to colonialism as “new antisemitism” is not essentially colonial but becomes colonial when they are universalized and forced upon colonized peoples. It is crucial to understand Israel as a settler-colonial state and in turn as part of an imperial power relation (via Europe and North America as key allies) where coloniality asserts both its applicability and its superiority over colonized epistemologies.[34] In earlier research Salaymeh demonstrates this universalizing mechanisms when the distinctions between antisemitism (prejudice or discrimination against Jews), anti-Zionism (opposition to the ideology of Zionism), and criticism of Israel are deliberately muddled. To understand the depth of its tenet she focuses not on the more self-evident IHRA, but on the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) which came up as an alternative definition that included those with anti-Zionist views. But despite its oppositional stance to IHRA, the effort failed because JDA in essence shares a similar colonial theology, taking the secular ideology underlining this approach further: it essentially generates both Judeophobia and islamophobia.[35] This concept of Judeophobia may go beyond historical and cultural specificity, have essential value that only Jews should define. However, Judeophobic as something natural or static is false because it relates to local framings, experience and histories; it is crucial that knowledge and intention contribute to the situatedness of Judeophobia.

Likewise, if Jews should not be asked to criticize Israel that justifies these claims, then they should not be asked to support Israel and if from this could follow that it is wrong to regard Zionism a Jewish conspiracy, then it follows that it is equally wrong to allege that anti-Zionism is an antisemitic conspiracy. Of course, this argument around authorship and representation is all too familiar. In the UK this debate about discursive ownership of the classification of oppression is often cited in relation to the Stephen Lawrence racist murder trial and it has been exploited in the debate about anti-semitism too.[36] What one individual identity group considers prejudicial may be itself prejudicial against another group, for as Salaymeh argues there are dissenting opinions within the same community such as when members of identity groups cannot create a consensus on what the group considers offensive. The qualification of BDS as antisemitic clearly demonstrates this is not only an example of racist reductionism that is directed towards (pro-) Palestinians, but also against anti-Zionist Jews. In this paradigm, the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine can be normalised and instead of being identified as an urgent problem relegated to the mundane.[37] Social fears and desires for security are exacerbated to empower the broader dynamics of colonial states, and normalize the violent oppression of colonized peoples. The broadly shared fear of new antisemitism or censorship of anti-Zionism must be situated within wider “national security” fears. While in Global North states such fears heighten, it mainly benefits ruling elites and military industrial complex among others through increasing justification of security measures.[38] Salaymeh adds that this is a consequence of the combined effect of exaggerated fear in the global North and normalized colonial violence in the Global South. The link between 9/11 and antisemitism discourses is important part of the objective conditions. The violent War on Terror and military repression of the Palestinian Intifada’s must be reassessed through earlier experiences because the shutdown resonate with the fear during the decolonisation eras of the 1960s/1970s. And what is interesting is that recent rise in protests (especially after the 2011 Arab uprisings) meant a new generation of activists’ rediscover those earlier revolts.

 

III. Anticolonial Constellations

The temporality of the radical left of that earlier era correspond with leaps in progressive intellectual traditions – this had social implications as argued above. One of the most influential ideological strands in the region’s politics has been (secular) Arab nationalism. This had important consequences for the political theories that structure the political strategies. Nasserist’s mostly rejected the explanation that an international Zionist movement controlled the US; Israel was considered the ‘imperialist base in the heart of our Arab homeland’. This anti-imperialism was appealing and gained popularity, and this is why the ‘Nasser = Hitler’ dictum began to be deployed. It should not surprise that in Western hegemonic historiography (if at all) Nasser is most likely be mentioned slanderously and numerous cases taken out of context. Nasser had publicly repudiated the ‘throwing Jews into the sea’ mantra and consistently identified imperialism as the key enemy. One such case is the major outcry when Nasser authorized the death sentences against two Egyptian Jews in 1955. Achcar puts the conviction in context of a large-scale terrorist operation prepared by Israel that included spies.[39] The critique of capital punishment is legitimate, but it must be remembered that Egyptian Muslims convicted of espionage were also executed, oppositional communists suffered this fate later, and the judicial killing of the Rosenbergs, two American Jews for communist conspiracy in the United States saw a different uproar. The different frames of reference employ ethical baselines that are lopsided and therefore insincere.

Putting anti-colonial demands at the centre and prioritising material rights above cultural claims meant aiming at Arab lackeys. In the words of Nasser ‘… Arab leaders say Israel and the Jews. They are afraid to say England’. This independent spirit emerged at the background of a progressive Arab intellectual mindset in the 1970s. Pointing to the difference between the political Right and Left program is essential against essentialism. Palestinian intellectuals developed some of the most radical analyses concerning antisemitism taking pains to differentiate between Jews and Zionists and against false hope. There were also disagreements, but they were discussed openly in magazines and during public events. Progressive Arabs would disprove the idea that it is “impossible to see Jews as victims while you are victimised by them”. In a discussion of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish statement (cf. epitaph), including his emphasis on “Nazism is the enemy of all the worlds’ peoples”. Achcar discusses the kind of Left Universalism horizon as I discussed at the outset. Its strategic vision was a democratic, secular, state for all inhabitants. The debates included Zionism and the future place of Israelis in a decolonised Palestine. meanwhile, deep frustration with the international silence nurtured for the political Right and conservative forces diverted widespread resentment about the imperial carving up away from (materialism) imperialism and towards (culturalism) Jews. Progressive thinkers were a bigger threat to the Zionists (and later Israel and Israel’s allies) than any reactionary conspiracy theory. Israel’s liquidation campaign of progressive political cadres and actively helping to crush left-wing movements. This was backed by Western states who all along supported right-wing dictators subservient to them, the hugging and handshaking of dictators that entertain anti-Jewish conspiracy is testimonial.

That this era – one could even argue the most progressive till date – is hidden, is of course unsurprising. Where comprehending the globally connected era we live in used to make sense in reference to progressive justice, it became increasingly filtered through cynical negativity rather than transgressive rebellion. The assassination policies globally in 1960/70s meant the near complete decimation of the revolutionary left (I refer here to black radicals in USA, left political parties and trade unions in South American West Asia, North Africa) and has resulted in a historic amnesia, is unsurprising. The balance of forces in which the left operated were extremely contradictory: eventually the progressive left was unable to develop because of the counter-revolutionary violence. Because progressive thinkers were far more threatening than reactionary conspiracy theorists (PFLP figures Abu Iyad and Ghassan Kanafani were assassinated) we should consider the rejection of antisemitism (at least in part) as a modality through which antisemitism is given discursive and political meaning, rather than a principle. Relating this to the posters with Jewish Symbols convey the political contradictions and represent the uneven awareness (sometimes reflecting certain balance of forces and political order) they inhibit. The statements and representations on these posters have meanwhile changed too – for better or worse – what do both sides of the paradox tell us about the current political state of affairs? In some an anti-Zionist gesture while in others, it collapses Jews with Israeli murder. The aesthetic symbols in the circulation of political culture that marked these radical ideas are important for how it transcends across movements and to reverberate from the specific to inspire the general.

