ABSTRACT
Jews may themselves be antisemitic long ago ceased to be an occasion for surprise, except to those completely ignorant of the history of Jews in Europe. Self-hating Jews have made such large contributions to the ideology and politics of anti-semitism that it may fairly be called a product of the "Judeo-Christian" tradition. Zionism, in the nineteenth century, proposed to establish for Jews a refuge from antisemitism. But Zionism also aspired to cure the antisemitism of the Jews themselves, sometimes referred to as Jewish self-hatred. The Zionists also sought to "normalize" Jewish existence. One group of Israeli thinkers, called the Canaanites, carried these anti-Diaspora tendencies to the point where they sought to sever all connections between the state of Israel and the Jewish people. The desperation of Israelis who resort to antisemitism as a means of explaining the world signifies the failure of dogmatically secular Zionism to provide Israeli Jews with a culture and an inner world of their own.
