The rise of Jew-hatred in America can be reversed, but only if it is fought differently. The hate-mongers have been successful in obtaining legitimacy for their absurd argument that being anti-Zionist and supporting the eradication of the State of Israel does not make them antisemites.
Even antisemites like far-left political commentator and streamer Hasan Piker, who referred to hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews as “inbred” and who supports Hamas over Israel, are legitimized within mainstream publications and mainstream politicians on the left. The reason that he and others are legitimized is the polling that shows that Democratic voters support Palestinian Arabs over Israelis by a 3-1 margin, and the Democrats want to appeal to those voters. Once public opinion changes back, people like Piker and others will no longer be legitimized by the Democratic Party members.
The fact is that in order to argue that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, the haters have to do two false things. The first is that they need to argue that Judaism has nothing to do with Zionism. They attempt to prove that with Neturei Karta demonstrators and assimilated self-hating Jews with no knowledge of Judaism. The fact that the Neturei Karta represents a tiny, insignificant group that doesn’t even represent Orthodox Jews—no matter their traditional dress—is ignored in the media.
The second false narrative is to deny Jewish history and Jewish connections to the land of Israel. Everyone would agree that if you deny that the Holocaust happened, you are an antisemite. If you deny that King David ruled over Jerusalem, you are an antisemite. If you deny the fact that Jewish prophets and others have been buried at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem for more than 2,000 years, then you are also an antisemite. (It’s important to note that the oldest Muslim cemetery in Israel dates from the 11th century.)
If you believe in the rights of indigenous people to their land, except when it comes to the indigenous Jewish people of Israel, you are antisemitic. If you ignore the historical legal right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel because you deliberately ignore that under the League of Nations decision of 1922, the Anglo-American Treaty ratified in 1925 and under Article 80 of the U.N. charter, international law recognizes the Jewish right to the land of Israel, you are antisemitic. If you try to claim some random time in history when Jews were not the majority and not go back to who was first in Israel—namely, the Jews—or who is a majority in Israel today—namely, the Jews—then you are antisemitic.
The Jews were militarily forced from their homeland by the Romans in the year 70 C.E. and then in the Bar Kokhba revolt in the years 132 to 136, in which the Jews, except for a few, were forcibly evicted from their ancestral homeland and never allowed freely to move back in big numbers until the modern-day Jewish state was re-established in 1948. The land of Israel was mostly empty, as American essayist Mark Twain described during his visit in 1867.
I asked Thomas Nides, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, to name a Palestinian Arab leader from before 1867. He could not because those who were called Palestinian in 1867 were Jewish residents, not Arab residents. Even the Muslim Waqf, in its 1925 tourist guide to the Temple Mount, wrote that it was the site of the Temple of King Solomon. It acknowledged that Muslims occupied the site in the seventh century when they built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque.
Despite the League of Nations decision of 1922, Jews were limited by the British from moving back to the land of Israel, despite the fact that there were still 600,000 Jews in Israel by the year 1948. After being forcibly removed, the Jewish people never gave up their claim to Israel. That is why Jews face toward Jerusalem when they pray, and why returning to Jerusalem is in the main Amidah prayer of the Jewish service. Now, nearly 8 million Jews currently live in Israel.
Those who advocate for the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state to replace the indigenous Jewish state are the advocates for apartheid, since a majority of the people living in the land of Israel are Jews. If they support the physical murder of this Jewish population, then they are supporters of the real definition of genocide.
When debating such topics with those who are not overtly antisemitic but who are critical of Israel, like the 40 Democratic senators who oppose selling arms to Israel while the country is fighting a war against multiple enemies, they are attempting to destroy it. Those who oppose Israel are good at attacking it, but cannot defend their own positions, political or otherwise.
The point is: The United States has no better ally than Israel, with its air force, intelligence and other strategic know-how. Israel is a military and technological power, with around 100 companies on Nasdaq. Compare this to a country more than 10 times its size, like Egypt, which has 1 company on Nasdaq.
Moreover, the joint war with Iran has shown the United States the great value that Israel brings at a time when European countries won’t lift a finger to battle Islamic extremism. They refuse to even let their bases be used to help take down a regime that aims to overpower the West.
The bottom line is that the Jewish people and Israel have the winning argument. They can overcome the antisemites. They do, however, need to change tactics in how to fight back because the current tactics aren’t working in America.
