Simon Schama’s defence of Israel and the campaign to criminalise opposition to genocide

Simon Schama’s recent intervention in defence of Israel is presented as a contribution to historical understanding. In reality, it belongs to a broader political campaign whose purpose is to delegitimise mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The significance of such arguments lies not in their historical accuracy, but in their political function. At a moment when millions of people around the world are expressing opposition to war, ethnic cleansing and imperialist violence, intellectuals associated with the political establishment are increasingly being mobilised to provide moral and historical justification for repression.[1]

The campaign’s central mechanism is straightforward. Criticism of the Israeli state is equated with hostility to Jewish people. Opposition to Zionism is portrayed as a modern form of antisemitism. Protest against the destruction of Gaza becomes evidence of sympathy for forces allegedly seeking the destruction of Jews. Through this process, the unique moral authority associated with the Holocaust is transferred to the contemporary Israeli state, allowing criticism of its actions to be denounced as a revival of humanity’s greatest historical crime.

This conflation is not an intellectual mistake or conceptual confusion. It is a deliberate political operation. Its target is not the racist right, which continues to flourish across Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Rather, it is directed against anti-war demonstrators, socialist organisations, students, academics and workers who oppose genocide and imperialist war.

The narrative’s omission of the far right is especially revealing. Many of Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters are found among political forces with long histories of xenophobia, racism and authoritarian nationalism. Across Europe and North America, right-wing nationalist movements have increasingly presented Israel as a model of ethnic exclusivity, militarised borders and state violence against a subject population. These forces are rarely accused of antisemitism when they support Israel because they are politically useful allies. The contradiction exposes the dishonesty of claims that support for Israel constitutes the defining measure of opposition to antisemitism.

At the centre of Schama’s argument lies a familiar liberal-Zionist distinction between Israel’s allegedly noble foundations and the unfortunate excesses of its current government. Schama portrays Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich as departures from a fundamentally democratic and humane project. The implication is that Israel has somehow lost its way.

This narrative cannot withstand historical examination. The catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza did not emerge from a temporary deviation from Israel’s founding principles. It grew out of the state’s historical foundations. The Nakba of 1948, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, was not an accidental by-product of state formation. It was the decisive event that established the state. The subordination and displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population were not peripheral episodes but central components of the Zionist project as it developed in practice.

For decades, Israel has functioned as a strategic ally of the major imperialist powers in the Middle East. Its military, economic and diplomatic position has been inseparable from its role within broader geopolitical calculations pursued by Britain and, increasingly after the Second World War, the United States. To describe the destruction of Gaza merely as the consequence of an extremist government is therefore to obscure the deeper historical and political forces that have shaped the state from the beginning.

Mario Kessler on Antisemitism

The German historian Mario Kessler has made an important contribution to understanding antisemitism by examining it through the history of the socialist movement. His work is particularly valuable because it challenges the widespread assumption that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are fundamentally the same thing. Instead, Kessler demonstrates that some of the strongest and most principled opponents of antisemitism were found within the revolutionary socialist tradition, many of whom were also critics of Zionism.

Kessler approaches antisemitism not simply as a prejudice but as a social and political phenomenon rooted in specific historical conditions. Drawing on Marxist scholarship, he shows how antisemitism often emerged during periods of economic and political crisis, when ruling elites and reactionary movements sought to channel social discontent away from the existing social order and towards a minority group. Jews were portrayed as responsible for social problems that were, in reality, products of capitalism itself.

One of Kessler’s key themes is the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Zionism. He traces debates within the labour movement from the late nineteenth century onward, showing that many Jewish socialists rejected the Zionist project while remaining uncompromising opponents of antisemitism. For figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and many members of the Jewish labour movement, the solution to Jewish oppression lay not in creating a separate nation-state but in the international struggle for socialism and democratic equality.

Kessler’s work also highlights the twentieth century’s tragedy. The rise of fascism and the Holocaust devastated the European Jewish population and transformed political attitudes towards Zionism. Yet he argues that understanding this catastrophe requires serious historical analysis rather than political myth-making. The history of antisemitism, in his view, cannot be reduced to support for or opposition to Israel.

Kessler is particularly relevant today because he insists on historical precision. He rejects attempts to use accusations of antisemitism as a weapon against all critics of Israeli policy, while equally opposing genuine antisemitism in all its forms. His work reminds us that the socialist movement developed both a powerful critique of antisemitism and a tradition of internationalism that sought solidarity between peoples rather than separation through competing nationalisms. For readers interested in the relationship between antisemitism, socialism and Zionism, Kessler provides an important historical bridge between nineteenth-century Marxism and contemporary political debates.

