Fight the real antisemites
The Israeli government and the ADL are clueless over whom and what to fight
Years ago, when I was based in Uganda, I ran afoul of the government and its manifold sycophants with my reporting for The Economist. They hurled several insults against me, including that I was an Israeli spy. They didn’t arrive at this slur because I have an Israeli passport because I don’t. They didn’t call me an Israeli spy because I’m an intelligence operative or spy because I’m not and have never been. They smeared me with the label because I’m Jewish. The accusation stands as a clear example as antisemitism, whether you use the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition or the Jerusalem Declaration.
When I was a teenager in Toronto, neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel gained notoriety for denying the Holocaust and publishing anti-Jewish propaganda. CBC’s The Fifth Estate produced a segment on Zundel’s odious work in 1993. He died in Germany after being deported there in 2005 by the Canadian government. Zundel’s toxic hatred bothers me even now, especially since our maternal grandfather, Ralph Kirsh, fled Poland in the 1930s to escape anti-Jewish attitudes and policies that became genocidal.
I’ve personally known about antisemitism for almost five decades. Every semester, I teach my students about the 15th-century blood libel against Italian Jews based on the writing of Jake Soll. Sometimes, I teach about how George Soros became a figurehead (and remains as one) for anti-Jewish conspiracies on the American far-right.
History.com’s entry on antisemitism is exceedingly clear.
The term anti-Semitism was first popularized by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to describe hatred or hostility toward Jews. The history of anti-Semitism, however, goes back much further.
Hostility against Jews may date back nearly as far as Jewish history. In the ancient empires of Babylonia, Greece, and Rome, Jews—who originated in the ancient kingdom of Judea—were often criticized and persecuted for their efforts to remain a separate cultural group rather than taking on the religious and social customs of their conquerors.1
Whether it’s implicit by insinuation or explicit through racist rhetoric, antisemitism is not new. What is new, as identified by Brian Klug in 2004, is how the definition has expanded to include anti-Zionism.
There is a long and ignoble history of “Zionist” being used as a code word for “Jew,” as when Communist Poland carried out “anti-Zionist” purges in 1968, expelling thousands of Jews from the country, or when the extreme right today uses the acronym ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government) to refer to the US government. Moreover, the Zionist movement arose as a reaction to the persecution of Jews. Since anti-Zionism is the opposite of Zionism, and since Zionism is a form of opposition to anti-Semitism, it seems to follow that an anti-Zionist must be an anti-Semite.
Nonetheless, the inference is invalid. To argue that hostility to Israel and hostility to Jews are one and the same thing is to conflate the Jewish state with the Jewish people. In fact, Israel is one thing, Jewry another. Accordingly, anti-Zionism is one thing, anti-Semitism another. They are separate. To say they are separate is not to say that they are never connected. But they are independent variables that can be connected in different ways.2
Despite Klug’s argument being more than 20 years old, neither the Israeli government nor the Anti-Defamation League dare to consider it. In fact, the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told the Israeli Knesset on Jan. 7th that his organization and the wider Jewish world failed to combat the “inferno of antisemitism.” What’s more, he said fresh thinking to combat the scourge was needed.
“Otherwise, as Einstein said, we’ll be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It’s the definition of insanity. So starting with ADL and the rest of the NGO sector in the U.S. and around the world, we’ve got to start doing things differently. And the same goes here in Israel. This means that the problem won’t be solved by yet another new Knesset task force. It won’t be solved by the government just throwing money at the problem. It won’t be solved by the IDF spokesperson’s unit issuing updated talking points or suddenly using TikTok. Like us in America, you need to adopt new strategies to experiment with creative tactics to study the results and scale what works,” he said. “We need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold Pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle. We need the kind of courage that executed Operation Deep Layer inside Syria and destroyed Iranian missile manufacturing capabilities to undertake this mission. This is the kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that have always been a hallmark of the State of Israel, that have always been a characteristic of the Jewish people. I know we can do it.”3
Now I’m no CEO, but I don’t think Israeli “ingenuity” is going to resolve a problem — discrimination, hostility, prejudice and violence against Jews — that dates back centuries. Nor should Israel’s far-right government of convicted criminals and fascists, led by the worst leader in Jewish history, be trusted with this fight. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the face of contrary evidence, unsurprisingly views antisemitism as a left-wing and Muslim problem in Europe, not of that of the far-right. By no coincidence, Hungarian autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose antisemitism has frequently targeted Soros, remains one of Netanyahu’s staunchest allies in Europe. To that end, Matt Lieb of AJ+ (Al Jazeera) produced a video five years ago on why antisemites love Israel.