 

IV. Rediscovering Progressive Arab critique

I kept returning to some of the configurations on the posters. The reason I tie this artwork to debates about Zionism and antisemitism raised by Arab radicals in the 1960s/70s, is that the inspiring images are also deliberately erased as part of the occlusion in mainstream historicising. My reflections on the Palestinian revolutionary posters (and the sentiments they concurrently reveal and conceal) changed considering the highly problematic conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. As the endless assaults on Palestine solidarity that occurred around the same time. I selected from the poster archives a few pieces that reflect the contradictions. The visuals shared here mediate the political contradictions of symbols and their interpretations. On poster 1 we can see a swastika, with the word “Fascism” superimposed on a bleeding background and a fedayeen profile (holding a Kalashnikov and wearing a kuffiye) composed on the right bottom space. In the circular area of the enlarged S just above the swastika is a Star of David. Poster 2 depicts three David Star figures – each with an image corresponding to the words Expansion, Oppression, Occupation. And on poster 3, Jews not Zionists hovers over a picture of two Jews in orthodox attire, walking in what seems like East Jerusalem, above it the framed slogan Zionism is Racism. The texts are in English, Arabic and Hebrew. While poster 3 conveys a progressive pedagogical meaning – the necessity to distinguish between Jews and Zionists, poster 1 and 2 seems conflate a religious symbol with a political ideology. How to reconcile this?

 

      

But if we look again, the combination of the colour blue and the lines suggest it is a reference to the flag, the flag of Israel. This suggests a difference message namely an accusation: pointing to a violent (blood dripping) settler-colonial state. All these three posters symbolise colonialism and refer to a state (the colours and horizontal lines of the Israeli flag). Even if the conflation of Judaism and Zionism connote bigotry in some expressions, the visual choices and aesthetic placements are projected with a proxy message here. Thus, it is not a given that the design pointed to a community. In fact, why would the design per-se point to a religious group, what’s the advantage? As discussed below, there was also ignorance and also the adaptation to a dominant (a state that claims to be synonymous with Judaism) grammar. An alternative assessment of these visuals is to acknowledge its value precisely in this ambiguity. These posters are products of their time, with strengths and limitations that are in turn specific to their conditions. Like all movements, this is in motion, 2 is placed after 1 and 3 after 2 to envision uneven or enhanced insights.

An important explanation of the deterioration of the principal rejection of anti-Semitism lies in the political failures, which in turn lead to intellectual defeatism as discussed above. Edward Said tirelessly pointed out how the popularity of antisemitism was a reflection of ideological regression for the important transformations of the 1990s. Political defeat in the broad sense, but also the historical injustice of Palestinians in particular, became a breeding ground for the acceptance of European antisemitism. The warm reception for the French Garoudy and his holocaust denialism was added cultural significance when he converted to Islam.[40] Progressive Arab intellectuals explicitly rejected to grant Garaudy legitimacy and argued that his pseudo-intellectual critique has done great damage to the Palestinian cause in Europe. This kind of new politics added to the simplistic interpretations of the Jewish David star and the “Zionism = Nazism” slogan on the posters. But another indication from left-wing legacies that help us here is the reverse. Rather than minimising the Holocaust, Arabs began employing it as their own public diplomacy.  These expressions are often-misconstrued because underlying them are fascinating reminders of longer history of a thinking Arab communists devised in the 1930s against anti-Semitism. In the equation in the slogan “Zionism = Nazism”, the left called for equal aversion for both. The Nazi genocide was not disputed in mainstream Arab discourse. This progressive intellectual stance was correctly summarised as a rejection of competition between tragedies. Crucially though, competing is not the same as comparing. And yet the attempt to compare has grown into one of the strongest contentions: the in-comparability of the Holocaust.

Almost all comparability – be it aesthetic in the form of swastika or discursive in the use of the term – is now akin to antisemitism. In this anti-intellectual approach neither intention nor context is relevant. To return to Achcar’s Arabs and the Holocaust, trivializing Nazi references has a long history, from David Ben Gurion calling Menachem Begin ‘another Hitler’; Leibowitz named IDF soldiers ‘Judeo-Nazis’; outspoken Israeli Jews labelled ‘anti-Semite’ in smear campaigns; etc., this all devalues the history of anti-Semitism. But comparing and relating does not need to mean that we to flatten our histories and subjectivities. Indeed, it is important to differentiate between the policy to wipe out a population because they are an obstacle to an expansionist settler colony; and the industrial mass murder to satisfy a vicious desire born of ethnic hatred for the untermench; wiping out Jews (as well as Roma, Sinti, disabled) for the fantasy of breeding a pure race. But sometimes the layers of different stories overlap. Certain experiential aspects are analogous and should not be controversial. For the native population being removed through killing and forced exile, the Nakba was a genocidal mass extermination. And that, I believe, is why Darwish continued the opening quote:

‘It is not overly severe to say that the Israeli Zionist behaviour towards the original people of Palestine resembles Nazism’.

The Holocaust was a terrible act of human beings against other human beings-to draw a parallel is not offensive. Such an approach is both anti-intellectual and turns historical episodes into metaphysical events. And therefore, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues precisely when extraordinary historical event must be comparatively understood and rejects this incomparable ontology.[41] The linking of oppressions as mediated by many of the posters is a transgressive act. Yet, to state what is by now the obvious: doing this in the context of Palestine/Israel became not only exceptionally controversial but itself an act of antisemitism.

