Pro-Hamas activists insist that their cause is not antisemitic. Rather it is “anti-Zionist,” “anti-colonialist” and a fight for “human rights.” Certain people, the activists say — three guesses which people — “weaponize” the charge of antisemitism in order to “silence” the activists’ concerns. It is thus the prerogative of those who justify the murder of Jews to tell the rest of us what antisemitism is.
Thanks just the same, but Jews already know. Antisemites have long argued Jews are uniquely vengeful, that they murder non-Jewish children, and that despite being a small minority, Jews secretly manipulate everything from finance to public opinion to launch violent upheavals in their quest for global dominance. The Nazis tried to create a world without Jews. But in killing some 5.7 million of them, they discredited open antisemitism. A new, more respectable terminology was needed.
Zionism offered a key. Born in the late 19th century, Zionism argued for Jewish peoplehood and called for a state in the ancestral home of Palestine to allow the Jews safety and cultural renewal. The birth of Israel in 1948 and the unsuccessful Arab attempts to destroy it militarily meant that “anti-Zionism” became the new language of Jew-hatred. This supposedly respectable yet twisted veneer invited the global left to view Zionism as a new form of Nazism.
In 1968, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasser Arafat proclaimed in its charter that the Jewish connection to Palestine was fake, that Zionism was “racist,”“colonial,” “fascist” and “fanatic,” and that Israel, though tiny, was “the geographic base for world imperialism.” Israel’s destruction, the PLO said, would bring world peace and reaffirm human dignity and freedom.
Who could disagree with human freedom? The West European Left, which was anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and which had historically seen Jews as capitalist exploiters, approved. Anti-Zionism became their cause too, even as PLO affiliates promoted world peace by hijacking airplanes and launching terror attacks against Jews both in Israel and Europe. Like today, PLO terrorists were hailed as “resistors.”
The Soviet Union and their allies jumped aboard. They had sold weapons to Israel’s enemies, but they also looked suspiciously at their own Jews. Poland, whose antisemitic history needed lots of scrubbing, launched an “anti-Zionist” campaign in 1968 that drove thousands of Jews from the country.
In the Soviet Union “scientific” studies concurred that Zionism promoted racism, colonialism and hostility to human rights, with Israeli “aggression” at the forefront.
The United Nations General Assembly legitimized it all in 1975, resolving that “Zionism is a form of Racism.” U.S. ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan charged the UN with a “terrible lie.” The terms “racism” and “human rights,” he said, were drained of all meaning if they were warped to promote antisemitism. In 1991, the UN revoked the statement, but the belated “never mind” did not erase the slander.
The calumny now finds a home on the progressive left, which, liberal Jews have finally discovered, has no use for them unless they renounce Zionism and express “solidarity” with those calling for Israel’s destruction. Jewish Voice for Peace, with 12 chapters on U.S. campuses (Hillel International has 850) are among the very few Jews who have swallowed this barbed hook.
Hamas’ aims are not opaque. In calling for the “liberation of Palestine,” its 1988 covenant openly discusses “our struggle with the Jews,” while invoking Islamic verses to promote the killing of Jews. It also borrows conspiracy theories of Jewish global domination from the infamous antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) which helped to drive Nazi mass murder.
On Oct. 7, Hamas murdered and mutilated children and old people not as imaginary aggressive Zionists as their western devotees assert, but simply as Jews.
Hamas also recycles one of antisemitism’s oldest inversions. It is not the Jew-hater, but the Jew himself who delights in killing the innocent. Hamas thus insists that Israel deliberately targeted Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital, killing 500. Despite all contrary evidence, Hamas’ supporters all over the world echo the lie.
Hamas’ apologists today validate antisemitism with decades-old semantic dishonesty. A current practice is to invoke Palestinian “resistance” while eluding Hamas murder. Another is to falsify human rights law by charging Israel with genocide, a legal term referring to the intentional destruction of a particular group. They ignore that Israel tries to minimize civilian deaths even as Hamas uses civilians as human shields and propaganda tools.
More broadly, the activists pretend that despite justifying (under any language) the massacre of Jewish civilians, that despite calling for the end to the world’s one Jewish state, and despite intimidating Jews from New York to Los Angeles, their rhetoric has nothing to do with endorsing antisemitism in its most vile form. They are, they contend, above reproach.
But the facade is fragile, and it has cracks. Even at the Oct. 25 pro-Palestine protest at UF, a single voice almost wrecked it. One man yelled out “Long live Hamas” in front of reporters. He was immediately shushed by other protesters. When trying to camouflage antisemitism today, it is becoming harder for everyone to stick to the script.
Norman JW Goda is the Director of the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies at UF and the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies. He is currently teaching a course on antisemitism.
