Viktor Vakhshtain. Photo: myatom.ru
Yevgenia Albats*: On April 19, another attack on a synagogue occurred in London, this time in Kenton, a suburb of London. In the UK, there were 3,700 incidents against Jews, Jewish symbols, and monuments in 2025 alone. A new wave of antisemitism is sweeping the world. It has reached record levels, especially after the bloody massacre carried out by Hamas in southern Israel in October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza. The latest report from Tel Aviv University — it has just been released and concerns 2025 — claims that 2025 was the deadliest year in terms of antisemitic attacks. Only last year, 20 people were killed on three continents simply because they were Jewish. In Canada, the number of antisemitic incidents (6,800) tripled compared to previous years. In Australia, it increased by 29%, from 472 in 2022 to 1,750 last year. We remember the terrible shooting at Bondi Beach, where 15 people died. It is striking that antisemitism increased precisely after the bloody pogroms of October 7, 2023. It reminded me of a similar trend after World War II when, seemingly, the world should have mourned the 6 million exterminated European Jews. In the USSR, the level of antisemitism, both domestic and state, sharply increased, evolving into a campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" and the practice of quotas and restrictions against Jews.
Why has such a powerful wave of antisemitism emerged? And in countries where, 6–7 years ago, public antisemitism was considered bad form, something completely indecent.
Legitimization of Antisemitism
Viktor Vakhshtain: We need to distinguish between two versions of antisemitism. They are often mixed, but they are very different things. There is old antisemitism, about which we know a lot, including from personal experience. There is new antisemitism, which is anti-Zionism.
The boundary between them is quite strict. What has happened over the last 4 years is a gradual legitimization, justification of antisemitism through anti-Zionist rhetoric. I think it is very important to draw this line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism because these are two different forms of hatred, and they are coded very differently in different legislations. For example, in the States, anti-Zionism is not criminalized. If you kill a person because they are Jewish, it is a hate crime, an antisemitic crime, and the punishment will be much harsher. But if your violence is motivated not by religious but by political hatred, for example, you kill them because they are Israeli, it is already an act of political action, and there will be no additional sanctions. Although now state prosecutors are spending a lot of effort to criminalize political hatred on par with religious hatred.
Anti-Zionism is a form of leftist rhetoric. In reaction to this, on the right flank, there is a rise of old antisemitism. The difference is that some hate Israel and Israelis, others hate Jews as a whole
What is the fundamental difference? As colleagues from Tel Aviv University also show, anti-Zionism becomes a legitimization for the left. It is a form of leftist rhetoric. And in reaction to this, on the right flank over the past year, we are beginning to observe the rise of old antisemitism, right-wing. The difference is that some hate Israel and Israelis, others hate Jews as a whole. But if we delve deeper, there will be quite interesting differences in the structure of worldviews, in how the weights of evil are distributed between global capitalism, transnational corporations, where Israel's place is. This is in one version. And in the second version, it will be the Jewish lobby that secretly controls the American government and drags it into war in the Middle East.
Yevgenia Albats: Let's remind what Zionism is. And when they say "anti-Zionism," what is meant?
Viktor Vakhshtain: Anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Zionism. Zionism is a concept that formed the basis for the creation of the state of Israel. There are a huge number of different "Zionisms." They are united by only one thing — that the state of Israel has the right to exist. As for anti-Zionism, it is a concept that appeared later. It appears in the late sixties of the last century and represents a deep conviction of people that the state of Israel does not have the right to exist. Therefore, we have anti-Zionism as a denial of Israel's right to exist and, as a consequence, the demonization of Jews associated with Israel. My favorite example is if an Arab, in this case, more likely a Bedouin, who served in the IDF, comes to study in the States and gets punched in the face by an American Jew who is an anti-Zionist and comes out with the slogan: "Let's kick out all the damned Zionists from here, especially the war criminals of the IDF". That is, when an anti-Zionist leftist Jewish student of an American university attacks a Bedouin who served in the Israeli army because he is associated with Israel, this is anti-Zionism in its pure form. At the same time, we understand how interconnected these things are. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism often imply each other, although not always.
