Last week’s stabbing attack against two Jews in London’s Golders Green neighborhood was just the latest instance of what even local police agreed was an “epidemic” of antisemitic crimes. It was just one of many such incidents in the United Kingdom, the United States, continental Europe and Australia over the course of the last 31 months in which Jews were subjected to violence merely for being conspicuously Jewish.
Since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, such incidents have become commonplace. The connection between the two is not a coincidence. That’s because the Oct. 7 attacks were the spark for a global surge of Jew-hatred. It’s rooted in the idea that the war to destroy Israel—for which the atrocities of Oct. 7 were just a trailer for what would happen to the rest of the Jewish state should Hamas and its allies triumph—was a righteous cause that enlightened progressives should support.
And in the name of this supposedly righteous cause of ending the one state on the planet that is Jewish, where half of the world’s Jews just happen to live, a lot of harm is being done to Jews elsewhere.
They don’t want to be called ‘antisemites’
The curious thing about the people who support these awful ideas is that they don’t wish to be considered antisemitic.
Listen to those like leftist podcaster Hasan Piker and former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who openly support Hamas, and they’ll tell you that while they support the destruction of Israel, they want to assure Jews in the Diaspora that they have nothing to fear from them. Or, at least, not as long as they don’t support Israel.
They are adamant in asserting that anti-Zionism—a movement that denies rights to Jews that no one would think to deny to any other group or people—is not the same thing as antisemitism. Indeed, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, they are proud of their public advocacy against the Jewish state and their nonstop floating of lies about it committing horrible fictional crimes while denying or rationalizing the actual crimes committed against it and its people.
At the same time, they deny that this has anything to do with the unprecedented worldwide increase in acts of Jew-hatred. Piker was at pains to make this argument in, of all places, JTA, which was once the respected primary source of news about the Jewish world. He claims that he’s trying to fight antisemitism while leading the charge in favor of demonizing the Jews of Israel and their supporters abroad.
Making common cause with right-wing Jew-haters, like former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson—their moral equivalent at the other end of the political spectrum—says the same thing. That was exhibited this past weekend, when he attempted to explain himself in a largely friendly interview with The New York Times.
Demonizing Jewish rights
What it boils down to is the claim that the war on the Jewish state is not a war on the Jewish people or Judaism.
That is why college students and their professors chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”), or demonstrators on the streets of American cities, could believe that they were not behaving indecently—that they were simply doing the right thing. If you’ve been indoctrinated by toxic leftist ideologies to believe that Israelis and Jews are “white” oppressors of Palestinians who are victimized “people of color,” then anything, even a genocidal war, done to them can be rationalized.
This mindset, in which Israel and Zionism are demonized and delegitimized, is the reason why so many left-wing activists and ideologues, especially those who masquerade as mainstream journalists, have spread Hamas propaganda that amounts to blood libels about Israelis committing “genocide” against Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.
Those smears are the core content of what Israeli journalist Matti Friedman dubbed “Gazology,” or what legal scholar and author Alan Dershowitz calls “Palestinianism.” They are both ways of describing an international movement aimed not at uplifting this populace, but of singling out Israel and the Jews as a malevolent global force that is symbolic of all the world’s ills. It’s a long-told sinister fantasy: Their eradication will magically liberate the oppressed people and causes in the world.
That is why Jews are being assaulted and murdered in the name of “Free Palestine” in the streets of England, Australia, and, yes, the United States.
The people who are most prominent in publicizing the ideas that help to incite such crimes, however, are indignant at the claim that what they are doing is antisemitic.
Redefining antisemitism to exonerate the Jew-haters
Their problem is that their advocacy—not to mention the name-calling they indulge in—falls directly into the category of behavior cited in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. And, of course, that’s why antisemites and their enablers and apologists consistently oppose the IHRA.
Carlson’s platforming of Holocaust denial is an example of Jew-hatred labeled in the definition. But so do his claims, similar to his left-wing equivalents like Piker, that Israelis are the new Nazis. More than that, their repudiation of the right of self-determination to Jews in their own homeland is inherently antisemitic, judging it by double standards not applied to any other nation. Another classic antisemitic trope is their claims that American Jews who support Israel are guilty of “dual loyalty.”
Let’s also be clear that what Carlson on the right, along with what Piker and Jewish apologist writer Peter Beinart are doing on the left, is not “criticism” of the State of Israel and its government. Like all Americans, Israelis publicly criticize their governments for one reason or another all the time. Criticism of the actions of Jerusalem or of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet is not antisemitic. But claiming that Zionism—the national movement of the Jewish people aimed at securing their rights to live in peace, security and sovereignty in their ancient homeland—is not only racist but uniquely illegitimate when compared to the rights of any other people is indeed an expression of Jew-hatred.
