Jewish Fear in a Zionist Unreality
By: Em Cohen
Tags: Anti Semitism, Zionism, Philosemitism, Judaism

Whether it’s intentional or not, publishing these posts as “Anonymous” adds subconscious credence to the idea that Jews are imperiled and their fear is justified. While in reality, zionist students who publicly cast anti-zionists as antisemites are launched into the spotlight by zionist organizations and publications, JOC pretends it’s actually dangerous or stigmatized to make those claims. Additionally, the anonymity renders any investigation into the context of or truth behind their stories impossible.

An incident included in ADL’s tracker of antisemitic incidents

What JewishOnCampus does recreationally, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) does professionally. Like the AMCHA Initiative, the ADL maintains a database of what it claims are antisemitic incidents. However, because the ADL conflates Judaism and zionism, many of the incidents they count are opposition to israel or zionism, not Jews. Understanding this, it’s not surprising that as anti-zionist protests spread globally (in response to israel’s recent spate of increased violence against Palestinians) the ADL reported a massive spike in alleged antisemitism. The ADL’s ominous statistics of ‘surging antisemitism’ then appeared in news articles, op-eds, talk shows etc., where they were used to justify racist, zionist, and Islamophobic arguments. After weeks of doomsday messaging, that is intentionally designed to stoke fear, the ADL then reports that Jews are, unsurprisingly, more fearful.

Zionists invoke white Jewish fear of anti-zionism as proof that anti-zionism is antisemitism. The JewishOnCampus stories and the ADL incidents are rendered coherent through this rationale. According to their logic, because Jewish students are scared of anti-zionism, it is antisemitism. However, this backwards premise must be rejected. It’s no different than proving that the rubber hand is one’s real hand by citing the fear one felt as the hammer came down.

White Jewish fears that anti-zionism is antisemitic are similar to white nationalist fears of the “great replacement.” The two are in fact mirror images of each other and of settler fear in general. In “Two Degrees of Separation,” Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS Movement, writes, “colonizers always fear that the colonized will one day rise against them and do to them what they have been doing to the colonized.”

How the Zionist Unreality Harms the Struggle Against Antisemitism

Canary Mission, the AMCHA Initiative, JewishOnCampus, and the ADL all do occasionally condemn or expose real antisemitism, which is, put simply, the hatred of Jews because they are Jewish. However, these efforts are not sincerely intended to fight antisemitism. Instead, condemning real antisemitism is, for these organizations, an attempt to obscure the fact that their primary focus is defending zionism and lend legitimacy to the idea that they are organizations who fight antisemitism. If they never mentioned neo-nazism or fascism, it would be much easier for the average person to recognize the disingenuous nature behind their actions. Occasional condemnations of real antisemitism serve an additional purpose- to stoke ever greater fear about the alleged threat posed by anti-zionism. In a video that the ADL posted about 2020’s “historic high” rate of antisemitism, the ADL equated nazis seig-heiling while holding a banner that reads “K*kes lie whites die 1488” with bathroom graffiti that says “fuck hillel free Palestine” as if to prove that those both present a danger to Jews and that said danger is similar.

Cartoon by Eli Valley, June 2021

By focusing the struggle against antisemitism on israel, zionists ignore the Jewish diaspora communities who are harmed by real antisemitism and assert that the only path to Jewish safety or security is in supporting colonial genocide. This positioning ensures that those who would fight by our side against real antisemitism cannot do so without supporting their own oppression. It’s unreasonable to expect the people who are victimized by zionist organizations to stand with those same organizations as they ‘condemn antisemitism.’

Make no mistake, the primary victims of the zionist unreality are the victims of zionism in general. We should never, in acknowledging the ways zionism also endangers Jews, ignore that zionism is a colonial movement in Palestine, not a theoretical project. False antisemitism allegations are wielded against Palestinians and others to cause not only immense direct harm by justifying zionist colonization but also bolster and reproduce Islamophobic, white supremacist, and anti-Black ideas such as the orientalist “clash of civilizations.”

The zionist unreality is deeply connected to philosemitism. In 5 Philosemitic Dog-Whistles to Watch Out For, I define philosemitism as the basis of white euro-american identity formation vis-à-vis treatment of Jewish people, where white euro-america presents itself as the protector of Jews and other societies as a threat to the Jews. Philosemitism developed primarily after the Holocaust, as the white euro-american world needed to retain all it had stolen while simultaneously ‘forgiving itself’ for the Holocaust. Further, as I write in On the Dangers of Fighting Antisemitism, “white euro-america discovered that by assigning itself the task of ‘protecting the Jew’, it could grant itself the power to determine both who is a Jew and who is an antisemite.” In committing to “fight antisemitism” the white euro-american world erases its history and creates justification for its ongoing white-supremacist colonial projects- the colonized are labeled “antisemites” and the “commitment to fight antisemitism” is colonization.

