Thread by @YairWallach

There's a narrative that sometimes people get so excited about their Palestine activism and their principled objection to Zionism that they get "carried away" and drift into antisemitism. I think that's wrong. /1

Whatever your position on Palestine/Israel, there's no reason why you would "drift into" antisemitic terrain if you weren't there already, or if it did not appeal to you in the first place. It's true that we do encounter antisemitism among some Palestine activism.... 2/

... for two reasons IMO: there are some (not many) people who are driven by antisemitism and use Palestine activism as a cover. It's easy to recognise these types and to see through them, they care very little about Palestine and actual Palestinians. 3/

More common are cases where some people, not necessarily in conscious manner, invoke antisemitic tropes when discussing Israel/Palestine. They do so because antisemitism is such a rich reservoir of metaphors with wide resonance in Western culture. 4/

So it is easy to draw upon this "reservoir", sometimes without understanding, as explained so well in this piece, which I will not tire of promoting 5/
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

Antisemitic tropes are attractive because they offer easy, simple narratives of black and white, and in this case because they offload the British legacy of colonialism onto others: a powerful lobby, evil conspiracy, rich bankers, ruthless Zionists. NOT US. THEM. 6/

(for anyone familiar with British Imperial history, to present the Balfour Declaration as a unique and inexplicable aberration or error, achieved by an evil lobby, is an utter joke. I mean carving up territories and moving people around was what the Empire did) 7/

The problem is not with Palestine activism or one's enthusiasm about it. The problem is antisemitism, the general prevalence and ubiquity of antisemitic metaphors and antisemitic ways of thinking in this society.