Israel and Judaism
How can they justify this?
They do so by attempting to redefine Jewish identity in a way that strips it of one of its essential elements. It is not merely a set of theological concepts. It is composed of the Torah and the Hebrew bible, combined with the age-old set of works that interpret the scriptures in the oral law that has been handed down in the Mishna and Gemara, known as the Talmud. But it is also composed of Jewish peoplehood and the connection of that people to the land of Israel. To claim that the land is not integral to Judaism and Jewish identity is to demonstrate illiteracy about the faith and history of the Jews.
Yet that is exactly what a generation of anti-Zionists, who repeat talking points written by Soviet propagandists in the 1960s and 1970s, is doing. So brazen are they that those like Max Strasser, the anti-Zionist Jew who is the “Ideas” editor of The New York Times, are actually prepared to mock the idea that the role of Israel in Judaism is nearly as integral to it as circumcision, as he did in a recent book review.
Strasser’s point (like that of Beinart, Piker and Carlson) is essentially to claim that the only way to be a “good” Jew is to pretend that the Jewish connection to their homeland is a modern invention of racist fascists. They ignore the fact that it is noted throughout the Torah, as well as part of the liturgy that religious Jews have invoked three times a day when they prayed for millennia.
Still, to justify this rewriting of history and Judaism to suit their politics and ideologies, they must do more than that. To defend this shameless set of lies, they must also accuse Israelis of being, in Strasser’s formulations, “monsters” that moral people—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—abhor.
That is why Israel’s moral and legal war of defense against genuine genocidal monsters, like the Palestinian Arab supporters of Hamas and the other terrorist groups that comprise their national movement, must be falsely portrayed as “genocide.” That is why the sole democracy in the Middle East must be libeled as a form of “apartheid,” and its American supporters smeared as conspiracists who are determined to drag America into wars against its interests.
Stripped of their disingenuous moral preening about human rights, anti-Zionists and their claim to be concerned about antisemitism can be seen for what it is: a disingenuous smokescreen whose purpose is to conceal backing for a cause that has one purpose. And that is the destruction of Israel and the mass murder of half of the world’s Jews.
The pre-Shoah debate
The debate about Zionism inside the Jewish world before the creation of the modern-day State of Israel was different from what is now asserted by the anti-Zionists. As Jonathan Brent, the head of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—the home of the archives of the pre-Holocaust European Jewish world—told me in a podcast interview, the debate among Jews prior to 1939 was not about an Israel that didn’t yet exist.
At that time, the arguments between the socialist Bund (extolled by anti-Zionists like Strasser), which wanted the largely Yiddish-speaking Jewish population to have autonomous rights in Eastern Europe, and Zionists were about how best to preserve Jewish life. Jews faced existential threats from Nazis and Communists, as well as traditional forms of Jew-hatred rooted in the Christian religion and its institutions. As it turned out, the hopes of the Bundists for Jewish survival in Europe died in the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags. Zionism provided the only viable path for Jewish survival, even though its triumph came too late to save European Jewry.
To oppose Israel’s existence now, whether in the name of an extinct Jewish movement or fashionable leftist ideologies rooted in toxic ideas about race, is not merely to ignore this basic history. It involves the contemplation of, if not actually cheering for, a new Holocaust in which more than 7 million Jewish lives would be snuffed out to accommodate the Arab and Islamist intolerance for any non-Muslim sovereign entity in the Middle East, coupled with Marxist opposition to Jewish nationalism.
Seen clearly, it’s easy to understand why the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism in liberal outlets like the Times, as well as left and right-wing podcasts hosted by Piker and Carlson, has been accompanied by an increase in the targeting of Jews for violence. Anti-Zionism is not distinct from antisemitism; it is just a variant of it.
The denial of the connection between the two—and the resulting violence that is its inevitable corollary—is not any more of an intellectually coherent argument than the efforts of the likes of Strasser, Piker or Carlson to define Judaism or antisemitism in a way that exonerates their hateful advocacy. It is nothing more than gaslighting and should be treated as such. News outlets like The Times that attempt to portray this compendium of hoaxes and conspiracy theories as an enlightened cause or a well-meaning difference of opinion that deserves a hearing aren’t just wrong. They are as intellectually and morally bankrupt as those who are actually carrying out the antisemitic assaults and murders that they self-righteously claim to deplore.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
