It should be clear to everyone not invested in the mythologies of Zionism that the Western crackdown on something being named “antisemitism” not only has nothing to do with antiracism, but is a wholly racist endeavor. What the Palestinian scholar, Anna Younes, calls the “war on antisemitism” is waged “by managing, criminalizing, and targeting migrant, refugee, and of colour communities,” Palestinians in the first instance. In a similar vein, Dylan Rodríguez reminds us that the term antisemitism itself has become a “theater of war.” He names “lexical warfare” as the “reorganizing and redirecting [of] entire theatres of conflict through the conquest and colonization of words, definitions, and narratives.”
We have largely failed to see this, insisting instead on speaking about antisemitism having been “weaponized.” As I argue in my new book, The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, claims of weaponization, with their vague invocations of “real” and “false” forms, obscure antisemitism’s function as always already in service of the supremacism of Europe, the West, and whiteness. Historically, as the Black radical political scientist Cedric J. Robinson observed, “the Jewish question” concerned the Jews’ function for European civilization, not as a people, but as a symbol through which to understand and configure itself. Today, the chimera of “Jewish safety” justifies the fight for Western preservation as seen in Israel and the West’s genocide of the Palestinians, and attendant counterinsurgency.
The New Racial Regime uses Cedric Robinson’s concept of “racial regimes” developed in his 2007 book Forgeries of Memory in Meaning, in which he called them, “constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for relations of power.” Racial regimes undergo a process of constant recalibration in response to being undermined from below. In my book, I show how the racial regime is restitched anew from what Robinson called “remnants of its predecessors and new cloth,” often mobilizing contradictory narratives, weaving the fascistic and the ostensibly antiracist together to recapitulate the chaos that racial rule sows even as race, as an idea, suggests order. A crucial dynamic of the racial regime is its incompatibility with a “discoverable history.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent and present politics of antisemitism, which trades in obfuscation to prosecute the Zionist case that opposition to its century-long campaign of settler colonialism and genocide is commensurate with what is proposed as an irrational hatred for Jews, uninterrupted over three millennia.
Against this backdrop, observing Trumpian Schrödinger’s antisemitism may be pleasurable, but it misses the point. It is indeed easy for Trump, Orbán, Le Pen, or any number of fascist politicians to be both antisemitic and to be fighting antisemitism at the same time, because such is the nature of the “war on antisemitism.”
For example, NPR reports on Trump’s use of “the fight against antisemitism as justification for the deportation of pro-Palestinian student protesters and funding cuts to universities,” citing the US Jewish Council for Public Affairs’ objection to “appointing people with antisemitic and other extremist ties to senior roles within the administration” if he were “serious about countering antisemitism.” However, the JCPA itself participates in counterinsurgency using “the spectre of antisemitism” by co-signing the campaign to pass the Countering Antisemitism Act which bases itself on the Anti-Defamation League’s widely discredited Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. The ADL and other signatories of the campaign, such as StandWithUs or Hillel, contribute to the equation of pro-Palestine activism with antisemitism that propels the war on antisemitism. Both Trump and his co-traveling admirers of Israel are the epitome of white-supremacist-racial-capitalist-settler-colonialism and of the Zionist associations – often Jewish but not exclusively – that are the operatives in this war.
In fact, pinpointing the political commonalities between Trumpists and Zionist organizations across the political spectrum (the JCPA is opposed to Trump) tempers the tendency to puzzle over the affinities between Zionists and extreme-right white supremacists and neo-Nazis. These commonalities include how the Zionist state’s stalwart supporters celebrate it as a strong nation where “nationalism is viewed as good, and patriotism is good.” A purported “white genocide,” due to “mass immigration” can be allayed, they claim, by following in the footsteps of this unabashed racial state.
These affinities are not new. In fact, we can trace this back to how, after the successful installation of a Zionist state on stolen Palestinian land, a chimera of the Jew could be appropriated for the defense of Western civilization. I expand on this argument in the final chapter of The New Racial Regime.
