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How many posts did it take before Israel came up? *sigh*
I'm going to take what looks like a detour here. It does relate to how these attacks occur, why they occur, and why the reactions to them are what they are. Most directly, it relates to why we can't talk about these attacks without talking about Israel. Talking about Israel in this context is the real off-topic detour.
Talking about Israel in the context of anti-Jewish prejudice misses the point entirely. Of course anti-Israeli arguments have been incorporated into the anti-Jewish rhetoric. They are used as part of an old but proven propaganda technique of the atrocity story. This is not to assert that any claims made about Israeli actions by anyone on any side of this issue are false or true - for propaganda, the factual truth isn't relevant. Truth, lies, exaggerations, minimizations, it's all in there: a story is either useful or it is not useful. Such arguments are neither the source of nor the reason for anti-Jewish feelings or actions among those not directly affected by Israeli politics and practices, but only useful tools.
Stories of Israeli horrors and misdeeds used to manipulate those outside the situation - to be blunt, western white guys who never met a Palestinian or an Israeli in their lives - serve as emotional redirectors to turn compassion into hate. The natural human emotion of sympathy for victimized people is redirected and reflected into hard feelings for the victimizer. After the first redirector, the emotions then have to be received by another redirector that changes the target of the emotions from the specific victimizer to a generalized icon of the class to which the victimizer belongs. A similar redirector also serves to catch any of the overflowing compassion by depriving it of a specific target.
Iconifying individual Palestinian victims and their lives into "the Palestinians" and a set of specific images puts a safe barrier between the target WWGs and the brown folks, necessary to keep the emotions pure and uncomplicated. When one wishes to motivate people through racism, one literally can't afford to allow their residual sympathy for their brown brothers to go as far as, for example, charitable actions to help refugees or personal actions to bring about peace and justice. One has to be the proxy to receive that compassion as the vengeful sword of justice and the punisher of the transgressors.
Iconifying the specific Israeli actors into "the Jewish people", or worse, "the Jew" , transfers and extends the redirected emotions from specific Israeli individuals to the state of Israel to all Jewish people. If the iconification of "the Jew" has been successfully done to be timeless - "the eternal Jew" - then the Israeli settler poisoning the orchard of the Arab neighbor becomes not just a coreligionist or distant cousin of the starved concentration camp inmate, but the same person. The precedence of events does not matter emotionally: the current atrocity story serves to reduces the sympathy generated by atrocity stories about the Holocaust, even as it reduces the sympathy for current and future victims of anti-Jewish attacks.
After that has been done, the prepared target is ready to strike any individual he perceives as represented by the icon. If the iconification has been successful, he will not see the individual victim, but only the icon. There's no room for compassion to enter, even as he sees his victim suffer. It's only an icon that's suffering, and the target sees himself as paying back an injustice with each blow.
This technique, or structure, of propaganda works with any group. It doesn't have to be Jews - it is working just as well and in the same way against Muslims. Have some Muslim people committed atrocities? Of course! Are all Muslim people responsible? It's ridiculous to even answer, but blind to deny that the atrocity story is a major motivator of anti-Muslim sentiment that extends to all Muslims or even those who look like they might be Muslims. To a lesser extent, it is working against liberals, but the atrocity stories are so small-scale that they aren't working as well. There aren't any piles of dead bodies to show, no mothers wailing over dead babies. Pictures of aborted fetuses and rumors of assasinations are as good as it gets until the iconfication can successfully incorporate Stalin and Mao into the leftist-liberal icon.
(If one wishes to shore up the atrocity story plus iconification strategy, one should assign ownership or control of the media (truly The Media, the icon of information outlets) to the icon. That way, if The Media don't reflect the "truths" one tells about the icon, it proves that your "truths" are true: the icon-controlled media is just defending itself. Their power becomes an indicator of one's own power. The more The Media struggle against one's "truths", the more powerful one's "truths" must be. If the media ignore one's "truths", that also proves one's "truth" that The Media are controlled by the icon and the icon doesn't want you to know "the truth"!)
Talking about Israel in the context of discussing attacks by right-wingers against Jewish individuals only supports, sustains, and gives credence to the very propaganda that motivated the attacks. It does nothing to help any victim, whether the victim of the attack or the victim of the atrocity used in the atrocity-icon propaganda or even the victim of the propaganda who has had his natural emotions twisted into hate. Using one atrocity against one person as a reason to justify or even lessen the feelings aroused by an atrocity against another hardens the heart and softens the mind. The discussion about Israel is valid and has its place, but this is not that place.
If you've read this far, thanks :-)
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