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<\/a>Anti-Zionists who condemn antisemitic crimes are gaslighting us<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\nJonathan S. Tobin<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Last week\u2019s stabbing attack against two Jews in London\u2019s Golders Green neighborhood was just the latest instance of what even local police agreed was an \u201cepidemic\u201d<\/a><\/span> of antisemitic crimes. It was just one of many such incidents in the United Kingdom, the United States, continental Europe and Australia over the course of the last 31 months in which Jews were subjected to violence merely for being conspicuously Jewish.<\/span><\/p>\n Since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, such incidents have become commonplace. The connection between the two is not a coincidence. That\u2019s because the Oct. 7 attacks were the spark for a global surge of Jew-hatred. It\u2019s rooted in the idea that the war to destroy Israel\u2014for which the atrocities of Oct. 7 were just a trailer for what would happen to the rest of the Jewish state should Hamas and its allies triumph\u2014was a righteous cause that enlightened progressives should support.<\/span><\/p>\n And in the name of this supposedly righteous cause of ending the one state on the planet that is Jewish, where half of the world\u2019s Jews just happen to live, a lot of harm is being done to Jews elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n The curious thing about the people who support these awful ideas is that they don\u2019t wish to be considered antisemitic.<\/span><\/p>\n Listen to those like leftist podcaster Hasan Piker<\/a><\/span> and former MSNBC<\/i> host Mehdi Hasan, who openly support Hamas, and they\u2019ll tell you that while they support the destruction of Israel, they want to assure Jews in the Diaspora that they have nothing to fear from them. Or, at least, not as long as they don\u2019t support Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n They are adamant in asserting that anti-Zionism\u2014a movement that denies rights to Jews that no one would think to deny to any other group or people\u2014is not the same thing as antisemitism. Indeed, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, they are proud of their public advocacy against the Jewish state and their nonstop floating of lies about it committing horrible fictional crimes while denying or rationalizing the actual crimes committed against it and its people.<\/span><\/p>\n At the same time, they deny that this has anything to do with the unprecedented worldwide increase in acts of Jew-hatred. Piker was at pains to make this argument in, of all places, JTA<\/i>, which was once the respected primary source of news about the Jewish world. He claims that he\u2019s trying to fight antisemitism while leading the charge in favor of demonizing the Jews of Israel and their supporters abroad.<\/span><\/p>\n Making common cause with right-wing Jew-haters, like former Fox News<\/i> host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson\u2014their moral equivalent at the other end of the political spectrum\u2014says the same thing. That was exhibited this past weekend, when he attempted to explain himself in a largely friendly interview<\/a><\/span> with The New York Times<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n What it boils down to is the claim that the war on the Jewish state is not a war on the Jewish people or Judaism.<\/span><\/p>\n That is why college students and their professors chanting for Jewish genocide (\u201cFrom the river to the sea\u201d) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (\u201cGlobalize the intifada\u201d), or demonstrators on the streets of American cities, could believe that they were not behaving indecently\u2014that they were simply doing the right thing. If you\u2019ve been indoctrinated by toxic leftist ideologies to believe that Israelis and Jews are \u201cwhite\u201d oppressors of Palestinians who are victimized \u201cpeople of color,\u201d then anything, even a genocidal war, done to them can be rationalized.<\/span><\/p>\n This mindset, in which Israel and Zionism are demonized and delegitimized, is the reason why so many left-wing activists and ideologues, especially those who masquerade as mainstream journalists, have spread Hamas propaganda that amounts to blood libels about Israelis committing \u201cgenocide\u201d against Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.<\/span><\/p>\n Those smears are the core content of what Israeli journalist Matti Friedman dubbed \u201cGazology,\u201d<\/a><\/span> or what legal scholar and author Alan Dershowitz calls \u201cPalestinianism.