Renée Fregosi is a philosopher and political scientist. She is also a member of Dhimmi Watch. In this article, she observes the updating of anti-Zionism, in the light of Wokism and Islamism.
Islamo-wokism: universities at the forefront
Wokeism, a fundamentally anti-Western victim ideology, a new avatar of Third Worldism, appeared and "developed on North American campuses towards the end of the 2010s, then having quickly reached the worlds of culture, politics and even business, it did not take long to cross the Atlantic to invest in European countries.[1] "In France, it has now reached many universities. As we know, the intellectual world is an important player in the design and dissemination of offensive ideologies. It is therefore not surprising to see the academic world agitated just as much by the Islamism of the new generation of the Muslim Brotherhood.[2], than by decolonialism, racialism, transgenderism and other identitarianisms. What may be more surprising at first glance is the convergence and collusion between these two types of movements, wokeism and Islamism.
How, for example, can LGBTQ++ activists found a specific movement “Queers for Palestine” without shuddering while Islamists persecute them, going so far as to assassinate them in the worst ways in jihadist attacks? Their banners were nevertheless seen in Times Square in New York and on several campuses during demonstrations in support of Hamas after its terrible terrorist raid on Israel on October 7, 2023. American universities — and among the most prestigious ones like Harvard, Stanford or NYU — have indeed once again been at the forefront of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and many of them (like Georgetown in particular) under pressure from woke student organizations, have remained silent in the face of the horrors suffered by the Israelis. The statements widely distributed on social networks spoke of “Palestinian resistance”, “the full responsibility of Israel”, this “colonial, genocidal and murderous state[3] ».
In France too, of course, the universities were abuzz with the same slogans. [4] : in an amphitheater at the Jean Jaurès University in Toulouse, a banner reading "Le Mirail supports the Palestinian resistance!!!" was displayed and tags such as "Gaza is expanding, decolonization has begun" appeared on the walls. At Science Po, posters in tribute to Omri Ram, the Israeli student who attended the school last year and was killed in the Hamas attack on the music festival, were systematically covered by posters calling for demonstrations to “support Palestine”. And in Paris 8 Saint-Denis, a student meeting was organized "against the crimes and colonial oppression" (that Israel would impose on "the Palestinian people").
It is undoubtedly indeed the decolonial passion that is at work here, as it solidly cements Islamo-wokism as a whole. Pro-Palestinian anti-Zionism was constituted through two parallel chains of identifications: on the one hand, from the Palestinian to the Arab, to the Muslim, to the immigrant, to the former colonized supposedly neo-colonized; on the other hand, from the usurping and colonizing Israeli, leading "a war of extermination of the Palestinian people", to the Jewish traditional ancestral enemy of the Arabs and Muslims. Because the wokist ideology also joins Islamism through its anti-Semitic dimension, reformulating it in particular through the theory of privilege of which the Jews will bear the brunt.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism
Anti-Zionism began to reformulate the ancestral Judeophobia in Arab countries, starting in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration advocated the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1947, with the UN decision to create two states (one Jewish, the other Arab) in Mandatory Palestine, and even more so from 1964 with the creation of the PLO under the sponsorship of the USSR[5], pro-Palestinian anti-Zionism will increasingly be the expression of anti-Semitism, which became shameful, even criminal, after the Shoah.
However, as Georges Bensoussan explains [6], the movement of Palestinian Arabs against the strengthening of the yishuv (the Jews already present in the ancestral lands of Israel) by Jewish immigration under Zionist impetus, became Islamized in the 1920s. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, whose anti-Semitism was deeply rooted, understood at that time that the nation in the modern sense of the term was not likely to unite the Arabs against the Jewish presence in the region. Arab societies, nearly 90% Muslim, essentially rural and massively illiterate, were, on the other hand, likely to be politically organized through Islam. The Brotherhood of Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, whose aim was global, then provided a valuable instrument for structuring the movement.
Then, through the rapprochement between Sayyid Qutb, the main preacher of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Navvab Safavi, a proselytizer of political Shiism, a reversal took place in the 1950s which would be fundamental: "The Palestinian question [is no longer] an Arab national question, but an Islamic question [7]"In 1987, the creation of Hamas (an organization of the Muslim Brotherhood) reinforced the shift between pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism (according to the expression of Georges-Elia Sarfati [8]) and links even more closely the religious, national and conspiratorial dimensions of this Arab anti-Semitism (article 32 of the Hamas charter even refers to the delusional text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion [9]).