Thus, the almost total impunity granted Israel as it has exacted death and destruction on the people of Palestine and sown murderous chaos around the region since its founding can also be understood in terms of the function it serves for the West. Israel’s recent June 12 attack on Iran exposes this in no uncertain terms. Germany, erroneously thought by a majority of observers to be driven in its rabid support for the Zionist colony by guilt for its genocide of the Jews of Europe, made its desires clear. Commending the strikes, German Chancellor Merz said, “This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.”
In the way we see that calls for “Jewish safety” are tacit calls to underwrite a war to preserve the West.
The narrative of “Jewish safety,” which ideologically secures the impunity granted Israel, can also be explained with the help of what Siddhant Issar and his co-authors call the “primitive accumulation of whiteness.” They propose that “the forging of a white, Christian, European subject (homo europaeus),” as the beneficiary of racial capitalism, “is fundamental to the primitive accumulation of capital.” Karl Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation refers to the violent destruction that births capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg later reworked this by showing that “blood and dirt” are a necessary corollary to all stages of capitalism. It cannot proliferate without them. Homo europeaus must be constantly and violently reconstructed against non-white others both within and outside Europe. The authors use Geraldine Heng’s important work on antisemitism in Medieval England alongside Cedric Robinson’s theorization of racial capitalism in Black Marxism to demonstrate how what they call “the bifurcation of human populations and their respective territories” is integral to this primitive accumulation. They show how this carried through into recent history when the “war on terror” configured a threatened homo europaeus in opposition to an “uncivilised, pre-modern and terroristic Muslim.” Under neoliberalism, the presentation of Muslims as a threat to the West drove the “war on terror” which in turn facilitated the expansion of financial markets and for-profit security companies, and thus the reproduction of racial capitalism.
The apparent determination today to install regime change across the Middle East is propelled ideologically by the need to secure “Jewish safety”; wherein Jews become a proxy for homo europaeus. To make this possible, Jews must be severed from the “Orientalist characterizations” that once united “Semites” in the European racist imaginary and recruited for the primitive accumulation of whiteness. The Jew in need of saving thus becomes a key piece in the discursive arsenal necessary to enable what Issar and his co-writers call “militaristic interventions for profit.” Just as the “war on terror” was predicated on the necessity of securing “our” borders from those said to be racially primed to harm “us,” all can be permitted, it seems, to ensure the continuing primitive accumulation of whiteness, both in Palestine and the wider region, and on the domestic front across the West.
In the final chapter of The New Racial Regime, I connect Cedric Robinson’s discussion of Marx’s famous essay “On the Jewish question” to the misnomer of “Jewish safety” to expose how this functions to secure Western hegemony at a time of civilizational collapse. Robinson remarks that Marx was not really talking about the Jews, but about the German society which had conceptualized them “in the wrong way, in an absurd way, in an irrational way, ultimately, in a very destructive way.” According to Robinson, when Marx wrote that “it was necessary for human emancipation that the Jews be destroyed,” he was not talking about world Jewry, but about German society and the Jews’ function for it, and by extension, for European civilization. The Jew had been constructed as a “question” in the context of emancipation, thus contributing to a process ongoing since at least the sixteenth century to abet European colonial ambitions in the Middle East.
As anti-Zionists are faced with repression and punishment, including detention and deportation, across the West, and as the region is faced with perhaps its deadliest threat to date, it is incumbent upon us, as Robinson tells us Marx did, to refuse “to accept the terms, the language, the conceptualizations of the society… He could not accept them because he understood them to be… very clearly related to distortions, to the oppression of a people.” Today, the terms that are used to dominate those who stand against genocide are “antisemitism” and “Jewish safety.” These terms have been disaggregated from antiracism and wielded by those in power to bolster the oppression of the Palestinian people and to punish those who stand with them. The only revolutionary solution, as Robinson proposes, is to reverse these terms and to “transform the culture which it is opposed to in order to emerge a very different culture than existed before.” The fight against antisemitism, inextricable from the fight against racism and white, Western, Christian supremacy, will also fail without this renewal. When white supremacists and genocidaires claim to stand for Jewish safety, we should know that this change is urgent.
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/against-jewish-safety/
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