Criticism of Israel’s war and occupation is not anti-Semitism

And claiming that it is harms the fight against the very real and growing threat posed by anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is a plague. And one that is, as I have realised in the aftermath of Hamas’s horrific terror attack in Israel on October 7, far more endemic than I was willing to accept before, despite having been questioning and confronting this hate all my life as the child of an American Jewish and Catholic German couple.

Anti-Semitism, its prevalent nature, and the shame and guilt for the Holocaust that sit at the heart of Germany’s memory culture have indelibly shaped my life.

My late grandmother never acknowledged being aware of Germany’s crimes towards Europe’s Jews. I did not believe her, but it did not matter. Whenever we came to visit, she always insisted that my siblings and I tour the Jewish cemetery, Europe’s oldest, in the city of Worms, where she spent her final years.

My parents separated when I was young, but my mother often told us the story of how my elder brother and I were baptised in the same Catholic Church where my father had gone to school because my atheist father wanted to please his devout mother. It was only as an adult that I learned from my father that it was in fact my Jewish mother who insisted on it. Less than 50 years prior European Jews spent fortunes acquiring fake baptismal certificates in an attempt to escape the Nazis. My mother, like countless others, clearly knew the revival of this ancient hatred always loomed as a threat.

Today, however, it appears the world has turned upside down. The fight against the scourge of anti-Semitism is under threat from those who refuse to criticise Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip because they conflate such action with anti-Semitism.

Nowhere is this more clear than the reactions to a now infamous March 3 tweet by Congressman Mike Collins. On that day, an openly anti-Semitic far-right account posted a tweet implying the author of a Washington Post article that included a tongue-in-cheek reference to the US being built on “stolen land” is Jewish. Collins responded by tweeting “Never was a second thought”. To this day, Collins refuses to apologise – he even accused his many critics of “gripping at straws”.

The saga made Collins the second member of Georgia’s nine-strong Republican congressional delegation to have engaged in blatant anti-Semitism and to refuse to apologise for it.

Another member of the delegation, Marjorie Taylor Greene, had risen to infamy for a Facebook post she made in 2018, before she was elected, where she implied “Jewish space lasers” (though she never used that precise term) were behind the 2018 wildfires in California.

Far too many who should know better have gone along with these arguments. The will-they-or-won’t-they around the fates of UPenn and Harvard’s presidents received far more media attention than Collins’s comments or Greene’s volte-faces have. One of the latter’s board members, hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, publicly recast himself in the effort to take down Harvard’s president, and warned that his alma mater was becoming anti-Semitic. He has remained shtum with regards to Collins and Greene’s anti-Semitism, however.

This is not just an issue in political life but across society. Yes, Kanye West lost his billion-dollar Adidas contract in October 2022 after engaging in a flurry of anti-Semitic statements, but it has since been revealed the firm was aware of equally troubling, if less public, comments for nearly a decade prior. And he remains a best-selling world-touring headliner.

Elon Musk also only briefly had to deal with the fallout from publicly endorsing a claim that “Jewish communities” were pushing “dialectical hatred against whites” last November. Musk’s response that his tweet was “foolish” stopped some way short of an apology, and yet 12 days later he was feted on a visit to Israel by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

These days, many of those who say they are fighting anti-Semitism seem only interested in fighting against anti-Zionism and silencing all criticism of Israel.

For many of Israel’s most ardent supporters, there is no space in the debate for those who criticise Israel’s actions, even those who root their criticism in their own Jewish identity. Nowhere is this more clear than in Germany, where German Jews, many of them Israelis, make up a disproportionate percentage of those detained for protesting against Tel Aviv’s warpath.

Yes, some have allowed Israel’s wanton response to October 7 and its decades-long occupation of the West Bank to cloud their judgement and crossed the line into anti-Semitism in their criticism of Zionism. And numerous genuine anti-Semites have jumped on the bandwagon of defending Palestine to further their own agenda.

But all criticism of Israel, and especially criticism of the way Israel conducts its war against Hamas in Gaza, is not anti-Semitism and treating it as such harms the urgent, crucial fight against the growing threat posed by this ancient scourge.

Violence begets violence.

“Never again” must mean never again by anyone, against anyone. If this call is not applied to Palestinians, there can never realistically be any hope that others will apply it to Jews – especially in an era in which so much anti-Semitism goes ignored because it does not fit into the pro-Israel/pro-Palestine dichotomy. Hatred must be fought everywhere and in all its guises, including among those whose fight against anti-Semitism is dependent upon how it relates to Israel.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect media’s editorial stance.