Op-ed by FMEP’s Lara Friedman, originally published at Responsible Statecraft, Dec. 12, 2019

What does an antisemitism spewing, Nazi dog-whistling President give his favorite Jewish and Christian zealots for the holidays, after already giving them Jerusalem, settlements, the Golan Heights, the murder of the two-state solution, and the delegitimization of Palestinian national claims, identity, and aspirations?

An Israel exception to the First Amendment, of course.

That’s what Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Antisemitism is, no matter how the White House and credulous, lazy, or dishonest pundits try to sell it.

To be sure, the shifting public debate around the executive order might have confused some people. When it became clear that there were errors in the original report on the order’s exact text, the speed with which some journalists and pundits pivoted from concern about potential governmental over-reach to self-satisfied mocking of those who had sounded the alarm was breathtaking. Even more telling was the readiness of “experts” and supposedly unbiased reporters to adopt a condescending and factually inaccurate message that boiled down to: “this was all a case of leftist hysteria and anti-Trump alarmism, over an order that turns out to be completely non-controversial.”

This effort to shift the debate is an act of misdirection. Don’t fall for it.

Trump’s executive order — celebrated by adherents of what can be shorthanded as the “all-meaningful-criticism-of-Israel-is-illegitimate” crowd — is non-controversial only if you prioritize quashing criticism of Israel over free speech. It is non-controversial only if, in the service of that goal, you support U.S. law conflating Jews, whatever their nationality and wherever they may be, with Israel (a conflation that suggests the New York Times’ original scoop about the order wasn’t as far off as people want to think). It is non-controversial only if, in the service of that goal, you are happy politicizing and cheapening the very notion of antisemitism, at a time when actual, lethal antisemitism is surging in the United States and stalking Jewish communities across the globe.

At the heart of Trump’s executive order is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This definition includes a set of illustrative examples provided as guidelines setting limits on what is to be considered legitimate criticism of Israel, unlike anything that exists for any other country or issue. Notably, these IHRA examples are explicitly referenced in Trump’s executive order, which states that they are to be a resource, “to the extent that any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.”

According to these guidelines, criticism of Israel is ipso facto antisemitism if it focuses solely on Israel, rather than targeting other countries with similar critiques. Likewise, criticism of Israel that questions Israel’s right to exist is considered, again, ipso facto antisemitism.

What will that mean in practice? We will soon find out, but as a guess: A Palestinian talking about her lived experience under occupation? Almost certainly antisemitism. A Palestinian refugee talking about what it means to want to return to his ancestral homeland or challenging the Israeli narrative of Israeli manifest destiny in a land-without-a-people-for-a-people-without-a-land? Antisemitism! Student activists trying to organize support for Palestinian human and civil rights? Antisemitism! Likewise, experts and academics on Israel-Palestine like me, or like my colleagues in Israeli human rights groups, talking about their areas of expertise? Say it with me now: Antisemitism.

Given that numerous groups are already waging lawfare against critics of Israel on U.S. campuses, this is by no means hypothetical. Indeed, mere hours after Trump signed his order, a Republican congressman, working in close cooperation with one of the groups that has for years been attacking Israel-related free speech on U.S. campuses, sent a letter demanding that the Department of Education investigate and halt funding to a major U.S. university for activities critical of Israel that now must deemed antisemitism.

The goal of this effort, and that ones that will certainly follow, is clear: to punish campuses that protect free speech on Israel-Palestine, and to have a chilling effect on academic institutions across the board, ensuring that campus administrators and donors choose to preemptively quash criticism and activism related to Israel rather than risk reputational harm, legal jeopardy, and potential loss of funding.

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While Trump’s executive order may have come as a holiday gift for his closest friends and most fanatical supporters, the road that led to it was paved by almost all mainstream U.S. Jewish organizations, including, shamefully the Anti-Defamation League; by hardline Jewish and Evangelical Christian “Israel-right-or-wring” organizations; by elected progressive members of Congress like Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and Senators like former Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Casey (D-Pa.); and by the efforts of the state of Israel and its surrogates.

These forces — out of ideological zeal, moral cowardice, political opportunism, or deliberate ignorance — have worked ceaselessly to legitimize and promote the view that criticism and non-violent activism targeting Israel is an insidious new kind of antisemitism that, like the old kind, must be rooted out and vanquished.

In this context, the fact that Trump — who appears to be systematically ticking off every item on the “in our wildest dreams” wishlist of the pro-Israel far-right — used an executive order to codify a free speech exception for Israel is wholly unsurprising. Likewise, the actual text of the order was entirely predictable, given that it’s merely the latest iteration of legislation that was first introduced in Congress in 2016, known as the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (ASAA).

Given its title, it would be natural to assume this measure was designed to address the sharp rise in antisemitism taking place in the Trump era — linked to Trump supporters (and officials) who either are, or have a clear soft spot for, white supremacists, Nazis, and their fellow travelers.

That assumption, sadly, would be mistaken. The ASAA, from Day 1 through enactment via Trump’s executive order, has nothing to do with raising awareness about or combating actual antisemitism. It is and was always about exploiting concerns about antisemitism as a pretext for policing, delegitimizing, and quashing criticism of Israel, with the IHRA definition as the chosen weapon.

This is the point the American Civil Liberties Union made, when it described the ASAA as, “part of a disturbing surge of government-led attempts to suppress the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate. The trend manifests on college campuses, in state contracts, and even in bills to change federal criminal law but the impact is the same: Those who seek to protest, boycott, or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced.”

What of the claim that the IHRA definition is needed to stop antisemitic attacks on Jewish students? The ACLU also noted: “anti-Semitic harassment is already illegal under federal law. The new bill does not change that fact, but its overbreadth makes it likely that it will instead silence criticism of Israel that is protected by the First Amendment.”

This is also the point made, repeatedly, by Kenneth Stern, who in his former role as the American Jewish Committee’s top official working to counter antisemitism was the lead drafter of the text that became the IHRA’s definition: in 2015, in a piece in the Jewish Journal noting that the “definition that was never intended to regulate speech on a college campus”; in 2016, in the New York Times, arguing that turning IHRA definition into policy or law would be dangerous, counterproductive to fight against antisemitism, and unconstitutional; in 2017, in an an 18-page letter to the House Judiciary Committee, arguing that if this definition is enshrined in law, “outside groups will try and suppress – rather than answer – political speech they don’t like”; and in 2018, when he warned that legislating the IHRA definition of antisemitism could “exacerbate student conflict, damage academic freedom, chill speech and harm the academy more broadly…[and] put students with a variety of critical views about Israel in jeopardy.”

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Not coincidentally, the effort to legislate a free speech-quashing definition of antisemitism took hold in the Netanyahu era, as the peace process was killed off by Israeli policies and actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians openly aiming at preventing a two-state solution. As Israeli policies became ever-more difficult to defend, and as support of the Palestinians (and most importantly, support for boycotts of Israel and settlements) gained legitimacy and steam, this effort has gained greater traction.

Now, in the Trump era, it serves the dual goals of delegitimizing protest and activism, while distracting from the real antisemitism surging in this country, including antisemitism coming straight from the president himself.

And coincidentally or not, just days before Trump’s executive order was announced, Deutch (D-Fla.) — who has applauded foreign countries that adopted the IHRA definition — published an op-ed in the Times of Israel making the case not just for the passage of the ASAA, but for the U.S. to adopt policy across the entirety of the U.S. government.

Would this mean that U.S. museums be attacked for hosting events or exhibits deemed too critical of Israel? Would participants in cultural events and festivals, or events at synagogues and Jewish community centers (most of which receive public funds for security) be forced to sign a commitment that they reject boycotts of Israel, and that they promise not to criticize Israel? Would discussion of the occupation, human rights, civil rights, children’s rights, rule of law, and more be exiled from all public venues? We may soon find out.

It is a near certainty that Trump’s executive order will ultimately be challenged in U.S. courts; given current political trends and the state of the courts, it is by no means certain how those case will play out. In the meantime, serious people should be readying themselves for the very real possibility that Deutch — or Trump himself — will forge ahead to make the IHRA definition applicable to the entire government and to all who receive federal funding. And don’t fall for efforts at misdirection: the implications of such an expansion, just like the implications of the order on its own, are chilling.

 

Op-ed by Lara Friedman, published in Times of Israel, September 13, 2019.

Almost since the start of the Trump Administration there has been speculation that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might annex all or part of the West Bank. Proving the speculation well-founded, Netanyahu announced earlier this week — in what some insist was an election stunt, and others see as a statement of real intent — that he will move forward with annexing the Jordan Valley, if he retains his job after the Sept. 17^th elections.

In response, many experts, pundits, and ostensible peace advocates – both in the US and Israel – raised the alarm, arguing that annexation will harm Israel’s security, undermine Israel’s democracy, destroy Israel’s Jewish character and the Zionist dream, or further erode the prospects for peace.

So we know what they are against, and why. What is less clear is what many of them are for – and therein lies the rub.

For many if not most people speaking out today, opposition to annexation doesn’t equal a demand for real change in Israeli policies vis-à-vis the West Bank and the Palestinians who live there – policies that already amount to annexation.

Rather, opposition to Israel’s potential annexation of a large swathe of land in the West Bank seems to stem from a fear of losing the prevailing paradigm — the one  which holds that the West Bank is still held in a state of “temporary occupation,” with its permanent status to be resolved someday, but only through negotiations.

This occupation paradigm still stands, 52 years after the 1967 War and 26 years after the start of the Oslo peace process, despite the fact that it has become nothing more than a fig leaf covering up Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank.

