PLO

28 September 1982.

To my brother and sister Arab Jews, oppressed in Israel.

My brothers, my sisters, I am writing to you from the depths of a prison where I am being held as a revolutionary, in the same country from which you were chased. It is now twenty or thirty years since the lies of the Moroccan Jewish bourgeoisie pulled you into the trap that is Zionism. The discriminatory and racist politics of the majority of the Moroccan Muslim bourgeoisie did the rest, even whilst you were under the supposedly protective tutelage of the Moroccan regime, itself nothing but a feudal subjugator, reinforced by the racist brutalities of the police. Since 1961, this regime never hesitated to sell you off to Zionism.

My brothers, my sisters, I address myself to you in order to speak of your future and the future of your children. I would like to speak to you about the struggles you will have to undertake, if you have not already, to guarantee your children the justice, the peace, and the dignity that your exploiters have denied you up until the present, in your country of origin just as much as in the land of Palestine; a land which you were assured would be a happy and welcoming one for you, with a state, the state of Israel, that you were told was founded by your Jewish brothers.

Your brothers; what bitter irony! They are your oppressors. They despise you, only calling you ‘Oriental’ or ‘Sephardic’ to further deny your identity, and in their own jargon referring to you as ‘schwartze’. They deny you access to education, to skilled work, to dignity. They reduce you to workhorses for the most backbreaking of labours and to cannon fodder for their army, with their senseless, criminal dreams of domination and conquest. They refuse you even the chance to exercise the religion that our forefathers practiced for centuries. They have transformed this religion of peace, of justice, of mutual respect, into one of hate, of war, of injustice.

What a shame for the sacred memory of our forefathers! Murderers like [Menachem] Begin and [Ariel] Sharon, having their mercenaries massacre women, children, the old, in the name of Judaism. What shame; what sacrilege!

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

Begin posed as someone who would put an end to the racism and the discrimination of which you are the victims. Begin is a terrorist trained in the fascist, Hitlerian demagoguery of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist party: a party that can accurately be described as a Jewish variant of fascism, with which he marched in the 1930s in brownshirt, chanting ‘Germany for Hitler, Italy for Mussolini, Palestine for us!’ This fascist demagogue claims that the discrimination which you suffer is merely the result of Labour Party policy. But has racism and discrimination decreased over the five years that Begin has been in power? Has your lot improved? Quite the contrary. Has Begin’s placing in his cabinet – like a puppet – a careerist such as David Levy changed anything in your life, in your misery? Your future and that of your children remains just as impassably blocked, whilst the madness of colonisation and conquest never stops worsening, dragging you further into cycles of massacres and death. Going from a Peres to a Begin or back again will not and cannot change anything: The situation will remain thus, as long as this oppressive, racist, conquering regime persists.

Indeed, the root of the problem is not to be found in the knesset’s puppet show. It is in the racist nature of the regime that oppresses you, a nature that cannot be altered by a change of leader nor of party, but only by a radical change of the regime itself. In Israel, such a change could never come through the parliamentary way. It will be the result of struggle – of your struggle and that of all those oppressed people who are suffering under this yoke. And in your case, the first thing to do is to bring your fight to the streets.

Remember my brothers, my sisters, how the demonstrations of the Black Panthers almost twelve years ago shook the regime far more than a dozen electoral cycles would. You have expressed your anger – but without organisation, without a programme, without definite objectives. As a consequence, this historic movement was appropriated by professional politicians and thus lost to the quicksands of Israeli “democracy”: a democracy like that of Ancient Rome, in which you are the plebeians, kept in the slums and in ignorance; a democracy that for you means oppression, and for the Palestinian people, massacre; a democracy where real power is held by a barbarous military junta made up of solidly fascist generals, from Raphael Eytan, to Mordechai Gur, to Ariel Sharon. The deeper reality of this regime, founded on the racist, expansionist essence of Zionism and its organic alliance with imperialism, is that it is a forward military base for American imperialism’s domination of the entire Middle East – a military base of which the Euro-Americans, the “Ashkenazis”, are the pilots and technicians, and of which you are the workhorses and cannon fodder.

Such is the reality of this regime; such is its nature!

It is founded on a racist ideology, one which has nothing to do with the religion of our forefathers and which was rejected from the beginning by the rabbis of Europe, of America, and of the Arab countries. This ideology was only able to impose itself as a result of the capitalist Jewish bourgeoisie taking it up in the context of first Britain’s, then America’s conquests. The Zionist leaders did not hesitate to use the Nazi holocaust to drag the whole of European and American Jewry into their venture, making them, as required, the objective accomplices of the holocaust. In 1938, for example, Ben Gurion was opposed to every offer of evacuation of German Jews to England and the United States (see his 17 December 1938 letter to the Zionist General Council).

Zionism, this racist and chauvinist ideology born from the crisis of Judaism in Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century in the context of European colonial expansion, is contrary to all the traditions and all the achievements of European Judaism: The same tradition that gave the world Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, and so many others.

Zionism is contrary to the glorious history, spanning more than a millennium, of Arab and Mediterranean Judaism, which was historically forged in symbiosis with Islam within the Arab civilization. The splendour of al-Andalous’ golden centuries continues, moreover, to illuminate our culture through works such as the Zohar: an expression of this symbiotic relationship that did not cease to bring its message of fraternity and justice from the bottom of the valleys to the very tops of mountains, and across the plains where our mothers and fathers laboured. Since it reaffirms the essential content of the biblical message – a universalist call for justice and human dignity – the Zohar is opposed to the distortions that the ancient Hebrew state itself introduced (for the purposes of its dominant classes), as well as to the various legacies of that same tribal fanaticism.

Today it is Zionism, this tribal and racist ideology of modern times, that exalts fanaticism. Witness how the criminal Zionist leaders and the sacrilegious rabbis, created by and in the pay of the Zionist apparatus, deform the biblical message and deny its fundamental reality – one which has, through both Christianity and Islam, won over half of humanity. That message, enriched by the Gospels and Liberation Theology, served as a clarion call for the oppressed masses of Latin America; that message which, throughout history, has been the unshakeable core around which Judaism has maintained itself, despite all persecution. Thus the sacrilegious Zionist leaders overturn the religion of our fathers, transforming it into an ideology of racial hatred and war. This ideology, and the state apparatus which upholds it, has incessantly aroused in you a hatred of our Palestinian brothers – of our Arab brothers – only in order to make cannon fodder of you, as required for their criminal, senseless projects.

Zionism, an ideology that issued from colonial Europe and that is a foreigner to the historical essence of Judaism, is above all an ideology of war and conquest. The aim of Zionist leaders – the aim of Ben Gourion, who had nothing but contempt for you and your culture – was to create a “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates. As bloodthirsty a villain as Sharon, crazed with ambition, pushes for still more conquest, wanting to impose Israeli hegemony from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean – even into the heart of Africa! The Lebanese war, the massacre of the Lebanese and the Palestinians, the death of your brothers and of your sons who died only to satisfy the dreams of Begin, Sharon and other Zionist leaders: this entire parade of crimes and tragedies is but another phase of the insane fantasy pursued by the Zionist clique with such great perseverance for more than half a century. Every means is acceptable – lies, crimes, wars – none of which will end except by the defeat of these dangerous men and their political and military apparatus.

This ideology of war and conquest, this ideology of insane rogues, is above all a racist ideology. It is the Jewish counterpart of Hitlerism. Hitler made the Jews the least of the ‘races’ … along with Arabs. Zionism does not change this hierarchy, other than to make Jews the first of the ‘races’.

It is imperative and indeed urgent to put an end to the myths of the “Jewish people” and the “Chosen people” on which the Zionist ideology is based. These ideas, born in the tribal period of the history of the Hebrews, must be rejected in our era . Do you form one people with your oppressors? What an insult! Both the Arab Jewish and European Jewish traditions view this notion as having a purely religious content: the “Jewish people” is therein analogous to the Islamic “Ummah” or to “Christendom”. As for the idea of a “Chosen people” – whose inanity Spinoza has shown – the great Jewish thinkers of Andalusian mysticism and their Arab successors understood it as a requirement that Jews behave, wherever they find themselves, justly: thus they would encourage the advent of God’s Kingdom on earth, bringing a reign of justice and peace forall people. Today, in a time when the great religions have abandoned their pretensions of superiority over other faiths and when dialogue between believers and non-believers is finally allowed, it is time for Judaism to definitively move beyond this notion. Thus it would conform to the universal content of its own religion as well as its historical dynamic, and could thus overcome the fatal regression that Zionism has caused.

Indeed, as Martin Buber has written, “Once religious rites and dogmas have become so rigid that religious feeling is no longer able to alter them, or even comply with them, then the religion itself becomes uncreative and therefore a source of falsehood.”

Martin Buber speaks out against the ultimate mendacity of such a tendency without understanding that it is inherent to the fundamental logic of Zionism. This logic wants to reduce Judaism to the tribal mores it knew two thousand years ago, making Judaism another form of racism. It proclaims the State of Israel a “Jewish state above all”, just as Hitler proclaimed Germany “Aryan”.

In order to achieve its mythical, mad objectives, Zionism must above all erase “the Arab”. It must first of all disappear the Arab Palestinians as a people without hesitating to resort to genocide, as in the cases of Sabra and Shatilla, and indeed throughout its long and bloody history since 1948, at Deir Yassin, Qibya, and Kafr Qasim. Zionism must reduce the Arab to a sub-human, and certain ideologues are happy to justify this erasure. 

This is why Zionism, in its racist anti-Arab logic, wants to debase you too to this condition, even whilst proclaiming you as full citizens of the state of Israel as Jews. This citizenship is nothing more than the citizenship of the plebeians of ancient Rome. It is precisely here that the reality of Zionism is unveiled: you are Jews, but you are Arab Jews. Your conception of life, your culture, and even your practices of Judaism are rooted in the centuries-old past, in the lands of the Atlas Mountains, of Yemen and Iraq, which our ancestors contributed to shaping. An Arab culture that was as equally enriched by the Jewish Arab philosopher Moses Ben Maimoun as it was by the Muslim Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd; an Arab culture of the interwoven songs and dances of peasants and artisans, of Muslims and Jews, from the mountains of Yemen to the oases of Tafilalt.

My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters, oppressed in Israel – hold your heads high! This culture, our culture, is a culture of peace and justice, of harmony with nature, of familial and social warmth, and of fraternity and dignity.

What is this so-called “culture” that your oppressors want to impose? It is a mechanism of death and hatred, a world of bunkers and shrapnel that uproots the thousand-year-old olive tree in order to displace Palestinian peasants, and that makes of you slaves of Euro-American capital and indeed as the intended victims of its military maneuvers. What is this so-called “culture”, my proud and dignified sisters, that reduces many of you to prostitution? And you, my brothers, to unemployment and the misery of slums?

Hold your heads high! Wrest your freedom and your dignity from oppression! Destroy your oppressors and build a just society, a society of peace and fraternity!

My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters, oppressed in Israel, I am writing to you because even in the summer of 1982 – marked by the bloody reality and murderous insanity of the Zionist political-military apparatus, culminating on Rosh Hashanah, crimson with the blood of the innocents of Sabra and Shatila – a prospect for peace nevertheless lies before you. In the face of the Camp David fraud, the road to a realistic and lasting peace lies before you, in opposition to this murderous insanity.

Such is the objective of the realistic program of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO), sole representative of the Palestinian people, as adopted in Fez^[1] alongside almost all the Arab states. I must insist that this program should be viewed as the PLO conceived it, that is, as a whole with eight inseparable points. It is important not to allow yourselves to be influenced by the propaganda claiming that this program is the PLO’s first step towards a capitulation, one which would converge with the projects of Ronald Reagan, Shimon Peres, and King Hussein.^[2] Those latter projects are incompatible with the raison d’être of the Palestinian revolution: to win back the homeland whilst taking into account the right to life, peace, dignity, and respect for the culture of Jews who, deceived by Zionism, settled on this land.

