A student asked about the poppy in my lapel today after class. I explained what it was for, and that I wore it as an act of remembrance for my father, who served in the Second World War, and for all of the people who have died and continue to die in our wars. She said that it was a beautiful symbol, and that she wished that she had a poppy to wear to honor the memories of the Palestinian and Israeli dead in the current war, and for all of the people who have died and continue to die in our wars.
I took the poppy from may lapel and gave it to her. Her eyes teared up, and she expressed her gratitude, and pinned the flower, very carefully, to her hijab.
I wear a poppy during the week leading up to Remembrance Day every year. It is a way for me to honor the memory of my father, who died in 2012 and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. Remembrance Day is also what my spouse has often called “Canada’s High Holidays.” It is an occasion when Canadians come together to reflect on the cost of war in a shared, collective moment. And that moment is deeply important to me.
This year, Remembrance Day fell on a Saturday; my spouse and I quietly watched the service at the Cenotaph in Ottawa on the CBC, observing the traditional two minutes of silence, bracketed by “The Last Post” and “The Flowers of the Forest,” and “The Rouse.” In other years, when 11 November was a teaching day, I would always stop the class for the two minutes, and then talk with the students about war, destruction, and peace.
It seems that I have been talking to my students a great deal about war and peace in the last few weeks. About a quarter to a third of them are Muslims and many, including the student to whom I gave my poppy, are Palestinians with relatives seeking shelter at this very minute under the bombs and missiles of the IDF. Campus is festooned with pro-Palestinian posters and handbills, and a great many students are wearing Keffiyehs and “Free Palestine” T-shirts and hoodies. Some walk across the quad between my department’s building and the library with the red, black, white, and green Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders like a shawl or a cape.
There are reports in the media that tell me that I should be worried; that there is a “surge of antisemitism” on American and Canadian campuses. As an identifiably Jewish man who wears a yarmulke and beard, you might think, I should be especially nervous. All of my students know that I am Jewish – a fact of identity that I sometimes use to make a pedagogical point – and, the media’s conventional wisdom holds, I should feel particularly insecure on a campus with a disproportionately large Muslim student population.
And I don’t. On the contrary, I feel safe and sheltered as I field questions from Hasan, Amira, Abdelraman, Asiyah, and the others. They are frightened, but also curious; they want to know what is happening, and how it came to happen; as their history professor, yarmulke or not, it is my obligation to answer their questions and find common ground. The poppy showed me that such understanding is possible.
I have been shocked and appalled by the efforts of the media and, above all, Zionist members of my own community, not only to deny that such understanding is possible, but to undermine any possibility of it. That is the point of the canard about a “rise in antisemitism,” and the lengths they go to shut down legitimate criticism of the State of Israel and its brutal offensive in Gaza. Indeed, as Rep. Rashida Tlaib discovered this week, the mere repetition of a pro-Palestinian slogan, however ambiguous or unfortunate is enough to bring down official censure, while some of her congressional colleagues have been able to call for the murder of Palestinian civilians with no consequences.
In social media, for a Jew – even an observant, yarmulke-wearing Jew like me – to question the rectitude of the IDF’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza, or to suggest that, maybe, we should take Palestinian freedom and self-determination seriously, is to invite unending abuse. To many of my Zionist shvesterkind, my social media commentary (which follows below) makes me a “kapo,” a “traitor,” a “self-hating Jew,” and even not a Jew at all.
Yet, I found a moment of humanity and connection with a young Palestinian student in my class in an act of remembrance. I am rarely inclined to hope, but I found it then, as she pinned my poppy to her hijab.
***
Anyone who believes that there has been a “rise in antisemitsm” in the last weeks, months, or years, is either delusional or hasn’t been paying attention. Antisemitism is a feature of our civilization, and it is not merely hateful or violent acts. For many years, its overt expression was constrained by good taste but, like other forms of racism, it was always there, unspoken. People still hated Jews – they simply kept it to themselves. The last few years have merely undermined good taste, and they’re not keeping it to themselves anymore. It isn’t that they are more antisemitic, they’re just more shameless and vocal about it. And, being vocal about it, they are more inclined to act on it.
By “they,” of course, I mean white Christians (both religious and secular) at all points of the political spectrum.
The “rise of antisemitism” that many people in my community are referring to, however, is something different. They mean the public expression of anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist animus. A good deal of this – especially from the white, Gentile left – is certainly antisemitic. I have heard “the Jews” referenced often enough as the villains in the current tragedy it to be anything else.
