#136 Anti-semitism: a material analysis - Barnaby Raine

Speaker 1: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. between you and me, us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of The Malcolm Effect. It's been a while, but I'm excited to have this conversation with two people I consider friends, comrades, and teachers. First is a voice you might have heard before, you definitely know, Amandla Thomas-Johnson. Welcome back to The Malcolm Effect. How are you?

Amandla Thomas-Johnson: I'm good. It's great to be here.

Speaker 2: Lovely. And someone who has been a long time, but I'm glad to have them back, Barnaby Rain. How are you?

Barnaby Rain: I am so happy to be on my favorite podcast. So thank you for having me.

Speaker 2: That's a great shout out. I'm happy. I'm happy. You recently wrote this piece for Salvage. And it was, funnily enough, it was Amandla that told me, oh, I just shared a really good piece of a material analysis of antisemitism by Barnaby on my Facebook. Obviously, being how young I am, I don't really use Facebook in the same way others do. So I missed that post. But I'm glad I was directed to seeing the post on Facebook. And it's titled... What do people panic about when they panic about antisemitism? And why I was like, immediately when I read this piece, I was like, this is it. Everything that I've seen about antisemitism, which we're going to discuss, the ways in which you discourses around antisemitism, just is missing that material analysis. It's one that either veers into like right-wing conspiracy or one where it just... Posits Jews as vulnerable, as a minority needing protection. But I even that sometimes felt a bit insufficient. So I really appreciate the way in which you broke down your argument, which we're going to go into more. So my first question is yours. Your piece pushes us beyond what stands in for discourse that claims it has explanatory power to why there seems to be an exception when talking about antisemitism, why there seems to be, quote unquote, I hate this terminology, which you talk about borrowing from Aaron Kondani, liberal forms of racism, right? This understanding that racism is to do with attitudes and prejudice, but it's not linked to power. But before we get perhaps into that, just talk me through your thinking, why you wrote the piece.

Barnaby Rain: I wrote it because I think that the question I'm trying to address is both obviously a highly important question for politics today. We live in a time in which across the global north, and not just in the global north, in several South American countries, in Chile and Argentina, and across Western Europe and the United States and Canada and the other European settler colonies, antisemitism the charge of antisemitism has now become a central fixture of political discourse where in our childhoods we're all roughly the same age i think though amanda's obviously much older because he uses facebook we antisemitism was barely discussed it was obviously highly discussed in my family because we're jews and we talk about being jewish all the time but it wasn't a central fixture of political discourse and it's become a central feature of political discourse at the moment of a sense of the return of the left. It's the central charge wielded against Mélenchon in France, Corbyn in Britain, the squad and now Zahraan Mamdani in the United States, and so on. Even I mentioned earlier, South America, where a Jewish candidate can face up against the child of Nazi officer and still be accused of antisemitism because he's a leftist and he's pro-Palestinian. So there's obviously something both widespread and kind of absurd about this and also potent. One of the reasons I think that it becomes the central charge is because the other charges that are wielded against the left in these moments, you're not protecting our borders, you're disloyal, you're not a proper patriot, hit home less potently for the left because they disorganise and confuse the left less aggressively. The left is less upset about being accused of being disloyal to the European nation than it is about being accused of racism. But I want to read the allegation of anti-Semitism in the context of those other panics about the left and to say that it arises as part of that general angst about the decline of European and Western imperial power. Now, that's a strange thing to say because, of course, it doesn't present as an angst about the decline of Western European imperial power. It presents as a form of anti-racism. And this is precisely its confusing, disorienting effect. anti-racism leftists are used to thinking is a rebellious discourse of opposition to european western power and so the question that interested me is how has this panic arisen this panic across the political mainstream across the political center and even now on parts of the right and even cohering so much of the radical right my piece starts with a quote from riet vilders a sort of nazi descended by intellectual genealogy leading Dutch politician for whom the anti-Semitism panic has become totally central, as it has for politicians in Britain, from Robert Jenrick to Nigel Farage. Why is it that people who normally groan about cancel culture, if ever they're accused of being racists, have this one racial minority that they claim to defend vigorously, enthusiastically, aggressively, that they champion? What on earth is going on there? Why is it that the left, which understands itself as anti-racist, is the central target of this allegation of racism? On a continent, I speak to you from Europe, where... within living memory. It was the organised political right that gassed 6 million Jews. How have we got to that situation? And what can we discover about our wider society from it? So the impulse that I had in writing the piece, and I'll talk more about these kind of intellectual influences, was a sense that we need to turn to those students, those previous scholars of political panics, of moral panics. And I can say more about what that term means, because I think it's It's used sometimes now in quite vague ways, but it means something quite particular. Previous scholars of racisms and of moral panics in political discourse have lessons for us about how panics that appear to be about one thing can really be about a set of other things. and yet how the thing that it appears to be about is still important. It's not good to think about race and racism and anti-racism just as a kind of transparent distraction where it just really means something else. But there are traditions for thinking both about why people think they're panicking about one thing when really they're panicking about other things, and also why that particular thing that they think they're panicking about becomes the object of their apparent concern, what it is about the specific dynamics of that thing that make it amenable to its use for other worries. So that was the question that I felt. If we're on the left, we see this rise of antisemitism as a discourse used to attack the left. I think that if we come to understand it, we might also be able to understand the reasons that there is real a rise in hatreds and anxieties and panics about Jews. And I wanted to understand all that, and I felt that we weren't doing so. And then the last thing I'll say is, I felt we weren't doing so because we basically were stuck between bad explanations. So rather than trying to ask what are people really panicking about when they panic about Jews, and then they panic about anti-Semitism, we've had entirely reactive, defensive responses to the panic, which have either said, oh my God, yes, there is anti-Semitism everywhere, takes the panic at face value and says, we must have better anti-Semitism training on the left, we must... be very concerned about all this anti-Semitism, just taking the quite complex panic at face value, or it takes it at face value and flips it and says, why is everyone panicking about Jews? It must be when every other minority is attacked by the right, why does the right champion Jews? It must be because Jews have power and control. And so we get very widespread ways of explaining this situation, which veer from the hard, overtly anti-Semitic to the soft kind of apparently common sense. The reason there's all this panic about Jews must be because Jews are wealthier and more powerful than other minorities. And I think there's actually something more complicated and more important and more interesting going on.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson: Yeah, thank you for that. Thanks for that explanation. I thought it was a really, really rich piece. And the thing that really struck me was the material analysis that you sort of did. You put it in a context very early on of other anti-racisms against black people, against Muslims as well. And I really like that. One of the things I was thinking about, and I'm hoping I'm not giving my age away when I say this, was you spoke about the fact that it was the far right that are responsible for the gassing of, you know, six million Jews or so in the Second World War. But since then, we've really had this emergence of this discourse of Judeo-Christianity. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, because that's something that I sort of felt this piece reminded me of. And, you know, what are its fissures, its points of tension, and what sort of strategic work does it do, this discourse?

