A frequent means of avoiding the antisemitism that hides under apparent criticism of Israel is to claim that hostility to Israel is legitimate and accusations that it could be antisemitic are an unfair conflation. David Seymour argues that this defence avoids the problem of antisemitism and in some cases makes Jews responsible for the antisemitism that they suffer.
TRADITION! TRADITION!
Maybe it is because I recently saw the award-winning revival of Fiddler on the Roof, coupled with the increasing ubiquity of the word in recent years, that I cannot hear or read the word conflation without the tune of the show’s opening number, Tradition! Tradition!, running through my mind.[1] Conflation! Conflation! However pleasant or irritating its existence as an ‘ear worm’, the connection is rather apt. In the present context, it is the case that ‘conflation’ does indeed have its place deep within the modern anti-Jewish tradition. Tradition! Tradition! Conflation! Conflation!
‘AS A JEWISH PERSON’
Speaking in the aftermath of the Golders Green stabbings, and the latest in a series of attacks on Jews and Jewish-owned property, Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, expressed his concern. Opening his statement in a manner that recalls British prime minister Keir Starmer’s refrain of his father having been a toolmaker, Polanski spoke ‘as a Jewish person’ and as ‘one of only five people in British political history who have been Jewish and led a political party,’ somebody for whom antisemitism is ‘personal.’ Polanski continued:
In the same breath, I’ve been accused sometimes of antisemitism when I’ve been criticising the Israeli government and their ongoing genocide. It’s really important that we do not conflate genuine antisemitism with legitimate criticism of an Israeli government who are committing war crimes. I think that is really important.[2]
These reflections are on the issue of ‘conflation’ and how politicians like Polanski use the term.
THE ORIGINS OF CONFLATION
Hannah Arendt’s observation in the opening sentences on her essay on antisemitism is applicable to the contemporary use of the word ‘conflation’. Arendt termed antisemitism ‘a secular nineteenth century ideology—which in name, though not in argument, was unknown before the 1870s.’[3] The same goes for conflation, which has been present within the storehouse of modern Jewish animus since the turn of the 19th-century and is a staple of racist thought since the 1970s. In terms of antisemitism, we hear echoes of the notion of conflation as early as 1815 at the threshold of Jewish emancipation in the writings of the German national-populist antisemite Jakob Fries. The populariser of the word antisemitism, Wilhelm Marr, used the conflation argument some sixty or seventy years later at the threshold between national-religious and ‘racialised’ anti-Jewish animus.[4] The clearest recent precursor is the French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou at the threshold of antisemitism and antizionism.[5]
Less directly, but nonetheless pertinent, were the arguments that some, but by no means all, German social democrats made at the turn of the 20th-century when they conflated philosemitism with antisemitism along with opposition to antisemitism with defending capitalists or at the least ‘Jewish capitalists’.[6] In France, some socialists were wary of opposing antisemitism directly less it be interpreted as defence of the ruling-class during the Dreyfus Affair.[7]
A similar argument emerged within the racist, anti-immigrant rhetorical arsenal around the time of that the U.K. passed the Race Relations Acts (1965 and 1968). Racists expressed their version of conflation in the vernacular of the day through the self-accusation and self-exculpation of the cliché that ‘you can’t say a word against those ‘coloureds’ without being called a racist’, (As we shall see, the repetition of these claims is inherent within the ‘conflation’ tradition). Although many of the points raised in this essay also are relevant to anti-migrant racism, the primary focus of this essay is the place of conflation within the anti-Jewish tradition. It is to the meaning of ‘conflation’ and its use within this tradition that I now turn.
THE MEANING OF CONFLATION
‘Conflation’ is defined as ‘bringing together two (or more) texts, ideas, or things to form as unitary narrative.’ Its earliest use in the 16th-century referred to conflating four separate Gospels into a unitary narrative. More recently, in 1973, it took on its contemporary meaning that ‘treats two similar but disparate concepts as the same’ or as ‘being equal to’ each other. Merriam-Webster notes the overlap between this meaning of ‘conflate’ with that of ‘equate’.[8]
At first sight, this latter definition seems to capture adequately the statement that underpins Polanski’s (and so many others’) accusations that people are ‘conflating antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel’. Taken at face value, that is a relatively innocuous proposition, and no different in substance from other political opinions that are less or more worthy of discussion. Yet, appearances can be deceptive. As with so much within the anti-Jewish canon, the claim to ‘innocence’, to ‘the need to have a discussion’[9] belies its complicity within these antisemitic traditions. It is in this context that the statement about conflation loses its innocence and, baring its teeth, turns into the accusation it always has been. It places conflation, now understood as an ‘accusation’ within very the antisemitic tradition it claims to have abandoned.
The inherent antisemitism of conflation becomes apparent with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, claim that those deemed responsible for conflating ‘legitimate criticism of Israel’ with ‘antisemitism’ are incorrect and are doing so ‘knowingly,’ ‘cynically’ and in ‘bad faith.’ This familiar refrain is seemingly underpinned by Jewish or, more recently ‘Zionist’ mendacity. The claim is reinforced by the traditional accusation that the ‘sole’ reason for this cynicism is to silence their opponents. Of course, the idea that the accusation of antisemitism has the power to silence anybody is, at the very least, historically debatable.
Moreover, if we add to this accusation the implicit ‘immorality’ of Jews and Zionists ‘exploiting’ their own past historical sufferings, we notice how the accusation of conflation comes into proximity, if not conflates, with the claim of the ‘weaponisation of antisemitism.’ Polanski’s X post of April 22, 2026 offers one of many, many examples.[10]
The notion that identifying antisemitism is ‘weaponising’ it against antisemites is part of the anti-Jewish tradition. The accusation of ‘weaponisation’ is not merely rhetorical. Rather, it serves ab initio to close off discussion, to silence those who raise the question or even the possibility that criticism of Israel could be antisemitic.
The conflation accusation also carries a threat, one which appears with familiar frequency notably in social media during the immediate aftermath of an act of terrorism directed at Jews. This threat, more often than not articulated through the language of justification, places responsibility for the act of violence onto the Jews, those whom the antisemites accused of cynical manipulation…
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