What else would make an antisemite pretending to be an anti-Zionist as angry as the Jews making it harder to kill them?
By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine
In a London cafe, Jewish theatergoers arriving to take in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ were accosted by bigots waving PLO flags. In Los Angeles, a Holocaust museum and a synagogue were attacked by masked mobs in keffiyehs who claimed to be protesting against Israel.
In Brooklyn, a Hasidic Jewish man was stabbed by a thug shouting, “Free Palestine”.
The old arguments about the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism are in the same sort of ruin as the Jewish communities on the border with Gaza and Lebanon after Oct 7.
The entire intellectual infrastructure for arguing that there is some distinction between opposing Jews and opposing a country for the Jews was destroyed not by concerted debate or the universal adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, but by the actions of the Left.
From the Biden administration to the Ivy League campuses that provide its manpower and its donor and voter bases, the Left universally accepted the legitimacy of the anti-Israel movement as a principled moral activity, and the anti-Israel movement celebrated by scrawling “Hamas is Coming” on D.C. monuments, waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and attacking synagogues.
Pro-Israel groups argued there was no difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Anti-Israel groups proved them right. What would the anti-Israel movement have to do to Jews to have its actions be officially acknowledged as antisemitism? There seems to be no red line.
There is little that the Nazis did that the so-called anti-Zionist movement hasn’t done from promoting the mass murder of Jews, drawing up lists of Jewish writers to purge, attacking houses of worship, and calling for the elimination of Jews from public life.
Ivy League bosses who had policed Halloween costumes argued that another Holocaust was all about the context.
The Bolsheviks banned antisemitism in the Soviet Union only to define any form of Jewish identity that did not involve leftist activism as Zionist or otherwise reactionary.
In the name of anti-Zionism, the USSR banned the Hebrew language and most expressions of Jewish culture and life except for a narrow slice of ‘Yiddishism’ and a few closely monitored synagogues.
The Soviet Union did all this while officially prohibiting antisemitism. The modern Left does much the same thing. It officially rejects antisemitism while endorsing anti-Zionism.
As in the USSR there is a cadre of leftist Jews who support the destruction of Israel and are anti-Zionists in good standing (at least for now) and, like George Soros, are the only official victims of antisemitism.
The other 99% of Jews are Zionists. And they may be protested, harassed, assaulted, and killed.
Since 99% of Jews are Zionists, their synagogues, Holocaust museums and even productions of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ are fair game for the decolonization program. When Hamas or Hezbollah kill Jews, they never bother to check their views on an independent Jewish homeland.
Why should their allies, whether wearing Jihadist black, white or green, or Marxist red and yellow, be any more scrupulous when attacking synagogues or randomly stabbing Jews in Brooklyn?
The Jewish position was that anti-Zionism was antisemitism and therefore an ugly form of hatred. The anti-Zionist position is that most Jews are Zionists and therefore antisemitism is justified.
The fundamental disagreement here is not over whether there is a difference between killing Jews or killing Zionists, but whether Jews deserve to be killed.
Since Oct 7, it has been abundantly clear that the supporters of killing Jews call themselves anti-Zionists. By rebranding antisemitism as anti-Zionism, they transform the act of persecuting and killing a minority group from a shameful form of bigotry to a courageous form of progressivism.
Targeting a minority group because of its religion or its ethnicity is considered reactionary, but redefine the group as an ideology and suddenly targeting Jews becomes noble.
College encampments that barred black or Latino students from campus would be a hate crime, but campus encampments targeting Jews as Zionists follows the right side of history.
Redefining Jews to justify antisemitism is not as innovative as leftists like to think.
Antisemitism was always premised on redefining the Jewish existence as unnatural and artificial. Jews were being denounced as colonizers as far back as the days of Pharaoh. The term ‘antisemitism’, coined by Wilhelm Marr, a German socialist, followed in the proud tradition of socialists justifying why they wanted to liberate all the oppressed of Europe except the Jews.
The Jews, being semites, did not belong in Europe. The Jews, being European, do not belong in Israel. The Jews, being Zionists, do not belong at progressive institutions like Harvard or Columbia. And the Jews being occupiers, do not belong in London watching ‘Fiddler on the Roof’.
t is the duty of all progressive people of goodwill to make them uncomfortable not only by lobbing rockets at Jerusalem and burning Jewish families alive in their homes, but also by showing up to attack them anywhere in the world they might be. Because it’s not about Israel.
Just as anti-Zionism is a manifestation of antisemitism, so the calls for the destruction of Israel by the average non-Muslim has nothing to do with a tiny country in the Middle East.
And everything to do with the Jews.
The profusion of PLO flags and shouts about rivers, seas and the Arab Muslim colonizers who adopted the name of the European colonizers known as the Philistines, are simply the latest incarnation of the Swastika and shouts on German streets of “Juden Raus!”
Anti-Zionism is antisemitism misspelled or revamped for a new and more tolerant age that needs heavy doses of ideological formulation before it can go ahead with its pogroms.
If Israel didn’t exist, it would have had to be invented. European Jews reinvented Israel because of antisemitism. And antisemites cling to Israel so that they can claim to be anti-Zionists.
The idea that the current plague of antisemitism would not exist without Israel is a fantasy.
The obsession of the Muslim wing of the anti-Zionist coalition with Jews long predates the rebirth of Israel. And socialists were hurling antisemitic invective at Jews in the antebellum era.
Mohammed did not ethnically cleanse the Jews of Arabia because of the State of Israel. Nor did Marx rant that “money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist” back when Theodor Herzl was a teenage boy because he was so infuriated by Zionism.
The red-green alliance of Marxism and Islam has always hated the Jews. It will always do so.
But the followers of Mohammed and Marx also hate a great many other people besides Jews because hatred is their ideology more than any faith or economic system.
They distill and channel that hate along ideological lines, but it is not their ideology that defines their hate, but their hate that defines their ideology. If there were no Israel, they would still be turning up outside synagogues and chanting for the death of Jews as they did before there was an Israel.
Israel is not the cause of the antisemitism or anti-Zionism of Marxists and Muslims, it is the best defense against it. Israel’s existence infuriates them because it has made it harder to kill Jews.
And what else would make an antisemite pretending to be an anti-Zionist as angry as the Jews making it harder to kill them?