Barnaby Rain: I'm so happy you asked that question because it's a pet peeve of mine. You know, I really hate it whenever anyone talks about Judeo-Christian civilization because it's an example of this historical flattening. So the claim of the language of Judeo-Christian civilization is that for 2,000 years since the death of Jesus, I imagine, there has been this fusion of two cultures in one, which is called the Wests. Alternatively, that tradition is rooted in classical Greece and Rome. And the idea is that there's a continuity of tradition threatened now by outside. Threatening is very important. So the first thing to say is that this is a revealingly historically sloppy way of thinking about the world. In the 19th century, the Times newspaper in London published an article concerned about Afghans, concerned about the need for the British to step in to save Afghans, which they've been claiming to do for 200 years. Because it said that it found there were some Afghans, Hazara Afghans, who were very pale and had blue eyes. And they said these must be the descendants of Alexander the Great, who had migrated there, the birthplace of the West. There's no reason to think that Alexander the Great was pale and had blue eyes, except that they had imagined a history of Europe in which it began with Macedon, with Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great was not conscious of birthing something called a civilization of Europe, but this was a projection back after hundreds of years of history, which said much less about who Alexander the Great actually was than what those 19th century Europeans wanted to do in imagining their civilization. It's even more extreme in the case of this language of Judeo-Christian civilization, because of course, far from being fused at the hip, Christians spent 2,000 years saying that Jews killed Jesus. They spent 2,000 years not just writing it in pamphlets, It's not just saying it in beer halls in Munich. They spent 2000 years killing us and persecuting us and identifying us therefore as the foundational other of Christian civilization. So how did we go from a position where there was a thing called Christian civilization, Christendom, which when it launched the Crusades, understood Jews as its antagonist. The greatest Jewish sage, maybe ever, and certainly of the medieval world, Maimonides, offered his services when he went to the Holy Land as a personal physician to Salahuddin Saladin fighting the crusading armies. Now the Israelis bomb Salahuddin Avenue in Gaza. How did we move from a position where Jews were positioned alongside Muslims as an other to European Christian civilization, where across Eastern and Central Europe, Jews were alongside Roma people, the central constitutive other of Christian civilization. And even more than Roma people and Muslims who were maybe problems, Jews were the people who had rejected God and then killed him. So they were the foundational total other of that civilization. And then in the move from a religious framing of the problem to a racial one, Jews were called what? Semites. Antisemitism in 1870, Wilhelm Marr, the German writer, coins this term in an attempt to say there's something scientific about hating Jews. It's not an old-fashioned pre-enlightenment religious prejudice. What does it mean to call someone a Semite? It means to say that they are the Semitic language group, which got imagined instead as a race, in the way that races get imagined. They are something similar to Arabs. So my question is, how did we move from this position where Jews were the other of Christian civilization to a position where Jews are part and parcel with Christian civilization? And if you go and look at that... you know, Google engrams and you look at the use of these terms, you'll see that there's a recent spike in the use of this language of Judeo-Christian civilisation. And it all happens after World War II. It's not to say the term didn't exist before, but it really gets going from the 1960s especially. And so, again, my question was, how are Jews being imagined here and why? And I think the answer is because it filled, not because Christian civilisation was suddenly interested in protecting Jews, but because it filled a set of other imperatives of that Western Christian civilisation. And now I think there are these conjoined geopolitical and demographic angsts of Western civilisation. Geopolitically, there's anxieties about decline, about the rise of China, the strength of Russia in a block with China, the rise of Arab countries as enormously wealthy, while Western countries are stagnating economically. The rise also of African economies having a much higher GDP growth than European ones, again, in an alliance with China that's called imperial when China does it, but not when the West invades them. So there's a geopolitical angst about the decline of the West, and there's a demographic, internal, domestic angst about mass migration. And these two angsts together can both be answered by framing those who are arriving as terrifying migrants, and those who are on the rise as non-European civilisations, as something bad and something scary, something frightening. And one of my arguments in the piece is that the discourse of antisemitism, the discourse of Judeo-Christian civilisation, allows you to frame these racial others as frightening in an amazing move after you've post-1960s decided that racism is discursively, nominally a bad thing. You can frame racial others above all Muslims, but also the kind of image of the global South with the Palestinian and the Kafir as the vanguard. You can frame that other as frightening, as attacking Western civilization, because you can say it's attacking Jews who've shifted from being therefore your foundational other to being your protected minority. I use the analogy to white women in the Jim Crow South, your image of a vulnerable group that you need to protect from the violent savage hordes from Black men who are going to rape them in the imagery of the Jim Crow South, or from Muslims who are going to attack their synagogues. And so just by starting with the question, why did we get this move from a language of Christendom to a language of Judeo-Christian civilization, we can reveal a lot about the changing thinking of European power, the way that it slots Jews into that thinking, not because Jews are in control of the process, or Jews are powerful, or they've really decided they love Jews. They may believe now that they love Jews, but because it serves their other agendas, and above all, meets their other anxieties.

