Why Sri Lankans and Muslims Cannot Be Antisemitic
Photo courtesy of New York Daily News
The anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiments in Sri Lanka have found a new outlet and refuge in the newly discovered word – antisemitism. This article addresses allegations of antisemitism in Sri Lanka, particularly within activism opposing the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Is there antisemitism in Sri Lanka? The answer is a categorical no. There is no antisemitism in Sri Lanka because Sri Lankans can’t be antisemites.
What is antisemitism? It is the white European Christian structural racism against Jews. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish scholar herself, argues that antisemitism, the precursor to the Holocaust, is not a result of rampant nationalism or its xenophobic outbursts but emerged at a time when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power collapsed. First, European Christians used theological defences to justify a racist political ideology and promote nationalist propaganda against Jews. They established state structures that transformed prejudices into crimes. The racist policies later expanded to political exclusion through citizenship law, which became an instrument for the implementation of national socialist race ideologies. Just as the Sri Lankan state used anti-Muslim and anti-Tamil racism as structural tools for its survival, Nazi Germany relied on structural racism against Jews, known as antisemitism, for its survival. The logic of yesterday’s antisemitism mirrors today’s Islamophobia.
As Joseph Massad points out in his article Semites and Anti-Semites, That is the Question, in the 19th century, with the rise of European biological racism (more importantly, Aryan theories), those who hated Jews could no longer rely on religious difference to mark out post-Enlightenment Jews as objects of their hatred. As religion could no longer be convincingly used for argumentation in a self-claimed rational and scientific Europe, a new basis for hatred had to be invented. This did not prevent, however, certain Christian religious and theological ideas from being rationalised to justify racism against Jews. In fact, the Protestant Reformation’s appropriation of the Hebrew bible into its new religion and its framing of modern European Jews as direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews allowed racialisation to proceed under a new guise. Post-Enlightenment haters of Jews began to identify Jews as Semites based on the claim that their ancestors had spoken Hebrew. Yet, the ancient Hebrews spoke Aramaic, the language in which the Talmud was written, as well as parts of the Bible. Drawing on the new philological taxonomy aligned with racial classifications in the biological sciences, Massad argues that Jews were assigned a linguistic category that was soon transformed into a racialised one. Accordingly, he says, haters of Jews began to identify themselves as antisemites. Thus, the object of hatred of European antisemitism has always been European Jews. Every exclusionary category culminated in the rebranding of the Aryan race and it was this racial logic that functioned in the Holocaust.
Antisemitism is not a global south problem, as there has never been a Jewish Question nor even a significant encounter with Jews in the capacity of their Jewishness. As Houria Bouteldja observes in her book Whites, Jews, and Us, the historical conditions that produced antisemitism in Europe are simply not present in Muslim majority societies or societies outside Europe. Apart from encountering Jews as People of the Book in Islamic theology and, more recently, as colonisers in Palestine, Muslims have had no significant engagement with Jews in the same structural or ideological way as Christian Europe did. In fact, Bouteldja points out that the real connection between the Jews of the 1940s and Muslims is “our relationship to the white people.” The Jews of wartime Europe occupied the racialised position that Muslims now occupy in the contemporary global order.
But today, Jews have become white and have melded into whiteness. In other words, they have become part of the humanity without a race, a position only white European Christians can claim. Today Jews as chosen people are assigned three crucial roles: First is to solve the white world’s moral legitimacy crisis (resulted from the Nazi genocide), then to outsource racism (as we can see in the West and the Global South through the wielding of antisemitism and pro-Palestine sentiments) and finally to establish imperialism (in the Arab world and now other parts of the world). So, how can Muslims be anti-Semitic when they are the ones against whom crimes are being committed today?
Throughout history, Jewish communities have experienced periods of oppression, discrimination and hatred as Jews, based on religious, political and economic considerations. However, none of them were inspired by rational science and biology or Enlightenment philosophy. This is a crucial distinction because until Nazism brought the chicken home to roost, the methods applied to Jews in Europe were only applied to non-Europeans in the colonies. As Robin D.G. Kelley notes, drawing on Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, the true crime of fascism was not its exceptionalism but rather its application of colonial violence to white European populations. Cesaire wrote, “If the techniques of mass massacre revealed all their efficiency in the concentration camp, because they had been tested on us, and this made all the more efficient, and if white ferociousness came down on you with such savagery, it is because European populations closed their eyes to the tropical genocide.” What Israel is doing today is the perfection of savagery used during the Holocaust against the Palestinians.
Lest we forget, the Holocaust targeted not only Jews but also had many other groups exterminated. In addition to six million Jews, the Holocaust also saw to the killing of seven million Russians plus three million Soviet prisoners, 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, 312,000 people from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 250,000 people with disabilities who were living in institutions, 250,000-500,000 Roma and numerous others oppressed category of people in a systematic, bureaucratic and state-sponsored persecution. However, as Norman Finklestein, a Jewish scholar, points out, acknowledging the genocide of any other group here meant the “loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish moral capital.”
