Jonathan Tobin: The illiberal crusade to defend antisemitic mobs
Just as troubling is the willingness of many in the chattering classes to defend the protesters and pretend that expressions of antisemitism are a matter of free speech rather than hate. The Guardian’s Moira Donegan attacked Shafik in a column for what she described as “colluding with the far right” by calling in the police to enforce the university’s rules. She treated the entire idea that antisemitism was present as a right-wing talking point rather than an awful reality for Jewish students, whose plight interested her not at all.Andrew Pessin: The Indelible Stain of Antisemitism: The Failed Practice of ‘Jew-Washing,’ Part 2
The Times’ Michelle Goldberg sounded a similar theme in her denunciation of both the House committee investigating antisemitism and Shafik.
Both quoted comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a committee member whose questions were aimed at denying the antisemitic nature of the mobs that had transformed Columbia into a hotbed of Jew-hatred. That someone who has been censured by the House for her own repeated antisemitic rhetoric should sit on such a committee (or in Congress itself) is an irony completely lost on leftists. Both Donegan and Goldberg thought it was an outrage that Omar’s daughter—a junior at Barnard College—was among those participating in the pro-Hamas demonstration and rightly suspended from the school, though that piece of information was not generally known when Omar was trying to sabotage the hearing.
As with the rest of the debate about whether the antisemitism being vented on college campuses in the six months since Oct. 7 should be protected free speech, most of the arguments in defense of these mobs are disingenuous. The notion that the pro-Hamas activists are defending free speech is risible considering that most of their efforts are focused on silencing defenders of Israel and the Jews. These are not idealists acting out their sympathy for Palestinian victims but, rather, ideologues who have embraced the cause of a terrorist war to destroy the Jewish state.
What must also be acknowledged is that the crusade on the part of much of the liberal commentariat to defend or rationalize this epidemic of antisemitism is profoundly illiberal. This applies to those who, like the Times’ foreign-policy columnist Nicholas Kristof, have sought to mainstream blood libels against Israel. Their goal is to change the conversation about the war against Hamas from a necessary campaign to eradicate terrorists to an effort to legitimize a genocidal movement and its Western apologists.
The saddest aspect of this debate is the way it has been politicized by the left to make it appear that the fight against antisemitism is a Republican issue. It is deeply unfortunate that much of the liberal activist base of the Democratic Party that has been captured by advocates for critical race theory and intersectionality has taken sides against Israel in the war against Hamas. It’s also true that—as the daily drumbeat of incitement against Israel and its Jewish supporters in the Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC show—left-wing journalists are doing their utmost to legitimize anti-Jewish hate.
The effort to curb the surge of antisemitism in this country should not be conducted along party lines. Democrats and Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, should be lining up against those who agree with Omar and her cheering section that antisemitic mobs are principled idealists rather than self-entitled hate-mongers. All decent Americans should—if not agreeing with Cotton about roughly preventing illegal protesters from taking over our public squares—be actively seeking to treat these antisemitic agitators with the disdain and punishment they deserve. If the defenders of the mobs prevail, the alternative is a nation where antisemitism is mainstreamed and Jewish safety a thing of the past.
The most famous here are perhaps the Neturei Karta, a fringe group whose members appear at anti-Israel events worldwide.[10] They are ideal for Jew-washers, since, in their ultra-orthodox appearance, they are quite visibly Jews—and what could better exonerate an Israel-hater from charges of antisemitism when such clear Jews hate Israel too? Yes, they are a small group, but they are real, and they do derive their anti-Israelism from their Judaism: the Hebrew Bible as they read it teaches that Jews will legitimately re-form their political collective in the Land of Israel only by divine means, upon the coming of the Jewish Messiah. The contemporary State of Israel, then, is a religious abomination. The fact that the state and its overall culture are largely secular—surely only worse. No wonder they have 3-D hatred toward it.[11]Gaza cease-fire alone won’t repair larger enduring rift, political scientist says
But does the existence of Neturei Karta successfully exonerate the non-Jewish anti-Israelist from the charge of antisemitism? (Henceforth we focus only on the “invoking authority” mode of Jew-washing.)
To see why not, consider a distinction made by former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who famously described campus attempts to boycott and divest from Israel as “antisemitic in effect if not intent.” Effective antisemitism will roughly be any position, policy, or behavior that de facto discriminates in some negative way against Jews, whatever its actual content or intent. Intentional antisemitism is much harder to define, but doing so should not be necessary for our purposes. Suffice to note that sometimes a person’s intentions can absolve even his effective antisemitism from counting as antisemitism simpliciter.[12]
Neturei Karta’s ideology does seem to be effectively antisemitic, after all, for it discriminatorily denies to the Jewish people (pre-Messiah) the same right to political self-determination in their ancestral homeland that presumably all other peoples enjoy in theirs. Members of the group themselves may escape the charge of being intentional antisemites (or antisemites simpliciter), however, since they sincerely derive their position from bona fide Jewish principles.
But the same is simply not true for the non-Jewish Israel-haters who Jew-wash with Neturei Karta. They share the group’s effectively antisemitic doctrine that the Jewish state is illegitimate while not sharing precisely those intentions that would exonerate their antisemitism.[13]
So Jew-washing with Neturei Karta fails. Neturei Karta provide an illusory cover for Israel-haters’ antisemitism, but they do not remove it.
We turn in the next part to what we might call “ultra-non-orthodox Jewish anti-Israelism.”
Calls for a cease-fire in Gaza may be well-intentioned, but a halt to the current fighting will not repair the enduring rift between Israelis and Palestinians. That can only happen once the Palestinians abandon an ideology that rejects the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state, said Israeli political scientist Einat Wilf ’96.
During a conversation Friday with Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and faculty director of the Middle East Initiative at HKS, Wilf spoke about the war in Gaza and why she thinks there’s been so little progress reaching a resolution over the years. The talk was the fifth in an ongoing Middle East Dialogues series at Harvard Kennedy School, organized by Masoud, which aims to showcase a range of viewpoints on the current crisis and promote informed dialogue.
Describing herself as “the poster child of the Israeli Two-Stater Left,” Wilf served in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, from 2010 to 2013 as a member of the Labor Party, which supports the creation of an independent Palestinian state. She said she still favors such a goal, but no longer believes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is just about land.
“I voted for [Yitzhak] Rabin; I voted for [Ehud] Barak,” she said of the former Labor prime ministers. “I was euphoric in the ’90s, like many Israelis … when Barak goes to Camp David,” she said. “I believed in the vision of a new Middle East.”
But in 2000 and again in 2008, she watched Palestinian leaders refuse the terms of proposals from the Israelis for a state in the West Bank in Gaza.
“And I began to ask myself, ‘What is going on? What do the Palestinians want — because it’s clearly not a state,’” said Wilf, a former intelligence analyst. “They could have had that, and they walked away” without being criticized by the Palestinian people.
She came to that realization after conversations she’s had with many highly educated, moderate Palestinians over the last 20 years. “They basically tell me things like, ‘The Jewish people are not a people. You’re only a religion. This idea that you have a connection to this land, you invented it to steal our own,’” she said.
“And I realized from the conversations with them that how they think about the conflict, and how I think about it, don’t even meet. For them, the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state is illegitimate.”