Speaker 2: Okay, so I do appreciate what I managed to hear. Guys, I'm having some internet issues, but I do appreciate what I had because the ways in which I see the invocation of Judeo-Christianity that now is posited as defending Christian civilization or Western modernity, against these kind of barbarian Saracens. I'm like, but hang on a minute, 1492, the kind of collapse of Al-Andalus. So in the 15th century, the collapse of Al-Andalus also meant the expulsion of Jews as well and Muslims. So I'm just like, when did this take place that the civilization narrative becomes one of Judeo-Christianity? So yeah, I really appreciate what I heard from your answer. But OK, I think what was really some of the meat of the argument and why I really was drawn to this kind of material analysis is that you link the invocation of anti-Semitism to the role it does in the reproduction of power. So basically, like, yeah, explain what does that mean?

Barnaby Rain: I think the first thing to say here is that we should talk not just about racism, but about racialisation. And that's a move that lots of scholars have been talking about for a long time. And the importance of it is partly that racism suggests in people's minds prejudice or a kind of traditional equation, prejudice plus power. which the great British Marxist Shivanandan said is a very troubling equation because it suggests that you can just remove the prejudice and leave the power in place and you'll be fine. Racialisation asks, how do we get constructed? How do we get read? And then crucially, it asks why? So the question of racism can give you a politics of recognition, which says, I am a Jew, you are black, let's try and ensure that the state doesn't disrespect us or humiliate us or degrade us in our position. Racialisation asks, Why am I a Jew? Why are you Black? What does that mean? What processes made us that way? How are we read? Because we're seen as those things. Which bits of those things do we want to keep? Because it's not the case that all the identities that are shaped in us by social forces we want to lose. Which bits of us do we want to keep and which bits do we want to liberate from the other aspects of our coding by power that are not comfortable or that come from violent histories that we want to surpass? And then crucially, why? Why are we racialised? We all are. You know, I find it strange that in some anti-racist discourse, people talk about racialised peoples as if that excludes people who are called white. Everyone is racialised. And we all are for certain projects. And so what interested me is the recent shift in the racialisation of Jews by the right, especially in, I know best about Europe, especially Britain, but across, I think, the global north. And so, you know, the anxieties I was just discussing, the joint geopolitical and demographic anxieties of Western power at a moment of the peripheralisation of the old imperial core within world capitalism, and at the same moment when population flows are pouring into that creaking old imperial core, in that moment, antisemitism becomes a convenient language of panic about that decline, I think, for very interesting reasons. So, you know, I said earlier... that I come from those critical traditions that read racisms as ways of panicking about other things, but not just ways of panicking about other things where it's incidental that race is the thing that's focused on, that the fact of the dynamics of racialization are important in why they get focused on. So think of this example. as to what's happening here. We were just talking before we came on, before we started recording about our joint like for publication that I've written about in my PhD, an amazing publication sort of irregularly appeared in 1970s Britain called the Black Liberator. And one of the terms that the writers on the Black Liberator, especially someone called Cecil Gutsmore introduced was anti-racialist racism. And this is the term that I found very, very helpful and that I've been using. Firstly, it begins with a distinction that we've now lost. a distinction among lots of 1970s radicals between racism and racialism. Racialism meant the attitude, meant people having their personal prejudices, and racism described the features of a social structure. Just like in feminist language, we have the difference between misogyny, which is the hatred, and patriarchy, which is the structure. I think it's a real problem that we've lost that distinction when it comes to talking about race in a way that we haven't when it comes to talking about gender. I think that we've lost that distinction for very important, for very interesting reasons, which is in the kind of tragic half victory of the revolutions of the anti-colonial civil rights, world revolutionary 1950s to 80s period, it has become rhetorically unacceptable to say, I believe that some people really belong to races that really are inferior to others. And yet the material structures that those ideological claims developed to defend remain in place. So in 1920, someone would have said, I don't want Chinese immigrants coming to America as they did because there's something distinctly wrong about their race as Chinese people. Now you can't say that second part, but still migrants are being locked up, drowned at sea, thrown back for being other and different. So we have a material racism sustained in an awkward kind of jarring, because this is how history works unevenly, sustained no longer by its ideological complement in explicit racial claims. We have, in other words, a society which understands itself as anti-racist as a virtue while presiding over a materially racist world hierarchy. And in that context, a really brilliantly convenient way that you can denigrate, that you can racialise the others that you racially fear is, and here's the irony, by calling them racists, because racism has become a bad thing in your society, which remains racist. So if you can call racial others racists, That's a really good way of coding them as bad in this new anti-racialist racism. What happens, I think, in the anti-Semitism panic is that especially Muslims and Arabs get cast as savages attacking our civilised society. And my friend Sy Englert has written about how in Algeria, the French pioneered this kind of language. If we leave Algeria, to the Algerians, to the FLM, the liberation forces, they will massacre the Jews. The use of protected minorities as a way that power defends its violence by saying I'm protecting vulnerable people is a very, very classic technique. Here in this strange world of anti-racialist racism, you have a racially protected minority that you think the racial other, the Muslims, the Global South, the savage hordes at the gates of Vienna attacking civilised Europe, they will threaten this vulnerable group that Europe puts its bear-hug arms around and protects its poor Jews. And the final neatness of this picture is that encoding these racial others, Muslims and others from the Global South, as anti-Semites... You deploy precisely that remainder, that leftover part of the discourse of antisemitism that remains within Europe's soul, which is antisemitism was the way that you feared rebellious, dangerous insider outsiders who were not total outsiders, which is how you imagined Africans, people without history. savages who couldn't think. Instead, the Semite, the Jew, was the one who was just too cunning, who therefore was going to seep into the pores of your civilization and tear it down from within. And my argument is that that kind of anti-Semitic logic is now wielded against today's Semites, the migrants arriving on Europe's shores, the Arabs and Muslims threatening European civilizations, the ghettos where they don't properly integrate. I mean, they even use the language of ghetto which in Europe has a very Jewish resonance. They talk about people failing to integrate. Robert Jenrick, recently British politician, spent 90 seconds in Birmingham and said there weren't enough white people. His problem is that these outsiders don't integrate. All of the same stuff that was said about Jews. And then they say these outsiders are a threat to what they call British values. They're a threat to the established holocaust. hierarchical values of the state and society they are dangerous they come to up to overturn the established social order to turn the world upside down this is all the way that jews were once imagined but now that the label that's appended to that fear is no longer jew but anti-semite so in order of those curious ways, a racist society whose tragic half-victory of anti-racist discourse means that it now wields anti-racism as its supposed virtue, needs a way to code its racial others, and bizarrely, it now accuses them of racism. And so the anti-Semitism panic is partly, and I don't think this is all that's going on, but it's partly a way for European society to process its racism in our strange times.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Amanda, do you want to go for your next question?

