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The Jewish community cannot center fears about ‘Jewish safety’ while supporting genocide in Gaza

Because the Jewish community has not shown the minimal moral capacity to call out genocide I cannot take concern around alleged pro-Palestine antisemitism seriously as it appears to just be a strategy to aid and abet Israel’s crimes.

Joseph LevineApril 5, 2025

Jewish students and community leaders come together at George Washington University, Washington, DC, on May 2, 2024. (Photo: Ted Eytan/Flickr)

There is a standard trope that has been playing out now for years, nay decades, but has become much more pronounced ever since the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas and the ensuing genocidal attack on the people of Gaza, along with escalated ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion in the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Syria. The trope begins with some protest or remark that accuses Israel of various crimes against Palestinians, maybe even a straightforward attack on Zionist ideology. The response is to call out the protest, remark, or resource as “antisemitic.” The pro-Palestinian reply to that is to challenge the assimilation of Judaism and Zionism, to insist on the important difference between racist verbal attacks on Jews and legitimate political criticisms of Israel. What’s more, goes the pro-Palestine response, antisemitism is indeed a real problem in the world, and exploiting its threat to let Israel off the hook only serves to undermine the important fight against it. 

Of course, everything asserted in that pro-Palestine response to the charge of antisemitism is correct. In particular, antisemitism is obviously morally wrong, a form of racism, and its general rise during this period of right-wing populism is worrying, similar to the way that the animus toward immigrants, Muslims, people of color, queer people, and other favorite targets of hate is worrying.¹ However, regardless of how morally and factually correct it is (though I will qualify this somewhat below) constantly defending against the charge of antisemitism is to be constantly playing defense. It situates the American Jewish community² solely in the role of victim, and centers their concerns and fears, thus sidelining the exponentially greater concerns and fears of Palestinians, and Arabs more generally.

It is time the pro-Palestine movement stop “playing defense” on the question of antisemitism.

What would “playing offense” look like? Basically, rather than viewing the American Jewish community primarily through their role as victims of hate as a consequence of Israel’s actions, one can see them as partners in crime with the State of Israel, as active agents of genocide and ethnic cleansing. 

Of course, when speaking of “the Jewish community” in this context, I have in mind not all individual Jews or even all Jewish organizations. Rather, I mean the organizations and institutions that represent the mainstream of organized Jewish life in the U.S., along with their members and followers, those individuals who see their Jewish identity expressed through these organizations. I’m talking about organizations like the Jewish Federations, the mainstream religious affiliations, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the college and university Hillels, the Jewish Community Centers, the various Jewish Community Relations Councils, and the like. For purposes of brevity, let me call the target community I have in mind the “Establishment Jewish Community”, or EJC for short.³

When I hear voices in the EJC raising their fears of antisemitism, particularly in the context of protests against Israel’s genocide, my impulse isn’t to immediately defend every chant or slogan from the charge, but rather to charge back: “How can you possibly be centering your fears and concerns for ‘Jewish safety,’ when your people in Israel, who you identify with so strongly that an attack on them is felt as an attack on yourself, are committing such morally depraved, indeed ‘Nazi-like’ crimes? Aren’t you in the least bit ashamed?” 

Even if one were to grant that some responses to Israel’s behavior are tinged with antisemitism, or even blatantly antisemitic, I, for one, am willing to engage on that issue only after I first hear an expression of outrage at Israeli crimes and how they’re being carried out in the name of the Jewish people. After we come together to stop the horror, then there will be time to address any antisemitism that has been expressed within the movement, if there has been any at all. 

It is typical for protestors against Israel’s genocide to be met with “But before we go any further, do you condemn Hamas?” It’s time we turned that around and demanded of those expressing concerns about antisemitism in the pro-Palestine movement, “Before you say another word, do you condemn Israel?” 

Unless you manifest the minimal moral capacity to call out genocide by your own people, how can you be taken seriously regarding alleged moral sins committed against yourself and your people? What’s more, unless you emphasize your opposition and outrage at the horrors committed in your name, your complaining about antisemitism on the part of others who do oppose the genocide serves only to aid and abet it, making one not only morally obtuse for ignoring this monstrous crime but actively complicit in it.

Zionism and Jewish identity

This idea of taking the offensive connects with another source of discomfort I’ve had for some time with standard responses from the pro-Palestine movement to charges of antisemitism. It is now a standard talking point on the other side to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, on the grounds that Zionism is an integral part of Judaism or Jewish identity. So, if you charge Zionism with being racist, then you’re accused of saying Judaism, or Jews collectively, are inherently racist. The pro-Palestine response, the one I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with, resists the incorporation of Zionism into Judaism, insisting that Judaism itself, as a religion and an identity is independent of the political doctrine of Zionism. Therefore, criticizing Zionism as racist, or settler-colonialist, or the like, does not entail any criticism of Judaism or the Jewish people.

Of course there is a lot to be said in favor of this independence claim. I myself, as someone who was raised in a strictly Orthodox household and attended yeshiva for many years, can testify to the fact that Zionism was never held to be integral to our faith or identity. Indeed, while our loyalty was always with “the Jews” whenever there was a military conflict between Israel and “the Arabs”, Zionism itself was considered a heretical ideology. Similarly, within more modern tendencies in Judaism, there is a robust history of opposition to Zionism during its development from the late nineteenth century through a good part of the twentieth. (See The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, by Marjorie Feld, and Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, by Geoffrey Levin.)

But I don’t want to insist on the independence claim as the principal reply to the charge that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, for two reasons: First, I don’t think anyone is really in a position to say what is and what is not essential to Judaism and Jewish identity, any more than with other religions and identities. Second, more importantly, even if it’s true that Zionism is essential to Judaism, that doesn’t make attacks on Zionism antisemitic.

