Musk and the marches

As if the world’s Jews don’t have enough problems right now. Still dealing with the aftershock of the worst slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, over 200 of us still held hostage by the same murderous fanatics who carried out that pogrom, and with a worldwide wave of anti-Jewish hatred sweeping through our communities, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, decided to remind everyone that eliminationist anti-Zionism is not the only game in town when it comes to antisemitism.

“You have said the actual truth”, was Musk’s reply to a post on X/Twitter that accused “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred against whites” and promised not to give “the tiniest shit” about antisemitism as a result. When challenged on this, Musk conceded that “this does not extend to all Jewish communities”, but he essentially stood by his point: major Jewish organisations like the Anti-Defamation League, and Jewish communities more widely, so he claimed, encourage anti-white hatred and support mass migration that is undermining Western societies (and, in Musk’s view, is the primary source of antisemitism today).

This idea has a name: The Great Replacement Theory, and it has itself inspired terrorist attacks against Jewish communities, most notoriously the shooting of 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 by a neo-Nazi called Robert Bowers. “HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] likes to bring invaders to kill our people”, Bowers wrote on Gab, a social media platform favoured by far right extremists, shortly before embarking on his rampage. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

More broadly, the idea that non-white and Muslim immigration is encouraged and facilitated by wealthy, powerful liberal Jews - George Soros is normally the name in the frame - in a deliberate effort to undermine the cohesion and national identity of Western societies is a conspiracy theory, following in an old and ignoble tradition of blaming a hidden Jewish hand for whatever it is people don’t like or feel threatened by. The idea that Jewish support for migrants is motivated by hatred of white people, rather than sympathy and compassion for refugees, is part of the package.

Musk is hardly alone in echoing this line of thinking: last week ex-Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson and right wing commentator Candace Owens, speaking on Carlson’s show on X/Twitter, agreed that it is perfectly understandable for people to hate “the pro-Israel lobby” for allegedly funding academic ideas leading to “white genocide”, and that’s why Jews are now not receiving the support they expect against the Israel-orientated antisemitism coming from the radical left and from within Muslim communities. You made your bed by encouraging these people in the first place, is the thinking.

Quite why Jews would want to promote anti-white hatred is never explained, and anyone familiar with the currently fashionable notion that Zionists are white supremacist colonisers might be somewhat confused by the idea. But the contradictory narratives that right wing Jews (cast as Zionists) are white supremacists while left wing Jews (cast as woke liberals) are anti-white, is the contemporary equivalent of the twentieth century twin narratives that Jews were simultaneously arch capitalists and subversive communists. It’s a reminder that antisemitism is never about how Jews actually behave, and always a reflection of what different people in society fear at any given time.

Musk, to be clear, is adamant that he is not antisemitic. “Nothing could be further from the truth”, he posted yesterday, and I’m sure he means it. Very few people think they are antisemitic, even if they sometimes say (or post) things that suggest the opposite. That is progress of sorts, and we shouldn’t take it for granted. In several European countries in the first half of the twentieth century, and in many Muslim-majority countries today, openly anti-Jewish sentiment has been commonplace and has not attracted any social or political cost for those who express it. If we have moved beyond those times, then that’s for the best. How is it, then, that we seem to live in a time when there are precious few self-declared antisemites, but there is still lots of antisemitism?

This question brings me to the pro-Palestinian movement that is dominating our public spaces right now, through its uniquely mass protests in our city centres every weekend, and the equally unique spike in anti-Jewish hate crime the rest of the time. There has been extensive coverage of antisemitic placards and chants, and support for terrorism, on these demonstrations, and just as frequent have been the claims that most protestors just want peace and any antisemitism is only found on a tiny fringe.

I very much want to believe, when I see 300,000 people marching against Israel through the streets of my city, that the fact Israel is the world’s only Jewish State, and more generally is the best-known, most high-profile Jewish thing in existence right now, is just a coincidence. And I know people who went on that march because they wanted to call for a ceasefire, are definitely not antisemitic and are not Hamas supporters. But there were other people there who definitely are antisemitic, because they made that clear too. (It is striking that, out of the two protests in central London on 11th November, it was the left wing one, not the right wing one, where some people were carrying swastikas). And the truth is, nobody really knows what proportion each group made up, out of that total of 300,000 people.

However, we do know what proportion of the UK public is antisemitic: around 5%, according to the largest-ever opinion poll of British attitudes towards Jews and Israel, which the Community Security Trust (CST, who I work for) and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) carried out in 2017. This survey found that 2.4% of people in Britain are what you might called hardcore antisemites, and a further 3% or so are ‘softer’ but similar in their views, meaning that “ about 5% of the general population can justifiably be described as antisemites: people who hold a wide range of negative attitudes towards Jews.” Bear in mind that the world has changed since 2017: these figures may well be out of date, but they are the best we have for now.

