Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. This sentiment is a form of racism, and a person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Though antisemitism is overwhelmingly perpetrated by non-Jews, it may occasionally be perpetrated by Jews in a phenomenon known as auto-antisemitism. Primarily, antisemitic tendencies may be motivated by negative sentiment towards Jews as a people or by negative sentiment towards Jews with regard to Judaism. In the former case, usually presented as racial antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by the belief that Jews constitute a distinct race with inherent traits or characteristics that are repulsive or inferior to the preferred traits or characteristics within that person's society. In the latter case, known as religious antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by their religion's perception of Jews and Judaism, typically encompassing doctrines of supersession that expect or demand Jews to turn away from Judaism and submit to the religion presenting itself as Judaism's successor faith — this is a common theme within the other Abrahamic religions. The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by anti-Judaism, though the concept itself is distinct from antisemitism.
Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century to enable the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports "the development and protection of the State of Israel".
Gush Emunim was an Israeli ultranationalist Orthodox Jewish right-wing activist movement committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. While not formally established as an organization until 1974 in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, Gush Emunim sprang out of the conquests of the Six-Day War in 1967, encouraging Jewish settlement of the land of Israel based on two points, one religious and one practical. The religious point was a belief that, according to the Torah, God wants the Jewish people to live in the land of Israel and had returned lands such as the biblical Judea and Samaria as an opportunity for the Jewish people to return to their ancestral homeland. The second point stemmed from a concern that the pre-1967 borders, a mere 10 km (6.2 mi) wide at its narrowest point, were indefensible, especially in the long term, and it was therefore necessary to ensure that the land captured in the Six-Day War remained under Israeli control by creating a Jewish presence in the region and placing "facts on the ground". While Gush Emunim no longer exists officially, vestiges of its influence remain in Israeli politics and society.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism.
Sir Ian Kershaw is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.
David Cesarani was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998).
Michael Robert Marrus was a Canadian historian of the Holocaust, modern European and Jewish history and international humanitarian law. He is the author of eight books on the Holocaust and related subjects.
The functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical debate about the reasons for the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. It essentially centres on two questions:
Ian Steven Lustick is an American political scientist and specialist on the modern history and politics of the Middle East. He currently holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the department of Political Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 historical novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. The plot concerns a German boy named Bruno whose father is the commandant of Auschwitz and Bruno's friendship with a Jewish detainee named Shmuel.
Holocaust trivialization is any comparison or analogy that diminishes the impact of the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of six million European Jews during World War II. The Wiesel Commission defined trivialization as the abusive use of comparisons with the aim of minimizing the Holocaust and banalizing its atrocities. Originally, holocaust meant a type of sacrifice that is completely burnt to ashes; starting from the late 19th century, it started to denote extensive destruction of a group, usually people or animals. The 1915 Armenian genocide was described as a "holocaust" by contemporary observers.
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine – the biblical Land of Israel – was flawed or unjust in some way.
Judaism's doctrines and texts have sometimes been associated with violence or anti-violence. Laws requiring the eradication of evil, sometimes using violent means, exist in the Jewish tradition. However, Judaism also contains peaceful texts and doctrines. There is often a juxtaposition of Judaic law and theology to violence and non-violence by groups and individuals. Attitudes and laws towards both peace and violence exist within the Jewish tradition. Throughout history, Judaism's religious texts or precepts have been used to promote as well as oppose violence.
The double genocide theory alleges that two genocides of equal severity occurred in Eastern Europe, that of the Holocaust against Jews perpetrated by the Nazis and an alleged second genocide that the Soviet Union committed against local populations in Eastern Europe. The theory first became popular in Post-Soviet Lithuania, in discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania. A more explicitly antisemitic version of the theory accuses Jews of complicity in Soviet repression and characterizes local participation in the Holocaust as retaliation, especially in Lithuania, eastern Poland, and northern Romania. Double genocide theory has been criticized by scholars as a form of Holocaust trivialization.
The assertion that the Holocaust was a unique event in human history was important to the historiography of the Holocaust, but it has come under increasing criticism in the twenty-first century. Related claims include the claim that the Holocaust is external to history, beyond human understanding, a civilizational rupture, and something that should not be compared to other historical events. Uniqueness approaches to the Holocaust also coincide with the view that antisemitism is not another form of racism and prejudice but is eternal and teleologically culminates in the Holocaust, a frame that is preferred by proponents of Zionist narratives.
Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany have been made since the 1940s, taking place first within the larger context of the aftermath of World War II. Such comparisons are a rhetorical staple of anti-Zionism in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Whether comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are intrinsically antisemitic is disputed.
In discussions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust and the Nakba have come to be regarded as interrelated events, both historically and in the way these two tragedies have influenced perceptions of the conflict by both parties. In Israel, all Israeli Jews are considered survivors of the Holocaust who must implement the imperative of never again in regards to being a Jewish victim. The uniqueness of the Holocaust is emphasized, non-Jewish victims of Nazi Germany are sidelined, and any linkage between the Holocaust and the Nakba is rejected. The 2018 book The Holocaust and the Nakba makes the case that "unless we can hold these two moments in our hearts and minds as part of the same story, there can be no moving forward in the seemingly unmovable conflict that is Israel-Palestine".
"Death to Arabs" or "Death to the Arabs" is a slogan commonly used by Jewish extremists across Israel and the West Bank. Depending on the person's temperament, it may specifically be an expression of anti-Palestinian sentiment or otherwise a more broad expression of anti-Arab sentiment, which includes non-Palestinian Arabs. It is widely condemned as racist and hateful in nature, with some observers asserting that it manifests genocidal intent. The slogan is primarily invoked during confrontations with Palestinians in the West Bank, where it is a popular rallying cry for revenge attacks in response to killings of Israelis by Palestinians, though it may also be used against Israeli Arabs during times of inter-ethnic civil unrest within Israel. It is typically chanted at marches in Jerusalem and at football matches, and has also appeared in graffiti vandalism; it is a recurrent aspect of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank.
Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality is a 2019 book by political scientist Ian S. Lustick, published by University of Pennsylvania Press about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Lustick formerly supported the two-state solution, but in the book he analyzes the reasons why, in his view, this solution has become unviable. He proposes working with the current one-state reality—in which a single state controls the entirety of Israel/Palestine—in order to achieve democratization and equal rights for all inhabitants. Many reviewers agreed with Lustick's diagnosis of the current situation as a one-state reality, but several questioned the likelihood of his proposed solution.