The effort to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism also requires the systematic suppression of an alternative political tradition, namely that of revolutionary socialist internationalism. The historical record is clear. The socialist movement, not Zionism, produced the most consistent and principled struggle against antisemitism. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socialist organisations opposed antisemitism not as an isolated prejudice but as a reactionary ideology rooted in the contradictions of class society.

David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine

David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is less a conventional history book than a collection of political and historical essays that examine the origins of Zionism, the Palestinian question, and imperialism’s role in the Middle East. Written from a Trotskyist and international socialist standpoint, the book challenges both the mainstream defence of Zionism and the various nationalist perspectives that dominate discussion of the conflict.

One of the book’s strengths is its placement of Zionism in a broader historical context. North argues that Zionism emerged as a response to the oppression of European Jews, but that it developed as a nationalist movement whose fate became closely bound up with the interests of the major imperialist powers. Rather than treating Israel as simply the fulfilment of Jewish self-determination, he examines how the state was formed, its relationship to the displacement of the Palestinian population and its strategic role in the Middle East.

A recurring theme is the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. North insists that opposition to Zionism is not the same thing as antisemitism and points to the long history of socialist opposition to both antisemitism and Jewish nationalism. The book draws heavily on the writings of Marx, Engels, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and, above all, Leon Trotsky. These figures argued that antisemitism was rooted in the crises and contradictions of capitalist society and could not be overcome through the creation of a separate national state.

Particularly interesting are the sections dealing with Trotsky’s analysis of the Jewish question in the 1930s. Trotsky recognised the terrible danger facing European Jewry under fascism while maintaining that Zionism offered no lasting solution. North argues that subsequent events, including the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, have confirmed many of Trotsky’s warnings.

The book also connects the Palestinian struggle to broader questions of war, imperialism, and class politics. Rather than advocating either Israeli or Palestinian nationalism, North advances socialist internationalism, arguing that a genuine democratic solution requires workers’ political unity throughout the region.

Whether one agrees with its conclusions or not, The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is an important statement of the Trotskyist position on one of the most contested questions of modern history. It combines historical analysis, political polemic and theoretical argument in a way that encourages readers to think beyond the narrow framework through which the conflict is usually presented.

August Bebel and the Socialist Struggle Against Antisemitism

August Bebel (1840-1913), the co-founder and leading figure of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), played a decisive role in establishing the Marxist movement as the most consistent opponent of antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Europe. At a time when antisemitic agitation was gaining influence among sections of the middle classes and even among workers affected by economic crisis, Bebel insisted that hostility to Jews was not a form of social protest but a reactionary diversion from the struggle against capitalism.

Bebel is best known for describing antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.” By this he meant that antisemitic demagogues sought to exploit genuine popular grievances while directing anger away from the capitalist system and towards a vulnerable minority. Rather than identifying exploitation as a consequence of the social relations of capitalism, antisemites attributed poverty, unemployment and financial crises to the alleged conspiracies of Jewish individuals. In doing so, they transformed social discontent into racial hatred and protected the existing economic order.

For Bebel and the Marxist movement, antisemitism was not simply a prejudice or moral failing. It was a political weapon used by ruling elites and reactionary forces to divide the working class. Antisemitic campaigns encouraged workers to blame Jewish neighbours instead of the capitalist class as a whole. This undermined workers’ unity across national, religious, and ethnic lines, which Marxists regarded as essential to socialist struggle.

Bebel’s opposition to antisemitism anticipated later Marxist analyses developed by figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. His insistence that workers reject all forms of racial and religious chauvinism became a foundational principle of socialist internationalism. At a time when many liberal politicians accommodated antisemitic sentiment, Bebel and the SPD publicly opposed it, making the socialist movement the principal political force combating antisemitism in Germany.

His intervention remains historically significant because it demonstrated that the fight against antisemitism is inseparable from the struggle for working-class unity and social equality. For Bebel, the liberation of Jewish people could not be achieved through exclusion, nationalism, or scapegoating, but only through workers’ common struggle against capitalism itself.

