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A fortress won’t save American Jews
Jews have found themselves at the center of politics over the past few years — not a place we want to be, at least not like this.
Anton Jäger, a historian at Oxford University, has argued that since the Covid-19 pandemic spurred more government intervention into the lives of ordinary citizens, many Western countries have become “engulfed in a kind of permanent Dreyfus Affair.”
His point was that a contemporary obsession with politics has consumed society in the same way that the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on manufactured treason charges sucked up the oxygen in France at the end of the 19th century.
Jäger doesn’t mention the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish. But just as his Jewishness animated the scandal in the Third French Republic, Jews — real and imagined — have also found themselves at the center of today’s toxic political climate.
As many Americans became unmoored from reality during the pandemic, they alternately blamed Jews for creating the virus and described themselves as being victimized like Jews during the Holocaust for refusing to get vaccinated or comply with other public health guidance.
Jews have also found themselves at the center of debates over immigration, with suggestions on the right that George Soros is fueling mass migration intended to displace white Americans even as some on the left think of Jews as too white to be included in the minority coalitions fighting white supremacy.
Joe Biden made countering antisemitism a keystone of his presidency, while simultaneously providing Israel with a blank check after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that allowed the country to wreak absolute devastation on Gaza — a military assault drove many Americans toward strident forms of anti-Zionism that teeter into antisemitism.
Donald Trump accelerated the logic of Biden’s fight against campus antisemitism — which held that the intense discomfort some Jewish college students felt over speech targeting Israel was a violation of their civil rights — to decimate elite universities that had long been targets of the conservative movement.
Meanwhile, right-wing media stars like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have won massive audiences while inveighing against Jews who they claim are supposedly controlling American politics, and even establishment institutions like the Heritage Foundation have struggled to keep what were once fringe antisemitic views from coming into the mainstream.
The overt kind of antisemitism peddled by the right is far less severe on the left — but the emergence of strident opposition to Israel as perhaps the core litmus test for inclusion in progressive spaces has hit many Jews hard in politics. At workplaces, schools and in social settings, people often fail to make space for any sense of Jewish attachment to Israel even when those Jews share deep outrage over the country’s actions or structure of government. AIPAC has ascended into the pantheon of liberal enemies alongside longstanding and much vaguer villains like “corporations” and “billionaires.”
Israel’s actions, and its apparent impunity to international concerns about its often abhorrent conduct, are an obvious and real explanation for this. But it doesn’t explain everything. Whatever one thinks about Zionism, the almost messianic notion that Palestinian liberation would unlock everything from world peace to Medicare for All is both unserious and, at its worst, part of an ignominious tradition of assigning Jews outsized control over the world.
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This can make it feel like there is little room for persuasion in the fight against antisemitism. If someone believes that Israelis engineered Covid-19 in a lab to kill gentiles, what can you really say to sway them — and is it even worth it, if they’re just going to move on to a new conspiracy about George Soros or the Rothchilds? And if someone believes that all the allegations against Graham Platner were a plot by Israel and its supporters to sink his candidacy, it’s hard to believe they’re coming from a place of genuine concern about Palestinians.
It’s a feeling of hopelessness that has ironically animated both the argument that we should stop trying to counter antisemitism, promoted by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in his State of World Jewry speech earlier this year at the 92nd St. Y, and the Jewish establishment’s turn toward embracing the use of force against perceived enemies of the Jews.
This force is literal in the case of Israel’s campaign in Gaza and more figurative — though sometimes still involving arrests and police violence — when it comes to cracking down on campus protests at home.
Both Stephens and the Anti-Defamation League, which he took target at in his remarks for supposedly spinning its wheels in a hopeless attempt to defeat antisemitism, seem to have adopted a belief that Jews are better off going it alone.
Stephens argued that we should shift the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been invested in countering antisemitism into day schools and other institutions that can cultivate a sense of Jewish belonging and peoplehood.
The ADL, along with much of the Jewish establishment and dozens of new Jewish defense organizations created over the past decade, have abandoned past efforts to combat antisemitism through coalitions with other minority groups in favor of a rhetorical and legal assault on those they contend criticize Israel in unacceptable ways. Their methods — including promoting rigid definitions of antisemitism that include anti-Zionism, sponsoring lawsuits against colleges and universities, and cheering on the Trump administration’s move to deport student activists — seem to accept that they aren’t going to win hearts and minds but can perhaps still bludgeon their enemies into submission.
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But I don’t think Jews have the luxury of throwing up our hands in the face of rising antisemitism and deciding to either completely retreat, as Stephens has proposed, or strategically retreat while launching some rear-guard actions meant to keep the antisemites at bay for as long as possible.
First, there just aren’t enough of us. Jews may collectively have more wealth and resources at our disposal than any other community in the history of the Jewish diaspora, but there are still only a few million of us in the United States. Any fortress we try to build here would be cramped and vulnerable to being overrun by the 98% of the country that is not Jewish.
The community’s strength and power has come from our engagement in the political process and the fact that elected officials and civic leaders across the political spectrum take us seriously as citizens and constituents.