Articulated in the defense of the "Palestinian cause", anti-Zionism reinvests the ban on Jews having a national territory. Indeed, from the Roman pax erasing the names of the territory of the vanquished (Judea, Samaria, Galilee) to replace them with Palestine, to the Muslim empires (caliphal and Ottoman) establishing the dhimma (status of inferior subject subject to specific taxes, obligations and prohibitions due to his non-membership of the Muslim community [10]), through the prohibitions affecting them in the Christian kingdoms to the constitution of modern states which would emancipate them, the Jews were prevented from owning land.
Why then should Jews not deserve to cultivate the land and have a national territory? If not because they should be punished for their supposed ancient crimes (frequently mentioned in the Koran and the hadiths) and recent ones (already mentioned in Hitler's warmongering counter-argument, and since the creation of the State of Israel rehashed by the pro-Palestinian victim propaganda). The Jew remains in fact the capitalist exploiter and the financier "sucking the blood of the people" of traditional left-wing anti-Semitism, with its conspiratorial side of "master of the world", but he has become, moreover, colonialist. Globalist after having been "cosmopolitan", the Jew is no longer the stateless person, the "foreigner", the "half-breed", the "inferior race" or even the "sub-man" of the racist anti-Semitism of yesteryear, but on the contrary becomes the "super-white" in a racialist conception of domination: supporter of American imperialism, former auxiliary of the French colonists and new "colonist" of the "occupied territories" (in fact "disputed", after Jordan, which had seized them in 1948, was driven out by the Six-Day War in 1967).
Anti-Zionism is also a populism
Anti-Semitic anti-Zionism thus enters into particular congruence with the justicialist populism of the right and the left, crossing the two forms of populism: socio-populism ("against the rich") and national-populism (against foreigners and/or imperialism and/or globalism). The victimization of the people is in fact consubstantial with the affirmation of the impunity of the powerful and the so-called "double standards" that always favor them. Among these favored ones, the Jews accused of "profiting" from everything, including the Shoah, occupy a privileged place in a way.
Populitheme [11] powerful, the notion of "impunity" plays in the register of miserabilism, activating the negative feelings of resentment and vengeance, and incites the emergence of vigilantes, of righters of wrongs. It is in this logic that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were able to give rise to expressions of joy and their "understanding" with regard to the humiliation supposedly suffered by Muslim populations throughout the world and particularly in Israel. We remember Jean Baudrillard who was excited by "the prodigious jubilation of seeing this world superpower destroyed [12] " or Jacques Derrida who implied that the United States had in some way provoked the attacks by its aggressive policy throughout the world and showed a certain admiration for the highly symbolic choice of targets aimed at on September 11 [13]. Argument of the excuse that continued from the attack on Charlie in 2015 until today. In the footsteps of Edward Said who believed that the Palestinians constitute "perhaps an exceptional people [14]» (which was unintentionally ironic for a people invented on the myth of the nakba, and slyly turning the notion of a chosen people on its head), Noam Chomsky compared Western reactions to the attack on Charlie to those of Israel's "vicious assault on Gaza in 2014 [15]"And just recently, the LFI press release to the National Assembly excused Hamas' murderous raid on Israeli territory by stating that "The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes amid the intensification of Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. [16]».