Nor should Israel be leading the fight against antisemitism because it uses the charge to shield itself from any criticism. Consider Netanyahu’s response to the International Criminal Court arrest warrants.
"The antisemitic decision of the international court in The Hague is a modern Dreyfus trial, and it will end the same way. One hundred and thirty years ago, the French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason by a biased French court. In response of these false accusations, the great French writer Émile Zola wrote his monumental essay, J’Accuse. He accused the French court of antisemitic lies against an innocent officer, who was later exonerated of all guilt. Now, an international court in The Hague, also headed by a French judge, is repeating this outrageous offense.4
The response is outrageous on several levels. One, you can disagree with the ICC’s warrants, but they are based on policies, not opposition to Judaism. Two, Alfred Dreyfus was not the head of a sovereign government when he was falsely accused of treason. Three, multiple, credible sources maintain Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
However, completely separating Jews from Israel to combat antisemitism is not as clean a separation as Jewish anti-Zionist groups argue. The concept of K’lal Yisrael, which can be understood as the whole Jewish community, inclusive of Israel, or Jewish peoplehood, is extremely potent in the diaspora. It is viewed as an important value in Jewish communities. The dominant interpretation, I think, is the one of a shared responsibility for other Jews, especially those in Israel.5 The Jewish high school both Josh and I attended includes an amended version of K’lal Yisrael as a key pillar in its strategic plan. It’s not an exaggeration to say that pretty much every Jew I know would agree with the dominant interpretation.
And yet, if we stick to that interpretation of K’lal Yisrael, it becomes harder and harder to fight the real antisemites, both on the far-left and the far-right. Rachel Shabi argues that the charge is losing its meaning because of its application to anyone and everyone who criticizes Israel. In her view, there needs to be a much improved discussion for everyone’s benefit — including Jews who are facing increased violence and threats in the diaspora. Shabi’s new book, Off White: The Truth about Antisemitism, takes a progressive view of the problem.
A true understanding of what has gone so wrong with our discussion of antisemitism — and how to put it right — will not just fortify the left in this urgent political moment. It will also consolidate our antiracist endeavours. It will yield inclusiveness, moral clarity and cohesion. And most of all, it will help us to make sense of the alarming, divisive and destructive rightwards shift of the world — because only then do we stand a chance of changing it.6
As much as I appreciate and support Shabi’s viewpoint, not all Jews are progressive, nor will they support her analysis. Thus, we need an adjacent path that everyone can embrace. Philip Joseph in The Forward reminds us that the fear of antisemitism is not evidence.
A Dec. 11 letter signed by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Federations of North America asserted that, since the onset of the Oct. 7 war, Israel’s opponents “have verbally and physically attacked Jews, protested in front of Jewish religious and communal institutions, and attacked Jewish owned businesses.” This sounds quite a bit like the environment faced by our ancestors on the eve of World War II….
Despite their alarmist language, the writers of the Dec. 11 letter were not responding to physical or verbal assaults on Jews; protests of communal institutions; or attacks on Jewish businesses. The occasion, instead, was the National Association for Independent Schools (NAIS) People of Color Conference, held from December 4-7 in Denver, Colorado — where I live — which featured two speeches that described Zionism as a colonialist project and the war in Gaza as a genocide.
For the letter writers, the problem with the NAIS speeches was that they threatened to inhibit Jewish pride. “Perhaps the most heartbreaking report we received,” they wrote, “was from a Jewish student who stated that he and his peers ‘felt so targeted, so unsafe, that we tucked our Magen Davids in our shirts’….No student should ever be made to feel this way because of their identity.”
Yes, it’s concerning that any child should feel unwelcome because of their identity. But the letter fails to note that while the students felt fear, there is no evidence of their Jewishness being an issue of any kind. No one was, in the end, actually targeted for wearing the Magen David.7
And this is the heart of the problem. Antisemitism is real, and it has increased in the diaspora. There have been terrible attacks since Oct. 7th, 2023. This includes the arson terrorist attack on Adass Israel in Melbourne; a woman being stabbed at her home in Lyon, France; multiple shootings at Jewish schools in Montreal and Toronto; and the pogrom in Dagestan, Russia.
