On Antisemitism in Our Politics
My unvarnished thoughts on where we are.
I have been surrounded by Judaism my whole life. I have grown up and lived in places where Jews were my classmates, my teachers, my bosses, my friends — and I have never once been accused by any of them in my life of antisemitism until recently. Until recently, I have walked a fine line in my criticism of Israel. I want to share some of what I have seen throughout my life on this topic, because I think the conversation we are having in public right now is not the conversation the topic deserves.
Antisemitism is real. It is a real bigotry, ancient and persistent, and I have encountered it throughout my life. Whenever I have been faced with it, I have confronted it — aggressively. I will continue to do so, because Jews are humans, like any other humans, and they are my friends and brothers and sisters in shared humanity. That is the long and short of it. This is how I approach life. This is how I think about it and how I will go on thinking, because thinking any other way is stupid.
One cannot set aside the historical trauma of the Holocaust when confronting this topic, because the trauma is real. It has had real effects. It has shaped and formed Jewish contemporary culture, and it should. Hannah Arendt is one of my intellectual and literary heroes in her diagnosis of the nature of totalitarianism and antisemitism. I cite her often in my writing, and her formulation of the banality of evil features heavily in my own contemporary analysis. She is a Jewish intellectual and I put her on a pedestal. She did the hard work of moral witness — of taking the patience to look at evil and try to understand it on its own terms. That she did this is remarkable because doing this is beyond most people’s capacity for tolerating cognitive dissonance. Arendt’s observations about human nature are sobering and they have never been more relevant.
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October 7.
Before I say anything else about the war, I want to say what October 7 was.
It was the deliberate mass murder of Israeli civilians in their homes, at a music festival, in agricultural communities where they had been living. It was sexual violence used as an instrument of terror. It was the taking of hostages, including children and elderly people, some of whom have not come home, some of whom never will. It was filmed by its perpetrators and celebrated in real time by the organization that planned it and, in some places, by people who received the news as vindication of a grievance they had been cultivated to feel. It was not a military operation against a military target. It was a pogrom organized at state scale by an entity that has openly stated its intention to extinguish Jewish presence in the region.
There is no political grievance that justifies what happened on that day. There is no historical context that renders it intelligible as anything other than what it was, which was an atrocity. The fact that it occurred inside a longer history of Israeli occupation, settlement expansion, and the systematic denial of Palestinian political futures does not diminish what it was. It only names the conditions under which an atrocity of that specific character became possible, which is a different claim and a subordinate one.
I write this at the beginning of the essay because the rest of the essay will be critical of Israeli state conduct, and I want the reader to know that my criticism of Israeli state conduct is not offered in competition with an accounting of what was done to Israelis on October 7. Both accountings can be held at once by a serious moral agent. Both accountings must be held at once if the conversation is going to be worth having. I refuse the framing, offered by some on the left, that speaking clearly about October 7 is apology for the occupation. I refuse the framing, offered by some on the right, that speaking clearly about the occupation is apology for October 7. These framings are offered by people who do not want the full accounting because the full accounting is uncomfortable. I want the full accounting.
What has been happening in Gaza.
I have watched, with increasing horror, imagery of human beings’ entire lives being pulverized into ashes. The scale of civilian death in Gaza is not in serious dispute. The destruction of hospitals, schools, residential neighborhoods, the infrastructure that makes ordinary life possible, is documented. The children who have died in Gaza over the course of this war — children who were not yet born when Hamas was founded, children who had no political agency, children whose lives were extinguished before they had the capacity to hold any political view at all — those children are dead. They are not combatants. They are not political actors. They are children, and they are dead, and the responsibility for their deaths is the responsibility of the people who made the decisions that killed them.
I have heard the argument that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, embeds its infrastructure in civilian spaces, and bears moral responsibility for the civilian deaths that occur in the prosecution of Israeli military operations. This argument is not baseless. Hamas does use civilians, does embed infrastructure, does bear moral responsibility for the shape of the battlefield. But this argument, pressed to its conclusion, cannot justify any quantity of civilian death, because at some point the quantity becomes incompatible with any serious claim that the operations are constrained by the principles of proportionality that the laws of armed conflict require. That point has been reached and passed in Gaza. Israeli officials themselves — including former IDF officers, former Shin Bet directors, and writers at Haaretz — have said so publicly. This is not an external critique imposed on Israel from outside. It is a critique Israelis have been making of their own government, and it is a critique I find compelling.
Yes, some Palestinians celebrated the October 7 attacks. They did so because they hate Israelis, and they were taught to hate Israelis and Jews by Hamas propaganda that included Sesame Street-style children’s programming portraying Jews as literal demons and monsters. Hamas has sold its children every antisemitic trope in the book. This is true, and it is documented, and it is part of the moral landscape that any honest analysis has to account for.