My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters, oppressed in Israel: I am a revolutionary militant. I have paid enough in struggle and sacrifices to be without personal ambition, and to have acquired a certain degree of lucidity. I know that the fight is hard, and that it will be harder for many years to come. I know that I will not personally witness the victory of this struggle, which is inevitable. It is with full responsibility that I am addressing you. I do not tell you to trust the heads of Arab states, whether feudal or bourgeois, kings or emirs, generals or colonels. You know the responsibility that they bear, both those who were and those who were not at Fez – a responsibility that lies in their false independence and in racist and chauvinistic demagoguery. They forced you to leave the land of your ancestors for your current exile: No, I will not ask you to trust them.

However, I know the people of Palestine, its militants and leaders. Strengthened by half a century of suffering and struggles, rooted in the millenial culture of the Holy Land, the Palestinian people are by far the most advanced of all Arab peoples. The Zionist rulers hailing from Europe, from Ben-Gurion to Begin, wanted to tear them away from this land where Muslims, Christians, and Jews have continuously lived in fraternal harmony for thirteen centuries, the imprint of which the Palestinians bear. The Palestinian people’s leaders and organisations were forged in the fire of one of the most difficult revolutionary struggles of this century; they carry the best that humanity has built in its long, painful march towards a society of justice.

Since the Palestinian people began their revolution, which allowed them to assert themselves as a conscious people with their own organisation — the Palestine Liberation Organisation, independent of any external control and their sole legitimate representative — they have continuously reassured all Jews settled in Palestine that there is a possibility of living in peace on this land. Whilst continuing their legitimate fight to liberate Palestine, they promise Jews full respect for their democratic rights and full equality of religion and language, under the condition that they renounce Zionism, which is in its essence opposed to a just and humane solution. Since January 1969, the Palestinian people have not stopped affirming this noble objective, each time more concretely. And, since 1975, they have clarified the steps needed to achieve it.

The Fez Initiative is part of this search for a realistic and viable route to peace. Certainly, it does not require Israeli Jews to renounce Zionism for specific, concrete steps to be achieved. The Palestinian people have reaffirmed, through the voice of their leader Yasser Arafat, their determination to maintain their legitimate resistance across all of the territories occupied since June 1967, and that by all means: “nothing more, nothing less”. The Palestinian people resists occupation and colonisation, as well as the terror inflicted by the leading Zionist clique, alongside their diplomatic efforts to implement the Fez Initiative.

My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters, oppressed in Israel! Personally, I am convinced that the Zionist rulers — Begin, Peres, and the military clique who are the true masters of the state of Israel — will by every means block such a route to peace, and will not hide it either. Nevertheless, it is the only possible path, since the Palestinian people will accept neither submission nor any other form of capitulation: they will never renounce their legitimate and inalienable right to win back a homeland that was forcibly seized from them. This path – the only path towards a just and lasting peace for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews – is contrary to the very essence of Zionism, which can only bring its unreasonable, fanatical project to fruition through the negation of the Palestinian people. Thus, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, however deranged it may seem, speaks to the objective of the barbaric and criminal Zionist leaders: to block this opening to peace, precisely because it is realistic and viable.

The path to peace is possible. However, it is only possible if you throw off the yoke of your oppressors, the yoke of the Zionist apparatus. What is Zionism for you, concretely? What has it brought to you other than evermore suffering and misery? It has killed even hope. What is Zionism concretely, if not an institutional, political and military structure that ensures – through its interpenetration with the Jewish capitalist bourgeoisie of Western Europe and the United States – the survival and strength of the Euro-American caste that oppresses you? Within this structure, Israel is linked principally with American imperialism, which itself views the country as nothing but a means of dominating the region and as an immense advanced military base – of which you are the cannon fodder.

By fighting against the political apparatus of Zionism, against Begin, Peres, and the others, and by refusing to follow its military clique in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, you will fight against the core of your oppression: you will fight both for your liberation and a future of lasting peace for you and your children in the Near East.

My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters, oppressed in Israel! I cannot, from my prison, thousands of kilometers away from the social and political reality that you live, tell you how or through which political and social organisations, whether they exist or are yet to be created, to proceed, though I aim to follow your struggle both with heart and mind. It seems certain to me that any organisation that claims to be Zionist can only reinforce your oppression, even as it claims to do the opposite. It also appears certain to me that you must get closer, within and for this struggle, to your Palestinian Arab brothers onto whom the status of ‘Israeli citizens’ was imposed. You must refuse to take part in any acts of repression aimed at our Palestinian brothers in the occupied territories, and in any military adventures, whether they be in Lebanon or elsewhere. Undoubtedly, you must fight alongside other progressive Israeli Jews, who work courageously for a real and lasting peace, for the evacuation of all territories occupied since 1967, and protest against the bloody and criminal maneuvers of Zionist leaders.

However, I do not think that this should prevent you from simultaneously asserting yourselves specifically as Arab Jews politically, culturally, and in all areas of social and political action. Take control of your culture and your identity; they are your primary weapons of liberation! But, of course, do not let your struggle be hijacked by these opportunists who only flaunt the label of “Sephardic” to better succeed in their careers and political ambitions, whether they be unscrupulous demagogues like David Levy, bourgeois politicians like Yitzhak Navon, or corrupt rabbis like Abouhatzeira, who tarnish the names of the long line of rabbis of the people, righteous and respected.

You are Arab Jews, my brothers and sisters; you are, we are, Arabs. You are also oppressed workers, and it is alongside your fellow oppressed workers, and above all, alongside other Arab workers, that you must fight your battle – all without allowing yourselves to dissociate from your identity. On the contrary, the more you can assert your identity in this fight, the more it can be incorporated into the shared struggle with all Arab workers and the oppressed of Israel, in the shared struggle with the first victims of Zionist and racist oppression, our Palestinian brothers, and in the shared struggle with all the progressive voices of Israel. With regards to the latter in particular, one must be careful not to counter the anti-“Oriental Jewish” racism of the Zionist political military clique with a reversed, anti-“Ashkenazi” racism. The more you are able to reclaim and reassert your identity, the more you will be able to overcome the divisions and mistrust between yourselves and your brothers in oppression and struggle: all of your brothers in oppression and struggle!

My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters, oppressed in Israel, to say more would be presumptuous on my part. This is an appeal for militancy, for dignity, for a future of peace and justice. In a secular state of Israel – freed from Zionist oppression and racism; having evacuated from all the territories occupied since June 1967 and rectified the injustices of the 1948 colonial aggression; having rid itself of the tutelage of American imperialism and its role as aggressor against the whole Near East – you and all the citizens of this state will be able to work fraternally alongside a Palestinian state, preparing for a shared future where the Holy Land, the land of Palestine in its entirety, will become a Palestinian, democratic, secular, reunified state. It would then be a beacon of light for all humanity, and above all, for the entire Arab region — not that of kings, emirs, generals and colonels, but founded by the Arab peoples, liberated from imperialist oppression, feudal and comprador reaction, and the so-called bourgeois saviours. Thus, in this glorious land of Palestine, in which fraternal unity has been reconstructed and taken to a higher level, Arab Judaism will be able to flourish. It will exist in creative and democratic harmony with all the other Islamic and Christian components of Palestinian society – an Arab culture and a Palestinian people of tomorrow. Similarly, the distinctive culture of those European Jews that the tragedies of history have discarded onto this sacred land and who remain attached to it, will be able to assert themselves and integrate into its culture, both themselves and their descendants. And thereby, simultaneously, the spiritual home of Judaism as a religion – the objective need for which is the only explanation for the irrational attachment that so many Jews across the world have towards the state of Israel as a Jewish state – would be attained in the Holy Land.

My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters, oppressed in Israel.

Such is the noble prospect before you. Such is the path that your vital struggle must follow.

Rise up against your oppressors, against the racist and criminal Zionist rulers!

For peace, fraternity, justice, for dignity, arise!

^[1] Translators’ note: the Fes Initiative’s eight-point document is provided in the appendix.

^[2] Editors’ note: History has unfortunately proven Serfaty - and the PLO majority which he was echoing - wrong on this particular claim. By abandoning the strategy that focussed on the liberation of the entirety of Palestine, the PLO opened the way for the Oslo accords, the institutionalisation of the Palestinian bourgeoisie within the structures of the Palestinian Authority, and the bantustanisation of its territory and people (see Farsakh 2005). Since this historic defeat, the Palestinian revolution has rejected this approach and returned to an approach which struggles for the liberation of the whole of historic Palestine, including in the lands colonised in 1948, and all of its people.

“However intense the hostility between Israelis and Arabs, no Arab has the right to feel that his enemy’s enemy is his friend, for Nazism is the enemy of all the worlds’ peoples.” Mahmoud Darwish

“Left-antisemitism” and “Muslim-antisemitism” are the two prevailing variants of the general discussions about antisemitism. We cannot consider these framings merely as “polemical” - that would assume a certain exceptionality – because they have come to present a common conduct in contemporary political public sphere. It matters that Palestine solidarity/critique of Israeli settler colonialism are the main issue that these frameworks relate to. There is a particular dictionary for the racialised other (depending on regional context “the” Muslim, Black, Arab, Maghrebi) or political nemesis as state subject (“the Leftist”), that dares to be unapologetic in its anticolonialism. Offered through a pre-packaged and ready-to-use villain figure - the Holocaust denying Arab speaking protagonist, the Muslims sharing a vigorously anti-Jewish culture, the dodgy Marxist shadily preoccupied with Israel - discourses on antisemitism often rely on Islamophobic and redbaiting tropes. When both tropes are in turn linked to a political conflict that is situated at the sharpest end of contemporary imperialism – antisemitism provides a normalised approach deployed by state politics, and more than ever detached from grassroots politics.

The term antisemitic indexes easy to remember formulae, attached to immoral qualities, that suffices for these kinds of peoples and their monolithic cultures. This was confirmed at a time when an edited collection about revolutionary posters from Palestine, curated for Lumbung Press, was being prepared. These posters were part of anti-colonial and progressive struggles and as a group we were intrigued and excited by the material in front of us.[1] Our activities ensued amidst an upsetting controversy over the supposed antisemitism surrounding Documenta fifteen exhibition in Germany. In retrospect, it seems unquestionable that the terms according to which we ascribe meaning and symbols related to visuals have fundamentally changed. In the light of what we know now (solidarity for Palestine is officially denounced and successfully problematised by the adoption of IHRA policy and banning of BDS across educational and art institutions and the highest political echelons), the poster collections would be interpreted in the now familiar hegemonic and negative way: as antisemitic. “Anti-anti-antisemitism” (denying the reality of antisemitism or refusing to fight the reality of antisemitism) and antisemitism function as negative metonyms: is like an empty-yet-deadly signifier. It creates permanent scandals, destroys reputations, and dismantles organisations, the moment antisemitism is gestured, its already too late: it is an adaptable and all-encompassing gesture that says it all. We don’t have to put matters in context, no need to consider the historic weight of imperialism or how the lasting impact of colonialism plays into contemporary racist systems and sentiments. It therefore does not matter that in the 1950s antisemitism was not a cause but a product of conflict in the region; nor does it matter that many Jewish progressives or Arab Jews do not fit this framework. Neither is an ethical contract that could (at least) provide some discursive accountability when using ugly normative labels, deserved. And it certainly has no value if a similar definitional option with regards to racism is meanwhile denied to other victims of everyday (Islamophobia) and state (Deradicalization) racism, these are (at best) second-class citizens that orbit outside a moral space: undeserving subjects with no concrete stake to protect.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

