The answer is undoubtedly the latter, according to Eve Garrard. Pointing to Israel as the root cause of anti-Semitism, she writes, is like pointing to “immigration as the root cause of all social unrest in the UK”: a way of ensuring “that the blame for the problem lands exactly where the observer has already decided it belongs.” Rather, anti-Semitism is better understood as a deep-seated tool for explaining every problem under the sun:
[The] long tradition of appealing to the idea of Jewishness to explain the world’s troubles, and in particular the wickedness of [one’s] enemies, persists today, both in the West and in the East. It means that such [an] appeal has the deep attractions of tradition. There’s a Jew-shaped space, and not a pleasant one, in Western culture, and placing actual Jews, both inside and outside the Jewish state, into that space seems obvious, familiar, and natural—they seem to fit the space so remarkably well, especially once their actual activities have been reconstructed to conform to a deeply hostile picture of them. . . .
More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, David Nirenberg, Holocaust, Israel & Zionism