Anti-Zionism is built on several simple premises. That there is some global evil. The global evil is usually the United States of America, transnational corporations, and global capitalism. There are some islands of resistance, those countries that try to resist the American dictate. But transnational corporations wrap their tentacles around the world to extract resources from it. And Israel is one of the tentacles. This is local evil. In the radical version of anti-Zionism, leftist anti-Zionism, we can find quite pro-Russian sentiments. Some sites directly say that there are two main accomplices of the genocide that the United States is organizing around the world — Netanyahu and Zelensky. Two genocidal regimes, as they call them, two American proxies. Therefore, leftist anti-Zionism is connected with anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism. Accordingly, Hamas for them is a national liberation movement. Such a clear ideological structure: global evil — capitalism, transnational corporations; global good — well, for example, Putin in the worldview of Max Blumenthal (American journalist, blogger, collaborating with the agency Sputnik and the RT network. — NT). Local evil — Israel as an accomplice of American murderers and local good — the national liberation movement in the face of Hamas.
Demonstration against antisemitism in Marseille, southeastern France, November 12, 2023. Photo: Clement Maudo / AFP
Do you understand why anti-Zionism affects us so much, and not antisemitism? Because we have always been global evil. We controlled the world, we extended our tentacles all over the world, and we were simply demoted: we are now Trump's puppets in the anti-Zionists' worldview. Almost all Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda was built on this metaphor. You will find the same image transitioning from the magazine "Peretz" to the magazine "Crocodile" from the fifties to the seventies. It will be such an American banker, less often the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of American imperialism, on one knee of which will sit the Israeli military, most often armed to the teeth, and on the other knee some other local evil — sometimes the Argentine junta, sometimes Ukrainian nationalists. Like the Americans are nurturing their proxies. This is the anti-Zionist worldview. It is not criminalized anywhere. Hatred of the state of Israel is not a form of antisemitism from the point of view of European and American legislation. And therefore, everything is clean here. Americans manage their Israeli mercenaries. But over the past year, another formula has emerged — that in fact, Trump is a puppet of Israel, that Israel dragged him into the war, that commands to the White House come from Jerusalem. Well, here everything falls into place again: global evil — the Jews, and local evil turns out to be, therefore, the short-sighted American president. These two mythologies do not so much compete, although one of them is much more represented on the left, especially the ultra-left flank, and the other on the right and especially the ultra-right. But today they quite complement each other.
Where Can a Poor Jew Go?
Yevgenia Albats: I remember my conversation about ten years ago with a very famous philosopher, feminist Mary Daly, author of the brilliant book called Beyond God the Father. In particular, she told me that Jews should get out of Palestine back to Europe. I asked her: "Mary, where to?" After the end of World War II, when the doors of concentration camps opened, Jews tried to return. They came to their homes and apartments, and they were told: "Get out". And when they didn't want to leave, pogroms began, as it was in Poland, for example. And then it became clear to the Jews that they could not live in Europe, and they went to Palestine to somehow raise their children and survive as a people.
How can you interpret this?
A tragic narrative has one feature. Its main characters are not martyrs who take the blow, as in the case of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. It's now about innocent victims
Viktor Vakhshtain: You encountered an interesting phenomenon. But if we dig deeper, there is a good study by Jeffrey Alexander from Yale University on the perception of the Holocaust and its connection with the creation of Israel, which studies the structure and dynamics of collective memory. The study is dedicated to how the memory of the Holocaust was formed in the first decades after World War II. There are three stages. The first 10 years — this is almost an absolutely unmentioned topic. And not only in Germany, where it is understandable, but also in the United States, for example. And in Israel! In Israel, it was absolutely taboo for the first 10 years of the state's existence. And such total silence continues until the Eichmann trial. The way the memory of the Holocaust was formed, by the way, played a special role in modern anti-Zionism. In the States, until the eighties, an epic narrative prevailed. After the first stage — silence, the second stage was — epic: we saved the world from monstrous evil, and the Holocaust is evidence that our role is that of a savior. (By the way, in the cult of May 9 in the Russian Federation, there are still many elements of this epic narrative that was in the States until the eighties). And then something breaks in the narrative. And now it's no longer about absolute evil that needs to be resisted with weapons in hand. It's not about martyrs like Mordechai Anielewicz (one of the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. — NT), who lay their lives on the altar. It becomes a tragic narrative. A tragic narrative has one feature. Its main characters are not martyrs who take the blow, as in the case of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. (The Soviet epic's equivalent of martyrdom would be Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.) And it's now about Anne Frank. It's now about innocent victims. It's about people who are deprived of the ability to resist. And this means, in particular, that the difference between the executioner and the victim is who is armed at that moment.