There is much to unpack here. My contribution here should in part be read as a review essay of The Arabs and the Holocaust by Gilbert Achcar (2010). Despite its meticulous display of how Antisemitism arose against the backdrop of Israeli state terror and regional conflicts it is rarely referred to in contemporary debates.[2] This book develops a strong set of arguments against the notion of ‘Arab anti-Semitism’. By re-engaging it now, we can push against the orientalist representations of a single Arab/Muslim discourse regarding Palestine/Israel. Achcar already called the then (frankly shocking) new development of IHRA in his book in 2010. It would be an untruth to claim the major backlash that followed a decade later was acknowledged then for what it would become. The belated introspection is therefore helpful because it provides historical understanding of important intellectual interventions that pushed against broader regression. That progressive intellectuals challenged a reactionary tendency within Arab political discourse that entertains Holocaust-denial, confirms that societies are liable to a changeable ideological pendulum which fluctuates in response to political formations, militarisation and social inequalities. This is contextualised around a decline of educational system and repression of free press that started in the 1970s, and when the left underwent repeated defeat.[3] The political vacuum was filled by a noticeably increasingly presence of reactionary forces backed by former colonial powers and (more prominently after the 1979 Iranian revolution) the US. But even when their parameters were declared irrelevant during 1980 and 1990s postmodernism or End of history paradigms, progressive intellectuals tirelessly analysed the political-economic role of imperialism and capitalism or how social relations produce political subjectivities. Achcar identifies two important historical and contemporary dynamics that shifted towards Holocaust topics. Firstly, political regression (especially anti-left crackdowns) saw the destruction of institutional workers and students’ movements and their institutional infrastructures in the wake of postcolonial dictatorships undermined emancipatory progressive universal values for humanist advances. Especially after the loss of progressive Nasserism that brought along reactionary wave that saw the PLO ousted from Jordan and expelled from Lebanon. This matters because Palestinian revolutionary forces had grown into a progressive political force over those years, becoming an intellectual transgressive reference point for the whole Arab speaking region of West Asia and North Africa. The political devastation of 1967 and 1982 created an intellectual retreat. The impact of its role as a progressive bastion weakened considerably. A decline can radiate across the region and far beyond precisely due to its disproportional importance.

The second dynamic that marks the Holocaust debate is the 1948 Nakba, while the history of Palestinian colonialism goes back further this moment which catalysed crucial political-cultural transformations should not be underestimated. The creation of the state of Israel dealt a heavy blow to the main ideological currents. While certain Islamists had allied with imperial forces (most) communist party members followed the political zigzags of Stalin. The fact that the latter hardly engaged helps explains the gap in archival material from that period. The traumatic events led a massive exodus that bore the longest and largest refugee population to this date. But the Nakba is either denied or ridiculed in Israel, and largely excluded from most Euro-American curriculum. Especially because it is unresolved it is not a matter of the past, the denial of the Nakba provokes another denial. Like an open wound that doesn’t close, this liminality provides an important explanation of the political refusal to use the term ‘Israel’ for instance. It is important to appreciate that, for many and especially those in forced exile in refugee camps still hoping to return, that this implies acceptance of the loss oftheir (street, house, estate, farm) Palestine.

Taken together, the double standards regarding the right to self-determination/violent repression of progressive movements produces different horizons; allowed the loss of an important progressive archive.[4] In a twisted logic: if recognising the Holocaust means accepting a settler-colonial racist state, then the holocaust will be questioned. But also, this is part and parcel of the way Arab, Israeli and Jewish left subjectivities has been relatively easy to deform and flatten. Going back and forth between the present and the early/mid-70s of these posters, confronts us with the choices, duties and intentions. To be clear, this article is not invested in cultural analysis or philosophical understandings of aesthetics, yet via the posters I branch out to these broader questions. We revisited these posters collectively - each bringing up different historiographic aspects. While taking serious culture in terms of understanding, interpreting and feeling material artefacts that carries a profoundly emotional resonance, refutes the erasure of essential parts of our collective histories. It occurred to me that this, the expunging of our different radical histories is an important yet often missing piece of the puzzle. In fact, because context matters even more when we consider the erasure of progressive and Arab Jewish radicals, I include figures such as Serfaty in helping me make sense of the present political positions.

As the criminalisation of Palestinian solidarity at major events like Documenta fifteen shows, indignation is racially codified. That is why riots, anger and rage are qualified as an inferior feature. But in particular they are about the wrong kinds of victims. This is not only a Palestinian issue. Every historical moment or political context has a deserving and non-deserving class. When mass protests and expression of anger erupted in the USA in 1950s and 1960s they were reduced to “race riots” by a “mindless mobs”. Martin Luther King answered that riots are ‘the language of the unheard'.[5] This is important because it reminds us that even if censored and pushed out of view, those at the receiving end of the silencing know otherwise. Ordinary people across the world are intuitively on the side of the oppressed because they see right through the dehumanisation that they themselves also experience. This is why community opinion public opinion is almost the opposite of state alliances with Israel, and why these inversions can be mapped onto the schism between position of most of the Global South and that of the Global North. That the broader audiences know instinctively where it stands makes this manoeuvring even more necessary. In the words of Fanon: ‘to wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of action which is very clear, very easy to understand and which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people.[6] Palestinians’ plea is dehumanised. To follow on from Martin Luther King “What is it that America has failed to hear?” what is the reality that the Lumbung community at Documenta fifteen conveyed that fell on deaf ears? The conditions in Palestine are enraging according to any objective or subjective measure, by removing a moral threshold through the antisemitism index, legitimate rage can be reduced to violence. To be deemed irrational and uncivilised as theLetter from Lumbung community in response to the report of the ‘scientific advisory panel’ of Ducumenta fifteen put painfully clear:

The report equates critique of the current violent actions of the Israeli State with hatred. … We reject it categorically. We refuse the intentional political manoeuvre that aims at separating struggles and dividing them from each other—dividing us from each other. We stand together, unconditionally and without hesitation.

Todays’ manifestation of racism is not different from what Martin Luther King notes about riots in the USA or Fanon about the colonised rage. Consider Fanon reflecting on his Concerning Violence “This book should have been written three years ago …But these truths were a fire in me then. Now I can tell them without being burned”. Wallerstein discussed this meaning:To be sure, he was an angry man and one who used angry language, but it was in fact a very controlled anger. […] the very opposite of spontaneous and unreflecting anger.  We recognise a pattern. Bigotry and Islamophobia makes it easier to project onto Muslims/Islam heavy charges (vengeance, enemies of freedom, paths to violence, rejection of modernity), to then render them unworthy of sympathy.[7] As the attacks on the Lumbung community and the Reprint exhibition at Ducumenta fifteen was raging in the background, I was pulled to a set of posters that displayed the kind of visual indexes (Swastika, Star of David, Kalashnikov, blue and white of Israeli flag) that according to racialised framework I outlined, can only mean the condoning of Nazism, proof that Arabs, Muslims, (or their leftist supporters) are Holocaust deniers. Without uncritical valorisation, I engage with this tough conundrum through the poster collections, their historical timeframe suddenly brought to light their relevance.

To unwrap this, I first build (Section 1) on Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust (2010). Albeit ignored in debates aboutanti-antisemitism ornew antisemitism, the book provides depth and context.[8] Undoing the dehumanisation is a crucial part of the undoing of the continuous violence that enables it. Concealing the violence and injustice of settler colonialism also maintains the ideological paradigms and cultural frames beneath it. To understand this dynamic, we need to also recognise the construction of a Palestine-radical left-Muslim as the all-encompassing subject of what the liberal mainstream is not. This requires consideration of the influence of structural racism and Islamophobia (Section 2). It shows that the “anti-antisemitism” signifier is an ideological construction that has little or no contribution to the struggle against antisemitism. Anti-Jewish racism and Islamophobia form two sides of the same coin. Conversely, the revolutionary posters convey a didactic message that, whilst certainly also attractive, strike an important balance pedagogy and aesthetics, I appreciate them as both material and vernacular objects. Their style, colours, chants reflect the radical 1960s, some of the posters show how struggles evolve, develop, and elapse. As the emergence of a New Arab Left and revolutionary guerrilla movements are crucial transformations - the negation of the right-wing clichés of reactionary movements or intolerant individuals that are always emphasized in discussions about people from the region - I attempt to unwrap their temporal situatedness (Section 3 and 4). Rekindling with this legacy is an antidote against historical amnesia and hopes to push against the dominant frame of antisemitism. This article tries to make sense of our particular conjuncture with regards to antisemitism. I propose that to do so we also need come to terms with the erasure of a left epistemology that had emerged from the region in the 1970s. Serfaty offered important class analysis of Jews and a perspective about local Judaism that is invisible in the debates about antisemitism. Pushing against this will help to explain that a flattening of complex histories and (Arab, Left, Jewish) subjectivities is a condition in the defence of Zionism (Section 5). Progressive Jewish interjections about liberation politics in general and also Palestine, are belittled precisely because they penetrate the hegemonic framework.

I. Arabs and the Holocaust

The current political contestation is the product of more than a century of history making. The region’s response to Israel has to be understood as one linked to military occupation and violent land appropriation, and it is a response discursively shaped by a state that always and primarily defines itself as Jewish state. Achcar contextualises religious/political positions about Jews and Judaism in a furthermore important history of European anti-Semitic racism which has a centuries-old fantasy-based hatred of the Jews. And shows this is different from a relatively more recent hatred about Israel felt among Arabs.[9] He untangles progressive Arab interventions and progressive liberation politics, from the reactionary forces that did entertain anti-Semitic tropes.[10] He shows how leftist politics and radical shaped movements across key historical moments; from the opportunities they seized to the limitations they faced.[11] The book at once exposes anti-Arab racism and develops strong arguments against the notion of a pervasive ‘Arab antisemitism’. He insists that what is referred to as the ‘New’ antisemitism is not a timeless continuation of anti-Jewish opinions being accredited to Islam, but - albeit fuelled by the Arab-Israeli conflict - this is a deeply ingrained anti-Jewish tradition in Christianity antisemitism imported from Europe.[12] He quotes the pro-Israeli scholar Harkabi For Arabs and Muslim anti-Semitism is not a cause but a result;[13] and orientalist Bernard Lewis: “For [European] Christian anti-Semites the Palestinian problem is a pretext and outlet of their hatred”.[14]

Judaism and Islam share many similarities through more than seven centuries Islamo-Judaic civilisation between West Africa, Southern (Iberian) Europe and West and East Asia. Judaism is artificially coopted into Christianity and employed as a paradigm by states that merely seven decades ago had the most systemic industrial destruction of its Jewish people. This is not to deny anti-Jewish stereotypes or racism, past or present (and he names and shames Arab Holocaust deniers), but to reiterate why the sentiments in the region stems from colonial projects and hardly exist as a concept before WWII.  We have to account for how (ethnic, religious, cultural) minorities are subjectified, racialised, and politicised in any given dominant social relation. Nonetheless, despite the insignificant role in Nazi politics among Arabs, thousands of pages have been written about Arab collaboration with Nazism. The entry on al-Hussaini in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust is much longer than that of Goebbels, Himmler and Eichmann. If we pause for a moment and process this, it is actually shocking for the cruel reality is that al-Hussaini’s propaganda – however imprudent – had no real impact before, during or after the Nazis were in power. Achcar distinguishes between opportunists, ideological apologists and those acting deliberately. Achcar engages the important study Philip Mattar that tackled the recurring claim that Amin al-Hussaini – the Mufti of Jerusalem– wholeheartedly identified with the Nazis. Al Hussaini is sometimes described as a proponent or supporter of the mass murder of Jews. And even if there was "fascination from a distance", al-Hussaini’s tactics were the exact same [just in reverse][15] as that of Churchill who said I would ally with the devil himself against Hitler. The point is that these are not “Arab” or “Muslim” positions, butreactionary views or conservative coalitions.

