OPINION – European governments fighting antisemitism with Islamophobia

This article first appeared in Anadolu Agency on November 15, 2023 and was written by Bridge Initiative Senior Researcher Farid Hafez

ISTANBUL

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin. European leaders’ attempt to ostensibly fight antisemitism by defending Israel’s right to kill 11,180​​​​​​​ Palestinians is nothing but the latest perversion of a necessary struggle against racism.

Old histories

Antisemitism and Islamophobia have always been twin brothers of the racial imagination of white Europe. Europe and the imagination of a white Christian continent is historically based on the exclusion of Muslims and Jews from the Spanish peninsula of Andalusia and both have continued to shape the imagination of what Europe was, excluding the external Muslim oriental as well as the internal Jewish oriental.

New realities

This entanglement only started to crack with the establishment of Israel, which was much less a Jewish project than a Zionist project born in the cradle of white European nationalism. With Israel, Jews became whitened and Israel today is largely embraced by many European political elites as part and parcel of a newly invented post-1948 Judeo-Christian “tradition.”