The author argues that smearing the struggle for Palestinian rights as “antisemitism” perpetuates the genocide, stifles free speech, and makes Jews less safe.
The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism
By Marjorie N. Feld
NYU Press 2024
ISBN 9781479829316
Stephen Rohde
When the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on November 1 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Netanyahu accused the judges of “anti-Semitic hatred toward Israel.”
After November 5th, promising to crack down on campus protests by invoking the Insurrection Act to enlist the US military, President-elect Donald Trump warned American colleges and universities that if they did not “end antisemitic propaganda,” they would lose accreditation and federal financial support.
A favorite tactic of repressive governments and intolerant societies to suppress dissent is to stigmatize opponents with a label which, at the time, is despised and reprehensible. Heretics, blasphemers, heathens, witches, savages, Communists, illegal aliens, racists, and terrorists are all examples of derogatory epithets used to isolate and demonize groups and individuals, in an attempt to undermine their credibility and banish them as legitimate participants in the discussion of any important issue.
Today, one of the oldest and most virulent forms of hatred — antisemitism — is being weaponized as a cudgel to silence opposition to Israel’s war against the Palestinians. If you criticize Israel, you are “antisemitic.” If you condemn Zionism, you are “antisemitic.” If an international court with 125 member countries, dedicated to what Kofi Annan called “the cause of all humanity,” accuses Israel (as well as — it is important to note — Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif) of war crimes, the judges (from France, Benin, and Slovenia) are guilty of “antisemitism.”
The widespread conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism with political criticism of Israel not only limits the circulation of information and stifles free and open debate; it makes Jews less safe around the world.
In its Gaza onslaught, Israel has killed over 45,000 Palestinians (60% of whom are women, children and the elderly), injured another 102,000, and destroyed over 70% of housing. The armed conflict has now spread to the West Bank and Lebanon (where a shaky ceasefire was reached in November). Consequently, Israel’s actions deserve to be subjected to thorough scrutiny, debate, and protest, as for any other country engaged in acts of war. In that debate, neither Israel nor its founding Zionist political ideology is entitled to a free pass, insulating it from criticism. But that is exactly what has happened and continues to happen when critics of Israel and Zionism are pejoratively labeled “antisemites” or “anti-Zionists.”
[On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International released a 296-page report, based on nine months of field research and testimony; the report concludes that, “Israel, through its policies, actions and omissions against Palestinians in Gaza following 7 October 2023, committed and is committing genocide.” Download the report here. —ED.]
The founders of Israel willingly took a known risk when they established a Jewish state, choosing the sacred religious symbols of the Star of David (Magen David) as the official state insignia on the nation’s flag and the menorah as the official state emblem, and designating Hebrew as the state’s official language. In 2018, the Knesset doubled down by passing a law designating Israel the “Nation-State of the Jewish people.” The chairman of the special legislative committee that drafted the law described it as merely confirming “the founding principle on which the state was established,” that “everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people.” The Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel responded to the law by noting that it “contains key elements of apartheid.”
Yet Israel had been warned. During the highly contested debate over Zionism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-Zionists and non-Zionists repeatedly argued that establishing a Jewish state would pose grave dangers not only to the indigenous Arab inhabitants, but to Jews around the world.
In her new groundbreaking book, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, (NY Press 2024), Marjorie N. Feld, a professor of history at Babson College, unearths the vibrant and multi-faceted debate within the European and American Jewish communities that greeted Zionist proposals beginning in the late 1890s. Today that complex history has been largely replaced by an official, sanitized version that doggedly erases the many Jewish voices that have sounded well-grounded alarms over the establishment of a militarized theocracy.
A history of Jews against Zionism
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a Viennese Jew considered the founder of modern political Zionism, published a famous pamphlet in 1896, The Jewish State, promoting the idea of establishing an independent Jewish homeland in Zion, a reference to a hill in Jerusalem that came, over hundreds of years, to refer to the entire land of Israel. But as Feld demonstrates in sweeping detail, both before and even after the Holocaust, there was active opposition to Zionism throughout the Jewish community. Anti-Zionists opposed a “Jewish sovereign political entity” in Palestine. Non-Zionists “saw Palestine as a safe haven for Jews during the Holocaust,” but they opposed “Jewish state-building for a multitude of reasons, among them a fear of destroying Arab/Palestinian communities and displacing the communities that lived in Palestine for generations; some also cited a belief in the separation of church and state-building.”
“American Reform Jews,” Feld writes, “believed that Jewish nationalism could present Jews as a ‘race apart’ and thus could spark antisemitism accusations of dual loyalties,” which one scholar of Jewish history called “a staple of hard-core antisemitism.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC), formed in 1906 to lobby and raise funds for the victims of pogroms, raised early objections to Zionism. In 1919, a group composed largely of AJC members issued a public statement quoting a prominent Biblical scholar: “It is not true that Palestine is the national home of the Jewish people and no other people.” The scholar predicted “bitter and sanguinary conflicts” were “inevitable” if Zionism was realized. Above all, the signers believed that Zionism was “utterly opposed to the principles of democracy” and that uniting “Church and State … would be a leap backward of 2,000 years.” Their hope for Palestine was a “free and independent state, to be governed under a democratic form of government, recognizing no distinction of creed or race or ethnic descent.”