 The Palestinian posters show a much more complex picture, and thereby help us reclaim a part of history against dehumanised and ahistorical distortion. It is essential to pause and look back. Not only to reclaim a part of history, but also, to appreciate the posters for how it teaches us about a collective and progressive heritage that has weaved valid criticism of Israel and Zionism with progressive anti-racism from the 1960-70s. The Tokyo and Brussel collections posters survived from one of the richest intellectual episodes of our regions; they are cutting-edge in terms of progressive politics that still radiates through them. The openness was created both by the very fresh experience of anti-colonial resistance, inspiration by ongoing liberation struggles (Palestine, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique). The emerging Left movements – with its critical position in trade union and student movements would put them in stark opposition with many of the conservative (postcolonial) states. Many transgressors – feminists, trade unionists, students, and artists – questioned the social order and debated the strategies and tactics for a truly emancipatory project, including questions about identity, minority communities. Those same intellectuals also discussed the difference between Judaism, Zionism, and Israel while these historic episodes should not be romanticised, the impacts of those debates were far more transgressive exactly because they were part of actual political mobilisations and thinking about both the means andends of revolutions. This is why thesubjective flattening and the purging of progressive histories from public memory is crucial with regards to contemporary recollections of earlier eras. The waning of transgressive paradigms and fading of revolutionary horizons is a crucial presentiment of the shift during the 1990s during which the political forces and ideological dynamics worsened with the restructuring into a ‘new world order’, the acceleration of the 2^nd Intifada was the background of this contradictory periods imbued with protest. And this is how the Holocaust discourse transformed in the 1990s into a stable political ecology, as discussed by Achcar; a new imperial context (First Gulf war, September-11, Second Gulf war) evolved to the disparaging Muslims as thereal theonly thetrue perpetrator of antisemitism in the Global North. But this ‘enemy within’ helped mask European anti-Semitism. This is why it is unsurprising that the controversy of Documenta fifteen happened in Germany.

In Germany where Dokumenta was held, this has particular consequences. According to legal scholar Nahed Samour, in Germany who is considered a threat to society is so racialised and triggers exceptional legal measures reserved for the ‘potentially dangerous person’.[16] In Europe, the issue of antisemitism is directly linked to Israel via the history of WW2. Both have grown as closely linked to Islamophobia. Lean shows in The Islamophobia Industry the many overlapping characteristics across campaigns, blogs, pressure groups between Islamophobic, right-wing Zionism and evangelical Christians, the latter ardent supporters of Israel and not only for Old Testament/Biblical reasons.[17] This is why a double layered racism consisting of cultural dehumanisation and historic erasure (later in this paper) are at the centre of my analysis.

II. Anti-antisemitism as the sacramental stage for Islamophobia

The merging of Israeli colonial objectives with the ‘War on Terror’ meant that the Palestinian liberation struggle was reduced to ‘counter-insurgency’. This is code for horrific practices behind house demolitions, detention of all men of a certain age, and the targeting of civilian spaces and populations.[18] This context encouraged a deepening of anti-Arab sentiments that itself could feed off of anti-Muslim racism. Because the extreme violence is also followed by much louder anti-war protests, the construction of a pro-Palestine-Left-Muslim as everything the liberal mainstream is not, becomes even more instrumental for dehumanisation. Meanwhile, the ‘War on Terror’ allowed Israel to push forward, and ‘conflict’ eclipse all possible international policy frameworks about the Second Intifada. Equating Palestine with terrorism rationalises Israeli colonial occupation more easily. From this follows that the life of a Palestinian or Muslim should not be represented as moral equivalence, as a ‘militant’ it appears less valuable: the wrong kinds of victims for who neither empirical fact nor moral objectivity are relevant. And when dispensable: bombing cities, assassinating journalists; detaining children; entertaining fascists; inviting far-right leaders; tolerating Holocaust deniers, are not red-lines.[19]

As Lean (2017) notes (via Khaled Hroub), how Hamas’ views and analyses of Jews and Zionism evolved, it had dropped its 1988 Charter and adopted a more explicit inclusion of the Holocaust narrative and supported the proposition to include the history of the Holocaust in school curriculum.[20]  But none of this is typically mentioned. Besides a denial of a colonial context, the reason for this absence relates to the familiar pattern of projecting the other is against change. When the other isstatic it allows for the continuation of racist articulations of the (uncivil) ‘other’. The biased dynamic produces reactionary societal norms such as in the demand that ethnic and religious minority communities condemn what society at large fears; in fact it has become the key ritual that governs national security. The reality of post-9/11 is mapped onto systemic racism, which also continues from what the Stop-and-Search treatment of mainly young black men. Framing Muslims as a security liability has produced an tacit acceptance that the state must keep the public safe from harm by disciplining potential terrorists, represented as the Muslims including determining their ideas along moral measures that delineate culpability. This is why calls to condemn haunt us; follows us; threaten to overwhelm us; silence us as put by Qureshi.[21] As part of the broader ‘hostile environment’ there has been a deepening of suspicion of (assumed to be) Arabs and Muslims. The policing of especially black and brown subjects has turned into a disturbing direction by how the ‘duty to report’ engender a culture of “snitching” though. As the authors of the letter from the Lumbung Community collective stated ‘This [newly crossed] line marks a racist drift in a pernicious structure of censorship. […] For months we have continuously faced smearing attacks, humiliations, vandalism, and threats in major media outlets, as well as in the streets and in our spaces. […] What is even scarier is the normalized dismissal of these actions’.[22] The racism feeding such debates fully legitimates the refusal to assume responsibility for acts by individuals and apologies on command. Moreover, it’s a set-up because we cannot speak without first verifying our humanity.[23]

But what is this humanity? If it is already decoded as someone already a potential terrorist, radical, antisemite, etc. what remains? In the UK, the focus on deradicalization, and surveillance transpired clearest with Prevent (2016), and this opened the door to IHRA (2020), and together these allowed for a climate in which we saw the submission of the National Union of Students in the UK (NUS) through the Tuck report (2023).[24] After such policies were (forcefully) imposed in higher education as an ideological tool and aggressively enacted through threats of withdrawing funding to universities (legislated imposed Tory MP Williamson under Boris Johnson was meekly adhered to by many VCs) more critical work has emerged. As I show below, the same Islamophobic stigma that operates here also prohibits that Swastikas being decoded as a condemnation of the violence of settler colonialism and precludes David star as the reference to a state rather than religious community. As mentioned later, these are (moral) comparisons that are not allowable in any case. Is this all about fighting racism and battling anti-semitism? This supposed calling out of ‘anti-anti-semitism’ begins to depend on a particular definition as the crux of what came to be a new ‘truth’ about the fight against antisemitism. This imaginary perception contradicts reality and is more about Israel than about Jewish people. Perhaps that’s why, deep down the discourse demonstrates onindifference according to Lapidot.[25] He demonstrates that it focuses on a certain perception of Jews, and even in its official focus on hatred toward Jews, there is no real relation to real Jews.[26] Moreover:

[S]omething inessential, beyond love and hate, beyond anti- and philo-. The anti-anti- is in this sense, beyond binary logics, where negation of negation means affirmation, a double negation that means stronger negation, anti-anti- that is more negative—not to say more exterminatory—than anti-.[27]

In his extensive engagement with the scholarship of anti-Semitism, he argues that the division between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia - between Arab and Jew - that has been generated is further reproduced in the notion “anti-anti-Semitism”. This makes sense because targeting specifically hate against Jews helps: “to uphold the division between Jew and Arab, between Jew and Muslim is to reproduce the origins of racism and at once”.[28] Citing Judaken, Lapidot argues that anti-antisemitism merely reverses the “dictums of antisemitism without problematizing the axiology and doxology that underpin antisemitism.”[29] In other words, there is perhaps a whitewashing of the past and clearly a disconnect “between the history of anti-Semitism and the current struggle against it.”[30]

Yet, the fact a lot of “anti-anti-semitism” critique mimics what it seeks to resist is not random for it clearly serves to close off any critical debate.[31] As Qureshi testifies, his completely legitimate – in fact necessary – attempt to put events within wider historic context and proposes to understand what prods the actions of someone like “Jihadi John” (Mohammed Emwazi, a British Muslim who joined ISIS in Syria in 2014). This was immediately assume as agreeing with said action. This is bizarre but that’s also why it’s so important not to regard it haphazardly. As seen with the organisation Cage that Qureshi was part of and with the scandals over Documenta fifteen; these framings are extremely functional to policies that have the power to invalidate organisations and indict individuals. It is not unimportant that this particular ideology serves to silence especially those that are standing in solidarity with Palestine. Organising the politics of silencing is a simply way to describe the outcomes of policies like Prevent and IHRA. Overextending the category of antisemitism to include anti-Zionism complements official Israeli state strategy. The workings of ideology take particular root with a concept like “new antisemitism”. But not only does it obfuscate empirical evidence as Salaymeh agrees with Lapidot, she identifies this as part of a longstandingcoloniality trinity.[32] Put differently, caricaturing opposition to colonialism as “new antisemitism” is not essentially colonial butbecomes colonial when they are universalized and forced upon colonized peoples. It is crucial to understand Israel as a settler-colonial state and in turn as part of an imperial power relation via Europe and North America as key allies because as a universalizing ideology, coloniality asserts both its applicability and its superiority over colonized epistemologies.[33] In earlier research Salaymeh demonstrates this mechanisms when the distinctions between antisemitism (prejudice or discrimination against Jews), anti-Zionism (opposition to the ideology of Zionism), and criticism of Israel are deliberately muddled. To understand the extent of its tenet she focuses not on the more self-evident IHRA, but on the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) which came up as an alternative definition that included those with anti-Zionist views. But despite its oppositional stance to IHRA. And yet, the effort failed because JDA in essenceshares a similar colonial theology, taking the secular ideology underlining this approach further: it essentially generates both Judeophobia and islamophobia.[34] The concept of Judeophobia may be both transhistorical and transcultural, but it does not have essential or universal characteristics because both knowledge and intention contribute to the situatedness of Judeophobia. Thus, the expectation that what may be Judeophobic is something natural or static is false because it relates to local framings, experience and histories. This is crucial because the argument that only Jews should define antisemitism justifies these claims.

Likewise, if Jews should not be asked to criticize Israel, then they should not be asked to support Israel and if from this could follow that it is wrong to regard Zionism a Jewish conspiracy, then it follows that it is equally wrong to allege that anti-Zionism is an antisemitic conspiracy. This argument around authorship and representation, echoes the debate about discursive ownership of the classification of oppression, in the UK this is often cited in relation to the Stephen Lawrence racist murder trial and it has been exploited in the debate about anti-semitism too.[35] For, as Salaymeh argues, since there are dissenting opinions within identity groups about what is offensive, members of identity groups cannot create a consensus on what the group considers offensive. What one individual identity group considers prejudicial may be itself prejudicial against another group as the qualification of BDS asantisemitic is also clearly demonstrates this is not only an example of racist reductionism directed towards (pro-) Palestinians, but also against anti-Zionist Jews. In this paradigm, the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine can be normalised and instead of being identified as an urgent problem relegated to the mundane.[36] Social fears and desires for security are exacerbated to empower the broader dynamics of colonial states, and normalize the violent oppression of colonized peoples. Popular fear of new antisemitism or censorship of anti-Zionism must be situated within wider “national security” fears. While Global North states heighten fears in order to justify their security measures, it mainly benefits the (elites of the) military industrial complex.[37] This is a consequence of the combined effect of exaggerated fear in the global North combined with the normalized colonial violence in the Global South, as Salaymeh adds. Since this resonate with the fear during the decolonisation eras of the 1960s/1970s, the wars following September-11 must be reassessed through this earlier experience. Especially as the climate of protest and a new generation of movements meant a rediscovery of early revolts.