As Edward Said demonstrated in his classic Orientalism: “What has not been sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti‑Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and … the way this academic and intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient.” Said added, “The transference of popular anti‑Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.” In the context of the 1973 war, Said observed that Arabs came to be represented in the West as having “clearly ‘Semitic features’: sharply hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non‑Semitic population) that ‘Semites’ were at the bottom of all ‘our’ troubles.” Therefore, it was not the Jews who invented the term Semite but rather racist white European Christians.
In his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Norman Finkelstein explains how the Holocaust created moral capital and how the Holocaust industry exploits this capital by commodifying the suffering of needy Holocaust survivors. He further examines how the dogma of eternal hatred of Jews has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to explain the hostility directed at Israel. According to Finkelstein, the creation of the Holocaust industry took shape immediately after the 1967 Arab-Israel War, a moment when Israel badly needed an effective public relations strategy. This was the same year Israel launched a war against its neighbouring countries and captured the Golan Heights from Syria, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, actions that violated international law and demanded justification. As Finkelstein elaborates, “This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: intent as the Gentiles always is on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defence.”
In 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer and Auschwitz survivor, Jean Améry, came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. In one of his final essays, he wrote in reference to Israel, “I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end”. Primo Levi, another Holocaust survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, also expressed deep concern. “Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation… We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.”
Pankaj Mishra also highlights how Holocaust survivors were initially prevented by Zionist leaders from settling in Palestine until later when their victimhood could be politically instrumentalised in the colonisation project. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Holocaust survivors as “human debris”, claiming that they had survived only because they had been “bad, harsh, egotistic”. Another Jewish scholar, Noam Chomsky, addressed those who claim that Israel has a right to exist when he argued, “No state demands a ‘right to exist,’ nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be.” He noted that this was a deliberate attempt by the US-Israeli propaganda machine since “there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession” by accepting the right of a settler-colonial state on their land.
So, it is a natural response to resist colonialism, oppression, war crimes and crimes against humanity, despite the perpetrators’ faith or ethnicity. As the Jewish Holocaust survivors have shown, criticism of Jews when they are the colonisers is not anti-Jewish but rather anti-colonial. As they also highlighted there is no need for exceptionalism of crimes of oppressors because they were the victims of yesterday’s crime. Given this, Mahmood Mamdani says, antisemitism and philo-Semitism are two sides of the same coin. Both exceptionalise Jews for being Jews. One resulted in the Holocaust and the other resulted in creating the state of Israel in the same image and principle of Europe (ethnic cleansing and genocide).
Sri Lanka, anti-Muslim racism and pro-Israel sentiments
Nazism had many allies in Sinhala Buddhist nationalists in the early 1900s. Anagarika Dharmapala, the Sinhala Buddhist fundamentalist, popularised the claim that the Sinhalese are a unique race descended from the Aryan people, borrowing heavily from the mythical Mahavamsa. Taking a direct hit at Christians and Muslims, he said, “Practices which were an abomination to the ancient noble Sinhalese have today become tolerated under the influence of Semitic sociology… The sweet, tender, gentle Aryan children of an ancient historical race are sacrificed at the altar of the whiskey-drinking, beef-eating, belly-god of heathenism. How long, oh how long, will unrighteousness last in Ceylon?” What can be categorised as Stockholm Syndrome, Dharmapala also said, “To the Sinhalese, without Buddhism, death is preferable. The British officials may shoot, hang… or do anything to the Sinhalese, but there will always be bad blood between the Moors and the Sinhalese.” In the 1930s, the supporters of Buddhist revivalism openly sympathised with Nazi Germany and Hitler’s racial theories of Aryan supremacy. One writer in A.E. Goonesinghe’s newspaper Veeraya (Hero) wrote in 1936 that the Sinhala race must have “a group of virtuous, steadfast people, with a leader… a hero of great virtue and courage… like Hitler, who was implementing policies for saving the Aryan race from degeneration”. The Aryan ideology thus served a double function: elevating the Sinhala Buddhists to a globally noble status while at the same time marking all others as inherently inferior, undesirable or foreign, rendering other internal exclusions functionally obsolete in the dominant narrative.
In the early stage of British rule Chief Justice Sir Alexander Johnston proposed a plan to establish a Jewish settlement on the island. But this was ignored by the colonial office in London. Sri Lanka recognised the state of Israel on March 25, 1949. Formal diplomatic relations were established in September 1967. The administration of Sirimavo Bandaranaike in the 1970s, whose foreign policy was based on the principles of non-alignment, severed ties with Israel, arguing that Israel had violated UN Security Council resolution 242. Her decision was widely praised as a bold move in support of the liberation of Palestine.
