The Passion of Antisemitism

MELANIE PHILLIPS<
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Jews being persecuted; Rochester Chronicle, 13th century

Antisemitism, which has been erupting uncontrollably across the west for many years, continues to be bedevilled by confusion about its most frequent public expression in anti-Israel sentiment. This provides the excuse that what’s being expressed is not hatred of Jews (heaven forfend) but hatred of Israel (apparently fine).

That distinction is itself spurious, since both have precisely the same unique characteristics; but let that pass for now. A great deal of what is occurring below the media radar and expressed frequently by ordinary people is unambiguous, traditional, paranoid Jew-hatred (Jews are rapacious, cunning, control banking, politics, culture and everything in the world to the benefit of themselves and to the detriment of everyone else, etc ).

But now, even more remarkably, there has brazenly emerged a type of Jew-hatred that most people might have assumed disappeared with the end of the Middle Ages: medieval and theological Christian demonisation of the Jews.

A key trope of medieval Jew-hatred was the presentation of the Jews as demonic vampires with the claim that they murdered Christian children in order to drink their blood. This claim became known as the “blood libel”, and incited the murder of countless Jews in Britain and Europe.

Now both the Adelaide Writers’ Week and the Guardian have recycled this grotesque and murderous lie in the claim that Israel harvests and eats the organs of dead Palestinians.

A session at this Australian literary festival featured two participants who ignited a firestorm of protest. One was the Palestinian Arab-American author Susan Abulhawa, who had tweeted that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was a “Nazi-promoting Zionist” and “a depraved Zionist trying to ignite World War III”. The other was Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian Arab poet. Even a cursory analysis of El-Kurd’s social media and his book, said the American Anti-Defamation League,

reveals an indisputably troubling pattern of rhetoric and slander that ranges far beyond reasoned criticism of Israel. It is unvarnished, vicious antisemitism.

One particular example was his line in a poem that Israelis

harvest organs of the martyred [Palestinian Arabs], feed their warriors our own.

— the Palestinian Arab version of the blood libel.

The Guardian’s deputy culture editor, Sian Cain, appeared to endorse this line by claiming (or uncritically repeating El-Kurd’s claim; this isn’t clear):

it was based on easily found and widespread news reports from 2009 in which the Israeli military admitted pathologists had harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families for years.

But as Adam Levick reports for CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, El-Kurd’s claim bears no resemblance to the underlying controversy — which itself was misrepresented by The Guardian in 2009 with a “grossly misleading” headline that was later changed.

That 2009 article, to which Cain linked, followed an antisemitic scandal involving the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, which published a false story alleging that the IDF killed Palestinians to provide the Israeli medical establishment with organs. The truth of it was that that, in the 1990s, specialists at the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv had harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

That practice had long ended. Israel’s health ministry was quoted in the 2009 article saying that all organ-harvesting was now done with permission. It said:

The guidelines at that time were not clear. For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law.

That was utterly different from El-Kurd’s claim that Israelis fed themselves off Palestinian Arab organs. As Levick writes about last month’s Guardian story:

The news article Cain cited to defend El-Kurd’s antisemitic quote, involving a 30-year old claim of illegally taking organs of both Israelis and Palestinians  for medical use without consent, isn’t remotely comparable to El-Kurd’s odious accusation that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred, feed their warriors our own”. Cain’s use of the article to refute the ADL’s accurate characterisation of El-Kurd’s language as racist legitimises classic antisemitism…

Using organs from deceased individuals, even for medical purposes, without permission from their families is of course deplorable. But it’s a practice that was stopped three decades ago, and that bears no resemblance at all to what El-Kurd claimed — that Israelis “harvest organs” of dead Palestinians and “feed their warriors” those organs. What actually occurred was a violation of medical ethics, but El-Kurd’s false charge demonises Israelis as bloodthirsty monsters. And the Guardian functionally endorsed his claim.

Cain quoted the director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, Louise Adler — herself “the “Jewish child of Holocaust survivors” — defending her line-up by saying :

These steadfast Adelaide audiences came out in their thousands and listened with courtesy and respect for the conversation. It should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.

The fact that so many Australians treated both the antisemitic defamation of Zelensky and an unvarnished and murderous blood libel against the Israelis with “courtesy and respect” should be a cause for horror and revulsion, not a lifting of the spirits.

Even more startling and disturbing have been performances of Easter “Passion Plays” in Britain and Europe, spectacles dating from an ancient, barbaric era and whose message is the Christian demonisation of the Jews. …

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