III. Anticolonial Constellations

The temporal moment of the radical left – including the aforementioned leaps in progressive intellectual traditions – had social implications. One of the most influential ideological strands in the region’s politics has been (secular) Arab nationalism. This had important consequences for the political theories that structure the political strategies. Nasserist’s mostly rejected the explanation that an international Zionist movement controlled the US; Israel was considered the ‘imperialist base in the heart of our Arab homeland’. This anti-imperialism was appealing and gained popularity, and this is why the ‘Nasser = Hitler’ dictum began to be deployed. It should not surprise that in Western hegemonic historiography (if at all) Nasser is most likely be mentioned slanderously and numerous cases taken out of context. Nasser had publicly repudiated the ‘throwing Jews into the sea’ mantra and consistently identified imperialism as the key enemy. One such case is the major outcry when Nasser authorized the death sentences against two Egyptian Jews in 1955. Achcar puts the conviction in context of a large-scale terrorist operation prepared by Israel that included spies.[38] The critique of capital punishment is legitimate but it must be remembered that Egyptian Muslims convicted of espionage were also executed, oppositional communists suffered this fate later, and the judicial killing of the Rosenbergs, two American Jews for communist conspiracy in the United States saw a different uproar. The different frames of reference employ ethical baselines that are lopsided and therefore insincere.

Putting anti-colonial demands and political-economy above culture meant targeted Arab lackeys too, as Nasser said ‘… Arab leaders say Israel and the Jews. They are afraid to say England’. This independent spirit emerged at the background of a progressive Arab intellectual mindset in the 1970s. Pointing to this difference between the political Right and Left program is essential against false essentialism. Palestinian intellectuals developed some of the most radical analyses concerning antisemitism and the place of Israel after decolonisation, taking pains to differentiate between Jews and Zionists. These were also part of heated debates and disagreements, but they were discussed openly often in magazines and during events. Numerous progressive Arabs disprove the idea that it is “impossible to see Jews as victims while you are victimised by them”. Achcar offers in a discussion of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish statements (cf. epitaph) “Nazism is the enemy of all the worlds’ peoples”. Its vision was a democratic, secular, state for all inhabitants. Heated debates were discussed openly. The deep frustration with the international silence nurtured for the political Right and conservative forces diverted widespread resentment about the imperial carving up away from (materialism) imperialism andtowards (culturalism) Jews. Progressive thinkers were a bigger threat to the Zionists (and later Israel and Israel’s allies) than any reactionary conspiracy theory. Israel’s liquidation campaign of progressive political cadres and actively helping to crush left-wing movements. Meanwhile this was backed by Western states who also supported right-wing dictators subservient to them, the hugging and handshaking of dictators that entertain anti-Jewish conspiracy is testimonial.

Somehow it is understandable that this era – one could even argue the most progressive till date – is hidden. Where comprehending the globally connected era we live in used to make sense in reference to progressive justice and transgressive rebellion, it became filtered through the negative. The assassination policies globally in 1960/70s meant the near complete decimation of the revolutionary left (I refer here to black radicals in USA, left political parties and trade unions in South American West Asia, North Africa) and has resulted in a historic amnesia, is unsurprising. The balance of forces in which the left operated were extremely contradictory: eventually the progressive left was unable to develop because of the counter-revolutionary violence. Progressive thinkers were a more significant threat than any reactionary conspiracy theory; people like Abu Iyad and Ghassan Kanafani were assassinated. It inhibits a vision that is in tune with certain balance of forces and political order. That is why we should consider the rejection of antisemitism (at least in part) more a modality than a principle through which antisemitism is given discursive and political meaning. Relating this to the posters with Jewish Symbols convey the political contradictions and represent the uneven awareness they inhibit. the statements and their representations on these posters have meanwhile changed too – for better or worse – what do both sides of the paradox tell us about the current political state of affairs? In some an anti-Zionist gesture while in others, it collapses Jews with Israeli murder. The aesthetic symbols in the circulation of political culture that marked these radical ideas are important for how it transcends across movements and to reverberate from the specific to inspire the general.

IV. The Mediation and Rediscovery of Progressive Arab epistemology

The reason I tie this artwork to the debates about Zionism and antisemitism raised by Arab radicals in the 1960s/70s but occluded in mainstream historicising, is that the inspiring images that are also deliberately erased. I kept returning to some of the configurations on the posters, my reflections on the Palestinian revolutionary posters (and the sentiments they concurrently reveal and conceal) changed in light of the extreme conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and the endless assaults on Palestine solidarity that occurred around the same time. The examples I selected from the poster archive replicate the contradictory debate in different ways. these visuals mediate the political contradictions of symbols and their interpretations. On poster 1 we can see a swastika, with the word “Fascism” superimposed on a bleeding background and a fedayeen profile (holding a Kalashnikov and wearing a kuffiye) composed on the right bottom space. In the circular area of the enlarged S just above the swastika is a Star of David. Poster 2 depicts three David Star figures - each with an image corresponding to the words Expansion, Oppression, Occupation. And on poster 3, Jews not Zionists hovers over a picture of two Jews in orthodox attire, walking in what seems like East Jerusalem, above it the framed slogan Zionism is Racism. The texts are in English, Arabic and Hebrew. While poster 3 conveys a progressive pedagogical meaning with Jews, not Zionists, poster 1 and 2 seems conflate a religious symbol with a political ideology.

If we look again, the combination of the colour blue and the lines suggest it is a reference to the flag, the flag of Israel. This suggests the accusation pointing to a violent (the blood drops dipping) settler-colonial state. On poster 1 and poster 2 the symbol is also referencing that of the state’s flag. The visual choices and aesthetic placements are projected with a proxy message. Even if the conflation of Judaism and Zionism connote bigotry, it is not a given that the design pointed to a community. Why would the design per-se point to a religious group and not a nation-state? As discussed in Section I, there certainly was also ignorance. My assessments of these visuals lie precisely in its ambiguity. Like all movements, these posters are products of their time, with strengths and limitations that are in turn specific to their conditions.

An important explanation of the deterioration of the principal rejection of anti-Semitism there also lies in the political failures lead to intellectual defeatism. But another example of Achbar’s study of left-wing archives that helps here is the reversal; rather than minimising the Holocaust, Arabs began employing it. Edward Said tirelessly pointed out how the popularity of antisemitism was a reflection of ideological regression for the important transformations of the 1990s. Political defeat in the broad sense, but also the historical injustice of Palestinians in particular, became a breeding ground for the acceptance of European antisemitism. The warm reception for the French Garoudy and his holocaust denialism was added cultural significance when he converted to Islam.[39] Progressive Arab intellectuals explicitly rejected to grant Garaudy legitimacy and argued that his pseudo-intellectual critique has done great damage to the Palestinian cause in Europe. This kind of new politics added to the simplistic interpretations of the Jewish David star and the “Zionism = Nazism” slogan on the posters. Whilst in fact these expressions are often-misconstrued because underlying them are fascinating reminders of longer history of a thinking Arab communists devised in the 1930s against anti-Semitism. In the equation in the slogan “Zionism = Nazism”, the left called for equal aversion for both. The Nazi genocide was not disputed in mainstream Arab discourse. This progressive intellectual stance was correctly summarised as a rejection of competition between tragedies. Crucially though,competing is not the same ascomparing. And yet the attempt to compare has grown into one of the strongest contentions: the in-comparability of the Holocaust.

Alost any comparability – be it aesthetic in the form of swastika or discursive in the use of the term – is now akin to antisemitism. In this anti-intellectual approach neither intention nor context is relevant. To return to Achcar, trivializing Nazi references has a longer history. David Ben Gurion calling Menachem Begin ‘another Hitler’ and Leibowitz called IDF soldiers ‘Judeo-Nazis’ during the First Intifada as Achcar documents. Numerous leftists and outspoken (Israeli) Jews also get the label ‘anti-Semite’ in smear campaigns. This all meanwhile devalues the history of anti-Semitism. But comparing and relating does not need mean that we to flatten our histories and subjectivities. Indeed, it is important to differentiate between the plan to wipe out a population because they resist imperialism or are an obstacle to an expansionist settler colony; and the industrial mass murder to satisfy a vicious desire born of ethnic hatred for theuntermench; wiping out Jews, and Roma, Sinti for the fantasy of breeding a pure race. But sometimes the layers of different stories overlap and certain experiential aspectare analogous, this is not a controversial historic fact. A native population disappearing through killing and forced exile, the Nakba was a genocidal extermination, I believe that is why Darwish added to the aforementioned quote: ‘It is not overly severe to say that the Israeli Zionist behaviour towards the original people of Palestine resembles Nazism’. Why is drawing at parallel offensive? Such an approach is both anti-intellectual and turns historical episodes into metaphysical events. The Holocaust was a terrible act of human beings against other human beings, a historical event, and therefore as Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues it must be compared.[40] Besides claiming this comparative ontology, the linking of oppressions is a transgressive act mediated by the poster. Yet, to state what is by now the obvious: doing this in the context of Palestine/Israel became extremely controversial and itself an act of antisemitism.

This tells us that over time new political modalities have allowed a very selective subjectivity and ideology to correspond to the moral credibility of certain struggles which may even contribute to its moral claims to disappear. In the singular narrative of the antisemitic Arab or monolith reactionary Muslim, a dynamic, living and breathing, epistemology is categorically denied. Hence, what needs to be subverted or at least made visible, is the epistemology that underlies the discourse of Semitism as Lapidot argued above. The challenge is not only to remember the Jew and the Muslim, but to access Jewish and Muslim memories, where Jewish and Muslim do not only exist as Christian others, as “Semites.”[41] Indeed, comparisons between Judeophobia and Islamophobia result in political controversies in the global North precisely because they challenge the Eurocentric and colonial notion of Jewish exceptionalism and highlight liberal legalism’s contemporary protection of colonial (Zionist) Jews.[42] Comparing themselves to Jews is both an emotional motive and tactical source among Muslim communities in Europe, yet this explanation is overwhelmingly ignored as part of a strategy as a result of the dehumanization Muslims. As Salaymeh argued, contemporary European states do not recognize anti-Muslim expressions as hate speech because they are not forms of discursive violence against global North states or their colonialism.[43]

In a sense, I consider the posters as mediators of the contradictory realities and uneven progresses that were specific to their conditions. These posters are like artefacts that provide small slices of a complex history, inhibiting certain ambiguities which have flattened out over time. They hark back to a context in which resistance movements produced ideological transformation with ground-breaking debates a new epistemology embedded in notions of liberation and freedom. I tried to understand why this transgressive knowledge is so hard to find. The disappearance of political movements was necessarily removed from universal ideological visions reproduced. The additional erasure concerns the subjective antizionist Jew and Arab Jew. I realized they are a missing piece of the puzzle, as profound figures of the Left they need to be deleted from collective and political memories. This includes revolutionary thinkers and historical figures such as Mehdi Amel, Mehdi Ben Barka and Abraham Serfaty. And especially the latter is crucial to our discussion about anti-semitism. Thankfully, the progressive shifts emergence, with the Arab uprisings and major protest movements in recent decade, has meant a rediscovery for new generations.