This shift tells us that over time new political modalities have allowed a very selective ideology to correspond to the moral credibility of certain struggles which may even contribute to its ethnical universal claims (in the way Sekyi-Out understands it) to disappear. In the singular narrative of the antisemitic Arab or monolith reactionary Muslim, a dynamic, living and breathing, epistemology is categorically denied. Hence, what needs to be subverted or at least made visible, is the epistemology that underlies the discourse of Semitism as Lapidot argued above. The challenge is not only to remember the Jew and the Muslim, but to access Jewish and Muslim memories as more than the other. Indeed, comparisons between Judeophobia and Islamophobia result in political controversies in the global North precisely because they challenge the Eurocentric and colonial notion of Jewish exceptionalism and highlight liberal legalism’s contemporary protection of colonial (Zionist) Jews.[42] Not unlike the public diplomacy attempts on the posters, Muslim communities in Europe comparing themselves to Jews emerge from both an emotional motive and a tactical source. Yet this explanation is overwhelmingly ignored as part of a strategy as a result of the dehumanization Muslims. As Salaymeh argued, contemporary European states do not recognize anti-Muslim expressions as hate speech because they are not forms of discursive violence against global North states or their colonialism.[43]

In a sense, these posters are like artefacts that provide small slices of a complex history. I consider the posters not only as mediators of transgressive acts but also of expressions of the contradictory realities and uneven progresses that were specific to their conditions and ambiguities which have been flattened out over time. They hark back to a context in which resistance movements produced intellectual transformations with ground-breaking debates and nurtured by the epistemology of liberation and freedom. I tried to locate, at least on a basic level, why this transgressive knowledge is so hard to find. The disappearance of political movements that reproduced universal ideological visions was as hinted at before the literal removal (assassinations of the left in particular Mehdi Ben Barka, Ghassan Kanafani, etc) so as to keep intact a Zionist version of the representations of the resistance. But there is an additional erasure and this concerns the Jew as European antizionist subject and the Arab Jewish revolutionaries. I realized a missing piece of the puzzle are profound figures of the Left negating the claims of Zionism from within. They too need to be scrapped from collective and political memories, this is both crucial to our discussion about anti-semitism and a reminder that a radical re-emergence with the Arab uprisings in recent decade meant a rediscovery of precisely these subversive protagonistsfor new generations.

 

V. Historical Amnesia: The other Jew

My brothers, my sisters, I am writing to you from the depths of this prison where I am held, in the same country from which you were chased. It is now twenty or thirty years since the lies of the Moroccan Jewish bourgeoisie pulled you into the trap that is Zionism. The discriminatory and racist politics of the majority of the Moroccan Muslim bourgeoisie did the rest, even whilst you were under the supposedly protective tutelage of the Moroccan regime, itself nothing but a feudal subjugator reinforced by the racist brutalities of the police. Since 1961, this regime never hesitated to sell you off to Zionism (Abraham Serfaty, Letter to the Damned of Israel. 28 September 1982).

 

As witnessed during the preparation and inauguration of the Dokumenta fifteen exhibition, the convergence of Palestine with antisemitism has become a deliberately habitual reference. German law enforcement going as far as prohibiting Palestinian solidarity protests, arresting those carrying – IHRA secured that it being about Israel not jews is irrelevant – Palestinian flags relates to familiar pattern whereby this (Israel not Jewish) subject is the definite polemic. People who engage in discussions about Palestine/Israel often experience this formulaic trait. Being rendered antisemitic is sometimes done explicitly. This is echoed in the rushed condemnations and accusations of pro-Palestinian art exhibitions and a warped interpretations of the revolutionary posters as antisemitic. At others more subtle as when a critical opinion is countered with ‘As a Jewish person I [am shaken, upset, disappointed, offended]’. Endless examples of Jewish critics, organisers and Palestine supporters, exposed the selective application of this rule. As discussed above, putting Jewish sufferings into a unique historical place and antisemitism in a distinctive European legal cadre is also about obscuring European responsibility. The repositioning of European industrial violence onto Palestine and the implication of antisemitism, are two levels at play to inverse the burden. Moving from the message to the messenger behind the assumption that only Jewish people can reflect on policies or opinions related to Israel. But of course, the key question is, which Jews? If it was up to pro-Israel opinions, the antiracist and revolutionary chapter of Jews is all but forgotten.

At the start of this essay, we saw that an open-minded ideology became a buffer against analytic reductionism but that intellectual regression of progressive movements and emergence of political short-cuts and chauvinist personalities compels the erasure of such radical constellations. This amnesia is firstly cultivated with the disappearance of the progressive intellectual Arab theory and praxis. The second level is the way this dismissal of a transgressive legacy – in all its ambiguities – erects an essentialist profile of an antisemitic culture at the expense of this revolutionary constellation. Nazis, fascism and counter-revolution killed millions of working-class peoples, decimated progressive cadres, and prevented the materialisation of important humanist visions and transgressive alternatives. Here I consider this decimation to be part and parcel of the denial of Jewish diversity that includes revolutionary legacies. Jews were integral to movements for justice, either as part of national liberation or in opposition to their oppressive rulers, kings and sultans, and often the prominent personalities of the 1960s generation. Whether Abraham Serfaty (in Morocco), Henri Curiel (in Egypt), Daniel Timsit (in Algeria), or Daniel Bensaïd (son of Algerian Jews in France), who belong to the revolutionary left and voiced strong opposition to the displacement of Palestinians from their land and regarded Zionist representatives who were encouraging local Jews to leave with distrust. To fully understand the complexity of Jewish Arab regional affinities we need to take a step back to consider how the colonial power. They established the bases for fractures in Arab society across religious lines and divisions with Amazigh identities through official censuses.

The position of Jews in the region shifted both with the creation of the state of Israel and with colonialism. But both dynamics were played out together in the way Jews were considered by British colonial powers as allies in Middle East imperialism or by the French colonial powers as potential settlers in Algeria as they were outnumbered by those they aimed to rule. Through the legal orders and material statuses of the Cremieux Decree Algerian Arab Jews were given French nationality and thereby turned into extensions of the colonial project.[44] They constructed outrageous racial categories to divide indigenous populations and while it caused enormous damage in the years that followed this serve as an important example of how colonisers positioned Jews – ‘lifted up’ into French civilisation or in direct opposition to the majority of indigenous Muslim populations – but that far from liberating Algeria’s Jews this segmenting and segregating along ethnic, religious, and geographical lines where eventually its own breakdown.[45] Meanwhile, France could simultaneously oppress Jews in the metropolis while ‘freeing’ them in Algeria. As Englert succinctly put it: “They were to be used as both a stick against the Algerian Muslims and a shield behind which to hide the motivations for the violence and oppression of the French colonial state.”

