By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post & News
Is
so-called “anti-Zionism” antisemitic? It was not always so. Prior to the
Holocaust and the creation of a Jewish state, many Jews did consider Zionism –
a return to the Land of Israel -- unworkable, unnecessary, even wrong-headed.
In the United States, prior to the Holocaust, Reform Jews in the American
Council for Judaism were committed to the proposition that Jews are not
a national but a religious group. Jewish socialists and others on the political left, including the
influential Jewish Labour Bund, were opposed to what they thought was an
ideological “bourgeois” error.
But these
were internal debates in the Diaspora, and in any case most non-Jewish people
had little say about them -- if they even bothered to pay any attention to
these internal arguments within Jewish circles. Nor, obviously, did those politically
against the Zionist movement ally with pogromists who slaughtered Jews.
All of that
is history, really part of a vanished Jewish world. Yes, there are remnants of
that past, in sectors of the haredi world. The Satmar Hasidim are the most
visible. They are theologically committed to a reading of Jewish history that
considers that the recreation of a Jewish nation must await the Messiah. They
are “anti-Zionists” in the legitimate sense of the word, but no one thinks they
want to kill the Jews in Israel or elsewhere.
That’s a
different matter than today’s Jewish anti-Zionists, who are largely uninformed
about Judaism, Jewish history and culture. They are a fringe group, allied with
states and ideologies that want to eliminate the existing Jewish state of
Israel and perhaps even murder most of its Jewish population and expel the
remainder. Today’s version has more to do with pre-war German Nazi
eliminationism than with long-forgotten intra-Jewish disputes.
Assimilated
into left-wing movements and doctrines, these Jews are in most cases little
more than Jews through genealogy, “Jews in name only,” making political use of
that on behalf of those wishing to destroy Israel. Their “anti-Zionism” is part
of the larger antisemitic movements arrayed against us, and they serve, to use
a well-known term, “useful idiots.” They make use of general slogans,
identity politics and symbolic statements like wearing a keffiyeh, with minimal
complexity and knowledge.
They are producing vast amounts of simplistic
one-sided literature and media. One example is the film “Israelism,” the story
of two young American Jews “raised to defend the state of Israel at
all costs” who “join the movement battling the old guard over Israel’s
centrality in American Judaism, and demanding freedom for the Palestinian
people.” Call them “Jewish shields” for the pro-Palestinian left that is
glorifying the post-October 7 pogrom by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
“Antisemitism in Canada and
abroad is primarily presenting itself through the prism of anti-Zionism, which,
in my opinion, is the most pervasive form of antisemitism, and the most
perverse in a number of ways,” remarked Casey Babb, a senior fellow with the
Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Institute for National Security Studies. I
guess our Jewish “anti-Zionists,” wilfully blinded by the company they
keep, refuse to see what’s in front of
our eyes.
Fortunately,
here in Canada, despite the noise they make, such anti-Zionist Jews are
a tiny and marginalized group. Professor Robert Brym of the Department of
Sociology at the University of Toronto and probably Canada’s most eminent
Jewish academic, on May 30 released an addition to his lengthy “Jews and Israel
Survey 2024” published in the spring 2024 issue of the journal Canadian Jewish
Studies.
To his question “Do you believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish
state?” 91 per cent of his Canadian Jewish respondents answered in the
affirmative, six per cent said they don’t know, and only three percent said no.
We know the
difference between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. The
belief that the Jews, alone among the people of the world, do not have a right
to self-determination, or that the Jewish people’s religious and historical
connection to Israel is invalid, is inherently bigoted. When
Jews are verbally or physically harassed or Jewish institutions and houses of
worship are vandalized in response to actions of the State of Israel, it is
antisemitism.
Expressions of anti-Zionism include downplaying or negating
the historic and spiritual Jewish connection to the land of Israel, and the
insistence on holding Israel to unreasonable standards when viewing its
response to threats in comparison to the actions of other members of the
international community.
Now many of
these Jewish anti-Zionists don’t necessarily agree with everything listed
above. But by associating and collaborating with those who do, they are at the
very least, to use an old-fashioned phrase, “fellow travellers” allied to these
antisemitic movements. And they can be paraded before the media as Jews who
have seen the evil that Israel causes. What better evidence?
