Part of being a student of Jewish History is an awareness of Gavin Langmuir's distinction between a realistic and a chimerical anti-Semitism. Take the example of medieval Christendom. In 1096, Jews in the Rhineland were murdered by roving bands of Crusaders. (It is important to keep in mind that not all Crusaders supported killing Jews and many Christians, such as the Bishop of Speyer, actively protected Jews.) Those Jews who were murdered were killed for "crimes" that they were most certainly guilty of. Imagine if those Jews were put on trial:
"Jew, do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?
"No. I believe that he was a mamzar and his mother was a zonah."
Not to approve of the mass murder of Jews, but it did not happen because Christians misunderstood something about the nature of Judaism. The Crusaders were looking to kill unbelievers and they were correct in assuming that Jews were unbelievers.
The big question at the heart of the study of medieval Christian anti-Semitism is: how do you explain what happened in the twelfth century? For some reason, and there is a vast literature with a wide variety of theories as to why this happened, Christians somehow came to believe that Jews actively served Satan. Their ancestors during the first century crucified Jesus precisely because they knew that he was the Son of God and that contemporary Jews gathered to reenact the crucifixion by torturing innocent Christian children to death. In essence, twelfth-century Christendom went insane.
Considering that medieval Christianity was no longer thinking rationally regarding Jews, it must be understood that, regardless of whether medieval Jews were particularly saintly, medieval Christian chimerical anti-Semitism had nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Christianity. Christians might have come to believe that Jews were greedy because of Jewish moneylenders. Christians coming to believe that Jews served the Devil required something internal to Christianity. To be clear, what precisely that internal issue was is an open question, but insanity is, by its nature, something internal to the human mind.
In modern times, we have the example of Nazi Germany. It would have been one thing if the Nazis had simply believed that Jews were greedy capitalists or revolutionary communists. Early in the Nazi period, we have Hitler ignoring the pleas of leading German scientists not to expel Jews from the universities, as this would damage German science. Hitler believed that the Jewish threat was of such a nature that he knowingly sabotaged German scientific development. Considering the role of Jews in the Manhattan Project and Nazi dismissal of Relativity as a "Jewish physics," Nazi anti-Semitism quite literally caused them to lose the race for the atomic bomb and ultimately the War.
The Nazis started World War II and used it as a cover to carry out the Holocaust because they believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; in essence, that there was a vast Jewish conspiracy, stretching from Wall Street to the Kremlin, that threatened to take over the world. The Holocaust was not only one of the greatest acts of human evil; it was also profoundly foolish. What was the logic of diverting trains, in the middle of a war, to murder useful slave laborers? In essence, people like Eichmann, who carried out the Final Solution during the final two years of the War, when Germany was losing, did so knowing full well that they were likely costing Germany the War. They were "humanitarians," willing to sacrifice their own country in order to save the world from the Jews.
Considering the irrational nature of Nazi anti-Semitism, it should be understood that, whatever its origins, it never was really about the Jews. There were many things one can fault early twentieth-century Jews for. Nothing that Jews did could ever explain why the Nazis would do something so destructive to themselves as the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that Jews were an existential threat to the world for reasons that could only have come from an internal discourse within German thought that had nothing to do with Jews.
Chimerical anti-Semitism becomes important for understanding modern anti-Zionism. Whether or not anti-Zionism actually is anti-Semitism, it lends itself to the sort of chimerical thinking that is the hallmark of anti-Semitism. Let me be clear. There are good reasons for Arabs and Muslims to object to the State of Israel and even be willing to use armed force to eliminate it. This is different than believing that the State of Israel is at the center of some kind of grand conspiracy to rule the world.
Consider the example of October 7th. I can understand why Hamas would attack IDF bases along the Gaza border, but why shoot people at the Nova Music festival? Hamas' leadership had to have known that their actions would lead to the bombing of Gaza. What did they do to protect and feed Gaza's citizens? One has to conclude that Hamas made the calculation to not only murder Israeli citizens but to sacrifice Gaza's civilians as well. In essence, like the Nazis, they were willing that their own country should be destroyed if it might strike a blow against the Jewish conspiracy.
