Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism

By Elder of Ziyon

The Tsarist forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was not the first conspiracy theory about Jews, but it is perhaps the most famous one. It described specific steps that the Jewish cabal was said to use to take over the world and enrich its members: supporting wars, manipulating the media, and replacing religion with materialism.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: EoZPress
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985708417

Book preview

Introduction

The Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, proposes the most infamous conspiracy theory involving Jews, but conspiracy theories about Jews long preceded its publication: after all, the medieval libels that Jews poison wells or murder Christian babies for Jewish rituals also represent conspiracy theories.

The Protocols book was, perhaps, the first to describe specific steps that the Jewish cabal uses to take over the world and enrich its members: supporting wars, manipulating the media, and replacing religion with materialism.

Today we have updated versions of the protocols. They might not take the same written form as the older forgery, but they are imprinted on the brains of modern antisemites. These protocols include ideas such as: the Jewish lobby controls the American government; Israel ethnically cleanses non-Jews from Israel; Zionism is racism; Israel violates international law in myriad ways; and Jews use the Holocaust to justify their own Nazi-like crimes. In some circles these new protocols have practically become a religion, and the people who believe the new lies are as fanatic as the ones who believe the old.

This book examines these new protocols. It derives mostly from articles I have written over the past decade on my website, The Elder of Ziyon, about the new antisemitism.

Researchers have found references to la nouvelle judéophobie as early as 1968, but Abba Eban defined it pretty well in 1973:

[R]ecently we have witnessed the rise of the new left which identifies Israel with the establishment, with acquisition, with smug satisfaction, with, in fact, all the basic enemies [...] Let there be no mistake: the new left is the author and the progenitor of the new anti-Semitism. One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism. The old classic anti-Semitism declared that equal rights belong to all individuals within the society, except the Jews. The new anti-Semitism says that the right to establish and maintain an independent national sovereign state is the prerogative of all nations, so long as they happen not to be Jewish. And when this right is exercised not by the Maldive Islands, not by the state of Gabon, not by Barbados... but by the oldest and most authentic of all nationhoods, then this is said to be exclusivism, particularism, and a flight of the Jewish people from its universal mission.[1]

We see that the new antisemitism isn’t so new anymore. I usually call it modern antisemitism.

Modern antisemitism is pervasive. It takes many forms, has many practitioners and, sad to say, many defenders. This differs little from antisemitism through history.

We too-easily forget that the decades following the Holocaust, when the world still felt horror at the Nazis’ Final Solution, represent an anomaly in the long history of Jew-hatred. The Holocaust merely caused antisemitism to morph into new varieties of hate.

Outside neo-Nazis, few people proudly call themselves antisemites. But many proudly call themselves anti-Zionists or use other euphemisms such as revisionist historians or pro-Palestinian activists. As we will show, it is but a new label on a very old bottle.

The cover picture includes the avatar I have been using online, supposedly a picture of Rashi, the 11th century Jewish commentator on the Torah and Talmud. Rashi earned fame for his encyclopedic knowledge as well as his uncanny ability to explain texts clearly and concisely. No one knows what Rashi actually looked like – someone took a guess and this picture became associated with him in the 20th century – so in a sense he is a well-known yet anonymous writer. He is a role model for my writing, although I fall far short.

My goal when I write articles for the website is to make sure the reader learns something they didn’t know before in every post. I hope this book approaches that high bar. Antisemitism may have seen discussion in great detail in thousands of books and articles since the term was coined, but unfortunately it manifests itself in new ways.

Section 1: Modern antisemitism

This section surveys modern antisemitism in its most popular guises.

First, we must define the term. That has become a cacophonous political battle between Zionists and anti-Zionists regarding where to draw the line between hate and legitimate criticism. I propose a definition that I believe is brief, comprehensive, and intuitively accurate.

The rest of the section goes through many attributes of modern antisemitism – its similarities with its predecessors, the ways it justifies itself, and how the politics surrounding it end up turning Jews into pawns that both the Right and the Left exploit. I discuss some specific manifestations of antisemitism today and the reasons behind them.

A new, better definition of antisemitism

To expose antisemitism, we must define antisemitism.

In recent years, defining antisemitism has become a cottage industry, and it all revolves around Israel.

Natan Sharansky famously created easy-to-use criteria for when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism. He formulated the 3D test in 2004:  

The first D is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.

The second D is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism.

The third D is the test of delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism.[2]

It’s an excellent, accurate formulation. For years, the US State Department accepted it as an official definition for that specific subset of antisemitism-as-anti-Zionism.