After the terrible terrorist attack launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip on Israel on October 7, 2023, the anti-Semitic left and the politically correct of the "balanced" vision have indeed continued to hold Israel responsible for what is happening to it. In the imbecilic logic according to which a victim cannot be an executioner (and vice versa), if Israel is powerful and the Palestinians are its victims, all the fault for the antagonism can only rest on Israel. In 1968 (one year after the Six-Day War won by Israel), Jacques Vichniac already wrote: "The neo-anti-Semites only want to recognize Israel if it retains as a state the specific negative constants that were its own as a people: precariousness, vulnerability, minority, alienation. If Israel accepted these constants, took on the misfortunes and the curse of the wandering Jew, they would go so far as to pity it, since also, in their capacity as men of the left, they did not bargain away their pity for the persecuted Jews. As long as Israel does not play the game, it is cheating. That it has won seems to them downright inconceivable. [17]»
With the creation of the State of Israel, the Jews fought with weapons in hand, regained a national territory and transformed a desert into a fruitful and innovative country. Having regained a dignity denied for centuries to the dhimmis and to those persecuted by pogroms and the Shoah, the Jews no longer represented the archetype of the victim. Even if nearly a million Jews were expelled from Arab countries or forced into exile after 1947 (without being recognized in any way as refugees, even temporary and even less for life and for several generations, as is the extraordinary case of the Arabs of Palestine who left their villages between 1947 and 1949 and of all their endless descendants), the defenders of the poor, the unfortunate, the "wretched of the earth", had to find another figure of the victim. They therefore created it by inventing "the Palestinian people" martyred by the Israelis.
In the same way that Pierre-André Taguieff analyses populism above all as "a political style [18]", contemporary anti-Semitism, pro-Palestinian anti-Zionism, can be characterized by its vengeful justicialist style. Justicialism consists of a posture that demands justice in all directions for "the small, the dominated, the discriminated, the excluded" considered as systematically "stigmatized" and unjustly persecuted, while a fundamental injustice would organize the impunity of the powerful, the privileged, the elites, the dominant, the beneficiaries of globalization, and... the Jewish colonizers. Justicialism therefore claims "popular justice" of "justice for the people", against "the law that oppresses and the law that cheats", against "double standards" and "the impunity of the powerful".
Anti-Zionist Justicialism Against Democracy
More broadly, this demand for exemplary and vengeful punishment against the dominant, supposedly corrupt, perverse and licentious elites, calls into question the framework considered misleading of the "false democracy", of the Republic which would in fact be a dictatorship. It is through this style shared with other current phenomena of authoritarianism, notably of the "woke" type [19]", that anti-Semitism will today regain strength, redeploy itself and build itself an apparatus of revolutionary legitimation.
Beyond a structural familiarity (polarization, designation of the anti-people enemy, conspiracy logic), anti-Semitism and populism participate in a common mobilizing dynamic: the appeal to the people of populisms lending its support to anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish hatred consolidating in return the convergence of scattered elements, coming from the right and the left, from religious traditions, from various nationalisms and from spontaneous revolts. This "new anti-Semitism" that is anti-Zionism has in fact become one of the ideological pillars not only of Islamists on the offensive, but also of the radical left: from the pro-Palestinian Maoists wearing the keffiyeh since the 70s to the vigilantes of Nuit Debout giving a large place to the anti-Israel BDS ("Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions") stand and to the elected officials of France Insoumise ensuring a "Muslim" electoral base.
This movement, which is contesting the republican order and is eminently conflictual, has thus placed the Palestinian question at the centre of its indignation, as Stéphane Hessel explained: "Today, my main indignation concerns Palestine, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank. The conflict is the very source of indignation [20]". The "Jewish question" formulated today around the existence of the State of Israel is in fact an integral part of the discourse against American imperialism, Western neocolonialism and globalized elites, which is at the heart of populist mobilization. The justicialist claim experienced in the mode of revenge, popular vengeance, liberation from the domination exercised by the elites, is then fantasized as a decolonization and anti-white racism is thus justified in the same way as anti-Zionist anti-Semitism.
Once again, anti-Semitism, here in its anti-Zionist form, participates in the attack on democracy and the republic at the same time: by fragmenting the national community, by promoting a new racism (anti-white), by re-articulating religion and politics, by subverting the idea of justice, by valorizing revolutionary violence. The characteristic of populist action is in fact undoubtedly its non-institutional character: the people realize themselves, take shape and reality in the spontaneous action that in an instant makes unity of a scattered plurality. There is no real populist movement without a crowd movement, that is to say without "overflows"; overflow of affect and action, because "the formation of a crowd requires the exaltation and intensification of emotions" as Ernesto Laclau says, repeating almost word for word a sentence from Freud [21].
