Chicagoland Pro-Israel Political Update

Calling balls and strikes for the pro-Israel community since 2006



July 31, 2022

If you remember nothing else, remember this:

  • We cannot effectively advocate for Israel or fight antisemitism if we incorrectly label criticism of Israel as antisemitism.
  • Natan Sharansky's 3 Ds and the IHRA definition of antisemitism are flawed criteria for identifying antisemitism.
  • The better approach is to make the case for Israel on the merits and label criticism of Israel as antisemitic only when it evidences true antisemitism. Nexus, T'ruah, and the Jerusalem Declaration provide better guidance for determining when criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
  • Last week, we saw clear-cut examples of antisemitism from the United Nations and the Republican Party.
  • New research shows that antisemitic attitudes are far more prevalent on the political right. Those guards at our synagogues are not there to protect us from BDS supporters; they are there to protect us from far-right extremists such as the Tree of Life shooter.
  • Congratulations to Chanan Weisman for successfully concluding his second stint as White House Liaison to the American Jewish Community and to Shelley Greenspan for her appointment to that role.
  • Read to the end for our upcoming in-person event with Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan and fun stuff.

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Friends,

If you are reading this newsletter, you support a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. You support a safe, secure democratic State of Israel. You support continued American military assistance to Israel, including missile defense systems such as Iron Dome. Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people. It is not only a necessary refuge from persecution but the only place in the world where Jews can live to their fullest potential as a religion and a nation. As Jonathan Jacoby writes, "the existence of Israel is a moral and historical imperative. Whatever injustices may have been committed in the name of Zionism, dismantling the State of Israel would be just as unjust."

But instead of making the case for Israel on the merits, some of us conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The temptation is obvious: If it’s antisemitic, we don’t have to argue on the merits. Antisemitism is out of bounds, and we can dismiss criticism as antisemitic. But mislabeling all harsh or inaccurate criticism of Israel as antisemitism, no matter what our motivations, diminishes both our ability to fight real antisemitism and our ability to advocate for Israel.

Antisemitism is “hostility, prejudice, hatred, or violence against Jews as Jews.” Natan Sharansky recommends the “3 Ds” to determine whether anti-Israel criticism is antisemitic: demonization, delegitimization and double standards.
 
Sometimes mnemonics are great. "My Very Enthusiastic Mother Just Served Us Noodles" is a wonderful way to remember the planets. But mnemonics don’t work so well with nuance. Sometimes the 3 Ds identify antisemitic criticism of Israel. But too often they mislabel criticism of Israel as antisemitism, and that’s where we have to be careful.
 
Delegitimizing Israel can and might often be antisemitic, but not always. Anti-Zionism is antithetical to what we believe, but not necessarily antisemitic. Ken Stern, the lead author of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, asks us to “imagine you are a Palestinian whose family was displaced in 1948—and not merely displaced but also dispossessed from your home and from a sense of control over your own identity and life. The exercise of Jewish self-determination clearly had a negative impact on you and your family, not only on your past but your future. Is your objection to Zionism because you see a Jewish conspiracy [which would be antisemitic], or because someone else’s national expression harmed you and your national aspirations?”
 
Stern then asks what if you are not Palestinian but you support Palestinian national aspirations. “If your priority is to support Palestinians, but you then gleefully embrace hateful tropes about Jews that is antisemitism. But is it antisemitism if you do not consider Jewish claims to the land as having equal merit to the Palestinian ones?” 
 
As Hadar Susskind reminds us, “many Israelis (and American Jews) vehemently deny the legitimacy or the validity of the Palestinian national movement, but they are not all necessarily Arab haters or Islamophobes.” The same holds true of those who deny the Jewish national movement.
 
Holding Israel to a double standard is sometimes but not always antisemitic. What do double standards even mean? Is every critic of Israel required to first criticize every country doing something worse before they can criticize Israel? Imagine if, when we were marching for Soviet Jewry, someone had criticized us for not marching for people who were even more oppressed, or for not protesting the policies of countries who treated their citizens worse than the Soviets treated theirs. Were we guilty of double standards? Is any critic of any country required to find the very worst country on earth and criticize that country first? 

Of course not. We had every right to focus on the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jews. Can we blame Palestinians for focusing on Israel? Is it per se antisemitic for non-Palestinians to focus on Israel? Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote that "Human rights activists and organizations almost always choose a focus for their efforts. (One may reasonably work to end the genocide of the Rohingya community in Burma, for instance, without simultaneously addressing Assad’s slaughter of his people in Syria.)” [Now would be a good time to join me in signing the Jewish Rohingya Justice Network Letter to Secretary of State Blinken--unless you think that by doing so, you'd be guilty of double standards]

Jacobs explains that it might be reasonable to conclude in some cases that Israel attracts disproportionate attention not because of antisemitism, but because it is a top recipient of U.S. foreign aid. It is the only western democracy “currently carrying out a military occupation of another people. Its territory is sacred to three major world religions. The existence of a strong U.S.-based lobby dedicated to promoting the policies of the Israeli government unsurprisingly generates a counterresponse. And Palestinians have built a national movement over the past five decades, unlike more recently displaced people.” Those facts, and not always antisemitism, can explain the disproportionate attention on Israel. 

