Eve Garrard’s 2013 ‘The Pleasures of Antisemitism’, argued that not merely cognitive errors but also deep emotional satisfactions were at stake in the spread of antisemitism. The essay has been one of the most read pieces in Fathom’s first decade. She revisits her argument here in light of the reactions to 7 October, and the global surge of antisemitism since the massacre.
Back in the day, in the early 2010s, people who were hostile to the State of Israel, or more broadly to Jews in general, often explained this hostility in terms of the terrible things that Israel had (supposedly) done, such as settler colonialism, or apartheid, or genocide. That is, they accounted for their hostility by appeal to a push factor – something that pushed, indeed forced, them away from their natural response of friendliness and anti-racism to all comers, Jews included. This push factor, so it was claimed, steered them in the direction of hostility towards Jews or the Jewish state. And the something, the push factor, was identified as Israeli or Jewish wrongdoing: it was Jewish wrongdoing that supposedly made people hostile to Jews. Antisemitism in general was very often explained in this way, especially by those people who, while energetically denying that they themselves were antisemitic, nonetheless told us that they found antisemitism in others understandable because of Jewish misdeeds. (A famous example is the film director Ken Loach, who declared that ‘Israel feeds feelings of antisemitism … nothing has been a greater instigator of antisemitism than the self-declared Jewish state itself.’)[1]
This ‘push’ explanation was never a very plausible one, partly because the complaints against Jews or Israel which are supposed to constitute the push were often grossly exaggerated, and at worst were outright lies (and hence in need of being explained themselves). A further reason for thinking the push story to be implausible resides in the fact that those who are very averse to Israel rarely if ever display a similar degree of hostility towards other states or peoples whose track record in the wrongdoing stakes has been manifestly worse, sometimes by orders of magnitude, than that of Israel itself.[2] So to some of us, back then, it seemed more likely that an adequate explanation of antisemitism, particularly in its current anti-Zionist form, would lie at least in part in what we might regard as a pull factor: not something objectionable pushing people away from solidarity and support, but rather some highly attractive factor pulling them towards rejection and hostility – some deep pleasure or satisfaction to be found in experiencing and expressing dislike and enmity towards Jews and the only Jewish State. An account of the nature of this pleasure, so I suggested in 2013, could plausibly appeal to three possible sources of it: the pleasure of hatred, the pleasure of tradition, and the pleasure of a purported moral purity.[3]
But here we now are, about ten years down the line, and it’s worth asking whether this account of antisemitism, especially in its anti-Zionist manifestation, seems to capture what’s going on today in the shadow of 7 October, when around 1200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were massacred – murdered, raped, tortured – by members of Hamas, and approximately 240 hostages, many of them children, were kidnapped and taken away to Gaza. This was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and it was clearly a terrible act of murderous hostility. To understand the situation, however, we need also to consider what kind of murderous action it was: in particular the fact that it deliberately caused, by its multiple rapes and tortures, what we might regard as a nightmarish overkill, a superfluity of suffering, far greater than was needed to constitute resistance or a substantial assault on Israeli power and determination. In fact many of the details of 7 October, when released, turned out to be too much even for some of the strongest stomachs in the hard-bitten world of international journalism; here we need only note that the details extensively involved rape, sexually sadistic torture, and murder, sometimes by burning alive, of adults and children alike.
The Pleasures of Hatred revisited
So turning now to the responses to these events, does the original analysis still seem to apply – firstly, can we see pleasure and satisfaction, stemming from hatred and contempt, in the perpetrators of the events of 7 October? Unfortunately we can, most obviously in the notorious phone call made by one of them, who excitedly told his mother, ‘Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Mom, your son is a hero!’ This is more than relief at being able to turn on a supposed oppressor, or more even than grim revenge for the supposed oppressions: there is a quality of adolescent excitement here that would almost be touching if it weren’t for the hideous nature of the boy’s reasons for being so proud. There can be no doubt that he’s filled with pleasure at his own actions, and at his own hatred of the Jews whom he is so happy to have murdered – a pleasure which he expects his family to share, and which certainly helps to explain his readiness to commit such actions.
