The claim that opposition to the Israeli state is ‘anti-Semitism’ has become the official view in Western Europe and North America; in some US states, opposition to the Israeli state has been criminalised.

Deborah Lipstadt, mentioned in chapter 1, exemplifies this distortion of the term ‘anti-Semitism’. She claimed that the founders of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which uses non-violent pressure on the Israeli state to further Palestinian demands, are anti- Semitic because they endorse the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes of which they had been dispossessed ‘and [they] therefore [advocate] the end of Israel as a Jewish state’. For her, to demand that refugees be allowed to return to their homes expresses anti-Jewish hatred. The American government agrees, hence her appointment as its arbiter of anti-Semitism. It is not alone. That anti-Semitism means not hatred of Jews but opposition to the Israeli state is now the mainstream position throughout the West. Western governments have a new-found enthusiasm for rooting out ‘anti-Semitism’, which, in reality, is a thinly disguised assault on critics of the Israeli state.

There is an irony to this. The American Jewish comedian Groucho Marx famously withdrew his membership from a tennis club. On being asked the reason, he responded that he would not belong to any club that would have him as a member. The remark was, it is said, not meant to make a political point. He wanted to resign from the club in favour of another, but it refused to let him go. His witty response secured his exit. But his statement could be seen as an unconscious reaction to the situation of the Jew in polite Western society where, since the Enlightenment, Jews were tolerated but still seen as outsiders, excluded from the places where ‘real’ Westerners gathered. The metaphorical clubs that they wanted to join would not have them as members. Western embrace of the claims of a ‘new anti-Semitism’ makes some Jews – those who endorse the Zionist enterprise – welcome in the Western club that had once barred them.

This partly explains the success of Israeli state propaganda in the West. Nazism deprived anti-Semitism of legitimacy among Western elites and the Israeli state has used charges of anti-Semitism as a stock weapon in the propaganda war.