Antisemitismus

Anti-semitism, the hostility towards Jews for being Jews – that is, precisely because they are Jews – has bred the worst crimes in human history and makes the fight against anti-semitism the front line in the struggle for human rights. Since Israel was accused of apartheid at the 2001 UN conference in Durban, however, there have been tendencies to undermine the concept of anti-semitism, so that opposition to Israel appears as “ultimate anti-semitism”. The present paper differentiates between anti-semitism, anti-zionism, criticism of Israel and hostility towards Israel and presents empirical findings that support that (1) anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are correlated but different attitude dimensions, and (2) criticism of Israel is not identical with anti-semitic attitudes. Decisive for the distinction between Israel-related anti-semitism and non-anti-semitic criticism of Israel is the attitude from which Israel is criticized, whereby four different types of support vs. criticism of Israeli Palestine policy can be identified: support for Israeli policy, latently anti-semitic avoidance of criticism of Israel, anti-semitic criticism of Israel, and human rights-based criticism of Israel. It turns out that the anti-semitic component of anti-Israel attitudes is caused less by an attitude specifically directed against Jews than by a broader racism that is also directed against Muslims, with German Islamophobia and German anti-Semitism being empirically, historically, and phenomenologically more closely related than Muslim and German anti-Semitism. Although Muslim anti-Semitism shares some of the same anti-Jewish stereotypes as German anti-Semitism (particularly the belief in the power of Judaism), it has a different origin and is more closely related to the islamophobia found among Jews than it is to German anti-Semitism. While Israel-related anti-Semitism transfers hostility towards Jews to Israel, Muslim anti-semitism transfers hostility towards Israel to Jews. However, the danger that an Israel-critical commitment to the rights of the Palestinians could also lead to a revival of anti-semitic attitudes among non-Muslim Germans cannot be dismissed out of hand.