Regarding the first point, unless one insists that one’s own vision of religion/identity is sanctioned by God and eternal, one must acknowledge that religions change and develop over time, responding to the new circumstances that unfold throughout history. So, while the activists of JVP are right in insisting that their Judaism is not only independent of Zionism but outright opposed to it, I don’t see how they can claim that the Judaism of others isn’t integrally bound up with Zionism. Religions and peoples don’t have hidden essences independent of the beliefs and practices of those comprising them. If a group of Jews hold beliefs and adopt practices that incorporate Zionism into their Judaism, who is in a position to say they’re getting it wrong?

Indeed, while the books cited above make clear how much Jewish opposition to Zionism existed into the middle part of the twentieth century, they also demonstrate the degree to which Zionism successfully “colonized” all mainstream Jewish organizations within the U.S. (and Europe as well, as mentioned above) since then. For example, in the early 1950’s the American Jewish Committee, one of the most important American Jewish institutions, funded a project of the political scientist Don Peretz to investigate the fate of the Palestinian refugees from 1948, expressing concern for their welfare. Israeli political operatives, as documented in Geoffrey Levin’s book, killed that effort, ensuring that his report never saw the light of day. But it wasn’t until after the 1967 war that the AJC dropped its official “non-Zionist” designation and fully embraced Zionism.

The story of the transformation of the AJC, from critical distance from Zionism to full embrace, is the story of the mainstream American Jewish community writ large. From the major national institutions to almost all synagogues,⁴ Zionism is intimately and intricately interwoven with the other tenets and practices of their faith. One of the most obvious manifestations of this phenomenon is the fact that the Israeli flag stands prominently beside the American flag at the front of most synagogues and temples.

Here’s one way I often think of the relationship between the Jewish community (again, with the qualifications mentioned above about who I include in this category) and Israel, the Jewish state. It’s common to think of the notion of a people as an extension, or scaling up, of the notion of a family. Just as there are universal moral principles governing one’s rights and obligations regarding every human being, there are special rights and obligations reserved for close friendships and familial relationships. One can then extend these special moral relationships, or ones like them, to members of the same people, to one’s compatriots. So, though most members of the American Jewish community were properly outraged by the murder of Blacks at the Charleston church a few years back, they felt a special horror and empathy for the terrorist attack against the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The sentiment is that in the latter case it wasn’t only a crime against people, but a crime against our people.

I get this sentiment (though I don’t share it, I’m more of a cosmopolitan on this issue) and am not objecting to it. But to be morally consistent, if one is to extend the concern one feels for members of one’s family to members of one’s people, one must also extend one’s sense of responsibility for the actions of one’s family members to those of one’s people as well. 

From this perspective, one might regard Israel as, in a sense, the Jewish family project, one shared between the Jewish community in Israel and the Jewish community in the diaspora. So, when American Jews feel attacked by strident political rhetoric against Israel as it pursues its genocide against Palestinians, why don’t they also feel responsible for doing all they can to stop it? If an attack on Israel is automatically an attack on you, then why isn’t an attack by Israel automatically an attack by you?

Still, there might be a lingering worry that if in fact Zionism is integral to the Judaism practiced by the EJC that attacks on Zionism would count as antisemitic, and this brings me to the second point mentioned above. Let me put that worry to rest. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the appeal to identity as a basis for immunity from criticism is a perversion of the moral status of identity. Attacks on someone merely because of their identity are indeed wrong and racist (in the broadest sense of that term). But attacks on certain beliefs and practices based on universal moral principles are not only permitted, but required, and it is no defense to say that these beliefs and practices are essential to one’s identity. They are wrong, pure and simple, and you can’t evade the demands of justice, which, as Rawls puts it, is the “first virtue of social institutions,” by appealing to the claims of identity. To put it simply, in the moral realm justice trumps identity.

I conclude by reiterating and expanding on a point made at the beginning. It’s not just that members of the EJC are exhibiting a perverse moral compass when they challenge the protests against Israel by calling them out as antisemitic. Rather, as I said above, it makes them active agents, collaborators with the Israeli government, in implementing Israel’s genocide, ethnic cleansing, and general repression of Palestinian national and human rights. Israel cannot carry out atrocities on the scale we have seen without truly massive American support. That support is maintained and zealously protected by the also truly massive intervention of the EJC in the American political landscape. (See here for how even high-level members of Trumpworld aren’t exempt from their discipline.) 

Imagine if it were the reverse. Imagine if mainstream synagogues and temples, the AJC and the ADL, while maintaining their vigilance against antisemitism, loudly cried out that this horror unleashed by Israel against a defenseless people must stop, that it must not be carried out in their name, and that they refuse to lend their political and financial support to it. If that had happened once the scope of Israeli atrocities were evident after October 7 (very early on) they would have stopped long ago. Only after I see that sort of response will I, for one, be willing to entertain worries about antisemitism on the left. Until then, just shut up!

Notes

1. There is an important difference however: the other targets mentioned are marginalized and relatively weak within American society, but it’s just absurd to say the same of the American Jewish community. I cringe every time some progressive says the phrase, “Jews and other marginalized groups”, a phrase I hear a lot these days.  ↩︎
2. I will continue to speak here of the American Jewish community, though much of what I have to say applies to Jewish communities in Western Europe as well. ↩︎
3. I specifically exclude here individuals of Jewish background who aren’t active in any such organizations, don’t belong to a synagogue, and generally don’t see their Jewish identity as a crucial parameter of who they are and how they live their life. I also exclude, for obvious reasons, those who actively identity as Jews but also actively protest Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and Western support for it, such as members of Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and other groups like them.  ↩︎
4. Excluding those of the Haredi community, who I don’t let off the hook as collaborators with genocide, but their case has a very different character from the rest of the American Jewish community. ↩︎