Disentangling antisemitism from political criticism of Israel - opinion

One approach to understanding this intellectual and moral morass lies in an understanding of what Prof. Bernard Lewis, one of the greatest authorities on Islam and the Near East, had coined the “new political antisemitism.” In his groundbreaking commentary in the December 2005 edition of the American Scholar, Lewis noted that religious and racial antisemitism has given way to an ideological hatred of the Jewish collective, an expression of “cosmic evil” that has defied territorial compromise between Palestinians and Israelis.

Professor Lewis urged his readers to understand that the modern metastasizing hatred of Israel is rooted in part in the masquerading of antisemitism as political critique. This intellectual and moral chaos embodies the thesis of the 2020 compendium, Israelophobia and the West, that this writer co-authored and compiled over the course of a year’s research into the masking of political antisemitism as legitimate criticism of Israel. Antisemitism masked as policy critique in Western circles has given voice to and exacerbated the ideological assault against the existence of Israel as the democratic nation state of the Jewish people.

The tendency of international institutions, especially the UN and its agencies, to pass off antisemitic statements as political critique has been concisely articulated by Alan Baker, Israel’s former ambassador to Canada and previous longtime legal adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Baker wrote in Israelophobia and the West:

“The extent of negative generalization and vilification through the use of internationally recognized ‘buzz words’  consistently targeting only Israel, the Jewish state, to the exclusion of any other state or people, very easily transposes itself into delegitimizing propaganda against the Jewish people. For example, the deliberate and easy use of empty or inaccurate expressions, such as ‘OPT’ Occupied Palestinian Territories, lacking legal or factual basis, serves as a popular engine to influence the public, the media, international fora, and nongovernmental and international organizations.”

Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus of Harvard Law School, has noted that antisemitism against Israel embodies critics’ confusion between what Israel does as policy, and what they accuse Israel of being – an “apartheid” or “Nazi” white supremacist regime.

Bernard Lewis writes in the American Scholar, “This is where the third phase of antisemitism arises, which for want of a better term we might call political-cum-ideological Judeophobe. Race? Oh no, we wouldn’t have anything to do with that. Religious prejudice? Oh no, we’re far beyond that. This is political and ideological, and it provides a socially and intellectually acceptable modern disguise for sentiments that go back some 2,000 years.”

The late historian Robert Wistrich, a leading global expert on antisemitism, identified its modern expression in hatred of Israel, by demonstrating parallel forms, including the widespread sale of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Arab world and its adoption of Soviet anti-Israel propaganda. In fact, modern political antisemitism has deep roots in 20th-century Soviet disinformation, uses its terms, and mixes its accusations between Jews, Israel and Zionism interchangeably, as Natan Sharansky, former Soviet prisoner of Zion, who served as Israel’s deputy prime minister, has explained. 

Lewis’s explanation of the ideological hatred of Israel, which he had coined political antisemitism in early 2005, has since been formalized by the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, whose definitional principles were also adopted by the US State Department and Department of Defense. While published five years ago and adopted by nearly every state in the EU, the IHRA definition appears to have been overlooked or willfully ignored by many in the international diplomatic and political echelons.

The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism includes the following elements:

 • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

 • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

 • Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

 • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

 • Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

These guidelines that define political antisemitism against the Jewish sovereign collective, demonstrate that many of Israel’s harshest critics, including the UN, EU institutions and the politicized International Criminal Court, engage in antisemitic rhetoric masked as mere policy criticism. Antisemitism expert Fiamma Nirenstein, former deputy president of the Italian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, emphasized this current trend in her July 2021 policy monograph, “Double Message Double Standard.” Nirenstein noted that institutional antisemitism rests on three pillars: “Nazification” of Israel – claiming the Jews do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews; “denial of sovereignty” – manifested in the term “illegal occupation,” thereby criminalizing Jewish territorial claims; and finally, the negation of the Iranian regime threat to annihilate Israel.

The Oxford English dictionary defines criticism as the "act of making fair, careful judgement about the good and bad qualities of something.” It follows that, in contrast to the hatred-filled name calling characterized by political antisemitism, political criticism rests on a clear set of underlying principles that define the term and its application. This consistent blueprint requires us to recognize and explicate the clear intellectual and moral differences between political antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel.

