Equating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism powers the engine of Israel's war machine

There’s a YouTube segment by Double Down News entitled, “What UK did in Gaza is SHOCKING & no one’s allowed to talk about it.”

I rarely consume material from Double Down News, but I clicked through because the title suggested something that resonated: what is happening in Gaza is shocking and no one is allowed to talk about it, socially speaking. The topic is verboten.

I’ve certainly observed this to be true, from my own experience of excommunication at Daily Kos, to the intense crackdown in the US (and other Western countries) in terms of ordinary citizens expressing not only dissent for Israel’s military incursion but also solidarity with and sympathy for Israel’s victims.

College students dared to make their opposition symbolically visible, and riot police showed up with tear gas, truncheons, horses, dogs, and rubber bullets. Snipers took up positions on the rooftops of university buildings.

People are losing their jobs and getting blacklisted from future ones. Book tours, award ceremonies and speeches, even those held in private venues, are getting canceled, banned and raided. Prominent dissidents such as Ilan Pappé are being stopped by government officials while traveling by plane. FBI agents at the Detroit airport copied the contents of Pappé’s phone and refused to explain to the historian why he was detained. In Europe, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis was banned from speaking in Germany which, due to EU regulations, means that he cannot speak in any member countries.

All of this is a message: No one is allowed to talk about Gaza. And as long as we’re not allowed to talk about Gaza, the genocide can continue unimpeded.

This restriction links back to the abuse of anti-semitism as a charge or accusation, because that charge is what enforces a cone of silence around Israel’s most egregious policies and structures.

“Classic” anti-semitism,¹ like other forms of racism and bigotry, is communicated through language and speech acts. Anti-racism activists have long known that, to break the chain of transmission and perpetuation of racism, there must be established neutral zones such as in the education and employment sectors where such language cultures are tamped down. This permits full participation by diverse citizens.

Proponents of the “new anti-semitism” are appropriating that solution to a longstanding social problem and are applying it to Israel to shield it from criticism. And the way it’s doing that is to present Israel as “a Jew among the nations” — that is, as if Israel were a flesh-and-blood person.

Were it not for this appropriation from anti-racism circles, this strategy — of equating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism — wouldn’t work. We’d all see that Israel, obviously a nation-state with laws and policies, is a social construct that can be critiqued on the basis of said laws and policies.

As I noted in a previous essay,

They consider antagonistic comments about Israel to be “the new antisemitism,” on the dubious concept of Israel being “a Jew among the nations” — that is, a nation-state personified as being an individual with a Jewish background. The unspoken line advanced here is that if someone makes a disparaging remark about Israel, then that person should be seen as doing the same to a Jewish person — and leveling that criticism solely on the basis of the individual’s Jewishness. It is by this legerdemain that all criticism of Israel becomes an ethnic attack.

Once Israel is viewed as a person, and specifically as a Jewish person, that opens the door to viewing it as possibly suffering from the social scourge of anti-semitism — and then to view criticisms of problematic Israeli policies as hate speech.

The moment political speech is transformed into hate speech, it can be suppressed and regulated out of existence. This is what Yousef Munnayer, Head of Palestine/Israel Program and Senior Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC, spoke of months ago on Jadaliyya.

[D]iscrimination is not protected by the First Amendment. So if you can cast or portray criticism of Israel as discrimination, you can then hijack and redirect anti-discrimination law, existing anti-discrimination law, against critics without running into the First Amendment.

Such transfiguring mechanisms, like the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism, do an end-run around the First Amendment and in fact eviscerate it.

This is why I call the IHRA definition of anti-semitism a Trojan horse. Once pure political speech — that which is accorded the highest protections under the law — is magically transformed into hate speech (a form of speech that has no protections at all), the First Amendment becomes hollowed out and reversed, like a pocket turned inside-out. It no longer functions as designed.²

So we must keep talking about it. We must keep talking about Gaza. And we must keep breaking apart this fallacious equation of Israel as a nation-state with a person, because that is the link that makes all of this repression possible.

1. Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, emeritus, of the Orthodox branch of Judaism, stated very simply that “[a]nti-Semitism means criticizing or disliking—a negative feeling towards—Jews as Jews.” His broader comments can be found here: “Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro: A Critical Analysis Of The Claim That Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism,” Yaakov Shapiro (YouTube, August 14, 2021).

2. Importantly, the U.S. House has passed H.R. 6090, which would enshrine IHRA into law. The Senate will take up the measure. It is crucial that American citizens contact their senators about this move if they oppose this in order to register opposition.