But the Palestinians dying in Gaza are overwhelmingly not the Palestinians who celebrated October 7. They are children who cannot have celebrated anything because they were too young to hold a political thought, and women in apartment buildings that were bombed because something military-adjacent was suspected nearby, and elderly people who could not flee, and medical workers, and journalists, and civilians of every category who had no capacity to resist what was being done to them by either side. The moral fact that Hamas indoctrinates its population into antisemitism does not make the population collectively responsible for Hamas, and it does not make the deaths of the uncelebrating majority into a morally lesser category of death.
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The power imbalance.
Many people will be shouting into their screens as I write this — I can feel it — that what I have described is in reaction to what Israel has done. A reaction to settlement expansion. A reaction to the systematic denial of Palestinian political futures. A reaction to the helplessness and desperation of a population that has no meaningful political voice over the circumstances of its own life. This is true. I grant it.
I am not trying to do “both sides.” I am really not. The power imbalance between Palestinians and Israelis is not symmetric. The Israeli state is the state that exists in the territory. It has the military, the borders, the infrastructure, the diplomatic recognition, the nuclear weapons, and the decisive leverage over how Palestinian life is shaped. Violent resistance is a predictable — not justified, but predictable — response from a people who have no political representation over the circumstances of their lives.
Hamas, like any right-wing reactionary movement, has been able to use very real grievance and very real desperation to cultivate its particular form of political vision. The Iranian regime has been crucial in financing and furthering this project. And on the Israeli side, rockets falling on cities and towns have produced dynamics of fear that the Israeli right has been able to capitalize on. In my estimation, and in the estimation of many Israelis themselves — including former prime ministers, former security chiefs, former IDF generals, and a significant intellectual tradition within Israel represented by figures like David Grossman, Amos Oz while he was alive, Gideon Levy, and the staff of Haaretz — Netanyahu came to see Hamas as a useful enemy. Useful for his political purposes at home, useful for ensuring that Palestinians would have no unified basis on which to sue for an independent state. Divide and rule. This is documented. Netanyahu himself has said things consistent with this reading, in his own words, when speaking to his own political allies in Hebrew.
The expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the moves toward outright annexation appear to be the culmination of a project pursued deliberately by the Israeli far right over decades. Not unlike the decades-long efforts in the United States by the American right to capture the courts, degrade state capacity, untether the executive from independent oversight, and ultimately provide the opening for complete state capture. Different ends. Same method.
The Israeli critics I have named hold this view. I hold it because they hold it, and because the evidence they have marshaled is persuasive. When an American gentile makes this argument, it can be dismissed as ignorance or bias. When Israeli Jews make it, as they have for decades, the dismissal is harder to sustain. I am not introducing a view from outside. I am repeating a view from inside, and agreeing with it.
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When criticism becomes antisemitism.
This is the question people ask, sometimes in good faith and sometimes not: how do you know your criticism of Israel is not antisemitism? I think the criteria are actually clear, and I want to state them rather than gesture at them.
Criticism of specific Israeli governments and their specific policies is not antisemitism. Criticism of the current Israeli prime minister on the grounds that he runs a fascist government is not antisemitism when the same standard is applied to other leaders — Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Modi — who exhibit the same characteristics. If the test for fascism is applied uniformly across cases, calling one specific leader fascist for meeting the test is not a special condemnation of the Jewish state. It is a consistent application of a political category.
Criticism of Israeli state conduct in Gaza is not antisemitism when the conduct being criticized is the same conduct Israeli critics are naming in their own press and their own parliament. Importing an argument that Israelis themselves have made is not importing prejudice. It is importing testimony.
What is antisemitism, in my view, is the rhetorical pattern that Einat Wilf named: the serial equation of Zionism with every contemporary evil — Zionism is racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is Nazism, Zionism is genocide, Zionism is white supremacy. The equations are not individually evaluated against the specific historical meaning of the terms. They are deployed ritually, and the ritual function is to require Jews to repudiate Zionism as the condition of their social acceptance. This is coercive and it is antisemitic, and I think Wilf is correct to name it.
My criticism of Netanyahu’s specific government is not that ritual equation. I am not saying Zionism is Nazism. I am not saying Jewish national self-determination is inherently illegitimate. I am saying that the specific government currently running Israel is a fascist government by the same criteria I use elsewhere, and that the specific conduct of that government in Gaza constitutes war crimes by the same criteria I apply elsewhere. These are specific claims about a specific government’s specific actions. They are the kinds of claims that can be argued with on their merits. They are not claims about Jews.