However, the denigration of politics and Sri Lanka’s shift to a neoliberal economic order is symbolised also by its foreign policies. Today, the JVP-led NPP government epitomises this political and moral bankruptcy. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said the war in the Middle East has some effect in Sri Lanka, justifying the arrest of activists who organised protests against the influx of Israeli tourists, particularly those with military backgrounds, in Arugam Bay. While the concerns were against Israeli nationals with ties to military forces and Zionist organisations, the president attempted to frame it as a result of Muslim fundamentalism in the country. Shreen Saroor wrote, “The most visible symbol of the Israeli presence is the Chabad House.” Located on Mafasa Mosque Road, the Chabad House serves not only as a place of worship for Israeli tourists but also as a stark reminder of the structural racism of the NPP government against citizens of Sri Lanka. Saroor also wrote that the “disproportionate level of protection given to Israeli tourists has led to accusations of a double standard” of the government since “locals feel their safety and privacy are being compromised for the sake of foreign nationals”. There was an attempt by the NPP government to construct the opposition to Israeli war tourism as a national security issue. More arrests were made subsequently, along with intimidation of pro-Palestine activists by law enforcement units.
The Hind Rajab Foundation drew attention in December 2024 to a visiting IDF soldier Gal Ferenbook, nicknamed Terminator, who had recorded his own war crimes on social media. It wrote, “Demand to Sri Lankan Authorities: Sri Lanka is urged to detain Ferenbook and cooperate with the ICC, despite its non-membership in the Rome Statute. The Foundation stressed that failure to act would perpetuate impunity for war crimes.” Sri Lankan authorities provided safe passage to Ferenbook despite pleas from the local activists. As a signatory to the Geneva Convention (1949), Sri Lanka has a responsibility to prevent and punish genocide, an obligation it has failed miserably. In fact, Sri Lanka is complicit in the genocide in Gaza.
According to the Times of Israel, before October 7, 2023 150,000 Palestinian labourers from the West Bank and another 18,500 Palestinians from Gaza worked in Israel. Following the operation of the Palestine resistance on October 7, 2023 the number of Palestinians permitted to work in Israeli towns was sharply reduced to just 15,000. For Israel, the acute shortage of Palestinian workers following October 7 brought construction to a shuddering halt. Residential construction fell by 95% late last year, contributing to an overall 19% slump in economic activity. Other sectors such as agriculture were also hit. Sri Lanka has sent close to 20,000 workers by mid-2025, which is 13% of the total labour shortage in Israel. Furthermore, there are new job opportunities posted regularly on government websites. Bimal Rathnayake, Minister of Transport, Highways, Ports, and Civil Aviation and Leader of the House, refused to cut ties with Israel in May 2025. He feared the crash of the economy if any economic sanctions were unilaterally imposed by Sri Lanka, signalling continuous support to uphold a settler colonial economy that is also carrying out a livestreamed genocide in Palestine. Sri Lanka also contributed $50 million to the Israeli military complex in February 2025 by renewing its agreement to upgrade the Kfir jets.
Given this, is there structural racism against Jews for being Jews in Sri Lanka? The answer is a resounding no. Is there structural racism against Muslims for being Muslims in Sri Lanka? The answer is a resounding yes. Muslims in Sri Lankans can’t practice their civic and political rights against Israeli illegal settlements and illegal activities, in addition to the genocide they carry out in Palestine without being threatened with arrest under the PTA. So the question ought to be how much anti-Muslim sentiment is too much anti-Muslim sentiment?
Muslims and Jews may have conflicts between them but they are not Nazi or antisemitic in nature. In the Arab world, this could be about the nation-state structure where there is contention about sovereignty, minority rights and distribution of power. But these are a result of European colonial encounters and not a result of the original societies that lived in these regions. What Israel and Western European colonialism did was absolve itself from the responsibility of the Holocaust (and inherent antisemitism) onto groups of people who had no hand in its genocidal projects, namely, Palestinians.
In the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed over 60,000 people (conservative numbers). Israelis are resented not because they are Jews but because they are colonisers of Palestine who are killing children by shooting them point blank in the head, murdering starving people waiting to collect food, bombing UN shelters and targeting journalists, doctors, paramedics, poets, scholars and anyone they can. Israel is a settler colony. It is a land centred project involving the elimination of natives through ethnic cleansing and genocide. If Israelis, who happen to be Jews, are allowed to kill Palestinians because of their Jewishness, then European genocide should be excused based on their whiteness and Christianity. This will lead to a dangerous path of providing similar justification for the crimes of Nazism and similar atrocities to continue in the future.
Jews in Sri Lanka are subjected to scrutiny and revulsion because they are Israelis, not because they are Jews. Antisemitism stems from Europe’s perception of Jews as a religious, cultural and political other. So how can Sri Lanka be accused of antisemitism when Jews have never been constructed as a political other in the Sri Lankan context? Therefore, we can put to rest the whitewashing of genocide through a political reality (antisemitism) that cannot manifest in Sri Lanka.