Simply stated, political criticism excludes hyperbole, name calling, and eliminationist phrasing. As opposed to the anti-Israel slander that has become de rigueur in the public discourse, legitimate political critique would include the presentation of facts, stripped of political exaggeration, and framed in principles of even-handed assessment and well-reasoned legal, historical, security and diplomatic context. Professor Asa Kasher, IDF ethicist and recipient of the Israel Prize, has outlined an additional set of criteria defining legitimate political critique. He suggested that a negative assessment constitutes a legitimate criticism when it is properly reasoned and based on principles, data, analyses and forecasts, with the objective of reaching a sound evaluation.

A contextualized and nuanced discussion of political criticism would compare and contrast Israel’s territorial disputes to those of other countries. For example, Turkey and Northern Cyprus, China and Tibet, India and Kashmir, Georgia and South Ossetia, Russia and Crimea, and Morocco and Western Sahara all constitute territorial disputes. However, the UN, ICC, ICJ and other states do not mobilize hyperbolic language or collectively launch accusations of apartheid, genocide or ethnic cleansing, even when factually appropriate. Similarly, the international community does not call for the dismantling of Turkey, Russia, China, Georgia, Morocco or India as sovereign countries. None of these parties has been subjected to the eliminationist language used to single out Israel for destruction.

In one example of an antisemitic approach to Israel, its activists have deemed Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, West Bank and parts of Jerusalem examples of racist, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Yet these “buzz words” ignore the critical legal assessment required to determine their international status. This would require the careful consideration of opposing views on Israel’s housing policy east of the 1949 armistice lines.

The accepted critical view was established in 1978 by Herb Hansell, then US State Department Legal Advisor under the Carter Administration. Hansell’s negative legal opinion rested on the claim that Israeli settlements east of the 1949 armistice lines, (1967 Green Line) violated the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. A legitimate critical policy discussion would need to consider Hansell’s legal opinion against opposing legal assessments of other jurists, such as all Israeli government legal advisers since 1968, and internationally renowned professors of law including Julius Stone, Elihu Lauterpacht, Eugene V. Rostow – former US undersecretary of state and dean of Yale Law School, and Arthur Goldberg, former UN ambassador and US Supreme Court justice – and Arthur Goldberg, former UN ambassador and US Supreme Court justice.

This legal examination would also need to consider the recent legal determination of US State Department jurists under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of the Trump administration. Pompeo’s legal experts concurred with the above-mentioned legal authorities that Hansell’s longstanding legal determination is mistaken and that Israeli settlements “are not per se illegal.”

Regardless of one’s position, this form of balanced and rational policy debate constitutes legitimate critical dialogue.

The importance of well-reasoned objective and contextual debate underscores its current lack of seriousness in the public discourse in the United States. Unprecedented antisemitic aspersions have appeared to have overtaken reasoned policy critique even in the House of Representatives. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have libeled Israel as a racist, apartheid state. In one hyperbolic accusation during the May 2021 conflict opposite the Iran-backed Hamas, Omar equated the United States and Israel with the Taliban and Hamas as perpetrators of “atrocities.”

Notably, these fictional and facetious statements have been empowered by political organizations such as Human Rights Watch, led by some progressive and other radical political activists masquerading as human rights experts, whose recent fictitious and even fantastical report accusing Israel of apartheid was refuted by leading scholars and respective policy institutes including Professor Gerald Steinberg and NGO Monitor, Professors Avi Bell and Eugene Kontorovich and Kohelet Policy Forum, and Ambassador Dr. Dore Gold and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Omar and HRW’s absurd accusations are not made to affect policy. Instead, slanders and libels of Israel charging apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing sensationalize and shock in order to mobilize, among other direct actions, mass protest movements such as those led by self-declared radical activists Marc Lamont Hill, Linda Sarsour and the leadership of Black Lives Matter, who have called for dismantling and eliminating the State of Israel.

Clearly, Israel should be judged by the same principles and standards as other nations to prevent the current international obsession of defaming, delegitimizing, dehumanizing, demonizing and denying Israel’s existence and its citizens’ collective rights, as former Canadian Justice Minister Professor Irwin Cotler has argued.

Respectful civil discourse on Israel including well-reasoned contextualized, balanced and rationally considered policy debate must now be embraced as the new universal moral standard in the international diplomatic, media and public dialogue.