Dear Fellow Zionists: Not Everything is Antisemitism

The scourge of antisemitism is too real to be used to deflect from urgent conversations about Israel.

Jew-hatred today is rampant, bipartisan, and deadly. And so I understand the mindset of those in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities who, since the release of Amnesty International’s report last week asserting that Israel is guilty of apartheid against Palestinians, are tempted to respond to the “Apartheid” charge with a loaded A-word of our own.

But simply labeling the report as antisemitic won’t persuade anyone that it’s wrong. Instead, we’ll find the word “antisemitism” landing on increasingly deaf ears.

I should acknowledge that I’m not Israeli. I’ve never had my country invaded from all sides by armies vowing to push me into the sea, had rockets fired at my town, or lost friends to suicide bombings. I’m also not Palestinian. I’ve never been expelled from my home, seen buildings in my city leveled by airstrikes, woken up to soldiers conducting a surprise search in my home, or had to pass through checkpoints to get to work.

I’m an American Jew. I’m also a Zionist; I believe Jews are indigenous to Israel and that history proves the necessity of self-determination for Jews as much as any other people, if not more. Too many of my relatives are in mass graves for me to change my mind anytime soon. If you don’t like the fact that Israel exists, I’m sorry — maybe work on building a world that’s safer for Jews.

I also believe that a huge amount of anti-Israel energy in the world stems from antisemitism. (Why? Because many who vilify Israel say nothing about other foreign countries; many who are outspoken about racism remain silent in the face of mounting anti-Jewish hate crimes; bullying of Jews and Israelis in the name of anti-Israel activism is rampant; and many at the vanguard of anti-racism seem allergic to confronting the antisemitism in their own ranks. Some are actively stoking it.)

So trust me, I get it. I understand the danger we face as Jews.

But I’ve had enough of the boilerplate, head-in-the-sand response of much of the pro-Israel establishment when Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians are called out.

As I mentioned, Amnesty International’s 280-page report asserts that Israel is guilty of apartheid against Palestinians. (Both critics and fans of the report said it labeled Israel an “apartheid state,” even though this phrase doesn’t appear in the document.)

In response, the American Jewish Committee tweeted: “To equate the liberal democratic State of Israel with the system of apartheid in South Africa is nothing short of a canard, a libel.” In a video, its CEO made valid distinctions between the two scenarios. But this misses the point, because the report says explicitly that it’s not equating or analogizing Israel with apartheid South Africa (see pp. 13–14).

Now, the actual legal question of whether Israel is guilty of apartheid hinges in part on international law, and in part on on-the-ground realities and how we interpret them. There are multiple definitions of apartheid, and lawyers may disagree about the extent to which different legal regimes (Israel, the West Bank, Gaza) meet different definitions. I’m not a lawyer.

But as a layperson who’s been to Israel and the West Bank, I do have a layperson’s opinion about apartheid in Israel. I agree with Daniel Sokatch’s recent assessment that if you took a group of intellectually honest BDS supporters up and down Israel inside the 1967 borders, they’d see little to call apartheid. But if you took a group of intellectually honest pro-Israel hawks up and down the West Bank, they’d have a hard time coming up with any other word for what they’d see.

And indeed, several Israeli organizations have reached the same conclusion as Amnesty on this question, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak warned five years ago that Israel was on a path to apartheid. The former Attorney General of Israel wrote today that he believes the term accurately captures the on-the-ground reality today. I would submit that Israel’s most highly decorated soldier and its former top lawyer are not Jew-haters.

By all means, argue against the apartheid claim! Talk about the rights enjoyed by Israel’s Arab citizens, for example. And by all means, call out the specific problems with the report. I’m not even saying the document is antisemitism-free. I had some problems with it myself (for example, in the timeline on page 41, Amnesty omits the genocidal attack against the Jewish state by multiple Arab armies in 1948).

You might also take issue with Amnesty International as an organization more generally, from its disproportionate focus on Israel relative to much worse human rights violators, to its current Secretary-General’s baseless claim in 2013 that Israel assassinated Yasser Arafat, to other questionable hires, to its 2015 decision not to campaign against antisemitism in Britain (the rationale for this last one was that it’s better to fight “discrimination in all its forms,” even though the organization has since issued numerous reports on Islamophobia specifically).

None of these topics bear directly on the contents of the report, though. It’s possible for a compromised nonprofit organization to make true accusations, just as it’s possible for an unduly hated country to commit real crimes.

Instead of rebutting the substance of the report, many Zionist organizations seemed content simply to call its conclusions and motivations antisemitic — in some cases, before the report was released. This is not persuasive to neutral, open-minded observers, who will see a detailed, footnoted report on one side and name-calling soundbites on the other.

The Anti-Defamation League, for its part, wrote that the report “creates fertile ground…for antisemitic discourse.” But that can be said of many criticisms of Israel, however legitimate. The problem is with the antisemitic discourse itself, not with the word “apartheid.”

Some Zionist organizations have gotten this response right. T’ruah and J Street, while pushing back on aspects of the report, emphasized that Amnesty’s shortcomings should not be used as an excuse to avoid talking about the on-the-ground reality that Palestinians are experiencing. And the report has lots of details about that reality that much of the organized pro-Israel world will hardly even acknowledge, much less condemn: Ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank. Near-impunity for Jewish settlers who commit violence against Palestinians. Home invasions. Arbitrary detention. Restrictions on freedom of movement. A system that inflicts daily terror and misery on millions of people, while those of us outside that system debate what to call it.

Again, it’s fine to dispute the apartheid charge, criticize Amnesty International, and point out the antisemitism is the Israel-Palestine discourse generally. But if your entire response to the apartheid charge is that Amnesty International is bad and life for Israeli Arabs is good, you’re ceding the actual discussion of Palestinian life in the West Bank and Gaza — where majority of non-diaspora Palestinians live — to your adversaries. You’re not distracting people from the report’s many troubling and well-supported claims. They must be refuted or recognized.

I’m an American. I believe there are many great things about my country, and I also know that it’s guilty of sins that go back to its founding. The more I see it and confront and acknowledge those sins, the prouder an American I become.

I’m not Israeli, but I am tied to Israel by bonds of family and peoplehood. I know there are many patriotic Israelis who are working to help it confront and acknowledge and address its own past and present sins. American institutions who defend Israel should find the courage to do so, too.