For a deeper understanding of Israel and the region

Fathom highlight | We Need To Talk About The Way People Talk About Israel / 16 October / 2019

This week’s Fathom Highlight offers three pieces examining worrying trends in contemporary discourse about Israel. Academic expert Matthias Becker calls for a new qualitative research strategy to understand online antisemitic hate speech, which he claims is still largely terra incognita, despite its central role in recent attacks from Pittsburgh to Halle. Leading US public intellectual Michael Walzer identifies the point at which left-wing criticism of Israel tips over into antisemitic forms of anti-Zionism. Cary Nelson reviews a worrying new study by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy about the proliferation of social media hate speech and why it is ‘becoming more virulent … and increasingly intrusive and aggressive’.

Our Image of the Week is activists protesting against violence on women, following the murder of a young Israeli woman by her husband last week, 12 October 2019. Photo by Miriam Alster. Flash90.

Our Voice of the Week is BBC Journalist Frank Gardner in conversation with Prince Khalid, Saudi Ambassador to the UK, discussing the security and political challenges faced by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. RUSI event, London, 14 October.

Understanding Online Antisemitism: Towards a New Qualitative Approach

by Matthias J. Becker

Matthias Becker is a research fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at TU Berlin and the Center for German and European Studies (HCGES) at University of Haifa. After conducting several research projects on the use of antisemitic language in political and media campaigns he is now examining antisemitism in the British mainstream. In this essay he argues for the development of a new qualitative approach to understanding what he claims is still largely terra incognita: the ugly world...

Voice of the Week

Image of the Week

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
by Michael Walzer

Michael Walzer is editor emeritus of the democratic left magazine Dissent and an advisory editor of Fathom. He argues here that ‘when it comes to...

Book Review | Behind the Mask: The Antisemitic Nature of BDS Exposed
by Cary Nelson

‘The world would be soooo much better without jews man.’ This post from a social media account appears in the new September 20019 100-page report...

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