If we now look at the reactions of some of those responding to the events of 7 October, we can see something of the same excited pleasure in what they say. Some of the universities, especially in the US, are unfortunately a notable locus of this kind of attitude: Professor Joseph Massad (Columbia University) speaks of jubilation and awe; of a major achievement; of a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance. Professor Russell Rockford at Cornell University finds it exhilarating and energising, and claims that you would not be human if you felt otherwise; Professor Gilbert Achcar (SOAS) thinks it’s amazing and highly daring; Professor Lara Sheehi (George Washington University) thinks we mustn’t be reluctant to pay the grisly price of freedom; and Professor Stephen Sheehi (William and Mary College) complains that Palestinians aren’t allowed to be happy that they broke out of jail. Considering that what this particular group of Palestinians chose to do, when they broke out of the supposed jail of Gaza, was to commit the war crimes of rape, torture, kidnapping and murder, of civilians, many of them children, some of them babies, it isn’t entirely surprising that other people don’t always encourage them to be happy about their actions. The view that victims are justified in doing anything they please to inflict suffering on those they regard as perpetrators, (or those who are allied to supposed perpetrators, or those who are the babies of supposed perpetrators) is neither a plausible moral precept, nor any kind of moral truth.
And something is also revealed about the nature of the desires which these people nurture towards their enemies: what they desire to do, what makes them happy, is to inflict maximal pain, suffering and humiliation on those towards whom they are hostile. Happiness which is generated by intentionally maximising the suffering of others is something which we should all have moral doubts about. But Sheehi et al do not seem to have any such reservations about those actions; they too regard them as entirely justified. And I don’t think there can be much doubt about the pleasure these academic onlookers take in the spectacle which they praise so enthusiastically.[4]
In Lebanon, there were celebrations and the distribution of sweets after 7 October. In the UK, according to the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, the massacre in Israel
was quickly followed by an extensive outbreak of hostility towards Jews. The incidence of antisemitic events rapidly increased by well over 500 per cent, and this increase began even before there was any Israeli retaliation in Gaza to provoke further hostility. As one commentator said, ‘It was almost as if the initial reaction to a crime against humanity was the celebration of a massacre of the Jews.’ And again, the pleasure taken by the various celebrants, in the taunting, the threats, the graffiti, the assaults, is obvious.
The Centre for Research into Antisemitism concluded ‘In no preceding escalation phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict has the predominant antisemitic reaction been one of open jubilation and joy over the deaths of Israeli Jews.’ [5]
The Pleasures of Tradition, revisited
Secondly, how should we see the role of tradition in this sinister efflorescence of hostility towards the Jewish state and those who support it? There is undoubtedly a long-standing tradition of hostility towards Jews and Jewish activities, in Britain and elsewhere – what part does this tradition play in generating satisfaction and pleasure in anti-Jewish activities? The Students’ Union at Cambridge University in the UK called for a mass uprising of Palestinians against Israel. In the US, students at over 100 colleges called for an end to US aid to Israel. Several called for the exclusion of Zionists from campus public life. At Harvard University some student groups declared that Israel was responsible for all the violence. (Famously, the President of Harvard found herself unable to assert that calls for genocide against Jews were invariably against Harvard’s principles).[6] But those who are currently most vociferous about ultimate Israeli blame for violence against both Palestinians and Jews have been in the past largely, and strangely, quiet about widespread and horrific violence against Palestinians by Syria (at least 120,000 displaced Palestinian refugees from Syria, and several thousand killed); about the more than 24,000 Rohingya killed in Myanmar; about the Uighur Moslems in concentration camps in China, and the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria; about the hundreds of thousands of Darfuri people killed and raped in Sudan; and all the other horrors in this unhappy world. There have been very few marches about these events, and virtually no student unions have called for hostile action against anybody at all as a remedy for the atrocities. Only the one country generates instant blame and calls for action, and there has been singularly little protest, if any, from the sources mentioned above about the remarks of Ghazi Hamad (a senior Hamas member), when he said that 7 October must be repeated again and again; and that the existence of Israel is illogical and it – the whole country – must be destroyed. [7] (It was he who claimed that Palestinians are victims of occupation and that consequently everything they do is justified.)
A comparable example comes from Ahed Tamimi (a Palestinian activist favoured by Amnesty International)[8] who said that Palestinians would drink Jewish blood and eat their skulls[9] (her mother later denied that she had made those remarks.). It’s hard to think of any other context in which those who loudly claim to be entirely justified in committing rape, torture, and murder would get a free pass from people on the Left, let alone be given their widespread support. The extraordinary double standards that were and are so manifestly on display do seem to echo the age-old tradition of antisemitism, both in its Western form and in its (somewhat different) Islamist one. This tradition is a very long-standing one, in the West, in Russia, and in the Middle East, although for some decades after the Second World War it seemed possible that it was dying out. But conflict in the Middle East certainly revives it: immediately after 7 October, exhilarated people were driving past synagogues shouting ‘Kill the Jews!’[10] The Jews, not the Israelis, nor even the Zionists.
