Antisemitism in Britain has risen to new highs. So claims a YouGov poll commissioned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), finding that 21% of the public endorsed four or more “antisemitic” statements, up from 16% last year.

The main headlines have focused on the fact that more than 45% of the British public believe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is comparable to how the Nazis treated the Jews — a view widely condemned as antisemitic and as a deliberate trivialisation of the Holocaust.

As with all surveys of this kind, the results hinge on how the questions are asked — and in this case, some are framed rather dubiously. There is a clear difference between asking about Jews, a people, and Israel, a nation-state that enacts policies. Likewise, there is a difference between asking whether respondents would be as open to having Jewish friends as others, and whether they would feel comfortable spending time with “supporters of Israel”. For many, the latter depends entirely on what “support” means: if it implies endorsing the current Likud government, a negative response is hardly surprising.

Reported antisemitic incidents in the UK have risen significantly since the 7 October attacks. Some of this is expressed in Islamist sectarian terms, while some of it masquerades as anti-Zionism cloaked in pseudo-progressive language, making it harder to identify. According to the CAA’s own poll, 51% of the British public believe antisemitism has increased in the UK since October 2023, a view shared by 60% of young people.

Yet this sits uneasily alongside the widespread use of the antisemitic trope comparing Israel to the Nazis. The CAA explains this by saying that those same people are not “bothered by the surge in anti-Jewish racism” or that they don’t understand “their role in the increase”.

Maybe, though it is unlikely that people would highlight a rise in antisemitism if they weren’t bothered by it. It’s more likely that there’s something deeper going on.

When progressives compare Israel to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, what they are really trying to say is that Israel is a racist state. They wish to condemn it in the strongest moral terms they can. For months, they have watched viral TikTok clips of Gazan children killed by Israeli bombs. They hear Israeli leaders including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich making openly racist calls to expel Gazans and resettle the territory with Jews — remarks that put Israel’s Western defenders in the awkward position of trying to dismiss them as merely “marginal”.

Nazi Germany is the analogy they instinctively grab on to because all their life they’ve been raised with the Holocaust as the “civil religion” of the modern West. Even though Israel’s actions in Gaza are not comparable in scale or method to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, the analogy is invoked out of ignorance of other, more apt historical parallels. One such example is the final months of Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamil Tigers in 2009, which killed 40,000 civilians.

The pro-Israel side has its own interpretation of the Holocaust civil religion, which bears a more nationalist flavour. The guiding motivation here is to ensure that Jews are never again vulnerable to slaughter as they were on 7 October. If tens of thousands of Palestinians must be killed in the process, then so be it.

These highly emotive arguments constitute a clash between two interpretations of the same civil religion of the Holocaust — one universalist, one nationalist. The scale and evil of the Holocaust lend moral power to those who invoke it for their cause. But the way it haunts the argument over Israel-Palestine mystifies this unresolved national question rather than clarifying it.

Ultimately, the CAA poll will do little to resolve this. Both sides differ sharply on what constitutes antisemitism relating to Israel. Is condemning the state of Israel as genocidal equivalent to defaming Jewish people as a whole? They don’t agree on the framing of the argument to begin with. The two sects of the civil religion around the Holocaust, as with any religious schism, will continue to shout past each other, with no progress on the core issue for a long time to come.

---

Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

buffsoldier_96

---