Ask a loaded question …

Over the years, a frustrating phenomenon for anyone writing about the oppression of Palestinians and the upsurge in hostility to Muslims in the West following 9/11 was an established race relations industry that was stuck in the mid-20th century, which continued to insist that Jews were oppressed and refused to accept that British and American Jews, in particular, were white and this was a large part of why they were able to influence mainstream political parties to such a degree, usually in favour of Israel, with nobody remarking on it and for anyone who did to be shut down. In the mid-2000s I had an exchange with a Muslim blogger who published a blog post portraying members of a then popular, pro-Israel, pro-war, Islamophobic blog as the Ku Klux Klan and alleging that they were anti-Black and probably antisemitic, when the comments and the names used by the commenters suggested that many of them were in fact Jewish.

Right now, as Jewish Israelis bomb Gaza daily, destroying schools, hospitals, residential neighbourhoods and farms, as Jewish Israeli snipers shoot old ladies in convents, journalists in press vests and paramedics trying to rescue them, as well as ordinary Gazans, people protesting this are being shut down. Journalists who signed an open letter calling for journalists in Gaza to be protected lost their jobs. Student Palestinian solidarity societies have been banned. People have been kicked out of school because of their parents’ pro-Palestinian social media posts. In Germany, where the descendants of yesterday’s Nazis stand in solidarity with today’s, protesters against the ongoing genocide are attacked by the police. In the UK, people have been arrested for holding banners at protests that go against politically motivated, pro-Israel definitions of antisemitism adopted during the witch-hunts arising out of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. A group of people whose critics are silenced this much does not look much like an oppressed minority; rather, they look like a powerful subset of the white majority.

Yesterday Brianna Wu, a former Democratic Party candidate for a Congressional seat in Massachusetts who came to fame as a campaigner against the GamerGate misogynists a few years ago, posted a short thread quoting an American opinion poll (PDF) in which people were asked, “Do you think Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors, or is this a false ideology?”. Overall, 27% replied that Jews were oppressors (yes); 73% not, but among young adults (18-24) two thirds responded yes and among the next age group up (25-34), 44% responded yes, with each age group responding with fewer yeses than the one below; the 65+ age group responded only 9% yes. Wu commented:

Stop giving people grief for calling out antisemitism. This shit is going to eat us alive if we don’t stop it. The time for waffling is over.

If you take a long historical view, antisemitism is this kind of shape-shifting mind virus. The specifics change, but the dehumanization doesn’t.  

So much of what we’re seeing right now is just the newest, deadliest variant. And a lot of people are catching it.

When someone responded that the poll had no “don’t know” option, she simply waved it away with “Here we go, deny the polling”. The sample size was 2,034 and conducted online. In a country the size of the United States, that sample size is trivial and however much they ‘weight’ it, it’s unreliable. It isn’t conspiracy theory to cast doubt on the reliability of small polls or the weighting of sample groups, especially when they cast a pall of suspicion over groups of people or whip up fear or panic. Polls have often been used for these purposes, to reveal secret attitudes among minorities, including Muslims in several cases in the UK, and these inflammatory polls were carried out by mainstream polling organisations.

But the biggest criticism of this question is that it’s loaded. Besides giving no “don’t know”, it poses a false dichotomy that leaves no room for subtlety or shades of opinion. We might not consider Jews in general to be oppressors, much less everyone with Jewish ancestry, but Jewish Israelis oppress Palestinians in numerous ways in the West Bank and Gaza, and even in Israel itself, and had done for decades before the start of the ongoing genocide. Mainstream Jewish organisations in the West freely agitate on behalf of Israel, ‘educate’ Jewish youth on the virtues of Israel and its importance to them, arrange visits and the like, with the result that a number of the most fanatical settlers come from western countries where Jews have never been persecuted and were not in danger. Jewish publications and the hacks that write for them commonly whip up suspicion and hostility to those they consider hostile to Israel, particularly Muslims; this has been going on since at least the post-9/11 era. Of course, we all know that many Jews are not attached to Israel or are not involved in the agitation, some are actively pro-Palestinian and we see them at the solidarity and anti-genocide rallies, but the pro-Israel elements are the mainstream, and enjoy enormous influence.

Of course, nothing justifies harassment of Jewish students or anyone else purely on the grounds that they are Jewish, but when we hear complaints that they “feel unsafe” and the meat of it is that they are hearing slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — meaning free of those who have been terrorising native Palestinians since 1948 and especially since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — or that Jews have been telling each other they are unsafe or not to go to synagogue, while there has been one murder and three attempted murders of Arabs in the USA recently, the dead person being a child and one of the survivors being paralysed, as well as other documented physical assaults on anti-genocide protesters, these claims to persecution look like another attempt to demonise and shut down protests against the genocide. This is oppression.

Last year I wrote a piece here about the definition of oppression, about how there are groups of people who claim to be oppressed whose reality does not really meet any reasonable definition of that term, who are mostly comfortable and enjoy proximity to power, in particular White middle-class women. The word oppression is being bandied around to mean things which are unfair or annoying but which do not cause a huge amount of suffering, when traditionally it referred to regimes such as dictatorships, occupations and Apartheid. When some of these same people calling themselves oppressed see the real thing, they deny it or blame the victim, the same behaviour they rail against when they perceive it being targeted at them. While I do not doubt that some prejudice exists against Jews, hearing a country you identify with being fairly criticised for rampant human rights violations, or for that matter people using some intemperate language about some of those violations, is not oppression. Being shamed or called names for openly supporting it is not oppression. Jews as a class, if they can even be called that, aren’t oppressors, but a lot of Jews in the UK and USA are at least allies of oppressors, and it’s not antisemitic or a symptom of a “brain virus” to say so. It’s the truth.

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• The benefits of learning Jewish history
• There’s a genocide going on
• The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”