Such (pre-existing) conditions allowed the state of Israel to further exacerbate divide and rule. Both in terms of extracting Arab Jews who became settlers and in harming Arab social and cultural stability. This is deployed on different levels supporting states that rival with Arab states for regional dominance with military backing or alliances with minority groups were cultivated – and the current normalization deals with Arab states are the clearest outcome of Israel’s goal for acceptance of its existence in the region. Ethnic divide and rule are sometimes downplayed as ‘conspiracy’, but those who have been under colonial rule know how common this was (and still is) and that is why Cremieux should be studied alongside the 1950s policy known as the Alliance of the periphery. Developed by David Ben-Gurion (first Prime Minister of Israel), Israel began to develop close strategic alliances with non-Arab partners in the region (through legitimate national questions) for its own foreign policy strategy. This was primarily utilized towards Turkey, pre-revolutionary Iran and Imperial Ethiopia (including Eritrea). As Takriti discussed with regards to a particularly strong Kurdish-Palestinian affinity, this “peripheries strategy” weakened the Arab sphere on which Palestinian liberation ultimately depended. [46] There are important implications in the long run, even when they don’t reflect popular opinion. We could say that this continued with the top-down normalisation policies that flourished in recent years. But it was, in essence, a marriage of convenience, thus even while not build on genuine sentiments it successfully counteracts united opposition of Israel.[47] This has been difficult to maintain where official normalisation agreements between states are popularly rejected. A more contemporary digital manifestation of Israeli Hasbara, continues to be a consistent part of the history of divide and rule, propaganda; political distraction; sowing internal division.[48]

One of the context-and-language specific issues (yet systematically ignored) is the use of Jew. For Arabs who have lived with Jews for centuries ‘Jew’ was the common reference, not a slander. On the other hand, this is due to Israeli politicians, generals and civilians who legitimise massacres, expulsions, house demolitions, deliberately convoluting the grammar by consistently call Israel a Jewish state. This argument will not be accepted because of the stubborn image of the peoples of this region as forever anti-Semitic. Although ridiculed for being a false apology, ‘Jew’ did became the norm because there was no Israel. The erasure of local Jews eases the frame of hatred of Jews as “their” primordial feature,  but becomes problematic in a region where the Jews are part of the “them”. This denial is not random but has to do with Abraham Serfaty’s proposition that the Arab Jew is the subversive subject from within the region, one that rejected Zionism. West Asia and North Africa clearly knew and still has deeply rooted Jewish communities that were allied with or led progressive and socialist movements. Several scholars (Nadi, Guebli, Heckman, Englert) provide alternative insights, in fact there is no lack of knowledge. But this is less available as popular awareness, and the absence of this Arab Jew allows for senseless matters to make sense. I share the point by Nadi that we should not allow the erasure of a specific Jewish view from Arab analysis of antisemitism and we should neither confuse them into a universal Jewish people (which effectively means European).[49] We have a choice to amplify dissident voices and what we learn collectively may take us forward. Here, it is not about a unique or exclusive essence, but to understand how formations of community and identity are part and parcel of emancipatory politics; of the productive possibility to join against a shared oppressor whilst holding onto communal conditionality. Serfaty argued that not the notion Moroccan-Jew but the notion Zionist-Moroccan was the real paradox. Why should these Jews leave their homes to settle in someone else’s, Abraham Serfaty asks. As he regarded Moroccan Jews as exiles, in Israel in Letter to the Damned of Israel (28 September 1982) he continues: Do you form one people with your oppressors? What insult! […] They forced you to leave the land of your ancestors for your current exile.

As true as this may be, it is important to agree that conflicts between Moroccan Jews (Arab and Amazigh) and Muslims did not only occur with the establishment of Israel. It also connects to a social hierarchy and political economy of racism and where Muslim and Jewish Moroccan bourgeoisie tended to support the politics behind Israeli recruitment of local Jews. Prejudices against Jews were promoted by the bourgeoisie and adopted by others. Moroccan Jews were torn from their country (especially since 1961) both through racist politics and Zionism. Chauvinist conceptions of identity had to be dealt with head-on based on principles. Zionist mobilisation of Arab and Amazigh Jews was part of a broader debate about the place of minorities on the radical left. Ethnic recognition and cultural equity, whether Jews, Sahraoui, or Amazigh, are a basic condition of progressive epistemology that reflects the left universalism and different ideas of what makes a free[d] subject, I discussed at the start of this piece. This could not be relegated to an after-thought and certainly not covered-up by an abstract ‘Pan’ one-fits-all identifier.

A social analysis was crucial according to Serfaty, the exploitation and division allowed by class society means “[T]he big commercial and petite-bourgeoisie to get rid of the poor Jews – especially the Jewish peasantry of the Atlas Mountains and of South Morocco – who became the favourite target of Zionist recruiters, to resettle them in Israel. Regarding the departure of 45000 Moroccan Jews between September 1955 and June 1956 […] the poorest and the most vulnerable became the target of recruiters with the tacit, if not explicit, the backing of the bourgeoisie, both Jewish and Muslim, who got rid of this authentic Judaism”. [50] The Moroccan left conceptualised the different ways in which Palestine was deeply connected to local, regional and global politics through which it became a crucial issue as El Guebli put it.[51] Serfaty’s lifelong dedication to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism; his participation in trade unionism; his opposition to the dictatorship and King of Morocco: all were intricate to his Arab-Jewish heritage. Zionist erasures of local Jews is appalling and a logic that dictator King Hassan II applied to Serfaty himself. He immediately exiled him on the false charge of Serfaty never being Moroccan but “actually” Brazilian, the moment he was released in 1991. At stake is a recovery of a rich heritage that avoided the marginalisation of minorities, the broader debates about identity and affinity is part of the universalism of Arab progressivism. Most progressive Jews from the region considered Zionism a European phenomenon. The social condition of Arab Jews is also constructed by from colonial and social conditions. The extent to which Serfaty’s antizionism related to his reflections shaped his analyses about the social conditions of Arab Jews and the Arab subject as the main threat to Zionism. This political thinking is crucial for an analysis of antisemitism. To confuse them into a “universal” Jewish people (which means, in reality, European Jews) shows why Serfaty understands “identity” as a social category rather than a liberal (individual) or cultural category and focused ostensibly on the class basis of “identity politics”. To him it was a critical error for pan-Arabism to ignore the question of minorities, especially since Zionists were the oppressors of Arab Jews that also denied the specificity of their identity as Arabs.[52] These approaches were of course dangerous to the opportunist and conservative status quo and the capitalist ruling class and made visible how reactionary forces used Palestine as a fig leaf. As Al Guabli attests it was “not just a critique but also a forward-looking project to give a new meaning to the left and its anticipated revolutions”.[53] When Serfaty speaks of “European”, “Arab”, “poor”, “rich” [Jews] he did not address “Jewish” as a sort of universal identity, he refuses a homogeneous “Jewish subject” that collapses Arab Judaism in the general History of Zionism. Their radical left politics was also part of a “strategy for Jewish inclusion in national liberation politics shed light simultaneously on Jewish politics in Morocco and the wider MENA region and on the phenomenon of Jewish leftist politics more globally” as Heckman argued.[54] Unconditional support for the self-determination of the oppressed was a significant development that proved crucial. This is why Serfaty committed himself to the struggle for Moroccan independence, Saharan self-determination and Palestine liberation.[55] But there is a different option that takes us further and beyond religion or ethnicity.

