Gideon Levy's article is a good reason to write a thread on why Israelis don't understand antisemitism - and are a little antisemitic themselves. haaretz.com/opinion/.premi…
The first thing to note is that Jewish Israelis grew up as members of a privileged hegemonic majority in a sovereign Jewish State. And this is a profoundly different experience that that of a Jewish minority elsewhere.
True, Israelis share past traumas with Jews in the diaspora: Holocaust, forced migration. And these traumas are foundational to Jewish identity in the diaspora and Israel, but they resonate differently.
Obviously, Israelis do not have personal experience of racism from majority non-Jewish society. They may have heard stories from their grandparents. But that's not the same thing.
In her article @RivkahBrown described the gut reaction to antisemitism. "I remember it as a kind of muffled panic, like screaming into a pillow." vashtimedia.wordpress.com/2019/11/27/ant…
This is not an Israeli experience. In my own experience in the UK, encountering antisemitic rhetoric. "The Jews never get along with anyone" "The Jews, they have the power, the money" I found it pathetic, annoying, outrageous, but not instinctively threatening.
When I recognised, on those instances, what it was, it didn't feel as if it was directed against me. My reaction came from my brain, not from my stomach. It was not an instinctive reaction. I had to decipher it: so that's antisemitism sounds like.
That's why so many Israelis fail to recognise antisemitism. It's abstract for them. So for some everything is antisemitism. While for others nothing is antisemitism (unless it comes in Nazi uniform). Both talk about something that is theoretical, rather than born of experience.
But the second reason is that Jewish Israelis were brought up to look down on the diasora. Zionism presented itself as the negation of exile. It defined Israel against the negative model of the diaspora Jew. Strong vs weak, Active vs. Passive, Rooted vs rootless.
The negative characterisation of the diaspora was often steeped in antisemitic tropes. Herzl calling Yiddish "miserable stunted jargon ... stealthy tongue of prisoners" reflected the disgust with which many Zionists viewed East- European Jewish existence
And so, when Gideon Levy accuses British Jews of conspiracy and disloyalty to the UK, this is not because he's a post-Zionist, critic of Israel. Quite the contrary, it is because Levy is, inevitably, a product of Zionism, and he was taught to despise and ridicule the diaspora.
And if you ever met one of these big shots post/anti-Zionist activists/intellectuals (almost always men) you'll not fail to recognise how Zionist they are, in their habitus and demeanour, certainly in their dismissal of Jewish diaspora.
Jewish Israelis - Zionists, non-Zionist, post-Zionists, whatever - think of the diaspora as an addendum, as an incomplete community which needs Israel to give meaning to its Jewishness. The celebrated novelist A. B. Yehoshua called the diaspora "partial Jews".
So yes, I see a very clear line between Sharon's "advice" French Jews to flee to Israel in 2004, and Gideon Levy's writing on British Jews "Let them flee". In the long tradition of Zionist thinking, both see the diaspora condition as inevitably flawed and abnormal./End
