Should being pro-Israel be a prerequisite for Jews to be allowed to enter Israel? Photo by Valerie Macon / AFP / Getty Images

Contributing Columnist Emily Tamkin April 8, 2025

The militant Zionist group Betar made headlines earlier this year for compiling lists of international students for President Donald Trump’s administration to consider deporting over their criticism of the United States and Israel. Now, Betar has announced a new kind of list of supposed undesirables. But this time, they’re Jewish.

The group has “submitted a list of names of Diaspora Jews who we recommend be banned from Israel to numerous Israeli government leaders,” the group posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, last week, alleging that the Jews in question “pose a danger to the Jewish state.”

If Betar were only making lists of non-Jewish immigrants to deport over their views on Israel, that itself would be counter to the fight against antisemitism. Treating antisemitism like an imported problem ignores its deep domestic roots, to say nothing of the ways in which xenophobia and antisemitism feed off one another. But to add lists of Jews gives the game away completely. The project here is not fighting antisemitism. It is about policing the borders of Jewishness.

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According to the way of thinking that Betar is advancing — with increased prominence, given its (unconfirmed) assertion that its work is aiding the Trump administration in its effort to arrest and detain students involved in pro-Palestinian protests — only certain Jews are worthy of just treatment. And that should terrify, and anger, all Jews. It should also inform us as to the actual nature of Betar’s project.

What Betar is openly suggesting is that if you are the right kind of Jew — meaning, by and large, a pro-Israel one (as defined by Betar) — you deserve not only protection under the law, but for the law to bend others to its will for you. If however, you are the wrong kind of Jew — say, one who supports the idea of rights and liberties for Palestinians — you deserve to be publicly called out and punished.

In fairness, sort of, to Betar, they are not the only example of this. In fact, part of what’s most alarming here is that Betar’s actions are in some ways a logical extension of ideas long pushed by far less extreme groups.

Yes, the Anti-Defamation League has added Betar to its list of extremist organizations. But that same organization’s insistence since Oct. 7, 2023 that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism — and its leadership’s decision to label protesters against the war as antisemites and possibly Iranian proxies — have also, given the significant number of Jewish protesters, been a way of insisting that only some Jews are worthy of support.

Further, many Jewish groups have tried to push for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition to be codified as the governing definition of antisemitism, even though critics have long warned that it too rigidly legislates what it means to be Jewish.

“By legally enshrining support for Israel as a defining characteristic of Jewish identity, the new definition of antisemitism imposes a straitjacket of Zionist identity on American Jews,” wrote the Israeli scholars Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, “in effect telling them that certain political positions are incompatible with being authentically Jewish.”

Still, even if the idea that some Jews are more worthy of defending than others has long been a subtext in the Jewish mainstream, recent developments should make clear that that it is now becoming the text itself. It isn’t only that Trump’s administration is cynically using the cause of antisemitism for its ideological ends (although it is), but that, even to the extent that any of this is about the safety of Jews, it’s not about safety for all Jews. It’s not even really about the safety of some Jews because they are Jews, but rather because they adhere to a certain political or ideological program.

What Betar’s list — and its decision to take to social media to call out individual Jews as “everything wrong with Jewry” — will do is make it harder for Jews to feel safe to participate as full members of society. Jews have always been endangered by any effort to police and define their identities; the fact that now that effort is in part coming from their own community will not change that.

Some might here note that it’s only natural that efforts to promote Jewish safety will help some Jews more than others. For example, demands to invest in synagogue security help preserve Jewish safety for Jews who attend synagogue. (Although some Jews of color have argued that, actually, those efforts do exactly the opposite.) Per Pew’s 2020 study on American Jews, just one fifth of American Jews attend religious services at least monthly.

But there is a difference between promoting Jewish safety in a way that benefits some more directly than others, and promoting safety for some Jews at the direct expense of others. The latter only keeps people safe from dissenting views.

What’s kept safe here are the boundaries of Jewish identity, the fences people try to put up to dictate what it is to be Jewish. That actual Jews will be hurt in their construction doesn’t seem to matter much.

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