As the United States opened its new embassy in Jerusalem recently, tens of thousands of Gazans gathered at their territory's boundary fence to protest the loss of Palestinian homes and villages when Israel was founded 70 years ago.
Most were unarmed, but some protesters lobbed flaming tires or Molotov cocktails at the Israeli side. Israeli soldiers opened fire, killing more than 60 Palestinians and wounding thousands. Pro-Palestinian voices often described the Israeli response with words such as "murder" and "massacre."
The reaction fit into a long-running rhetorical battle in which harsh criticism of Israel's actions leads to accusations of bias against Jews. The right-wing Israeli news outlet Arutz Sheva, for instance, accused the United Nations agency that administers aid to Palestinians of encouraging anti-Semitism, citing a Fox News video that showed Gazan children chanting about the right to return to former Palestinian lands. "There are 7.4 billion people on earth and 193 countries, but the only news [the New York Times] reports on is Israel," one advocate tweeted.
Pro-Israel institutions have tried to blunt what they see as hate speech: South Carolina just passed a law deeming any criticism of Israel in the state's public schools or universities to be anti-Semitic. More than 20 states have banned public contracts with companies that engage in boycotts of Israel.
Anti-Semitism is alive and well. But as the executive director of T'ruah, a Jewish organization dedicated to protecting human rights here, in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories, I know it's possible to criticize Israel without veering into anti-Semitism. I do it every day.
People who pay special attention to Israeli policy are not necessarily anti-Semites. Human rights activists and organizations almost always choose a focus for their efforts. Israel attracts additional scrutiny because it is a top recipient of U.S. foreign aid and the only Western nation currently carrying out a military occupation of another people. Its territory is sacred to three major world religions. The existence
of a strong U.S.-based lobby dedicated to promoting the policies of the Israeli government unsurprisingly generates a counter-response. And Palestinians have built a national movement over the past five decades, unlike more recently displaced people.
But plenty of criticism crosses the line. Jews increasingly feel unwelcome on the left unless they abandon their commitments to Israel. A University of Virginia student recently told me that some progressive campus groups responded to the neo-Nazi incursions there by dismissing Jewish students as "Zionist baby killers." At rallies on college campuses and elsewhere, speakers regularly list "Zionists" in the same category as white supremacists and Nazis. Progressive leaders circulate lists of acceptable Jewish organizations. If the left continues to ignore this trend, most of the Jewish community will be pushed out of progressive spaces.
Despite what some pro-Israel organizations would have us believe, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Like all countries, Israel has a duty to uphold international human rights laws and to protect the rights of those living under its control. One may protest the use of live fire on unarmed protesters, the closure of the Gaza border and the subsequent humanitarian crisis, the military occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attacks on democracy and incitement against human rights leaders without invoking anti-Semitic tropes. Such policies would be wrong in any country.
These accusations are not on their face anti-Semitic. One may even boycott Israel without stepping into anti-Semitism if it's clear that the tactic aims to pressure Israel to change its policies, just as many Americans recently boycotted North Carolina over now-overturned laws discriminating against transgender people.
So how can you tell the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Here are five useful markers.
1.Seeing Jews as insidious influencers behind the scenes of world events.
Anti-Semitism often manifests in a nefarious belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that wields outsize power. On the right it's "globalists" and "elites" who manipulate events. On the left it's "Zionists." The terms may differ, but the fundamental conspiracy theory is the same.
For example, after news broke that a private investigative firm made up of former Mossad officers had been digging up dirt on Obama administration officials who helped broker the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi tweeted, "Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name of 'Israel' will [pop up]."
This language parallels the last ad of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, which flashed pictures of George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellen while warning of a "global power structure" that had damaged the U.S. economy.
Also in this category is the theory that Israeli trainers are to blame for racism and violence against people of color by U.S. police. This includes insinuations that American Jewish organizations that help send U.S. police officers to Israel for counter-terrorism training should be held responsible for the shootings of unarmed people of color.