And the whole narrative about the Holocaust turned out to be part of anti-Israeli propaganda. It became part of anti-Zionism. And then, people who have been teaching the Holocaust all their lives, like Professor Browning (historian, Holocaust scholar, honorary professor at the University of North Carolina. — NT), whose interview is published in the Tel Aviv University report, try to understand how it happened that all this rhetoric was essentially stolen, hijacked. Now it is used to equate Israel with the Third Reich. Because in the epic narrative, it is clear that good must have fists. In the epic narrative, evil can only be resisted by force. This is a grand epic — the defeat of Nazi Germany, the salvation of people, the liberation of concentration camps, and Never again.
Never again as a slogan, that is, never again — this is part of the epic narrative. And the tragic — it's like the Holocaust never ended, it continues, it just has new victims. And whoever is armed today turns out to be the executioner. Evil turns out to be whoever is armed, who is stronger. This is a feature of the modern interpretation of the Holocaust. We talked with the director of the Yad Vashem museum, Dani Dayan, and he just said that the worst thing that can happen now is that the whole theme of the Holocaust will be turned inside out because people steal all the symbolism and completely rebuild it. Well, actually, that's what happened. We talked with him 3 years ago when October 7 just happened. He quite accurately predicted what would happen next. And then this perverted, completely turned inside out picture becomes a very convenient part of political rhetoric in each specific country. For example, we are discussing the Tel Aviv University report of this year, and last year's report, based on 2024 data, was separately focused on Australia. My colleagues from Tel Aviv University explicitly wrote that
Australia continues to use anti-Zionist narratives as part of justifying its place in the world. It becomes an element of state propaganda. In fact, the report begins with a scene in the Australian parliament. And the main analytical materials were devoted to Australia. Less than six months pass — a terrorist attack on Bondi Beach in Sydney. We look at this year's data. In Australia, the growth of antisemitism continues. It is one of those countries, along with Canada, that shows a very confident growth of antisemitic incidents or attacks over the past few years.
Yevgenia Albats: What is striking is that Australia has struggled for a long time and it is unknown if it has managed to overcome the "White Australia" policy, when Chinese were forced to leave, children were taken from Aboriginals and sent to boarding schools. America has long struggled with racism and considered that when it elected Barack Obama, the first black American, as president, it was a signal of overcoming. We know that racism remained, it did not go away, but nevertheless. And in Canada, there was recently another scandal related to the treatment of Aboriginals, the treatment of children, what happened in Catholic schools. I spoke with colleagues from the University of Toronto, and they talk about Jewish businesses being smashed in Canada. Not Kristallnacht, as under Hitler, but windows were smashed.
So again, they went after the Jews. Moreover, as you said, in a striking way, there was a kind of unification of the far right, who indeed say that the ten-million Israel controls the USA, a country of 344 million, and that Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, dictates to President Trump what and how to do, — with American leftists, perhaps primarily with American leftist Jews, who call Gaza an open-air Auschwitz and say that Israel should cease to exist. I can't understand: where should 10 million Israelis, of whom 3 million are Arabs, go?
Viktor Vakhshtain: I have an answer to this. There are two factions. Radical anti-Zionists say that the state of Israel should cease to exist.
Where do they get this from? They take it from Jean-Paul Sartre's speech on genocide, which he read at the Russell Tribunal. It was a public tribunal over the American military in Vietnam. He formulated such a scheme of history. There are colonial powers. Accordingly, Israel is a colony, obviously. The population of the colonists is surrounded, it is in the minority, but it is better organized and armed, it is surrounded by masses of people who are less armed, less trained, and unorganized. But then, Sartre says, the war began. People gained military experience, people learned to obey orders, people formed a military machine. And now the overwhelming majority rises up. The colonists call for help from the metropolis. They, since they cannot cope with the local population, as the war becomes total, are forced to commit genocide. But in doing so, they undermine the economic basis of the colony's existence. And in the end, the troops retreat, taking the colonists with them. This was all taken from the speech of sixty-seven, transferred, respectively, to modern Israel, and they said: "Well, obviously, the metropolis is the USA". Here, please, military aid has arrived, by the way. And total war is what Hamas is doing. They literally compare Hamas to the Vietnamese rebels. Now they will finally destroy the region's economy. And when the economy collapses, there will be nothing for the Israelis to catch here, they will all sail away to the metropolis, that is, to the United States of America. When asked: are you ready for 10 million Israeli refugees — my kind of leftist students from American campuses shrug and say: "Well, America is big, just not next to us". This is one faction, for whom the metropolis is the USA, the colonists are Israel.
