Sayegh’s Critique of Zionism and the IHRA Definition: Notes Toward a Theory of the Antisemitism Industrial Complex

John Harfouch & C. Heike Schotten

John Harfouch:

As everyone here knows, any criticism of Zionism is always met with accusations of
antisemitism. This leads one to ask, what exactly is the relationship between Zionism and
antisemitism? In answering this question, our guide will be the writings of Palestinian
philosopher named Fayez Sayegh, who wrote in 1960, “if anti-Jewishness did not exist, Zionists would have to create it.”¹ Of course, this claim clashes with the commonsense idea that Zionism and the Israeli state are strict antidotes to antisemitism. Why does Sayegh say this? What evidence does he have to support it? And what might his answers mean for the IHRA definition of antisemitism?

These long-standing attempts to silence criticisms of Israel play into the notion that there is what we might call a “pure Zionism” or a Zionism that is free and clear of antisemitism. This commonsense view is grounded in a commonsense method, which grossly mischaracterizes all Arab phenomena and is routinely exhibited by an Orientalizing American press, and which Sayegh described as “always seeing things in black and white; always believing that ‘he who is not with me is against me,’ and always noticing the events of today without being aware of the events of yesterday which may have caused them.”⁴ Sayegh’s work consistently demonstrates and openly advocates for an alternative method in his studies of Zionist ideology, one that embraces the fundamental ambiguity of concepts as they unfold in time, a method that allows history to unfold those immanent contradictions and embraces those contradictions as productive. That method is dialectics, and while a full study of the long history of dialectical thinking is more than we have time for today, the essays we are going to turn to now deal with what Sayegh calls the “Zionist Dialectic.”

A number of authors have drawn comparisons between Zionism and antisemitism. For instance, in 1965, Hasan Sa’b drew the comparison between the Zionist idea of a chosen race and Nazi Aryanism.⁵ In 1967, Sami Hadawi made the case that Zionism needs antisemitism to both silence criticism of Israel and discourage Jews from assimilating to their countries of origin.⁶ Hannah Arendt hinted at a similar idea in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism.⁷ Scott Ury has commented on this relationship in the much more recent Zionist writings of Robert S. Wistrich and Schmuel Ettinger.⁸ Sayegh’s 1960 study of Zionism and antisemitism begins with Zionist reactions to the desecration of a then newly built synagogue in Cologne, Germany on Christmas Eve of 1959. This vandalism was the topic of global news, and the publicity set off an epidemic of copycat acts around the world, including European countries, the United States, several South American countries, South Africa, Australia, and even Israel. In the end, hundreds of synagogues were vandalized with swastikas and Nazi hate slogans, along with countless schools, cemeteries, war memorials, homes and businesses. These symbolic threats were accompanied by death threats and arson.

Sayegh condemns this rash of antisemitism without reservation, but what he finds interesting about the incident is not so much the desecration, as the publicizing of the desecration, where “certain political interests, recognizing the advantages to be reaped, directly or indirectly, from the continued surge in the hate-wave, have helped accelerate its pace and expand its range.”⁹ Regarding this global publicity, Sayegh notes several beneficiaries, but he is interested in how Zionism benefits above all, and how these benefits “touch at the very core of the Zionist platform.”¹⁰

The Cologne incident in 1959 was hardly the first incident of its kind, but it was noteworthy for how it was magnified by the media. An expert group of psychologists, an emergency commission, the Anti-Defamation League, and senior Rabbis all agreed that disproportionate media attention and sensationalized publicity around the Cologne synagogue undoubtedly contributed to the increased perpetration of antisemitic vandalism around the world. This publicity was explicitly condemned by the local Jewish community. For instance, the Director of West Germany’s Central Council of Jews told the New York Post in a January 1960 article, “With the rash of anti-Semitic incidents sweeping the world, I feel that if the Cologne incident had not been widely publicized, then many other outrages would never have occurred. It would have been better to clean the synagogue wall and ignore the affair.”¹¹ By contrast, consider the frontpage headline of Israel Digest, then the official publication of the World Zionist Organization: “Israel Draws World’s Attention to Danger of Anti-Semitic Acts.” Sayegh asks, what exactly was Israel’s role and why did they draw attention to the desecrations? Why was the advice from local Jewish leaders not followed and the graffiti not simply cleaned up? Why were the police actively prevented from erasing the swastika for three days in order to better publicize the crime?

