Jews who blame Israel for antisemitism are only helping antisemites
Women light candles in the shape of a Star of David during a January symposium on fighting antisemitism in Krakow, Poland. Photo by Omar Marques/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Sruli Fruchter April 12, 2024
When war in Israel begins, antisemitism inevitably follows. It happened in the summer of 2014, and May, 2021, and it’s been happening since Oct. 7.
But does that make the surge in hate Israel’s fault?
To a growing number of American Jews, the answer is clearly yes.
“We can fight antisemitism by how we choose to fight in Gaza,” Rob Eshman recently wrote in the Forward, because “Israel bears some responsibility for it, as do American Jews who support the war as it is currently being prosecuted.”
The “most obvious explanation of the current eruption” of antisemitism is “rage at an ongoing war in which Israel’s conduct has received widespread international condemnation,” Jay Michaelson reasoned, also in the Forward.
These arguments are dangerously misguided. Citing the intensity of Israel’s military campaign — and its vocal Jewish supporters abroad — to explain this upsurge disregards the virulent antisemitism documented mere days after Oct. 7, before Israel even entered Gaza on Oct. 27.
People can oppose Israel’s military strategy, but they are not entitled to justify their antisemitism under that guise. Antisemites alone — not Jews, not Israel, and not “rage” at the two — are responsible for antisemitism. Saying otherwise absolves antisemites of their bigotry.
No, antisemitism isn’t circumstantial
There’s a long history of people, including Jews deeply concerned by antisemitism, linking hatred of Jews to the ways Jews behave. Understanding that history is crucial to understanding today’s accusations against Israel.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt notoriously asserted that Jews have for too long shied away from “their share of responsibility” for their historic persecution, hiding behind the illusion of “perfect innocence.”
Regarding Nazism, for example, Arendt insisted that “an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily.” The fact that antisemitic fantasies like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion somehow came across as believable to so many demonstrated to her that antisemitism had to have at least some roots in reality. If there was no truth to it, Arendt maintained, how could such propaganda be believed?
Her view of the landscape in which antisemitism occurs was limited — and wrong.
In his masterful book Anti-Judaism, Institute for Advanced Study director David Nirenberg tracks antisemitism through various eras of Western history, demonstrating that anti-Jewish hatred persists not because it reflects reality but because it makes “cultural sense.”
That warped but effective logic, Nirenberg writes, developed over millennia in which “the threat of Judaism” became a default stand-in for people to “make sense of and criticize the world.”
Therefore, “anti-Judaism,” Nirenberg writes, “should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.”
It’s so easy for so many to believe the worst about Jews because that’s been the practice for so long. That also explains why, Nirenberg found, Jewish hatred has thrived in regions where no Jews live. You don’t need Jews to hate Jews (or to blame them for the world’s ills).
That’s what Arendt, and others who have argued that Jews sometimes bear circumstantial responsibility for antisemitic upsurges, overlook.. By contextualizing antisemitism so locally, they neglect to examine how systemic antisemitism really is.
But the truth is that antisemitism is a hatred of convenience because the Western tradition is accustomed to blaming Jews for problems — including their own suffering.
Israel’s war is an excuse, not a reason
It’s easy to see how the Jewish state is treated much the same today.
What drove Harvard students to draft “an emergency statement” on Oct. 7 holding Israel responsible for “all ensuing violence,” mere hours after Hamas’ terrorist attack began?
Why has Hamas’ thoroughly documented sexual violence against Israelis been so vigorously trivialized and denied?
The claim that this kind of inexcusable antisemitism is only a misguided way of expressing dismay over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians parallels Arendt’s faulty logic: If the masses believe that the Jewish state and its defenders are the chieftains of unprecedented evil, then that idea must contain truth — otherwise, how could they believe it?
Much like “the threat of Judaism,” the threat of Israel has evolved to become the world’s perpetual boogeyman for all evils. Any of the Jewish state’s supporters, by extension, are the complicit enablers of such evils — and their claims to “perfect innocence” are revoked.
Yes, it’s worth asking: If neither Hamas’ terrorist attack nor Israel’s war ever occurred, is it really possible that antisemitism would have skyrocketed in the same way?
But that perspective is still too narrow. The last six months of war are the proximate cause of antisemitism, not its root. They provide an excuse for anti-Jewish hatred to rear its head, but they are not the reason for it.
As Yair Rosenberg explained in The Atlantic, even before the Oct. 7 attack: “The root cause” of antisemitism “is the hateful ideology of the bigot, who holds every Jew responsible for whatever any other Jew in the world might do, and uses this to justify violence against them.”
In the same way that it would be wrong to, say, instruct left-wing Jews to denounce George Soros to ward off right-wing antisemitism, it is wrong to urge Jews to condemn Israel’s war strategy solely to quell antisemitism.
Antisemitism has no answer
There’s cold comfort in this reality. It’s disorienting for anyone to have their sense of safety shatter in a few short months, as so many diaspora Jews have. So when an answer seems like it could help put a lid on antisemitism — say, fighting back Israel’s military campaign — it’s tempting to accept it.
But appeasing antisemites to prove “loyalty” is a tried-and-failed approach. Antisemitism will never disappear, because antisemitism is not rational.
The unfortunate truth is that no one really knows how to fight it. Task forces, policies, education — everything our societies have already implemented has failed to dismantle thousands of years of systemic anti-Judaism.
What we face today is sadly the heritage of the Jewish people. Antisemitism is a historical precedent, not a historical anomaly. Even if American Jews did abandon Israel, antisemites would not bat an eye — because it was never about Israel.
Correction: The original version of this article misstated the timing of the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. It was in the summer, not March. It also gave an incorrect affiliation for David Nirenberg. He is the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, not a professor at Princeton University.
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