Is Israelophobia the latest form of anti-Semitism?

Israelophobia addresses an anti-Semitic mutation ‘evolving out of reach’: the demonisation of the Jewish state. Its author, Jake Wallis Simons, is the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. His antennae are primed for anti-Semitism and he finds plenty of it. In France, 60 per cent of religious abuse is directed at Jews and in Germany anti-Semitic incidents have doubled in a decade. In his telling, Israelophobia – Leon Pinsker’s Judeophobia transformed – is the descendant of the deicide myth, the blood libel and the Shoah.

You can hear it in the quality and narrowness of the discourse, he notes. Liberal Zionism is considered no less murderous by anti-Zionists than Greater Israelism. The desire to remove Israel from the map is not a political position, and political solutions are not desired: no Israelophobe wants to hear about the 1947 Partition Plan, which granted Palestine a state, or the exiled Jews of Arab lands (as in Europe, there are many empty Jewish quarters) or the fact that 50 per cent of Israeli Jews are non-white and cannot be accurately called European colonists. It is, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, a passion: another religion rooted in the soil of Israel-Palestine, with its own liturgy and practice. Israel has a gift for them.

This is a conflict filled with lies and a will to extremism: there is as little space in the discourse for moderate Palestinians as there is for moderate Israelis. Wallis Simons, who considers Palestinian national aspirations ‘a respectable cause’, notes the endless elusions, fallacies and sleights-of-hand, some important, some absurd. Israelis are defamed for ‘co-opting’ Arab food (petty and wrong); an article in Time magazine doubts the Jewish character of the Western Wall (just wrong); Israeli spy cows exist (what do you think?); Israel is called an apartheid state, despite the existence of Israeli-Arab judges and lawmakers.