We should speak out against unfair or inaccurate criticism of Israel, such as claims that Israel deliberately targets civilians when engaging in self-defense against rocket attacks from Gaza. But we should recognize that we weaken our credibility when we accuse even harsh critics of Israel of antisemitism unless their language evidences prejudice against Jews. 

For example, on July 25, Miloon Kathari, a member of the UN commission on Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, referred to social media controlled by the "Jewish lobby." Allegations of Jewish control of the media are textbook examples of antisemitism, and the Biden administration rightly called it out: U.S. Ambassador Michele Taylor expressed outrage over Kathari’s comments, and Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden administration's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, said that the antisemitic tropes were "wholly unacceptable."

Demonizing Israel, depending on the language, is more likely to be antisemitic. But not always. For example, accusing Israel of “apartheid” is not necessarily antisemitic. Part of the problem with accusations of apartheid is that they depend on your definition of Israel and your definition of apartheid. Daniel Sokatch, the author of Can We Talk About Israel, wrote that "if you give me a group of intellectually honest and open-minded BDS sympathizers and let me take them for two weeks up and down the length and breadth of the State of Israel on the Israeli side of the Green Line...if those BDS supporters were truly intellectually honest, they would have to admit that what they saw in Israel in no way resembled apartheid South Africa." 

But Sokatch continues, "if you give me a group of intellectually honest and open-minded right-wing supporters of Israel and let me take them for two weeks up and down the length and breadth of the Israeli-occupied West Bank on the other side of the Green Line...if those right-wing supporters were truly intellectually honest, they would have to admit that what they saw in the Israeli-occupied West Bank did resemble some of the more pernicious aspects of apartheid-era South Africa."

At least three former Israeli Prime Ministers, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert, used the word “apartheid” to describe where Israel was headed if it did not find a way to exit most of the West Bank and achieve a two-state solution. Are we comfortable saying that Rabin, Barak, and Olmert used antisemitic rhetoric?  

Two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa–who could be more qualified to talk about whether Israel is engaged in apartheid than Israeli diplomats who served in South Africa–wrote in 2021 that Israel's actions in the occupied territories constitute apartheid in part because they believe that "the occupation is not temporary, and there is not the political will in the Israeli government to bring about its end." We don’t have to agree with them, but are we comfortable accusing two Israeli ambassadors of using antisemitic rhetoric?

When we respond to charges of apartheid that Israel has Arabs in the Knesset, Arabs on the Supreme Court, Arabs here, Arabs there, that’s not an answer. The issue isn’t what’s going on in pre-1967 Israel. The issue is what’s going on in the West Bank, where there is clearly one legal system for Jews and one legal system for Palestinians. That’s excusable under a temporary military occupation. But the more the occupation looks permanent–no matter whose fault it is–the more the West Bank seems like part of Israel, and if the West Bank is part of Israel, then two legal systems based on ethnicity are operating within Israel. 

That’s why conflating the West Bank with Israel is a mistake. Dr. Alex Sinclair, the Israeli author of Loving the Real Israel, told me a few months ago that "the more you can distinguish between Israel and the settlements, the more you can distinguish between support for Israel and deep-seated concern and critique of our decades-long policy in the occupied territories, the better." 

If you want to refute the claim that Israel is an apartheid state, the last thing you want is for people to think that the West Bank is part of Israel or that the occupation is permanent. That’s why it was so counterproductive to claim Ben & Jerry’s was boycotting Israel when they announced they would not sell in the West Bank and specifically said they would sell in Israel. Ignoring that distinction played right into the hands of those who accuse Israel of apartheid. Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, recently said that "Sometimes something can be wrong, it can be unfair, it can be inconsistent, and it can be not efficacious. Not selling ice cream, for example, doesn’t really solve anything. It can be wrong on many levels, but it’s not necessarily antisemitic.”

I am a Zionist. I oppose BDS because it does not recognize the two-sided nature of the conflict and puts all the blame on Israel. I don’t think Israel is an apartheid state because the West Bank is not part of Israel. But we should not mislabel all criticism of Israel as antisemitism, especially since we are threatened by real antisemitism. If we want to fight antisemitism, we have to know what it is, and we should defend the real Israel on the merits.

