A New Zionist Congress Is Born
Defiant Jewish undergraduates are forming their own national organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and promoting Jewish pride. Join us.At 80 years old, human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler is busier than ever
In this new world order, nobody is surprised when a majority of students at Tufts University vote to pass a referendum blaming racist police violence in the United States on the State of Israel. In this new world order, it’s not cause for alarm when an Israeli restaurant in Portland, Oregon, is forced to remove all mention of Israel from its menus and signs, but still gets vandalized with graffiti that reads “eat shit” and “falafel is from Palestine.”
In this new world order, no one blinks when the organizers of a rally against police brutality in New York City say it’s “open to all, minus cops and Zionists.”
In this new world order, the first draft of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum listed the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement as a domestic civil rights issue and defined the Jewish people through the lens of colonialism and whiteness.
In this new world order, a professor at the University of Bristol can accuse his own Jewish students of being henchmen in a Zionist plot to silence left-wing professors, and still win the support of hundreds of “progressive” colleagues around the world, including Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.
In this new world order, a man can walk into a kosher supermarket in Michigan and taunt its Jewish customers by asking them to read “Free Palestine” on his phone, post the video to Instagram, and receive hundreds of thousands of likes and comments from adoring fans.
This is the insidious hatred students like me are dealing with on campus. Yet I’ve had professionals call me, their voices shaking, worried that they might get shamed on Twitter by college students if I use their platform to speak freely about what is actually causing anti-Semitism at school. This is all part of a desperate need to sit at the table with those who style themselves as fighting for justice. The adults in the room beg us to reason with them, to explain to them what Judaism means to us and why we have a connection with Israel. “Allyship,” they preach, because the only way we’ll be accepted is if we are conceived as oppressed.
I’m sorry. If a Jew is called a Nazi on campus, is it really his or her responsibility to invite the offending student to share a bagel on the quad? If someone bans me from their organization, is it really my responsibility to, as one individual put it to me recently, “internalize ways in which I am not welcoming, and strive for a more intersectional approach to dialogues about oppression and power”? What the hell does that even mean? What other minority community would be forced to endure this jargon-filled hellscape? Every time Jews speak out about anti-Semitism, we're immediately told to endure a corporate diversity training seminar, one which concludes that it's still our fault for causing all the drama.
And yet for many in the Jewish community, this is a tolerable price to pay to sit at the table. Well, I don't want a seat at that table. I don’t want to be anywhere near that table. I am in fact determined to flip that table over.
Unlike most other activists, Cotler might be lucky enough to have a direct line to the person handling U.S. foreign policy. He had a decades-long friendship with U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor. “When I was a law professor at McGill, we inaugurated the Raoul Wallenberg Lectureship in Human Rights,” Cotler recalled. The first person to give that lecture was Elie Wiesel; the second was Pisar, sparking a friendship in which Cotler visited him at his homes in New York and in France.
But human rights work is only half of Cotler’s portfolio — he also has another full-time job, as Canada’s antisemitism envoy. He took the job pro bono, he said, with practically no budget, to handle a huge portfolio that includes both domestic and global antisemitism, domestic and global Holocaust remembrance, and chairing Canada’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. (Canada has adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which Trudeau says is part of the nation’s “anti-racism strategy.”)
Cotler sees a straightforward connection between his two passions: the Jewish community and international human rights. “I take a human rights approach to combating antisemitism,” he explained. “While [bigotry] begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews. So for me, all these things converge, and there’s a universal resonance, both of the lessons of the Holocaust and the combating antisemitism today.”
Some on the political left might call this framework intersectionality. But Cotler is not trying to apply a political ideology to his fight against antisemitism, and he says he feels fortunate that Canadians by and large do not politicize the issue. “People are not weaponizing antisemitism. You don’t have the right weaponize it against the left, and the left weaponizing it against the right,” he noted — unlike Canada’s neighbor to the south. “The big difference is Canada is not as polarized or as divided as the U.S.,” and “there still is a consensus.” His biggest concern is what he calls the “normalization” of antisemitism, where “it gets mainstream, and it doesn’t elicit the condemnation, or maybe the outrage, that it deserves.”
One of Cotler’s goals as Canada’s global antisemitism envoy is to address what he views as antisemitism at the United Nations, in the double standard he says the U.N. applies to Israel. “The rights of Israel deserve equal respect, not that human rights standards should not be applied to Israel. They must be. But these standards must be applied equally to everyone else,” Cotler said. He pointed out that Syria was recently appointed to a top position on the U.N.’s Special Committee on Decolonization, despite its well-documented history of brutal repression during the country’s civil war.
Cotler noted that some in the pro-Israel community who criticize the U.N.’s treatment of Israel simply oppose the institution entirely, but he is not among them. “If you’re Canadian, the United Nations is part of your DNA,” Cotler explained, noting that “human rights is a centerpiece of our foreign policy, [and] international law is part of my identity.”
His work truly is international: The cases currently in his docket include Badawi in Saudi Arabia, along with dissidents from China and Russia. During his conversation with JI, he received a call about a matter related to political persecution in Venezuela. “That’s another priority,” he said. For Cotler, every matter related to global injustice is a priority: “I get energized by the work.”