Can the ready embracing of the tropes and tenets of traditional antisemitism be explained, at least partly, by the pleasure it affords those who endorse them? Traditions, many of which are beautiful and valuable, are often very comfortable and satisfying to participate in, as witness the persistence of religious rituals even among agnostics and non-believers, and also political rituals, such as the (much-mocked but still happily maintained) singing of the Red Flag in the Labour Party. Many traditions, whatever their relation to truth, such as the widespread, easy, light-hearted denigration of women, often feel natural and even obviously correct to their participants and to many onlookers. And where the traditions are more obviously damaging and vicious, such as the tradition of seeing Jews as disproportionately and dangerously powerful, and yet morally inferior, full of shadowy malevolence, they are nonetheless for many people both easy and pleasurable to absorb and express. They provide a comfortably familiar target for blame; those outside the supposedly blameworthy group can all concur that that group is a proper object of criticism and dislike. It provides an occasion for warm and enjoyable agreement among those doing the blaming. And it is enjoyable to be part of a group blaming others, as most of us realise consciously, rather to our shame and chagrin, as we grow up. (If we don’t feel at least a smidgen of shame and chagrin as we indulge this particular pleasure, then we’re at serious risk of joining whatever witch-hunts are prevalent in our communities. And communities, as we know to our cost, can get their witch-identification processes seriously wrong.). The glaring double standards displayed by many anti-Zionists and antisemites, and their widespread indifference to the obvious war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by non-Jewish perpetrators both in and beyond the Middle East, are silently glossed over by their sympathisers, whereas the traditional role of Jews as targets of criticism makes it easy and comfortable to focus on, and often invent, their failings.
There is a distinctive branch in this unlovely tradition which was once particularly influential on the Left in Britain, and that is the longstanding antisemitism to be found in Russia, and hence in the USSR, a country with whose regime many (though by no means all) on the Left felt a particular affiliation: they were pleased when they could find themselves in agreement with it. The USSR conducted a powerful and ferociously anti-Zionist and antisemitic campaign of propaganda throughout the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s, equating Zionism with apartheid, imperialism, settler-colonialism and ultimately Nazism, and this may well have shaped residual attitudes on the Left even now, 40 and more years later.[11]
A further aspect of the tradition of antisemitism is how readily it lends itself to hyperbole. Hyperbole is very satisfying to its users; there is a special pleasure in making huge accusations which charge the person accused of effectively dancing with the devil. Such accusations produce an enjoyably melodramatic effect, which increases the apparent significance of the criticisms being made. And most of us enjoy a bit (or even a lot) of overstatement when criticising those of whom we disapprove; we are ready to convince ourselves and others that the target of our criticism really is shockingly immoral, a threat to the community, and possibly downright evil. (Political discourse is often hyperbolic in this way.)
In the case of antisemitism, the most notable example of this hyperbole is the charge of genocide so frequently levelled at Israel. This seriously raises the stakes in the debate, presenting Israel and its supporters as complicit in one of the worst crimes that can be committed (and hence presenting the person levelling the charge of genocide as making particularly important and wide-scale moral judgements). However, this charge against Israel, which has been levelled for decades, is manifestly false, given the steady increase in the size of the Palestinian population during those decades, from approximately 1 million in 1955 to rather over 5 million in 2023. Here, the double standards mentioned above are also transparently on display by the critics of Israel. South Africa is currently charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice although it remains quite silent about Hamas’s explicit claim that it intends to commit genocide against Israel and indeed all Jews. And South Africa remains silent about, and indeed very friendly towards, Sudan, whose genocidal attacks on Darfur have led to the deaths of around 200,000 Africans. It refused to arrest its leader, Omar Al Bashir, and threatened to leave the International Criminal Court if punished for this refusal. (At least it can be said on Hamas’s behalf that it isn’t hypocritical about its approval of genocide.)