A person who refuses the ritual equations and still criticizes the Israeli government is making political criticism. A person who performs the ritual equations, regardless of what specific government is in power, is doing something different. The line is not between criticism and no-criticism. The line is between specific claims about specific actors and ritual claims about the Jewish national project as such.
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The asymmetric alarm.
What has been fascinating, and disheartening, in my conversations with some Jewish friends on the American right is the degree to which they experience right-wing antisemitism as a minor irritation and left-wing antisemitism as an existential emergency.
When I bring up the Tree of Life synagogue attack — the worst antisemitic massacre in American history, committed by a man radicalized by the same online right-wing ecosystem that produces Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the endless stream of “Great Replacement” content — it is quickly dismissed as an isolated incident. When I bring up the Charlottesville marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us,” it is dismissed as a fringe phenomenon. When I bring up the network of funders, media figures, and politicians who have mainstreamed antisemitic tropes about George Soros, about globalists, about the international financier archetype — it is acknowledged, minimized, and moved past.
But the students protesting for Gaza on university campuses — some of whom have indeed engaged in unacceptable conduct, some of whom have crossed into genuine antisemitism that deserves to be named — these are treated as the emergency. These are the people who keep my friends up at night.
I have struggled to see this as anything other than a deranged view of where the actual threat lies. This is not to say left-wing antisemitism is not a moral emergency. It is. Left-wing antisemitism deserves to be named, confronted, and resisted whenever it appears. But the idea that campus protesters represent a more serious threat to American Jews than an armed white nationalist movement that has already produced the Tree of Life massacre, the Poway synagogue shooting, the Colleyville hostage crisis, and a sustained campaign of neo-Nazi organizing that has now reached the executive branch through figures like Stephen Miller — this is not a serious assessment of comparative risk. It is a political commitment dressed as a threat assessment.
I have made this observation to right-leaning Jewish friends in person, over years, and I am making it again in public. I think the motivating reasoning here is visible, and I think it deserves to be named. When the political movement that is objectively more dangerous to you is also the political movement you are aligned with on other questions, the pressure to minimize its danger is immense. I understand the pressure. I do not think it produces accurate assessments of where the threat lives.
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What the conversation could be.
The conversation about antisemitism we are having in public right now is not a serious conversation. On the left, there is too much willingness to treat the ritual equations of Zionism with every contemporary evil as legitimate political speech rather than as the specific form of antisemitic coercion Wilf has named. On the right, there is too much willingness to minimize the violent antisemitic movement that has organized itself under the Republican tent in the last decade. Among critics of Israel, there is too much rhetorical discipline lost when the specific claim about specific Israeli conduct slides into general claims about Jewish national aspiration. Among defenders of Israel, there is too much willingness to treat any criticism, however grounded in the testimony of Israeli Jews themselves, as antisemitism in disguise.
A serious conversation would hold several things at once. It would hold that October 7 was an atrocity that no political grievance justifies. It would hold that the Israeli state’s conduct in Gaza has crossed the line that Israeli critics themselves have named. It would hold that Hamas is a right-wing reactionary movement that has cultivated real grievance into a specific form of political violence. It would hold that Netanyahu has used Hamas, and that the settlement project is a deliberate undertaking by the Israeli far right. It would hold that antisemitism is a real and ancient bigotry whose victims are human beings deserving of full moral consideration. It would hold that the ritual equations of Zionism with every contemporary evil are antisemitic in effect regardless of the intent of those deploying them. And it would hold that the most immediate violent antisemitic threat in the United States, today, comes from the armed white nationalist movement that has mainstreamed itself within the Republican coalition.
All of these things are true simultaneously. A serious conversation would require all of them to be held simultaneously. The fact that our public discourse cannot hold them simultaneously is a failure of our public discourse, not a sign that the underlying reality is incoherent.
I am trying to hold them simultaneously. I know this will cost me some readers. I have lost readers over the earlier piece, On Israel, and I will lose more over this one. I stand by what I said there and by what I am saying now. The conversation we are having is not the conversation the topic deserves, and the only way to change the conversation is to hold it differently — openly, uniformly, with the full moral weight every side of it deserves.
That is what I am trying to do. That is what I will keep trying to do. And if trying to do it honestly makes me an unreliable ally to any specific faction in the current public debate, I accept that cost, because the alternative is to participate in a conversation that the topic does not deserve and that Jews — the actual human beings, my friends and brothers and sisters in shared humanity — do not deserve either.
This is thoroughly well argued. And brave! Thanks for writing it. I can’t find a single thing to disagree with, which is rare for me! 🙂
I’d add an observation: the pro-Israel position of the right-wing christian nationalists has always bugged the hell out of me. How is supporting Israel’s existence because you believe it (and all Jews) will be destroyed and make your weird end-times fantasies come true NOT antisemitic?
Brilliant and spot on!