That fig leaf has proven invaluable to those who want to shield Israel from criticism for its policies and inoculate Israel from concrete pressure to change its behavior. It has been central to the narrative that delegitimizes those who do strongly criticize Israeli policies and who do seek to mobilize tangible pressure. And it has supported the twisted logic that not only absolves people from taking a hard stance against Israeli policies, but justifies them attacking anyone who does.

For years, “pragmatic” and “moderate” voices (many of the same ones now opposing annexation) have insisted that – for the sake of ending the occupation – Israeli actions that transformed occupation into annexation must be accommodated rather than criticized (like the normalization of Israeli demands to annex the “settlement blocs” and the “seam zone”).

They have argued that criticism of Israel’s West Bank policies must be tamped down (arguing that while Israeli actions may undermine the two-state solution, it is more productive to focus on the bad actions of the Palestinians and working to bring them back to the negotiating table).

And they have attacked calls to impose concrete consequences on Israel for its policies (based on the logic that holding the Israeli people in any way responsible for the actions of their elected leaders is unjust, counterproductive, and almost certainly antisemitic).

Today, with the fig leaf of “temporary occupation” as cover, pragmatic “pro-peace” voices continue to insist – against all evidence – that the only way to restrain Israeli policies in the West Bank is through ending the occupation itself, which can only come through negotiations. And subjecting Israel to too much pressure for these same policies will make the return to such negotiations less likely, and the achievement of an end to occupation more difficult.

Never mind that “temporary occupation”  has lasted for more than half a century. Never mind that the fig leaf of calling it “temporary occupation” has been exploited by Israel as cover for already annexing the West Bank in virtually every way except, arguably, the least important one – that is, in name.

Never mind that as a matter of Israeli practice, policy, and increasingly law, Israel today spans from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Never mind that for decades Israel has implemented polices designed to cater to Israeli citizens who openly seek to displace Palestinians and ensure permanent Israeli control over the West Bank. Never mind that it has done so, at the expense of the Palestinians, without paying any price or facing any real pushback from the world.

And above all, never mind that, irrespective of the term you choose to use to describe it, in the West Bank today the situation is quite simple: Palestinians are disenfranchised, second-class subjects of the same sovereign government that rules over Israelis on both sides of the Green Line (even if in limited areas Israeli rule is mediated through a Palestinian Authority whose “authority” is ultimately subordinate to Israel). There’s a word for such a situation — it starts with an “A” (and it’s not just “annexation”).

The fiction of “temporary occupation” is so thin today that the lights of thousands of new settlement homes twinkle cheerfully through it. This includes lights from Israeli homes built on Palestinian land seized after the Knesset — that bastion of Israeli democracy, accountable only to Israelis voters, but regularly legislating the fate of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank –- last year passed a law allowing Israel to literally erase Palestinian private property rights, for the benefit of Israeli settlers.

This fiction is negated by the ongoing Israeli global campaign demanding that the world treat settlements as indistinguishable from pre-1967 Israel (and labeling those who refuse to do so antisemites and Nazis).

This fiction is contradicted by right-wing Israeli ministers who proudly declare that Israel will never leave the West Bank.

And this fiction is gleefully erased by an Israeli Prime Minister who makes his intentions clear – not just with words but with consistent policies and actions spanning his record-long tenure in office – and by Israeli “centrist” political leaders who make clear that they, too, support annexation.

For too long, too many people have allowed the rhetoric of peace to be emptied of meaning. For too long, too many people have deluded themselves, or have sought to deceive others, into believing that giving lip service to supporting a negotiated two-state solution can substitute for taking concrete, often difficult stands against Israeli policies that violate basic notions of human rights, civil rights, property rights and international law, and that are literally designed to destroy the possibility of a negotiated solution.

Likewise, too many people are today deluding themselves, or deceiving others, into thinking that speaking out against annexation is, on its own, equivalent to fighting for peace. In reality, if one refuses to meaningfully challenge the  policies that have already made annexation a reality, speaking out against Israel officially annexing West Bank land amounts to little more than an effort to preserve the fig leaf of occupation, so that it can continue to give cover to those who want to keep enabling and defending Israel’s ever-expanding, ever-deepening annexationist status quo.

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published in The Forward on July 29, 2019.

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If you listened earlier this month to Republican responses to Donald Trump’s call for Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to the “places from which they came,” you noticed something odd. Trump’s defenders kept mentioning Israel.

“They hate Israel,”replied Lindsey Graham when asked about Trump’s attacks on The Squad. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin called Omar and Tlaib “anti-Israel.” Trump himself responded to the controversy by declaring that Omar “hates Israel.”

This is strange. As reprehensible as it is to demand that an American politician leave America for allegedly expressing insufficient patriotism, the demand is at least familiar.

“America, love it or leave it,” has been a conservative slogan since the 1960s. What’s virtually unprecedented is demanding that an American politician leave America because they’ve expressed insufficient devotion to a foreign country. Can anyone imagine Republicans defending Trump’s calls for expelling Omar and company by accusing them of hating Canada, India or Japan?

Of course not. The reason is that Republicans no longer talk about Israel like it’s a foreign country. They conflate love of Israel with love of America because they see Israel as a model for what they want America to be: An ethnic democracy.

Israel is a Jewish state. Trump and many of his allies want America to be a white, Judeo-Christian state. Israel, despite its free elections and parliamentary institutions, structurally privileges one ethnic and religious group over others. That’s what many Republicans want here.

In the press, commentators often overlook the right’s affinity for ethnic democracy in favor of other explanations for GOP support of Israel. But those other explanations are at best incomplete. One common argument is that Republicans love Israel because of its commitment to democracy and human rights.

But in the Trump era, democracy and human rights are not Republican foreign policy priorities. It’s not just Trump who admires authoritarian leaders. Rank and file Republicans do too. They hold a more favorable view than Democrats of both Russiaand Saudi Arabia. And when The Economist and YouGov asked Americans last December whether “Human rights abuses should be a principal concern in our dealings with countries,” Republicans were only half as likely as Democrats to say yes.

Most Republicans also want Israel to rule the West Bank, where Palestinians live under military law without the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. If you support Israel’s undemocratic control of the West Bank, democracy is probably not the reason you support Israel.

Another common argument for why Republicans love Israel concerns theology. Journalists often note that many evangelical Christians — most of whom vote Republican — see Jewish control of the holy land as necessary to bring about the second coming of Jesus. But it’s easy to exaggerate religion’s role. According to a 2019 Gallup study, “even the least religious Republicans are significantly more positive about Israel than the most religious Democrats. The impact of religiosity is swamped by the power of partisanship.”

A primary reason for this is race. Many religious Democrats are African American or Latino, and African American and Latino Christians — even African American and Latino evangelical Christians — are far more critical of Israel than their white counterparts. This spring, according to the Pew Research Center, members of historically black churches disapproved of the Israeli government by a margin of 34 points.

Republican support for Israel, in other words, isn’t driven by American Christians as a whole. It’s driven by conservative white Christians, whose political identity sits at the intersection of religion and race. In the Trump era, conservative white Christians have grown increasingly obsessed with preserving America’s religious and racial character, and they see Israel as a country that’s doing just that.

Most Republicans fear a less white, less Christian America. Earlier this year, Pew asked Americans whether it would strengthen or weaken “American customs and values” if whites ceased being the majority. By a margin of 46 points, Republicans said America would become weaker. And if Republicans fear America becoming less white, they also fear it becoming more Muslim. A New America poll last November found that 71 percent of Republicans believe Islam is incompatible with American values and 74 percent, according to an Economist/YouGov survey last June, think Muslims should be temporarily banned from entering the United States.

These racial and religious fears form the backbone of Republican opposition to immigration. As Clemson University’s Steven V. Miller has shown, Americans who want less immigration are almost six times more likely to be motivated by racial resentment than by economic anxiety.

So it’s a measure of the power of racial resentment inside the GOP that immigration is now, by far, the issue that Republicans care about most. Last December, when Quinnipiac College asked Americans what Congress should make its top priority, more Republicans answered immigration than all the other choices combined.

In June, when Reuters asked Republicans to name their top political concern, immigration again trounced the second most common answer by a factor of more than three to one.

For Republicans who want to preserve America’s demographic character, Israel — which makes immigrating and gaining citizenship easy for Jews but extremely difficult for non-Jews — represents a model. In her 2016 book, Adios America, which shapedTrump’s immigration rhetoric, Ann Coulter wrote that “Israel says, quite correctly, that changing Israel’s ethnicity would change the idea of Israel. Well, changing America’s ethnicity changes the idea of America too.”

In 2017, in response to a news article about Israel’s plan to deport African migrants, she tweeted, “Netanyahu for President!”

When the New York Times reported in 2018 on Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinians who were marching towards the fence that encloses the Gaza Strip, she asked, “Can we do that?”

It’s not just Coulter. “Everybody acts like ‘Oh what Trump has said is so amazing,’” exclaimed Mike Huckabee, in defending Trump’s Muslim ban. “It’s not that amazing in Israel. You don’t have open borders to Muslims here.”

Rick Santorum has cited Israel to justify profiling Muslims who come to the United States.

Last December, in a monologue arguing for Trump’s wall on the southern border, Tucker Carlson declared that, “Israelis know how effective walls are.”

Ted Cruz has said, “There is a great deal we can learn on border security from Israel.” And Trump himself has claimed that, “If you really want to find out how effective a wall is, just ask Israel.”

