In 2014, the UN General Assembly subjected Israel to 20 condemnatory resolutions, compared to only three for the rest of the world combined – one each on Iran, Syria and North Korea. Confirming Israel’s status as a political piñata, the UN Human Rights Council has maintained its efforts to ‘aid and abet a global culture of demonising the Jewish state,’ said the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch.

A German judge recently ruled that three Palestinians convicted of arson after firebombing a synagogue in Wuppertal were not guilty of anti-Semitism, but simply sought to draw ‘attention to the Gaza conflict.’ Several days prior to the arson attack, ‘Free Palestine’ had been spray-painted on to the wall of the synagogue, which had been rebuilt after being destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.

But a BBC reporter’s interview with a Jewish woman at the Paris rally following the Charlie Hebdo attacks suggests that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not so easily detached. ‘We have to not to be afraid to say that the Jews, they are the target now,’ said the woman, identified as Chava, a daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, comparing her feeling of insecurity to the situation in Europe in the 1930s. ‘Many critics, though, of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well,’ interjected the BBC interviewer, Tom Willcox, explicitly linking resurgent anti-Semitism with what he called Palestinian suffering ‘at Jewish hands.’ When Chava objected to Willcox conflating the two, he replied: ‘But you understand, everything is seen from different perspectives?’ The encounter is illuminating not only for the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, but the display of moral equivalence and relativism – both implied and explicit.

One of the many virtues of Joshua Muravchik’s Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel (full disclosure: I am cited in the book as one of the author’s conversational sources) is that he refuses to privilege anti-Semitism as a driving factor of anti-Zionist animus. His rigorous and well-researched book explains why so many in the West no longer view Israeli as the plucky democratic underdog surrounded by hostile Arab autocracies and eliminationist non-state actors, but as a despicable outlier, morally equivalent to South Africa’s apartheid regime. A scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Muravchik warns that this ‘relentless campaign to recast “Israel” as a malevolent Goliath places it in great peril.’

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.