V. Historical Amnesia: The other Jew

My brothers, my sisters, I am writing to you from the depths of this prison where I am held, in the same country from which you were chased. It is now twenty or thirty years since the lies of the Moroccan Jewish bourgeoisie pulled you into the trap that is Zionism. The discriminatory and racist politics of the majority of the Moroccan Muslim bourgeoisie did the rest, even whilst you were under the supposedly protective tutelage of the Moroccan regime, itself nothing but a feudal subjugator reinforced by the racist brutalities of the police. Since 1961, this regime never hesitated to sell you off to Zionism (Abraham Serfaty, Letter to the Damned of Israel. 28 September 1982).

As witnessed during the preparation and then opening of the Dokumenta fifteen exhibition, the convergence of Palestine with antisemitism is a habitual - if not deliberate reference. In this atmosphere we can better understand German law enforcement going as far as prohibiting Palestinian solidarity protests, arresting those carrying Palestinian flags. This is related to familiar pattern whereby the experience of the Jew is the definite polemic. Section 3 shows that people who engage in discussions about Palestine/Israel often experience this formulaic trait that renders them antisemitic. Sometimes it is explicit, at others more subtle as when a critical opinion is countered with ‘As a Jewish person I [am shaken, upset, disappointed, offended]’. This is echoed in the rushed condemnations and accusations of pro-Palestinian art exhibitions and a warped interpretations of the revolutionary posters as antisemitic. Of course, the first question is, which Jews? With endless examples of Jewish critics, organisers and Palestine supporters, there clearly is a highly selective method in the application of this rule. Enzo Traverso has discussed that putting Jewish sufferings into a unique historical place and antisemitism in a separate European legal cadre is also about obscuring European responsibility. How does the repositioning of European industrial violence onto Palestine, implicate antisemitism? There are two levels at play to inverse the burden from the message to the messenger behind the assumption that only Jewish people can reflect on policies or opinions related to Israel. This is what Lapidot, Salaymeh and others reject (Section II). But if it was up to pro-Israel opinions, the antiracist and revolutionary chapter of Jews is all but forgotten.

At the start of this essay, it was stated that an open-minded ideology becomes a buffer against analytic reductionism or political short-cuts. But intellectual regression of progressive movements and emergence of chauvinist personalities compels the disappearance of such radical constellations. This amnesia includes versions of erasure. One is cultivated with the disappearance of the progressive intellectual Arab theory and praxis. Even though a less biased historical reading teaches us about these radical movements as discussed above.

The dismissal of a transgressive legacy - in all its ambiguities - erect an essentialist profile of an antisemitic culture at the expense of this revolutionary constellation on a second level. Nazis, fascism and counter-revolution killed millions of working-class peoples, decimated progressive cadres, and prevented the materialisation of important humanist visions and transgressive alternatives. Here I consider this decimation to be part and parcel of the denial of Jewish diversity that includes revolutionary legacies. Jews were integral to movements for justice, either as part of national liberation or in opposition to their oppressive rulers, kings and sultans, and often the prominent personalities of the 1960s generation. Whether Abraham Serfaty (in Morocco), Henri Curiel (in Egypt), Daniel Timsit (in Algeria), or, Daniel Bensaïd (son of Algerian Jews in France), who belong to the revolutionary left and voiced strong opposition to the displacement of Palestinians from their land and regarded Zionist representatives who were encouraging local Jews to leave with distrust. To fully understand the complexity of Jewish Arab regional affinities we need to take a step back to consider how the colonial power. They established the bases for fractures in Arab society across religious lines and divisions with Amazigh identities through official censuses.

The position of Jews in the region shifted both with the creation of the state of Israel and with colonialism, but both dynamics were played out together in the way Jews were considered by British colonial powers as allies in Middle East imperialism or by the French colonial powers as potential settlers in Algeria as they were outnumbered by those they aimed to rule. Through the legal orders and material statuses of the Cremieux Decree Algerian Arab Jews were given French nationality and thereby turned into extensions of the colonial project.[44] They constructed outrageous racial categories to divide indigenous populations and while it caused enormous damage in the years that followed this serve as an important example of how colonisers positioned Jews - ‘lifted up’ into French civilisation or in direct opposition to the majority of indigenous Muslim populations – but that far from liberating Algeria’s Jews this segmenting and segregating along ethnic, religious, and geographical lines where eventually its own breakdown.[45] Meanwhile, France could simultaneously oppress Jews in the metropolis while ‘freeing’ them in Algeria. As Englert succinctly put it: “They were to be used as both a stick against the Algerian Muslims and a shield behind which to hide the motivations for the violence and oppression of the French colonial state.”

These pre-existing conditions that allowed the state of Israel to further exacerbate divide and rule both in terms of extracting Arab Jews who became settlers and in harming Arab social and cultural stability. This is deployed on different levels supporting states that rival with Arab states for regional dominance with military backing or alliances with minority groups were cultivated – and the current normalization deals with Arab states are the clearest outcome of Israel’s goal for acceptance of its existence in the region. Ethnic divide and rule are sometimes downplayed as ‘conspiracy’, but those who have been under colonial rule know how common this was (and still is) and that is why Cremieux should be studied alongside the 1950s policy known as the Alliance of the periphery. Developed by David Ben-Gurion (first Prime Minister of Israel), Israel began to develop close strategic alliances withnon-Arab partners in the region (through legitimate national questions) for its own foreign policy strategy. This was primarily utilized towards Turkey, pre-revolutionary Iran and Imperial Ethiopia (including Eritrea). As Takriti discussed with regards to a particularly strong Kurdish-Palestinian affinity, this “peripheries strategy” weakened the Arab sphere on which Palestinian liberation ultimately depended.[46] There are important implications in the long run, even when they don’t reflect popular opinion. We could say that this continued with top-down normalisation policies that flourished in recent years. But it was in essence a marriage of convenience, thus even while not build on genuine sentiments it successfully counteracts (united) opposition of Israel.[47] This has been difficult to maintain where official normalisation agreements between states are popularly rejected. A more contemporary digital manifestation of Israeli Hasbara, is not unique and has been a consistent part of these histories of divide and rule, propaganda; political distraction; sowing internal division.[48]

One of the context-and-language specific, yet systematically ignored is the use of Jew. For Arabs who have lived with Jews for centuries ‘Jew’ was the common reference, not a slander. This is in part because the Israeli politicians, generals, civilians who legitimise massacres, expulsions, house demolitions, consistently call Israel a Jewish state. This argument will not be accepted because of the stubborn image of the peoples of this region as forever anti-Semitic. Although easily ridiculed for being a false apology, ‘Jew’ became the norm because there was no Israel. But the erasure of local Jews is another reason that “their” hatred of Jews as a primordial fact is problematic in a region where the Jews are part of the “them”. In the proposition by Abraham Serfaty theArab Jew is the subversive subject from within the region, one that rejected Zionism. Our region knew and still has deeply rooted Jewish communities that were allied with or led progressive and socialist movements. Several scholars (Nadi, Guebli, Heckman, Englert) provide a rich collection of studies and while there is no lack of scholarship, this is less so in popular knowledge and the absence of this Arab Jew allows for senseless matters to makes sense. I therefore share the point by Nadi that we should not allow the erasure of a specific Jewish view from Arab analysis of antisemitism and we should neither confuse them into a universal Jewish people (which effectively means European).[49] We have a choice to amplify dissident voices and what we learn collectively may take us forward. Here, it is not about a unique or exclusive essence, but to understand how formations of community and identity are part and parcel of emancipatory politics; of the productive possibility to join against a shared oppressor whilst holding onto communal conditionality. Serfaty argued that not Moroccan-Jew but the notion Zionist-Moroccan was the real paradox. Whyshould we leave their homes to settle in someone else’s, Abraham Serfaty asks as he regarded Moroccan Jews asexiles in Israel. And he continues inLetter to the Damned of Israel (28 September 1982):Do you form one people with your oppressors? What insult! […] They forced you to leave the land of your ancestors for your current exile.

Conflicts between Moroccan Jews (Arab and Amazigh) and Muslims did not only occur with the establishment of Israel because it also connects to a social hierarchy and political economy of racism. Muslim and Jewish Moroccan bourgeoisie often supported the politics behind Israeli recruitment of local Jews. Prejudices against Jews were promoted by the bourgeoisie and adopted by others. Moroccan Jews were torn from their country (especially since 1961) both through racist politics and Zionism. Chauvinist conceptions of identity had to be dealt with head-on based on principles. Zionist mobilisation of Arab and Amazigh Jews was part of a broader debate about the place of minorities on the radical left. Ethnic recognition and cultural equity, whether Jews, Sahraoui, or Amazigh, are a basic condition of progressive epistemology. This could not be relegated to an after-thought and certainly not covered-up by an abstract ‘Pan’ one-fits-all identifier.

A social analysis was crucial according to Serfaty, the exploitation and division allowed by class society means "[T]he big commercial and petite-bourgeoisie to get rid of the poor Jews – especially the Jewish peasantry of the Atlas Mountains and of South Morocco – who became the favourite target of Zionist recruiters, to resettle them in Israel. Regarding the departure of 45000 Moroccan Jews between September 1955 and June 1956 […] the poorest and the most vulnerable became the target of recruiters with the tacit, if not explicit, the backing of the bourgeoisie, both Jewish and Muslim, who got rid of this authentic Judaism”.[50] The Moroccan left conceptualised the different ways in which Palestine was deeply connected to local, regional and global politics through which it became a crucial issue as El Guebli put it.[51] Serfaty’s lifelong dedication to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. His participation in trade unionism and his opposition to the King of Morocco were intricate to his Arab-Jewish heritage. Zionist erasures of local Jews is appalling and a logic that dictator King Hassan II applied to Serfaty himself. He immediately exiled him on the false charge of Serfaty never being Moroccan but “actually” Brazilian, the moment he was released in 1991. At stake is a recovery of a rich heritage that avoided the marginalisation of minorities, the broader debates about identity and affinity is part of the universalism of Arab progressivism. Most progressive Jews from the region considered Zionism a European phenomenon. The social condition of Arab Jews is also constructed by from colonial and social conditions. The extent to which Serfaty’s antizionism related to his reflections shaped his analyses about the social conditions of Arab Jews and the Arab subject as the main threat to Zionism. This political thinking is crucial for an analysis of antisemitism. To confuse them into a “universal” Jewish people (which means, in reality, European Jews) shows why Serfaty understands “identity” as a social category rather than a liberal (individual) or cultural category and focused ostensibly on the class basis of “identity politics”. To him it was a critical error for pan-Arabism to ignore the question of minorities, especially since Zionists were the oppressors of Arab Jews that also denied the specificity of their identity as Arabs.[52] These approaches were of course dangerous to the opportunist and conservative status quo and the capitalist ruling class and made visible how reactionary forces used Palestine as a fig leaf. As Al Guabli attests it was “not just a critique but also a forward-looking project to give a new meaning to the left and its anticipated revolutions”.[53] When Serfaty speaks of “European”, “Arab”, “poor”, “rich” [Jews] he did not address “Jewish” as a sort of universal identity, he refuses a homogeneous “Jewish subject” that collapses Arab Judaism in the general History of Zionism. Their radical left politics was also part of a “strategy for Jewish inclusion in national liberation politics shed light simultaneously on Jewish politics in Morocco and the wider MENA region and on the phenomenon of Jewish leftist politics more globally” as Heckman argued.[54] Unconditional support for the self-determination of the oppressed was a significant development that proved crucial. This is why Serfaty committed himself to the struggle for Moroccan independence, Saharan self-determination and Palestine liberation.[55] But there is a different option.

