Jews in the West are facing a gradually unfolding witch hunt, spurred by fanatics and zealots no less venomous than the Puritans who drove the Salem Witch Trials.
Let me make crystal clear the goals they are striving for.
They want Western publics to regard Israel as the greatest misfortune plaguing the world today.
They want Western publics to recognize Zionism as a political cancer as dangerous as fascism and racism (but not communism), as expressed in their slogan “Dismantle Zionism.”
They want Western publics to adopt the cause of Israel’s elimination as a noble aim that will advance human rights.
They want their governments to cut all diplomatic, commercial and cultural links with Israel and impose punishing sanctions in their place.
They want Western civil society—universities, unions, media outlets, organizations and campaigns pursuing social justice, religious groups, intellectuals, health workers, lawyers and a myriad of other sectors—to embrace a total boycott of Israel.
They want to criminalize Israeli citizens and Diaspora Jews who serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
They want to criminalize Israel’s political and military leaders.
They want to outlaw Zionist political and social organizations, youth groups and charities.
They want to strictly police Jewish communities in order to eliminate the presence of any Zionist affiliations—meaning that Jewish schools, synagogues and temples, community centers, kosher markets and restaurants would be prohibited from using or trading in Israeli products, displaying the Israeli flag, reciting the prayer for the State of Israel on Shabbat and during festivals, carrying out Zionist education programs, teaching the history of Israel and assisting with aliyah.
And make no mistake, any Jewish resistance to these measures would be met with a merciless response. Public condemnation. Media vilification. Fines. Arrests. Eventually, worse, if we let them.
Who are these witch-hunters? They have been on the margins of democratic societies for decades, coming to the fore on those occasions when the violent Palestinian objection to Israel’s existence comes back to the boil. Since the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, they have never been as visible or as influential as they are now, crystallizing in and around the pro-Hamas solidarity movement that has made even the most assimilated, Israel-distant Jews wonder whether antisemitism might really be a permanent, irredeemable defect of the societies in which they live.
You will find them at the United Nations, from where the now-sanctioned Special Rapporteur for Palestinian Rights, Francesca Albanese, has been waging a campaign to boycott and sanction any company with ties to Israel. You will find them among academics who are far too numerous to mention by name. You will find them in the halls of Congress and in parliaments in Europe, Australia and Canada, among other places, again too numerous to mention individually. You will find them clustered around the mayoral campaign of the antisemite Zohran Mamdani in New York City. You will find them on social media, even if you’re not looking.
Were I to dip my arms elbow-deep into this sewer, I would extract as Exhibits “A” and “B” of this approaching witch hunt two U.K.-based individuals whom you’ve likely never heard of. I would do so because these two have embarked on an initiative quite unlike anything since the Cold War, when Jews in the Soviet Union, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and other Communist countries were viciously persecuted by the authorities in the name of “anti-Zionism.”
Their names are Fahad Ansari, an Islamist, and Franck Magennis, a Communist. This truly sinister pair (who remind me of Joseph Stalin’s hissing prosecutors) have just launched “Riverway to the Sea,” an organization that transforms their London-based law firm into a legal center working for the death of, as they themselves put it, “the failed, fascist experiment currently known as ‘Israel.’ ”
Ansari and Magennis made waves earlier this year when they launched a bid to remove the United Kingdom’s proscription of Hamas—an organization both of them revere—as a terrorist organization. Their new project, whose name synthesizes the name of their former law firm with the pro-Hamas chant “From the river to the sea,” aims to support, from the United Kingdom and eventually from other countries as well, Hamas’s blood-soaked campaign to eliminate Israel, using the law as their instrument. “‘Israel,’ Zionism and Zionists are,” they say, “vulnerable to challenge in a wide range of legal contexts.”
No ambiguity there: individuals as well as institutions will be targeted for the “crime,” in their eyes, of Zionism.
If you want to work for Ansari and Magennis, then you will need to be as hate-filled as they are. The first question on the application for the role of “Events, Training and Comms” at their new organization reads as follows: “How will you use the time and space created by this position to deal maximum damage to Zionism?”
What’s striking about these two is that despite their declared focus on the legal process to achieve their ends, their language indicates a proclivity for violence that goes beyond their legal pleas for Hamas and unconditional support for Palestine Action, a fiercely antisemitic grouping that the British government designated as a terrorist organization earlier this month.
Addressing a far-left group last week, Magennis said that the task of the audience when it came to Zionism was to “kick it to death.” On social media, one pictures him frothing as he stabs his keyboard: “Zionism is crumbling. The reckoning is here … Tear down the world that did this to Palestinians. Escalate! Escalate now!” (Amusingly, Magennis—yet another Irishman in thrall to Palestinian eliminationism—suddenly became very sensitive about anti-Irish tropes when a respondent made a joke about him going to bed clutching a bottle of whiskey.) Ansari, meanwhile, continues in a similar vein, hailing the “unique opportunity to do real damage to Zionism” he believes his organization embodies.
“Real damage” means advocating for and implementing the measures I described above, whose impact will be felt primarily by British Jews, not the Israeli government. This is not an accident; in the multifront war launched by Hamas nearly two years ago, the role of its international solidarity movement is to make life as unpleasant as possible for the vast majority of Jews who identify as Zionists. In that regard, the handful of Jewish anti-Zionists in their ranks provides some convenient cover, much as the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party did when the Bolsheviks banned Zionist organizations and cracked down on Hebrew and Jewish education.
With the exceptions of the present U.S. administration and the current German government, no other Western government has understood, let alone acted upon, the grave threat these groups and individuals represent. As a first priority, the welcome U.S. sanctions on Albanese—rooted in the same executive order applied to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for its pursuit of American citizens and allies of the United States like Israel—should now be expanded to all groups dedicated to waging lawfare against Israel and Jewish communities outside Israel. We don’t want you here, and you should entertain no illusions: We will defeat you.