The decision to preserve the graffiti was made by the congregation’s rabbi, Rabbi Zvi Azaria, who was not a member of the local German Jewish community but rather an Israeli citizen. Azaria had fought with the Israeli forces in the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and he was in Germany because he had been selected by the Israeli government to set up a Zionist youth center in Cologne. In the aftermath of the swastika incident, Azaria told reporters he had ignored the advice of the German Jewish community and followed instructions from leaders in Israel who “cabled us from abroad asking us to leave the swastika on the synagogue.”¹² This leads Sayegh to ask why an Israeli Zionist, after being told that publicizing an antisemitic desecration would set off a rash of copycat acts, would prefer to publicize and, thus, proliferate the antisemitic vandalism? What does this reveal about the basic precepts of Zionist ideology?

For an answer to these questions, Sayegh turns to statements from Zionist leadership. They applauded Azaria’s decision and wasted no time asserting that the wave of antisemitic desecrations vindicated the basic creed of Zionism. After summarizing the wave of antisemitic incidents following from the Cologne desecration, the February 8, 1960 edition of the (Zionist) Jewish Newsletter concluded, “All Jews from all over the Diaspora should be evacuated to Israel immediately, and if they do not want to go by their free will, they should be forced to do so.”¹³ Nahum Goldman, then president of the World Zionist Organization, declared, “For us Zionists, this is yet further proof that Israel is the only radical solution to the Jewish problem, whether collectively or individually.”¹⁴ Sayegh reminds us this is the same Nahum Goldman who had declared only a few years earlier at the World Zionist Conference that “Anti-semitism has performed a great function in Jewish life” and “the absence of brutal anti-semitism” was in fact an “grave peril.”¹⁵

But Sayegh believes one newspaper summarized the whole situation best with a political cartoon. This was the Jerusalem Post, which carried an image by its regular cartoonist Meir Ronnen. It was then reprinted in the Israel Digest on January 22, 1960, which is where we pulled the slide. Now the Cologne synagogue was vandalized with a swastika and the words “JUDEN raus” or “Jews get out.”

As Sayegh explains, “The slogans are not antithetical; nor are they incompatible; they are indeed cognate and mutually complementary.”¹⁶ He continues, “Opposed in motives and affinities, ‘anti-Semitism’ and Zionism nevertheless share the same basic postulates and strive for the same practical objective; in practice, then, they are not enemies but allies.”¹⁷

When Sayegh published this series, of course, he was immediately accused of antisemitism. He responded with two further articles on antisemitism and Zionism.¹⁸ Again, he appeals these charges with evidence from Zionist leaders. It would be redundant to go through all of them, but I do just want to look at two significant instances before wrapping things up. The first comes from historian Arthur Hertzberg, who wrote a long commentary on Zionist ideology at the behest of the Theodor Herzl Foundation.¹⁹ In his analysis of Herzl’s dialectical thinking, Hertzberg wrote, the key to understanding the Zionist dialectic is “The assumption that anti-semitism ‘makes sense’ and that it can be put to constructive uses – this is at once the subtlest, most daring, and most optimistic conception to be found in political Zionism.”²⁰ And this is corroborated by Herzl himself, who stated as much in the opening pages of his 1896 manifesto. In presenting the imminent possibility of his idea of a Jewish state, Herzl explained just how this ideal would be made a reality, writing, “Now everyone knows how steam is generated by boiling water in a kettle, but such steam only rattles the lid. The current Zionist projects and other associations [attempting] to check anti-semitism are teakettle phenomena of this kind. But I say that this force, if properly harnessed, is powerful enough to propel a large engine and to move more passengers and goods.”²¹