Amandla Thomas-Johnson: Yeah, I mean, sort of, just as you were sort of talking about that and this idea of the enemy within, it made me think about the sort of position of antisemitism back in the 20s and 30s, you know, the Bund, this idea of left-wing Jews. And, you know, there's a legacy as well of sort of cultural Marxism as well. So I sort of wondered, and I was thinking about this even in the context of, the expulsions from the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, where there was a very high percentage of Jews, in fact, who were expelled. So could you talk more about the position of the left-wing Jew in all of this and the sort of way that they have been viewed has shifted over time?

Barnaby Rain: Well, actually, I think it's sort of the one constant. I think the position of the left-wing Jew, funnily enough, is the only thing in this panic that hasn't had to flip. And I think that's very telling. I think if you track... The image Jew, you know, and one of the important things to understand about racisms is that they invent their own projections. Racisms are scared of black people, not qua black people, but qua what they imagine black people to be. So if you trace not the real history of Jews, but the image, what Jew means in the anti-Semitic imaginary or in the, I think, in the anti-antisemitic, you know, Western imaginary so-called, you get a shift from Semitic insider-outsiders threatening to tear away the fabric of Western civilization and bring it down, whether because they are... I mean, in Hitler's imaginary, there are two internationals of Jews, the gold international of Rothschild and the red international of Trotsky, and they're both the same because they both tear apart the fabric of the ordered, cohesive nation-state. the Orthodox Jew who refuses to integrate is another figure of fear alongside the Jewish capitalist and the Jewish communist. And you see all of these images now transferred onto the others of the West, whether it's brilliantly cunning, clever Chinese who are going to spy on us and bring down Western civilization, and they're billionaires, and they've got the best trains, or whether it's the pro-Palestinian wearing the kafir radicals and the Chinese devil standing for the old Rothschilds, or the pro-Palestinian radicals who stand in for the old Jewish communists, or the Muslim communities who fail to integrate and their women are all covered, who stand in for what Hasidim, what Orthodox Jews have once read us. So in all of these ways, the traditional fantasy, scared fantasy of the Jew is now displaced onto other objects. except the left-wing Jew is the one that's remained constant because the left-wing Jew who was the Semitic insider outsider who was trying to bring down your civilization still is the Semitic insider outsider who's terrifyingly on your streets, lives in North London, but actually wants to bring down Britain. They remain imagined now exactly as they were in the 1920s. And that's why in the expulsions from the Labour Party, as you say, there was a hugely disproportionate targeting of Jews for anti-Semitism. So among people expelled from anti-Semitism, they were disproportionately Jewish and they were Jewish leftists. And I think, again, there's all these little clues about what's going on. And I think that's one of them. If you track the changing imaginary of the Jew and then the non-changing imaginary of the Jewish left winger, I think you begin to unravel some of what's really happening here.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much.

Barnaby Rain: That is to say, Jews have moved from being imagined as Semitic insider outsiders to being imagined as the purest epitome of Western civilization of whiteness. But the Jewish left-winger still isn't quite the purest epitome of whiteness. And that's why they can be attacked as anti-Semites quite relaxedly, quite easily. And you get new discourses like the mainstream of the community, you know? So at the one and the same time... the political mainstream in Britain will celebrate the Battle of Cable Street, where Jews and other Eastenders fought fascism, because we now all claim to agree that fascism's bad. But actually, in the 1930s, the Jews who came onto the streets to fight fascism were doing so in explicit disagreement with the slightly more bourgeois, much more conservative communal leadership bodies who told them not to go. And now, those communal leadership bodies organise commemorations of Cable Street, because we all claim to be anti-fascist, while at the same time accusing the left-wing Jews, and I'm talking... The Jews who were on the streets against the fascists were members of the Communist Party and members of the Independent Labour Party. Those same left-wing Jews who now are celebrated by communal bodies, when they appear today in the 21st century, are told they're outside the mainstream of the community, which is a kind of dog whistle for saying, you know, you're not really Jews. Frequently it's alleged, are they really Jews? Do they really go to synagogue? Are they really fully Jewish? Are both their parents Jewish? You know, all this stuff, so that they can be cast out of the new imaginary of the Jew as the epitome of whiteness, and they can be cast back into the old imaginary of the Jew as the semite.