This view isn’t confined to Republican elites. Public opinion surveys suggest a strong correlation between hostility to immigration, hostility to Muslims and support for Israel. When University of Maryland Professor Shibley Telhami, at my request, crunched the data from polling he conducted last fall, he found that Americans who said the United States government should “lean toward the Palestinians” in mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict supported making immigration to the US easier by a margin of 60 points.

Americans who said the US should “lean toward Israel,” by contrast, supported making immigration to the United States harder by a margin of 20 points. Similarly, almost 70 percent of respondents who said the US should “lean toward Israel” had an unfavorable of Islam compared with less than 33 percent of respondents who said America should “lean toward the Palestinians.”

But the right’s admiration for Israel’s ethnic democracy extends beyond immigration. Israel doesn’t just maintain Jewish dominance by keeping non-Jews out of the country. It also delegitimizes and limits political participation by the non-Jews under its control.

On Election Day in 2015, Netanyahu warned that, “Arab voters are coming out in droves.” This year, Likud activists placed 1200 hidden cameras in polling stations in Palestinian areas in an effort to intimidate Palestinian citizens of Israel from voting.

Netanyahu’s Likud Party also asked Israel’s election committee to bar a Palestinian party, Ram-Balad, from running for the Knesset on the grounds that it supports terrorism and does not want Israel to be a Jewish state. (Under Israeli law, parties that reject Israel’s existence as a Jewish or a democratic state, or support racism or violence, cannot participate in elections.

Since many Palestinian citizens of Israel don’t want Israel to be a Jewish state, the Israeli right regularly uses this law to challenge their parties’ ability to run. So far, these efforts at barring them have failed in the Israeli Supreme Court.)

These efforts aren’t primarily about race. After all, roughly fifty percent of Israeli Jews hail from North Africa and the Middle East, and thus themselves would not qualify as white by American definitions. Nonetheless, it’s easy to see parallels between the Israeli right’s attempt to limit political participation by Palestinians and the Republican Party’s efforts to impede — or at least delegitimize — political participation by people of color, whether by claiming that Barack Obama was not a United States citizen, by passing laws that make it harder for minorities to vote, or by adding a citizenship question to the census in the hopes that fewer Latinos would then fill it out.

Even Trump’s attack on The Squad echoes an argument that Netanyahu has long employed. In his tweet, Trump argued that the four non-white members of Congress should leave the United States because they hail from “countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.”

The insinuation is that because Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley hail from supposedly uncivilized cultures, they lack the right to participate politically in the United States. That claim has deep roots in American history: It was central to the argument for denying blacks and other non-whites American citizenship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it has also been central to Netanyahu’s argument for why Palestinians in the West Bank lack the right to citizenship either in Israel or in a state of their own.

In his most important book, A Durable Peace, Netanyahu quotes former British officials as declaring that, “Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine” and that “The Arab is a poor fighter, though an [sic] adept at looting, sabotage and murder.” The implication is the same as Trump’s: People from uncivilized cultures don’t deserve political rights.

Understanding that Israel serves as a model for the ethnic democracy that many Republicans wish to create in the United States is crucial to understanding the way contemporary Republicans discuss anti-Semitism.

Trump and his defenders have not only called Omar and other members of The Squad anti-Israel, they’ve also called them anti-Semitic. The irony is that Trump has trafficked in exactly the same stereotypes that Omar has.

Omar got in trouble for saying AIPAC’s influence was “all about the Benjamins”; Trump in 2015 told the Republican Jewish Coalition, “You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money.”

Omar exacerbated her woes by suggesting that pro-Israel groups “push for allegiance to a foreign country”; speaking to the RJC this April, Trump called Netanyahu “your prime minister.” Of the two, in fact, Trump has the much longer and more egregious history of Jew-baiting. The key to understanding the GOP’s outrage, then, is not what Omar said but who she is: A black Muslim immigrant woman.

Since Omar is black and most Jews in contemporary America are considered white, making her the face of anti-Semitism furthers the right’s contention that most discrimination in contemporary America is reverse discrimination: By people of color and Muslims against whites, Christians and Jews.

In addition to calling members of The Squad anti-Semitic, Trump has called them “very Racist,” presumably against whites. This weekend he called African American Congressman Elijah Cummings a “racist” too. On Fox News, Democrats are frequentlycalled “anti-white.”

Republicans also emphasize what Rush Limbaugh has called the “Democrats’ War on Christianity.” Ralph Reed has called hostility to evangelicals “the last acceptable bigotry.” Trump’s Justice Department has made battling discrimination against Christians a centerpiece of its work, even as it defends his Muslim travel ban.

These arguments shape public opinion. According to an April 2019 Pew Research poll, Republicans are more likely to say that whites face “a lot” of discrimination than do blacks. They’re more likely to say Christians face “a lot” of discrimination than do Muslims. This belief that reverse discrimination is the dominant form of discrimination in contemporary America has enormous implications. It allows Republicans to cast their efforts to limit the free speech and political participation of Muslims and people of color not as acts of bigotry but as responses to bigotry.

If boycotting Israel is anti-Semitic, as Trump officials say, then criminalizing Palestinian activism in the US, as many Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have tried to do, is a necessary defense against discrimination.

If Sharia is inherently anti-Semitic and anti-Christian, then passing laws against it — as 14 states have done — doesn’t infringe upon the rights of Muslims. It protects the rights of Christians and Jews. And if Omar — the first Muslim woman ever to sit on the House Foreign Relations Committee — is anti-Semitic, then removing her from that committee, as Vice President Mike Pence has demanded, is simply a way of safeguarding Jews.

People of color are, of course, capable of all kinds of bigotry, including anti-Semitism. But the right’s effort to make Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory and Marc Lamont Hill the face of contemporary American anti-Semitism — despite Trump’s long history of invoking anti-Jewish stereotypes and despite the recent synagogue massacres by white nationalists in Pittsburgh and Poway — constitutes an effort to draw American Jews into the ethnic democracy project.

By calling America a “Judeo-Christian” nation, conservatives offer Jews full inclusion in a national identity that excludes Muslims. It’s an offer some Jews are eager to accept. The Zionist Organization of America’s Mort Klein, for instance, has justified Trump’s ban on admitting Syrian refugees by explaining that, “We’re opposed to bringing in people who have enormous antipathy toward Jews and Israel.”

But to the consternation of many conservatives, most American Jews have spurned the offer and continued voting Democratic, thus allying themselves with the very people of color who Republicans insist threaten them. While most American Jews believe that in a post-Holocaust world it’s important that Israel remain a country with a special obligation to represent and protect Jews, they don’t consider Israel’s ethnic democracy a model for the United States.

Instead, since at least the civil rights movement, American Jews have considered the struggle for equality by America’s most historically oppressed groups integral to their own equality. That continues in the Trump era. By clear majorities, Jews opposeTrump’s immigration policies and hold a favorable view of Muslims.

This helps explain the right’s obsession with George Soros. His high-profile activism on behalf of immigrant and Muslim rights epitomizes American Jewry’s rejection of the right’s invitation to help build a white, Judeo-Christian republic. And it helps explain the strange phenomenon of conservative Christians calling progressive Jews anti-Semitic. If people of color are the real anti-Semites, and limiting their numbers and influence is the way to combat anti-Semitism, then Jews who oppose doing that are complicit in anti-Semitism.

Republican attacks on Omar and her colleagues as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic aren’t ultimately about Israel or Jews. They’re an effort to use Israel and Jews to further the central goal of the Trump-era right: Maintaining white Christian dominance in the face of demographic change.

Rejecting that project may spawn more white nationalist anti-Semitism. The Pittsburgh shooter loathed Jews for supporting the rights of Central American refugees. Ann Coulter earlier this year castigated “Jews who think they’re black.” But most American Jews know in our bones that narrow, exclusive definitions of Americanism only leave us more vulnerable. By contrast, the more America welcomes Somali immigrants and Guatemalan asylum seekers not only into the country but into the political process — the more it truly becomes a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-faith liberal democracy — the safer we will be.

Op-ed by Peter Beinart published in The Forward on May 20, 2019.

Last month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that American aid to Israel is “something that can be discussed” in Washington. Her comments made news precisely because America’s policy of giving Israel billions in aid without expecting any policy changes in return hasn’t actually been discussed — or at least questioned — in either party in more than a quarter-century. That needs to change.

To understand why, ask yourself this question: Why did Israelis last month re-elect a prime minister who opposes a Palestinian state and — by championing settlement growth and vowing to annex parts of the West Bank — is working to make one impossible?

There are several common answers. One is historical: Over the last two decades the second intifada and rocket fire from the Gaza Strip have created an enduring right-wing majority among Israeli Jews. A second answer is demographic: Netanyahu’s center-left rivals lean heavily on the votes of secular Ashkenazi Jews, whose share of the Israeli population is shrinking. Netanyahu relies more on Orthodox Jews, whose share is rising.

There’s truth to both these explanations. But there’s a third, which American politicians and pundits rarely acknowledge: Israelis re-elected Netanyahu because he showed them he could undermine the two-state solution with international impunity. Indeed, he made that accomplishment a central theme of his campaign.

Again and again in recent years, Netanyahu has mocked political rivals who warned that his policies toward the Palestinians were making Israel a global pariah. In a speech to supporters in 2017 he quoted former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who predicted in 2011 that, “Israel’s delegitimization is on the horizon.” To which Netanyahu responded, “Nonsense… Israel is enjoying an unparalleled diplomatic spring.”