\u201d They are both ways of describing an international movement aimed not at uplifting this populace, but of singling out Israel and the Jews as a malevolent global force that is symbolic of all the world\u2019s ills. It\u2019s a long-told sinister fantasy: Their eradication will magically liberate the oppressed people and causes in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n That is why Jews are being assaulted and murdered in the name of \u201cFree Palestine\u201d in the streets of England, Australia, and, yes, the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n The people who are most prominent in publicizing the ideas that help to incite such crimes, however, are indignant at the claim that what they are doing is antisemitic.<\/span><\/p>\n Their problem is that their advocacy\u2014not to mention the name-calling they indulge in\u2014falls directly into the category of behavior cited in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance\u2019s working definition<\/a><\/span> of antisemitism. And, of course, that\u2019s why antisemites and their enablers and apologists consistently oppose the IHRA.<\/span><\/p>\n Carlson\u2019s platforming of Holocaust denial is an example of Jew-hatred labeled in the definition. But so do his claims, similar to his left-wing equivalents like Piker, that Israelis are the new Nazis. More than that, their repudiation of the right of self-determination to Jews in their own homeland is inherently antisemitic, judging it by double standards not applied to any other nation. Another classic antisemitic trope is their claims that American Jews who support Israel are guilty of \u201cdual loyalty.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Let\u2019s also be clear that what Carlson on the right, along with what Piker and Jewish apologist writer Peter Beinart are doing on the left, is not \u201ccriticism\u201d of the State of Israel and its government. Like all Americans, Israelis publicly criticize their governments for one reason or another all the time. Criticism of the actions of Jerusalem or of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet is not antisemitic. But claiming that Zionism\u2014the national movement of the Jewish people aimed at securing their rights to live in peace, security and sovereignty in their ancient homeland\u2014is not only racist but uniquely illegitimate when compared to the rights of any other people is indeed an expression of Jew-hatred.<\/span><\/p>\n How can they justify this?<\/span><\/p>\n They do so by attempting to redefine Jewish identity in a way that strips it of one of its essential elements. It is not merely a set of theological concepts. It is composed of the Torah and the Hebrew bible, combined with the age-old set of works that interpret the scriptures in the oral law that has been handed down in the Mishna and Gemara, known as the Talmud. But it is also composed of Jewish peoplehood and the connection of that people to the land of Israel. To claim that the land is not integral to Judaism and Jewish identity is to demonstrate illiteracy about the faith and history of the Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet that is exactly what a generation of anti-Zionists, who repeat talking points written by Soviet propagandists in the 1960s and 1970s, is doing. So brazen are they that those like Max Strasser, the anti-Zionist Jew who is the \u201cIdeas\u201d editor of The New York Times<\/i>, are actually prepared to mock the idea that the role of Israel in Judaism is nearly as integral to it as circumcision, as he did in a recent book review.<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Strasser\u2019s point (like that of Beinart, Piker and Carlson) is essentially to claim that the only way to be a \u201cgood\u201d Jew is to pretend that the Jewish connection to their homeland is a modern invention of racist fascists. They ignore the fact that it is noted throughout the Torah, as well as part of the liturgy that religious Jews have invoked three times a day when they prayed for millennia.<\/span><\/p>\n Still, to justify this rewriting of history and Judaism to suit their politics and ideologies, they must do more than that. To defend this shameless set of lies, they must also accuse Israelis of being, in Strasser\u2019s formulations, \u201cmonsters\u201d that moral people\u2014Jewish and non-Jewish alike\u2014abhor.<\/span><\/p>\n That is why Israel\u2019s moral and legal war of defense against genuine genocidal monsters, like the Palestinian Arab supporters of Hamas and the other terrorist groups that comprise their national movement, must be falsely portrayed as \u201cgenocide.\u201d That is why the sole democracy in the Middle East must be libeled as a form of \u201capartheid,\u201d and its American supporters smeared as conspiracists who are determined to drag America into wars against its interests.