Joseph’s path of being evidence-based allows us to learn a few important lessons. Svante Lundgren of Lund University argues that when conflict occurs in Israel-Palestine, it erupts in violence and threats in Europe. His research is based on events in the 2000s and 2010s. It’s not a large leap to extrapolate how feelings are even rawer and angrier with a live-streamed genocide in Gaza. For Lundgren, conflict in Israel-Palestine aggressively boosts anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
As we witness a surge in conspiracy theories circulating online, it is worth mentioning that the history of antisemitism is full of these. Ideas about Jewish manipulation — spread among a wider segment of the population — can also be used in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They “explain” things such as the US support for Israel and the positioning of western media.8
A second point is that we must recognize that feelings of Jewish insecurity and discomfort cannot overwhelm facts about Israel. Peter Beinart writes:
There’s nothing about saying that Israel is committing genocide or that Israel is acting in a racist way that makes Jewish students unsafe. The people who should be apologizing are the Jewish educators who have taught young American Jewish students to feel that their safety is at risk when people talk about what is happening to Palestinians.
Of course, if people actually, physically threaten or intimidate Jewish students on any campus, that’s absolutely unacceptable. But there is a profound difference between physically intimidating or threatening students and simply talking about what’s happening to Palestinians. And yet, so frequently in Jewish spaces, the message that we send and the message we send young people—and I am the parent of students who went through Jewish schools—that the message that we send is if Palestinians talk about their experience vis-a-vis the state of Israel, you should take that as a threat and therefore people can try on behalf of you in the name of your safety to shut that speech down, which is the opposite of education.9
My third point is that we need to be extremely clear-eyed and evidence-based about Israel as a state. It consistently pursues its own interests above considerations for diaspora Jews and universal values. One example is how Israel sold arms to Argentina’s military junta that disappeared 20,000 political dissidents, 2,000 of them Jews.10 Another is how Israel trained soldiers in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Congo (later Zaire and now Democratic Republic of Congo). Eitay Mack also reported that Israel exploited Mobutu’s antisemitic views to renew bilateral relations.11 More famously, Israel, post-1967, developed strong ties with apartheid South Africa, including military, technological and economic cooperation.12
The bottom line is that you can’t properly fight an enemy until you know whom you’re fighting. If you believe in a single democratic state from the river to the sea, then you do not automatically hate Jews and Israelis. If you believe that Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, then you aren’t automatically an antisemite. Dr. Joshua Shanes correctly argues that “antisemitism must be identified and fought, but so too must efforts to squash legitimate protest of Israel by conflating it with antisemitism.”13
Let us remember that if we label everything as antisemitic, then nothing will be. And that would truly threaten Jewish safety everywhere.
History.com’s entry is here: https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/anti-semitism
Brian Klug in The Nation, 2004: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/myth-new-anti-semitism/
EJewish Philanthropy’s story is here: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/in-the-knesset-adl-chief-admits-group-has-failed-to-combat-antisemitism-calls-for-new-strategies/
Embassy of Israel in Kathmandu: https://new.embassies.gov.il/nepal/en/news/prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu-22112024
Reform Judaism offers some intriguing commentary on K’lal Yisrael here: https://reformjudaism.org/blog/klal-yisrael-challenges-and-opportunities-uniting-people
Rachel Shabi in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/31/antisemitism-israel-gaza-war-right?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
Philip Joseph in The Forward: https://forward.com/opinion/686086/antisemitism-united-states-nazi-germany/
Svante Lundgren is here: https://theconversation.com/attacks-on-jews-always-rise-globally-when-conflict-in-israel-and-palestine-intensifies-216590
Balfour Project is here: https://balfourproject.org/inventing-the-new-antisemitism/
Eitay Mack’s work on Israel-Mobutu relations is here: http://statecrime.org/israels-heart-of-darkness/
Joseph Dana is NewLines: https://newlinesmag.com/argument/south-africas-stance-on-palestine-opens-questions-about-apartheid-and-history/
Dr. Joshua Shames is here: https://theconversation.com/when-is-criticism-of-israel-antisemitic-a-scholar-of-modern-jewish-history-explains-220995