The Liberal Democratic State and the Sovereignty of Antisemitism

The equation of antisemitism with criticism of the Government of Israel is evidently a flashpoint in today’s global politics. While many scholars of antisemitism have protested this formulation, few have explained its emergence as a prominent feature of the global North’s inter-State consensus. Seeking to fill this gap, this paper argues that the contemporary global war on antisemitism by Western States is rooted in the genealogy of the 21st century political philosophy of the liberal democratic State.
Scholars of Holocaust memorial culture in the global North have long pointed to the late 1990s as a watershed. Cosmopolitan globalism, liberal military interventionism, and the search for a new European identity have all been put forward as explanations. In contrast, this paper contends that Western States established Holocaust memorialisation as a principal tool for providing the liberal democratic State with meaning, as they sought to establish the universal sovereignty of this political form in a new global order. As the War on Terror led to the securitization of the State, Western States also securitized Holocaust memory as the philosophical essence of the new liberal democracy. This development led to the categorization of antisemitism as a threat to the Holocaust-liberal State nexus, symbiotically linked to the chief enemy to liberal sovereignty in the 21st century: the figure of the Muslim extremist.
The paper argues that the securitised conception of antisemitism positioned the State of Israel as both the ultimate totem of Holocaust memory—the essence of the new liberal democracy— and the West’s state of exception in the defence of that political form. Herein antisemitism, as anti-Zionism, gradually increased in significance in the global North State system as the panic of liberal democracy mushroomed. The construction of an antisemitism surveillance apparatus resulted, in symbiosis with the surveillance of the world’s Muslims.