This, then, is the answer to our question regarding the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism. Antisemitism is the steam that drives the Zionist settler colonial engine. And that is why Sayegh claims, “if anti-Jewishness did not exist, Zionists would have to create it!”²²

Heike will detail the significance of Sayegh’s analysis for the IHRA definition of antisemitism. But in concluding this portion of the presentation, I want to note that Sayegh prepares us to recognize the only way Zionism knows how to relate to the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Rather than a Zionism purely opposing antisemitism, Sayegh discovers an ideology that must produce it. Paradoxically, Zionism must incessantly produce what it must escape. Accordingly, Sayegh teaches us that when we oppose Zionist colonialism, we oppose a brand of colonialism that by its own admission relies on antisemitism to drive its colonial engine. When Zionism misrepresents us as antisemites and goes to such great lengths to publicize that antisemitism, we have to see that this is a strategy that turns opposition to Zionism into Zionism’s fuel, its “steam power,” as Herzl puts it. But again, if you oppose Zionist colonialism, then you cannot but oppose antisemitism. So, when we say this project is critical of Zionism, we must then oppose antisemitism above all.

---

Heike Schotten:

Introduction and Argument

The IHRA definition of antisemitism offers a striking case study of Sayegh’s analysis. Despite being separated from this history by at least half a century, the IHRA definition displays all the same characteristics of “antisemitism” that Sayegh analyzes in the Cologne synagogue desecration incident and in its publicity and aftermath. The origins are the same; their political uses are the same; the beneficiaries are the same; and the ultimate conclusion is the same. In short, what we learn from a Sayeghian analysis of the IHRA definition is that even definitions of antisemitism manufactured for the purpose of fighting antisemitism belie their true purpose; namely, to ensure the perpetuity of antisemitism so as to bolster the Zionist project.  

Common Origins

Like the synagogue in Cologne, which Sayegh notes was founded by an Israeli citizen and militant Zionist at the behest of the Israeli government, so too can the IHRA definition be understood as coming about via the behest of the Israeli government and “QUANGOs” (Quasi-Nongovernmental Organizations) like the World Zionist Organization, the ADL, and the American Jewish Committee.²³ As Antony Lerman has established, the “new antisemitism” thesis, wherein anti-Zionism from the left is cast as the latest, greatest threat to Jewish people, began as an explicit and purposeful propaganda campaign funded by the Israeli government.²⁴ Its uptake by, first, the European Fundamental Rights Agency (known, at the time, as the European Union Monitoring Centre [EUMC] on Racism and Xenophobia) and, later, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), is therefore driven at least in part by Israeli state interests. While the drafting and eventual adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism was fraught and not without conflict,²⁵ what is also clear is that Zionist Jewish organizations and actors played an outsized role in conceptualizing, drafting, and revising it. Indeed, Kenneth Stern, widely credited as the IHRA definition’s primary author, claims to have gotten the idea of drafting a working definition of antisemitism at all from Dina Porat, then-director of Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Racism and Antisemitism, an institute that has always been backed by the Israeli government and was founded with funding from the Mossad. Taking a long view, then, it is difficult not to see the IHRA definition as emerging, in significant part, from a constellation of economic and political forces driven primarily by the Israeli government.

Shared Political Utility

Just as the origins of these two events are similar, so too is their political utility. As Sayegh noted more than 50 years ago, “the perennial and long-range interest of Zionism” is to muddle or erode “the critical capacity to distinguish between sympathy for Jews as such and support for the cruel program of Zionism.”²⁶ So, in 1959, Rabbi Zwi Asaria insisted on retaining the swastikas on his synagogue for days, to the point that not only were they publicized in photographs printed around the world, but also to the point that they became unable to be removed from the synagogue walls: “for three days he [Rabbi Asaria] succeeded in preventing the police from erasing the swastikas, until, when they were finally sandblasted 72 hours later, they had been so deeply embedded in the stone that they remained legible.”²⁷ Similarly, in the 21^st century, the IHRA definition attempts to render antisemitism indelible by characterizing it as an ever-present force that threatens to destroy the Jewish people. Rabbi Asaria and IHRA do this in the same way: by blurring the distinction between Jewish people and Zionism.

