Surprise Casualties in the War of Words Over Antisemitism

Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? Before Hamas attacked Israel, American voters had not arrived at a consensus. They hadn't thought much about it. Asked whether the two terms were synonymous, 62% of respondents to a Brookings Institution poll taken seven months earlier said they didn't know. Fifteen percent replied yes, and 21% said no.

For the time being, that argument is over.

Supporters of Israel won. The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution that "clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism." A task force created to deal with anti-Gaza War protests at Columbia University, a hotbed of campus activism a year ago, has defined anti-Zionism as antisemitism. The policy change was announced in an Israeli newspaper. New York and Harvard universities followed suit.

If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you redefine criticism of the State of Israel and/or Zionism as antisemitism, it turns college campuses into hotbeds of antisemitic bigotry.

"Since the terrorist attack ... antisemitic incidents against Jewish students on college campuses have reached alarmingly high rates, increasing by 700% from 2022 to 2023," Hillel International claimed. The Anti-Defamation League said "anti-Israel incidents of assault, vandalism, harassment, protests/actions and divestment resolutions between June 1, 2023, and May 31, 2024" went up 628% "compared to the same period in 2022-2023."

ADL reports about campus antisemitism are unquestioningly reported by news media outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Colleges and universities have freaked out in response -- firing presidents and professors, banning protest groups, locking down campuses, expelling students and revoking diplomas, turning a blind eye as Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and imprisons their students. These actions are to be expected. Establishmentarian and conservative, university trustees and administrators don't want to be seen as tolerating antisemitism, especially those whose schools depend upon influential Jewish donors who cite this supposed spike in campus antisemitism.

Given those numbers, finding specific incidents of antisemitism should be easy. Yet factual, fully sourced reporting is almost impossible to come by.

Where are the Jewish students, or witnesses of any background, willing and able to go on the record about seeing or hearing acts of antisemitism? Where are the verifiable details? I've pored over hundreds of stories under sensational headlines describing an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred at institutions of higher education. To my frustration, almost everything I read turns out to be hearsay, hysteria or based on unreliable conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

It's amazing that these pieces passed editorial muster. The stories are vague -- there's no who, what, why, when or how. Secondhand accounts abound. Specifics are absent. There is generalized anxiety; Jews on campus, we are told, "feel uncomfortable," are "scared" or "worried" without explaining exactly why. Some supporters of Israel even say they're triggered when they see a classmate wearing a keffiyeh.

The reports of antisemitism we've been hearing about, it appears, have been overstated.

"The problem is that the ADL changed its methodology after October 7," NPR reported on April 25, 2024. "After (the Israel-Hamas War) began, the ADL started to include specific speech expressions in its audit of antisemitism, including certain anti-Zionist phrases and phrases that express support for Hamas. And for extremism researchers, you know, this is not traditional."

So when the ADL receives a report that a protester carried a sign or shouted "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" at a rally, the organization counts it as an "anti-Semitic incident." Even in a New Republic op-ed sympathetic to the protests, the author stretches to find possible antisemitism in a sign posted outside George Washington University's encampment that read "Students will go back home when Israelis go back to Europe." There is an argument to be made, and backers of Israel do, that statements like these evidence antisemitism. But people who protest against Israel, a movement that includes many Jews, disagree. No matter what the House says, there is no widely accepted opinion.

If you oppose Israel, the ADL considers you to be an antisemite -- even if you're Jewish. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explains away antiwar Jews, who are inconvenient to framing that all Jews support Israel. Greenblatt bizarrely calls anti-Gaza War groups like If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace "radical far-left groups" that "represent the ugly core of anti-Zionism." These organizations want the fighting to stop. Their members see a clear distinction between Israel, a nation-state with the most right-wing government in its history, and the Jewish people, most of whom do not live in Israel.

Greenblatt's claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is highly debatable -- even inside the ADL. A disgruntled staffer told The Guardian: "The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism."

Several ADL staffers have quit over Greenblatt's extremist stance. One former ADLer said: "Those were Jewish people who we (as the ADL) were defaming, so that felt extremely, extremely confusing, and frustrating to me. And it makes it harder to talk about that when any criticism of Israel, or anyone who criticizes Israel, just becomes a terrorist."

At face value, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism in order to discredit and suppress legitimate protests against a violent conflict that has cost at least 50,000 lives is dishonest and censorious. Stifling criticism of the biggest recipient of U.S. aid deprives society of the robust political debate necessary to develop intelligent analysis and policies toward the Middle East.

Less noticed and no less toxic is the effect the hysterical crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech has on Jewish people, especially those who feel affinity toward Israel.

The ADL's decision to add anti-Zionist speech to its tally of antisemitic incidents without indicating separate subtotals of each means that there is no way to know if antisemitism as we knew it before Oct. 7, 2023, has increased, decreased or remained at prewar levels. Are synagogues being vandalized more frequently? Are Jewish cemeteries getting desecrated more? We don't know. It's not apples to apples; it's apples plus oranges.

Has antisemitism really increased? There's no way to know. The FBI tracks hate crimes, not incidents that qualify as antisemitism but are legal, like First Amendment-protected speech expressing hatred of Jews. It may seem reasonable to assume that it would, given the powerful emotions surrounding the Gaza conflict. Feelings should never substitute for data. It's insane to suddenly start stripping kids of their diplomas, banning activist groups and deporting peaceful protesters in response to a poorly defined threat.

The ADL is doing no favors to Jews -- a group that has disproportionately suffered horrific violence at the hands of the hateful for centuries -- by insisting that people sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people are antisemites. Nor are the media outlets that accept their misleading statistics. When a Jewish person sees 100 people wearing keffiyehs and chanting "intifada," they may reflexively track the event as personal hatred directed at them when, in fact, they oppose the Netanyahu government's war in Gaza -- and the marchers may themselves be Jewish.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is complex. Opinions are highly diverse, a point illustrated by a September 2024 Israel Democracy Institute poll showing that 28% of Israeli Jews believe Palestinians have the right to their own state. Attempts to radically simplify this complicated situation by equating anti-Israelism to antisemitism may quash the pro-Palestine movement in the short run, but in the long run they will only muddy the truth and scare Jewish students -- and everyone else.

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Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.