No figure understood this process more profoundly than Leon Trotsky. Writing as fascism rose, Trotsky warned that capitalism’s crisis threatened catastrophe for European Jewry. The destruction of democratic institutions, the growth of fascist movements and the degeneration of bourgeois society pointed toward unprecedented crimes. At the same time, Trotsky rejected Zionism’s claim to provide a solution to the Jewish question through the creation of a national state in Palestine. He argued that the historical problem confronting Jewish people could not be resolved through a nationalist project, but only through the international struggle against capitalism itself.

Subsequent history tragically confirmed both aspects of Trotsky’s analysis. The Holocaust exposed the barbarism to which capitalism in crisis could descend. Yet the establishment of Israel did not eliminate antisemitism. Nor did it resolve the underlying contradictions that had produced it. Instead, new forms of oppression and conflict emerged, above all through the dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people.

This history poses an insurmountable challenge to Schama’s argument. The political tendency that most consistently analysed antisemitism, fought it and predicted the catastrophe confronting European Jewry was also the tendency that opposed Zionism. The existence of that tradition refutes the claim that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic.

Indeed, the current attempt to identify opposition to Zionism with hatred of Jews requires the erasure of a century of socialist political experience. Most crucially, the conflation of Judaism with the Israeli state does not protect Jewish people. It places them in greater danger. Antisemitism has historically functioned by attributing the crimes, failures and contradictions of society to Jews as a collective. Zionist ideology, particularly in its contemporary forms, insists that Israel acts in the name of Jews everywhere and that Jewish identity is inextricably bound to the state. This claim reproduces, from a different starting point, precisely the framework upon which antisemitism has traditionally depended.

When the actions of the Israeli state are identified with Jews as a whole, the distinction between a government and a people is consciously blurred. The responsibility for state crimes is transferred to an entire global community. This does not undermine antisemitism. It creates conditions in which antisemitic narratives can flourish.

The defence of Jewish people against antisemitism therefore cannot be entrusted to the Israeli state, nor to the imperialist governments that provide it with diplomatic cover, financial support and military assistance. Genuine opposition to antisemitism requires a fundamentally different political perspective.

That perspective begins with rejecting all forms of nationalism and ethnic exclusivity. It insists on the unity of Jewish, Arab, and international workers based on common class interests. It recognises that war, racism, authoritarianism and genocide arise not from ancient hatreds but from the crisis of the capitalist system itself.

The growing effort to criminalise anti-Zionist sentiment and suppress opposition to genocide is part of a broader assault on democratic rights. Governments that support Israel’s actions in Gaza increasingly resort to censorship, police repression and legal intimidation because they confront widening popular opposition. The attack on Palestine solidarity movements is one aspect of a wider turn toward authoritarian forms of rule in conditions of mounting social inequality, geopolitical conflict and economic instability.

Viewed in this context, Schama’s essay is not primarily a contribution to historical debate. It is a political intervention on behalf of the existing order. Its purpose is to provide intellectual legitimacy for the suppression of opposition to imperialist violence and to shield the Israeli state from scrutiny by presenting criticism as prejudice.

Defending historical truth requires rejecting this falsification. Antisemitism is a real and deadly form of reaction whose history culminated in some of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century. But it cannot be fought through support for a state carrying out mass violence against an oppressed people. Nor can opposition to genocide be silenced by accusations designed to delegitimise political dissent.

The struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Zionism are not mutually exclusive. Historically, some of the most principled opponents of antisemitism understood this. Their perspective remains indispensable today. The defence of democratic rights, the opposition to genocide and the fight against antisemitism all require the same political foundation: the independent mobilisation of the international working class against capitalism, imperialism and war.

Bibliography

Bebel, August. Mass and Class: Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980.

Kessler, Mario. Antisemitism, Zionism and Socialism: Studies in the History of Jewish Labour and Political Movements. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, various editions.

Lenin, V. I. “Anti-Jewish Pogroms.” In Collected Works, Vol. 29. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

North, David. The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine: Historical and Political Essays. Detroit: Mehring Books, 2011.

North, David. “Socialist Internationalism and the Struggle Against Zionism and Imperialism.” International Youth and Students for Social Equality Lecture, 2023.

Trotsky, Leon. “Thermidor and Antisemitism” (1937).

Trotsky, Leon. “On the Jewish Question” (1934-1940), in Writings of Leon Trotsky.

Weiss, Clara. “Mario Kessler on Marxism, Antisemitism and Zionism.” World Socialist Web Site, 3 July 2025.

Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

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[1] Jew-Hatred: Jewish Quarterly 265 by Simon Schama, 13 Oct. 2026, 96 pages