Friday, June 05, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
A submission to an inquiry into antisemitism does not ordinarily require a slanted recap of the 1948 war, missives on settlements, the Gaza blockade, the genocide accusation, and the apartheid analogy, yet this one does. APAN treats the Commission less as a body to inform than as yet another vector to spread propaganda. Yet when you strip away the historical narrative and the included "expert" reports, the filing reduces to a single demand: anti-Zionists must not be called antisemitic, whatever they say about the Jewish state. To that end, APAN urges the Commission to reject the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
How does APAN define the term? "Hatred of or animus against Jewish people because they are Jews."
To defend that definition, APAN refers to three prominent Jewish anti-Zionist scholars. All three of them happen to arrive at essentially the same definition of antisemitism — one that conveniently excludes themselves.
Shaul Magid, Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, complains in his report that the word has slipped its moorings — that "antisemitism" now stretches "from Christian anti-Judaism to racism, anti-colonialism, to anti-Zionism" — and insists on returning to what he calls the standard, which he says is "the unmitigated and unwarranted hatred of, or animus against, the Jew qua Jew."
Ilan Pappe gives this definition: "being anti-Jewish is racist and antisemitic. This is the hatred of Jews because of who they are. Whereas being anti-Zionist means opposition to an ideology."
Neve Gordon is quoted for a third variant, from a London Review of Books essay from January 2018, that antisemitism is "understood as hatred of Jews per se."
"The Jew qua Jew." "Because of who they are." "Hatred of Jews per se." Three anti-Zionist scholars essentially agree with each other that antisemitism is hate of Jews as Jews. The common denominator is that they are saying that real antisemitism has no reason - it is unwarranted, it is towards Jews per se, it is because of who they are. In other words, antisemitism has no reason, no excuse, it is pure bigotry divorced from logic. But these anti-Zionists have a good reason for their hate. That is the distinction that each of them is making. And that is the distinction they must make in order to separate themselves from the crude antisemitism of previous generations.
The only problem is that this definition includes lots of types of antisemitism that they claim they abhor.
The medieval mob did not hate Jews qua Jews. It hated them because they believed Jews poisoned the wells to spread the plague. They hated them because they believed Jews were murdering their Christian children for matzoh. This was, to their logic, self defense. Which means that according to these three scholars, it is not antisemitism because their hate was not unwarranted.
The 19th century racial antisemite didn't hate Jews as Jews. He hated a biological contaminant, a bloodline he believed inferior and dangerous and parasitic. This wasn't illogical, it was science. Aryans who converted to Judaism were not hated, which means that their hate was not unmitigated, so therefore they were not antisemitic, according to this scholarly, consensus definition.
Henry Ford published lots of reasons to hate Jews. Jews controlled the world press, cornered the money supply, debauched the motion pictures, corrupted baseball, ran the bootlegging trade, engineered Bolshevism, and started the First World War to profit from it. The chapter titles of The International Jew are a catalogue of warrants. Ford did not hate Jews for being Jews. He hated them, in his mind, for what they did - conspiring to control the world through Hollywood, banks and the media. I see no way that these three anti-Zionist scholars can categorize Henry Ford as an antisemite under their own definition.
The Ku Klux Klansman who bombed a synagogue because Jews backed Black civil rights had a reason, too — Jewish support for integration. A reason is a warrant, and a warrant means it is no longer antisemitic.
No doubt these scholars would object — their anti-Zionism is not illogical! It makes perfect sense! As if the accusation of apartheid and genocide against Jews in Israel is more logical or truthful than the blood libel or poisoning wells. Their beliefs have far more in common with traditional antisemitism than they have differences. The medieval antisemites would have defended their accusations just as vigorously as Jewish anti-Zionists do today.
Or they would say that antisemitic conspiracy theories, like Ford's, are really hatred of Jews as Jews. But is an unfalsifiable assertion that Israel has a secret plan to murder everyone in Gaza — one that would involve hundreds of thousands of soldiers, not one of whom leaks it — really different from that Ford's conspiracy theories?
Ilan Pappe adds a wrinkle - he says that they are not against Jews, but against an ideology, and opposition to an ideology cannot be antisemitic. In that case, Martin Luther wasn't an antisemite, either. Neither was Louis Farrakhan when he called Judaism a 'gutter religion' — he was attacking an ideology, just like Pappe.
They might claim that they are targeting conduct, not identity. But so was Ford and so was the author of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They would insist that they hated what Jews do, not what Jews are.
In the end, their definition allows no daylight between their hate for the Jewish state and previous hatreds of Judaism, or Jews as a people, or Jews as any collective. Their distinctions are cosmetic - every single previous type of antisemitism can and often did point to similar distinctions between their hate and their cruder predecessors.
Gordon actually shows the problem in the same paragraph. Defining the "traditional" antisemitism he regards as genuine, he names it: "hatred of Jews per se, the idea that Jews are naturally inferior, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy or in the Jewish control of capitalism." The phrase per se and the examples that follow it contradict each other. Belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy is a reason; belief in Jewish control of capitalism is a reason, just as belief that Israel has a plan to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza is a reason. The conspiracist does not hate Jews per se — he hates them because of the plot he is convinced they run, the most elaborately warranted hatred in the entire canon. Gordon defines antisemitism as warrantless and then offers, as his paradigm cases of it, two of the most reasoned hatreds in history. The only way to hold both halves together is to apply the per se test selectively to exonerate his and condemn theirs, without being able to come up with a single cogent reason for the differences.
A test applied selectively is not a definition. It is an alibi that has learned to dress as one.
Notice, finally, what the three of them share with the haters they would exempt. The religious antisemite tolerated Jewish apostates; the one that accused Jews of murdering children exempted the ones they were friends with. "Some of my best friends are Jewish" remains a joke for a reason. Being Jewish doesn't immunize anti-Zionists from being effectively antisemites; they are the shield wielded by the antisemites to avoid the charge. "See? She is a Holocaust survivor and she supports us!" Tokenism is real. The tradition of the tolerated Jew in an intolerant society is a very long one.
These three scholars converged on a definition of antisemitism that covers almost no one. They had to, because every other definition shows that their beliefs are just the latest in the long list of variants of Jew hatred. They set out to define themselves out of antisemitism. They could only do it by defining almost all of antisemitism out with them.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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