As for the anti-Israel protesters, I can understand why people would speak out and question the death and destruction in Gaza. The fact that this opposition exceeds that against only ongoing conflict, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggests that this is not really about whether Israel's response has been excessive, but a narrative in which Israel is not merely a small country on the other side of the world that engages in morally problematic behavior, but some sort of grand cosmic villain.
Like Hamas, opponents of Israel's war in Gaza care nothing about Gazan civilians. If you believed that Israel was actually carrying out a genocide, your first response would be to try to get as many Palestinians as possible out of Gaza. One thinks of the example of Jewish relief organizations trying to get Jews out of Nazi-controlled Europe only to run up against the fact that no country wanted to take in large numbers of Jewish refugees. Alternatively, consider the millions of Ukrainian refugees who are currently residing within the European Union. Why have the Arabs not done something similar for the people of Gaza?
The lack of interest in getting Palestinians out of Gaza becomes particularly farcical when you consider that Israel did not launch its attack on Gaza until about three weeks after October 7th. Already at this point, Palestinian activists were accusing Israel of genocide, but not using this window to evacuate civilians. It would have been a simple thing for Egypt to allow Palestinians into the Sinai Desert, where the international community could have set up refugee camps for them. This did not happen because Palestinian activists care even less about Palestinian lives than Israel does. Israel has some incentive to limit Palestinian deaths to avoid international pressure. For "supporters" of Palestine, dead Palestinian civilians are simply a sacrifice to awaken the world to the evils of Zionism. For them, Zionism's evil lies in the metaphysical fact that it is a settler-colonialist apartheid entity that causes Palestinian alienation; it has nothing to do with how Israel physically treats Palestinians.
This is not a defense of Israeli government policy, against which there can be numerous legitimate objections. That being said, it should be recognized that the opposition to Israel has nothing to do with anything Israel might have done, however morally dubious. This fixation on Israel, as opposed to numerous other countries with lousy human rights records, must be the result of something other than Israel.
Recognizing this distinction between regular prejudice and chimerical hate allows us to better understand anti-Semitism and to navigate the Israeli-Arab conflict. There is a common misunderstanding of prejudice where prejudice itself leads to genocidal violence. You can believe that Jews are greedy and manipulative and still be a perfectly friendly neighbor. This is distinct from having a narrative where a group becomes the conveyor of cosmic evil that must be resisted at all costs. If you are willing to sacrifice your own people to save the world from the Jews, of course you are also going to be willing to wipe out the Jews for trying to destroy the world.
While chimerical anti-Semites may wish to kill Jews, they have almost as little regard for the lives of their own people. For all the talk of the Nazis or Hamas about Jews oppressing Germans or Palestinians, they both were willing to destroy their own people as well. The reason for this is that it was never about what Jews might have actually physically done to Germans or Palestinians. Instead, the real Jewish crime is something existential against the moral order. As such, the Jews need to be defeated no matter how many non-Jews die in the process. On the contrary, the death of non-Jews will make for an even more glorious reborn world, as this sacrifice will show a greater rejection of the Jewish metaphysical evil.
As for confronting chimerical anti-Zionism, there is nothing you can do to mitigate it. Whatever concessions Israel should or should not make to the Palestinians, I will leave to the Israeli government and ultimately its voting public. That being said, let us be clear that nothing Israel does can ever affect those opponents who are chimerical anti-Zionists, as their turn toward chimerical anti-Zionism never had anything to do with Israel. Instead, it is the product of issues within the Arab-Islamic or leftist/rightest psyche and will only be resolved there.
As terrifying as chimerical anti-Zionists may be, it also offers us a kind of moral clarity. Unlike conventional prejudice, chimerical opponents honestly want to kill us at all costs to themselves and can never be negotiated with. As such, we should have no qualms with trying to get them first. As to the fear that we might kill innocent people and create more chimerical anti-Zionists, we can be confident that this will not be the case. Bombing people might create anti-Zionists who dislike us and even wish to fight back. It will never create chimerical anti-Zionists who believe that Israel is the ultimate evil to be wiped out no matter the cost.
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