Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Challenge for Israel

It has been one of Zionism’s foremost credos that so long as Jews continued their millenarian dispersal as small minorities in countless countries around the globe, antisemitism would remain unabated. Only by reinstating the Jewish people as an equal member of the comity of nations through reestablishment of its own independent state in the ancestral homeland would Jews be able to regain normalcy and respectability, and to ameliorate, if not eliminate, this long hatred. What this buoyant prognosis failed to consider, however, is that the prejudice and obsession that had hitherto been reserved for Jewish individuals and communities would be redirected to the Jewish state. Hence nearly 80 years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world whose right to self-defence, indeed to national existence, is constantly challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

The chapters in this volume by a distinguished group of international scholars discusses the origins of this hateful phenomenon and its implications for the state of Israel and world Jewry, including the social psychology of contemporary antisemitism; the Israelization of Jew-hatred and the concept of ‘antisemitism light’; the anti-Israel apartheid and racism calumnies; international media delegitimization campaigns; and manifestations of antisemitism in the Middle East and East Asia.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.

Efraim Karsh is Emeritus Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London and Former Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He is the author of 16 books including Palestine Betrayed (2011), Empires of the Sand (2001), Islamic Imperialism: A History (2013), Arafat’s War (2007), and Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (2007).

Efrat Aviv is Associate Professor of History at Bar-Ilan University specializing in Turkish history and politics. She is the author of Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Turkey from Ottoman Rule to the AKP (Routledge, 2017) among other books.