Smaller Jewish communities around the world, including those in Europe, have tried the fortress approach — often faced with little other choice as their numbers have shrunk and hostility has skyrocketed well beyond American levels — with dismal results. Following their lead voluntarily would be a tragic mistake.
Second, many Jews would be left outside the walls of any fortress. That’s because Stephens and his allies in the establishment seem determined to protect Jews not only from neo-Nazis, but also from anti-Zionists, who they often describe as posing the same threat as white supremacists. Where, then, would the roughly 50% of young Jews (and smaller shares of older groups) who oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — preferring a binational one — find protection from those who wish them ill based on their identity?
An insular community that conditioned American Jewish identity on political support for Israel would also serve to legitimize antisemitic arguments that diaspora Jews should be held responsible for the country’s actions.
But the third, and most hopeful, reason to stay in the fight is it’s not a futile one. Antisemitism in the U.S. has receded dramatically since the 1960s, when university quotas and “gentiles only” disclaimers in employment ads were still common. The phenomenon of intermarriage, sometimes held up as an existential threat in its own right, is also a testament to the widespread acceptance of Jews in American society, and Jews remain welcome in the highest echelons of government, corporate and cultural life in this country.
That was not always true — but it became true in part as more Americans got to know Jews, and as Jews forged intentional alliances with other minorities to cultivate a more accepting climate in the country.
Antisemitism never disappeared, and I’m not suggesting that Jews can make it disappear any more than other minorities can make racism disappear or women can make sexism disappear. Prejudices ebb and flow according to factors beyond any of our control.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in five years on this beat it’s that we need Jews in the fight. The most effective path to fighting antisemitism is having Jews with credibility who are genuine participants in movements across the political spectrum and have allies who will listen to them when they raise concerns.
This isn’t a panacea. There’s no magic bullet to stop antisemitism and no singular approach that will work. Many people, and many communities, are hurting in this country right now. My appeal is simply that we accept that hurting alongside them — and working with them to lessen the pain — is our best shot at preserving Jewish safety.
The post A fortress won’t save American Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election
There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.
The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.
These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.
The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.
But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved – suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.
The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.
This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.
The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.
By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.
When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.
The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.
Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.
On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.
I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”
Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.
The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.
As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.
So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.
That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.
Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.
The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.
But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.
Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.
But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.
The post The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election appeared first on The Forward.
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Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium
(JTA) — Zach Bryan, one of the world’s most popular country artists, appeared onstage wearing a shirt that read “Free Palestine” on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
The venue was at the center of the dispute between stadium owner Robert Kraft and rapper Macklemore, who was blocked from performing there after Kraft objected to statements and imagery from an earlier stop on the tour and a “broader history” that Kraft characterized as antisemitic.
Representatives for Bryan and Kraft did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan, whose biggest hits include “Something in the Orange” and his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” broke a stadium attendance record with 73,538 people on hand, the stadium said in an X post.
Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, helped lead an effort by stadium owners to block Macklemore from performing at their venues as Ed Sheeran’s opening act. Sheeran tried to distance himself from the venue owners’ actions, but his backup band and other acts subsequently withdrew from the tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium appeared first on The Forward.
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Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion
(JTA) — Britain’s Green Party on Sunday adopted a policy equating Zionism with racism, a move that immediately drew condemnation from the Israeli government and sparked concerns among some Jewish party members and the broader Jewish community.
The motion has also caused divisions within the party itself, with leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, skipping the vote and the party’s five sitting members of parliament issuing a statement on the policy.
Passing with 1,022 votes to 813 votes at the left-wing party’s annual conference, the motion argues that Zionism as an ideology is racist as it promotes “ethnonationalism,” and “privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others.”
It also declares the Greens to be an “anti-Zionist party” and that Zionism, the movement to develop and protect a Jewish state in Israel, will be “treated as any other form of racism.”
The motion also supports the establishment of a “single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press statement, “Today, the Green Party in Britain ceased to act as a political party and became a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism. The Greens have adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle.”
“The shocking resolution adopted today legitimizes armed struggle, calls for a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ – meaning the destruction of the State of Israel – and labels as ‘racist’ the aspiration of the Jewish people for self-determination,” the ministry statement said, adding that it “goes far beyond the boundaries of legitimate political debate.”
The ministry called on other political parties in Britain, particularly the ruling Labour Party, to reject the resolution.
In a letter to Polanski ahead of the vote, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust said they had “acute concerns” about the motion and called on the party leaders to oppose it. They wrote that urgent action was needed to address growing antisemitism within the Green Party. Such a motion, they wrote, “fuels hatred of Jews.”
The five representatives of the Greens who sit in Parliament – MPs Ellie Chowns, Adrian Ramsay, Siân Berry, Carla Denyer and Hannah Spencer – issued a joint statement condemning the actions of the current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but emphasizing, “We know there is no conflict between supporting the rights of Palestinians and the rights of Jewish people.”
A clause was proposed to protect Jewish Greens by clarifying that the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline” those affiliated with synagogues or other Jewish groups that describe themselves as Zionist. The clause was voted down.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion appeared first on The Forward.