In a campaign ad this year, Netanyahu juxtaposed an ominous 2013 quote from former foreign minister Tzipi Livni — “The prime minister of Israel is leading the State of Israel to severe isolation” — with images of him alongside Donald Trump and other world leaders. In another ad, he showed himself in the Oval Office telling a dejected-looking Barack Obama that Israel will never return to the 1967 lines.

Netanyahu’s message, as Hagai El-Ad of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has noted, was that Israel can have it all: It can deny Palestinians basic rights and enjoy international favor at the same time. Even presidents like Obama, who disapprove of Israel’s actions, don’t penalize Israel for them. They fold.

Netanyahu was right. It’s not just Trump who has enabled his assault on the two-state solution. Obama did too. For eight years as president, Obama warned that Israeli policies in the West Bank were endangering Palestinian rights, American interests and Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish state.

And yet, during those eight years, Obama never used American aid to Israel as a lever to change the policies he decried. Obama watched Netanyahu rebuff him again and again. He watched as Netanyahu in 2011 travelled to the White House to publicly repudiate his vision of a Palestinian state near the 1967 lines.

He watched as Netanyahu in 2014 “flatly refused” to give Secretary of State John Kerry “the slightest hint about the scale of the territorial concessions” he was willing to make to the Palestinians. He watched as Netanyahu used settlement growth to “sabotage,” in the words of one American official, Kerry’s efforts at brokering a two-state deal.

Then, after all that — and after Netanyahu’s fervent lobbying against the Iran nuclear agreement — Obama in 2016 rewarded him with the largest military aid package in Israeli history.

“America is a thing you can move very easily,” Netanyahu once boasted to settlers. Obama and Trump have both illustrated the point.

The American government’s capitulation — under both Democrats and Republicans — is the unspoken elephant in the room when Americans discuss Israel’s embrace of permanent occupation. It is impossible to understand the looming death of the two-state solution without understanding that, for more than a twenty-five years, no American president has made Israel pay a price for undermining it. During that time, the notion that an American president might refuse to subsidize policies that brutalize Palestinians, harm America’s image, and threaten Israeli democracy, has become almost inconceivable. It’s time for a new generation of American progressives — especially progressive Jews — to make it conceivable again.

One reason conditioning aid has become inconceivable is that any American president who proposed it would be labeled anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic. But by that standard, these epithets should be affixed to most of the presidents of the mid to late twentieth century.

During the cold war, as Nathan Thrall details in his indispensable book, The Only Language They Understand, presidents we now routinely think of as pro-Israel routinely used American aid to influence Israeli policy.

When Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, after attacking Egypt alongside Britain and France in 1956, mused about annexing Egyptian territory, Dwight Eisenhower threatened to end all US aid unless Israeli troops withdrew immediately.

In 1975, when Israel refused Henry Kissinger’s demand for a partial withdrawal from the Sinai desert, which it had conquered in 1967, Gerald Ford vowed a “reassessment” of “our relations with Israel,” and refused any new military or economic assistance until the withdrawal was done.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1977, Jimmy Carter told Menachem Begin that Israel’s use of American armored personnel carriers violated the Arms Export Control Act, which prevented American weaponry from being used for offensive operations. Unless Israel left Lebanon immediately, Carter warned, future arms sales “will have to be terminated.”

In 1982, when the Reagan administration determined that Israel’s use of cluster bombs in Lebanon may have violated America’s Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with the Jewish state, Reagan banned new sales of the bombs to Israel for six years. In 1991, George H.W. Bush initially refused to give Israel the $10 billion in loan guarantees it requested to resettle Soviet immigrants until it froze settlement growth in the West Bank.

This history not only undercuts the claim that conditioning American aid reflects hostility to Israel, it also undercuts the claim that conditioning aid doesn’t work. In recent years, former diplomats like Dennis Ross, and establishment American Jewish leaders like Malcolm Hoenlein, have insisted that only American reassurance, not American pressure, produces Israeli concessions.

But during the cold war, American pressure produced Israeli concessions again and again. When Eisenhower threatened American aid in 1956, Israeli troops began leaving Egypt within 36 hours. Ford’s threat to halt new arms sales forced a partial Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai in 1975 and Carter’s threat forced Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1977. The following year, Carter again threatened aid during the Camp David talks that led to Israel leaving the Sinai completely. And although Bush failed to restrain settlement growth, his initial refusal to provide loan guarantees, according to the Oxford historian Avi Shlaim, “forced” Israel to participate in the 1991 Madrid Conference, where for the first time it publicly negotiated with a delegation of Palestinians.

Of course, American pressure was rarely the sole reason for Israel’s actions. Had Egyptian President Anwar Sadat not offered peace, it’s unlikely Israel would have fully left the Sinai. Had Palestinians not launched the first intifada, which raised the price of Israel’s occupation, and had the PLO not recognized Israel’s existence, it’s unlikely Israel would have signed the 1993 Oslo Accords. Had Saudi Arabia not unveiled the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, Ariel Sharon may not have withdrawn Israeli settlers from Gaza in a bid to undercut the Saudi effort three years later.

Palestinian and Arab behavior matters. And it matters who leads Israel. But Israelis are more likely to elect rejectionists to lead them — and rejectionists are more likely to remain rejectionists once in office — when they know their rejectionism will not harm Israel’s most important alliance.

Netanyahu’s decade-long political dominance in Israel, and his decade-long defiance in Washington, would simply not have been possible under the old rules. Which is why progressives need to bring back those old rules — or at least a modified version of them — if they truly want Israel to change course.

To condition American aid on Israeli behavior would not single Israel out. In theory, the Foreign Assistance Act, as amended in the late 1990s, prohibits the United States from providing aid or training to any foreign military units that have committed “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

Congress also places additional human rights conditions on American aid to numerous specific governments, including Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Columbia, El Salvador, Egypt, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Before Trump ended American assistance to the Palestinian Authority, its aid was among the most heavily conditioned of all.

What distinguishes American aid to Israel is precisely its exemption from the rules and limitations that govern assistance to other nations. While the United States phased outeconomic assistance to the Jewish state a decade ago, Israel receives far more military aid than any country where the United States is not currently at war. Outside of active American combat zones like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the United States gives most of its military aid through something called Foreign Military Financing: a line of credit through which governments can buy American weapons. In Trump’s 2019 budget request, 61 percent of that foreign military financing goes to Israel. Israel also receives its financing in a more advantageous way than other countries. Every other foreign government receives a set amount of money per year, which it can spend on American weapons. Seth Binder of the Project on Middle East Democracy compares it to a debit card: You can only spend what America has already given you. Israel, by contrast, enjoys something called “cash-flow financing.” Binder compares it to a credit card: Israel can buy American weapons merely by committing to spend money America will give it in the future. Under the Memorandum of Understanding Obama announced in 2016, Israel is due to receive $3.8 billion per year until 2028. And because of cash-flow financing Israel can spend some of that future money now. That helps it buy expensive items — as it did in 2017 when it purchased 17 F-35 fighters at close to $100 million per plane — which would be hard to afford using America’s aid for only one particular year.

The United States also gives Israel its aid right away. While most other nations can access American aid only when they agree upon an arms purchase, Israel is given a lump sum at the beginning of every fiscal year. Since Israel doesn’t spend all that money right away, it puts the rest in the bank, where it accrues interest, which makes the amount it actually receives in American aid even higher than the official $3.8 billion figure.

Finally, Israel is the only nation that can spend part of its aid buying weapons from its own manufacturers, not those in the United States. In that way, Israel has used American assistance to fund its defense industry, which now ranks as the 8th largestarms exporter in the world. The ten-year deal Obama signed in 2016 phases out this “offshore procurement” in 2028. Israel, however, is still allowed to spend at least 20 percent of its aid on Israeli weaponry through 2024, and smaller percentages after that: A total of more than $5.6 billion.

But even observers who acknowledge that it’s not inherently anti-Israel to condition American aid, and that such conditionality has proven effective at changing Israeli behavior in the past, might still resist doing so for one simple and understandable reason: Security. Israel faces genuine threats, both from hostile governments like Iran and violent groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. American aid helps protect Israel from them.

Americans should care about keeping Israelis safe. That means continuing to give Israel the roughly $500 million per year the US currently provides for missile defense and guaranteeing Israel’s military edge over its regional foes. But there are ways to condition aid that don’t weaken Israeli security. They actually enhance it.

What follows does not exhaust the possibilities. In the years to come, Democrats should consider a range of proposals that balance their commitment to Israeli security with their commitment to Palestinian rights. But it’s worth detailing two types of conditionality in particular. The first involves specific Israeli practices that the United States should refuse to fund because they serve no legitimate security goal and produce immense suffering.

One such practice is the detention of Palestinian children. In the West Bank, Israel maintains two legal systems: a civil system that guarantees robust legal protections to its Jewish citizens and a military system that guarantees far fewer rights to its Palestinian non-citizens. Under this system of military law, the Israeli army routinely arrests Palestinian children.

Between 2012 and 2015, Defense of Children International-Palestine interviewed more than 400 Palestinian children — almost one-third of them under the age of 16 — that Israel had arrested in the West Bank. It found that many were arrested in the middle of the night. Most were blindfolded, strip-searched and had their hands bound. In the vast majority of cases, neither they nor their parents were told why they were being arrested.

