DISCLAIMER: TIME FOR ZIONISTS TO MAKE SOME DEMANDS

HOW HAVE PRO-ISRAEL PEOPLE ALLOWED OURSELVES TO BE PUT ON THE DEFENSIVE?

Let’s put this where it belongs.

There is a social convention where people like me are effectively forced to tag on a disclaimer every time we suggest that a particular trope or expression against Israel reflects antisemitic bias. We will say something like “Not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but here is why this particular instance could be …”

It’s time to reframe that obligation.

If people want us to take seriously their criticisms of Israel, they have an obligation to acknowledge the role bigotry plays in this discussion.

Before condemning Israel with a vehemence they never display for the worst human rights violators, or devoting all their activist energies to this one conflict while ignoring exponentially worse situations worldwide, the very least they can do is a simple acknowledgment.

Perhaps we should expect people to tag on a disclaimer something like this: “I recognize that antisemitism has an enormously long history and can manifest in complex and unknowable ways. Conscious of this reality, I think …”

The thing that people do not understand when they make silly blanket defenses like “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” is that this problem does not look the way they think it looks. The way these two phenomena intersect is not I hate Jews therefore I hate Israel. No, it is a little more subtle.

It is, among many other things, a sort of cognitive bias.

It is hearing the most extravagant accusations against Israel and believing them because they comport with ideas about Jews we do not even know we carry.

We dismiss the myriad peace offers Israel has made (and the Palestinians have rejected) because we “know” (thanks to culturally inherited bigotry we have not even begun to explore) that nobody stands a chance in negotiations against those people.

We ignore the reality that Israel has given up proportionately more land in peacetime than any country in history, or that Israel has repeatedly offered to hand over everything the Palestinians claim to seek, and subscribe instead to a narrative of “stolen land” because somewhere in the recesses of our minds, civilizational DNA has implanted in us the idea that those people take what’s not theirs.

We portray the only pluralist democratic society in the region as “apartheid,” as a “religious ethnostate” and as the embodiment of evil in ways that can only be explained if we subscribe to false, antisemitic ideas of presumed Jewish supremacism and malevolence.

We use blood imagery in ways we do with no other people or conflict, (perhaps) unaware of the long history of the blood libel and how that colors our perceptions of this conflict.

We accuse Israel of being guilty of everything we detest in ourselves and our own societies — cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, wealth amid poverty, racial inequality — in a textbook example of scapegoating. Unaware, it seems, that the Jew is history’s greatest scapegoat (including one particular Jew, who is ritually scapegoated every Sunday morning just down the street from your house), Israel’s critics nonchalantly heap on that one country every imaginable sin — and then call for its crucifixion.

The list goes on and on. Ideas of Jewish control and power permeate this discussion. Victim-blaming, which has always been a justification for antisemitism, is foundational to our approach to this conflict. Demonization of Israelis, a phenomenon with a 2,000-year history with Jews, is a central strategy of activists.

That is what we mean when we talk about the intersection of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. But activists won’t listen or learn because they are too busy chanting “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” — a disclaimer progressive people would not accept in our approach to any other form of racism.

So the very least we should be able to expect when critics want to be taken seriously is that they acknowledge the undeniable role antisemitism plays here.

I have made this suggestion before. But I would add a new caveat. If you do not criticize — indeed condemn — Palestinian autocrats, kleptocrats, dictators, extremist clergy and the panorama of hatred and incitement that is the root of this conflict, (Read this!) decent people should stop listening.

Almost inevitably, pro-Israel voices are forced to say something like “I don’t agree with or support the current government in Israel, but …”

And yet, incredibly, we let the other side get away without any commensurate demand that they take a position against the extremist Hamas government in Gaza (indeed, many of these kooks actually endorse it — and we aren’t adequately responding to those people) and the “moderate” Fatah government in the West Bank, which is among the most despotic entities on the planet.

How did we let people like these put us on our back foot? I may not like Netanyahu, but he is a paragon of virtue and good governance when compared with anything passing for leadership on the Palestinian side.

Until critics of Israel acknowledge both the role antisemitism plays and condemn Palestinian tyranny with at least the vehemence they reserve for condemning Israel, I think I will start putting them in the antisemite column. Guilty until proven innocent.

Is it fair? Maybe not. But at this point, I think it’s time for those people to burn a few calories proving they’re not antisemitic.

It is literally the least they can do.

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