Criticizing Israel: When Does Condemnation of Israel Become Antisemitic?

Dec 10, 2020 by Alex Grobman

By Alex Grobman, PhD

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently declared that the “global discriminatory” boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and the practices that facilitate it, “such as discriminatory labeling and the publication of databases of companies that operate in Israel or Israeli-controlled areas” would be treated as antisemitic behavior, this extremely significant statement formally recognized the pernicious nature of this movement, whose sole purpose is to destroy the Jewish state.

The question raised by Mr. Pompeo’s anti-BDS policy is the determination of when criticism of Israel devolves into antisemitism. At what point does condemnation of Israel cross that redline?

On the face of it, this seems a rhetorical question for those who may not be able to define antisemitism, but certainly know it when they see it. It might be expected to be a sensitivity more prevalent among those on the political right, but it is frequently equally understood by those who are considered more left-wing.

BDS Movement

In 2005, Omar Barghouti, a graduate of Tel Aviv University and a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the group that initiated the BDS movement, decried the efforts of “Israel and its lobby groups” to “invoke the smear of antisemitism,” despite what he said was “the unequivocal, consistent position of the movement against all forms of racism, including antisemitism.”

Barghouti insisted that the “unfounded allegation” of the antisemitic roots of the BDS movement “is intended to intimidate into silence those who criticize Israel and to conflate such criticism with anti-Jewish racism.”

After hearing Barghouti speak at UCLA, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, a renowned left-wing activist and long-time executive director (now emeritus) of UCLA’s Hillel, declared BDS “poison” and Mr. Barghouti “a classic antisemite.” He found in Barghouti’s statements “no articulated aspiration for peace, only a negative desire to destroy the very foundation of the State of Israel.”

“This is just recycled Palestinian rhetoric about the pursuit of justice in the mouth of a sophisticated, smart, Israeli-educated and wily ideologue,” he said, adding that, in Barghouti’s lexicon, “justice” becomes merely “a political code word for no compromise.”

Seidler-Feller considered Barghouti’s denial of Jewish peoplehood particularly egregious, calling the usurpation of the right of Jews to define who they are “an aggressive act of denying Jews the fundamental right of self-definition.”

Criteria to Distinguish the Differences

Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism went further, delineating several criteria to distinguish between reasonable criticism of Israel and antisemitic assaults. According to the Institute, the line is crossed when the character traits, expressions, and descriptions ascribed to Israel use antisemitic stereotypes; when Israelis and Jews are portrayed as “cosmic evil” and held accountable for global calamities; when they are compared to Nazis; and when Israeli and Jewish supporters of Israel are targeted, attacked, and treated in a “disproportionate manner in relation to the issue at hand and in comparison to the actions of other nations.”

Further, said the Institute, the line is crossed when Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is delegitimized; when the Holocaust is denied, distorted, or made into a “political weapon, allegedly misused by Jews to extort financial support and make political capital.”

A similar definition of antisemitism—and the one used by President Donald Trump when he extended Title IX protections to Jewish students on US campuses—was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). It can be found at https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/world-remembers-holocaust.

Deadly Moral Obligations

The late Hebrew University historian, Robert Wistrich, saw clearly that anti-Zionists who insist on comparing Zionism and the Jews with Hitler and the Third Reich are nothing more than antisemites using Nazism, the defining metaphor of absolute evil, for their own benefit.

When Zionists are “Nazis” and the Israeli Prime Minister is Hitler, then it becomes a moral obligation to wage war against Israel, he said, adding that, in practice, “this has become the most potent form of contemporary antisemitism.”

Similarly, criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism when Jews, Judaism, and Israel are characterized as the treacherous enemy of Islam. Among Palestinian leaders, public calls demanding the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people everywhere have become commonplace.

These declarations can be found in the covenants of Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization as well as in some Islamic legal rulings (fatwas), all maintaining that it is a religious obligation to destroy Israel and the Jews.

Legitimate Criticism?

Clearly, not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. As the late American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset explained, no democratic states should consider themselves immune to rebuke.

“Israel is a liberal democratic state,” he said, recalling that, “in ancient Israel, the Biblical prophets devised the art of self-criticism.”

A useful key in determining whether the criticism in question is legitimate or just antisemitism disguised as such was offered by journalist Edward Rothstein, who suggested examining the “standards of justice.”