In the worldview of some anti-Zionists, Israel is a European colony, not an American one, because the Jews came from there. Let them return to Poland
The second faction says: "Wait, let's send them back to the countries they were expelled from, let them return". Like, let them go back to Poland. But also to Morocco, and to Ethiopia, right? The problem is that most of these countries are where the genocide actually happened. We know about the European one, but we know little about the Ethiopian genocide, we know quite little about what happened to the Jews of Iraq, although this is a very well-documented story. And what, in general, happened in the Arab countries from which the Jewish population was expelled. But this, as you can guess, does not stop anyone, because in their worldview, Israel is a European colony, not an American one, because the Jews came from there. Here's Nassim Taleb (American writer of Lebanese origin, Ph.D., author of the bestseller "The Black Swan." — NT), who has completely gone mad, wrote that America is a colony of Israel, and Israel is a colony of Poland. He meant — by origin, but did not go into the fine details, confused management and origin, because in anti-colonial rhetoric these are coinciding things. That is, where people are from by origin, from there, accordingly, commands come. Of course, the Poles had the most fun: such a number of memes on the topic that we finally rule the world — it was a real explosion of creativity.
Well, there is the most moderate faction of anti-Zionists, the fewest of them, who say: "No, Israel is an occupier and colonizer, it colonizes the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, etc. Let's squeeze everyone back around Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and within the 1947 borders", that is, essentially proposing to return to the partition plan that was under the UN mandate.
Yevgenia Albats: But then it was primarily the Arabs who opposed the formation of two states, they were the ones who started the war against the Israelis. Am I remembering correctly?
Viktor Vakhshtain: Yes, absolutely, five armies, which, as you can guess, anti-Zionists today do not know. And if they do know, they use it in a different key. For example, Professor of Law Ramsey Woodcock from the University of Kentucky formulated it as follows: "In fact, the Zionists created the state of Israel to destroy the Palestinians."
That is, this was initially the only plan to destroy the Palestinians. And they didn't need any state. It was actually a genocidal outpost. The Arabs understood this and tried to stop the future genocide and therefore invaded the state of Israel. Today we must immediately, using the UN resolution "Unity for Peace," which allowed intervention and stopped the Balkan wars, use it to stop the genocide and destroy the state of Israel. True, the consistent anti-Zionist Professor Woodcock forgot that if you use the formula that the Jews historically harbored a plan to destroy the Palestinians, and publicly issue this in a university, it becomes not anti-Zionism, but antisemitism — according to the working definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). And that's it, after that he lost his job. But in anti-Zionist rhetoric, all wars against Israel will be an attempt to stop a future genocide, to prevent the existence of a genocidal state in its infancy. Today this rhetoric is widespread in the States. It is very widespread in Spain, in Canada. In Germany, this rhetoric is much less. And in the UK, much more. The situation in Australia is alarming, where there is a very high probability of a continuation of what happened last year. Alarming data from France, because despite the fact that the total number of incidents has decreased, the number of violent ones has increased significantly. When we look at the pure graphs, we do not fully understand what is happening there, because these are numbers that include threats, intimidation, or desecration of synagogues. But if we look at violent crimes, then in France there is growth, not a decrease. So the rhetoric does not go away, on the contrary, it is gaining momentum, it is legitimized. And by the domino principle, it begins to launch old antisemitic conspiracies on the right flank. There is no longer anti-Zionism, there is normal old antisemitism about Jews ruling the United States.
Justification of Violence
Yevgenia Albats: I spent two years at Harvard, just when there were student protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. My attention was drawn to a poster that said anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. I talked to young guys, they turned out to be Jews, and I told them that in the USSR after the war, Jews were also persecuted, but they did not say that they were persecuting Jews. They were called rootless cosmopolitans. And then the policy of state antisemitism began with restrictions on the admission of Jews to universities and appointments to leadership positions, and they also said that it was a fight against Zionism. There was even an Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public. So, of course, the students know nothing about this.
But a lot was written, said, and shown about the massacre that took place on October 7, 2023, in southern Israel. And yet it did not work. It's not just ignorance, it's a complete denial of any suffering of Jews and a complete misunderstanding that Hamas has been killing Jews for many years, that Hezbollah, with which Israel is now fighting in Lebanon, has been shelling northern Israel with rockets for several years, and more than 100,000 people have been relocated from northern Israel to the center simply because it is impossible to live near the border. But the media do not talk about this. How can you explain this?