In upholding the colonial world, the zionist unreality both fosters real antisemitism and makes fighting it impossible. It is the same colonial systems that produce fascism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that also produce antisemitism. Consequently, there is no way to uphold colonialism without producing antisemitism. This is why, as long as zionism has existed, zionists have allied with antisemites. Zionists can look past antisemitism because of a shared interest in the continued existence of the colonial world. Barghouti, again, writes that zionism “has always thrived on real antisemitism, including during the rise of nazi anti-Jewish legislation in Germany in the 1930’s.” Herzl, one of the founders of zionism, asserted that antisemitism provided the “requisite impetus” for Jews to join the settler-colonial zionist project. He believed that antisemitic countries would be the greatest allies to the zionists because they both shared a common goal of having Jews leave europe.

Despite the zionist weaponization of antisemitism allegations against anti-zionists, antisemitism is real and it is vital that we struggle against it. But “Jewish fear” and specifically, Jewish fears regarding anti-zionism, cannot be the basis of that struggle. White euro-america only validates or attempts to redress the fears of Jews when those fears can be used to support colonial white supremacy. Thus, philosemitic white euro-america ignores the fears of Black Jews, non-Black Indigenous Jews, and non-Black Jews who speak out against zionism. This is proven by the response to both the Pittsburgh and Poway pogroms. After each of these synagogue shootings, white Jewish zionists called on the state to ramp up its ‘protection of Jewish communities’, which it gladly did by placing cops in and outside of shuls and Jewish institutions. As Black Jews spoke out against this, their cries were ignored.

The zionist unreality harms the struggle against antisemitism because it abandons the Jews who are victimized by the white euro-american colonial project and strengthens the systems that produce antisemitism.

For Judaism to Live, Zionism Must Die

In an essay that appeared recently in the Tablet, Natan Sharansky contrasts Jews who oppose zionism (which he dubs “Un-Jews”) against “actual Jews” (a term he uses to mean zionists.) He writes “the anti-Zionists know exactly what they are doing, and what they are undoing. They are trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish people-hood, while undoing decades of identity-building.” Elsewhere in his essay, Sharansky writes, “a century ago, when Zionism was still a marginal movement, and there was no Israel, Jews nevertheless had a strong sense of Jewish solidarity, of people-hood.”

In simultaneously acknowledging that Jews had a strong sense of people-hood before the emergence of zionism while also asserting that zionism is the sense of Jewish people-hood, Sharansky unintentionally uncovers the lies of the zionist unreality exquisitely. Jewish zionist identity and the zionist unreality was manufactured through decades of the zionist destruction, co-option, and distortion of Judaism, a process he reduces to “identity building.” Explaining why he uses the term “un-Jews,” Sharansky writes:

We call these critics “un-Jews” because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness. They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent. Many un-Jews are active in forms of Jewish leadership, running Jewish studies departments, speaking from rabbinic pulpits, hosting Shabbat dinners.

He so readily admits information you think he’d want to guard tightly. One can remain dedicated to Jewish practices, be deeply involved Jewishly, and host Shabbos dinners, but that does not matter. Failure to support a settler-colonial movement younger than my grandma means we are “un-Jews.” To be an “actual Jew,” to Sharansky, means supporting zionism. Sharansky reveals that, in many ways, the zionist unreality goes even deeper than equating Judaism and zionism. Instead, it seeks to replace Judaism with zionism.

For decades, Jewish institutions and leaders have raised young Jews to hear calls for freedom and liberation as calls for mass Jewish death. They have used the painful history of antisemitism to justify colonization and make Jewish children terrified. As young Jews grow up and are faced with those righteous calls for freedom, they cower and adopt racist reactionary zionist positions. The right response is not to dismiss as dishonest their fear, but to point out that their fear response to anti-zionism, and broader anti-colonialism, is built on a lie. No matter how convinced one is that the rubber hand is really their hand, it isn’t! and no matter how convinced one is that zionism is Judaism or that Jews are israel, it is not true. The fears do not reflect the reality. Despite Flayton’s fear that he can’t wear a kippah outside, thousands of Jews wear their kippot throughout the streets of New York City every single day.

The zionist unreality marks a monumental Jewish communal failure and disentangling Judaism from zionism is necessary to begin repairing that harm. Anti-zionist Jews must do everything in our power to expose the zionist unreality. Imagine how different the rubber hand illusion would look, in-practice, were there people standing by the table going “that is not your real hand!” The entanglement would be less complete and the hammer smack less startling. We must educate both Jews and non-Jews about the horrific history of zionism and make clear that Judaism is not zionism and israel is not Jews. Judaism has existed for millennia before zionism was even a thought! Additionally, we must demand the complete destruction of all of the organizations who uphold the zionist unreality. We must refuse to collaborate with the ADL and other zionist “anti-antisemitism” organizations, recognizing them as an enemy even when they condemn real antisemitism. We must stand firmly against the organizations who argue that Jewish safety is only possible through colonialism.

From another perspective though, I believe this disentanglement is somewhat inevitable. Zionists maintain their unreality by spreading absurd claim that BDS, a Free Palestine, or anti-zionism would be the death of Judaism (or, as Seffi Kogen claims, the end of Shabbos dinners). I almost pity them for the lack of faith they put in Jews to be Jewish, something we have done for thousands of years. The zionist settler-colonial project won’t exist forever. The colonial world is not immortal and the movement for the liberation of Palestine grows stronger every single day. The best way to disprove the zionists who claim that “zionism is Judaism” is to end zionism. Because, when Palestine is free, there will still be Shabbos dinners.