We can do better than three criteria chosen because they begin with the same letter. The IHRA definition of antisemitism is not much better. It was never intended for codification or to identify antisemitism on college campuses but as its lead author has repeatedly said, was originally written to help European data collectors flag possible antisemitism. Legal scholar David Schraub wrote that the IHRA definition is "vague to the point of incoherency, and riddled with so much imprecision and hedging that it could justify labeling anything or nothing anti-Semitic."

Neve Gordon and Mark Levine point out that under the IHRA definition, comments made by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz could be considered antisemitic. Nevertheless, for the reasons they outline, this definition appeals to Jewish institutions with certain agendas. Victims of antisemitism object to the IHRA definition because it is vague and inadequate.
 
The Nexus Task Force, made up of leading scholars and public policy experts, developed much clearer criteria to determine when criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Nexus defines criticism of Israel as antisemitic when it uses an antisemitic trope that has historically been directed at Jews, when Israel is used as a surrogate term for Jews, when Israel is depicted as having hidden power or control, when Israel is criticized because of its Jewish character, when Jews are denied the same individual or national rights as others based on their Jewish identity, when Jews are held collectively responsible for Israel’s policies or actions, or when criticism insinuates that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country in which they live.
 
However, criticism of Israel is not antisemitic simply because it is harsh or unfair. Non-violent actions that press for changes in Israeli policies are not generally antisemitic. Boycotting goods made in the West Bank and/or Israel is not antisemitic unless it specifically singles out Israel because of its Jewish character. Anti-Zionism can be antisemitic if it specifically denies the Jewish right to self-determination or it employs an antisemitic trope but opposition to Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic. Devoting special attention to Israel is not generally antisemitic. 
 
No set of criteria is perfect. T'ruah and the Jerusalem Declaration are excellent resources and also provide far better guidance than the IHRA definition.

Want some real examples of antisemitism--look to the Republican Party. Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, who recently gave a speech his own aide described as “a pure Nazi speech worthy of Goebbels," will be speaking next week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, along with leading Republicans.

New research shows that "antisemitic attitudes are far more prevalent on the political right in the United States" and that "prejudicial attitudes towards Jews is particularly strong among younger conservatives...the researchers found that agreement with overtly antisemitic statements increased from left to right. Agreement with the statements was 2-3 times higher on the far right compared to the far left." Those guards at our synagogues are not there to protect us from BDS supporters; they are there to protect us from far-right extremists such as the Tree of Life shooter.

Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has come under fire for antisemitic associations, but Andrew Torba, one of Mastriano's backers,
responded that “We’re not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore"...an apparent reference to the rough percentage of the country that is Jewish...“We’re taking back our country,” he added. “We’re taking back our government, so deal with it.” Last week, DJOP Chair Jill Zipin condemned Mastriano's antisemitism. After days of silence, Mastriano issued a statement that ducked key questions and raised more questions than it answered.

The Republican Party has mainstreamed antisemitism. Armchair communications experts would advise me to enhance my credibility by calling out "both sides," but false equivalency is partisanship at its worst because it insinuates that the problem is the same on both sides of the aisle, from which it logically follows that since "both sides do it," it's not a factor we should not consider at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Antisemitism exists in the American left, but unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party condemns and marginalizes it within its ranks. You don't see anyone engaging in antisemitic rhetoric winning the Democratic nomination for president or governor (in any state) or leading the Democratic Party in Congress. But antisemitism is not a bar from Republican leadership; it's almost becoming a feature.

Former U.S. Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ira Forman recently wrote that "of all the horrific forms of Jew-hatred, antisemitism promoted by governments is arguably the most dangerous." He was writing about Hungary and Viktor Orban. If Republicans regain power, he might be writing about the United States--if he's allowed to write.

Congratulations! To Chanan Weissman for wrapping up another successful stint as White House Liaison to the American Jewish Community and to Shelley Greenspan for her appointment to the role. Chanan was outstanding, and no doubt that Shelley will also do a great job.




Twitter Replies of the Week. Titles for Pence's forthcoming memoir.

Irresponsible Votes of the Week. Senate Republicans (background from Chris Hayes).


Upcoming Events. Please join me, Dana Gordon, and Marcy Fleisher & Steve Kanner plus a growing list of co-hosts (check out the invitation) for an in-person (outdoors if the weather is nice) reception in support of U.S. Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH) candidate for U.S. Senate, on Wednesday, August 24 at 6:30 PM at a private residence in Highland Park. RSVP using this link.

We need at least two more Democrats in the Senate to move forward with our agenda. With our help, Tim Ryan can be one of them. Ryan is great on our issues, and he's running against J.D. Vance--this 30-second clip is all you need to know.

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