For October 7, there is a stable formula in the left anti-Zionist language. It is called "an explosion of cleansing violence"
Viktor Vakhshtain: Every time we try to understand how people perceive information, what they trust, how they filter it, how they connect different fragments of information that reach them, we need to look at what is called framing, that is, what is connected with what. After October 7, there was about a month of silence because it was impossible after all these pictures to say: "Well, you understand, in fact, the Israelis staged it themselves, it didn't happen". There will be a wave of such statements a year later, not initially, when investigations are underway, when Lord Roberts' commission publishes a report on sexualized violence, when the UN report on rapes is published, and all that. And then the narrative begins to be reassembled. In general, for October 7, there is a stable formula in the left anti-Zionist language. It is called "an explosion of cleansing violence."
Protesters hold signs reading "Antisemitism = Republic in danger" during a demonstration against antisemitism in Marseille, November 12, 2023. Photo: Clément Mahudo / AFP
This is a formula by Frantz Fanon (social philosopher and revolutionary, one of the theorists of the decolonization movement of the Third World. — NT), which literally means the following: "Looking at all these monstrous crimes of Hamas, we must first of all ask the question: how did you drive people to such a state that they react to you like this? What did you do to them in the previous decades that people do such things? You are undoubtedly to blame for this yourself". And the phrase: "This did not happen in a vacuum" essentially means that we take an event that is an absolute event, like the Holocaust, pull it out of the specific context where it happened, expand the frames, and place it in another context. For example, as the team of lawyers from South Africa does in The Hague, saying that October 7 should be considered in the context of years of occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people. This is a formula that allows, on the one hand, to remove any emotional response (you are to blame for this happening), and on the other hand, it allows giving some pseudo-explanation that Hamas is actually not a subject, it is a pure spontaneous reaction to Israel's actions. If you ask someone like Hasan Piker (American influencer, left-wing political commentator. — NT), better known as Hamas Piker, how would you explain October 7? — he will certainly say: "It was an explosion of cleansing violence in response to..." This gives a sense of some analytical detachment and explanation of everything and anything.
Yevgenia Albats: Cutting off women's breasts — is this an act of cleansing violence?!
Viktor Vakhshtain: Frantz Fanon, "The Wretched of the Earth." Let's look a little deeper, where did such a worldview come from. In the States today, normal liberals, when they look at their own children who tell them that cutting off women's breasts is an act of cleansing violence, they are shocked, of course — who did we raise. But actually, this is part of a course on postcolonial studies, which builds the following logic. There is a work by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from 1916 on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, where the entire structure of how empires through their proxies, their accomplices try to commit genocide of the people is clearly shown, and the people therefore have the right to rise, to resist colonialism and occupation. And the only way — this is no longer Lenin, this is already Frantz Fanon — the only way they can express this, since colonized people are deprived of language, they are not represented, is violence as the only language available to them, since the cursed colonizers stole their culture. Fanon mixed Leninism with Freudianism, that is, it is also quite a psychoanalytic logic about "an explosion of cleansing violence." This model of thinking is entrenched thanks to French intellectuals already in the sixties, where what we observe today appears.
When we talk about anti-Zionist propaganda, we can notice how it unexpectedly took deep roots in the States from the Soviet Union, and we need to understand that these two processes were parallel, that in the States this discourse also developed. Just in the Soviet Union, there was state anti-Zionism and domestic antisemitism, and at some point, they gave a quite understandable cocktail. State antisemitism is a fight against cosmopolitanism. State anti-Zionism is all that we observed, for example, after the Yom Kippur War, since the Soviet Union was on the side of the Arabs and supplied them with weapons. And now in each subsequent country, these two viruses, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, give different cocktails, different combinations. My favorite example is Hungary.
Hungary is one of the most pro-Israel countries in Eastern Europe according to all polls. But at the same time, it is a country with the largest number of people who believe in Jewish conspiracy theories. How does this combine? Well, we are not against those Jews, they say, we are against these, who control our media, banks, and so on.
And just like that, for example, the scandalously famous Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, produces hate speech that the state of Israel is the enemy of the human race. And this is not just a basic formula of dehumanization. The enemy of the human race is a formula that goes back to Cicero and was used, for example, in the trial of Eichmann. But when she is told that she is already under personal sanctions and is compromising the UN, she immediately backs down: "I didn't mean Israel. I meant the whole system that made Israel possible." This is anti-Zionism. By the system, she means media, banks, and algorithms. That is, she added to the traditional "riders of the apocalypse" — arms dealers, journalists, and bankers — also ChatGPT, because algorithms hide the truth. Four riders appeared.