It is notable how many of the traditional tropes and tenets of antisemitism refer to harm to others on a really vast scale. Perhaps nothing can outdo in scope the medieval charge of killing God, but 19th century worries about racial integrity and superiority were translated in the 20th century into a hostility towards those who supposedly threatened the racial purity and pre-eminence of Germany, and first among those supposed threats were of course the Jews, with consequences we all know. What was then regarded as racial science has since been comprehensively debunked, and hostility to Jews has now taken a somewhat different form, focussing primarily on charges about human rights, but hyperbole has certainly remained. One example of this can be seen in a letter of protest circulated by academics in one of our universities, in which it is declared that Israel is not only a genocidal, apartheid, settler-colonialist state, but that ‘its action in Gaza is an event so monstrous that it will reverberate down the ages as one of the most inhuman acts of our times’. Leave aside the obvious and pressing issues about falsehood in this claim, the hyperbole is still remarkable in its scale, applying as it does to a century containing conflict in Darfur (deaths in the hundreds of thousands) and also in the Congo (deaths in millions), and unfortunately many other lesser but still appalling atrocities.(As I write, the Houthis in Yemen have decided to execute homosexuals by stoning or by crucifixion – an atrocity which though relatively small-scale is still in every way appalling.) What is notable is that it’s very hard to recall any letters of protest about these horrors circulating in the university whose academics produced the Palestine letter, or indeed in any other university. (The chant ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!’ is heard, unchallenged, on the weekly Saturday marches in London. Atrocities which can’t be blamed on Jews simply don’t seem to be interesting enough. The self-important attractions of sweeping hyperbole about Israel were clearly too much for the letter-writers to resist. On that front there has been very little improvement in the last few years; if anything, matters have got markedly worse – the tradition of hostility is being steadily reinforced.
The Pleasures of Moral Purity revisited
Thirdly, we should consider the pleasures afforded by a strong conviction of moral purity. Thinking that you’re morally pure doesn’t of course guarantee the presence of the real thing – we can be seriously mistaken about our own virtues. And what people think of as moral purity varies, and it won’t be the same for a radical left-winger as it is for a radical Islamist. But when moral purity is genuinely present, it is generally a good. However, a powerful element in the drive for purity can be something which isn’t particularly good at all: the self-satisfaction indulged in by some purists at having reached what they see as a high moral standard, and very often the further self-satisfaction produced by contemplation of the moral inadequacy and inferiority of their adversaries. In fact this contempt often spreads beyond the adversaries to focus on anyone who fails to condemn those adversaries with sufficient force and venom. This kind of satisfaction is by no means peculiar to the issue of antisemitism; perhaps one of its purest manifestations was among the witch-hunters of the 17th century. But we can certainly see it in aspects of anti-Zionism today – the readiness to boycott any organisation which might be thought to have any connection with Israel, or any person who refuses to reject all sympathy with it, to the extent that ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zionist’ become dirty words, used to automatically dismiss the legitimacy of such people and their views.
This dismissal of people who do not reject every aspect of sympathy for Israel can be seen in the recent brouhaha at the Soho theatre, where the comedian Paul Currie invited his audience to give a standing ovation to the Palestine flag. When one man refrained from doing so, the comedian screamed at him, with the usual obscenities, to ‘get the fuck out, motherfucker’, and members of the audience began to chant until the man (an Israeli) and a few others left the theatre under a barrage of calls to ‘get out’ and ‘free Palestine’. The theatre management has apologised fulsomely, but the comedian has not, and instead has published praise for his actions by another comedian. It does look as if he, and his chanting audience, are pleased at the hounding of Jews from a public space.
The drive for purity is a drive for moral rectitude, and it’s regularly found in a wide variety of political disagreements. It’s particularly evident right now, with thousands of people in the UK marching to the chant of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’. This is the claim that it is not enough for Palestinians to have a state of their own; what’s required is the elimination of the Jewish state. Those calling for the destruction of the state of Israel, however, are often silent about what this means for the actual people of Israel, since the obvious implications of death and destruction might impugn the moral rectitude of those calling for that elimination. There is, however, the spectacular exception of Hamas and its vocal supporters, who openly declare that Palestine will be made free by killing all the Jews. Hence we get the hideous example of small Palestinian children declaring that they want to fire missiles at the Jews and be martyred like their father. They look happy as they say this.[12] (The children are not, of course, to blame, but those who taught them, and those who permitted them to be taught in this way, certainly are.) The Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh spoke on 26 October, a fortnight after the attack on Israel, about ‘the blood of the women, children and elderly … we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit.’[13] We needn’t doubt that Haniyeh feels himself to be morally pure, beyond moral criticism.
The drive for purity, with its hidden orientation towards the high status of the purist, is also illustrated by some of the language on display in pro-Palestinian marches, such as the claim that ‘we cannot stand and watch what’s happening’, the constant reference to ‘Resistance’ (with its echoes of the war against the Nazis) as a descriptor for the torture, murder and kidnapping of 7 October, and slogans such as ‘smash the Israeli terror state’, with its implications of an urgent need and desire to use extreme physical power. It also, almost inevitably, involves the further embracing of hyperbole. Similar issues to the ones we have seen associated with the charge of genocide also arise with the charge of being an apartheid colonial state – it serves to increase the apparent political understanding and importance of the person making the charge, without involving anything like a commitment to the truth about Israel’s history and present state. There is no colonising mother country for Israel, which is full of refugees fleeing discrimination and persecution in Europe, Russia and most of the Middle Eastern Arab countries. Notwithstanding the falsehood of the hyperbolic claims, they are clearly very satisfying to make, since they establish the speaker as admirably hostile to colonialism, and many on the Left (and some on the Right) are anxious to be seen in this light.
