A few thoughts on the labour anti-Semitism hellscape. I’m a white South African Jew who has been in the UK for 3 years but I’ve been terrified to weigh on U.K. anti-semitism because I struggled to grasp the contours so I assumed it was a different context & not mine to comment on

So I’ve read & listened quietly to the smart folks and learnt a lot. And realised it is different but also the same. And maybe there’s something useful in that for struggles and solidarity. So here goes.

Won't speak for others, but the only time I experienced anti-Semitism in SA was when the Jewish Board wrote in response to me and the 65 Jewish signatories of a letter advocating for BDS at UCT which basically said we’re not part of the community. https://twitter.com/SAJBD/status/1175730395293331458?s=20

A lot of the reason white Jews don't experience much semitism in SA is because non-Black SA Jews were classified as white as part of a series of arrangements involving support for Israel and the NP’s toning down of Nazism to consolidate a unified white constituency for apartheid

This is a similar kind of zionist consolidation and whiteness consolidation that I see in both Tory and Israeli framing of both Judaism and anti-Semitism. The horror is not about attacks on Jews. But attacks on a notion of Jewry predicated on Zionism and whiteness.

It moves in similar ways, despite different appearances. It does so on the bodies of our Jewish ancestors. It does so because anti-Semitism needs to be the ultimate evil so that anti-Blackness, Islamophobia and white supremacy can be minimised. But it also needs to be minimised.

As it does so, it negates the ways anti-Semitism is both a product of and necessary for the maintenance of white supremacy. Also thinking of Trump and the Embassy. Of Charlottesville and the synagogues here.

In the U.K. I’ve experienced real anti-Semitism and it’s clear how Jews are required as the semi-permeable border to sediment the political project of whiteness in the service of anti-Blackness, Zionism, Islamophobia and anti-semitism. For this, anti-semitism is required.

The difference I see between SA and the U.K. is that in SA, the border isn’t semi-permeable. It’s a wall. It’s a wall made by the settlement of a Judeo-Christian white supremacist logic for a fascist order of racial capitalism. It’s a wall and a pact of whiteness.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. I’ve been thinking a lot with James Baldwin & Stuart Hall & Tendayi Sithole & @CliveSG & @ztdamudzi the last while. And reflecting on how white South African Jews were interpellated into this ideology in the same way white British Jews are.

And on reflection I see my own work to assimilate in SA English white spaces. And what may have been quiet anti-semitism of English liberalism I didn't understand. Because the wall is solid.

So I guess maybe there’s something there in the choices we can make as white Jews about how we invest in this system of white supremacy and the gains we see from oppression, the instrumentality of our names for oppression and the acquiescence to our own oppression for this.

I don’t know what we ‘do’, but I do think we need to name what white supremacist, anti-Black fascist governments are doing everywhere, and what exactly we are participating in, interpellated into. And think about the possibilities for solidarity that lie in our refusal.

SA struggle stalwarts Ronnie Kasrils, Pallo Jordan and Ebrahim Ebrahim

To be clear. This is entirely consistent with the rife anti-Semitism issues on the left which follows similar paths. And also has links to SA. It’s just not what it’s pretending to be here. Zine Magubane and @Sisyphusa have written brilliantly on the SA dimensions here