What is Antisemitism and Who Gets to Say?
We will redefine what “genocide” means so it applies to you people.
We will redefine what “apartheid” and “colonialism” mean so they apply to you people.
We will redefine what “white” means so it applies to you people.
But we will also define what “antisemitism” means so you people can’t say it applies to us.
It seems the antisemites of the world can teach the Jewish people a thing or two about chutzpah.
In modern societies, persecuted people are generally afforded significant leeway to define their persecution. This is, however, not the case for Jews, who alone are always being told what they are not entitled to find offensive.
The prevailing leftist dogma of “intersectionality” divides the world neatly into oppressors and oppressed, and its adherents have declared the Jewish people to be white, rich and powerful, and therefore oppressors, notwithstanding the disproportionate incidence and dramatic recent rise in physical and verbal attacks on Jews around the world.
What is antisemitism and who gets to say?
Is it, for example, antisemitic to accuse Israel of committing genocide?
The correct answer is: not necessarily, but very likely. There are three possibilities about the understanding of a person making that accusation: they could know that it is false; they could believe it to be true; or they could not know whether it is true or false but make it anyway.
If they know the accusation is false, but make it anyway, they are antisemitic. Falsely accusing the nation-state of the Jewish people of genocide, the worst crime imaginable and one that was established in the wake of the Holocaust, is a poisonous blood libel orders of magnitude uglier and more nocuous than the pogrom-inducing blood libels of the Middle Ages. It is also a grotesque act of Holocaust denial, falsely equating the systematic murder of six million Jews as part of an explicit plan to exterminate them with the (undeniably tragic) deaths of thousands of Palestinian noncombatants in a defensive war started by Hamas’ barbaric invasion, which deaths were caused (at least largely) by Hamas’ intentional use of those people as human shields and as bait.
To make that accusation knowing that it is false is not merely strategic hyperbole; it drips with hatred. It is the emotional impact of the word, its ability to inflict pain on Jewish people and generate hostility against them, that is the very reason Israel’s most cynical and intellectually dishonest opponents chose to appropriate it to their cause. It dehumanizes Jewish people by negating their pain, it puts them at grave risk (as has been tragically and repeatedly demonstrated in recent days), and it seeks to paint their nation as one apart from humanity, one which cannot be allowed to exist in the same moral universe. So yes, those who know the word genocide is inappropriate but still accuse Israel of it are intentional antisemitic bigots. (Ironically, Israel’s enemies – Hamas and is supporters – are explicitly and proudly genocidal but we never hear a word about that from those who level that accusation at the Jewish state.)
If someone accusing Israel of genocide believes it to be true, then they are ignorant: they either do not know the meaning of the word (and its history), or they do not know the facts about what is happening in Israel and Gaza. Or both. It is no offense to be ignorant, especially when one’s sources of information – often the echo chambers of social media but even large parts of the mainstream media and the “human rights” community – are deliberately one-sided and dishonest. But being brainwashed is nothing to be proud of either. The facts are readily available for anyone who wants to know and understand, and before publicly making an accusation that, if wrong, would be an outrageous and dangerous libel, one should want to know and understand.
The third category, blurring with the second, are those who do not know whether the accusation is true or not, but use it anyway, because it brings them some benefit, typically economic, professional or social. These people are opportunists. They may be intelligent and may not harbor actual ill-will towards Jewish people (they may even be Jewish themselves), but they are almost as bad as the intentional antisemites, because they are willing to spread hatred, cause pain, and endanger innocent lives for their personal gain, for more likes or swipes or downloads or dates or dollars. With the number of antisemites (however defined) on the planet vastly outnumbering the number of Jews, these folks are not irrational. You will win many new fans by screaming “genocide” at Coachella, but you have no claim to the moral high ground. If the last group are negligently ignorant, these guys can be thought of as reckless antisemites.
It would be nice to believe that, when the war ends and it becomes clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that there never was any genocide or attempted genocide, all the dignitaries, luminaries, UN rapporteurs and ICJ judges, influencers and actors who promulgated this horrific blood libel would have the integrity to apologize for fanning the flames of antisemitism. But they will not. Instead they will likely boast that their words, if perhaps a tad exaggerated, saved lives. After all, as one gormless performer said recently, why quibble over semantics when people are dying?
The analysis of the genocide accusation above applies to other fallacious allegations – like those of “apartheid” or “colonialism” – which are also used not as criticisms of Israel in an effort to make it improve its behavior, nor to try help find a solution to the awful protracted dispute in that region, but to paint Israel as an entity that is beyond the pale, one that does not deserve to exist.
The false analogy to apartheid has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, including by Justice Richard Goldstone in the New York Times, who called it a “pernicious and enduring canard” noting that “[n]othing comes close to the definition of apartheid” in Israel, where “equal rights are the law, the aspiration and the ideal.” There are however still large numbers of brainwashed people who believe it, and many antisemites and opportunists who scream it at the top of their lungs at every opportunity they get.