A majority reported being physically abused during their arrests and a quarter reported physical abuse while being interrogated in detention. While in detention — which can last from 24 to 96 hours, depending on a child’s age — almost all were interrogated in the absence of their parents or a lawyer. Which helps explain why the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has reported that, “ill-treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” This harrowing B’Tselem video, which shows soldiers in March arresting a nine-year old at school despite his teacher’s desperate pleas, shows what that looks like up close.

Minnesota Representative Betty McCollum has introduced legislation to ensure that no American money funds the detention of Palestinian children. Shamefully, only one Democratic presidential candidate, Representative Seth Moulton, has endorsed it, according to McCollum’s office. For a party that claims to prize human dignity, this shouldn’t be a close call. Using American money to subsidize Iron Dome or David’s Sling, which shoot down Hamas or Hezbollah rockets, is morally defensible. Using American money to traumatize children by pulling them from their homes or schools, often binding, blindfolding, strip-searching and beating them in the process, and then interrogating them without a parent or a lawyer present, sometimes for days, is morally indefensible.

Israel is a world-class military power. The Palestinian children it detains are mostly accused of throwing stones at an occupying army. Israel can afford to offer them the same legal protections it affords Jewish children suspected of wrongdoing. And by foregoing “torture,” which is how a 2013 report by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child describes Israel’s treatment of many underage Palestinian suspects, Israel may also lead fewer of them to engage in violence as adults, which makes Israelis safer.

In addition to ensuring that American money isn’t used to detain Palestinian children, the US should ensure that it isn’t funding the demolition of Palestinian homes. It’s well known that Israel demolishes the houses of suspected Palestinian (though not Jewish) terrorists. But the practice is far broader than that. In the West Bank, most Palestinian homes are bulldozed not because their inhabitants are accused of violence but merely because they lack building permits. The problem is that in Area C, which encompasses sixty percent of the West Bank, and which right-wing Israeli politicians seek to annex, Israel tries to keep the Palestinian population as low as possible, which means a Palestinians’ chances of getting a building permit are, in B’Tselem’s words, “slim to none.”

So when Palestinians grow sufficiently desperate for places to live, they build without permits, and hope the bulldozers don’t come. But often they do. According to B’Tselem, Israel has demolished at least 1400 Palestinian houses in the West Bank since 2006, leaving more than 6,000 people homeless. Sometimes, as in the recent cases of Susiyaand Khan al-Ahmar, entire villages are threatened with demolition so Israel can expand settlements onto their land. For such work, Israel has in the past used American-made Caterpillar bulldozers, some of which it has bought with American aid. This must end. There is no security justification for asking Americans to pay so Israel can demolish the homes of people who have been accused of no crime other than failing to possess building permits that — as non-citizens under military law — they cannot get. If Democrats can’t grasp that, they should spend a moment watching Palestinian familieswatch their homes being bulldozed before their eyes.

Finally, America should extend this principle — funding aspects of Israeli policy that have a plausible security rationale and refusing to fund aspects that don’t — to Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Shooting down missiles and blocking tunnels deserve American support. But why does Israeli security require banning businesses in Gaza from exporting processed foods like cookies and potato chips to Israel and the West Bank? Why does it threaten Israeli security to allow people in Gaza to visit the West Bank to attend a grandparent’s funeral? Why does Israel bar students in Gaza from studying at West Bank universities? A few years ago, Israel denied exit permits to most of the students at a music school in Gaza, thus preventing them from performing in the West Bank, until the Israeli human rights group Gisha convinced a member of the Knesset to intervene.

It is understandable that Israel inspects containers entering and exiting Gaza. It is understandable that Israel conducts background checks to ensure that the people entering Israel or the West Bank have no ties to terrorism. But blanket prohibitions on the movement of everything from college students to potato chips don’t bolster Israeli security. To the contrary, they weaken it by fostering Palestinian hatred and despair, and denying people in Gaza exposure to more open, liberal societies. Which is why current and former Israeli security officials have repeatedlywarned that Palestinian hopelessness creates the conditions for violence, and criticized the blockade.

These blanket prohibitions on the movement of goods and people aren’t designed to reduce terrorism. They’re designed, as Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have acknowledged, to keep Gaza and the West Bank separate so Palestinians cannot achieve their own state. That’s not a goal American taxpayers should subsidize.

Critics may respond that it should be up to Israelis — not Americans — to decide which Israeli policies are moral and which bolster Israeli security. That’s true. But it’s up to Americans to decide how to spend American money. And funding the detention of Palestinian children, the demolition of Palestinian homes and the virtual imprisonment of Palestinians in Gaza doesn’t only harm Palestinians. It also harms America.

In 2010, General David Petraeus observed that, “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region].” In 2013, General James Mattis said, “I paid a military security price every day as the commander of CentCom because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel.” That doesn’t mean American leaders should give Arab governments a veto over American support for Israel. But it underscores the importance, for America’s own national security, of deciding which Israeli policies are worth subsidizing and which are not.

The problem with this first type of conditionality — conditions on which Israeli policies American money can support — isn’t that it’s illegitimate. It’s that, on its own, it may be ineffective. Restrictions on funding certain Israeli practices may draw valuable attention to them in the United States. But money is fungible. Israel could simply pay for child detention, home demolitions and restrictions on travel from Gaza with its own money and use American aid for other purposes. Which is why Democrats should consider a second, broader, form of conditionality as well.

This second form of conditionality doesn’t require reducing overall American aid to Israel by even a dime. It merely requires threatening to reduce “off-shore procurement”: the unique arrangement through which America allows Israel to spend billions in American aid on its own weapons rather than American ones. In his 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, Obama pledged not to phase out off-shore procurement until 2028. But as prominent Republicans insisted at the time, such memorandums are just blueprints; they’re not legally binding. And since 2016 Netanyahu has, by declaring his support for annexing parts of the West Bank, announced a radical policy shift to which the United States is entitled to respond with policy shifts of its own.

As former Bush Pentagon official, and Orthodox rabbi, Dov Zakheim has suggested, the United States should use off-shore procurement to try to alter Israeli policies that not only deny Palestinians basic human rights, but pose an existential threat to Israel. Currently, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live, in different ways, as Israeli subjects but cannot become Israeli citizens. That’s colonialism. Palestinians — like all people—deserve to be citizens of the country in which they live. Denying them that right is a recipe for intifada after intifada since no people will indefinitely endure subjugation. And the more Palestinians lose hope of becoming citizens of their own country, the more they will demand citizenship in Israel, which Israel cannot grant without ceasing to be a Jewish state.

The United States should not condition off-shore procurement on the creation of a Palestinian state since creating one is not solely within Israel’s power. But America can use off-shore procurement as leverage to keep Israel from foreclosing a Palestinian state. The US can insist that Israel not annex any part of the West Bank. (Palestinian leaders have in the past suggested that Israel could annex certain settlements as part of a two-state deal, but only in return for land inside Israel proper. If Israel annexes settlements unilaterally and without compensation, the basis for that trade disappears).

The US can also insist that Israel stop settlement growth, which eats away at the territory on which Palestinians would establish their state (and which often involves the theft of land that individual Palestinians own). In 2017, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population grew at close to double the rate of the Israeli population as a whole. That’s partly because the Israeli government essentially pays Jews to move into the West Bank by allocating far more government money to settlements than to cities and towns inside Israel proper.

Finally, while the United States cannot demand that Israelis and Palestinians reach a two-state deal, it can demand that the Israeli government accept the basic outlines of one, as detailed in the Clinton parameters in 2000 and the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, as Mahmoud Abbas has done, and negotiate on that basis. Israel can refuse. But then America can refuse to stop allowing Israel to spend American money on Israeli arms.

Like the first, this second form of conditionality would elicit howls from the Israeli and American Jewish political establishments, which would accuse the US of undermining Israeli security. But it’s worth remembering that, overwhelmingly, Israel’s top security officials consider the two-state solution safer than permanent occupation. In 2015, one former head of the Mossad, Israel’s external security agency, Meir Dagan, warned that Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians were “leading to either a binational state or an apartheid state.” In 2017, another former Mossad head, Tamir Pardo, called the death of the two-state solution an “existential threat” to Israel. Such views are widespread. In 2016, Major General Gadi Shamni, former head of Israel’s Central Command, which encompasses the West Bank, noted that, “The overwhelming majority of the senior ranks of the defense establishment think we are moving in very problematic directions in regard to the Palestinians. For every 50 people who think as I do, you’ll find [only] one or two who espouse a different view.” That same year, a Likud member of the Knesset quipped that “there is something that happens” to the people who run Israel’s security agencies that “makes them left-wing.”

This may sound strange to Americans. How could Israelis, who prize security, elect leaders who are entrenching an occupation that so many Israeli security professionals consider dangerous? But it’s not that strange: Ideologues overrule security professionals in our political system too. The Pentagon considers climate change a grave threat to national security; Donald Trump considers it a Chinese hoax. The police condemn laws that make it easier to own a gun. Police-loving Republicans pass them anyway.

By conditioning off-shore procurement, the United States can prod and empower those in Israel’s security establishment who fear permanent occupation to more forcefully oppose it. And America can weaken Netanyahu by showing ordinary Israelis that his policies undermine Israel’s most important relationship. As B’Tselem’s Hagai El-Ad has argued, “Perpetuating the occupation and paying no price for it – having it both ways – is Netanyahu’s single goal. Breaking…that mold is the biggest hope we have of finally ending the occupation.” With this shift in policy, Democrats can keep this hope alive.