When they are “applied in profoundly distorted fashion, when those distortions put the literal survival of a society at stake, and when murders are taking place and explicitly encouraged declarations are being made that may even fit university standards for ‘hate speech,’ it is safe to say the rhetoric is no longer honest criticism, but, rather, antisemitism,” he said.

Recognizing What It Is

Like pornography, antisemitism is recognized as such by those who know what it looks like.

The late-Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. did not hesitate to label anti-Zionist remarks as antisemitic. On one occasion when speaking to African-American students at Harvard, he heard an anti-Zionist remark from one of them. According to reports of the incident, Dr. King “snapped at him” and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking about antisemitism.”

The late leftist literary scholar Hans Meyer understood this as well, writing that “whoever attacks Zionism, but by no means wishes to say anything against the Jews, is fooling himself and others.”

“The State of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wants to destroy it, openly or through politics that can affect nothing else but such destruction, is practicing the Jew-hatred of yesterday and time immemorial,” he said.

Ironic Antisemitism

Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, saw the irony in the fact that many fine people see it as beneath their dignity “in decorous western society” to acknowledge they hate Jews, yet see nothing wrong with the open avowal of hatred “with impunity” of an Israeli prime minister or any other Israeli leader.

“Lashing out at an Israeli leader does not risk the raised eyebrows that demonizing his people, let alone Jews as such, would do in a post-racist age. The irony in such a statement is the current worldwide imperative to deem everything in racial jargon, meaning that we are clearly not in a ‘post-racist age.’  Israel is constantly the focus of outrage in the media, while other countries who repress their minority populations or engage in widespread human rights violations are rarely condemned or become front-page news,” he said.

Joffe saw this clearly when haters of Israel engage in the “fleeting” denunciation of Palestinian-Arab terrorism, which they then justify by condemning Israel’s alleged “occupation” and tyranny.

Calling this an “obsessive need for moral denigration,” Joffe said it indicates that, for people who engage in this rhetoric, “Israel has assumed a special place in contemporary demonology,” one in which facts do not determine judgment, but, rather, are selected based on prejudices.

Hatred “Only” Towards the Jewish State

Often anti-Zionists argue that they harbor no ill will towards Jews, but “only” against the Jewish state.

New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, a well-known harsh critic of Israel, termed the effort to equate criticizing Israel with antisemitism “vile.”

However, he said, “singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction—out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East—is antisemitic, and not saying so is dishonest.”

Per Ahlmark, the late deputy prime minister of Sweden and a renowned writer, compared this approach to an individual who says he is “only” against the existence of Great Britain but is not anti-British, or really loves the Swedes but believes Sweden should be eliminated.

Anyone who would make such remarks would not be believed, said Ahlmark, because “you cannot love or respect a people and hate their state.”

The logic in Ahlmark’s explanation is lost on those who imagine they can separate the two feelings when it comes to Israel.

 “I Support the Right of Britain to Exist?”

Even some seemingly banal statements of support for Israel may betray more sinister undercurrents.

Daniel Taub, a former Israeli ambassador to Great Britain, admitted he frequently heard people say, “I’m a friend of Israel and I support its right to exist.”

It made the ambassador wonder: “Can you imagine anyone saying that in relation to any other country? I support Australia’s right to exist, or Guatemala’s right to exist—as though that somehow makes me a friend of Guatemala. In relation to what other country does a discussion or policy descend into a question mark over the very existence of that state?”

Former Canadian Minister of Justice and Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Law Professor Irwin Cotler has frequently spoken about the enduring threats to Israel. He said he finds “the silence, the indifference, and sometimes even the indulgence” the most disturbing in the face of such genocidal antisemitism.

Fooling No One

The only glimmer of light is that those who are crossing the line from criticizing Israel into blatant antisemitism are increasingly no longer allowed to do so with equanimity.

In an address to Parliament shortly before he died, the late former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, pointed out that antisemites rarely admit to hating Jews. On the contrary, he said, throughout history, many antisemites insisted they liked or even loved Jews.

“In the Middle Ages, they said, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their religion. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, they said, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their race. Today, they say, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their nation-state. It’s the same antisemitism dressed up in a different gown,” he said.

And this time, they are fooling no one.

 

Dr. Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.