“Anti-Zionism is justified antisemitism, finally within everyone’s reach. It is the permission to be democratically antisemitic.”

Vladimir Jankelevitch, Pardonner ?, 1971

October 7, 2023 made verifiable what Vladimir Jankelevitch had put on record fifty years before: that anti-Zionism is the historically specific form through which the European left settled its account with antisemitism. Not by overcoming it. By reinventing it in a language compatible with its own declared values. This argument is uncomfortable, most of all for someone writing from inside that tradition. Which is exactly why it needs to be made.

The Mechanism Rereading Jankelevitch today produces a particular kind of unease. His words are almost cruelly clear. And that cruelty sharpens when you register that they were written more than fifty years ago — that they describe, with something close to surgical exactness, what played out across an entire continent in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. A diagnosis made when the patient still looked well, found in a drawer while the patient is on life support.

What Jankelevitch had identified was a mechanism. The way an ideology sustains itself by changing its name — keeping the deep structure intact while the surface acquires a new respectability. “Anti-Zionism” does more than swap a label. It transfigures. It moves the discourse from biology to politics, from racial hatred to the critique of states, from the obscene to the acceptable. Further still, as Jankelevitch saw: to the obligatory. A duty, now, in democracy’s name.

The slippage is culpable. Its structure is what one might call, with some precision, a second-order false consciousness — a representation that has pre-absorbed and neutralized the available critique, something beyond simple distortion. Oppose anti-Zionism and you are instantly assigned to the camp of reaction, of complicit silence, of apology for the strong. The mechanism is autoimmune. It produces........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)