Therefore, the erasure of a particular Jewish revolutionary Internationalism is also at stake, thus a positionality that is neither limited to the Arab-only, nor standard Euro-American historiography.[56] Heckman beautifully reconciles the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism with the more marginalised North African case studies. Heckman discussion of progressive Jews and via Hannah Arendt more politically as the conscious pariah. There continues to be a robust critique of the state of Israel for over a century, and which Lorber notes is, buried under the mistaken assumption that all Jews have consistently supported Zionism.[57] Thus when we expand this legacy to understanding Palestine politics, it loses what is considered a key argument. That is why I suggested that the erasure is multi-layered, political amnesia doesn’t work as singular modus. Put differently, not only the Arab Jews are unworthy of being mentioned, but also progressive, anti-colonial, internationalist Jews. Moreover, debates often revolve around what constitutes antisemitism. The denial of anti-Zionism as an important strand within Jewish communities across the world is not a surprise. For example, the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania considered Zionism the bourgeois answer to the Jewish Question and as Lorber discusses, they regarded the call for a Jewish state anescapist response to antisemitism. Not many Jewish immigrants in the US were looking to the other side of the world, they opted to improve their material conditions and advocate for workers’ rights and social status in and through movements. As Lorber argues: ‘For many decades, the heart of a vibrant secular Jewish Left beat not for the upbuilding of Jewish settlements in mandate Palestine but for the Scottsboro Boys, the struggles of workers in factories and fields, the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the movement to defeat Nazi Germany, the unfolding progressive vision for a more just and equal world’. From figures in ANC, leaders in the Marxist tradition (Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky), Jews joining the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Alan Wald describes “this consideration of the past [Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism] in the present cannot occur as the tracing of a straight line but only as a shadowing of the contours of a slow spiral […]. It is a past that must not pass because it once carved deep and distinctive tracks …”.[58] Recalling the story of anti-apartheid activists arrested (1963 Johannesburg) with Mandela and trialled (Rivonia Trial) with severe sentences, among them was a noticeably disproportionate Jewish participationinside Black liberation.[59] Nonetheless, it is important to beware of cultural essentialism in all cases. By the same token that the Antisemite Arab does not exist as a given, theTransgressive Jew is not a primordial fact either. Even if this is conveniently hidden to the benefit of an anti-Palestinian, Israeli, white Jew. Alan Wald points to the phenomenon of a Revolutionary Internationalist as thepotential actuality of multiple identities. It grows from basic reminder that one’s emancipation is always bound up with the emancipation of others:

There was and remains no consensus as to whether being Jewish is mainly a religious, cultural, ethnic or national identity. What is pertinent [is that] individuals then made a choice in political outlook and behaviour that is known as Revolutionary Internationalism.[60]

The Jew and the Arab share an oppression which is constituted by racist hatred that directly touches on the realm of definitions in which there is no space given to the progressive and anticolonial Jew. This shows us the (unintentional) overlap with which Lapidot gestures to a certain indifference that ends up organizing both anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism.[61] The interpretation of whole sections of Jews is side-lined. The notion of new antisemitism is effectively an alternative to the bigoted terms “Muslim antisemitism” and “Islamic antisemitism.” Unsurprisingly, European states deploy these notions in order to discipline Muslim communities.[62] That is also why it is argued that, if anything, the European framework for hate speech regulation should be contextualized within Europe’s own past and present Judeophobia and Islamophobia. By recovering grassroots socialist movements rooted in Yiddish as the language and the Jewish working class, is important here. Sai Englert describes the importance of fighting where one is, alongside the people one lives with, as beautifully conjured through the notion of Doykayt (here-ness) for the Jewish Bund, which was “conceived as a rejection of both Zionism and separatism to argue with Jews about the importance of changing the world, their current world.”[63] We should thread lightly when asking whether its lessons tell us something exclusively about Jews or about the human condition as a whole. Sai Englert urges for an interpretation of Jewish history in light of ‘Judeo-Jewish’ thought in which Jews only act for Jews, and others act against them and thus across a particularistic and universalist focus:

It is a question resolved newly every generation, depending on context, in one direction or another. If the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe represented the universalism of Jewish thought and action, the second half has undoubtedly been dominated by a narrow particularism.[64]

But because of what Achcar, Englert, Heckman, Lapidot, Lorber, Nadi, Salaymeh and Wald also show in this article, I take another lesson from this perspective too. This is about the simultaneous existence of ordinariness and uniqueness of what can be considered a “moral universe”. This seeks ways to disseminate a radical pedagogy from the inspiring intellectual legacy of Arab intellectuals discussed above and the Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism. I refer to understanding political struggles who share an understanding of capitalism and decolonisation, that produces an analysis situated in a “world system that requires that discrete challenges against exploitation locally must of necessity work in harmony internationally. […] an elective affinity with a heritage animated by a global, supra-national identity”.[65] We therefore cannot regard antisemitism only as the inert history of Hitler. We must for example remember the anti-Semitic targeting of Jewish leftists under US McCarthyism.[66] Serfaty was part of anticolonial consciousness, not unlike many on the left. And yet, as a Jew he was also conditioned because of how the antisemitic law of the Vichy Regime during World War II targeted Moroccan Jews. Serfaty symbolises the Doykayt subjectivity. As Sai Englert note, the socialist Bund did not consider Jewish history or movement separate or distinct from the histories and movements of the societies in which they lived. This is why the signifier “Jew” in debates about antisemitism becomes the arc, and why as Lapidot (following Gil Hochberg) argues we must take on the critique against Zionism as “Europe’s way to cleanse itself from its two modern historical crimes—anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and colonialism on the other—by transferring their weight onto its primary historical victims.”[67]

A Radical Pedagogy

They reduce you to workhorses for the most backbreaking of labours and to cannon fodder for their army, with their senseless, criminal dreams of domination and conquest. They refuse you even the chance to practice the religion that our forefathers continued for centuries. This religion of peace, of justice, of mutual respect, they have transformed into a religion of hate, of war, and of injustice. (Abraham Serfaty, Letter to the Damned of Israel. 28 September 1982).

The posters I began this essay with, were works of art, but it was immediately recognisable that they were first and foremost made as part of struggles. Because the deliberately one-dimensional manifestation of such expressions remains astounding, these ground-breaking products of transgressive politics that must be historicized adequately. The anti-colonial politics were side-tracked by unsubstantiated accusations and a racist bias. But despite how these admonitions were mapped onto these political artefacts, the impending revolutionary reverberations of the posters are something to treasure. They bring to live political causes that carry as their ethical compass the importance of radical solidarity and activist alliances. An important conclusion for the progressive left is that the struggle against anti-Semitism cannot be separated from the struggle against contemporary Islamophobia. This idea of progressive reciprocity has been replaced by another, a very curious, kind of trade-off. I refer to what the excavation of Palestinian politics shows through the prism of rituals and political performances related to antisemitism. And that this teaches us a cruel yet crucial irony about political strategies.

In 1998, the White House (Dennis Ross) pushed for a token of peace in the form of some sort of formal acknowledgement of the Holocaust. The US state department and Palestinian negotiators for the Oslo Agreement thus organised a visit to the Holocaust Museum (Washington DC) by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.[68] This approach is critiqued for the obvious reasons (why bring Palestinian into the fold of what is a European complicity and crime in what was eerily similar to an apology?). Yet, the cruel irony is that even this tokenism cannot resist the deeply ingrained racism and islamophobia reserved for Palestinians. The museum director refused to invite president Yasser Arafat. Only after much diplomatic pulling and embarrassing conditions (Arafat was not to enter officially as a political leader, neither as president the Palestinian people nor head of PLO, merely on a personal title did he concede).[69]The main point here is that – aside from how little sense it makes for Palestinians or Arabs to immerse themselves in deflecting European antisemitism or apologising through ritualistic acknowledgement for the Holocaust – such a performativity is either ignored, suspected, or plainly rejected. I mean that it doesn’t actually do what it aims to do. But this is merely another side of dehumanisation. Entertaining antisemitic opinions did not always endure. Achcar gives examples A shift towards a clearer stance also notable in the political evolution of Hezbollah (Nassrallah undermined anti-Semitism in many speeches). And if we recall the aforementioned sheikh Jamal Mansur supporting the Jewish narrative of the Holocaust, did his measured proposition to include the general school curriculum history make any difference? Not really, as he was assassinated a year later. Mansur was one of the thousands of deadly targets amid a popular uprising (Aqsa Intifada 2000-2005) that changed the course of the Palestinian history.[70] The Oslo peace agreement in reality only brought defeat and the Israeli military occupation continued. This had its toll. It would frankly be odd if after the failed peace process of the 1990s, the Second Intifada, the 2006 war on Lebanon, Cast Lead Gaza’08-’09, 2012, 2014 anti-Semitic conspiracies had not grown. A deterioration of progressive politics opens the space for reactionary interpretations.

This essay called for moving the focus away from conservative cliches, reject the rehashing the right-wing conspiracies in leftist spaces, and engaging more explicitly with the transgressive examples that our radical histories endowed us with. To adhere to progressive approaches with a universal vision and anti-racist ethic, is a risk. But as the scholars I cite illustrate: the milieu and intellectual sharpness was there all along and still offering inspiring lessons for today; even if the debates about Zionism and antisemitism raised by Arab radicals in the 1960s/70s are occluded in mainstream historicising it is our heritage. Most relevant in terms of historical contextualisation is that there is an essential connection between defeats and political failures and a deterioration of the principal rejection of antisemitism. I attempted to tie the lost history of progressive politics that challenged antisemitism to the question of what the revolutionary posters simultaneously reveal and conceal. By illuminating some of the voices via the politics of Jewish radicals such as Abraham Serfaty or Darwish in that important (regrettable small) window of Palestinian and third-world intellectual history through these posters, their impact continues to reverberate. Not only did progressive intellectuals provide important lessons for revolutionary resistance, they argued against divide and rule, the importance of including minorities and the universal rejection of the Holocaust. The rediscovery for contemporary activists is happening at once in a subjective and philosophical way, on the level of representation – getting acquainted with Jewish Arab radical legacy matters – and on the level of ideology – revising transgressive epistemologies that expand the mind.

Rather than closing off the discussion, this provides us with two crucial possibilities. The temporal moment of radical left- and progressive thinking, what ground-breaking leaps were they developing, which radical ideas and symbols marked these, and how has this transcended to reverberate/inspire others but has been deliberately erased and silenced. No secular (anti-imperial, anti-capitalist) struggle can be successful if it tried to erase cultural and religious specificities.[71] Looking back, however, is never about reproducing linear developments, it’s always contradictory. We need to move away from binary approaches and simplistic answers because our histories are uneven. Arab Jews in Israel are both complicit in a colonial projectand itself oppressed in that colonial project. Andboth local antisemitismand Zionist recruitment in collaboration with the dictatorship of Hassan II explain the large relocation of Moroccan Jews to Israel. That is why Serfaty thought explicit participation of Arab Jews in anti-Zionist politics and the unequivocal identification as a Jew in Arab political spaces are transgressive act. The intentional decimation of that radical window was necessary precisely because of its transgressive potential. Intellectual regression and political pessimism gradually detach the compass of movements from earlier progressive politics and transgressive ethics that harboured a particular political agency in wider society, and eventually attracts conservative cynicism. Revisiting that process also points to the counter-revolutionary assaults on Palestinian solidarity are precisely what the erasure of this radical history facilitates. The opposite, way increasing reactionary influence of KSA in the region, or whether GCC funding, normalisations with Israel, domestic crackdown, the relegation of progressive radicalism is therefore part of the story.The virtually constant accusations of antisemitism faced by critics and activists is part of this reactionary list, what the ‘scientific advisory group’ of Documenta fifteen in Germany did or the adoption of IHRA in the UK does, does not feel different from what repressive bodies in the region do.