Some
of Canada’s most disruptive actions and blockades have been coordinated by
groups with U.S. funding and organizational links. For example, the Tides
Foundation, a San Francisco-based “social justice” non-profit has supported
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow, among others, in the United States.
Both have been perennial organizers of anti-Israel rallies and blockades.
The Canadian affiliate of JVP, Independent Jewish Voices
Canada, calls itself a “grassroots organization in Canada grounded in Jewish
tradition that opposes all forms of racism & advocates for justice and
peace for all in Palestine-Israel.” It calls Zionism “the
political ideology that has provided the basis for Israel’s settler-colonial
project and unfolding genocide in Palestine.”
They are indeed “useful,” and
antisemites know it. On May 27, for instance, a representative was on
Parliament Hill holding a press conference insisting that the country’s network
of pro-intifada campus encampments was not antisemitic.
On June 10
the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), one of Canada’s largest
public sector unions, which is actively engaged in Pro-Palestinian activities, held a discussion “Addressing
Islamophobia and antisemitism in the Workplace.” Of course no Jew supporting
Israel was invited, not even Deborah Lyons, Canada’s Special Envoy on Holocaust
Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, and a former ambassador to Israel.
The
panelists were Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s Special
Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, and, on the Jewish side, Avi Lewis, a
former Al Jazeera correspondent and now an associate professor of “social and
political change” at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
However, Lewis, scion of a prominent family that has been
for decades active in the New Democratic Party – grandfather David led the
federal NDP and father Stephen was head of the Ontario party -- is an active
“anti-Zionist,” a member of the anti-Zionist Independent Jewish Voices Canada,
and a co-founder of the UBC chapter of the Jewish Faculty Network.
Richard Marceau, vice president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs,
said the union’s efforts at doing something about antisemitism were
disappointing.
“Inviting someone like Avi Lewis -- who is not an expert on antisemitism,
who is a marginal figure in the Jewish community and who is viciously opposed
to Israel -- to train union members on antisemitism shows how unserious PSAC is
about combatting Jew-hatred,” he stated.
Yes, Jews can be Jew-haters too. (The term “self-hating
Jew” is silly; they hate other Jews, not themselves.) Such Jews now face
anti-Israel sentiment of unprecedented ferocity, often couched in the language
of social justice, critical race theory, and so-called intersectionality. It is
sustained by the hegemonic hold of a theory of “settler colonialism,” now
ubiquitous in Canada’s universities, and one which deems Israel an illegitimate
colonial settler state.
And Palestinian academics known
how to use this terminology to make their case. Typical is an article by Joseph
Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at
Columbia University, New York. In a May 30 oped, “Instead of Recognizing
‘Palestine,’ Countries Should Withdraw Recognition of Israel,” published on the
website Middle East Eye, he uses all the correct buzzwords, referring to
“Israel's illegality as an institutionally Jewish supremacist racist state.” He
considers the very establishment of this “settler-colonialist” state “an
illegal act and in violation of the very UN resolutions that proposed its
establishment.”
Massad therefore advocates the “dismantlement of Israel’s
racist structures and laws” in favour of “one decolonised state, from the river
to the sea, in which everyone living within it is equal before the law and does
not benefit from any racial, ethnic, or religious privileges.” Only the end of
the Israeli “settler-colonial state” will lead to a “decolonised anti-racist
and democratic outcome.”
Massad’s analysis and prescription is the true bedrock
Palestinian position, as presented for western ears. (Hamas’ creed is a
different matter.) The theoretical construct behind it is one that fits
completely within today’s liberal-progressive ideology espoused by the
intellectual elites in western countries now. The “anti-Zionist” Jews reading them usually know far less about what
the Jewish people have gone through historically. This makes them easy prey for
our enemies.
Natan
Sharansky, currently Chair of the Institute for the Study of Global
Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and McGill University history professor Gil Troy, in a June 16, 2021
Tablet article entitled “The Un-Jews,” asserted that these people “are
trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish
peoplehood.” And the voices
of these “inflamed Jewish opponents of Israel and Zionism are in turn amplified
by a militant progressive superstructure that now has an ideological lock on
the discourse in American academia, publishing, media, and the professions.”