Speaker 2: No, I really appreciate that answer. So when we speak about the influence, though, that Israel, quote unquote, has on British politics and Western politics more general, also in the United States, the conversations range from it is the Israeli lobby, I'm talking Mershime here, or Israel is an imperialist outpost, or you have the really kind of anti-Semitic, like, Zog thing. People say the Zog, which I find to be deeply anti-Semitic, actually. So how you read Israel, and again, we understand the racialization of Jewish folk in this particular juncture that has allowed the offsetting for what is like real crisis of neoliberalism and capitalism having no more answers for people, that then being offsetted in a moral panic to other groups of people, all done in the name of protecting Jewish folk. But my question is to you then, when you hear these debates about what is the role that Israel has changed, on politicians, and we hear from Mossad, etc. But how do you understand? What is Israel to you? And you mentioned a settler state, of course. But yeah, what is Israel to you?

Barnaby Rain: Israel is a chapter in the history of European settler colonialism. Israel is the moment in which, beginning in the late 19th century... Jews sought to cast off the skin of our Semitism, no longer to be Semites, no longer to be the insider outsiders of European society, but instead to try to become members of European society. And Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, had been an assimilationist, had wanted Jews to give up their Jewishness and become good Frenchmen and Germans, and is sometimes narrated in Zionist histories as having shifted, interestingly, from assimilationism to nationalism, to a proud, assertive Jewishness. I think, in fact... He didn't flip, but recognised that in order to become good Frenchmen and Germans, or rather, in order to become good Europeans, Jews needed what Europeans had, which was a nation state, land, language, culture, that these things had to be fused in the modern idea of the nation form. So it is a moment of Jews doing what other oppressed groups have done. There's some interesting work on parallels with Liberia, for example. quite complex, more complex parallels with Garveyism. But Zionism is the moment of Jews attempting to replicate the logic of the European nation form and doing so specifically by replicating the imperial settler colonial nation form. Theodor Herzl wrote an admiring letter to Cecil Rhodes, the butcher of Southern Africa. So I read Zionism as a tragic episode in Jewish history, which is the moment of Jews looking at a mountain of Jewish corpses and saying of Western civilization, if you can't beat it, join it. And that's why Zionism was a minority movement that said that until the Holocaust happened. where the scale of the brutality and the violence of Western civilization, as the culmination of 2,000 years, was so extreme that a lot of people said, look, I'm not going back to Poland now. Like, I'm not willing to give them another chance. I've been a socialist before the war and I was trying to build a better Poland, but look what they just did to us. So it's a tragic... and I'm quite interested in histories of tragedy in the 20th century. And it was the encounter, the meeting between that tragic chapter in Jewish history, Western civilization with its imperial settler colonial fantasies and norms, finding a use for the Jews. So think about Theodore Herzl writing that letter to Cecil Rhodes saying, I want to learn to be more like you. And think at the same time of Ronald Storrs, Britain's colonial governor in Jerusalem, saying that what they were going to create by creating a Zionist state was a little Jewish Ulster. So Ulster, one of the provinces of Ireland, settled by Scottish Protestants and to this day included in the United Kingdom, British colony in Ireland. So there you have the meeting point. You have a Jew trying to say, I don't want to be a Jew anymore. I don't want to be the thing that they hate in me. And the number one thing that they hate in us, the number one thing that I think has been the greatest contribution of Jews to modern socialism has been our refusal of the nation form, has been our existing outside nations. We are a diaspora who can nowhere point to a map and say that was home. If only I could go back there. We understand the reality. I think the reality of all diasporas that identities are processes in motion and that we have no fixed firm home. Jews, I think, have been very gifted at giving the world that lesson and giving to socialism, therefore, all of its internationalism. Workers of the world unite, says Marx. He was a man born in Germany and spent most of his life in Britain and lived in Brussels and Paris, a rootless cosmopolitan, as Stalin and David Ben-Gurion both referred hatefully to Jews. So Semitism, that condition of being an insider-outsider, that rootless cosmopolitanism, Some Jews wanted to cast off, understandably given the brutalities of the way that Christendom had treated us. And at the same moment, Western civilization found it could turn Jews into settlers just as it had turned others into settlers. And settler colonialism is often the product of that kind of marriage. I mean, think about the history of South Africa, where the Afrikaners understood themselves as victims of Europe, having to flee Europe. Talked a lot about the concentration camps in which the British had put Boer men and women and children in the Boer War. and also simultaneously understood themselves as the defenders of European civilization at the frontier with savagery. And so that allowed them to look scathingly upon the Europe that had victimized them and which now had a bit of liberalism and didn't like the fact that they were massacring Black people. That precise same duality, we are rejected by Europe and we are the emissaries of Europe in the savage wilderness. That duality constitutes the Zionist consciousness just as it constituted the white South African consciousness. So I read Israel as a chapter in European history, which fits its mould, and a tragic rupture in Jewish history, which I want to end in order to return to better, finer Jewish traditions. I can stop there or say more about the Zionist Occupied Government Zog stuff if you want.

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, please do. Because it comes up a lot.