This is the result of a rather long evolution of ideas. That is, it did not appear yesterday, and when we see the connections between Soviet propaganda and the ultra-left narrative in the States, it is not a coincidence, it is a common set of ideas that are simply combined differently in different countries. And just like that on the right flank. Part of the mentioned report is devoted to the analysis of how the discourse of conspiracy theories in the States, on the right flank, was revived. Not only that, as it turned out thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene (ultra-right American politician. — NT), Jews control the weather on Earth with space lasers from the Moon. So we have a space base there? Now we need to connect this with the fact that the Americans did not just send a spaceship there, apparently, to visit their own... But in general, conspiracy theories work perfectly. A person wants to explain why the ship flew to the Moon. Clear. A person wants to explain why Trump decided to bomb Iran. Clear. Only this is no longer anti-Zionism. This is already normal antisemitism. As in Poland, for example, Catholic antisemitism is being revived, which has also not been heard for a long time. Anti-Zionist rhetoric turned out to be the domino piece that led to all subsequent ones. And how anti-Zionist rhetoric turns into antisemitic, we already know well. This is a studied topic.
War Nearby
Yevgenia Albats: In Europe, a big war has been going on for the fifth year, hundreds of thousands of people have died, soon the count will go to millions. Millions of refugees, thousands and thousands of dead civilians, children, old people, women. I mean the full-scale aggression of Russia against Ukraine. This is happening directly in Europe. We see anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist demonstrations in Europe, demonstrations in defense of Gaza. At the same time, have you seen a demonstration against Russian aggression recently?
Viktor Vakhshtain: I remember well. January 3, Paris. 15 people.
Yevgenia Albats: How can this be? Despite the fact that Europe, judging by the rhetoric of current leaders, has begun to realize that Putin may not be satisfied with Ukraine, and may go, I think, inevitably further. And that they have to increase their defense budgets and cut the welfare state because of this. And yet we see that in Europe there is no powerful protest against Russian aggression in Ukraine. Why?
Viktor Vakhshtain: In the report we are discussing today, there is a large fragment about this. Israeli Professor Shavit (mathematician, professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. — NT), tries to ask American Professor Browning: "Listen, can we talk about our European friends? Do they really think that good and love can defeat Putin?" Well, how is it that defense budgets are so indifferent to everyone? Should security issues be discussed when drones are already in the German sky? What is this related to? And Professor Browning tries to explain to Israelis, for whom security is primary, and peace is something that requires a huge amount of effort, — that Europeans have forgotten about this very much. And therefore, the war that is going on in Ukraine, part of the people perceive it as time to increase the defense budget, and part believes that on the contrary, by increasing the defense budget, you are only adding fuel to the fire, because the violence is never an answer, violence is never the answer. It is very difficult for an Israeli to explain such a logic of response: that if you don't notice the war, it will disappear. That if you just close your eyes tightly, nothing will happen. That it's better this way than if we arm ourselves now and turn into an analogue of Putin.
Yevgenia Albats: But why did they notice the war in Gaza?
In every rhetoric, in every narrative, Israel occupies some place, usually not related to what it actually is, but it turns out to be a very convenient character
Viktor Vakhshtain: This is the second question. Why did they not notice the war that is happening literally above their sky, right? The collapse of German air defense, because it turned out that the police and the army still do not understand who should deal with drones. And the general feeling among a significant number of German citizens that if something happens, we will not survive, we do not know where the bomb shelter is...
And now how does the war in Gaza look, which, note, when it ended, it did not affect the number of antisemitic incidents in any way. They continued to grow. You will not see changes in the data on the number of incidents related to the end of the war in Gaza in any country. And Israel at this moment is perceived not just as alter ego of Europe, it is perceived as a country that today embodies all the sins of European countries, but in the past. As in the case of Australia, which colleagues wrote about a year ago, that
Australia is working through its own traumas through Israel, related to the fact that, in fact, the basis of Australian history is the genocide of indigenous peoples. Just like Europe, where right and left react very differently to what is happening, projects onto Israel the facts of its own history. Britain, especially the ideologues of the organization called Palestine Action, tries in this case to explain that it is not us, it is Israel that colonized everyone, we never colonized anyone. Russia never attacked anyone, England never colonized anyone. And most interestingly, British right-wingers, for example, also project onto Israel what they would like to see England as. If you look at the Telegraph, there is such a description of Israel, in which Israelis hardly recognize themselves: like strong national borders, a state that cares about its security... Well, yes, strong, we saw how strong. And just like that, when you read the right-wing American press, you will be surprised to learn that Israel is the last bastion of the Christian world, that is, we are protecting the Christian world with the whole synagogue. In every rhetoric, in every narrative, Israel occupies some place, usually not related to what it actually is, but it turns out to be a very convenient character.