White people have never needed Jews to teach them how to brutalize people of color on American soil. There are reasonable questions to ask about the content of training programs in Israel, but the suggestion that Jews bear the guilt for U.S. police killings is an update on the old anti-Semitic trope that falsely accused Jews of managing the global slave trade.
2.Using the word "Zionist" as code for "Jew" or "Israeli."
"Zionism" denotes a movement, forged in the late 19th century and evolving ever since, for the existence of a modern Jewish state in the land of Israel. The Zionist label attempts to reduce a state full of living, breathing humans to a simplistic political notion. It's common for Palestinians and their supporters to refer to "Zionist occupation forces" instead of the "Israeli army," or to the "Zionist entity" instead of "Israel."
One may disagree with the decision of the United Nations to recognize Israel decades ago, wish that the state had never come to be, or aspire to the establishment of a binational state in its place without necessarily stepping into anti-Semitism. But refusing to call Israel or Israelis by their internationally accepted names denies the very existence of the state and its people's identities.
3.Denying Jewish history.
As a means of rejecting the legitimacy of Israel, some stoop to asserting that Jews have no national history there. For instance, the website Middle East Monitor referred recently to the "alleged Temple" in ancient Jerusalem (the ruins are still there). Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas likewise resurrected the old canard that today's Jews descend from Khazar converts in a much-criticized speech.
The Jewish connection to Israel goes back millennia. After their expulsion by the Romans in 70 A.D., Jews continued to pray for a return to the land and to observe four fast days each year to mourn the exile. Zionism's revolution came not in creating a new connection between Jews and the land of Israel, but in suggesting that a return to the land could be achieved through modern political means, rather than by waiting for the messiah.
Some critics also reduce Judaism to religion rather than acknowledging our more complex sense of ourselves as a people with a history and an ancestral land, as well as religious and cultural practices. This includes dismissing Zionism as "white supremacy," as the Chicago Dyke March did last year when its organizers argued that Zionism had no place in an anti-racist movement and that it "represents an ideology that uses legacies of Jewish struggle to justify violence."
Statements like these ignore the fact that Jews have been subject to racially based discrimination, and that more than half of Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi, meaning their families did not come from Europe.
Finally, disregard for Jewish history may take the form of using Nazi imagery to depict Israel or its army. Israel may be violating its human rights obligations but is not carrying out a Nazi-style extermination operation.
4.Dismissing the humanity of Israelis.
In a conversation about terrorist attacks by Palestinians, one young pro-Palestinian activist told me, "I can't judge how other people carry out their liberation movements." Such lack of concern for Israeli lives is evident in failures to condemn rocket attacks against civilians, in the rejection of the term "terrorist" for anyone who acts against Israelis and in statements blaming Israelis for their own deaths. A movement motivated by concern for human rights requires caring about the dignity, well-being, concerns and self-determination of all people.
This means opposing the military occupation of the Palestinians, with its attending violence, as well as rejecting terrorism or rocket fire against Israelis. Human Rights Watch, which right-leaning groups often accuse of being anti-Israel, has modeled such an approach by regularly condemning Hamas for launching rockets at Israeli civilians. This approach also means standing with Israeli human rights leaders.
5.Assuming that the Israeli government speaks for all Jews.
Rabbis who speak at rallies on domestic issues regularly tell me that audience members shout at them, "What about Palestine?" An explicit disavowal of a connection to Israel shouldn't be a prerequisite for Jewish involvement in broader social justice issues.
Reasonable people may disagree about Israeli policy, about nationalism or about whether the solution to the conflict should involve one state or two. But Jews who care about Israel--many of whom revile Netanyahu and his politics--should not be excluded from progressive spaces based on their answers to such questions.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the executive director of T'ruah, which mobilizes 2,000 rabbis and their communities to protect human rights in North America, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
Editorial on 05/27/2018