If a Democratic presidential candidate endorses this shift — of the major candidates, only Bernie Sanders has so far come close — it will likely help them among Democratic voters. A University of Maryland poll this spring found that 57 percent of Democrats think the US should respond to settlement growth with “economic sanctions” or “more serious action.” But that candidate will come under ferocious assault from Republicans and establishment American Jewish groups. And it will be up to progressive American Jews to thrust themselves into that fight.

That won’t be easy. If other progressive Jews are like me, they feel an internal dissonance when it comes to pressuring Israel, a voice inside their head that says: Don’t turn on your own. The voice says that Israel, whatever its flaws, is family, and the Palestinians are not. It says that when anti-Semitism is rising, including on the left, you don’t throw chum in the water. Once American Christians grow comfortable condemning and pressuring Israel, maybe we’ll find they enjoy it just a little too much.

I can never totally silence that voice. I’ve heard it all my life from some of the people I love most. But it grows quieter at this time of year, in the extended interlude between Passover and Shavuot, when Jews contemplate the journey from physical to spiritual freedom.

The Jewish family is born in the Book of Genesis, in the land of Israel. But the Jewish people are born in the Book of Exodus, in slavery in Egypt. They then spend the rest of the Torah trying to return to the place where Abraham and his descendants already live near the beginning of the story. Why the detour, asks Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his Haggadah? His answer: Because the Jewish people “had to suffer the experience of slavery and degradation before it could learn, know and feel intuitively that there is something morally wrong with oppression.” God wanted Jews to gain that moral intuition before they settled, as a people, on their land.

Netanyahu — like his father before him — fears this moral impulse in Jewish tradition, which he sees as inimical to Jewish survival in a predatory world. He is right to fear it. Because the moral intuition that Sacks describes could help end the international impunity that Netanyahu has reveled in for the last decade. If Sacks is right, then ensuring that the United States does not help Israel arrest a child, demolish a home or imprison a people is just about the most Jewish thing we can possibly do.

Does a new generation of American Jews feel this moral intuition deeply enough to challenge the forces that sustain American complicity in Israeli oppression? The next chapter of American Jewish history will rest, in large measure, on the answer.

Op-ed by Lara Friedman, published in LobeLog on April 24, 2019.

The ongoing hullabaloo over an academic conference organized by the University of North Carolina and Duke University—involving allegations that the event featured “severe anti-Israeli bias and explicit anti-Semitism”—highlights escalating efforts to delegitimize airing of facts that are unflattering to Israel, stifle criticism of Israel, and deny Palestinians the right and ability to communicate their own experiences and perspectives.

The conference, held to discuss the “Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities,” featured an array of voices and perspectives, including Yasser Abu Jamei, who runs the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. During Israel’s 2014 military action in Gaza, the IDF leveled a building in which Abu Jamei’s extended family had taken refuge, killing 26 of his relatives, among them 19 children. Abu Jamei, who is regularly featured in programs about Gaza in the United States and around the world, spoke powerfully about the effects of trauma on Palestinians in Gaza, especially children.

Other voices from Gaza included Hani Almadhoun, whose presentation, like his writings, focused on the systematic violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Mohammed Eid, a Rotary Peace Fellow, recounted his Sisyphean efforts to leave Gaza to study at UNC (a video of him from another event is here). Also participating was journalist and author Laila El Haddad, perhaps best known for her appearance on “Parts Unknown” with Anthony Bourdain.

The event also included subject matter experts (many of whom are Jewish): Nathan Brown, a professor at George Washington University and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Sara Roy, a senior scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies; Tania Hary, the executive director of the Israeli non-governmental organization Gisha; Ghaith al-Omari, from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a right-of-center pro-Israel think tank; Nathan Stock, a fellow at the Middle East Institute and former Carter Center representative for the Gaza Strip and West Bank.; and me, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace

Were speakers critical of Israel? Certainly. Palestinians from Gaza are understandably critical of Israeli policies that treat them as a nuisance to be minimized, and, in the case of any offense, as collectively guilty and meriting devastating collective punishment. Likewise, Israel appeared in an unfavorable light when Gisha’s Tania Hary described what was previously an official Israeli policy of limiting the entry of food into Gaza to an amount calculated to meet just the minimum caloric requirements of the population to prevent actual malnutrition, or the Israeli policies that govern nearly every aspect of life in Gaza, or the high numbers of civilians killed by Israel.

Did speakers criticize only Israel? No. The man-made catastrophe in the Gaza Strip has many authors. Israel bears the lion’s share of responsibility and criticism, but there is plenty left for others. Those who want to shut down criticism of Israel would have disliked much of what was said; those who feel the same way about the criticism of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, the Gulf states, the United States, and Europe would have been similarly unhappy.

Speakers and panels aside, the actual hook for attacks on the conference is a single incident during a musical performance that took place the evening before the substantive panels got underway. This incident prompted two Republican members of Congress from North Carolina (George Holding and Ted Budd) to send letters to the Department of Education. The media breathlessly repeated and magnified their account. One right-wing media outlet even suggested links between the conference and a terrorist organization.

Introducing his satirical song, “Mama, I fell in love with a Jew,” Tamer Nafar, a well-known rapper and actor (and a Palestinian citizen of Israel), jokingly described it as his “anti-Semitic” song. His comments indeed sounded politically tone-deaf, or even painful, to the ears of many people, including me. But to be clear: the song is not anti-Semitic and until now was not even controversial. The video gained popularity in Israel two years ago when it was released. Israelis correctly understood the song as a cheeky send-up of the thorny realities that underlie Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel.

The injustice of attacking an entire conference over this single incident speaks for itself. So, too, does the fact that there is more outrage in Congress and parts of the general public over an Israeli citizen making a bad joke about something that is not-anti-Semitic being anti-Semitic than there is over actual anti-Semitic acts taking place in this country. Budd, for instance, voted “no” on a recent House resolution condemning anti-Semitism and other hateful expressions of intolerance, arguing that since it didn’t single out a specific member of Congress by name, he could not support it.

Clearly, the outrage over the UNC-Duke event is not really about Nafar’s joke or even what panelists or attendees did or did not discuss. The outrage is over the fact that a conference that focused on the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian equation was allowed to take place at all.

Ironically, the attacks on the UNC-Duke conference, led by two conservative Republicans, are taking place against the backdrop of growing right-wing indignation over the alleged silencing of right-wing voices on campus. Just last month, President Trump signed an executive order ostensibly designed “to defend American students and American values that have been under siege.”

The attacks on the UNC-Duke conference—alongside continuing efforts to pass laws defining criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism—demonstrate that, although the president clearly has something else in mind when he talks about protecting free speech on campus, the truth is that campus free speech, when it comes to Israel, is very much under attack today—by those who want to shut down all criticism of Israel.

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published in The Forward on April 10, 2019.

The lesson of Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent reelection victory is simple, and old. Frederick Douglass articulated it 162 years ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

For a decade now, commentators have bemoaned the demise of the Israeli left. They’ve attributed the left’s decline to a rising Orthodox population. They’ve attributed it to the legacy of the second intifada, which traumatized and embittered Israeli Jews. But there’s a more basic explanation: The left wants Israel to fundamentally change course. It wants to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which would require uprooting perhaps a hundred thousand settlers. For Israel, which has been steadily tightening its grip on the West Bank for more than fifty years, that would constitute wrenching change. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for merely launching a peace process with the PLO; he hadn’t even endorsed a Palestinian state. Any serious Israeli move to negotiate one would spark massive protests by the pro-settler right. Army units might refuse to withdraw settlers. There would be new threats of political assassination. Pundits would speculate about the risk of civil war. And a Palestinian state itself would create unforeseeable risks.

As a general rule, people don’t choose painful, convulsive change when they’re comfortable with the status quo. And, as Noam Sheizaf has long argued, Israeli Jews are comfortable. Yes, there are occasional rocket attacks from Gaza, but Israel has Hamas fairly well deterred. Yes, there are occasional terrorist attacks from the West Bank, but in partnership with the Palestinian Authority, Israel keeps them to a minimum. Israel’s economy is strong. And Israel is growing more — not less — accepted on the global stage. Under these conditions, it was entirely predictable that in this year’s election neither Netanyahu nor his main competitor, Benny Gantz, supported a Palestinian state.

Barack Obama predicted this. Early in his presidency, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, tried to convince Obama that the best way to get Israel to negotiate a Palestinian state would be to supports its government unconditionally. “If you want Israel to take risks,” argued Hoenlein, “then its leaders must know that the United States is right next to them.” Obama disagreed. “When there is no daylight [between the two governments],” he replied, “Israel just sits on the sidelines.”

The last decade has proved Obama right. When Obama pressured him in 2009, Netanyahu — a longstanding opponent of Palestinian statehood and champion of the settler movement — reversed course and endorsed a Palestinian state and instituted a partial settlement freeze. But when American pressure eased — largely because Congress would not sustain it — settlement growth returned and Netanyahu reasserted his opposition to a Palestinian state. Now, with Donald Trump in office, and all American pressure on Israel gone, support for a Palestinian state has virtually disappeared from the Israeli political mainstream.

It will not return until subjugating millions of Palestinians becomes uncomfortable for Israeli Jews. First, Palestinians must stop serving as agents of their own oppression. Right now, the Palestinian Authority serves as Israel’s subcontractor in the West Bank: It picks up the garbage; it runs the schools; it represses dissent against both itself and Israel. When that changes—when the Palestinian Authority disbands and stops doing Israel’s dirty work—Israeli Jews will grow uncomfortable. They’ll grow uncomfortable because they’ll be forced to choose between chaos in the West Bank, which could threaten Israeli security, and direct occupation of the West Bank, which would require Israel 19 year olds to patrol every Palestinian city and town.

