You’re missing the point

Continuing in its proud – and not at all new – tradition of antizionist libel, the New York Times published an oped last week alleging systemic rape in Israeli prisons – including by dogs trained to rape prisoner on verbal command. Naturally, this has caused a bit of a stir.

First, let’s be clear: The dog rape libel is an utterly classic case of anti-Jewish libel, following the precise pattern it has followed for thousands of years. As Jew hatred evolves, it retains its core essence:  Jew hatred operates by casting the Jew as the barrier to morality and uses libels to whip up the mob into frenzies of anti-Jewish violence. After all, morality demands it. 

Antijudaism casts the Jew as the Christ-killer who poisons the wells to spread plague and kills Christian children in Talmudic rituals to get blood for bubbe’s matzah recipe.Antisemitism casts the Jew as dirty non-white foreigners who pollute the Aryan bloodline and corrupt society as disloyal subversives. And today, antizionism casts the Jew as a hyper-white colonizers whose very existence amounts to genocide and apartheid and kills Palestinian children for sport.

So, how did we all handle this obscene antizionst dog rape libel? On one hand, the NYT and left-leaning outlets proudly stood firm in their utterly embarrassingly sourced allegations. On the other hand, the community rapidly mobilized, and groups committed to fighting antizionism and antisemitism organized a successful protest at the NYT. And even on the other hand, a refrain has emerged from some corners of the Jewish world (one of many such examples): While the dog rape allegation is clearly nonsensical – it’s a problem specifically because it prevents us from fighting real abuse and sexual violence in the Israeli prison system. 

This refrain is two things: 

1. It is true. This absurd accusation does obscure the fight for civil rights in Israeli prisons. It condemns the antizionist libel while also calling to do the real work of dismantling prison abuse.
2. It is utterly, entirely, completely, totally, just stunningly irrelevant. 

I repeat: No matter how technically accurate it is or good it sounds, it is irrelevant. You are missing the point.

It’s easy to see why it is irrelevant: People who are seriously invested in repairing Israeli society and preventing abuse and rape in Israeli prisons do not confidently assert – and then double, triple, quadruple down on – dog rape libel. Kristoff and the NYT did not publish this piece from the perspective of, “We are concerned about flaws in Israeli society, so we are calling attention to them for the ultimate goal of improving Israeli society and dismantling abuse in the prison system.” While that may be the perspective of those adopting the refrain, to argue that it is also Kristoff and the NYT’s perspective is projection. Whether you want it to be written from that perspective is simply not relevant, because it wasn’t. Believing it was is a security blanket that it’s long past time to grow out of needing. 

For this is not what people acting in good faith do. They do not use Hamas and outlets that take gleeful pride in October 7th and intifada as their sources. They do not then defend the use of these sources. And when they are called out for using these sources, they apologize, they introspect, they take tangible action to unlearn their biases, and they publicly adopt new editorial guidelines that put systems in place as tangible efforts to prevent it from happening again. This is simply what we are seeing. 

This leaves the question: If their goal is not to call for Israeli prison reform, what instead drives them to publish and then double, triple, quadruple down on such a horrific lie with such weak and obviously blatantly Jew-hating sources? The answer is, nothing short of the ecstatic fervor of a moral crusade. The same fervor that has undergirded anti-Jewish hate for millennia and continues to bolster it in its most prevalent and socially-acceptance modern day form: antizionism.

This brings us to the next question: What do we do about it? How do we handle the fact that people do not act in good faith when discussing Israel? It’s a very good question, because what we have been doing about it apparently does not work. We have been fighting antisemitism for years, and our safety grows more and more precarious each day. We often hear the refrain from Jews that we’ve been here before. We have suffered ostracization, we have suffered persecution, and we repeat to ourselves gam zeh ya’avor – this too shall pass. Yes, it’s true, it will probably pass, and the Jewish people as a whole will survive. But this framing casts the scenario as somehow benign. Antizionism is not benign. It is a demonization project that provides permission – and worse, a moral imperative – for people to harass, purge, and murder Jews, all while doing approximately nothing to support Palestinians (including guarding them against systemic rape by Hamas, but I digress!)

The Manchester Yom Kippur attack. The Bondi Beach Hannukah massacre. Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky. Karen Diamond in Colorado. The Michigan car-ramming attack. The Golders Green stabbing. Nearly daily attacks on Jewish institutions across the USA, Canada, and the UK. Antizionist protesters roaming the streets of orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn flashing strobe lights in children’s eyes. 

How many Jews must be attacked and killed before “this passes,” and why do we accept these as necessary casualties? These antizionist attacks and murders are our Kishinev. Antizionism does not run the risk of becoming normalized – it has already been normalized and soon the consequences of this normalization will be too great to hide from, anywhere in the world.  

But in fact, there is no requirement for society to rise up and harass and murder us every hundred or so years. We have the ability to stand against it and fight it, following in the footsteps of other successful civil rights movements. It is time to stop looking for the reason they are hurling these libels at us. To stop wondering why they double, triple, quadruple down on those libels when exposed. To stop convincing ourselves of comforting stories that they don’t really mean that. 

We are telling fairytales how our abusers are not, in fact, abusing us, and we are internalizing the abuse to try and make sense of what cannot possibly be true – that we are being abused. We have not survived thousands of years to be shoved into corners by people who don’t act in good faith. Until they start acting in good faith, we do not have to tolerate them, and indeed we should not tolerate them. Don’t give the mouse even one crumb, let alone the whole cookie or worse the keys to the whole damn bakery. 

We have to name the problem: Antizionism.

We have to name our abusers: Antizionists. 

We have to learn about antizionism and teach others about antizionism. 

Join the Movement Against Antizionism and save Jewish lives. If you don’t, I promise you’ll look back and wish you did.