Members of the Tehran Jewish community navigating the site where the Rafi’-Nia synagogue was destroyed, as depicted and recorded by Mehr News Agency.
Controversy was stirred recently due to a photograph used by a leftwing Italian newspaper depicting an illegal Jewish settler mocking an Indigenous Palestinian woman in the occupied West Bank. Israel supporters have lambasted the magazine for alleged antisemitism. But nothing was said about the man’s ethnic or religious heritage or identity. It merely used the image with the title “L’Abuso” or “Abuse.” And it is not AI or CGI. It is a real photograph.
The issue these pro-Israel figures are trying to drum up is the horrendous use of caricatures to dehumanize Jewish people. These images portrayed Jews in the most heinous ways and were intended to provoke a visceral hatred toward their community. They were effective in Germany and across Europe in the early part of the 20th century and helped pave the way to the Holocaust.
But to equate those horrible caricatures with actual photographs of violent and supremacist settlers is quite a leap. And it is also an attempt to divert attention from the current campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon.
Israel has emboldened and supported violent settlers in the occupied West Bank for decades. They are protected and assisted by the Israel Defense Forces and enjoy unprecedented impunity in Israeli courts. Their campaign of ethnic cleansing has only expanded exponentially since Israel’s Western-supported genocide in Gaza.
In the end, people will see what they want to see. And that is generally guided by their biases, principles and prejudices. But the facts continue to exist regardless of our particular or peculiar proclivities.
Real antisemitism is abhorrent and should always be unequivocally opposed and condemned. But Zionism is not Judaism. One is a political ideology based upon racist supremacy which has culminated in genocide. The other is an ancient ethnic and religious category and identity. To equate the two is actually one of the worst forms of antisemitism.
In addition to this, Israel is a genocidal apartheid state. It is ethnically cleansing vast swaths of the region so that one ethno-religious group has dominance over all others.
What I find the most telling about all of this is that the ones braying on about this photograph have been notoriously silent about Israel bombing a synagogue in Tehran. A synagogue older than the state of Israel itself. Apparently, a photograph is more horrifying to these people than an act of violence committed against an ancient Jewish community in Iran.