Five percent isn’t much as a slice of the pie, although if you do the maths it works out at around 3,350,000 people in Britain: or approximately twelve antisemites for every British Jew. And if 5% of the 300,000 people marching against Israel last weekend were antisemites then that would mean 15,000 antisemites all marching together, which would make it the largest political demonstration of Jew-haters in modern British history. Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts only mustered around 3-5,000 fascists at Cable Street in 1936, for example.

But that isn’t the end of the story, because that 2017 opinion poll also found that while only around 5% of the British population are antisemites, 30% of people believe at least one antisemitic stereotype or negative idea about Jews. And in this detail lies the answer to the conundrum of how we can have so much antisemitism, with so few people who are knowing, self-aware antisemites.

The antisemitic statements people agreed with in this poll included things like “Jews get rich at the expense of others”, “Jews have too much power in Britain” or “Jews think they are better than other people”. The fact that someone might agree with one of these doesn’t make them an antisemite, strangely. They often don’t feel any conscious hostility towards Jews, and some people who agreed with one of the antisemitic stereotypes agreed with one of the positive statements about Jews as well.

It doesn’t make sense, until you remember that stereotypes and myths about Jews, good and bad, have circulated in our societies for centuries. Looking at what Elon Musk tweets, or the fact people go on anti-Israel marches, as evidence that they are confirmed antisemites is to misunderstand how antisemitism works. Beliefs and myths about Jews are built into our world and form part of how society teaches people to think and talk about Jews, about Jewish things, and about the world itself. They so familiar that people absorb and express them without recognising them for what they are, or thinking too deeply about them at all. They have enormous appeal as ways to explain crises, especially if those crises involve Jews. It’s not a coincidence that the likes of Musk and Carlson express antisemitic ideas right now, when the world is gripped by a crisis involving Israel and mass antisemitism has reappeared as a phenomenon in our societies. It provides a ready-made way for people to understand and interpret what is going on, and just because people are wealthy and powerful, it doesn’t make them any more resistant to these ideas than anyone else.

Meanwhile, given that 30% of the British population believes at least one antisemitic idea, if that march of 300,000 people was a genuine representation of British society, a cross-section of all its classes and cultures, then that would mean 30% of those marchers have at least one negative thought in their heads about Jews. Furthermore, that 2017 poll found that a staggering 74% of people with strongly anti-Israel views - for example, people who agreed that “Israel is deliberately trying to wipe out the Palestinian population”, “Israel is an apartheid state”, “People should boycott Israeli goods and products” and a range of similar attitudes - also hold at least one anti-Jewish attitude. In other words, antisemitic ideas are far more prevalent amongst people with strongly anti-Israel views than they are in the general population.

I don’t know what role, if anything, anti-Jewish ideas had in motivating some (never mind most) of those marchers to go on a demonstration against Israel, when they don’t usually demonstrate about any other overseas conflict in anything like those numbers. We don’t know whether 5% of those marchers were antisemites, or whether 30%, or 74%, agree with one (or more) anti-Jewish belief. It’s reassuring to tell ourselves that the vast majority of anti-Israel protestors are not motivated by antisemitism, but nobody really knows whether that is true or not. There’s no data to support or contradict that position, although when the journalist Lewis Goodall went to investigate for the News Agents podcast, what he found was “pretty unsettling”.

What we do know, though, is that antisemitic ideas circulate widely in society, especially at times like this, and it would be a remarkable anomaly if a march against Israel did not disproportionately attract people who were excited by those ideas.

People often refer to antisemitism as a virus, and I understand why this metaphor appeals. It explains how antisemitism adapts to fit every new time and place and it holds out the possibility that, with the right treatment, the virus can be expunged and society’s health restored. The flaw in this idea is that a virus is an alien invader that infects an otherwise healthy body from the outside, and I think that gets antisemitism wrong. These ideas about Jews are not some external infection. They are an intrinsic part of the fabric of the world we live in, and, as we have seen this past month, they never lose the potential to mobilise and influence people’s attitudes, whether about a conflict in the Middle East or immigration in our own countries. Nor, though, does this make the people who believe these ideas irredeemable antisemites. It just makes them products of the world they, and we, all live in.

If you enjoy my writing and want to understand more about why antisemitism happens and what we can do about it, please consider buying my book ‘Everyday Hate’ https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/everyday-hate