We hear it from progressives
like the author Naomi Klein, who is professor of Climate Justice at the
University of British Columbia (and married to Avi Lewis). Klein’s Passover
message in the April 24 British Guardian newspaper was headlined “We Need an Exodus
from Zionism.” She told readers that “we
don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project
that commits genocide in our name.”
For Klein, Zionism “takes our
most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery-- the
story of Passover itself -- and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial
land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.” The creation of the State of Israel, and the
entire Zionist movement, was a ghastly mistake and Jewish life is best led in
exile.
“Arguing for the purity of exile
and powerlessness, and demanding abandonment of the now-impure Jewish State,”
Elliott Abrams, currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at
the Council on Foreign Relations in
Washington, observes sadly that “we have indeed been watching the young
American Jews who helped build those campus tent cities and joined the
denunciations of the Jewish State.”
In “American Jewish Anti-Zionist
Diasporism: A Critique,” in the May 2024 issue of the British periodical
Fathom, he sees them following the lead of “the hundreds of Jewish professors
who wish to proclaim their virtue by lining up against the Jewish State.”
Finally, there are the many Jews
like Rabbi Elchanan Poupko, the president of EITAN--the American Israeli Jewish
Network, whose anger at anti-Zionists is palpable. In “Anti-Zionist Jews, Have
You Seen the Mirror?” a blog published on the Times of Israel website, May 28,
2024, he points out their hypocrisy.
“The people who were angry at
Birthright for taking them on a free, all-expenses paid trip to Israel without
taking them to Gaza, Ramallah, and Sheikh Jarrah were somehow unable to utter
the words Kibbutz Be’eri, Sderot, Metula, Kiryat Shmona, or the massacre at
Nova music festival. Those who were angry at their teachers for celebrating Yom
Ha’atzmaut with no mention of the Nakba were suddenly unable to speak about the
Hamas charter calling for the killing of Jews worldwide.
“Yet perhaps worst of all, was
not what anti-Zionist Jews said -- or did not say -- but rather the company
anti-Zionist Jews have chosen to keep. Over the past few months, anti-Zionist
Jews have stood shoulder to shoulder with masked and uniformed individuals in
public places, physically blocking off ‘Zionists.’”
They exclude their fellow Jews from public
spaces in universities, side with terrorist organizations that call for the
annihilation of all Jews in the world and make partnerships “with what is
objectively the most antisemitic movement since the Holocaust,” he writes.
Rabbi Poupko lives in New Haven,
Connecticut. The region is home to Yale University, Quinnipiac University, Albertus Magnus
College, the University of New Haven, and Southern Connecticut State University,
making it a hub of higher education – and, of course, pro-Palestinian protests.
“I got to see firsthand what
anti-Zionism in Jewish spaces meant. A group of anti-Zionist Jews shared to
their social media videos with cheers like ‘there is only one solution –
intifada revolution,’ which is a call for deadly violence.”
As Iran began shooting ballistic
missiles and drones carrying hundreds of tons of explosives at Israel’s
civilian population, “many anti-Zionist Jews were there to explain why Iran was
justified in its attacks on Israel. Jewish Voices for Peace posted a photo of Houthis in Yemen praising the
pro-terror mobs on campus.”
He concludes by noting the irony
of anti-Zionist Jews siding with the mobs behind the greatest push for
Diasporic Jews to move to Israel. “Those who want you to believe Jewish safety
should not depend on the State of Israel have helped make much of the diaspora
unsafe for Jews and Jewish life.” When the people you march with “are the
reason countless synagogues, JCCs, and day schools are hiring more security,
you probably don’t get credit for making Jewish life in the Diaspora more
appealing.”
Such Jews are betting their
present and future will be outside the confines of the Jewish people, and they
will do anything to gain the acceptance of the antisemitic circles in which
they traffic. “When anti-Zionist Jews hold signs that say: ‘this Jew is
against genocide,’ besides for defaming other Jews as being for genocide, they
also often forget the truly genocidal company they keep, company that would
like to eradicate the State of Israel. It is time for anti-Zionist Jews to take
a look in the mirror.”
Bottom line: Whatever we
call it, and however they can be distinguished, both terms, antisemitism and
anti-Zionism, are in today’s context simply manifestations of Jew- hatred.