It is by now well-established that the real force of the IHRA definition is not in its one-sentence statement, which in itself would not pass a freshman philosophy course, but rather in the eleven possible examples of antisemitism appended to the definition, seven of which identify criticism of Israel and/or Zionism. As so many have already argued, this is the IHRA definition’s true purpose: to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This conflation simultaneously insulates Israel from critique by rendering it a victim of hatred and bigotry while branding critics of Israel and/or Zionism as racist. As Hil Aked notes, the point of the IHRA definition is to brand anti-racist critique of Israel as itself racist; “It perversely implies that calling out Israeli state racism is itself a form of racism.”²⁸ As Muhannad Ayyash argues, the IHRA definition can be seen as a technology of racialization whereby Palestinians and all those who advocate the Palestinian cause are constituted as toxic threats to Jewish survival.²⁹

The Same Beneficiaries

Similarly, then, the beneficiaries of both the Cologne synagogue desecration publicity campaign and the IHRA definition campaign are also the same: Israel, Zionism, and Zionists. A foremost virtue of Sayegh’s reading of this incident is that he offers a materialist analysis of economic and political interests of various stakeholders and a strategic reading of which ones stand to benefit from the Cologne incident and how (the stakeholders he identifies are neo-Nazis, Communists, Britain, and Zionists). Rather than personalize politics, either by focusing on individual personalities and intentions or by demonizing entire peoples or political entities as uniformly of one ethos, Sayegh instead analyzes stakeholders and their interests via examination of empirical evidence, often the very words and statistical data offered by these actors themselves. It is on the basis of such analysis that he concludes that Zionists are the greatest beneficiaries of the Cologne incident insofar as they have not simply a transitory or temporary strategic interest in antisemitism’s existence (as do the neo-Nazis, Communists, and Britain), but rather a long-term, vested interest in its perpetuity and the conflation of Jews and Israel that such existence can be used to conjure.

Based entirely on the writings and speeches of the founding Zionists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, then, Sayegh articulates what he calls the two foundational beliefs of Zionism:

At the very foundation of Zionism there stand the two cognate beliefs: first, that Judaism is not only a religious faith but a peoplehood, binding all Jews together in national bonds and calling for full-fledged national self-realization; and second, that Jews must set up a state of their own, a “Jewish state,” in order to escape what otherwise remains a precarious existence in the lands of the Gentiles, where they are either tolerated at best or persecuted at worst, but in which they never fully belong. These are the two inextricable “first principles” of Zionism, upon which the entire body of Zionist doctrine is based as a super-structure, and from which the character of Zionism as a Movement and its practical policies and deeds essentially stem.³⁰

It is on the basis of this foundation that Sayegh asserts that Zionism requires antisemitism. This is both a logical consequence of these principles and the outcome of his material analysis of the various stakeholders in the Cologne vandalism incident. Indeed, the logical and the material are separable in his writing only analytically; overall, it is quite clear how and why Zionism requires antisemitism:

Within this framework, anti-Jewish sentiments and action play a vital role in the history of Zionism: first, by furnishing evidence of the soundness of Zionist theses, and vindication of the Zionist creed; second, by sharpening the awareness of some Jews of their “peoplehood” and creating such awareness among others; and, thirdly, by conditioning non-Jewish to support the adventures and programs of Zionism, out of sympathy for Jews in their tribulations. Without cynicism or prejudice, one may say that if anti-Jewishness did not exist, Zionists would have to create it!³¹

As Sayegh notes, Zionism is the primary beneficiary of antisemitism because antisemitism confirms its theses and operates affectively to convince Jewish people of the existence of a shared nationality and need for safety. But he is also quick to note that, in accepting these beliefs, Zionists are complicit with the animating tenets of antisemitism. As an ethnically/racially/nationally distinct people, Jews are separate from other peoples and cannot live safely or undisturbed amidst those other peoples. They must therefore realize their peoplehood in the safety of a Jewish-identified entity. In this form, Zionism is, indeed, antisemitism. And, as Sayegh notes, this conclusion is neither cynical nor racist; it is, rather, straightforwardly logical, practical, and material, and based entirely on what Zionists and antisemites say about themselves.

