In the United States, the Trump Administration has focused this mania on universities, with the goal of protecting Jewish students from Antisemitism, which has meant rigid policing of student and faculty speech when it comes to the Middle East.
In the UK, legal actions against musical acts and writers–like Kneecap, Bob Vylan and Paul Laverty–for their pro-Palestine speech have been taken in the name of fighting “Antisemitism” and “hate speech.”
The legal assault has occurred in the context of various commitments, again, to “protect” Jews publicly, both under Labour and the Tories.
Germany’s clampdown on pro-Palestine protests heightened when the government moved to deport two Irish citizens, one Pole and an American for participating in a pro-Palestine demonstration.
The desire to protect Jews from left-wing speech about Palestine flies in the face of the reactionary backlash against protections for others.
The Trump Administration has rolled back protections for LGBTQ persons and various protections for racial minorities, while ramping up anti-immigration efforts.
The British far-right protested the arrest of writer Graham Linehan over his anti-trans social media posts, while one pro-Palestine group has more or less become illegal.
Germany, once a magnet for immigrants from the Middle East, has done a complete about-face.
In the American case, we have a far-right president.
The UK and Germany have Labour and Christian Democratic governments, respectively, but have shifted to the right to compete with rising far-right parties.
These same governments fret when accused of being insufficiently protective of Jews.
“Chief Rabbi accuses Met of failing to protect Jews from pro-Palestinian protests,” reads a headline at the UK’s Jewish Chronicle.
“New York must do more to protect Jewish students on campus”, demands the headline of an op-ed in New York’s Times-Union by an American Jewish Committee leader.
Not to be outdone, in a commentary for the World Jewish Congress website, Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, concluded, “Jewish people are questioning society, its ability to defend itself against its enemies, and whether Germany remains committed to protecting Jewish life.”
Protection. What a word.
For liberals who care about sustaining a multicultural democracy, safeguarding minorities is the noblest endeavour of a strong yet benevolent state, like a bear guarding its newborn cubs.
For the right, these protections, which have often come in the form of sensitivity rules like “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” on university campuses, conjure up the pathetic image of a weak child hiding behind the teacher from the schoolyard bully.
At worst, such protections have been cast as anathema to free speech for conservatives, an overreaching nanny state that holds whites, straights and men as guilty until proven innocent.
For the most part, the right is winning the day against such protections, signifying a wave of contempt in response to decades of civil rights progress.
The war against wokeness has lifted protections on minorities that have been derided as Orwellian interventions against the God-given pecking order, a falsely enforced equality running contrary to the hierarchies naturally defined in social Darwinism.
Yet, the rules change for the right when it comes to Jews, who are seemingly always under threat not from far-right Christian theocrats but from Antizionist slogans, wrongly perceived as hostile to Jews.
While Congress would never guarantee the safety of Black or LGBTQ students, it has held several hearings on protecting Jewish students from leftist speech, protests, and college courses that contradict the Israeli narrative about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
On the one hand, there’s a simple explanation for the contradiction. Invoking Antisemitism is an easy and cheap ploy against pro-Palestine politics.
The American and European right support Israel, not out of love for Jews, but because Israel represents Western influence in the Middle East and embodies the nationalist reaction against multiculturalism, helping undermine liberal democracy.
For a good many Jewish institutions, it seems like favourable times. Among minority groups, Jews appear to be favoured by right-wing governments, mainly owing to Israel.
This is a dangerous situation for Diaspora Jewry and only alienates Jews from the rest of society.
True, a great many Jewish organisations continue to fight alongside immigrants, LGBTQ and Palestinian groups against far-right forces. However, they exist far outside the mainstream of monied, often right-wing Jewish political leadership.
The insistence of Washington, London and Berlin to bend over backwards to “protect” Jews while eviscerating protections for other minorities will only heighten resentment of Jewish status more, reinforcing the idea that they are less valuable citizens than we are.
Many Jewish leftists believe that this is intentional, as it promotes Antisemitism by portraying Jews as a protected class in an illiberal society. But it also reminds Jews that we owe our existence to a reactionary state.
These protections will also ramp up far-right resentment of Jews as well.
Scour social media, and we find the Jew portrayed as a privileged member of society who constantly guilt-trips the white European world about the Holocaust and 7 October, always claiming victim status while enjoying a better political life than others.
The worlds of MAGA and Brexit, currently moving heaven and earth to “protect” Jews in the name of Israel, will learn to resent Jewish protection the way they hate trigger warnings and safe spaces for other minorities.
In other words, this right-wing campaign of “protecting” Jews is less about making them safe than keeping Jews in perpetual precarity.
In the quest for attaining civil rights, accepting “protections” from the imperialist capitalist state was always a Faustian bargain.
Like a mob boss, imperialist politics offers safety in exchange for loyalty and tribute, a flow of power that only moves in one direction.
Now firmly outside the halls of power, Jewish left-wing groups refuse this abusive racket and are building networks of solidarity across communities against the rise of fascism.
What will it take to turn the Jewish right around and recognise that they’re endangering our community? It’s hard to conjecture at present, as they don’t seem to care.
Heaven help them when they find out how loyal their far-right Christian allies really are.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