What of that positionality, that is neither limited to the Arab-only, nor standard Euro-American historiography. Heckman beautifully reconciles the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism with the more marginalised North African case studies.[56] Heckman discussion of progressive Jews and via Hannah Arendt more politically as the conscious pariah. There continues to be a robust critique of the state of Israel for over a century, and which Lorber notes is, buried under the mistaken assumption that all Jews have consistently supported Zionism.[57] Thus when we expand this legacy to understanding Palestine politics, it loses what is considered a key argument. That is why I suggested that the erasure is multi-layered, political amnesia doesn’t work as singular modus. Put differently, not only the Arab Jews are unworthy of being mentioned, but also progressive, anti-colonial, internationalist Jews. Moreover, debates often revolve around what constitutes antisemitism. The denial of anti-Zionism as an important strand within Jewish communities across the world is not a surprise. For example, the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania considered Zionism the bourgeois answer to the Jewish Question and as Lorber discusses, they regarded the call for a Jewish state an escapist response to antisemitism. Not many Jewish immigrants in the US were looking to the other side of the world, they opted to improve their material conditions and advocate for workers’ rights and social status in and through movements. As Lorber argues: ‘For many decades, the heart of a vibrant secular Jewish Left beat not for the upbuilding of Jewish settlements in mandate Palestine but for the Scottsboro Boys, the struggles of workers in factories and fields, the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the movement to defeat Nazi Germany, the unfolding progressive vision for a more just and equal world’. From figures in ANC, leaders in the Marxist tradition (Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky), Jews joining the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Alan Wald describes “this consideration of the past [Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism] in the present cannot occur as the tracing of a straight line but only as a shadowing of the contours of a slow spiral […]. It is a past that must not pass because it once carved deep and distinctive tracks …”.[58] Recalling the story of anti-apartheid activists arrested (1963 Johannesburg) with Mandela and trialled (Rivonia Trial) with severe sentences, among them was a noticeably disproportionate Jewish participation inside Black liberation.[59] Even if this is conveniently hidden to the benefit of a stereotype. Nonetheless, it is important to beware of cultural essentialism in all cases. By the same token that the Antisemite Arab does not exist as a primordial given, the transgressive Jew is not that either. Alan Wald points to the phenomenon of a Revolutionary Internationalist as the potential actuality of multiple identities. It grows from basic reminder that one’s emancipation is always bound up with the emancipation of others:

“There was and remains no consensus as to whether being Jewish is mainly a religious, cultural, ethnic or national identity. What is pertinent [is that] individuals then made a choice in political outlook and behaviour”.[60]

The Jew and the Arab share an oppression constituted by racist hatred that directly touches on the realm of definitions in which there is no space given to the progressive and anticolonial Jew. This shows us the point that Lapidot gestured earlier about a certain indifference, as that ends up organizing both anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism. Not only are whole sections of Jews side-lined, the notion “new antisemitism is effectively an alternative to the bigoted terms “Muslim antisemitism” and “Islamic antisemitism.” Meanwhile, European states deploy these notions in order to discipline Muslim communities.[61] But that is exactly why the European framework for hate speech regulation should be contextualized within Europe’s own past and present Judeophobia and Islamophobia. Contextualizing through spatiality is far more meaningful than it seems in relation to our discussion here. By recovering grassroots socialist movements rooted in the Jewish working class (with Yiddish as the language), Sai Englert describes the importance of fighting where one is. This means alongside the people one lives with, as beautifully conjured through the notion of Doykayt (here-ness) for the Jewish Bund, which was “conceived as a rejection of both Zionism and separatism to argue with Jews about the importance of changing the world, their current world.”[62] Of course, we should thread lightly when asking whether its lessons tell us something exclusively about Jews or about the human condition as a whole. Sai Englert urges for an interpretation of Jewish history in light of ‘Judeo-Jewish’ thought in which Jews only act for Jews, and others act against them and thus across a particularistic and universalist focus:

It is a question resolved newly every generation, depending on context, in one direction or another. If the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe represented the universalism of Jewish thought and action, the second half has undoubtedly been dominated by a narrow particularism.[63]

But because of what I attempted to convey via  Achcar, Englert, Heckman, Lapidot, Lorber, Nadi, Salaymeh and Wald in this article, I do take an additional lesson from this perspective regarding the simultaneous existence of ordinariness and uniqueness. What can be considered a “moral universe” if we go back to the earlier discussion of Sekyi-Out? Is not the effort to disseminate a radical pedagogy from the inspiring intellectual legacy of Arab intellectuals discussed above and the Jewish internationalism the epitome of Left Universalism that itself continues in the legacy of the Black Jacobins? Here I recognise what Wald means by political struggles that share an understanding of capitalism and decolonisation and situated in a “world system that requires that discrete challenges against exploitation locally must of necessity work in harmony internationally. […] an elective affinity with a heritage animated by a global, supra-national identity”.[64]

We therefore cannot regard antisemitism only as the inert history of Hitler but always remember the anti-Semitic targeting of Jewish dissidents, whether leftists under US McCarthyism or Arabs under Vichy.[65] Not unlike many on the left in 20^th Century, Serfaty was part of a radical anticolonial consciousness. And yet, as a Jew he was conditioned differently because of how the French antisemitic law during World War II targeted Moroccan Jews in particular ways. I find that Serfaty symbolises the same Doykayt subjectivity and which the socialist Bund did not consider as distinct from the histories and movements of the societies in which they lived, as Sai Englert noted. This is why the signifier “Jew” in debates about antisemitism becomes the ultimate arc, and why we must critique Zionism as “Europe’s way to cleanse itself from its two modern historical crimes—anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and colonialism on the other—by transferring their weight onto its primary historical victims.” as Lapidot (following Gil Hochberg) put it.[66]

 

Conclusion: A Radical Pedagogy

 

— But nor were these acts products of radical contingency, created ex nihilo, instantaneous results of an explosive and unheralded sense of ‘human universality [that] emerges,’ as in the Haitian Revolution, ‘in the historical event at the point of rupture,’ unanchored in any a priori foundations  (Left Universalism, Ato Sekyi-Out, 2019:31).

They reduce you to workhorses for the most backbreaking of labours and to cannon fodder for their army, with their senseless, criminal dreams of domination and conquest. They refuse you even the chance to practice the religion that our forefathers continued for centuries. This religion of peace, of justice, of mutual respect, they have transformed into a religion of hate, of war, and of injustice. (Abraham Serfaty, Letter to the Damned of Israel. 28 September 1982).

