Israeli leaders came to treat antisemitism as eternal and unchangeable [causal]
And so, in the now very real battle over land and borders, a great many of those earlier debates appeared to fall away. Inside the young nation, and especially after the 1967 war and the protracted occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, anti-Semitism came to be treated not as a question in need of historically informed answers, but rather as something eternal, outside the bounds of history. In this pessimistic telling, Jew-hatred was cast as so potent, so deeply rooted in the collective understory of humanity, that attempts to fight it by advancing principles of universal human equality, and by joining forces with the many other groups of people who have been terrorized and slaughtered in the name of racial or religious purity and/or superiority, were treated by Israeli leaders and many Jews in positions of leadership as not just naïve but also actively dangerous.
QUESTION: When and how did this framing solidify after 1967? What debates did it displace?
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 963