One of the more peculiar aspects of the ideology of Jewish Exceptionalism is its rejection that antisemitism is just racism that is applied to Jewish people. When asked whether antisemitism and racism are different, the otherwise brilliant Marxist Jewish scholar Moshe Postone onceanswered that antisemitism is worse than “ordinary racism” because it had the added component of identifying the global bourgeoisie as Jewish. For Postone, this enabled an amalgamation between “ordinary racism” and a critique of capitalism through which all socio-economic injustices could be blamed on the Jews.
Postone’s argument thus resonates with more generic conceptions of “antisemitism-of-the-left”, which is usually a short cut for anti-globalist left-wing populism, which shares its anti-globalist orientation with right-wing populism. This use of antisemitism as a tool of performative accusation is for example deployed in attempts to discredit the British politician Jeremy Corbyn or the mayoral candidate for New York Zohran Mamdani.
Whereas is it empirically certainly possible to hold views that may deploy anti-semitic tropes in particular critiques of capitalism (after all Adolf Hitler had done the same), these critiques are by definition NOT capitalism-critiques. If the opposition to global capitalism is based on the argument that the global bourgeoisie is Jewish, then it is not capitalism critique. As soon as the Jewish bourgeoisie is replaced by a non-Jewish one, the critique would be over. You cannot sustain a coherent critique of capitalism by racializing the bourgeoisie, because capitalism does not derive from identity-thinking. Identity thinking is merely a means to sustain and legitimate capitalism.
Postone could not me more wrong to differentiate between racism and antisemitism on the basis of their different substantiations. Antisemitism emerged in Europe as an instrument of class war, bit in terms of establishing a Zionist elite as well as fragmenting working class opposition through the sustained cultivation of nationalism. Antisemitism performed exactly the same function as racism in colonialism; the only difference is the vector of colonization. Antisemitism was the first manifestation of endocolonization, whereas until then (Western-) European imperialism primarily evolved around exocolonization.
The two are not different in function, structure or interests, but mutually enforce a corruption of the alignment of Truth to Justice in service of the bourgeoisie and their stewards. This is why the Zionist response to the statement that the state of Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza is incredibly vacuous. Its main strands are: (a) it is not a genocide because the mass killing and starvations of Palestinian Civilians is not intentional but to be understood as collateral damage; (b) the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians is justified because they are all guilty (by association) of terrorism; (c) it is not a genocide because as an exceptional race, Jewish people are incapable of genocide because they are the heirs to the only Holocaust that needs to be remembered; (d) it is not a genocide because calling it a genocide would diminish and devalue the Holocaust; (e)genocides can only be committed against Jews not by them.
The absurdity of these so-called arguments is obvious. The very fact that they are still upheld in rational deliberations and public debates testifies to the bankruptcy of Habermas’ political philosophy (the Theory of Communicative Action) in defence of (western) democracy.
Zionism is not an exceptional corruption of the enlightenment, but merely an extreme version of it. It is a corruption in the dialectical sense is it emerged from the same enlightenment as a transformation from religion to ethnic nationhood. Jewish exceptionalism has enabled a sense of impunity that derives from a form of identity thinking that was fermenting in the bowels of European imperialism. From the very first European imperial venture, the corruption of western civilization, in the case that of Christianity, was part and parcel of the very ideology of western civilization.
The consolidation of the corruption is what we now call “the state”. Genocides are always committed by states against people, never the other way around. Genocides require an extreme asymmetry of the ability to kill. This is why the Hamas attack on Israel on the 7th of October was not a genocide but a (serious) war crime. The very argument, made by Zionists, that the Hamas attacks are similar to those of the Holocaust is based on extreme racist ideology: Jews are only the victims of genocide, never its perpetrators. If the victims of war crimes are Jews, then and only then – according to Zionists – it is called a Holocaust.
That should be enough to disqualify Zionism from entering into a political debate based on reasoned deliberation. This is also what is so deeply frustrating about debating with Zionists, as they perform genocide denial on the basis of bad faith arguments and ad hominem attacks. They deliberately violate semantics in defence of identity politics cultivated by hateful violence and systemic evil. Backed up by an extremely well-funded and widespread apparatus that exercises both physical and symbolic violence, attacking fundamental human rights, not only in Palestine but across the globe, Zionism is the epitome of the fundamental corruption of western civilization. It is therefore not surprising that the Jeffrey Epstein Network is primarily about the cover up of the deeply corrupt nature of wealthy and powerful (old) men. The protection of child sex offenders requires exactly the same mind-set as genocide denial when it pertains to non-Jewish civilians, especially children. The perversion of wealthy, powerful, old men is the perversion of established modern power which benefits them at the expense of others. Jewish exceptionalism is a concept that must be exposed and dismissed. If not, it will continue to rot in the foundations of any attempt to recover anything worthwhile keeping from the European legacy. This is also the case for every other form of exceptionalism, which ultimately, every expression of ethno-nationalist ideology is. Jewish exceptionalism is not exceptional. It is simply an extreme form of ethno-nationalism, exploited by some of the wealthiest of the world to ensure that they will remain above the law and democratic due process will ever get to them. This is why those advocating for Palestinians as having human rights are ultimately ending up being labelled terrorists. This is not because they challenge some mystical cabal, but because they challenge the entire system that ensures that wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of people, who may never have done an honest day of work in their entire lives.
Disaffected Sociology 
Leave a comment