 

The posters I began this essay with, were works of art, but it was immediately recognisable that they were first and foremost made as part of lived-experiences and during ongoing struggles. The manifestation of such expressions remains astounding. The posters document a Palestinian political heritage in different ways, revealing with stunning accuracy the significance of celebrating revolutionary victories, but the force of its memory also lies in how these mere paper gears actually transmit a great deal of information about a particular era. Visually providing both the historic facts – as well as the commentary thereof – of their own world-making, these ground-breaking artefacts are the products of a transgressive anti—colonial politics that must be historicized adequately. As I discussed, the emancipatory horizons were and continue to be side-tracked by unsubstantiated accusations and a racist bias. But despite how these admonitions were mapped onto these political artefacts, the impending revolutionary reverberations of the posters are something to treasure. They bring to live political causes that carry the importance of radical solidarity and activist alliances as their ethical compass. An important deduction for the progressive left is that the struggle against anti-Semitism cannot be separated from the struggle against contemporary Islamophobia and that the erasure of a particular Jewish revolutionary internationalism is also at stake in maintaining Islamophobia. This idea of progressive reciprocity has been replaced by another, a very curious, kind of trade-off. The excavation of Palestinian politics shows a radically different reality than what the rituals and political performances related to antisemitism and peace building show us. And bargaining on these false promises teaches us a cruel yet crucial irony about political strategies.

In 1998, the White House (Dennis Ross) pushed for a token of peace in the form of some sort of formal acknowledgement of the Holocaust. The US state department and Palestinian negotiators for the Oslo Agreement thus organised a visit to the Holocaust Museum (Washington DC) by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.[67] This approach is critiqued for the obvious reasons (why bring Palestinian into the fold of what is a European complicity and crime in what was eerily similar to an apology?). Yet, the cruel irony is that even this tokenism cannot resist the deeply ingrained racism and islamophobia reserved for Palestinians. The museum director refused to invite president Yasser Arafat. Only after much diplomatic pulling and embarrassing conditions (Arafat was not to enter officially as a political leader, neither as president the Palestinian people nor head of PLO, merely on a personal title did he concede).[68] The main point here is that – aside from how little sense it makes for Palestinians or Arabs to immerse themselves in deflecting European antisemitism or apologising through ritualistic acknowledgement for the Holocaust – such a performativity is either ignored, suspected, or plainly rejected. I mean that it doesn’t actually do what it aims to do. But this is merely another side of dehumanisation. Entertaining antisemitic opinions did not always endure. Achcar gives examples A shift towards a clearer stance also notable in the political evolution of Hezbollah (Nassrallah undermined anti-Semitism in many speeches). And if we recall the aforementioned sheikh Jamal Mansur supporting the Jewish narrative of the Holocaust, did his measured proposition to include the general school curriculum history make any difference? Not really, as he was assassinated a year later. Mansur was one of the thousands of deadly targets amid a popular uprising (Aqsa Intifada 2000-2005) that changed the course of the Palestinian history.[69] The Oslo peace agreement in reality only brought defeat and the Israeli military occupation continued. This had its toll. It would frankly be odd if after the failed peace process of the 1990s, the Second Intifada, the 2006 war on Lebanon, Cast Lead Gaza’08-’09, 2012, 2014 anti-Semitic conspiracies had not grown. A deterioration of progressive politics opens the space for reactionary interpretations.

This essay called for moving the focus away from conservative cliches, reject the rehashing the right-wing conspiracies in leftist spaces, and engaging more explicitly with the transgressive examples that our radical histories endowed us with through a Left Universalism approach. To adhere to progressive approaches with a such a radical vision is a risk, but as all the scholars I cite illustrate: it won’t be the first time, there are many shoulders to stand on then and now. The milieu and intellectual sharpness was there all along and still offering inspiring lessons for today; even if the debates about Zionism and antisemitism raised by Arab radicals in the 1960s/70s are occluded in mainstream historicising it is our heritage. Relevant for our historical contextualisation is the connection between defeats and political failures and a deterioration of the principal rejection of antisemitism. By illuminating some of the voices via the politics of radicals such as Abraham Serfaty or of Mahmoud Darwish reflecting that important (regrettable small) window of third-world intellectual history through these posters, their impact continues to reverberate.

That is why this article ties the lost history of progressive politics that challenged antisemitism on one side, to the question of what the revolutionary posters simultaneously reveal and conceal on the other. Not only did progressive intellectuals provide important lessons for revolutionary resistance, they argued against divide and rule and for the importance of including minorities and the universal rejection of the Holocaust. The rediscovery of such ethical and moral visions for contemporary activists occurs both in a subjective and philosophical way. Put differently, we see this on the level of representation – getting acquainted with Jewish Arab radical legacy matters – and on the level of ideology – revising transgressive epistemologies that expand the mind. This expansion is so welcome for rather than closing off the discussion it provides us with two crucial possibilities. The temporal moment of radical left – and progress what ground-breaking leaps were they developing, which radical ideas and symbols marked these, and how has this transcended to reverberate/inspire others but has been deliberately erased and silenced. No secular (anti-imperial, anti-capitalist) struggle can be successful if it tried to erase cultural and religious specificities.[70] Looking back, however, is never about reproducing linear developments, it’s always contradictory. We need to move away from binary approaches and simplistic answers because our histories are uneven. Arab Jews in Israel are both complicit in a colonial project and itself oppressed in that colonial project. And both local antisemitism and Zionist recruitment in collaboration with the dictatorship of Hassan II explain the large relocation of Moroccan Jews to Israel. That is why Serfaty regarded explicit participation of Arab Jews in anti-Zionist politics and the unequivocal identification as a Jew in Arab political spaces, are transgressive acts that go together.