The same can be said of the calumny of “colonialism” (which too has been thoroughly debunked), although that charge has a longer and more insidious pedigree. No-one can deny the problematic role that colonialism played in the centuries-long domination of the less developed world by the more technologically developed powers, the effects of which continue to this day. Colonialism has become the evil du jour, perhaps deservedly so, which is why the enemies of Israel seek to shoehorn their grievances into that paradigm. The problem is that it does not fit. To compare the Jewish people’s claim to the land of Israel to the Belgians’ claim to the Congo, or the French to Algeria or French Guiana, or the British to India or Australia, is an absurdity. The Jewish people have an unbroken, uniquely well-documented 4,000 year-old connection with the land of Zion, and a strong claim to be its indigenous people. Jews have always lived in Israel, albeit as a minority since the Romans carted most of them off as slaves, and have prayed for their return every day throughout their 2,000 year exile. Moreover, the vast majority of those Jews who returned came as refugees from countries where they had been subject to extermination, expulsion and persecution, and because they had nowhere else to go; no country would take them. It takes an extraordinary degree of ignorance, or cynical dishonesty, to label their reclaiming of their traditional homeland – one of the first acts of decolonization – a “colonial” project. And yet, thanks to the Soviet propaganda machine after the 1967 “Six Day” war when their side was humiliated, and to the stealthy investment of billions of petrodollars in educational institutions around the world, that fallacy is taken as gospel by large swathes of today’s youth. The “Overton window” (a construct defining the parameters of acceptable conversation) has shifted dramatically: fifteen years ago, it was only the lunatic fringe – radical groups like Hamas and their Iranian sponsors (and a few extremists on US campuses) – that openly championed the view that Israel had no right to exist. Sadly that cannot be said today.
One cannot deny the effectiveness of the strategy: colonial theory provided the pseudo-intellectual basis for denying Israel’s right to exist; the “apartheid” analogy provided the pseudo-moral impetus to declare the one Jewish state a pariah among the nations and isolate it; and now the genocide blood libel provides the call to arms. But it was always a strategy that depended on, knew it could rely on, and in turn fed the flames of, the oldest hatred of all, hatred of the Jewish people.
Zionism – the belief that the Jewish people are entitled to self-determination in some portion of their ancient traditional homeland – has been recast as an outrage, an offense even. People who hold that belief are declared unwelcome, unworthy of belonging to progressive groups, unworthy even of love (as five minutes on any dating app will evidence). Because, as research bears out, the vast majority of Jewish people do hold the connection to Israel as a core Jewish value, anti-Zionism declares that Jews are not worthy of belonging, not worthy of love, unless they are willing to shed this element of their belief system. Under such intense social pressure, many succumb, as Jews have done throughout history. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. But rejection of Israel’s right to exist as the one homeland of the Jewish people (democratic and with full rights and protections for all minorities), almost certainly is.
So how can one identify and define antisemitism?
Antisemitism has always been difficult to define, in part because of its fluid and changing nature.
As described by the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, antisemitism is a prejudice that, like a virus, has survived for so long by mutating over time to attach itself to the most acceptable justification based on the values of the time. In the Middle Ages, it was religion (and the Jewish people were accused of deicide); in post-Enlightenment Europe, it was science, the so-called scientific study of race (and the Jewish people were declared inferior); today, when the most visible expression of Jewish peoplehood is the State of Israel, it is “anti-Zionism:” the Jewish people’s assertion of their right to self-determination in their historical homeland is branded as evil colonialism, and words like genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing are called into action.
The most widely accepted definition of antisemitism today is the non-binding working definition adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization with 35 member countries and 8 observer countries founded in 1998. While not universally favored, it is the definition adopted or endorsed by the United Nations, the US State Department and the vast majority of American States, the European Union, and many other countries and political subdivisions, as well as numerous educational and other institutions.
The working definition itself is as short and colorless as it is uncontroversial: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
The practical substance of it is provided in a series of illustrative contemporary examples of potential antisemitism which begins with the following note: “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
Because of some of the examples provided, Israel’s enemies (that is, not critics of Israel, but opponents of Israel’s very right to exist as the national homeland of the Jewish people) are waging a “struggle” against the IHRA definition, which they say restricts criticism of Israel by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This “struggle” takes various forms. In 2024, the Columbia Law School Student Senate refused to sanction the formation of a group wishing to form Law Students Against Antisemitism (a very rare if not unprecedented rejection of a student organization), because its proposal referred to the IHRA definition. A recent essay on a respected legal website actually suggested that the IHRA definition exacerbates Islamophobia, because it “equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism per se” (notwithstanding the specific note quoted above). I will not cite the article to spare its authors the shame of highlighting their intellectual dishonesty, but it is precisely this sort of disingenuity by those who oppose the right of the Jewish people to self-determination that makes it so difficult to identify and thus combat antisemitism. The authors of that piece assert that the IHRA definition is not “neutral” because, they say, “[o]f its 11 examples of antisemitism, seven relate to Israel.” This is shamefully specious: seven examples may refer to Israel, but they are almost all clear cases of actual antisemitism (such as: “accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust;” “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations;” or “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”
The writers of this article are however correct about the IHRA’s definition not being entirely neutral in one respect: it says that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” could amount to antisemitism. The IHRA definition does accept, as the international community has done since the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine over a century ago and affirmed ever since, the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancient homeland. Those who reject the IHRA definition find this objectionable.
A rejection of Israel’s right to exist and the Jewish people’s right to self-determination might not be antisemitic if one was at the same time opposed to all other countries’ existence and all other peoples’ efforts at national self-determination. But if Israel is the only country one is seeking to delegitimize and eliminate, then, yes, that makes one an antisemite.
Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic, and there is certainly plenty to criticize. But spreading blood libels against the nation-state of the Jewish people – falsely accusing Israel of genocide, apartheid or colonialism – is not criticism. It is spreading hatred. It is antisemitism.
If one’s position is that the Jewish people should surrender the autonomy and security of their ancient homeland, for which they have paid a tragic price in blood, sweat and tears, and return to the status they had in 1930s and before, that of a vulnerable minority everywhere they exist in the world, subject to constant persecution, regular expulsions, and occasional genocides, then again one should look in the mirror and ask how that could not be antisemitic.
Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