Disappointed, feeling deceived, cheated by both the right and the left, these new Indignados oppose their radicalism against all institutionalized ways of doing politics, including those that claim to be anti-system. This "grassroots democracy" features a people who free themselves from the leader's preponderant word to appropriate it and give it infinite variations. This people claims equality with the powerful and produces a kind of leaderless populism. A rumor, a slogan launched on social networks, and the uproar or the escraches [22] take shape, black blocs are formed, terrorist actions are decentralized like cluster bombs.
The notion of “Jewish privilege”
In its original definition, a privilege is a particular legal status granted to certain people allowing them to enjoy an advantage, while others are deprived of it absolutely. In the theory of social privilege, this notion of privilege is distorted: privilege does not arise from an unequal right, but from a factual situation. By birth or by conjunctural acquisition, the privileged would benefit, sometimes without their knowledge, from a social system supposed to be fundamentally unjust. The notion of social privilege was theorized by the feminist researcher Peggy McIntosh in the late 1980s [23]. Privilege then designates a “systemic” effect. Social privileges would essentially come from — it is the case to say it — the fact of being a man and/or an individual of the white race.
The theory of privilege thus becomes a militant anti-Western doctrine with no possible redemption for the privileged, the end of privileges being able to come only in an apocalyptic pulverization of the evil "system". Having become mystical, the discourse on privileges makes us lose the sense of social causes. A secular religion of a new type, the theory of privilege is less millenarian than martyrological: we no longer project a radiant future on the horizon, certainly uncertain, but where oppression would be abolished, we rather fantasize about an immobile time where injustice is perpetuated eternally and must therefore be endlessly hunted down and eradicated from bodies and minds.
This return to a kind of timelessness of mythical thought through the overvaluation of the victim figure is quite symptomatic of our times where political scenes (national and transnational) are saturated with sententious, accusatory and justicialist tones. The aberrant theory of "white privilege" " thus produced a specifically anti-Semitic offshoot. In mid-July 2020 [24], resonating with the hashtag #whiteprivilege, appeared on Twitter the hashtag #JewishPrivilege ("Jewish privilege"), taken up by more than 122000 anti-Semitic messages in twenty-four hours.
The dissemination of the slogan "Jewish privilege" in the modern form of the tweet then syncretizes this hatred of Jews as a privileged group. The theme of the Jew and money is of course underlying, but a new element is added to it in the mode of favoritism. Jews would not only be profiteers, exploiters, expropriators, but also privileged. Privileged compared to groups that would be "stigmatized", discriminated against, dispossessed, frustrated of their dues, stripped of their status as victims, to be assisted, promoted by "positive discrimination", by compensatory advantages, by mirror privileges in short. Jews would even profit from the Shoah and would agitate, to gain pity, an anti-Semitism that would not exist: "The Ashkenazim are not Semites, Hitler killed them for their social role" Mahmoud Abbas still asserts in September 2023 [25]A variant of this anti-Semitism of privilege can go as far as negationist theses: the Jews would do more than instrumentalize the Shoah, they would have invented it!
The concept of Jewish privilege thus allows pro-Palestinian anti-Zionism to take up the elements of traditional anti-Semitism: Jews and money, Jews and power, Jews and cosmopolitanism, Jews and deceit, Jews and their "jeremiads", to translate them into contemporary anti-Jewish themes targeting the State of Israel. The State of Israel would be illegitimate because its territory would not be Jewish land (history is denied and Jewish historical sites are baptized with Arabic names referring to Islam: "the Temple Mount" has become "the esplanade of the mosques", "Judea and Samaria" are "Palestine", and Hebron, Jericho and even Jerusalem are claimed as Arab cities or Muslim and non-Jewish holy places). The Jews would therefore be colonizers who would usurp the land of the Arabs and more particularly of the so-called "Palestinians", going so far as to carry out a genocide of the "Palestinian people", by passing themselves off as victims, as the Nazis did, of which the Jews would be a new incarnation.
Vladimir Jankélévitch was therefore a visionary, who in a 1967 text, taken up in the posthumous work The imprescriptible [26], wrote: “Anti-Zionism is an incredible boon, because it gives us permission—and even the right, and even the duty—to be anti-Semitic in the name of democracy! Anti-Zionism is justified anti-Semitism, finally made available to everyone. It is permission to be democratically anti-Semitic. And what if the Jews themselves were Nazis? That would be wonderful.”