<\/span><\/p>\n Stripped of their disingenuous moral preening about human rights, anti-Zionists and their claim to be concerned about antisemitism can be seen for what it is: a disingenuous smokescreen whose purpose is to conceal backing for a cause that has one purpose. And that is the destruction of Israel and the mass murder of half of the world\u2019s Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n The debate about Zionism inside the Jewish world before the creation of the modern-day State of Israel was different from what is now asserted by the anti-Zionists. As Jonathan Brent, the head of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research\u2014the home of the archives of the pre-Holocaust European Jewish world\u2014told me in a podcast interview<\/a><\/span>, the debate among Jews prior to 1939 was not about an Israel that didn\u2019t yet exist.<\/span><\/p>\n At that time, the arguments between the socialist Bund (extolled by anti-Zionists like Strasser), which wanted the largely Yiddish-speaking Jewish population to have autonomous rights in Eastern Europe, and Zionists were about how best to preserve Jewish life. Jews faced existential threats from Nazis and Communists, as well as traditional forms of Jew-hatred rooted in the Christian religion and its institutions. As it turned out, the hopes of the Bundists for Jewish survival in Europe died in the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags. Zionism provided the only viable path for Jewish survival, even though its triumph came too late to save European Jewry.<\/span><\/p>\n To oppose Israel\u2019s existence now, whether in the name of an extinct Jewish movement or fashionable leftist ideologies rooted in toxic ideas about race, is not merely to ignore this basic history. It involves the contemplation of, if not actually cheering for, a new Holocaust in which more than 7 million Jewish lives would be snuffed out to accommodate the Arab and Islamist intolerance for any non-Muslim sovereign entity in the Middle East, coupled with Marxist opposition to Jewish nationalism.<\/span><\/p>\n Seen clearly, it\u2019s easy to understand why the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism in liberal outlets like the Times<\/i>, as well as left and right-wing podcasts hosted by Piker and Carlson, has been accompanied by an increase in the targeting of Jews for violence. Anti-Zionism is not distinct from antisemitism; it is just a variant of it.<\/span><\/p>\n The denial of the connection between the two\u2014and the resulting violence that is its inevitable corollary\u2014is not any more of an intellectually coherent argument than the efforts of the likes of Strasser, Piker or Carlson to define Judaism or antisemitism in a way that exonerates their hateful advocacy. It is nothing more than gaslighting and should be treated as such. News outlets like The Times<\/i> that attempt to portray this compendium of hoaxes and conspiracy theories as an enlightened cause or a well-meaning difference of opinion that deserves a hearing aren\u2019t just wrong. They are as intellectually and morally bankrupt as those who are actually carrying out the antisemitic assaults and murders that they self-righteously claim to deplore.<\/span><\/p>\n Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em> Anti-Zionists who condemn antisemitic crimes are gaslighting us Jonathan S. Tobin Attempts to separate the movement to accomplish the genocide of half the world\u2019s Jews in Israel from attacks on them elsewhere have zero credibility. People hold signs during a vigil outside the Australian Consulate in New York City on Dec. 14, 2025, following a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130296"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130313,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130296\/revisions\/130313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAttempts to separate the movement to accomplish the genocide of half the world\u2019s Jews in Israel from attacks on them elsewhere have zero credibility.<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
![](\"https:\/\/static.jns.org\/dims4\/default\/4fe4381\/2147483647\/strip\/true\/crop\/4300x2421+0+0\/resize\/1000x563!\/format\/webp\/quality\/90\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.jns.org%2F28%2F56%2F42ae90fc4103bf26c6994cfb59ec%2Fanti-zionism-is-jew-hate.jpg\")
People hold signs during a vigil outside the Australian Consulate in New York City on Dec. 14, 2025, following a terrorist attack in Bondi Beach where two gunmen opened fire on a Chanukah event, killing 15 people and injuring dozens of others. Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld\/Getty Images.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nThey don\u2019t want to be called \u2018antisemites\u2019<\/b><\/h4>\n
Demonizing Jewish rights<\/b><\/h4>\n
Redefining antisemitism to exonerate the Jew-haters<\/b><\/h4>\n
Israel and Judaism<\/b><\/h4>\n
The pre-Shoah debate<\/b><\/h4>\n
\n![](\"https:\/\/me.jnsi.org\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Jonathan-S.-Tobin-480x480.png\")
Jonathan S. Tobin<\/strong> is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS \u201cThink Twice\u201d podcast, both the weekly video program and the \u201cJonathan Tobin Daily\u201d program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
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