Expert warns of a 'perfect antisemitic storm' masked as anti-Zionism in 2024

The current global situation for Jews is a “perfect antisemitic storm,” Prof. Christer Mattson, director of the Segerstedt Institute at the University of Gothenburg, said at the 2024 European Jewish Association (EJA) Auschwitz delegation on Monday.

An expert on radicalization and antisemitism, Mattson explained how the idea of a perfect storm – a geological term referring to a storm fueled from different sources at the same time – can be applied to antisemitism.

In his speech, he drew on the different sources of antisemitism such as the far Left, the far Right, Islamism, and traditional Christian anti-Jewishness, among others. In 2024, Mattson said, all of these are active at the same time, contributing to the rise in hate.

Now, this antisemitism has taken the form of anti-Zionism, which those who hate Jews use to mask their hatred under an acceptable facade, the professor said.

He added that this masking has been prolific in regimes that wanted to make use of traditional antisemitism but without especially mentioning Jews, providing examples such as the USSR.

"Antisemitism is easier to sell without specifically referring to Jews," he said.

Antisemitism as anti-Zionism

“Antisemitism is easier to sell without specifically referring to Jews,” he said.

Antisemitism, Mattson continued, “is not about Jews, it’s about antisemites and their fantasies about Jews.”

He referenced the famous 1946 quote by Jean Paul Sartre that “if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”

“The Jew becomes whatever is needed: the communist, the cosmopolitan. If Christianity is the ultimate good in society, the Jew is the Antichrist,” he said.

“Now, in 2024, human rights are the ultimate good, and the ultimate Jew is the Jew who is not a Zionist.”

Mattson referred to this as the “Israelification of antisemitism,” whereby “Israelis become the collective global Jew.”

What is the solution to this? “We teach, we educate,” he said.

“If we can’t believe in education, what future can we believe in?”

Speaking ahead of the annual EJA visit of key diplomats and political figures to Auschwitz, 80 years since its liberation, Mattson said he did not believe that Birkenau was a death factory.

“It was a Nazi dream factory,” he said. “They mass produced their vision of a Europe without Jews.”

The professor stated that to “a large extent,” the Nazis succeeded.

He referenced the drastic decrease in the Jewish populations of European cities, such as Rhodes, Greece, which used to have a thriving Jewish population – at its peak, numbering around 5,000 – and which is now believed to be fewer than 20.

“Auschwitz is more present in Rhodes, in Germany, in Sweden, than it is in Auschwitz itself,” Mattson concluded.