Violent Attacks on American Jews Prove ‘Anti-Zionism’ Is Anti-Semitism

By David Harsanyi

Friday, May 21, 2021

 

This week, a wave of Jew-hatred broke out across the United States. You may not have heard much about it, since the media — so skilled at detecting every racist dog whistle and secret Nazi handshake — have been largely AWOL on the issue.

 

In West Los Angeles, men waving Palestinian flags drove in a caravan through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans like “Israel kills children” through a megaphone and getting out of their cars to attack Jewish diners at tables on the sidewalk. In Manhattan, another caravan of men with Palestinian flags drove to the Diamond District, burning one person and attacking others whom they believed to be Jewish. Also in New York City, a gang of men chanting anti-Israel slogans harassed and spat at people eating outside. If there were such attacks against Muslims, the media would rightly speak of nothing else right now.

 

Note, these weren’t clashes between pro-Israel demonstrators and pro-Palestinian demonstrators. These were attacks by the latter on whatever Jews they could find. And they should prove the falsehood of the narrative that “anti-Zionism” is distinct from anti-Semitism.

 

What is consequential in the long term is the normalization of the sentiments that drive this hatred. If it’s not the Washington Post running op-eds arguing that “justice” and a Jewish homeland can’t co-exist, it’s the Obama Bros, who helped to transform the Democratic Party on the Israel issue, asking their millions of followers to donate to the Islamic Relief charity even after the Biden State Department cut ties to that organization for promoting anti-Semitism (the tweet making this appeal has since been deleted). The union at The New Yorker — once the most prestigious magazine of culture in America, with central importance to many American Jews — tweeted out “solidarity with Palestinians from the river to the sea,” the latter phrase a Hamas-inspired genocidal slogan the plain meaning of which is the elimination of Israel. (That tweet, too, was deleted and replaced with a revised one still expressing “solidarity” but, you know, sorry about that Hamas language.)

 

Perhaps The New Yorker union was inspired by Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), a member of the “Squad” and one of a contingent of Hamas supporters now vocally present in one of the major American political parties. One wishes the media gave the Squad’s recent House floor statements slandering the Jewish State a fraction of the attention they give the rantings of largely powerless white supremacists. The Squad gins up anti-Jewish anger by lying about U.S. aid to Israel, falsely (and ludicrously) alleging that Israel practices apartheid, lying about Israel’s counterterrorism efforts and the causes of the present conflict, and comparing Hamas’s openly anti-Semitic mission to the struggle of black Americans against police brutality. All this is going on as craven Democrats cower.

 

These are the same people, incidentally, who lobby the Biden administration to take it easy on the Chinese communists, a regime unleashing genuine widespread repression and ethnic cleansing on Muslim minorities. Tell me it’s not about Jews.

 

It’s not surprising that the intersectional ideas of the American progressive are now being transposed onto issues that have nothing to do with race. Then again, the hard Left has always — since Marx sounded off on “the Jewish question” — viewed Jewish identity as problematic. And since Israel’s founding, “anti-Zionist” terrorism and harassment — whether perpetrated by Palestinians, Soviet-backed Arab states, theocratic Arab states, the Iranian government, terror groups such as the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, or bands of leftists on college campuses — has targeted Jews as a whole, and not merely Israelis. This began long before Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister, long before Gaza was under the control of Hamas, and long before the West Bank was an “occupied territory.”

 

“Anti-Zionism” is the leading justification for violence against Jews in the world. But don’t be fooled. Rather than claiming that Jews are members of secret unpatriotic international cabals or accusing them of using the blood of Christian children to bake their bread, today’s anti-Semites accuse the Jewish State — which acts as any responsible nation would in protecting its citizens from terror — of existing for nefarious purposes.

 

Israel is in the business of protecting Jews. That includes the offspring of the European Jews, of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees expelled from their homes throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the late 1940s, of the Jews who escaped oppression in the Soviet Union, of Ethiopian Jews escaping starvation, and many others. In a world that has repeatedly and dramatically threatened the lives of Jews and/or failed to protect them, Israel’s role as a protector is especially important. And it’s an especially tough task when your neighbors are continually plotting to murder your people. Few modern nations live in such constant tension.

 

And please, save your complaints about how being “critical of Israel” isn’t anti-Semitic. No serious person has ever argued otherwise. Israel, like any liberal democracy, has had both left-wing and right-wing governments over the years. Some of those governments have been incompetent or corrupt, some have been misguided, some have made huge mistakes. But Israel isn’t like so many of its repressive Arab neighbors, or like Iran, a nation for which progressives can’t muster any anger, in that millions of Israelis express criticisms of their own nation’s policies every day without any fear of repercussions.

 

When looking at how people are talking about Israel right now, perhaps the best way to gauge the difference between ordinary criticism and anti-Semitism is to use the Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky’s “3D” test: (1) Are “critics” engaged in delegitimization of the nation’s very existence? Indeed, they are. (2) Are “critics” engaged in demonization of the country and the people? Check. (3) Are “critics” employing double standards by, say, obsessing over a Jerusalem property dispute making its way through the courts while ignoring the authoritarianism, brutality, and corruption of Palestinian governments, or the abuse of minority populations by the Turkish, Sudanese, or Chinese regimes, and many more around the world? Indeed, they always are.

 

In a growing precinct of the Left, Israel is singled out for opprobrium. (Well, other than the United States.) Anti-Zionism has created an intolerably hostile environment for many Jews in Europe. In Israel itself, anti-Zionism takes the form of rockets aimed at civilians. It is now fueling anti-Semitism, including violent attacks on Jews, in the United States — perhaps historically the safest place the Jews have ever lived.