The intentional decimation of that radical window was necessary precisely because of its transgressive potential. Intellectual regression and political pessimism gradually detached the movements from progressive politics and transgressive ethics that carried forth a particular agency in wider society, and eventually attracted conservative cynicism. Revisiting that process points to the counter-revolutionary assaults on Palestinian solidarity are precisely what the erasure of this radical history facilitates. The opposite, way increasing reactionary influence of KSA in the region, or whether GCC funding, normalisations with Israel, domestic crackdown, the relegation of progressive radicalism is therefore part of the story. The virtually constant accusations of antisemitism faced by critics and activists is part of this reactionary list, what the ‘scientific advisory group’ of Documenta fifteen in Germany did or the adoption of IHRA in the UK does, does not feel different from what repressive bodies in the region do. If only it was for real concerns about antisemitism. To paraphrase Lapidot, anti-Semitism is a performance that disregards, forgets, and obliterates itself. Semitism as the double invention of “Judaism and Islam—the Jew, the Arab” are essentially (Western Christian) creations to be enemies and objects of hate.[71] The hypocrisy of Western liberal ideals is not empty but become the seed for right-wing conspiracies. Meanwhile, Muslim migrants in Europe are told to accept Islamophobia in the name of free speech. With every exercise of free speech that includes condemning Israeli Settler colonialism followed by racist assumptions about Arabs or Muslims that underlie debates about Palestine, the distrust and cynicism will bloom. Here we should recall that Zionism was locally considered an extension of European colonialism; the practice of colonial favouritism deepened suspicions and inflamed antisemitism as discussed via Englert and Takriti. Neighbours began to frame Jews as foreigners despite centuries-old Algerian Jewish local roots. Reactionaries of any denomination fear the revolutionary sparks produced by unity. Those voices that had broken away from cultural essentialism and religious bigotry had to be taken out. The poster collections are a treasure because they restore what is erased, they keep some of the resonance of Arab progressive and radical Jewish epistemology alive.

 

[1] James, C.L.R. 1989 (1938). : Touissaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Vintage Books.

[2] Sekyi-Otu (2019) exposes the hypocrisy of “Afrocentrism” (and its variety Afropessimism) and offers instead “Africacentrism” building on ideas of Frantz Fanon, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and others. He centres African thought over instead of Western imperialism through a double critique: reject racial particularity when at the expense of universalism which he regards to be mostly falsely identified as representing Western ownership and thought. One does not have to forget about the violent legacy of colonialism to come to this conclusion as Sekyi-Otu demonstrates.

[3] This collection was curated with Subversive Film for the Lumbung Press publication and was part of Dokumenta fifteen. The 15th edition of the well-known art exhibition in Germany held between June and September 2022 in Kassel. See https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/about/.

[4] Through a consideration of the main ideological currents (liberals, pan-Islamists, nationalists, communists), Achcar (2010) adds crucial context about local, regional and global power relations that informed their political landscape, including how Arab Nationalism emerged a decade later as a popular alternative out of this political vacuum. This would be the backstage to the period when Israel invaded Lebanon in one of the bloodies wars in recent memory.

[5] Gilbert Achcar references Mahmoud Darwish, Edward said, Elias Khoury, Azmi Bishara, Adonis, Samir Kasir, Joseph Samaha, Philip Matar, Joseph Massad. That I have not come across any female intellectuals is a sign of the times, namely that during the 1970s and even until the early 2000s, the public political discourse was completely dominated by men.

[6] The communist parties were already disgraced when Soviet forces violently occupied Afghanistan. The later collapse of the USSR meant a double degradation of a Left alternative that was beneficial for the crushing of the left in general and allowed a leftist legacy to be partly erased. This counter-revolution dynamic permitted a deliberate reframing of anti-colonial Palestinian solidarity as antisemitic.

[7] From his 1967 “The Other America” speech at Stanford University, explaining the cause of the Harlem (New York) and the Watts (California) riots. The full quote is “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” See here the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOWDtDUKz-U.

[8] As Fanon argued in Concerning Violence: The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. Available online: http://www.openanthropology.org/fanonviolence.htm.

[9] This context is crucial in any reading of Fanon, but his approach has been framed as revenge – short off a call for violence – see for an earlier contribution about this wider philosophical argument Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1970 Frantz Fanon: Reason and Violence, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 15: 222-231

(PN, 25, 11, in. Wallerstein 1970:223).

[10] Through English, French and Arabic archives of Arab social movements and their main political journals, and examining religious sources he frames the region’s politics and religious positions.

[11] Achcar, page 243

[12] The most important examples he engages are: Harkabi, Bernard Lewis and Huntington.

[13] I discuss The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives by Gilbert Achcar [(2010), London: Saqi] elaborately in a review essay for Mondoweiss: https://mondoweiss.net/2010/08/gilbert-achcars-book-on-arabs-and-the-holocaust/.

[14] Achcar, page 261.

[15] Referenced in Achcar as: 1976, page 298.

[16] Achcar, page 242.

[17] The British treated the Arabs in the most brutal colonial manner, most directly the Balfour Declaration and the Peel Commission.

[18] See especially: Samour, Nahed. 2020. “Politisches Freund-Feind-Denken im Zeitalter des Terrorismus”, in Goldhammer, Michael/Kulick, Andreas, “Der Terrorist als Feind?” Mohr Siebeck 2020. And: Anna-Esther Younes. “A Chronicle of A Disappearance: Mapping the Figure of the Muslim in Berlin’s Verfassungsschutz Reports (2002–2009).” Islamophobia Studies Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, 2014, pp. 114–42.

[19] Lean 2017, page11. (Nathan Lean. 2017.The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims.)

[20] See Khalili, L. (2010). The location of Palestine in global counterinsurgencies. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(3), 413-433. doi:10.1017/S0020743810000425

[21] There are numerous examples: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/24/why-benjamin-netanyahu-loves-the-european-far-right-orban-kaczynski-pis-fidesz-visegrad-likud-antisemitism-hungary-poland-illiberalism/;https://www.timesofisrael.com/senior-hungarian-official-netanyahu-and-orban-belong-to-same-political-family/;https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-18/ty-article/.premium/the-netanyahu-orban-bromance-that-is-shaking-up-europe-and-d-c/0000017f-db69-db5a-a57f-db6b405b0000; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/20/netanyahu-and-orban-meet-in-summit-of-illiberal-nationalists/;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/the-trump-netanyahu-alliance; Shanes, J. (2019). Netanyahu, Orbán, and the Resurgence of Antisemitism: Lessons of the Last Century. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 37(1), 108-120. doi:10.1353/sho.2019.0005.

[22] The leader of Hamas (Sheikh Jamal Mansur was in support of the Palestinian Call on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the Nakba.

[23] Asim Qureshi. 2020. I Refuse to Condemn. Resisting racism in times of national security. Manchester University Press

[24] The collective response was titled “We are angry, we are sad, we are tired, we are united”

[25] 2020, page 3.

