The accusation of anti-semitism and the logic of representation

There is an important fight over what is anti-semitism. Two equations must be rejected. 1) Criticism=hatred. This is false because statements are not equal to the persons making them, and because disagreement is not the same as a call to murder, which is the only thing hatred can really be defined as. 2) Israel="the Jews." (a) This is partly a form of "the nation is defined as the people as represented by the state." It is, but this representation is always selective. The representation is always an idea or project added to what it represents and a number of people and possible positions subtracted from it. Thus, the representation always falsifies what it represents (it cannot not do so, and this is the character of hegemony, presenting as universal something in fact partly particular (Laclau and Mouffe). (b) The demand of patriotism goes often with calls to war, and to silence dissenters on the occasion. Here the underlying problem is also that the government and its policies do not equal the state, qua national polity. Thus, you can criticize the government without implicitly calling for abolition of the national state that it currently runs. Some call for this in the case of Israel, but that is another question. People, and leaders, should avoid the hysterical leap to attribute larger and more controversial or unacceptable claims when more particular ones are being made. (c) Israel does not equal the Jewish people for another, simpler, reason: not all Jews live there. It claims to represent the Jewish people; it does not quite or entirely do so in fact. There is no single entity that today holds this place, as not all Jews are religious, or anything else; they do have in common a history and culture, of which the religion is a subset, and which like many things in the modern world has no clear and precise boundaries, which is probably a very good fact. Israel's current actions are far indeed from representing the very existence of Jews as such, such as was called into question by the Third Reich. There are people who hate Jews, to be sure, but nothing like their wholesale annihilation is currently at stake. History not only repeats itself but more importantly just continues with some of the same problems unresolved. But this continuity is rarely if ever the purer repetition that is easily feared, and today what continues that was happening in WW2 is actually something larger, mostly affecting different population groups, involving migrants and peoples subjected to ghettoization, including new forms of Apartheid, and possible annihilation in ways that are connected to today's capitalism and the military and police regimes that enforce it. The Zionist and Jewish appropriation of the meaning of the Holocaust is selective and falsifying. Banning outright antisemitism as Germany does (and the US does not) may be justified, but everywhere right-wing forces are misusing this to try to ban criticism of Israel. That is among other things simply a set of lies.