Israel’s war is making American Jews unsafe. So why are so many still supporting it?
Reckoning with surging antisemitism means reckoning with Israel’s role in fomenting it
Palestinians gather in front of a residential building hit in an overnight Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 9. Photo by Yasser Qudihe/Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman March 14, 2024
It is deeply uncomfortable to point out that the way the Israeli government is conducting the war against Hamas in Gaza is making American Jews less safe.
I can already hear the accusations: That I’m rationalizing antisemitism. That I’m undermining the sacrifice and bravery of Israeli soldiers on the front lines. That I’m worrying about my relative safety here when Israelis and Palestinians face far greater threats there. That I’m overlooking the enormous, traumatic violations of Oct. 7.
But I’m raising the point for a reason. This period of rising antisemitism is different from any other I’ve witnessed in my life. And even though a wartime escalation in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. has frightened many Jews, one of the things that has made this moment so distinctive also gives us reason for hope.
Since many anti-Jewish actions over the past six months have been a response to Israel’s military actions in Gaza, the damage may not be permanent. It may even be fixable.
“We used to say that Israel was the solution to antisemitism,” Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum told me. “It could ‘quell the fires of antisemitism.’ And now we see that it can fuel the flames.”
Berenbaum, who helped oversee the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum beginning in 1988, stressed that antisemitism was on the rise before Oct. 7 — especially emanating from the political right. A change in Israel’s policies won’t obliterate hatred that has simmered for centuries.
But the war is “exacerbating what’s there,” he said.
What that means is something relatively new in Jewish history. We are not just helpless victims, as in the past. We are also perpetrators. What we do affects what is done to us.
That’s not to say Jewish actions ever justify antisemitism — just to acknowledge that they can influence it.
Which means that to a greater extent than ever before, we can fight antisemitism by how we choose to fight in Gaza.
Israel didn’t choose to go to war on Oct. 7. Hamas did, with its barbaric attack on southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 280 hostages. Hamas also shares responsibility for the war’s duration: The group rejected the most recent attempt at a ceasefire deal, and has refused to either surrender or return the more than 100 hostages still in Gaza — the two quickest, surest ways to end the fighting.
But so long as the battle drags on, Israel’s choices about how to conduct it matter for Jewish safety everywhere — not just in Israel.
Israel’s retaliatory attack against Hamas in Gaza has to date claimed more than an estimated 30,000 Palestinian lives. The images of death, destruction, terror and struggle are posted hourly on social media. They are, plainly, horrifying.
In his latest New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof quoted from the plaintive emails of a Ph.D candidate in Gaza who detailed the slow death of his sister under siege; the near-death of one of his sons, wounded by an Israeli bomb; and how his cousin’s two-month-old baby starved to death for lack of breast milk.
Few of these details — which paint a portrait of a military power with a brutal approach to civilian casualties — figure into the gloomy ways in which prominent American Jews are framing the uptick in domestic antisemitism.
“The superficial sense of security that many Jews feel on a daily basis in the contemporary world turns out to be paper-thin,” writes Noah Feldman in a new Time cover story, “The New Antisemitism.”
“Impassioned support for the Palestinian cause metastasized into the hatred of Jews,” Franklin Foer adds in The Atlantic’s latest cover story, “The Golden Age of American Jewry Is Ending.”
“I knew antisemitism had seduced educated people in other eras,” said Bari Weiss in a Feb. 25 “State of World Jewry” speech at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, later published in The Free Press. “But I did not expect a wave of antisemitism to originate with them in ours.”
Each of these thinkers — whose words reflect the concerns of broad swaths of American Jewry — has acknowledged that legitimate criticism of Israel is acceptable. But none of them have openly questioned whether Israel can lower the heat on Jews around the world by changing its own behavior.
Isaac Saul, in a must-read essay titled “The Zionist Case for a Ceasefire,” argues that the way Israel has conducted the war “has made Israelis and Jews less safe, by destabilizing the region and crossing the line of what most of the world views as a proportionate or reasonable response.
“It has not deterred violence,” Saul wrote, “but drawn its neighbors into more.”
How to fight antisemitism, really
None of this absolves Hamas, its backers in Iran, or Israel’s other enemies from blame. And it doesn’t absolve those taking advantage of the war to express genuinely antisemitic sentiments, or to attack Jews.
It just means that we can’t overcome this wave of new antisemitism if we’re not honest about Israel’s role in fomenting it.
On the homefront, fighting back means calling out truly antisemitic rhetoric, and calling in those who, in efforts to critique Israel’s military campaign, stray close to hate speech. It means standing up to venues that cancel Jewish programming out of fear of antisemitic threats.
That happened in Chicago this week when the House of Blues scuttled a concert by the American Jewish musician Matisyahu; in LA when a popular book store, reacting to phone threats, canceled a talk by American Jewish actor Brett Gellman; and several weeks ago when an LA synagogue, buckling to fears of antisemitism, moved its prayer services. Cowering has never been the most effective way to defeat antisemitism.
But it also means pressing Israel and Hamas for an immediate ceasefire deal, calling for humanitarian relief for Gaza residents under siege, supporting those Israelis who seek a peaceful political solution with Palestinians, and standing with those Israelis who want a change in leadership.
“Only a confirmed antisemite,” Berenbaum told me, “could believe that the people of Israel have the leadership they deserve.”
The real battle in Jewish life, Yuval Noah Harari said in a recent talk to an American audience, is between those who see no contradiction between Jewish and Palestinian rights, and the ascendant movement for Jewish supremacy that comprises Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
“This is the great struggle we are trying to solve,” Harari said, “and if we fail — if they succeed in realizing this messianic vision — it will change the meaning of Judaism all over the world. You will all have to face the consequences.”
Over the past five months, we have seen a sample of what those consequences might look like. But in contrast to previous times in our history, we can do something about it — because Israel bears some responsibility for it, as do American Jews who support the war as it is currently being prosecuted. A just compromise between Israel and the Palestinians could help turn the antipathy toward Jews and Israel from a rolling boil to a gentle simmer. Antisemitism will never completely go away, but we can help it go slack.
The world hasn’t turned against Jews. Tellingly, Time illustrated its cover story on “The New Antisemitism” with a full page photo of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, on which the German authorities projected the phrase “Never Again Is Now.”
That continuing goodwill is a reason to be hopeful — and a reason to hold Israel to account.
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