NEWS: President Lula of Brazil reprimanded by Israel President for alleged Antisemitism. What is Antisemitism?

Israel declares Brazil's president Lula 'persona non grata' over Gaza remarks it deems 'serious antisemitic attack'

From <https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/feb/19/middle-east-crisis-live-israel-gaza-war-latest-news-updates-idf-rafah-attack-hostages-not-released-hamas-benny-gantz-benjamin-netanyahu-un-who-nasser-hospital#top-of-blog>

 

So, what is antisemitism exactly?  Oxford:

Hostility towards and discrimination against Jewish people (although there are other Semitic peoples, notably the Arabs, anti‐Semitism is only used to refer to prejudice against Jewish people) 

From <https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095417471>

 

Semite. noun. Sem·​ite ˈsem-ˌīt. : a member of any of a group of peoples of southwestern Asia chiefly represented by the Jews and Arabs.

From <https://www.google.com/search?q=antisemitism+definition+oxford&rlz=1C1FKPE_enFR976FR979&oq=antisemitism+defi&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgCEAAYgAQyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIKCAQQABjHAxiABNIBCjIwNTE3ajBqMTWoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8>

 

At first sight the term seems simple, it refers to bigoted attacks on Jews. But a Jew is not so easy to identify, unless they are fundamentalist and wear the traditional attire, anyone can be Jewish. Knowing that a person or group is Jewish is therefore a matter of some degree of knowledge and calculation to discriminate. So the term can also imply there is a systematic nature to such attacks, as in Nazi Germany.

Recently accusations and reports of antisemitism have risen, chiefly because of the conflict in Gaza, and the Israeli retaliation, after the terroristic attack on Israel by Hamas and others on 7 October 2023 in the context of resistance to Israel’s long-term occupation of Palestinian territories and the colonization of Palestine in 1948 after WWII by displaced Jewish refugees.

Why is this definition different to racism? Usually with racism the ethnic identity of those who are discriminated against is relatively more obvious due to, for instance, skin colour or other physical characteristics of the group. With Jewish people, racial characteristics are not present or relevant to the religion, so can only be imagined and imposed, which would be antisemitic. Although the notion of race itself is questionable in the sense that there are no actual different human races, only distinct traits among the one human species. Because of the problem of the loose identification of ‘the Jew’ and seeing Jewishness as a race and/or nationality, discrimination against Jews, and so antisemitism, can be against anyone to whom attaching the label is convenient for the interested party.

Currently, the far-right ruling government of Israel often uses or threatens to use the term. As above, for example it calls the president of Brazil’s comments antisemitic, these are his comments as presented on the BBC:

Speaking from an African Union summit in Ethiopia, Lula said: "What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments. In fact, it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.

"It's not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It's a war between a highly prepared army and women and children."

From <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68332821>

Over 29, 000 Gazan Palestinians have so far been killed in the bombardment of this fenced-in land, and thousands are being starved by Israel’s blockading actions, supported by the west led by the U.S., yet the comparison with the Holocaust by President Lula remains unwise, and is not proportionate. But even so, does this statement deserve being called antisemitic? Does not calling it antisemitic also cheapen the argument?  We have recently witnessed the label being used repeatedly in inappropriate contexts to silence opposition to and debate about various political activities, but of course most importantly about Gaza. We must note that this can itself be antisemitism, and that the ruling party of Israel has been antisemitic in precisely this sense. The systematic, state supported, dehumanisation of an indistinct ethnic group (Gaza Palestinian Arabs in this case) by the Israeli far-right is without any doubt a form of antisemitism. It is a charge thus which can also be used against its own Jewish citizens, such as when they protest this government. It may seem to be a strange and awful historical irony that this is Israel, a Jewish state, that is guilty of antisemitism, but recognizing this is not without precedent by some prominent Israeli citizens:

Thus, Israel's most influential philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz of the Hebrew University, had no difficulty calling the Israeli armed forces "Judeo-Nazis," and declared that Israel would soon be engaging in the "mass expulsion and slaughter of the Arab population" and "setting up concentration camps." 

From <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hazony-jewish.html>

THEORY: History and Art History

On the face of it, it is peculiar that art history has its own separate history to history as such. You would think that art history should be included in history anyway. Yet, more than other versions of historical interest, like the history of transportation or the history of beekeeping, art history is specially designated and has its own territory, academically defined, with its own distinct historiographies. The reasons for this seem to be due to the special importance of art in our culture, the unique difficulties in understanding the art object and its role in history, and perhaps the notion that it requires a certain refinement of character to appreciate and understand good art.

However, it must be the case that when studying ‘history in general’, the historian would not be able to avoid coming across works of art in any case, and would have to consider at least the apparent specialness of the work of art. This, because often the access to the past must be via surviving works of art, whether visual, textual, architectural, or designed objects. Because it is often works of art that survive the test of time precisely because they were considered special, and therefore attempts were made to both give to them longevity in the first place, by the artists and their professional activity, and to preserve them over the ensuing years, for instance, perhaps by curatorial practices in museums, location in hallowed religious places, or just by the care people gave to these objects.

The most obvious works of art, which are also exceptionally valuable to our history, or prehistory, is the cave painting. But regarding the latter, whenever I have seen accounts of these works by archaeologists, I have been disappointed that no artists or art historians or art theorists or critics have been consulted about them, their analysis seems to have been left to the forensics of archaeology or palaeontology, as if a sense of artistic value is worthless here. This does not surprise me at all. The disciplines police themselves and keep themselves separate, and for an archaeologist to go outside of these boundaries would probably raise some important eyebrows. Besides archaeologists must know something about art and that should be sufficient, no?

But this all leads inexorably to a narrative and context bound conception of the artwork, as if it were a simple case of understanding art as the sum of all its empirical inputs, which is no doubt important, but tends to leave out one of the most important factors in making a genuinely good work of art special, its quality, its quality being what often leads to its survival through time, giving it its provenance. This is something that Walter Benjamin was aware of and emphasized.

This is why I regard the historiography of the French 1^st Annales School to be so radical, as well as the few historical analyses that Marx provided us with, where art is mixed into the historical melee in ways that do not destroy its subtlety.

Locating the artwork in social history, properly, requires understanding it not just as passive objects, as the mere sum of their contextual inputs, but also as agencies that do something special and are understood to be designed to do this special thing.

I have always found it peculiar, though, that even art historians find it difficult to regard art, for instance, made by professional artists, to have an intended social agency, and if they do so, it is usually only as a narrative content, while the form of the work of art and the artists expertise in producing this form is invariably left out of the account.

I think what has happened here is the art historian has been also influenced by the restrictive practices of the typical mainstream historian for whom art in this sense does not exist. Yet the discipline of art history also has this important potential method to offer to the discipline of history as such. Nevertheless, a gap remains, and the approaches that the new history put forward, which included sensibility, psychology, feelings and alienation as important factors alongside class and social and economic forces, has been greatly resisted, and even in art history, which you might think is its ‘natural home’ because it is where aesthetic sensual considerations should be paramount.

Even in the apparently ‘Marxist’ historical materialisms there has generally been a sticking only to class as the new interpretive category, usually along with the constant reference to materialism as if it was a badge, one that allowed the wearer to avoid doing anything truly materialist in their practice, but so that, any question of psychology, pathology, sensibility, feelings, alienation, and the agency of sensible forms in art, is avoided or discounted. I see this rejection as also a sneaky way to go back to idealism, with the reign of ideas being re-ignited while the sensuality of materiality is diminished.