Another purist claim which is sometimes made is that being pro-Palestinian and hostile to Israel puts the speaker ‘on the right side of history’.[14] Given the track record of human history it’s not so clear that that’s an entirely desirable state, but in any case, for anyone who has seen the film Cabaret, it inexorably summons up images of the beautiful young boy singing in an angelic voice, ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’. But he was a fascist, and part of the point of having the song there in the film was to emphasise that at the historical moment in which the boy was singing, and for some time afterwards, the chances were that he was right. The spectacle of the current state of Syria, or Libya, or Sudan, does not suggest that the arc of history always bends towards the good. Grandiose and completely indemonstrable claims about the verdict of history are ways of asserting the moral importance and purity of the anti-Zionist stance, an assertion which is always satisfying to make. And reinforcing that satisfaction is another rather darker motivation: if Israel, the Jewish state, can be seen as thoroughly immoral, in breach of our currently central moral concerns, then no-one hostile to it need feel any guilt about ongoing antisemitism, or previous neglect of, or participation in, racist attitudes or behaviour towards Jews. Jews retrospectively deserve the bad things that have happened to them, and this happy outcome safely insulates the anti-Zionist from unwelcome criticism of her views.[15] This is yet another source of satisfaction provided by anti-Zionist antisemitism.
Overall, it looks as if the ‘pull’ account of widespread and currently increasing antisemitism, according to which a significant reason for its prevalence is the pleasure and satisfaction which the antisemitism provides, is at least as convincing now as it was in the past. This is not to say that more purely cognitive errors play no role in generating these attitudes: there are of course many cognitive failures in understanding which contribute to the explanation of the pervasive and intense hostility, in parts of both the Left and the Right, to Israel and to the Jews who support her. But since many of these erroneous views, such as the much-repeated claim that Israel is a white settler colonial genocidal apartheid state, are manifestly false and easily correctable, it does raise the question of why they are so common, and so commonly clung onto rather than revised. It seems quite plausible that the answer lies in the fact that antisemitism, and the prejudicial anti-Zionism which so commonly accompanies it, provide some deep emotional satisfactions for those who embrace with relish these discreditable and often deadly views.
[1] https://m.jpost.com/international/british-film-director-rise-in-anti-semitism-understandable
[2] For further discussion of the appeal to a push factor in explaining antisemitism see Norman Geras, Alibi Antisemitism in Fathom, Spring 2013, also in Alan Johnson (ed.) Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays, Routledge 2023.
[3] See Eve Garrard, The Pleasures of Antisemitism, in Fathom, Summer 2013, and in Alan Johnson (ed) ibid.
[4] For these and further examples, see Fathom, ‘The Universities in Crisis’, November 2023.
[5] See Decoding Antisemitism’, Sixth Discourse Report on Antisemitism (in the wake of 7 October 2023): Centre for Research on Antisemitism, (ZfA, TU Berlin.)
[6] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67869624
[7] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-01/ty-article/hamas-official-we-will-repeat-october-7-attacks-until-israel-is-annihilated/0000018b-8b9d-db7e-af9b-ebdfbee90000
[8] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/israelopt-palestinian-child-activist-ahed-tamimi-sentenced-to-8-months-in-prison/
[9] https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-protest-icon-ahed-tamimi-arrested-for-calling-to-slaughter-settlers/
[10] See Nick Cohen and Dave Rich, in nickcohen.substack.com, 9/10/23
[11] See Izabella Tabarovsky, ‘Soviet AntiZionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism’, in Johnson (ed) ibid.
[12] https://www.memri.org/tv/young-children-hamas-member-muhammad-al-homs-killed-ahmad-jaabari-we-want-be-martyred-our-dad
[13] https://www.memri.org/reports/hamas-leader-ismail-haniyeh-we-need-blood-women-children-and-elderly-gaza-%E2%80%93-so-it-awakens
[14] See, for example, https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/owen-jones-isnt-a-journalist-hes-a-propagandist-cxz8vm93
[15] See Philip Spencer, The Holocaust, Genocide, and October 7th, forthcoming.
