Are You Antisemitic?

If you ask a few out of touch elitists, probably!

Orthodox Jews outside Downing Street protesting in solidarity with Palestine. (Alisdare Hickson, UK)

As our elected leadership in the United States has once again shown their complete inability to comprehend the swamp within which they have submerged themselves – voting wholesale to judge words equally to actions of genocide – we are reminded yet again of just how totally distanced by influence the powers-that-be have become in the Western world.

Ask President Biden, and anyone who protests genocide is racist and antisemitic; the youth vote is being “complicit” in their silence on the atrocities being perpetrated against Jewish people in the United States. (Everyone forget that the same Columbia University that is so worried about antisemitism also has done nothing regarding the chemical attacks [see also: 1, 2] that occurred on their campus against pro-peace activists there.)

Of course, anyone who has been paying attention to the protests over the last 6 months is well aware of the huge role that Jewish organizations have played in exposing both the Zionist terror abroad and coalition-building with non-Jewish organizations here at home. If you have been to a protest, you know as well as I that Jewish voices have been present in the fight to stop Zionism since the first days of the Nakba, that some of the strongest voices in that bloc are those Jews who have been taken to Israel on “Birthright” and come back radicalized against the Zionist project.

Are these, as so many reactionary pundits have been willing to call them, self-hating Jews? If so, what is their motivation? Why do so many European and American Jews see the divide between their religion and Zionism yet evangelicals and their ideological sympathizers seem only to find reinforcement of their preexisting ideals?

Perhaps the answer is found in the recent vote in the House of Representatives, where no less than 377 of our elected officials voted to view a slogan – words – as something which is antisemitic and condemnable from an institutional point of view. This is, as all should see clearly, ridiculous and nonsensical in the face of the actual atrocities we still see on our phones every single day , hearing in the voicemails and stories of our friends.

Can the words “From the River to the Sea” be considered antisemitic when they have been stripped of all social, historical, and political context? Can we say that where one group may be asking for social freedom, another religious, and another political, that all have the same meaning? Can a call for emancipation be justifiably likened to calls for extermination? The outstanding ignorance of what our leaders seem to believe antisemitism is, the ludicrous idea that Arabs are not a semitic people descended from the same Afro-Asian lineages as the Hebrew peoples, is outrageous to consider for anyone with a knowledge of the history of the greater Cradle of Civilization. Are Arabs too, then, self-hating Semites?

Perhaps stripping away all of that is what makes it so problematic to the tenderhearted liberals who care so much about the “intimidation” of college students but not the literal dissection-by-missile of Arabs that is the true conversation. For, free of context, words are easy to use as a cudgel in the media-sphere; one can make an argument for any interpretation should you muddy the conversation enough beforehand.

And, once again, we find ourselves fighting against the Liberal delusion and disinformation campaign that is Respectability Politics. Because that is what this is at the end of the day: an effort to police language into the realm of what is respectable (read: valid of respect) to further dissemble the truth of the atrocity which they enable and protect. Rather than engage with and find themselves confronted with the realities of their actions, it is much easier to say that one isn’t using the right words or actions to be valid at all.

Make no mistake, that is all this latest push against pro-peace activism in the United States and the West is, an effort to further suppress your voice and convince you that you don’t have a right to an opinion on murders that are happening every day in your name; that you don’t know enough to have any opinion at all.

That is what makes this all so frustrating, the fact that we are once more having a discussion on words as if they are equivalent to actions, as if the demands for justice are as damaging and threatening as the actual violence being perpetrated daily. There is no time to be talking about what words are the “right” ones; which will be the magical key that will finally make the Liberal warhawk empathize with the battles being fought for emancipation across the world.

Looking to B’tselem’s coverage of the apartheid State of Israel in 2021, I think that the distinctions between actions and words become starkly clear.

The entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians. All this leads to the conclusion that these are not two parallel regimes that simply happen to uphold the same principle. There is one regime governing the entire area and the people living in it, based on a single organizing principle.

Whereas a call for emancipation may suggest violence for some, the struggle for political and social freedom from an occupying power being inherently violent regardless of rhetoric, the actions of the dominant power and the institution of those words as directive for governance is clearly the true outcome feared the most. For can oppressors envisage any future in which the horrors they have visited on others are not returned to them in time? I would argue no, the key tool of Liberals and Reactionaries being projection, the death they deal framed as a perpetual Sword of Damocles over their own necks.

Those smearing pro-Palestinian and pro-peace activists as antisemitic are well-aware of what they are doing and how they are dissembling in defense of Zionistic terrorism. It is incumbent on us to reject this idea of linguistic nuance that traps conversation, stripping away imminence and consequence with a caustic barrage of protesting the “right way” and being “respectful” in our dissent.

Photo: Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons