The Real Antisemitism—and Racism—Amidst the Moral Panic

Though not the norm, bigotry against Jews and Palestinians is a problem. We should say so.

A student protest in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 9th, 2023. Credit: Arthur Mansavage / Shutterstock

Last time, we examined a question that has mostly gone ignored in the recent storm over antisemitism, which is: What is it? How should antisemitism be defined, and to what extent does America’s burgeoning protest movement meet that standard?

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) published what would eventually become the most commonly-cited definition of antisemitism. That definition, to the extent that it can even be called one, is so vague as to be meaningless. This was likely a deliberate choice, as it allows anyone to throw around wanton accusations of antisemitism without explanation.

The IHRA was quick to take advantage of its own ambiguity. In the same document, it offers a list of “examples” of antisemitism, among which is “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” This is another way of conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, or opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the land of Israel.

But is anti-Zionism always antisemitic? What happens if the realization of Zionism’s goal of Jewish self-determination happens to conflict with that of another national group? Is it antisemitic to seek some equitable resolution, even if it involves a single state for both communities? The IHRA doesn’t say. It doesn’t have to. Nobody, after all, can possibly argue that calling such arguments antisemitic is somehow inconsistent with the IHRA’s cryptic definition of the term.

Thankfully, other organizations have stepped in with some better alternatives. Take the Jerusalem Declaration, which defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” Under this conception, a statement or act is antisemitic to the extent that it expresses animus towards Jews because they are Jews. If, on the other hand, one can reasonably argue that the subject’s Jewishness is beside the point, it is not antisemitic.

In contrast to the IHRA, the Jerusalem Declaration explicitly denies that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Jewish. “It is not antisemitic,” the authors maintain, “to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants ‘between the river and the sea,’ whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.”

The issue has taken on greater importance during the recent campus protests against Israel. The demonstrations are often explicitly anti-Zionist. Whether they are antisemitic is another matter. As I explained last time, it depends on what one has in mind for Israel’s Jews in the event a Jewish state no longer exists. If the goal is to have them driven out of Palestine, it is antisemitic. If, instead, it is to create a single state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians, it is not antisemitic. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of some of the organizations leading the demonstrations, it is doubtful that a majority or even a substantial minority of ordinary protesters want to see widespread violence against Israeli Jews.

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If two states cannot deliver full rights to both communities, one can reasonably argue that such a solution is not just—and there are no grounds to deem anyone antisemitic for saying so.

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Still, if anti-Zionists deny the right to self-determination for the Jews only and not other communities, would this not make their position antisemitic—even if they support equal rights for Jews and Palestinians alike? A few people raised this objection in response to my last post. The only arrangement that would respect the wishes of both communities, according to this view, is the so-called two-state solution. Under this framework, Israel would continue to exist as a Jewish state while permitting the establishment of another state for Palestinians in the occupied territories.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is quite small. Second, if we are being realistic, a future Palestinian state would at most comprise only 22 percent of the land, leaving the remaining 78 percent for Israel. This is the framework that formed the basis for past negotiations between the two sides, and it is unlikely to change.

While a two-state scheme might accommodate all of the current inhabitants, it could not do so for everyone who calls Palestine home. I am referring here to the millions of Palestinian refugees whose 1948 expulsion Israel, at the very least, helped instigate and who now live in other countries. There is simply no way a Palestinian state on such a limited piece of territory could hold all of these people.

How, then, would it be possible to guarantee that everyone who regards Palestine as their homeland, whether Jewish or Palestinian, can live there and enjoy full political and civil rights? Most anti-Zionists would say this could happen only in a single, democratic state. It is not that they selectively favor the dissolution of the Jewish state and no other state; rather, they seek to rectify a status quo which grants rights to Jews only but not stateless Palestinians. If two states cannot deliver full rights to both communities, one can reasonably argue that such a solution is not just—and there are no grounds to deem anyone antisemitic for saying so.

In sum, unless a large segment of the protesters would somehow find the genocide of Israel’s Jews to be acceptable, one can presume that most of them are not antisemitic. But the fact that antisemitism is a fringe position does not mean everything is fine. By this point, enough evidence has emerged to suggest it is a problem. As mistaken as it would be to tarnish the entire movement as antisemitic, so too would it be unreasonable to ignore the very real antisemitism on display. A proper assessment must take this into account—while making sure to distinguish genuine antisemitism from other things.

Some of the antisemitism is easy to identify. In other cases, it can be a bit harder to parse. Let’s start with the easy examples.

Uh, yeah, that’s antisemitic

As I discussed in my previous post, the slogan, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” can be antisemitic but is not necessarily so. The same is true of “Zionists, go home,” an expression which has sometimes been directed at pro-Israel counterprotesters.

Again, whether either statement is antisemitic depends on what the speaker intends to say. If “go home” means “back to your dorm room,” there is nothing antisemitic about it. If, instead, it means “go back to Poland,” that is a different story. “Go back to Poland” is one of numerous antisemitic insults heard at Columbia University in recent months. Poland was once a major source of Jewish immigration to Israel and the West, a fact to which the people yelling “go back to Poland” are obviously referring. One cannot interpret the phrase as anything other than an attack on Jews as Jews. Less ambivalent still is “you fucking inbreds,” another antisemitic slur reported at Columbia.

