Antisemitism in 2021

With antisemitism increasing across the world, Dave Rich, Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust (CST), which advises and represents the UK Jewish community on matters relating to antisemitism, terrorism and extremism, spoke to the latest Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) webinar on the topic, “Antisemitism in 2021”.

He noted the theme of Israel being the same as the Nazis is ubiquitous in anti-Israel propaganda, including in reactions to the recent Israel-Hamas conflict,

together with older themes, including Benjamin Netanyahu as a devil and a snake, Jews doing to Palestinians what they did to Jesus, Israel behaving as it does because it is a Jewish state, and claims Israeli money controls governments and Zionists planned the 9/11 attacks to allow Israeli expansion, so hatred of Israel and older antisemitism mesh.

He reported there was a huge escalation in the numbers of antisemitic incidents during the conflict, with a record 600 reported to the CST in a month.

Israel, he said, triggers levels of hatred like no other foreign issue, so “it is antisemitism being expressed in different ways, but it also fuels that. It encourages it…and whenever Israel has a conflict, that is why antisemitism surges in our own countries.”

The COVID pandemic, he said, has increased the intensity of feelings, and has its own antisemitic narrative, made up of three themes – COVID is good because it kills Jews; the “Jew Flu” conspiracy that Jews created either the virus or a hoax pandemic to engineer economic collapse; and that Israel is equivalent to COVID, because just as COVID is deadly and spreads and the whole world needs to fight it, so it is with Israel.

He added, “And it’s just an example of how antisemitic conspiracy theories will latch on to anything going on in the world and find a way to fit it into their worldview that everything bad that happens in the world, Jews, Zionists, Israel – some combination of them are behind them.”

He noted that “every year…there will be new narratives, there’ll be new images that pick up on anything going on in the world of significance and especially anything negative and twist it to give it an antisemitic perspective.”

Noting that antisemitism is coming from the far-right, the far-left and Muslim radicals, he said, “one of the features of antisemitism globally is the number of different directions that it can come from,” especially in the online world where the boundaries between extremes really become blurred. For example, right-wing antisemitism is spread on left-wing social media.

He said there were many reasons the recent conflict saw worse antisemitism than previous fighting, despite fewer casualties. It started around the Al-Aqsa Mosque, bringing a religious element with more powerful emotions. Social media has changed since 2014, with the main platforms being the image-based Instagram and TikTok, and influencers circulate the images globally, getting millions of views.

On what can be done about antisemitism, he said, “It’s really important to know how to explain what antisemitism is and to explain what Israel is and what it means for Jewish people…there is so much ignorance and so much misinformation goes around about Israel, about Zionism, about antisemitism.”

Governments can ensure there is appropriate legislation in place, and fund security, but can only do so much, so we also need changes in society, which requires leadership “especially from those bodies that are traditionally anti-racist and anti-discrimination, whether that is trade unions, whether it’s churches and religious leaders, whether it’s other kinds of opinion formers and so on, to basically make sure antisemitism is socially unacceptable and that there is…a cost, even if it’s an informal cost, that people suffer for expressing these views.” He added that we also need proper regulation of social media to stop hate online.