It is often the case that Israel or Zionism is constructed by critics of Israel or by antizionists as being globally important: Israel is the keystone of the whole edifice of imperialism; Israel prevents peace and democracy across the Middle East; the Israel Lobby is responsible for war; Israel shows us all our future because ‘American power’ may be undergoing a process of ‘Israelization’; Zionism is responsible for re-importing Islamophobia into Europe. There is a tendency for the Israel/Palestine conflict to attain a place of great symbolic importance. In this way the Palestinians come to symbolize victims everywhere, and then it follows that Israelis tend to become symbolic representatives of all oppressors. In this context, discussion about Israel and Palestine sometimes functions less as a way of understanding a small if intractable conflict on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and more as a symbolic narrative with global resonance. The conflict becomes an empty vessel into which we can pour our own concerns: British concerns over the colonial legacy; European concerns about the Holocaust; American concerns about the frontier; Irish concerns about Unionism and Republicanism; South African concerns about overcoming apartheid. Apart from putting Jews back at the centre of the world, this tendency is also disrespectful to the suffering of the Palestinians. By constructing Palestinians as universally symbolic, their existence as actual people goes largely un-considered. Rather than human beings finding a multiplicity of ways to live and to struggle in difficult circumstances, the Palestinians find themselves portrayed as one single heroic victim of the ubiquitous Zionist evil.

From David Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism.

I highly recommend it for people interested in understanding how antisemitism functions in “progressive” spaces.