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There& #39;s a narrative that sometimes people get so excited about their Palestine activism and their principled objection to Zionism that they get "carried away" and drift into antisemitism. I think that& #39;s wrong. /1
Whatever your position on Palestine/Israel, there& #39;s no reason why you would "drift into" antisemitic terrain if you weren& #39;t there already, or if it did not appeal to you in the first place. It& #39;s true that we do encounter antisemitism among some Palestine activism.... 2/
... for two reasons IMO: there are some (not many) people who are driven by antisemitism and use Palestine activism as a cover. It& #39;s easy to recognise these types and to see through them, they care very little about Palestine and actual Palestinians. 3/
More common are cases where some people, not necessarily in conscious manner, invoke antisemitic tropes when discussing Israel/Palestine. They do so because antisemitism is such a rich reservoir of metaphors with wide resonance in Western culture. 4/
So it is easy to draw upon this "reservoir", sometimes without understanding, as explained so well in this piece, which I will not tire of promoting 5/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.12854">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/...
Antisemitic tropes are attractive because they offer easy, simple narratives of black and white, and in this case because they offload the British legacy of colonialism onto others: a powerful lobby, evil conspiracy, rich bankers, ruthless Zionists. NOT US. THEM. 6/
(for anyone familiar with British Imperial history, to present the Balfour Declaration as a unique and inexplicable aberration or error, achieved by an evil lobby, is an utter joke. I mean carving up territories and moving people around was what the Empire did) 7/
The problem is not with Palestine activism or one& #39;s enthusiasm about it. The problem is antisemitism, the general prevalence and ubiquity of antisemitic metaphors and antisemitic ways of thinking in this society.
