In het artikel “Heil Israël” in de Groene Amsterdammer van 30 april 2025 spreekt Ian Buruma zich uit tegen de arrestaties en deportaties die plaatsvinden onder de regering Trump.

Demonstranten als Mahmoud Khalil worden beroofd van hun burgerrechten, zo stelt hij, en dat dit gebeurt onder het mom van fascistische strijd tegen Khalil’s vermeende “internationalisme” en “wortelloze kosmopolitisme” maakt het een vorm van antisemitisme.

Het lijkt me nogal een stretch om hier van antisemitisme te spreken¹, maar dat er ijzingwekkende parallellen bestaan tussen het antisemitisme van de jaren 30-40 en het racisme/ de moslimhaat van onze tijd is wat mij betreft overduidelijk.

A couple of weeks ago, a few kind students warned me about a post on Instagram: link.¹

I am always open to hear how my ideas and positions are hurtful in ways I do not realize yet. And I believe that when it comes to antisemitism, non-Jewish people like me have a special duty to be extra wary. As I have written here:

In the end, the conflict in Palestine knows many monsters, and they all feed on each other. But many of these monsters came from white, Dutch, German, French etc. non-Jewish people, manifested as the genocidal antisemitic and colonial violence committed abroad and at home. And since we cannot go back to fight these monsters in the past, the second best thing is to fight and resist their manifestations in the present, both at home and abroad.

Intro and disclaimer

I read this book with some friends. Someone had recommended it, and we felt that it was an appropriate time to reflect on what antisemitism has meant in the past, to better understand what it means in the present.

At the start I was a bit sceptical about this contemporary relevance: after all, a lot has happened since Sartre wrote this book (written in 1944, published in 1946). For example, to just mention something, the founding of the state Israel (in 1948). But after reading the book, I was surprised how helpful some of the arguments still are (at least to me).

Today I was accused of “tokenization” in sharing this powerful essay by Masha Gessen on Mastodon (see the reactions under this post).¹ Because of the character limit of a Mastodon post (at least on my server), I decided to turn my response into a little blog post.

In short, the principle that I was accused of violating looks like this: as an outsider to a community, I should not share/boost the view of a minority of that community, when that view disqualifies the concerns that are held by the majority of that community.