There is a ton of confusion about what is and what is not antisemitism, and right-wingers are making the most out of it.
MAGA Republicans, in the name of rooting out antisemitism, are launching McCarthy-like witch hunts aimed at dismantling DEI (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives at some of America’s most prestigious and influential universities. How is it possible that the new allies of the Jews are right-wing Christians—including open fascists– with their own history of virulent antisemitism?
Let’s start with the basics: antisemitism is a real thing. Ever since the Spanish Inquisition (1490s), nation-state builders in Europe targeted Jews as dangerous ‘outsiders’ in order to convince Christians that they shared a common identity as citizens of newly emerging nations. This antisemitism reached its peak during the late 19th and early 20th Century as European nation-states locked horns in imperialist conflicts. Rulers unleashed pogroms across Eastern Europe in order to whip up patriotic support for their wars. Eventually the most powerful nation-state, Germany, undertook the systematic eradication of all Jews under its control. In the U.S., Jews were red-baited by anti-immigrant rightwing politicians throughout the first half of the 20th Century.
This dynamic abated, partly because of world revulsion at the Holocaust, partly because of the mass exodus of Jews out of Eastern Europe to Israel and the United States, and partly because of a re-configuration of nation-states themselves as economic globalization began to take hold after World War II. In the U.S. and Western Europe, many Jews assimilated into a white middle class social order, often by changing their names, dropping Yiddish, and becoming religiously non-observant or embracing Reform Judaism.
But now the Western liberal social order is in a crisis. (See other posts on this site). As the middle class falls apart, a new generation of white Christian nationalists has begun a project to re-shape Western nation-states. And a new generation of ultra-nationalist Zionists have seized power in Israel.
The white Christian nationalist alliance with Zionism is of recent origin. Up until at least the 1980s, white evangelical Christians spouted virulent McCarthyist antisemitism, and earlier, had supported Hitler. Why are they rushing to defend Israel now? It’s quite simple, really: Israel is now the white nationalist project of the Mideast. We could argue about whether it has always been so. (In Israel’s early days, left wing Zionists envisioned a socialist Israel in which Jews and non-Jews were equal citizens even while the Israeli state engaged in the systematic displacement of Palestinians from their land and homes). But certainly, since the 1980s, the self-defined ‘settler’ movement has sought to aggressively expand Jewish claims to land and to remove all Palestinians. The definition of Israel as a nation of Jews alone was not fully enshrined into law until the enactment of the Nation-State Law in 2018. Since then, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have experienced a qualitatively greater level of unrelenting aggression, and the Netanyahu government has systematically attacked democratic rights of Israeli Jews as well. The U.S. white Christian nationalist movement is supporting Israel because Israel is now the vanguard of the world’s rightwing revolution.
For these reasons, anti-Zionism is not antisemitic but is anti-fascist. Furthermore, Zionism does not represent the aspiration of Jews everywhere. As Shaul Magid argues LINK, the region now called Israel does indeed have special significance to many Jews. The problem, he points out, is not that Jews want to live in Judea/Zion/Palestine/Israel. The problem is that the state of Israel claims that Jews and Jews alone own that land, trampling on other people’s legitimate attachment to that area who are Muslim, Christian, Ba’hai, and secular people. To call Israel “the home of the Jews” is also problematic because most of the world’s Jewish population has no desire to live in Israel.
Hamas’ October 7 attack posed a real challenge: was it a legitimate defense against Zionist aggression? There can be no doubt that the Palestinian people have been experiencing a new level of Zionist aggression and expansion of Israel’s claims to land since the passage of the 2018 Nation-State Law. It is also true that many Arab states were in the process of abandoning their commitment to Palestinian self-determination, leaving Palestinians’ feeling isolated and vulnerable. A military action aimed at stopping Israeli expansionism and galvanizing Arab solidarity for these reasons might have been warranted. But I would argue that Hamas’ attack was not anti-Zionist; it was antisemitic. It was not aimed at Israeli military or government targets: it was aimed at terrorizing Jewish civilians and included mass murders and sexual assaults on elderly people, women and children who were targeted because they were Jews. This equation of all Jews as responsible for Israeli aggression against Palestinians played right into the hands of the rightwing Zionist project (Israel = the Jewish people). But this equation is empirically wrong. 27% of Israel is not Jewish. And Israelis’ politics is not monolithic. In 2023, millions of Israelis marched in the streets to stop Netanyahu’s attack on democratic rights. And today there are a sizable number of Israeli Jews as well as non-Jews protesting the Israeli war. Many Jews around the world oppose Zionism and support Palestinian self-determination. To equate all Jews as the enemy of all Palestinians is not anti-Zionism; it is antisemitism.
This confusion about what is and is not antisemitism came to a head in the U.S. when some progressives defended Hamas’ October 7 attack. I was personally offended by online posts made by former comrades of mine who stated that the 1200 murdered Jews were legitimate targets because they were illegal occupiers of Palestinian land. At the time, I wrote a post warning progressives of the consequence of not calling out Hamas’ antisemitism. Sure enough, the rightwing quickly saw the opportunity to use this mistake and used it to whip up Jewish (and Christian nationalist) support for Zionist aggression as well as to attack progressive initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion on college campuses.
The lesson to me is simple enough: we can ill-afford to excuse antisemitism on the grounds that Jews are white and privileged, and in the case of Israelis, occupiers. Jews are people and even people living in a nation based on an illegitimate claim (Zionism) can suffer egregious discrimination as Jews. And when people are attacked because they are Jews, they must be defended. But we cannot let the rightwing get away with their argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Let us be clear what antisemitism is and is not. If we are not, the progressives’ gains of the last fifty years are in jeopardy.
The long view 