Antisemitism versus Anti-Zionism

Summary

Exploring the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Stevens Students for Gaza Protest

Remarks by Stephen R. Shalom

Jewish Voice for Peace, Northern NJ

Stevens Institute of Technology, Nov. 11, 2024

We are living in the midst of one of the great humanitarian tragedies of our lifetimes. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children — especially women and children — are being slaughtered in Gaza. Thousands more are being killed in Lebanon. They are dying from bombs, provided to the Israeli military by the United States government. They are dying from the intentional cutting off of food aid and medical supplies. They are dying buried under tons of rubble. They are dying from the systematic destruction of their health care system.

What can be done about this?

Israel could agree to a ceasefire.

The United States could cut off the massive flow of weaponry.

Washington could stop giving Israel diplomatic cover at the United Nations for its crimes.

But, no, Israel and its supporters in the United States have a better strategy. They just accuse anyone who criticizes Israel of being an antisemite, of hating Jews.

Antisemitism

Back in 2023, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, condemned the Hamas killing of civilians on Oct. 7, but he also said that one needed to understand the more than five decades of Israeli occupation and he condemned Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza. The Israeli ambassador immediately declared that Guterres was engaging in an antisemitic blood libel against the Jewish people.

When the International Court of Justice found that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, Israeli officials charged that the court was antisemitic, and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declared that the court had a predilection for antisemitism.

When the International Criminal Court considered bringing war crimes indictments against Hamas AND against Israeli leaders, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the chief prosecutor of the Court as one of the “great antisemites in modern times.” But it wasn’t just Netanyahu. The World Jewish Congress – an organization that supports Israel down the line – condemned the prosecutor’s call for an indictment as “antisemitic.”

Now let me be clear. Antisemitism – hatred of and bias against Jews – is a real problem, in the world and in the United States. It is ugly and it must be opposed. Consider some examples. In 2015, Pastor John Hagee, the head of Christians United for Israel, declared that the Holocaust was caused not by Hitler but by “half-breed Jews.” In 2017, neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, VA, chanting “Jews will not replace us” – leading Donald Trump to declare that the marchers included some “very fine people.” In 2018, a rightwing, anti-immigrant, antisemitic fanatic murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. In 2022, Trump had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with two individuals, one of whom denied the Holocaust ever happened and the other who declared “death con 3 on Jews” and said “there’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler.” In 2023, the Texas Republican party rejected a resolution banning the party from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers. In 2024, Trump endorsed for governor of North Carolina a person who called himself a “Black Nazi.” And during the recent election campaign, Trump declared that Jews would bear a lot of the blame if he lost the election. So antisemitism really exists and it is vile.

Is there any antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement? Of course. It would be shocking if when a country calling itself “the Jewish state” and claiming to be acting in the name of the Jewish people carries out horrendous war crimes there weren’t some people coming away with bigoted views about Jews as a whole. This is wrong and it must be condemned. Israel’s crimes are not the responsibility of all Jews. We need to unequivocally reject Jew hatred from whatever source it comes.

But it is important to make sure that when we call out antisemitism, we are actually addressing antisemitism and not criticisms of the Israeli state and its policies.

Unfortunately, legislators – across the country and right here in New Jersey – have been working to confuse the distinction between criticisms of Israel and antisemitism. They have been trying to pass laws that establish an official definition of antisemitism – the so-called International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition (IHRA) – that declares by legal fiat that if you call Israel a racist state then you are antisemitic.

But why is it antisemitic to point out the deeply racist nature of Israel’s Nation State Law, which declares that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination” in Israel “is unique to the Jewish People”?

Why is it antisemitic to identify the racism in Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s assertion that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people and them alone”?

Why is it antisemitic to claim that it is racism to have on the books, as Israel does, more than 70 laws that discriminate against Palestinians?

Why is it antisemitic to report the findings of the respected international organizations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, that concluded that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid?

Zionism and Anti-Zionism

Last year, the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Now what is Zionism? It is an ideology that says there should be a specifically Jewish state, an ethnonationalist state, in a territory where the majority of the population was Palestinian. True enough, there were some early Zionists who had visions of coexistence between Jews and Palestinians. But in recent years the dominant version of Zionism has meant establishing a Jewish supremacist state. And just as it was not anti-white to oppose the white-supremacist regime in South Africa, so too it is not antisemitic or anti-Jewish to oppose the Jewish supremacist regime in Israel-Palestine.

Now do some people use their anti-Zionism as a cover for their antisemitism? Yes. So, if you walk up to someone wearing a yarmulka, and say “You dirty Zionist” – when in fact you know nothing about the person’s views about Israel or Palestine and the only thing you know about them is that they are wearing a traditional Jewish skullcap – that’s antisemitism. But if someone chants – as many Zionists in Israel do – “death to the Arabs!”; or “May your village burn”; if someone declares, in the words of a Zionist member of the Israeli parliament, that the “Gaza Strip should be flattened,” and all its residents killed – then by all means you ought to be an anti-Zionist and there’s nothing antisemitic about it at all.

Here’s the thing about the IHRA definition of antisemitism: the overwhelming majority of experts on Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, and Middle East Studies agree that the IHRA definition unacceptably mixes up criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. And the overwhelming majority of civil liberties organizations warn that the IHRA definition is a violation of free speech, trying to shut down criticism of Israel – organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Human Rights Watch.

Now it would be antisemitism if Jews were denied their right to practice their religion. As some of you may know, we recently celebrated the Jewish holiday called Sukkot during which time observant Jews are supposed to construct a temporary shelter, a sukkah. Well, a few weeks ago at Swarthmore College, some Jewish students put up a sukkah — in solidarity with Palestine. The administration demanded that they take it down. The students explained it is sacrilegious to remove a sukkah before the end of the holiday. The administration told them it would “be happy to talk more.” But instead of talking, the College sent a large crew to destroy the sukkah, under cover of darkness, while students were sleeping in it, thus forcibly restricting them from practicing their religion. This is antisemitism, but this wasn’t antisemitism by the pro-Palestinian movement, but by a college administration defending the Israeli state. In fact, across the country, Jewish students at 22 campuses erected Gaza Solidarity sukkahs, and college administrations and agitators destroyed almost half of these sacred dwellings. 

Now you may hear the argument that it is somehow antisemitism to want to divest one’s university from Israel’s crimes. But it wasn’t anti-American bigotry to want to break university ties with Dow Chemical, which made napalm, during the horrors of the Vietnam war. It wasn’t anti-Latino bigotry in the 1980s to oppose university complicity with sweatshop labor in Central America. It wasn’t anti-white bigotry to want to divest universities from South African apartheid. It’s not any sort of bigotry to want to divest from fossil fuels that our hurtling our planet toward environmental catastrophe. In the same way, it’s not antisemitism, but the profound belief in humanitarian values that is behind the calls to divest from the Israeli war machine that is causing so much suffering in Gaza today.

So, let us always be alert for antisemitism. Let us condemn antisemitism wherever we see it. But let us not diminish our commitment to justice in Palestine by false charges of antisemitism from those who want to give a blank check to Israel’s crimes.

Thank you.