That is, to understand why people suddenly have such a puzzle, why here anti-Zionist rhetoric and criticism of global capitalism, and here conspiracy theories and lasers on the Moon, you need to understand how at this moment what we call the disposition of beliefs in a specific country is arranged. In each country, it will be very specific, in the Soviet Union its version of the combination of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, in Argentina its own, and so on. In short, every time we look at these situations, we do not have one universal answer — why antisemitism again? Firstly, because it is always there, it can just go off the agenda, it can disappear from the agenda, it can even not shoot in the life of a whole generation, but at some point, an ideology legitimator will appear, that is, something that will make it possible again. In this case, such a legitimator was anti-Zionist speeches after October 7.
Who Benefits
Yevgenia Albats: Quite a few articles and books have been written about how ethnic clashes are often provoked by top-level interests, elites. In some countries, so that the dictator can stay in power, and therefore it is important that there is some internal enemy to which protests and hatred are diverted. Others say that it is business interests, that some corporations use ethnic hatred in their struggle with other corporations. If we take the point of view of this theory, in whose interests is the current antisemitism?
Viktor Vakhshtain: You just voiced two hypotheses, two theoretical explanatory models. The first is called the "scapegoat" theory from the French philosopher René Girard and up to many modern people at the intersection of sociology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, who say that there must be a scapegoat on which accumulated aggression can be channeled. If this meat grinder <in Ukraine> continues for a couple more years, then Putin will say something like: "We were betrayed, a knife in the back, these Jews, because of them we lost the war". This will be an obvious way to confirm the correctness of the scapegoat theory.
Yevgenia Albats: Although there are practically no Jews left in Russia. Which is always more convenient.
Viktor Vakhshtain: You know, when Shakespeare wrote "The Merchant of Venice," there was one Jew in England, and he was baptized, and he was executed shortly before that. He was a Portuguese baptized Jew, the doctor of Queen Elizabeth. Did this prevent the creation of one of the main antisemitic tropes in European history? It did not.
The second explanatory model you voiced is Marxist. It's about the fact that there is always some subject who has interests, and he, in his interests, for example, incites the crowd against someone, against whom it is more convenient. And the Marxist model in this particular case will unequivocally point to universities and say: "Well, look at how this kind of rhetoric was legitimized in the classrooms." Universities are in the first place, in the second place are the media, which thus justified their right to exist. This is a whole separate topic — how the ideology of ameliorism, that is, improving the world (being on the right side of history) at some point absorbed all the antisemitic tropes that were on the opposite side 100 years ago. The extent to which today's leftist discourse simply robbed the right, taking from there all conceivable clichés, stereotypes, conspiracy theories — it's amazing. Nietzsche was even taken, already Nietzsche is a leftist thinker with his critique of resentment!
This is also not very close to me because it is a bit of a conspiracy theory. We just point the finger at universities and say: "It's all because of them, the damned Marxists with university degrees." No. Unfortunately, as Pelevin said, the world is not ruled by a secret lodge, but by an obvious mess. There is an evolution of worldviews. And worldviews evolved in a bizarre way. For example, the alliance of fundamentalist Islamism and revolutionary Marxism in the seventies, when Antonio Negri (Italian philosopher and political activist. — NT) and Michael Hardt (American writer, inventor of electronic books. — NT) talk about communism winning in Iran. How worldviews evolve will partly tell what narrative will be broadcast in the next generation, how historical events will be described there, how, for example, the monstrous violence of October 7 will be explained — as a genocidal attack, which it was, or as a "surge of cleansing violence," which needs to be considered in context. It just so happened that history is not written by the victors. History is written by the children of the victors, and the children are not always on the side of their parents.
The dynamics of hatred are well studied. We have passed the stage of demonization and are at the conspiratorial stage, when Israel is not just the embodiment of world evil, but when it has a plan, that is, a headquarters for world control
Yevgenia Albats: How far can this wave of antisemitism go?
Viktor Vakhshtain: It can go to anything. The dynamics of this kind of hatred are well studied. We are now at the conspiratorial stage, that is, we have passed the stage of demonization, when in Spain there is an announcement in Spanish: "We do not say the word Israel in Spanish, we say — genocidal state." We are now at the conspiratorial stage, when Israel is not just the embodiment of world evil, but when Israel has a plan, that is, it is already some kind of headquarters for world control, and all world events confirm this fact.