Other campuses too have witnessed antisemitism. At Northwestern, antisemitic images briefly appeared inside the protest encampment, including a crossed-out Star of David and a picture of the university’s Jewish president with devil’s horns. These, again, are obvious references to Jews and Judaism themselves and are therefore antisemitic. Fortunately, encampment organizers were quick to denounce the displays and had them removed.

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This gap in institutional heft between the two communities not only explains the mismatch in university responsiveness but also the rash resort to police intervention against the protest encampments.

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However indefensible such rhetoric may be on the students’ part, it is even less excusable when faculty indulge in it. Take Harvard, where an organization representing professors and staff retweeted a cartoon depicting a hand inside a Star of David holding nooses around the necks of two men, one Arab and the other Black. This is classic antisemitism and is—or should be—easy to identify as such.

Anti-Palestinian racism

If Jewish students have faced bigotry, so too have their Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian counterparts. At Columbia, some of them encountered racist slurs and had the keffiyehs ripped off of their heads. Similar incidents occurred at Emory, where, in addition to racist remarks, Muslim and Arab students claimed they were “followed on campus and filmed by their peers,” according to a federal civil rights complaint.

The University of Massachusetts-Amherst is the subject of another such complaint. There, eighteen people allege that they were “the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted.” “Kill all Arabs,” level Gaza,” and "baby killers” are among the myriad invectives detailed in the complaint.

Compounding the problem is the stunning lack of institutional support afforded to these students, especially compared to their Jewish classmates. When claims of antisemitism have arisen, university leaders have generally been quicker to respond, whether by deploying campus resources or issuing public statements. By contrast, when Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students have reported similar incidents, school authorities were frequently missing in action, forcing the students to file federal complaints against their institutions. As a result, a number of schools face investigations by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, including UMass-Amherst, Emory, Harvard, and Columbia.

The reason behind the disparate treatment is obvious: Israel and its backers can access an extensive pool of bipartisan support in Congress, among donor networks, and in establishment media. Muslim and Arab students cannot. As anyone perusing the homepage of The New York Times of late can attest, prominent pro-Israel figures are making their voices heard and university leaders are feeling the heat.

This gap in institutional heft not only explains the mismatch in university responsiveness but also the rash resort to police intervention against the protest encampments. With the exception of the anti-Vietnam movement, past episodes of student activism rarely brought forth the repressive collaboration between universities and police that we see now. This was not because they were any less unruly; the demonstrations against racial segregation in the 1960s and South African apartheid in the 1980s featured far more turmoil and violence than the current one against Israel.

The encampments today, while disruptive, are generally peaceful. The violence that has occurred has mostly been the work of pro-Israel agitators and police departments themselves. A survey of 553 campus demonstrations found at least 70 in which police used force against protesters. Yet the same analysis could not even identify 20 that witnessed serious violence or property damage. What’s more, in almost half of those 20 cases, the violence was directed at police officers during the course of their interventions and so could not have prompted the police response to begin with.

As Christopher Springman, a law professor at NYU, argued recently, the crackdowns are less the product of the students’ own actions than the antipathy they have engendered in university administrations, law enforcement, state houses, and Washington, D.C.

When antisemitism isn’t so obvious

If the above examples of bigotry are fairly easy to discern, that is because they are directed at a particular community writ large. Somewhat harder to decipher are statements against only part of a given group—say, Israeli Jews only, or Palestinians in Gaza.

Encouraging the use of force against Jewish Israeli civilians is surely contemptible. But is it antisemitic? Calls for violence, we saw last time, are implicit in such slogans as “by any means necessary.” Skeptics might object to this characterization, arguing that the statement references Israeli Jews not because they are Jewish but rather because they are occupying Palestinian land. How, then, could the speaker be accused of antisemitism?

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All over the world, one can find political forces determined to exact collective punishment on other communities. Behind this impulse is a tendency as ubiquitous as it is malign: Our penchant for bestowing humanity on some groups while denying it to others.

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The reason why it is antisemitic to support the collective punishment of Israeli Jews is that their Jewishness is their sole distinguishing feature. It would be one thing if organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine were urging violence against Israel’s Palestinian citizens as well as its Jewish ones (Palestinians in the occupied territories are stateless, but those who live in Israel proper have citizenship). Clearly, however, they envision reprisals against Jewish citizens only, not their Palestinian counterparts.

The authors of the Jerusalem Declaration make the same point. It is antisemitic, they maintain, to deny “the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality.” Defending the use of violence against Israeli Jewish civilians would surely violate this standard.

But in a country like Israel with a universal military draft, can anyone really be considered a civilian? According to this common retort, every Israeli citizen either has served or will serve in the army and, as such, is fair game for vengeance. If this is your belief, it puts you on the wrong side of International Humanitarian Law, which is not a great place to be from a moral standpoint.

This gets us to the heart of the matter. All over the world—in Israel, Palestine, Russia, Sudan, Myanmar, the United States, and beyond—one can find major political forces determined to exact collective punishment on other communities. Behind this impulse is a tendency as ubiquitous as it is malign: Our penchant for bestowing humanity on some groups while denying it to others. At best, it manifests itself as discrimination. At worst, it is a prelude to genocide.

There is an antidote, however. It can be found in International Humanitarian Law and the key tenet on which it is based: The equality of human dignity. We take up this issue next time.