But part of this is due to a decades-long effort by the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies in the Diaspora to equate the State of Israel with the People of Israel. In this equation, articulated even before 1948, but indelibly inscribed since 1967, State of Israel is all Jews, and all Jews are the State of Israel. In its most explicit, maximalist-Zionist formulation, one can only be a Jew if one uncritically walks in lockstep with the official Zionist line and davens facing Jerusalem, making proper obeisance to the State of Israel. Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy infamously called those of us who do not do this “un-Jews.”
I call this “Third Temple Judaism,” where the Temple has been rebuilt, with all of the attendant religious and social obligations, but it is embodied in the State of Israel. The wages of those who do not make offerings to this new Temple is cherem.
This equation of Judaism with Zionism, and Am Yisrael with Medinat Yisrael is, in fact, the foundation of most of the “rise in antisemitism” that Israelis and Diaspora Zionists lament in the anti-Israel rhetoric of the current moment. Make no mistake: antisemitism runs deep in our culture, many antisemites are taking advantage of current events to vent their bile (though, to be fair, a good many antisemites are publicly supporting the State of Israel), there are antisemites on the left and in the anti-Zionist movement, as there are throughout our society, and many Palestinian activists and militants (not the least of whom are Hamas and Hezbollah) are explicitly antisemitic.
But this isn’t really what Israelis and Diaspora Zionists are referring to. The “rise in antisemitism” they deplore has been almost (but only almost) entirely explicit and public condemnation of the policies of the State of Israel and the attendant critique of the legitimacy of the very existence of the State of Israel (as in “from the river to the sea).* And this is only antisemitism if one buys the Zionist canard that the State of Israel is all Jews, and all Jews are the State of Israel.
To believe this shibboleth is to deny the legitimacy, indeed the very possibility, of Diaspora Jewish life independent of the State of Israel and is, paradoxically enough, antisemitic. After all, one of the basic premises of antisemitism is that “the Jews” are a foreign other in the body politic and do not belong among Gentiles. But, also, it bears noting that the perceived “rise in antisemitism” of the last has mostly been a rise in anti-Israel, anti-Zionist rhetoric – often over-heated, sophomorically performative rhetoric, to be sure – that is only “antisemitic” because the State of Israel and its Diaspora proxies have made it so.
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* For the record, I regard the existence of the State of Israel to be entirely, and legally, legitimate, and a matter not worth relitigating. It was a positive creation of international law, and that legal act – UN Resolution 181 – that also establishes the legal legitimacy of a Palestinian State. The State of Israel has a right to exist and, because it does, so does a Palestinian state. (I’m not going to argue about this.)
***
I am not sure how many of you know that I was involved in anti-Nazi activism and fighting online antisemitism back in the 1990s and early-2000s. There’s a whole chapter about it in my first book. I worked with the B’Nai Brith League of Human Rights, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the Nizkor Project. In doing this, and especially in my journalism, I became well-acquainted with antisemites, Nazis, and Holocaust deniers. I spoke to and interviewed a whole lot of them, including Ernst Zundel, David Irving, Milton John Kleim, Gary Laucke, Greg Raven, William Pierce and even, albeit briefly, David Lane. I studied a cache of documents from Elohim City, and I have read most of the primary literature, from Mein Kampf (a pretty shitty book, as it turns out) to the Turner Diaries (an even shittier book, if that’s possible.)
I guess that you could say that virulent antisemitism is something that I know pretty well. I have some expertise on the subject.
In all this time, I began to realize that the worst thing that one could do with antisemitism was to attempt to silence it. On one hand, as Ken McVay, the founder of the Nizkor Project, used to say, “you can only stomp on cockroaches when they crawl out from under the fridge,” so it is important to provide antisemites the opportunity to expose themselves. On the other hand, silencing them will not change their minds and, in this era of pervasive internetworking, they will simply find another means to promote their hate – though now with the validation of “dangerous” and “rebellious” ideas. More importantly, the most extreme antisemites are only the most obvious manifestation of an ideology that has great purchase across a vast swath of our society. You much shut up Ernst Zundel and prevent him from publishing and distributing Richard Verrall’s Did Six Million Really Die?, but it won’t that great many people already disposed to think so, from questioning in their own minds whether the Holocaust happened and, if it is a hoax, then who are the powerful people with the ability to pull it off.
McVay was of the opinion that we should always confront antisemitic speech and rhetoric – and other forms of hate – in the open, and in the public commons, to discredit it and undermine its legitimacy with the patient work “deconstruction, critique, and counter-argument.”* You won’t change the mind of the antisemite, he argued, but you will certainly minimize its impact on what he called “the gallery.” And it will undermine the confidence of less-committed antisemites in the myths of antisemitism. Sol Littman, at the SWC, demurred, and was willing to shut down the then-embryonic Internet to shut down antisemitism. I sided with McVay, which led to my rather dramatic (and public) falling out with Littman.