Further, there is a fork. Either institutions, including legal institutions, somehow take the process under control and more and more indictments appear, or political elites react to this. And here the theory of class interests already appears, because political players are quite sensitive to such sentiments. In the States, openly anti-Israel politicians appear, including among Republicans, who actively express themselves and exchange attitudes. This will be the third stage: the normalization of rhetoric in political discourse, election <to Congress>, the adoption of appropriate acts, and ultimately normalization.
We understand what this can lead to. So far, everything is at the level of "it seems there is a conspiracy that dragged us into the war," "it seems there is a conspiracy for the genocide of Palestinians," "it seems there is a conspiracy with weather changes using space lasers." The stages are always more or less the same. The question is that somewhere at some point, institutions give a rebuff, and they either stop it or not. For example, in the Weimar Republic, they did not stop it. In the end, the question is to what extent the institutions turn out to be viable. In the report <of Tel Aviv University> I would draw your attention to the last section, where the personal files of all those who were charged with antisemitic attacks are collected. Less than 1% of them reach even not the court, but the indictment.
Time Will Tell
Yevgenia Albats: The classic question, what to do?
Viktor Vakhshtain: I am a sociologist. We, as researchers, do not give advice.
Yevgenia Albats: Well, for example, the experience of Harvard. When the antisemitic wave began at Harvard, the professors were terribly scared. And first of all, not that Jews would be beaten, but that they would have to somehow adapt. The president of Harvard was fired. A new president of Harvard appeared, who at first was also very afraid that he would be accused of being, God forbid, a Zionist. But then those who gave Harvard very large sums of money played their role. They stopped their grants, and this played a rather large role. Several schools — the theological Divinity School, School of Public Health, where anti-Zionism and antisemitism especially flourished, suddenly found themselves without money. And the central authorities of Harvard realized that it would be very bad, and began to take some measures. Although, frankly, the measures are half-hearted. And if it weren't for Trump's offensive, who in this case opposed the antisemitic lobby in the professorship and among organizations supported, including, by the professorship and various schools, everything would have remained the same.
Viktor Vakhshtain: Unfortunately, the Marxist explanation does not quite work there, that they took away the money, so everyone suddenly shut up. They did not shut up. In fact, the only thing that changed is that now slogans cannot be hung on the lawns. Educational programs have not changed much.
Yevgenia Albats: I must object to you, just as a fact. The courses of antisemitic teachers in the Divinity School were greatly curtailed, the head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies had to leave, and the composition there changed quite a lot. Before that, however, Jews had to leave because it was impossible to be there. Qatari money was circulating there, a lot of Qatari money. In other schools, a lot has changed too.
Viktor Vakhshtain: I think our competing hypotheses will be judged by time, the next 5 years. Because if indeed short-term effects from stopping funding have an impact on the administration, on management, then young professors who teach them have a direct impact on students. And what they teach, and what becomes legitimate, what becomes the norm. Normalization does not happen at the meetings of the Harvard Corporation. The normalization of antisemitism begins at the very bottom. It's always about what happens in the classroom. We can, yes, talk about the Divinity School and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies on Qatari money. But, for example, let's see what happens in the Medical School. It would seem, Medical School, well, what postcolonial medicine is there? And here we find that 39% of American doctors and medical staff face antisemitism almost every week. And secondly, colleagues write that compared to a regular city hospital, the chance of encountering antisemitism in a university hospital increases by 381%!
Why did it happen that universities, which, it would seem, historically, on the contrary, are churches of reason, where the right to express any opinion is accompanied by the obligation to express this opinion according to the position of the researcher, analyst, reasoning, reflecting, and so on, where there should be no place for slogans and chants — why did it suddenly happen in universities?
Here you can go further into depth, remember Ernest Gellner (British philosopher and social anthropologist. — NT), delve into the philosophy of education. But this is another very big conversation.
Viktor Vakhshtain — Russian and Israeli sociologist. Studied at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (MHSES, "Shaninka"), graduated from the master's program of the sociology faculty; simultaneously completed a similar program at the University of Manchester. In 2007, he graduated from the postgraduate program of the Higher School of Economics (Moscow), candidate of sociological sciences. Taught at "Shaninka," until 2022 was the dean of the faculty of social sciences. Left Russia due to the persecution of MHSES, which ended with its closure. Researcher at Tel Aviv University, professor at the Free University in Montenegro.
Video Version
* Yevgenia Albats, Viktor Vakhshtain in the Russian Federation are declared "foreign agents."