Barnaby Rain: Yeah, so I think, you know, this is partly my kind of struggle with Mearsheimer as well. Because I think that it's clearly empirically the case that there is an important Israel lobby. And if you look at the history of American support for Israel, especially and try to account for its historical change in the last 50 years... Even, you know, George H.W. Bush, George Bush Senior, was able to aggressively criticise the State of Israel. Ronald Reagan furiously called up Israel after the Sabaranchatilla massacre and said, stop this. Why do you get to a position where Joe Biden, sort of dodgeringly, unable to move much, but sort of keeps signing over checks for a genocide, and there's no question... any shift in that policy until Trump's sort of idiosyncratic strangeness, though Trump will stand in the Knesset and say, I thank Miriam Adelson, who gives billions of dollars to ensure that I move the embassy to Jerusalem. It would be foolish to deny that there's a well-organised political campaign that has targeted any American politician in internal domestic elections who's critical of Israel and attempted to ensure a Congress which is entirely supportive of Israel. That lobby is there. But I think that And Mir Shai Moore is a very good political scientist whose discipline is different from mine. He traces things like lobbies. I'm interested in saying, OK, what broader, deeper cultural, social conditions is this lobby working in? I'm interested in saying, why is it that America might have a deep settler colonial affinity with Israel that the lobby gets to work on, the lobby augments? for its purposes, but it's not enough to say that there's this lobby. And the reason I think that's important is if you think it's enough to say there's this lobby, then you save the society that's being lobbied from any criticism. So you say America would be okay if it wasn't for this cancerous growth. Now that's a horrible phrase. john mearsheimer to be clear he's not an anti-semite but there's this external presence which is poisoning our society so that on the on the soft edge you can have just empirically realistic understandings of the scale of the lobby and then at another end of the spectrum you have this zog thing that you mentioned zionist occupied government which says our whole society is fine it's an external presence which is which is brutalizing it and in britain we have people like dave David Miller, who seemed to move from one sort of sociological realism mapping lobbies to an obsession with Jews everywhere, left-wing Jews he thinks are secretly Zionists, and so on. And I think that the really important point here, the really important point, is that the so-called panic about antisemitism is useless for facing real antisemitism for several reasons. One of them is that it doesn't understand the deep importance of conservatism to antisemitic thinking. So that in the new anti-antisemitism, antisemitism is read as a radical criticism of Western civilization. And that's why it's the province of the radicals in the Kafirs and the radicals who want to bring down the West. The one really important thing about antisemitism to me is that it's a way of expressing social discontent by externalizing the problems in your life. So by saying, I'm out of work, it's not because there's a problem with the whole structure of banks. It's Jewish bankers who have a cultural problem. They're greedy. And so that provincializes the problem, localizes it to a few people who are outsiders to your civilization, which is therefore fundamentally healthy. So all you have to do is expunge that foreign cancer and your civilization will be basically fine. That is the deeply conservative function that antisemitic thinking plays. That conservatism, and so I think that is therefore a bad way of thinking about the problem of Israel, which comes out of those anti-Semitic impulses, rather than asking how, you know, the way that I narrate the history of Israel as a chapter of European imperial settler colonial violence imbricated with Jewish histories. But if you read it as a purely external problem, then you're never going to understand why... You could get rid of the Israel lobby from the United States today. You could get rid of the state of Israel from the United States today. And it wouldn't actually solve all of the problems of the Arab world if the United States continued to fund other dictatorships in the Arab world whose major purpose is to suppress their people. The United States believes, has had a long-term strategic view, that the most reliable ally in... one of the most important parts of the world for them because it's next to huge resources and it's right next to the Suez Canal, the world's most important trade route. The most reliable ally in that region is a settler colony because however brutal the dictatorship in Saudi, say, there is a possibility that the people of Saudi could overthrow it. America puts a lot of money into making sure that doesn't happen. But that's a possibility. Whereas if you have a settler colony, its people are invested in its violence. So there's a reason that America sees Israel as being in its interest in the region. But Israel's always stepped up. It knows what it's there to do. Stepped up when America needed it, whether it was to invade Iraq. Even in 1956, when the British and French wanted to invade Suez, which the Americans opposed, Israel was there to launch their neocolonial invasion. But if Israel went, that would not solve all the problems in the world. It wouldn't even solve all the problems in the region. And you don't understand that if you think that the problem is external and it's Jews and it's Zionists disarticulated from their relation to wider imperial power.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson: Thank you for that. Amandla? Yeah, thank you for that. That was a very rich answer. I guess my question is, you make some distinctions in the piece, for example, you talk about Arun Karnani's work, and you just mentioned it again, the distinction between sort of liberal racisms, you know, sort of around sort of privilege and maybe microaggressions to more structural forms of racism as well. But you also mentioned at the start of the piece, you mentioned the Muslim Council of Britain, for example, right? And the ways that they've been trying to get the British government to agree to a state definition of Islamophobia, right? And so it had me sort of thinking, okay, well, I'm about to set up a new anti-racist organization, a new, say, Muslim Council of Britain, let's call it. Okay, what should I be doing in order to form a broad anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist alliance with others? What does that look like? On what grounds should we be fighting? And what should our relationship be with the grassroots or with the state? Excellent question.

Barnaby Rain: I think there are two completely different images of what racism is and what anti-racism is. Lots of people have remarked on this difference. I'm very indebted to the work of recently of Asad Haider, for example, who talks about contemporary supposed anti-racism as the neutralisation, is his term, of actually emancipatory politics. from the 1960s and 70s. I also mentioned Aaron Kunani because he has recently framed the distinction in especially sort of stark terms. It's not a distinction that he originates, but he's framed it very well between a liberal and a radical anti-racism. So let me put it like this. For liberal anti-racism, the problem of race is essentially a problem of recognition. We are the racialised subjects that we are. We're not going to question how we got made that way. We just are. We are all different. You can see an analogy in the politics of sexuality, the contemporary policy of 10% of people just are gay and they need to be recognised, rather than the earlier politics of how did we get constructed with our sexualities by forms of power and what would it mean if we were all freer from them? So in the politics of recognition, you're black and I'm a Jew. The politics of recognition is endlessly contested and complicated. And I bet there are some people who would say you're not black and I'm not a Jew. I mean, it's hard. It's hard for them to deny I'm a Jew by any of their standards, because, you know, my family have been for as long as anyone knows. But I'm sure that people will. I've been told I'm not black, actually.