However, the need for a comprehensive and actionable definition of antisemitism altogether persisted, one that incorporates the 3D test as well as other definitions of antisemitism separate from Israel.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance came closest to an agreed definition; it issued this working definition in 2016:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.[3],

The IHRA included some specific examples as guidelines, some of which involve hatred of Israel, including:

-  Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

-  Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

-  Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

-  Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

-  Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

The scholars behind IHRA all agreed that some hate of Israel is antisemitic. The IHRA explicitly says, Criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

That didn’t stop today’s Israel-haters from attacking the IHRA Working Definition and lying about it, claiming falsely that it labeled all criticism of Israel antisemitic, and that it was being used to stifle any criticism of Israel, even any Palestinian voices.

In response to IHRA, they created their own definition of antisemitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.[4] Its core definition:

Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).

The explanations it attaches to the definition include more examples of how criticism of Israel (including boycotting Israel) is not antisemitic than of what is antisemitic. JDA emphasizes that antisemitism is only against Jews as Jews, which creates a huge loophole for antisemites who claim they attack not Jews as Jews, but merely whoever the current proxies for Jews are: rootless cosmopolitans, New York bankers, the Hollywood elite, or Zionists.

While the IHRA tries to get as inclusive as possible in its definition of antisemitism, the JDA tries to get as exclusive as possible. In all other contexts – when defining racism, misogyny, or any other bigotry – the Left strives for as much inclusion as possible, and the victim group is believed when they call something offensive or an attack. But in the case of antisemitism, the JDA authors deliberately narrow the definition to exclude anyone or anything they cannot associate with the Right. Whereas the IHRA Working Definition was not meant to be political, the JDA is nothing but political.

Let’s run a couple of examples through both definitions.

If someone who has no history of antisemitic statements comes out of the blue and says that Israel acts like Nazi Germany towards Palestinians, is that antisemitic?

IHRA says Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis qualifies as antisemitism, so yes.

JDA says, Even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid. Nazism, a historical case, presumably falls under this definition. But the JDA omitted the comparison of Jews to their murderers from its examples of antisemitism, and since it came in response to IHRA, that was obviously deliberate.

What about context? Any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany aims not to illuminate anything, but to hurt Jews by likening them to their murderers. If Israel weren’t a Jewish state, the comparison would lack valence and likely wouldn’t be made. This shows how far the JDA authors go in defending anti-Zionism as legitimate.

Sharansky’s double standards come into play vis-à-vis calling Israel racist or an apartheid state, or creating campaigns to boycott Israel when no remotely similar campaigns exist for any other state today. JDA descends into farce on this, saying, Boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.

Commonplace? What other states do people boycott with the publicity that BDS has? Why single out Israel when by any measure, even accepting the most insane lies about Israel, it still doesn’t approach the level of human rights violations by most states, including Western nations in wartime?

Similarly, the Left moots how to dismantle the Jewish state and replace it with another Arab state (falsely called binational.) What other state based on a national group is ever told to destroy itself? What other state is constantly told it has no right to exist?

This JDA’s subtext is that it is a huge coincidence that the only nation on the planet boycotted, considered illegitimate, compared to apartheid South Africa, and told its national ethos is racist, is also the only nation filled with Jews. Perhaps some people buy that argument, but most people don’t – and for very good reason the IHRA has been accepted or endorsed by some 30 nations so far, and the JDA by nobody.

Anti-Zionism is essentially antisemitism, simply because there is no comparable anti in the world when one looks at the vitriol it generates. Plus, those two antis are eerily similar: the accusations Jews have faced historically are the same as what the Jewish state faces, such as undue influence over governments, murdering children for sport, and deliberately spreading disease.  There is no difference between those who accuse Israel of poisoning Palestinian water, or of stealing Palestinian organs, and those who once accused Jews of poisoning the wells to cause a plague or using Christian blood for Passover rituals.

Another point requiring attention: antisemitism has historically seen Jews accused of the most heinous crimes of the age. Israel stands accused of the most heinous crimes of this age – racism, colonialism, indiscriminate killing and imprisonment of children, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. A passing knowledge of history makes the parallels obvious, but the JDA doesn’t acknowledge this aspect of modern antisemitism.

A definition that deliberately excludes most examples of what it purports to define is not a definition at all, but propaganda.

A further example of how JDA cannot be taken seriously: in 1933, Hermann Goering insisted to Western media, The [Nazi] government, and myself, will never permit anyone being subjected to persecution solely because he is a Jew.[5] He also said, Jews who have been ousted from public office were so treated because they were socialists.[6]

The JDA would consider the March 1933 Nazis not antisemitic because they claimed not to persecute Jews as Jews.