[26] The Prevent duty is a government requirement imposed on all education providers ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ and became a contentious and heavily criticised for targeting especially Muslim students of colour, see the earlier Prevent Prevent: https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/campaigns/preventing-prevent-we-are-students-not-suspects. See respectively, on Prevent: Saffa Mir’s Guilty without a crime (chapter 8 in Qureshi 2020), Nadya Ali’s Writing for the kids (chapter 12 in Qureshi 2020); on IHRA (and JDA): Lena Salaymeh’s (Forthcoming) Colonial political theology: Orthodoxy and orthopraxy in colonial politics, Ruth Gould’s (2020), The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism: Defining Antisemitism by Erasing Palestinians. The Political Quarterly, 91: 825-831. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12883; and on Tuck see: Bricup: https://bricup.org.uk/article/bricup-statement-on-nus-tuck-report/ and Brismes’ response to the Tuck report: https://www.brismes.ac.uk/news/statement-in-response-to-the-rebecca-tuck-kc-report-on-antisemitism.

[27] 2020, page 7. I would like to thank Lena Salaymeh for recommending this very helpful scholarship to me.

[28] 2020, page 17.

[29] 2020, page 19.

[30] 2020, page 20.

[31] 2020, page 8.

[32] Interestingly, in seeking to deconstruct a rise of new anti-Semitism and the basic categories that underlie it, Lapidot disagrees with the (such as carried by Hannah Arendt) alternative ‘antisemitism’ over ‘anti-Semitism’ for the reason that antisemites do not oppose any ‘Semitism’, which constructs a Jewish enemy but has nothing to do with any opposition to ‘Semitic’ ethnic origins or language communities (:6).

[33] This logic converts traditions into religions, law into positive law, and states (as forms of governance) into modern nation-states (Salaymeh forthcoming, page 4).

[34] Salaymeh defines colonial political theology as an epistemology that relies on dualisms such as “hate speech” and “free speech,” as well as “new antisemitism” and “Abrahamic religions”.

[35] Important here is her disagreement with other critiques of JDA that pointed at Palestinians not being included in determining its definition. Palestinians, as such, are not experts on either antisemitism or anti-Zionism, but JDA itself contributes to a deeply colonial framing that portrays Jews as essentially Zionists through a false pairing of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. JDA ignores the antisemitism (including philosemitism) of Zionists or supporters of Israel because this form of antisemitism serves Zionist colonization.

[36] Especially the Macpherson principle, which was mostly about the duty of authorities to believe and report and victim’s perception and investigate racist attacks, turned into the interpretation that the victim has the exclusive prerogative to determine whether is racially discriminatory. This is challenged also based on the progressive principle that not all members of a group share the same approach or principles and thus an assumed unanimity is impossible.

[37] Salaymeh, page 11.

[38] Salaymeh. page 10.

[39] Achcar, page 247.

[40] Achcar, page 248.

[41] See Modernity and the Holocaust, Baumann 1989, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1989.  Afropessimis claims (especially by Wilderson) of a Black ontology that does not compare (in one way is “superior” to) any other form of suffering) shows similarities with debates regarding the incomparability of the Holocaust.

[42] Salaymeh, page 15.

[43] Salaymeh, page 18.

[44] Sai Englert (2021), ‘Anti-Semitism and De-Racialisation – The case of Algerian Jews’, Spectre Journal, 3. Online: https://spectrejournal.com/antisemitism-and-deracialization/

[45] Sai Englert (2021), ‘The case of Algerian Jews’.

[46] Takriti, Abdel Razzaq. 2022, “The Kurd and the Wind: The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian–Kurdish Affiliation.” Chapter Two in The Political and Cultural History of the Kurds by Amir Harrak. Oxford: Peter Lang. Page 27.

[47] Takriti 2022. This is why it matters that the most progressive Arab-regional nationalist tendencies were grounded in a universalist anti- colonial and anti- imperialist ideology. Page 28.

[48] It was noticeable around the overwhelming expressions of support for Palestine during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, that an increase of online interventions about the Western Sahara emerged on social media. Many of this input were bots. For earlier empirical research see: Aouragh, M. 2016. Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age. Middle East Critique. 25 (3), pp. 271-297. https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2016.1179432

[49] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, page 2.

[50] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, page 5.

[51]  Brahim El Guabli (2020) Reading for theory in the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist testimonial literature, African Identities, 18:1-2, 145-161, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1773243

[52] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, page 4.

[53]  Brahim El Guabli (2020) Reading for theory in the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist testimonial literature, African Identities, 18:1-2, 145-161, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1773243

[54] Heckman 2018.

[55] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, page 4.

[56] Alma Rachel Heckman. (2018). Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography. Jewish Social Studies, 23(3), 67–100. https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.23.3.03

[57] Ben Lorber 2019. Jewish Alternatives to Zionism: A partial History. Jewish voice for peace, 11 January.

[58] Alan Wald. 2020. On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism.

[59] Wald describes that (2020 On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism) Mandela’s ANC was also supported by his school friends and SACP leaders Ruth First and Joe Slovo of Latvian and Lithuanian Jewish families: “Slovo became commander of “The Spear of the Nation,” the armed wing (founded by Mandela) of the African National Congress; First was assassinated in 1982 by the South African police while she was teaching in exile in Mozambique, apparently because they couldn’t get to Slovo himself.(6)”. […] Baruch Hirson (1921-1999), founder of the critical Marxist journal Searchlight South Africa in 1988, who was jailed for nine years for carrying out sabotage in connection with the pro-Trotskyist African Resistance Movement (ARM).

[60] Alan Wald. 2020. On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism. Against the Current. No. 209 (November/December). Online: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc209/jewish-revolutionaries/. According to Wald much of the confusion of the Jewish Revolutionary Internationalist tradition, and what this means for a Jewish identity in the modern world, was facilitated by ambiguities and uncertainties in the original discourse of Marxist positions, especially “The Jewish Question” and quotes Italian scholar Enzo Traverso “The history of the Marxist debate on the Jewish question is a history of misunderstanding.”

[61] Salaymeh, page 17.

[62] Sai Englert. 2016. Doykayt: Yiddishland for All. Salvage, January 25: https://salvage.zone/doykayt-yiddishland-for-all/.

[63] Sai Englert. 2016. Doykayt.

[64] Alan Wald 2020 On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism.

[65] Cf. Jewish Alternatives to Zionism 2019: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2019/01/12/a-partial-history-of-jewish-alternatives/; Decidedly Marxist 2019: https://viewpointmag.com/2019/03/05/decidedly-marxist-an-interview-with-abraham-serfaty-1992/.

[66]  Lapidot 2020, page 1.

[67] Cf. https://apnews.com/article/a3fd2088a8a65690302b891fd764ab0a and https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/01/17/holocaust-museum-denies-arafat-an-official-welcome/74ec9823-56eb-4299-a51a-3da809a3df82/ [last accessed 10 March 2022]

[68] Achcar, page 250.

[69] Achcar, page 251.

[70] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, page 9.

[71] Lapidot 2020, page 17.