Abstract
This chapter introduces the notion of ‘enabling concepts’: concepts which may or may not themselves constitute a mode of hate speech, but which through their broad social acceptability facilitate or legitimate the articulation of concepts which can be more directly classed as hate speech. We argue that each distinct hate ideology will contain its own, partly overlapping set of ‘enabling concepts.’ In this chapter, we will focus on the enabling role of references to apartheid for the constitution of antisemitism in British online discourse around Israel. This argument does not rest on agreement as to whether the ‘apartheid analogy’—comparisons between contemporary Israel and the former Apartheid regime in South Africa—itself constitutes a form of antisemitism. The chapter draws on qualitative analysis of more than 10,000 user comments posted on social media profiles of mainstream media in the UK, undertaken by the Decoding Antisemitism project in the wake of the May 2021 escalation phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We will show how web commenters frequently use the apartheid analogy to trigger more extreme antisemitic stereotypes, including age-old tropes, intensifying and distorting analogies (such as Nazi comparisons) or calls for Israel’s elimination. The results will be presented in detail based on a pragmalinguistic approach taking into account the immediate context of the comment thread and broader world knowledge. Both of these aspects are relevant preconditions for examining all forms of antisemitic hate speech that can remain undetected when conducting solely statistical analysis. Based on this large dataset, we suggest that—under the cover of its widespread social acceptability—the apartheid analogy thus facilitates the articulation and legitimation of extreme antisemitic concepts that would, without this prior legitimation, be more likely to be rejected or countered.
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Notes
- 1.
The question of where legitimate critique of the state of Israel ends and antisemitism begins is one of the most contested in both academic and public debates around this issue. It is the main point of contention amongst the multiple definitions of antisemitism that have been produced over the past 30 years, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ‘working definition’, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, and the Nexus definition being the most prominent. For all the heat this discussion has generated, however, there is broad agreement on all sides that antisemitic forms of anti-Israeli discourse exist, with notions of an all-consuming Israeli power and influence, or inherent evil, being agreed to be antisemitic across the field. The antisemitic status of the apartheid analogy does not, as discussed below, attract such broad agreement. Our aim in this chapter is not to settle this dispute.
- 2.
The most comprehensive historical overview of twentieth-century South Africa and the development of apartheid remains Davenport and Saunders (2000 [1977]).
- 3.
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), https://legal.un.org/icc/statute/99_corr/cstatute.htm (last accessed on 30 November 2022).
- 4.
Amnesty International (2022). Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity. Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch, 2021. A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. Human Rights Watch; B’Tselem, 2021. A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid. https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid (last accessed on 30 November 2022).
- 5.
Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). https://jerusalemdeclaration.org (last accessed on 24 November 2022).
- 6.
Throughout the Decoding Antisemitism project, from which the analysis in this chapter derives, references to Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ have been categorised as antisemitic, due both to the historical genealogy of the concept briefly set out above, and for the linguistic function of the concept in discourse around Israel. However, both for reasons of space and because this judgement is not necessary for the analysis or acceptance of any potential enabling function of the apartheid analogy, we wish to bracket this debate for the remainder of the chapter.
- 7.
We started by designing a classification system, composed of antisemitic concepts as well as linguistic and semiotic categories. We then collected the data, built a corpus, and examined it using MAXQDA, a data analysis program for qualitative and quantitative studies. By implementing the code system into the software, we were able to manually annotate each comment in the corpus in a systematic and efficient manner. We also integrated inductive categories that emerged while examining online discourse.
- 8.
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Working Definition of Antisemitism. https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism (last accessed on 24 November 2022).
- 9.
The extent to which the apartheid analogy plays a role of an enabler or solely a reinforcer or companion of clearly antisemitic attributions could be determined with all certainty through further, extensive long-term studies on corpora of different languages and web milieus.
Another approach would be to conduct surveys on two large target groups, addressed separately. For target group A, a questionnaire would be used in which Israel and Israelis were conceptualised at the beginning via references to apartheid, and in the second part via antisemitic stereotypes. For target group B, the reference area would be characterised by stereotypes from the outset. This would allow to evaluate whether the presupposition of apartheid scenarios in the Middle East leads to a confirmation and justification of stereotypical attributions. If target group A confirmed the clearly antisemitic attributions more strongly than target group B, this would support the characterisation of the apartheid analogy as an enabler.
- 10.
Since stereotypes are phenomena that exist on the conceptual, that is, mental level and can be reproduced using language, they are presented in small caps according to the conventions of cognitive linguistics.
- 11.
Examples quoted in the empirical chapter appear in their original form, including all spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. They are set off from the main text and numbered.
- 12.
This may be expressed in a range of ways, not necessarily antisemitic. While in some reiterations the media are presented as servile, devoid of agency and under Jewish control (see section on the concepts of power and instrumentalisation), in others they are merely sympathetic towards Jews and act of their own good will.
- 13.
The communicative functions of the Nazi analogy are the same as those of the apartheid analogy (see Becker, 2021: 197). The difference lies in the quality or intensity: Nazi atrocities represent the end point of humanly produced and industrially implemented cruelty and an unprecedented breach of civilisation. Accordingly, the arrangement of analogies described here represents an intensification of the scenarios.
- 14.
The reference to ‘6 million’ people living under Israeli occupation is a clear distortion of the facts: three million Palestinians live in the West Bank. According to the UN, there are a total of 5.6 million refugees in the surrounding areas outside Israel (including their descendants, as of 2019), but no reference is made to them in the quote. While the commentator’s usage of ‘6 million’ may not be a conscious Holocaust analogy, the instinctive use of such a historically-loaded figure—one that is repeated by another web user in a later comment—nevertheless activates the association between Israel and Nazi Germany frequently found within online discussions of the Middle East conflict.
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Bolton, M., Becker, M.J., Ascone, L., Placzynta, K. (2023). Enabling Concepts in Hate Speech: The Function of the Apartheid Analogy in Antisemitic Online Discourse About Israel. In: Ermida, I. (eds) Hate Speech in Social Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38248-2_9
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