Many nations and organizations have adopted the IHRA Working Definition; it remains the best definition available, its ambiguity and shortcomings notwithstanding. Israel-haters continue to fight, with petitions and articles falsely claiming it deems all criticism of Israel antisemitic. College campuses that consider its adoption become battlegrounds.

Meanwhile, another group – the Nexus Task force – tried to replace the IHRA definition with a watered-down version[7] that, like the JDA, focuses mostly on what antisemitism isn’t (criticism of Israel), not what it is. Like the IHRA, it then must go into detailed examples of what might be considered antisemitic in relation to Israel, since the core definition falls short.

All those definitions cannot stand on their own. They require lengthy lists of examples and explanations because the core definitions fail to cover all instances of antisemitism.

I decided to create my own definition.

I wanted to create a definition that could stand without examples. I sought a definition that includes all kinds of antisemitism but excludes what isn’t. It must not treat hatred of Israel as a special case of antisemitism with different rules; hating Israel is but one aspect of antisemitism, not a special case with its own rules.

Ideally, a good definition of antisemitism is short enough to fit in a tweet.

Here is what I came up with. (The line breaks are deliberate to facilitate reading and comprehension.)

Antisemitism is

hostility toward,

denigration of,

malicious lies about or

discrimination against

Jews

as individual Jews,

as a people,

as a religion,

as an ethnic group or

as a nation (i.e., Israel.)

Text Description automatically generated

SOME JEWS IDENTIFY as being part of the Jewish religion; some are atheists but identify with the Jewish people; some as part of an ethnic group; some as Zionist – part of the Jewish nation. All of these are legitimate aspects of Jewishness, and attacking any one of them is antisemitic, no matter how individual Jews identify.

Judaism is multifaceted, and unfair attacks on any of these facets is antisemitism, no matter how individuals feel. 

Attacking Jews as a religious group is clearly antisemitic even to Jews who don’t adhere to the religion. Likewise, attacking the Jewish state is just as antisemitic as attacking Jews as a people. Why distinguish between different aspects of Jewishness? A thoroughly secular Israeli who only identifies as Jewish through Zionism is as much a Jew – and thus a target for antisemitism – as an atheist Jew in the US whose Jewish ties come from lox and bagels. An attack on one is an attack on all. 

People who reject Israel as the Jewish state have no right to exclude Israel as an expression of Jewishness and target for anti-Jewish hate any more than people who reject Judaism as a religion can exclude religious Jews from a definition of what Jewishness includes. Roughly half of all Jews now live in Israel and the vast majority of the rest support Jewish nationalism; the rejection of Zionism by a small minority therefore has no bearing on the fact that Israel is just as much a component of Jewishness today as keeping Shabbat or speaking Yiddish.

The word denigration is important. Denigration specifically means unfair criticism. It excludes legitimate criticism – not just of Israel but of Judaism as a religion, or Jews as a people. Again, Israel is not a special case – it is a specific manifestation of Jewishness today and should be treated no better or worse than any other manifestation, with no further caveat or example necessary.

Hostility toward Israel as a state is no more legitimate than hostility toward Jews as a people or as individual Jews. Hostility towards Israel is not about legitimate grievances. Serious critics of Israel might criticize Israel’s decision-makers or leaders, not the entire state. When it crosses the line into hate, it crosses the line into antisemitism.

Discrimination against Israel is no different from discrimination against Jews as an ethnic group or as a people. Saying Israel cannot join certain UN committees; be a part of the Middle East or Asia in international forums; that it is the only nation whose supposed crimes make it and its people subject to boycotts; or that somehow Jewish nationalism is pernicious when every other ethnic nationalism is accepted – all of those are discrimination and bigotry. When seen through this lens, it is obvious that all of those are antisemitic attacks on the Jewish state because it is Jewish. 

The malicious lies clause is crucial. This covers not only Holocaust denial but all sorts of clearly antisemitic lies about Jewish history, such as the Khazar origin myth that Ashkenazic Jews are not really Jewish; that Jews have no historic ties to Jerusalem; or that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis. The other definitions do not cover these lies – even with their examples – but the lies are obviously antisemitic. This is perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the other definitions.

I think this definition has great advantages over the others: it is more accurate, all-encompassing, and doesn’t appear to include things that aren’t antisemitism or exclude things that are. Israel isn’t a special case – it is a core example of what Jewishness means today. The existence of anti-Zionist Jews doesn’t invalidate it as antisemitism any more than the existence of capitalist Jews doesn’t invalidate the antisemitism of the far-Right saying that they hate Jews because they are Communists.