If only it was for real concerns about antisemitism. To rephrase Lapidot, anti-Semitism is a political performance that disregards, forgets, or obliterates its own concept. Semitism is the (Western Christian) double invention of “Judaism and Islam—the Jew, the Arab.” are generated essentially as enemies, objects of hate.[72] Moreover, the hypocrisy of Western liberal ideals are the seed for right-wing conspiracies. A familiar pattern, is that Muslim migrants in Europe are told to accept Islamophobia in the name of free speech. With every accusation of racism when they exercise free speech in condemning Israeli Settler colonialism; and with every racist assumption about Arabs or Muslims that underlie debates about Palestine, distrust and cynicism will bloom. Here we should recall that Zionism was locally considered an extension of European colonialism in much the same way that French colonial divisive policies (Jews/Muslims, Arabs/Amazigh) were farcical. The practice of colonial favouritism deepened suspicions and inflamed antisemitism as discussed via Englert and Takriti. Neighbours began to frame Jews as foreigners despite centuries-old Algerian Jewish local roots. Reactionaries of any denomination fear the revolutionary sparks produced by unity. Those voices that had broken away from cultural essentialism and religious bigotry had to be taken out. To me, these posters are a treasure because they keep some of the resonance alive and resist the erasure of Arab progressive epistemology. That is why I tried to highlight the presence ofdouble erasure, while there is the absence of a transgressive anticolonial Arab movement, it cannot be fully understood without the absence of the progressive Jew. Taken together, we may find a reasonable explanation of perseverance of this absence.

[1] This collection was curated with Subversive Film for the Lumbung Press publication and was part of Dokumenta fifteen. The 15th edition of the well-known art exhibition in Germany held between June and September 2022 in Kassel. See https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/about/.

[2] Through a consideration of the main ideological currents (liberals, pan-Islamists, nationalists, communists), Achcar (2010) adds crucial context about local, regional and global power relations that informed their political landscape, including how Arab Nationalism emerged a decade later as a popular alternative out of this political vacuum. This would be the backstage to the period when Israel invaded Lebanon in one of the bloodies wars in recent memory.

[3] In Gilbert Achcar there are references to Mahmoud Darwish, Edward said, Elias Khoury, Azmi Bishara, Adonis, Samir Kasir, Joseph Samaha, Philip Matar, Joseph Massad. That I have not come across any female intellectuals is a sign of the times, namely that during the 1970s and even until the early 2000s, the public political discourse was completely dominated by men.

[4] The communist parties were already disgraced when Soviet forces violently occupied Afghanistan. The later collapse of the USSR meant a double degradation of a Left alternative that was beneficial for the crushing of the left in general and allowed a leftist legacy to be partly erased. This counter-revolution dynamic permitted a deliberate reframing of anti-colonial Palestinian solidarity as antisemitic.

[5] From his 1967 "The Other America" speech at Stanford University, explaining the cause of the Harlem (New York) and the Watts (California) riots. The full quote is “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” See here the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOWDtDUKz-U.

[6] As Fanon argued in Concerning Violence: The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. Available online:http://www.openanthropology.org/fanonviolence.htm.

[7] This context is crucial in any reading of Fanon, but his approach has been framed as revenge – short off a call for violence - see for an earlier contribution about this wider philosophical argument Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1970 Frantz Fanon: Reason and Violence, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 15: 222-231

(PN, 25, 11, in. Wallerstein 1970:223).

[8] Through English, French and Arabic archives of Arab social movements and their main political journals, and examining religious sources he frames the region’s politics and religious positions.

[9] Achcar: 243

[10] The most important examples he engaged are Harkabi, Bernard Lewis and Huntington.

[11] I discuss The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives by Gilbert Achcar [(2010), London: Saqi] in Mondoweiss:

[12] Achcar: 261

[13] Referenced in Achcar as 1976: 298

[14] Achcar: 242

[15]The British treated the Arabs in the most brutal colonial manner, most directly the Balfour Declaration and the Peel Commission. 

[16] Find reference.

[17] Lean 2017:11. Reference: Nathan Lean. 2017.The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims.

[18] See Khalili, L. (2010). The location of Palestine in global counterinsurgencies. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42(3), 413-433. doi:10.1017/S0020743810000425

[19] There are numerous examples: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/24/why-benjamin-netanyahu-loves-the-european-far-right-orban-kaczynski-pis-fidesz-visegrad-likud-antisemitism-hungary-poland-illiberalism/;https://www.timesofisrael.com/senior-hungarian-official-netanyahu-and-orban-belong-to-same-political-family/;https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-18/ty-article/.premium/the-netanyahu-orban-bromance-that-is-shaking-up-europe-and-d-c/0000017f-db69-db5a-a57f-db6b405b0000; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/20/netanyahu-and-orban-meet-in-summit-of-illiberal-nationalists/;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/the-trump-netanyahu-alliance; Shanes, J. (2019). Netanyahu, Orbán, and the Resurgence of Antisemitism: Lessons of the Last Century. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies37(1), 108-120.doi:10.1353/sho.2019.0005.

[20] The leader of Hamas (Sheikh Jamal Mansur was in support of the Palestinian Call on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the Nakba.

[21] Asim Qureshi. 2020. I Refuse to Condemn. Resisting racism in times of national security. Manchester University Press

[22] The collective response was titled “We are angry, we are sad, we are tired, we are united”

[23] 2020:3.

[24] The Prevent duty is a government requirement imposed on all education providers ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’ and became a contentious and heavily criticised for targeting especially Muslim students of colour, see the earlier Prevent Prevent:https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/campaigns/preventing-prevent-we-are-stude…. See respectively, on Prevent: Saffa Mir’sGuilty without a crime (chapter 8 in Qureshi 2020), Nadya Ali’sWriting for the kids (chapter 12 in Qureshi 2020); on IHRA (and JDA): Lena Salaymeh’s (Forthcoming)Colonial political theology: Orthodoxy and orthopraxy in colonial politics, Ruth Gould’s (2020), TheIHRA Definition of Antisemitism: Defining Antisemitism by Erasing Palestinians. The Political Quarterly, 91: 825-831.https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12883; and on Tuck see: Bricup:https://bricup.org.uk/article/bricup-statement-on-nus-tuck-report/ and Brismes’ response to the Tuck report: https://www.brismes.ac.uk/news/statement-in-response-to-the-rebecca-tuc….

[25] I would like to thank Lena Salaymeh for recommending this very helpful scholarship to me.

[26] 2020: 7

[27] 2020: 17

[28] 2020: 19

[29] 2020: 20

[30] 2020: 8

[31] Interesting, in seeking to deconstruct a rise of new anti-Semitism and the basic categories that underlie it, Lapidot disagrees with the (such as carried by Hannah Arendt) alternative ‘antisemitism’ over ‘anti-Semitism’ for the reason that antisemites do not oppose any ‘Semitism’, which constructs a Jewish enemy but has nothing to do with any opposition to ‘Semitic’ ethnic origins or language communities (:6).

[32] This logic converts traditions into religions, law into positive law, and states (as forms of governance) into modern nation-states (forthcoming:4).

[33] Salaymeh defines colonial political theology as an epistemology that relies on dualisms such as “hate speech” and “free speech,” as well as “new antisemitism” and “Abrahamic religions”.

[34] Important here is her disagreement with other critiques of JDA that pointed at Palestinians not being included in determining its definition. Palestinians, as such, are not experts on either antisemitism or anti-Zionism, but JDA itself contributes to a deeply colonial framing that portrays Jews as essentially Zionists through a false pairing of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. JDA ignores the antisemitism (including philosemitism) of Zionists or supporters of Israel because this form of antisemitism serves Zionist colonization.

[35] Especially the Macpherson principle, which was mostly about the duty of authorities to believe and report and victim's perception and investigate racist attacks, turned into the interpretation that the victim has the exclusive prerogative to determine whether is racially discriminatory. This is challenged also based on the progressive principle that not all members of a group share the same approach or principles and thus an assumed unanimity is impossible.

[36] Salaymeh Page: 11

[37] Salaymeh Page: 10

[38] Achcar: 247

[39] Achcar: 248

[40] See Modernity and the Holocaust, Baumann 1989, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1989.  Afropessimis claims (especially by Wilderson) of a Black ontology that does not compare (in one way is “superior” to) any other form of suffering) shows similarities with debates regarding the incomparability of the Holocaust.

[41] Page 17.

[42] Salaymeh, page: 15.

[43] Salaymeh page: 18.

[44] Sai Englert (2021), ‘Anti-Semitism and De-Racialisation - The case of Algerian Jews’, Spectre Journal, 3. Online: https://spectrejournal.com/antisemitism-and-deracialization/

[45] Sai Englert (2021), ‘The case of Algerian Jews’.

[46] Takriti, Abdel Razzaq. 2022, “The Kurd and the Wind: The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian–Kurdish Affiliation.” Chapter Two in The Political and Cultural History of the Kurds by Amir Harrak. Oxford: Peter Lang. Page 27.

[47] Takriti 2022. This is why it matters that the most progressive Arab-regional nationalist tendencies were grounded in a universalist anti- colonial and anti- imperialist ideology. Page 28.

[48] It was noticeable around the overwhelming expressions of support for Palestine during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, that an increase of online interventions about the Western Sahara emerged on social media. Many of this input were bots. For earlier empirical research see: Aouragh, M. 2016. Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age. Middle East Critique. 25 (3), pp. 271-297. https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2016.1179432

[49] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, in this collection.

[50] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, in this collection.

[51]  Brahim El Guabli (2020) Reading for theory in the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist testimonial literature, African Identities, 18:1-2, 145-161, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1773243

[52] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023, in this collection.

[53]  Brahim El Guabli (2020) Reading for theory in the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist testimonial literature, African Identities, 18:1-2, 145-161, DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1773243

[54] Heckman 2018

[55] Salim Nadi, Historical Materialism 2023:4. [how to refer to the pages?]

[56] Alma Rachel Heckman. (2018). Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography. Jewish Social Studies, 23(3), 67–100. https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.23.3.03

[57] Ben Lorber 2019. Jewish Alternatives to Zionism: A partial History. Jewish voice for peace, 11 January.

[58] Alan Wald. 2020. On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism.

[59] Wald describes that (2020 On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism) Mandela’s ANC was also supported by his school friends and SACP leaders Ruth First and Joe Slovo of Latvian and Lithuanian Jewish families: “Slovo became commander of “The Spear of the Nation,” the armed wing (founded by Mandela) of the African National Congress; First was assassinated in 1982 by the South African police while she was teaching in exile in Mozambique, apparently because they couldn’t get to Slovo himself.(6)”. […] Baruch Hirson (1921-1999), founder of the critical Marxist journal Searchlight South Africa in 1988, who was jailed for nine years for carrying out sabotage in connection with the pro-Trotskyist African Resistance Movement (ARM).

[60] Alan Wald. 2020. On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism. Against the Current. No. 209 (November/December). Online:https://againstthecurrent.org/atc209/jewish-revolutionaries/. According to Wald much of the confusion of the Jewish Revolutionary Internationalist tradition, and what this means for a Jewish identity in the modern world, was facilitated by ambiguities and uncertainties in the original discourse of Marxist positions, especially “The Jewish Question” and quotes Italian scholar Enzo Traverso “The history of the Marxist debate on the Jewish question is a history of misunderstanding.”

[61] Lapidot 2020, page:18

[62] Salaymeh, page: 17

[63] Sai Englert. 2016. Doykayt: Yiddishland for All. Salvage, January 25: https://salvage.zone/doykayt-yiddishland-for-all/.

[64] Sai Englert. 2016. Doykayt.

[65] Alan Wald 2020 On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism.

[66]Jewish Alternatives to Zionism2019;Decidedly Marxist 2019.

[67]  Lapidot, 2020:1

[68] Cf. https://apnews.com/article/a3fd2088a8a65690302b891fd764ab0a

[69] Achcar, page: 250

[70] Achcar, page 251

[71] Nadi 2023, page:9

[72] Lapidot Page:17.