That’s the choice Palestinians forced Israel to make during the first intifada. For the two decades since 1967, Israel had controlled the West Bank at low cost. But when Palestinians rose up in the late 1980s, the price of that control increased dramatically, which led to Rabin’s support of the Oslo Peace Process. When Palestinians rise up again — hopefully non-violently, as they mostly did in the first intifada — and raise the cost of occupation again, Israeli politics will change again.

Secondly, the United States must stop making occupation comfortable. The American Jewish establishment — which is dedicated to ensuring that Israel can abuse Palestinians with impunity — likes to claim that, because Israel is a democracy, America must subsidize its behavior. But Israel’s policies towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have as much democratic legitimacy as Mississippi’s policies towards African Americans during Jim Crow. You can’t claim democratic legitimacy for policies that perpetuate your control over people who lack the right to vote for the government that dominates their lives.

Last week, Beto O’Rourke called Benjamin Netanyahu a “racist.” That’s true, but insufficient. The bigger problem isn’t that Netanyahu is personally racist. It’s that maintaining separate legal systems for Jews and Palestinians — as Israel does in the West Bank — is racist. Allowing Jews, but not Palestinians, due process, free movement, citizenship and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives — these things are all racist. And a Democratic presidential candidate must summon the courage to call for the United States to stop funding this racism to the tune of almost $4 billion a year. Yes, Israel has real security needs that deserve American support. But the United States has every right — in fact, it has an obligation — to condition its aid on Israeli moves to disband the system of institutionalized racism it has established in the West Bank. That could start with an end to settlement growth and a public Israeli commitment to negotiate a viable Palestinian state.

Once a Democratic candidate says this, the debate inside the party will change forever. Most Democratic politicians and liberal pundits already know that subsidizing Israeli oppression is wrong. They just need permission to say so. When Democrats grant themselves that permission — and retake power — Israeli Jews will realize that the occupation is threatening their relationship with the United States. That will make them uncomfortable, and Israeli politics will change.

I wish there was another way. I wish my brethren in the Jewish state were angelic creatures whose consciences alone could move them to stop oppressing millions of their fellow human beings. But the Haggadah that we will read later this month reaffirms what Frederick Douglass taught: The world doesn’t work that way.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. I hope that demand is made non-violently and with love. But for the Democrats running for president — and the people choosing them — the lesson of this week’s Israeli election is clear: The demand must come, now.

 

Op-ed by Khaled Elgindy and Lara Friedman, published in Foreign Policy on April 3, 2019.

On March 15 and 18, 2019, LobeLog published two op-eds by Lara Friedman on how U.S. policy is erasing Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. Part 1 examines the actions of the Trump administration, while Part 2 explores the role of Congress.

Read Part I: Not Breaking News: Trump Administration Does Not Believe In Occupation

Read Part II: Erasing Occupation: The Pernicious Role of Congress

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published in The Forward on January 27, 2019.

It’s a bewildering and alarming time to be a Jew, both because anti-Semitism is rising and because so many politicians are responding to it not by protecting Jews but by victimizing Palestinians.

On February 16, members of France’s Yellow Vest protest movement hurled anti-Semitic insults at the distinguished French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. On February 19, swastikas were found on 80 gravestones in Alsace. Two days later, French President Emmanuel Macron, after announcing that Europe was “facing a resurgence of anti-Semitism unseen since World War II,” unveiled new measures to fight it.

Among them was a new official definition of anti-Semitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, includes among its “contemporary examples” of anti-Semitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred.

In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, The United States and roughly thirty other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake.

Yet barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot. It’s widely recognized that states based on ethnic nationalism — states created to represent and protect one particular ethnic group — are not the only legitimate way to ensure public order and individual freedom. Sometimes it’s better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than heritage: to make Spanish identity more inclusive of Catalans or Iraqi identity more inclusive of Kurds, rather than carving those multi-ethnic states up.

You’d think Jewish leaders would understand this. You’d think they would understand it because many of the same Jewish leaders who call national self-determination a universal right are quite comfortable denying it to Palestinians.

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Argument number two is a variation on this theme. Maybe it’s not bigoted to oppose a people’s quest for statehood. But it’s bigoted to take away that statehood once achieved. “It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being,” argued New York Times columnist Bret Stephens earlier this month. However, “Israel is now the home of nearly nine million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it.”

But it’s not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism — a state designed to protect and represent one ethnic group — into a state based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges.

In the nineteenth century, Afrikaners created several countries — among them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State — designed to fulfill their quest for national self-determination. Then, in 1909, those two Afrikaner states merged with two states dominated by English-speaking whites to become the Union of South Africa (later the Republic of South Africa), which offered a kind of national self-determination to white South Africans.

The problem, of course, was that the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of blacks living within their borders.

This changed in 1994. By ending apartheid, South Africa replaced an Afrikaner ethnic nationalism and a white racial nationalism with a civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races. It inaugurated a constitution that guaranteed “the right of the South African people as a whole [my italics] to self-determination.”

That wasn’t bigotry, but it’s opposite.

I don’t consider Israel an apartheid state. But its ethnic nationalism excludes many of the people under its control. Stephens notes that Israel contains almost nine million citizens. What he doesn’t mention is that Israel also contains close to five million non-citizens: Palestinians who live under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (yes, Israel still controls Gaza) without basic rights in the state that dominates their lives.

One reason Israel doesn’t give these Palestinians citizenship is because, as a Jewish state designed to protect and represent Jews, it wants to retain a Jewish majority, and giving five million Palestinians the vote would imperil that.

Even among Israel’s nine million citizens, roughly two million — the so-called “Arab Israelis” — are Palestinian. Stephens says overturning Zionism would mean the “political dispossession” of Israelis. But, according to polls, most of Israel’s Palestinian citizens see it the opposite way. For them, Zionism represents a form of political dispossession. Because they live in a state that privileges Jews, they must endure an immigration policy that allows any Jew in the world to gain instant Israeli citizenship yet makes Palestinian immigration to Israel virtually impossible.

They live in a state whose national anthem speaks of the “Jewish soul,” whose flag features a Star of David and which, by tradition, excludes Israel’s Palestinian parties from its governing coalitions. A commission created in 2003 by the Israeli government itself described Israel’s “handling of the Arab sector” as “discriminatory.”

So long as Israel remains a Jewish state, no Palestinian citizen can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become prime minister of the country in which they live.

In these ways, Israel’s form of ethnic nationalism—Zionism—denies equality to the non-Jews who live under Israeli control.

My preferred solution would be for the West Bank and Gaza Strip to become a Palestinian state, thus giving Palestinians in those territories citizenship in an ethnically nationalist (though hopefully democratic) country of their own.

I’d also try to make Israel’s ethnic nationalism more inclusive by, among other things, adding a stanza to Israel’s national anthem that acknowledges the aspirations of its Palestinian citizens.

But, in a post-Holocaust world where anti-Semitism remains frighteningly prevalent, I want Israel to remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews.

To seek to replace Israel’s ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism, however, is not inherently bigoted. Last year, three Palestinian Members of the Knesset introduced a bill to turn Israel from a Jewish state into a “state for all its citizens.” As one of those Knesset members, Jamal Zahalka, explained, “We do not deny Israel or its right to exist as a home for Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality… The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.”

One might object that it’s hypocritical for Palestinians to try to repeal Jewish statehood inside Israel’s original boundaries while promoting Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. One might also ask whether Zahalka’s vision of Jewish and Palestinian equality in a post-Zionist state is naïve given that powerful Palestinian movements like Hamas want not equality but Islamic domination.

These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues — who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state — anti-Semites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups?

Of course not.

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There is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism. It’s that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together.

“Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism,” writes Stephens. In reality, however, just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, virtually all anti-Zionists are also anti-Semites. You rarely find one without the other.

But that claim is empirically false. In the real world, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism don’t always go together. It’s easy to find anti-Semitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it.

Before Israel’s creation, some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their own countries. Before declaring, as Foreign Secretary in 1917, that Britain “view[s] with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” Arthur Balfour had supported the 1905 Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom.

And two years after his famous declaration, Balfour explained that Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

In the 1930s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack. It’s ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters from Betar and the Irgun on Polish military bases. Why? Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go.

You find echoes of this anti-Semitic Zionism among some right-wing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the United States.

In 1980, Jerry Falwell, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, quipped that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose.”

Benjamin Netanyahu in 2005 said, “we have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” — the same Pat Robertson who later called former US Air Force Judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military.

After being criticized by the Anti-Defamation League in 2010 for calling George Soros a “puppet master” who “wants to bring America to her knees” and “reap obscene profits off us,” Glenn Beck travelled to Jerusalem to hold a pro-Israel rally.

More recently, Donald Trump — who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015 that “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” — invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem.

In 2017, Richard Spencer, who leads crowds in Nazi salutes, called himself a “white Zionist,” who sees Israel as a model for the white homeland he wants in the United States.

Some of the European leaders who traffic most blatantly in anti-Semitism—Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, which promotes nostalgia for the Third Reich—publicly champion Zionism too.

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If anti-Semitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without anti-Semitism.

Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, twenty thousand Satmar men — a larger crowd than attended that year’s AIPAC Policy Conference — filled Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organizer, that “We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes.”

Last year, Satmar Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum told thousands of followers that, “We’ll continue to fight God’s war against Zionism and all its aspects.”