Speaker 2: I have actually been called that. So that's not...

Barnaby Rain: That doesn't surprise me because of the insane state of current anti-racist politics. I won't go into too much of it. Can you just tell us quickly on what grounds?

Speaker 2: Yeah, no. No, no, I will, I will. But funnily enough, I actually had like a ghost title at one point, a thing I never wrote. But I was like, I never knew I wasn't black until I went to the United States, right? But this is like, you know, this is like some... I say this because... Yeah, exactly. ADOS, FBA, talking about these more right-wing reactionary groups. But also as well, I mean, I even had someone say to me at one point, like, not to be so auto-ethnographic, but someone said to me, oh, you can't say the N-word. And I said, oh, okay, like, this person took offense to it, another Black person. And I said, why? And they said, because you're not descendants of slavery, that this was used to denigrate my ancestor. And I just said, well... I didn't want to go too much, but I'm thinking that does demonstrate and display such an ignorance of slavery and plantation slavery on the continent as well. Right. But anyway, besides that, you're right.

Barnaby Rain: It's a great example because in an understanding of anti-racism that says who can use what language, We are in a view where we all are racialized and we won't question how we got made that way. And the question is how many points I can get for decent, dignified treatment in a structure of racialization that will continue to racialize all of us. Whereas in the older anti-racist tradition, the question I think way more excitingly is how can we free all of us from all of us, however we are racialised, including the people who are racialised as white, how can we free all of us from a structure whose goal, and this is why the key question is, once you start talking about racialisation, why are we racialised? That becomes the key political question. How can we free all of us from a structure of racialisation whose goal is not anyone's individual flourishing, but the reproduction of a system of accumulation and of degradation and humiliation that, well, does benefit a few people, but doesn't benefit, for example, most white people? So there's a universalist anti-racism, which is not just a kind of crude universalism. It's proud of saying that the experiences of people who are racially degraded can teach those who are not. A richer universalism that teaches those who want to hang on to their racialized whiteness, for example, that actually they lose out from it too. They're pitted against people who should be their siblings and lovers and friends, and sometimes are their siblings and lovers and friends, and pitted against them and told that if they're now drowning at sea, they're fundamentally different and threats to them. That universalism requires asking, why are we racialised? To what ends? Seeing that it doesn't benefit the kinds of human community that we would want to build. And therefore, you concentrate on the stories structures which make our lives different and not immediately on, you know, you understand microaggressions where someone mispronounces your name as the product macroaggressions where some people can't live where they want because they can't get that passport and some people die trying to live where they want and get that passport. And other people get states in America have laws that if you're a homeowner, you can shoot people who enter your home so that if you're white, you can shoot poorer black people. And if you're Palestinian, you can face a genocide that if you were Ukrainian might not be allowed. So it's not to denigrate, actually, concern with the microaggressions. It's to read them as produced by the macroaggressions, what Sivananda, who I mentioned before, called the racism that kills, and to try to focus on attacking those macroaggressions. partly because they are the causes of the microaggressions and partly because that's how you build the broadest political unity and the most beautiful politics because where the microaggressions are carried in the prejudices of the individuals you encounter in the street, the macroaggressions are carried in the reproduction of the social structure that you want to abolish so that everyone can be free. And once you see it like that, you understand that the shift from talking about the macro to the micro has followed a deflation of political horizons where anti-racists have not been alone in giving up in the late 20th century on the possibility of a world totally different. And if you don't believe that you can abolish states that police their borders and keep some people out, you may believe that you can persuade your neighbour to pronounce your name correctly. And so it's a deflation of political horizons that focuses on what seems like the immediate and the doable, but is in fact deeply destructive because it divides people and therefore reproduces the ideology of race. You know, Paul Gilroy is a scholar I admire a lot, and this gets in a lot of trouble for writing against race. Very simple, very good title. The language of privilege checking, of safe spaces, you know, safe space is a very good example of it's necessary in an unsafe world to try to have some spaces where we can be safe. If you limit your horizon to the safe space, you accept that the rest of the world will remain unsafe, which is to say nothing of the problems of safety as an image of this kind of actually quite reactionary kind of image of the good. So you end up reproducing race by dividing those around you and attacking them for the prejudices they hold, rather than asking how we can overturn those prejudices in the work of overturning the social structures that produce those prejudices, which is not to be naive about the seriousness of the prejudice and the fact that it also can be the racism that kills if a working class kid is told to hate Black people and then goes and beats someone up. I mean, so it's not to denigrate, it's not to say that the problem is only at the macro level, it's to say that we have to treat the two together. And in a story that I always tell about this, Hakeem Addy, the great historian of Pan-Africanism, tells a story that I think sums up the point. He says that he was giving a lecture and a white woman came up to him at the end of the lecture and said... I find it really difficult listening to you talk about slavery. And he said, why? And she said, well, because my ancestors might have been involved in the slave trade. He said, do you know that more British people signed petitions against slavery than had ever signed petitions before? A huge number in the millions in an age before technology signed petitions against slavery. And yet the Royal African Company profited from trading in slaves. And the royal family today has those profits.