Ironically, then, even definitions of antisemitism that aim to fight it exist, rather, to ensure its perpetuity. How does IHRA perpetuate the antisemitism it ostensibly seeks to prevent? First, and perhaps most obviously, by naming the antisemitic tropes it prohibits in the examples (e.g., “the myth of a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions”), the IHRA definition reifies these racist figurations as essential, inevitable, ahistorical, and innately anti-Jewish.³² Second, the IHRA definition perpetuates the antisemitism it claims it wishes to end via its abstract assertion that antisemitism is a “perception” rather than, say, a regime of systemic social, political, and/or economic exploitation and inequality. This “certain perception” “may be expressed as hatred toward Jews” (emphasis added) but, apparently, also may not be, begging the question of how else antisemitism might be expressed and what other perceptions besides hatred might animate these expressions. 

Setting aside the astonishing vagueness and imprecision of this definition, what stands out is its claim that antisemitism is essentially a “perception” – an apprehension, an idea, a belief, or an intuition – and only later, subsequently, claimed as a material “manifestation.”³³ We contend that the IHRA offers this idealist analysis of antisemitism because it cannot offer a materialist analysis of antisemitism because it well knows that there is not, in fact, an empirically justifiable, materialist definition of antisemitism. That is, there is not really any systemic social, political, or economic oppression of Jewish people existent anywhere in the world. While there are certainly incidents of anti-Jewish violence and anti-Jewish statements, there is not widespread racist oppression of Jewish people such that a materialist analysis of systemic oppression (of the kind we could offer, say, of anti-Black racism, or anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism, anti-immigrant racism, or cisheteropatriarchy) would make sense or be of any use vis-à-vis Jewish people. As the editors of Jewish Currents argue,

[A]ntisemitic tropes have their origins in grisly periods of Jewish suffering like medieval Europe and Nazi Germany. But we do not live in 13^th century France or 1930s Germany. In fact, some discussions of Jewish power describe institutions we’ve built over the last century to successfully wield it. Even accounting for instances of overtly malicious intent, from offensive internet memes to horrific (but still relatively rare) eruptions of antisemitic violence, it is evident that the antisemite’s ideology has not dominated white Jewish experience in 21^st century America. Though some may regard every oblique – or even straightforward – trope as a track laid on the way to an American Auschwitz, it’s difficult to point to a contemporary state-backed or structural regime of antisemitism to stake it in the ground. In this context, antisemitic tropes seem to function largely as vacant signifiers – the shed skins of venomous snakes.³⁴

The notion that Jewish people are the world’s foremost and universal victims, subject to segregation, removal, ostracism, and targeted violence wherever they have lived, is a staple of Zionist mythology that serves to justify the existence of Israel as the only safe harbor for Jewish people, who have been unsafe for their entire history as a people. This story, however, is just that: mythology. As mythology, it is not intended to offer an accurate history, but rather to operate on an affective level to produce particular modes of individual and collective subjectivity.

The Same Outcome, or, Notes Toward a Theory of the Antisemitism Industrial Complex

Zionist propaganda lives in the affective and abstract realms rather than the concrete and material arena because, as many U.S.-based Palestine political pundits and commentators have already pointed out, Zionists know they have lost the actual argument. It is impossible to defend Israel’s actions anymore, even to an audience as thoroughly propagandized as Americans. The  result is that Zionist organizations have leaned ever more heavily into “tropes” and anti-Zionism as the essence of antisemitism and encouraged a primarily affective register in which to articulate these claims. For example, Zionist organizations that train students to defend Israel on their campuses instruct students to shift all conversations about Israel’s actions into the register of feelings, to talk about their identities being threatened (wherein the identities “Jewish” and “Zionist” are conveniently merged or confused) and not feeling safe on campus when Israel is criticized. While the IHRA definition and “the new antisemitism” argument is therefore a more recent development in the arena of abstract, affective propaganda, there is a political and material constant at work in the background and that animates the perpetual Zionist recourse to the abstract and the affective: the innate character of Zionism as a colonial project, a material reality that must be denied if the affective is to succeed – to succeed in convincing Jews of their peoplehood/victimhood and to succeed in convincing non-Jews of the necessity of Jewish peoplehood/victimhood. While early Zionists (and even some Zionists today) may believe the mythology of the eternal victim, what matters is not the beliefs of any particular individuals so much as the effectiveness of the mythology in producing support for Zionism. It could not be clearer now, in the wake of globally unprecedented levels of violence being committed by Israel against Gaza, just as it was clear in 1959–1960 in the wake of the Cologne incident, that this staple of Zionist ideology is not only mythological, but also completely ideological. 

