In May, I started writing an essay pushing back against the dominant Maximalist Zionist narrative that criticism of the State of Israel and support for Palestinian civil rights and national autonomy is antisemitism. I documented the history of the rhetorical equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism; it has a history, it emerged slowly, and was not, in fact, a fait-accompli until recently, when it was consolidated and institutionalized in the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism less than a decade ago.
I had meant to document that there has not been a “rise in antisemitism” in the wake of the State of Israel’s War on Gaza, as Maximalist Zionists and the State of Israel claim, swept along by pro-Palestine and anti-Israel politics. On the contrary, antisemitism is deeply rooted in Euro-American culture, the historical heir of what was once called Christendom. Opponents of the State of Israel did not invent antisemitism after 7 October, it had always been there, deployed by the right far more often than the left, because the hatred and mistrust of Jews is a foundational component of the culture we inhabit.
It is absurd, in fact, to say that there has been a “rise in antisemitism,” or even a rise in overt antisemitic incidents, because this mobilizes the fallacious rhetorical equation that the State of Israel and Jews are coextensive, and that Jews share monolithic beliefs (that is: we all stick together – itself an antisemitic canard), and ignores (in fact, elides) the demonstrable antisemitism, including many violent incidents, which preceded the War on Gaza, mostly deployed and perpetrated by activists (like Charlie Kirk) and terrorists on the right. The fact of Pittsburgh, Poway, Jersey City, MAGA rhetoric, and all the rest, make the narrative that there has been a “rise in antisemitism” an absurdity.
I wrote about 2,500 words of this essay and could not go on. The antisemitic terrorist attacks in Washington and Boulder, under the slogan of “Free Palestine,” stopped me in my tracks. And after looking at page nine, unfinished in mid-paragraph, sticking out of my typewriter for four months, I find myself wondering if I still believe what I had been writing.
Make no mistake: The equation of criticism of the State of Israel and anti-Zionism is a fallacy. To believe otherwise is to embrace the antisemitic canard that the People and the State of Israel are one – a falsehood that both drives Maximalist Zionism and inspired the murderous rampages in Washington, Boulder, and now Manchester.
Yet, I cannot ignore the fact that, while anti-Zionism is not, in and of itself, antisemitic, a great many people who criticize and oppose the State of Israel, and who support Palestinian autonomy are, in fact, antisemites, and that antisemitism informs – indeed, pervades – their politics. The murderous, antisemitic terrorist attacks of the last few months (and the ones inevitably to come), which were perpetrated in the name of “Free Palestine,” are testimony to that.
Where I disagree with the convenient narrative of “rising antisemitism” deployed by the State of Israel, its proxies, and Maximalist Zionists, is the contention that the antisemitism articulated and tolerated by many activists and militants of the left is a new thing, or that it is a product of anti-Israel politics.
It is not; antisemitism has always been there, just as it has always been a feature of Euro-American (and some Islamic) culture. People produced by this culture will inevitably deploy its foundational assumptions if they do not honestly confront and interrogate them. When even fellow Jews blindly embrace these premises, we become complicit in them. And the work of interrogating ideological premises (why do we think “crusades” are good, what is a “good Samaritan,” why is it CE and AD, why are Sunday, Easter, and Christmas “national holidays,” but not Rosh Hashanah, Eid al Fitr, and Diwali, under whose God this “one nation” is indivisible, who are the insiders and outsiders?) is so extraordinarily difficult that many, indeed most, of us simply abstain from it.
Antisemitism, like American (and Canadian, British, French, etc.) exceptionalism, and how we understand the saecularum, comes in mothers’ milk. It is easy to deploy unconsciously, as when we question the morality legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel on the grounds that it is a “settler-colonialist” state, but would never dream of doing the same of the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico… and the list goes on.
The question that I could not answer 2,500 words into my unfinished essay is, although anti-Zionism and criticism of the State of Israel is not itself antisemitic, how many people’s opposition to the State of Israel, their desire to see it disappear, and their opposition to Zionism is rooted in this unacknowledged antisemitism? How many make a special case of the State of Israel, but not Russia, China, Myanmar, indeed the United States and many other countries, because it styles itself “the Jewish State” and have eagerly swallowed the Maximalist Zionist myth?
So… I stopped. I will not let the antisemites on the left off the hook, I will not be the compliant, “Magic Jew” who absolves them of their hate and joins in on my othering and self-abasement. I left off in the middle of a contradiction, if not an aporia, that I could not then, and have not been able since, to reconcile: Anti-Zionism is, prima facie, not the same thing as antisemitism, yet so many anti-Zionists and some of the most passionate advocates for peace, Palestinian rights and autonomy – political commitments that I just as passionately share – mobilize their unconscious, uninterrogated, and now sometimes homicidal antisemitism in their politics.
I will return to that essay someday. I think that it is important and, as a scholar and as a Jew, I believe that I have an obligation to say what has not yet, in my opinion, been adequately articulated. But it will be a struggle… None of this comes easy to me. It shouldn’t.