Say what you want about Rebbe Teitelbaum and the Satmar, but they’re not anti-Semites.

Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in 2018 declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two state solution impossible. Thus, he argued, Israelis must “depart from the Zionist paradigm, and move into a more inclusive paradigm. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone.”

Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including former deputy Jerusalem mayor Meron Benvenisti, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.

Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they anti-Semites? Of course not.

To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are anti-Semites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the 1988 Hamas Covenant certainly qualify. So do the thugs from France’s Yellow Vest movement who called Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist shit.”

In some precincts, there’s a growing and reprehensible tendency to use the fact that many Jews are Zionists (or simply assumed to be Zionists) to bar them from progressive spaces. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come.

But while anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is likely on the rise, so is Zionist anti-Semitism. And, in the United States, at least, it’s not clear that anti-Zionists are any more likely to harbor anti-Semitic attitudes than people who support the Jewish state.

In 2016, the ADL gauged anti-Semitism by asking Americans whether they agreed with statements like “Jews have too much power” and “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind.” It found that anti-Semitism was highest among the elderly and poorly educated: “The most well educated Americans are remarkably free of prejudicial views, while less educated Americans are more likely to hold anti-Semitic views. Age is also a strong predictor of anti-Semitic propensities. Younger Americans — under 39 — are also remarkably free of prejudicial views.”

In 2018, however, when the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans’ attitudes about Israel, it discovered the reverse pattern: Americans over the age of 65 — the very cohort that expressed the most anti-Semitism — also expressed the most sympathy for Israel. By contrast, Americans under 30, who according to the ADL harbored the least anti-Semitism, were least sympathetic to Israel.

It was the same with education. Americans who possessed a high school degree or less — the most anti-Semitic educational cohort — was the most pro-Israel. Americans with “postgraduate degrees” — the least anti-Semitic — were the least pro-Israel.

As statistical evidence goes, this is hardly airtight. But it confirms what anyone who listens to progressive and conservative political commentary can grasp: That younger progressives are highly universalistic. They’re suspicious of any form of nationalism that seems exclusive. That universalism makes them suspicious of both Zionism and the white Christian nationalism that in the United States sometimes shades into anti-Semitism.

By contrast, some older Trump supporters, who fear a homogenizing globalism, admire Israel for preserving Jewish identity while yearning to preserve America’s Christian identity in ways that exclude Jews.

If anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are both conceptually different and, in practice, often espoused by different people, why are politicians like Macron responding to rising anti-Semitism by calling anti-Zionism a form of bigotry?

Because, in many countries, that’s what communal Jewish leaders want them to do.

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It’s an understandable impulse: Let the people threatened by anti-Semitism define anti-Semitism.

The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two state solution with impunity.

For years, Barack Obama and John Kerry warned that if Israel continued the settlement growth in the West Bank that made a Palestinian state impossible, Palestinians would stop demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel and instead demand one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, that replaces Israel.

Defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism reduces that threat. It means that if Palestinians and their supporters respond to the demise of the two state solution by demanding one equal state, some of the world’s most powerful governments will declare them bigots.

Which leaves Israel free to entrench its own version of one state, which denies millions of Palestinians basic rights.

Silencing Palestinians isn’t a particularly effective way to fight rising anti-Semitism, much of which comes from people who like neither Palestinians nor Jews.

But, just as importantly, it undermines the moral basis of that fight.

Anti-Semitism isn’t wrong because it’s wrong to denigrate and dehumanize Jews. Anti-Semitism is wrong because it’s wrong to denigrate and dehumanize anyone. Which means, ultimately, that any effort to fight anti-Semitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanization of Palestinians is no fight against anti-Semitism at all.

 

Op-ed by Peter Beinart, published in The Forward on February 12, 2019.

The following two things are true. First, Representative Ilhan Omar was wrong to tweet that the American government’s support of Israel is “all about the Benjamins.” Secondly, she’s being judged by a grotesque double standard. Her fiercest critics in Congress are guiltier of bigotry than she is.

Omar’s tweet was inaccurate. Yes, of course, AIPAC’s influence rests partly on the money its members donate to politicians. But it also rests on a deep cultural and religious affinity for Israel among conservative white Christians, who see the Jewish state as an outpost of pro-American, “Judeo-Christian” values in a region they consider hostile to their country and faith. (American conservatives have long admired small, pro-American countries in regions dominated by America’s adversaries: Think of the right’s affinity for “captive nations” like Lithuania, Latvia and Poland during the cold war, and its historic affinity for apartheid South Africa and Taiwan).

Omar’s tweet was also irresponsible. It was irresponsible because leaders should understand that their words carry historical baggage. Accusing a largely (though not officially) Jewish organization like AIPAC of buying politicians is different than accusing the NRA or the drug industry of buying politicians because modern history is not replete with murderous conspiracy theories about how gun owners and pharmaceutical executives secretly use their money to control governments.

That doesn’t mean it’s illegitimate to talk about AIPAC’s fundraising, any more than it’s illegitimate to talk about O.J. Simpson killing a white woman. Given the toxic stereotypes that such discussions evoke, however, they must be handled with care.

Ilhan Omar didn’t do that. Which is why she was right to apologize. And why she was right to apologize last month for a 2012 tweet in which she also evoked anti-Semitic stereotypes by accusing Israel of having “hypnotized the world” about its behavior in the Gaza Strip

But if we’re going to demand that politicians apologize for any hint of association with bigotry, let’s not stop with Ilhan Omar. Let’s hold her critics to the same standard.

Establishing two legal systems in the same territory—one for Jews and one for Palestinians, as Israel does in the West Bank—is bigotry. Guaranteeing Jews in the West Bank citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives while denying those rights to their Palestinian neighbors is bigotry. It’s a far more tangible form of bigotry than Omar’s flirtation with anti-Semitic tropes. And it has lasted for more than a half-century.

Yet almost all of Omar’s Republican critics in Congress endorse this bigotry. The 2016 Republican platform declares that, “We reject the false notion that Israel is an occupier” in the West Bank. In other words, governing Jews by one set of laws and Palestinians by another is fine. Last December, Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin, who has called for stripping Omar of her committee assignments, spoke at a fundraiser for Bet El, a West Bank settlement from which Palestinians are barred from living even though it was built—according tothe Israeli supreme court—on land confiscated from its Palestinian owners.

For her tweets, Omar was publicly rebuked by the entire Democratic House leadership. For his enthusiastic endorsement of land theft and state-sponsored bigotry in the West Bank, Zeldin has received no congressional criticism at all. To the contrary, he’s a Republican rising star.

That’s because, in Washington today, bigotry against Palestinians isn’t merely tolerated. It’s rewarded.

So is bigotry against Muslims. When Donald Trump in December 2015 proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, his support among Republicans increased.

In 2006, Roy Moore wrote that Muslims wishing to swear their oath of office on a Koran should be barred from Congress. His campaign spokesman reaffirmedthat this was Moore’s view in 2017.

The Republican National Committee backed Moore’s Senate campaign nonetheless. In 2013, then Congressman Mike Pompeo falsely accused “Islamic leaders across America” of failing to condemn the Boston marathon bombings and then claimed that this (fictitious) “silence…casts doubt upon the commitment to peace among adherents of the Muslim faith.”

In 2016, Pompeo accepted an award from ACT for America, which scours textbooks to eliminate any positive references to Islam and agitates against the sale of halal food. Two years later, every Republican Senator (except John McCain, who wasn’t present) voted to make Pompeo Secretary of State.

None of this justifies Omar’s tweet. What it justifies is suspicion about the motives of her fiercest congressional critics. Were the Republicans denouncing Omar sincerely opposed to bigotry, they would not reward bigotry against American Muslims and celebrate bigotry against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Were the Republicans denouncing Omar even sincerely opposed to anti-Semitism, they would not support Donald Trump. Trump, after all, in 2013 tweeted that “I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz—I mean Jon Stewart.”

He ran for president on a slogan laden with anti-Semitic associations from the 1930s: “America First.” In 2015 he told a Jewish audience that “You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money… you don’t want to give me money, but that’s ok, you want to control your own politicians that’s fine.”

In 2016 he retweeted an image of Hillary Clinton surrounded by money and a Jewish star. He closed his presidential campaign with an ad that showed three Jews—Janet Yellen, Lloyd Blankfein and George Soros—alongside language about “global special interests” that “control the levers of power in Washington.”

In 2017, he said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville. And in 2018, his racist fear mongering about a caravan of Central American migrants provoked a Pittsburgh man to commit the worst anti-Semitic atrocity in American history. Unlike Omar, he has not apologized for any of this.

If you denounce Ilhan Omar but support Donald Trump, you don’t really oppose bigotry. You don’t even really oppose anti-Semitism. What you oppose is criticism of Israel. That’s the real reason Republicans are so much more outraged by Omar’s tweets than by Trump’s. They’re not trying to police bigotry or even anti-Semitism. They’re using anti-Semitism to police the American debate about Israel.

Ilhan Omar foolishly played into their hands. She needs to understand that, thanks to this unfair double standard, when it comes to anti-Semitism, critics of Israel must be beyond reproach.

The rest of us must work toward the day when anti-Semitism among Israel’s supporters is as unacceptable as Anti-Semitism among Israel’s critics, and when bigotry against Muslims and Palestinians is as unacceptable as bigotry against Jews.

I’m happy that Ilhan Omar apologized. I’ll be even happier when Lee Zeldin apologizes too.