Hence the IHRA definition complains primarily about tropes, on the one hand, and criticism of Israel, on the other.³⁵ The other two examples of antisemitism are Holocaust denial and a thinly-veiled reference to the War on Terror racism that understands Muslims as the primary enemies of Israel and Jewish people (and this example is the first on the list: “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion”). On the Holocaust, Sayegh is clear regarding “the intense desire of Zionism to perpetuate the memory of Jewish suffering under Hitler and to disseminate knowledge about it” because “Such knowledge promises to perpetuate the feeling of uncritical sympathy and fuzzy humanitarianism (which fails to distinguish between Jewish suffering and Zionist greed) on which Zionism thrives.” ³⁶ As for the harming or killing of Jews in the name of a “radical ideology” or an “extremist view of religion,” it does not take too much research or critical thought to unearth the material and ideological connections between the Islamophobia of the War on Terror and Zionist interests. These phrases are of course dog whistles for anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism, and it is by now well-established not only that Israeli government propaganda developed the “terrorist” identity at the heart of War on Terror racism but also that September 11 was deliberately characterized and exploited as a kind of American Holocaust that linked America’s fate with Israel’s in the fight against “terrorism”/Nazism/evil.”³⁷

Ostensibly, the political utility of a working definition of antisemitism is to be able to better identify and prevent it. What becomes clear upon Sayeghian examination, however, is that the actual purpose of the IHRA definition is not at all to eliminate antisemitism but, rather, to keep its cause alive and well. Reproducing the fundamental tenets of Zionism in its text; encouraging the definition’s adoption by states, municipalities, universities, and communities around the world; and emerging from a government-funded international institution dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and education; the IHRA definition is its own Cologne synagogue vandalism publicity machine. It not only constitutes the boundaries and content of antisemitism in fundamentally Zionist ways, but, in advocating worldwide adoption of the definition, it keeps “antisemitism” at the center of any and all conversations about Israel and racism. While it is yet unclear what adoption of this “working definition” means concretely (as its proponents love to insist, it is “legally nonbinding”), it seems likely that adoption would be used, minimally, to identify acts of antisemitism in order to limit, prohibit, or punish them. Given the productive power of this definition to manufacture Zionist affects and identities, it is not unreasonable to worry that it will be equally, if not more, effective in generating the antisemitism it purports to want to prevent. 

The in-built incentive structure Sayegh identifies in Zionist monitoring of antisemitism raises the question of it would be fair to talk about a Zionist “antisemitism industrial complex” – that is, a network of powerful actors with financial and other material incentives to continue to (re)produce the problem they ostensibly exist to alleviate. (This would explain, for example, the ADL’s notorious statistics on antisemitic incidents, which are famously inflated and methodologically faulty.) The “industrial complex” terminology offers a way to theorize a system of power akin to “the Islamophobia Network” already identified by many critics and Right-wing watchdogs,³⁸ but with the added value of identifying the motive behind this system’s workings: namely, Zionism.³⁹ Bringing Sayegh’s materialist analysis into the present moment, we can use his reading of a seemingly obscure incident in 1959 Germany to understand and theorize the contemporary moment in which we find ourselves in a variety of “Western” states, a moment that, while quite different in many ways, still clearly needs to be dismantled at its very same roots.