Last year I was teaching a class on third world politics (I might have mentioned this before on this list), about 60 students, self-selecting to look at the third world, mostly radical, about a fifth muslims, British, whose parents came from Pakistan or East Africa, the rest a mixture of good, educated arty radical people, a handful of continental Europeans. The class was great fun to teach, not like some that can be a bit inert. Many had been involved in anti war protesting. They were intelligent, critical of western policy, and sceptical about humanitarian intervention. The muslims were bright, and their radical anti-Americanism was quite close to the radicals' anti war feelings.
I was using an example in the class, about Russia's oligarchs, and was about to make the point that the coincidence that some were of Jewish origin unfortunately reinforced some anti Semitic prejudices among Russians (which is my experience, Chris can pull me up if I am wrong). I only got half the sentence out: 'it just so happened', I said, 'that some of the oligarchs were Jews' meaning to say that this reinforced prejudices. But the whole class was nodding sagely, oh I see yes, they were saying, of course. I pushed them as to what they thought I meant. Everyone I asked thought that the point I was making - which they thought entirely sensible - was that the reason that Russia was robbed of its assets under the shock therapy was that the Jews had bought it all up. I took issue, but they weren't interested, and just let it ride. Any discussion of anti Semitism was something that they thought was ancient history, not really an issue, though they were mostly happy to assent to the idea that the Jews had bought up Russia. It was a common viewpoint among the white European students and the muslims.
That was when I started thinking it was worth re-examining the assumption that I had learned taking up the Sabra and Shatila massacre - that the charge of anti Semitism was a canard put about by Zionists. In fact, back then, in 1982 it was, I think. I helped organise a 'Week of Action' and resolutions at college (my University took in the Hendon Business School, so there was a lively Union of Jewish Students prepared to chase us all over the place). But one thing that was clear then, but not I think now, was that among leftists, any hint of anti Semitism was absolutely taboo (with the exception of the much hated WRP, which used to publish pictures of Tony Cliff, who they called Ygael Gluckstein, with the camera looking up his nostrils). Indeed the left then were fixated on the holocaust (even unhealthily so, as if all racism was reducible to the struggle against the 'Nazis'). I don't think it was decisive, but it did happen that a number of Trotskyists especially, but leftists generally were Jewish, though in the 1980s Britain's Jews were on the average moving to the right.
What was different, I think, was that anti-capitalism then was wholly identified with socialism, whether reformist or revolutionary. Today's anti-capitalist sentiments are a lot less programmatically inspired, and much more prone to conspiracy theory. The contemporary anti capitalist movement is a lot more tolerant of romantic nature worship, and ideals of indigeneity. Anti-globalisation themes in contemporary politics render cosmopolitanism as suspect.
The question of war in the middle east was generally understood by leftists, back then, as a facet of imperialism. Israel was just a local militia of the imperialist west. Today the dynamic is seen the other way around. All of these different trends, it seems to me, do make the anti-Israel protests predisposed to do what is after all the obvious (if ultimately deluded) thing, and see the problem as a problem of Jews. It that were a sentiment at large among Palestinians, you might say, who could blame them? But to see such ideas find any foothold in Europe is pretty creepy.
I am not saying that this is a wholesale reaction, it is just a specific problem within our own ranks that should be stamped on. It is not a case in favour of Israel - far from it. (It is Israel's policies that give a hook on which to anti Semitics attitudes.) Nor is it an argument for ignoring the slaughter in Gaza.