These are principles that I hold to today, in the context of war on Gaza. There is a whole lot of rhetoric out there about the State of Israel and Palestinian oppression. Most of it is legitimate, some of it is performative and unnecessarily (and counter-productively) tendentious, and a small quantity is antisemitic. To be clear: Criticizing the State of Israel, denouncing its actions, advocating for Palestinian statehood and human rights, even questioning the legitimacy of the State of Israel, is not antisemitism. Claiming that the State of Israel only gets away with the oppression of Palestinians, or that all Jews are Islamophobes, or that “the time has come to drown the Jews in the sea” is antisemitism. So is graffiti on Jewish organization properties and harassing visible Jews in public.
The thing is… So is calling those of us who support Palestinian statehood and human rights and are critical of the State of Israel “self-hating Jews,” or “kapos,” or “un-Jews,” or “Nazis,” or “traitors.” And this antisemitism is being deployed regularly by predominantly-Jewish Zionists.
The point of all of this is that most of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist speech and rhetoric out there is not antisemitic, unless you buy the Zionist canard that the State of Israel is all Jews, and all Jews are the State of Israel. And that shibboleth, deployed by Zionists and anti-Zionists alike, is in-and-of-itself antisemitic. (If you believe that, and promote that idea, then you are an antisemite. Please engage in some self-criticism.) And that speech must be defended, even if you (or I) find some of it overly tendentious and excessive. It must not be silenced.
Nor, even should that rhetoric (on both sides) that spills over into overt antisemitism. That speech must be confronted, delegitimized, and undermined – and we cannot do that if we silence it.
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* McVay said that this changed when the speech became an act, and I agree with him. But that means that we always have to vigilant and listen carefully to the speech.
***
I keep reading about a rise in antisemitism in the wake of the Gaza war. Yet virtually all of the antisemitic attacks that have received (with one exception) have come from Jewish Zionists. That bears thinking about, especially since the usual antisemites – the Christian nationalists, the neo-Nazis, the penis obsessives, the conspiracy theorists, and the rest – have been surprisingly quiet. Are they just sitting back with their popcorn, enjoying the spectacle of Jews beating up on Jews?
***
The outpouring of sympathy for Israelis on 7 Oct was spontaneous and authentic. We were all horrified by the vicious attacks and deeply concerned by the plight of the hostages. One month later, that sympathy has all-but-evaporated. For the most part, the only people who publicly support the State of Israel are the reliable, old-guard advocates in government and the media (and there are indications that this advocacy is soft) and hardcore, ideological, maximalist Zionists in the Jewish Disapora, whose backing is guaranteed in any and all circumstances.
The State of Israel’s brutal, murderous response completely squandered global sympathy to an extent that I have never seen. In the last month, Israelis have gone from being the victims of a savage terrorist attack to bloodthirsty killers of Palestinian children. I am sure that the maximalist Zionists will blame someone else for this – probably the “self-hating” “un-Jews” in the diaspora who won’t walk in lockstep with the State of Israel.
But the State of Israel has only itself to blame. The disproportionate response, the hardline, flat refusal to even consider a ceasefire, the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians, the genocidal rhetoric in the Knesset and on the streets, and all the rest might play well Beitar Illit and Gi’vat Ze’ev, but it has poisoned global opinion. And, as much as they believe that they are exempt from such things, Israelis live in a global community.
The State of Israel’s existence depends on support from the international community. It is a product of international law. Many of the countries that have steadfastly supported the State of Israel are democracies that are sensitive to the opinion of their voters, and that opinion is shifting away – far away – from sympathy.
The ruthless military campaign that the State of Israel is pursuing against Gaza (and no longer just against Hamas, no matter what Netanyahu says) in order to ensure its security, seems to be doing just the opposite. I have a hunch that this is a historical turning point after 75 years.
***
A reminder: One can be critical of the State of Israel, wish it to disappear and be replaced by a multi-ethnic state, or even to question its legitimacy, without being an antisemite. As Rep. Tlaib noted: ““It is important to separate people and government. The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent. And it’s been used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.”
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Does anyone know of a time when Congress censured a member for Islamophobic, anti-Arab, or anti-Palestinian rhetoric? I know of a great many members of Congress who have deployed such rhetoric, but I cannot think of one who was ever censured for it.
***
A reminder: While the State of Israel claims to be fighting a war against Hamas, it is bombing and killing the people of Gaza, the vast majority of whom are not members of Hamas. The vast majority of the victims of the State of Israel’s war against Hamas are civilians, including the 4,000 children who have died. These are things that we need to keep in mind.
***
I wonder how long it will take for Zionists and Israelis to just become disgusted by the slaughter. Or if.