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A new anti-semitism: American discourse since September 11 has seen a reinvention of the eternal anti-semitism thesis applied to critics of Israel.

Article Excerpt
One way to judge an alarmist discourse is to question its 'worldliness', its capacity to engage with the contingency of the past and the complex realities of the present. This criterion helps us to analyse the proliferating literature warning of the dangers of a 'new anti-semitism' resurgent in Europe and the Arab Middle East, a claim that has become deafening since the events of September 11, 2001. I follow the political theorist Hannah Arendt in imputing unworldliness to two prevalent doctrines explaining anti-semitism: the first, that anti-semitism has been eternal throughout history; and the second, that Jews have had no agency whatsoever in their unpopularity, but were simply blameless scapegoats, targeted by the irrational and omnipresent anti-semite. Arendt, wary that these doctrines denied the historical significance of economic and social relationships, decried these doctrines as metaphysical fatalism, "liquid[ating] the very possibility of human activity'. Or, in the case of Israel, I would suggest that these doctrines aim to liquidate sensible critique and active engagement with Israeli policies.

Scott Handleman, in "Trivialising Jew Hatred', an essay for the CounterPunch-edited volume The Politics of Anti-Semitism (2003), invokes Arendt to similar effect:

The premise of eternal anti-Semitism holds that Jews are forever the targets of irrational hatred, that the collective behaviour of Jews cannot alter this hatred, that Israel is therefore necessary to safeguard world Jewry, and...

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