Speaker 2: So two questions, and I'll just say them now, and then you can just maybe perhaps answer them together. The first is, what I find quite interesting in your piece is you talking about the mobilization of antisemitism to discredit or combat anti-colonial politics. So I'd love to hear more about that. And finally, to end with, not a great ending, but what do you make of the phenomenon of the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Barnaby Rain: Yeah, so I think those are actually very generously easy questions for me. Thank you, Maladou. Because I think they really fit into the kind of model I've been trying to develop. So, you know, I think that people like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene are... I keep talking about spectrums on one point of a spectrum. And if you delve more and more into social media, you find MMA fighters, UFC fighters, big muscly men like Dan Bilzerian with hundreds of thousands of followers who see themselves as conservative, see themselves as great Americans or Europeans. who don't like Israel, who say that Israel's acting very violently and brutally in Gaza, who say it's a genocide, and who then say explicitly, Hitler was right. We should start listening to Hitler. Now, that's not what Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are all themselves on slightly different places on that spectrum, Tucker Carlson goes out of his way more than the other two to insist that he's not anti-Semitic. But there are different points on the spectrum where right-wing criticism of Israel identifies Israel as an external problem in a civilisation that is broadly healthy, whereas my criticism of Zionism reads it as one aspect of one chapter in the same kind of violence that M.A. Césaire writes about when he says that every European bourgeois has a little Hitler inside them. That analogy is inconceivable to the right-wing anti-Israel criticism for which the very purpose of criticising Israeli violence is to salvage the wider civilisation that they defend from criticism. So I think that a good way of talking about anti-Semitism can do precisely the thing which the new anti-anti-Semitism, the pervasive so-called anti-anti-Semitism of our times doesn't do, which is to issue clear distinctions, to work out what kinds of criticism are anti-Semitic and what kinds aren't, where the new anti-anti-Semitism works precisely to muddy those boundaries, to muddy the boundaries between anti-colonial opposition to the Zionist state and racist anti-Semitic opposition. not totally mutually exclusive categories, but crucially important to distinguish if we are invested in a politics of universal freedom that wants Palestinians to have homes and dignity and Jews to have homes and dignity and freedom and safety too. If we're invested in that kind of project, then antisemitism is our enemy. Zionism is our enemy for the same reason, which is that they are both ways of coding and marking human beings according to a constructed racial type, which is then essentialised in them. And they're allotted a package of rights or responsibilities or blame on the basis of that racial coding, that racial essentialism. So we oppose anti-Semitism, we oppose Zionism for exactly the same reason. We therefore want to distinguish a kind of emancipatory, anti-racist, universalist anti-Zionism from an anti-Semitic kind. And that can help us to see Tucker Carlson's criticisms of Israel, not as simply anti-Semitic in that we want to throw a nasty label on him, but we can see that the form of right-wing thinking that leads him to criticise Israel doesn't hold out the same hope for universal freedom that a kind of left-wing anti-Zionism does, and how it can instead edge closer into anti-Semitism. Whereas the dominant way of talking about antisemitism that wants to blame the left for it precisely muddies the distinction that we need desperately to clarify between forms of politics that can save us all and forms of politics that can have us all killing each other. And I think the two aspects of antisemitic thinking that are therefore importantly obscured by the contemporary new anti-antisemitism are its conservatism, its attempt to salvage the wider civilization by identifying a cancerous other as a scapegoat, and its connection to race. it's that the anti-Semite thinks that the problem of Jews is not just that they're outsiders, but that they're in some fundamental essential sense outsiders, often today muddied again by the use of culture as a kind of language for actually talking about race. But do you believe that the world is fundamentally shaped by racial or cultural differences? Or do you believe that constructed racial and certainly constructed cultural differences are the effects of social structures that we want to abolish in order to free all of us. It's very important to me to make those distinctions because they allow me to understand how and why and the ways in which I want to combat anti-Semitism as a Jew, to be honest. I want to combat thinking about the world that scapegoats people for the problems of the wider society, that racializes problems in order to hide their real social construction. And I understand that the there's still a very lively work in our world of doing those things to Jews, even if sometimes the ways that Jews are constructed by that racialization seems to praise us. You know, it buries us under a mountain of praise in the hegemonic Western imaginary, where Jews are racially different and therefore great and have to be protected by the West from the savage hordes. So I want a way of tackling anti-Semitism that promises to free all of us, just like I want a way of tackling all racisms that promise to free all of us. I identify the so-called anti-antisemitism of the European and North American mainstream not as being about protecting anyone, not even as being about protecting Jews, but as being instead about protecting Western civilization. And I think that Western civilization has been a very bad thing for most people in the world. And I think it's very definitely been a bad thing for Jews. because it's been the organizing system of violence against us almost since the death of Jesus and certainly since the medieval world. So I think that the claim to protect Jews is really about protecting Western civilization. I do want to protect Jews. I don't want to protect Western civilization. So I think we need a different way of talking about anti-Semitism. And I think we should stop believing there's a zero-sum choice. It's not like if you're very passionate about Palestine, then you maybe care a bit less about anti-Semitism. If you want a world of universal freedom, then you hate anti-Semites and Zionists. And you understand that the discourse of talking about anti-Semitism honed by Zionism, in fact, puts Jews in danger. In fact, it associates Jews with a genocide. not in order to protect Jews, but in order to protect that genocide, as we are discovering in increased attacks against us all over the world. And so it really is very urgently true right now to say that Palestinian liberation is a universal struggle of our time that even involves, really deeply for me, involves liberating Jews from our cynical use as a protected minority of Western civilization, which would take us down with it in increasing violence against us in order to protect its colonial investments in West Asia. I don't want that as a Jew.

Speaker 2: And I think that's a great one. And I'm absolute solidarity and agreement with you on that. And I think that's a great way to end the show. Thank you so much for coming on.