We will examine numerous examples of modern antisemitism. Herein lies overwhelming proof that today’s single-minded hate of Israel that we see in the media, from the UN, from human rights organizations, and on campus, amounts to just another manifestation of the age-old hate for Jews.

Excuses vs. reasons for Jew-hatred

AS LONG AS THERE HAVE been Jews, there has been Jew-hatred. Each time, the Jew-haters justified their hate with pretexts that sounded reasonable to that generation.

Pharaoh saw Hebrews as a fifth column. Haman said Jews didn’t respect the King’s laws. Antiochus said the Jews refused to assimilate. Christians said Jews killed their god. Jews stood accused of killing Gentiles, especially children. Jews charged interest on loans. Jews lived apart. Jews tried to assimilate and take over nations. Jews spread capitalism. Jews spread communism. Jews were a subhuman race.

No one said they hated Jews for no reason. They always had a reason. Only bigots hate for no reason! But later generations saw each reason wasn’t a reason at all – it was an excuse to justify hate. In each case, the hate came first – then the excuse.

Each time, some Jews accepted the reasons as valid, and would try to distance themselves from the bad Jews, to ingratiate themselves with their oppressors. Hellenists, early Jewish Christians, the medieval apikorsim and minim, the German Reform movement, all sought to some extent to escape persecution as Jews by identifying with the antisemites of each era. They accepted the criticisms of Jews as valid and hoped to escape that hatred by siding with the antisemites.

In this sense, modern antisemitism is indistinguishable from the many older versions.

People don’t hate Israel and Zionism because of Zionist philosophy or Israeli government actions. They hate Israel because it is Jewish. The many reasons they give to justify that hate are post-hoc.  This was obvious in the early days of Zionism through the rebirth of Israel, when people took less care to substitute the word Zionist for Jew in their antisemitic statements. However, in the wake of the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable, so hatred of the Jewish state supplanted it, and remains today. The class of people who say they hate occupation hated Israel before 1967; the people who call it colonialist hated it before that word became an epithet.

Their reasons are excuses, and this is obvious because their hate doesn’t extend to other nations with the same supposed traits.

Today, no one can seriously read the objections to a Jewish state from Arab leaders before 1948 and consider them anything but excuses for a desire to ethnically cleanse Jews from the region.  Similarly, no one can look at the history of Jews in Arab nations in the 20th century and believe their leaders only opposed Zionism but not Jews.

When the Mufti started his antisemitic campaign in the 1920s, he had an excuse: the Jews were threatening Al Aqsa! People believed the excuse and excused Arab attacks.

It was a lie. 

When the 1929 pogrom killing Jews throughout the land happened, the Arabs claimed it was because of Jewish immigration taking away jobs (and supposed Jewish designs on Al Aqsa.) The British believed and punished the Jews as if it were the real reason.

It was a lie. 

When Arab nations threatened to, and then actually did, expel millions of Jews from their lands, they said it was only because the Jews were fifth-column Zionists bent on destroying their nations as well.

It was a lie.

Even in 2021 Hamas claimed that the rocket attacks towards Jerusalem were because of the property dispute in Sheikh Jarrah, as if one has something to do with the other. Yet the media take the excuse as a valid reason.

It is still a lie. 

In a generation or two, today’s arguments against Israel will be just as obviously antisemitic as they have proven to be in the past. Then other arguments will replace them.

The modern antisemites strive to separate Zionism and Israel from Jewishness. They want to hang onto their excuses, to pretend they hate for legitimate reasons. When one realizes the elaborate fiction underlying today’s anti-Zionism, nothing more than a new manifestation of the oldest hatred, it becomes clear how their arguments mirror those of the antisemites of old. Jews/Zionists have too much power! Jews/Zionists control the government! Jews/Zionists relish killing goyim! Jews/Zionists think they are better than everyone else! The world would be better off without Jews/Israel! It is a new label on a very, very old bottle.

As long as Jews assert any rights in the Middle East, there will be Jew-hatred disguised as humanitarian reasons for denying them. Modern antisemites pretend they have the solution for antisemitism itself – Jews relinquishing their rights. Not coincidentally, the antisemites have always espoused the same plan. 

As we’ve seen so often, plenty of Jews enthusiastically take up the arguments of today’s antisemites. Like their Hellenist and Reform forebears, these Jews hope to avoid today’s antisemitism by identifying with the new haters – even surpassing them in their vitriol.

The new minim show pride in their hate, as the old ones did. They use their Jewish background to buttress their arguments against Jews as generations of Jewish converts to Christianity did. They generalize the actions