The American Council for Judaism, founded in 1942, kept anti-Zionism alive even in the midst of the horrors of the Holocaust. “Council members saw Zionism and the creation of an ethnocracy (in which state power is determined based on ethnic identity) in the Jewish state as antithetical to Judaism’s true teachings,” Feld writes. In June 1943, in a Life magazine article entitled “Why Americans of Jewish Faith Are Opposed to the Establishment of a Jewish State,” Council president Lessing Rosenwald warned that “nationalistic philosophies” have “caused untold suffering to the world, and particularly to the Jews.” He predicted that to set up “an autonomous religious state” in a land that “for centuries has been a Holy Land” to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism would create “turmoil and strife.” In 1946, on a popular American radio show, Rosenwald reiterated that the Council “affirms that Jews are nationals of their respective countries and are Jews in religion only; are not a nation, race, or a people. It believes integration, not segregation, marks the road to equality, security, and happiness.” He urged that Palestine should be “neither a Jewish state nor an Arab state.”
In 1948, journalist William Zukerman (1885-1961), who had written The Jew in Revolt (1937), founded the Jewish Newsletter. Since he saw Israel as “no more sacred than any other modern state,” he complained that the “lack of criticism has been one of Israel’s great tragedies and … just criticism of its shortcomings can still save it from final disaster.” That year, together with Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook, Zuckerman signed a letter to The New York Times, condemning the massacre of more than one hundred Palestinians at Deir Yassin by Jewish militia groups, and accusing the right-wing Zionist militant group Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, of preaching “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.”
Predictably, Begin accused his critics of “antisemitism.”
Hasbara, Israel’s “antisemitism” propaganda since the Six-Day War
In 1967, in the New York Review of Books, Jewish journalist I.F. Stone warned that “[h]ow we act toward the Arabs will determine what kind of people we become: either oppressors and racists in our turn like those from whom we have suffered, or a nobler race able to transcend the tribal xenophobia that afflict mankind.”
Then, as now, zealous defenders of Israel mounted aggressive strategies to silence any criticism of Israel. In 1974, two leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, literally named their book The New Anti-Semitism, which, according to Feld, rendered “invisible the long-standing Jewish contests over Israel and Zionism.”
And so, decade after decade, as unquenchable nationalism backed by overwhelming military force expanded the devastating occupation of Gaza and encroaching settlements in the West Bank, Israel realized the worst fears of the most outspoken anti-Zionists, culminating in today’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. And, true to form, at every turn, defenders of Israel labeled the slightest opposition as “antisemitism.”
The dangers of conflating political criticism of Israel with antisemitism were on full display last October, when the UCLA Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias released a report entitled “Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias at UCLA.” Look no further than the very name of the task force and the title of the report. Both lump together “antisemitism” and “anti-Israeli bias.”
Embracing the conflation problem, the task force admits that it “chose to use terms throughout our report that mirror the name and scope of the Task Force (i.e., antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias).” As if to excuse itself from following a cardinal rule in social science research — “define your terms” — the task force actually brags that “as with our survey, we intentionally did not provide definitions of antisemitism or bias against Israelis” so as to allow the “lived experiences and perceptions” of Jewish and Israeli community members to “inform the way we analyze the climate at UCLA.” In other words, UCLA’s survey tool and the resulting “findings” purposely made no effort to distinguish between what a participant may personally perceive as “antisemitism” — hatred of Jews as Jews — and that person’s reaction to what others say about the nation of Israel and its policies. And what do we make of the undefined phrase, “anti-Israeli bias”? In its very choice of this label, the survey presumes that criticism of Israel constitutes “bias.”
All told, UCLA allows the undefined, subjective, undisclosed “lived experiences and perceptions” to infect the entire project. Consequently, we have no way of assessing the various “findings” of the task force, which were as follows:
Two-thirds of respondents reported that “antisemitism” is a problem or a serious problem at UCLA
- Three-quarters reported that “anti-Israeli bias” is a problem or serious problem
- The majority of respondents (70%) perceived the Spring quarter Encampment to be a source of “antisemitism”
- Three-quarters of respondents felt that “antisemitism” is taken less seriously than other forms of hate and discrimination at UCLA
- Nearly 40% of respondents noted that they experienced “antisemitic discrimination” at UCLA
- And almost half (49%) of the undergraduate student respondents reported that teaching assistants engaged in behaviors that included “offensive” comments.
But what portion of these figures had nothing to do with actual virulent expressions of Jew-hating and everything to do with protesting Israeli’s atrocities? There is no way of knowing.
It’s not as if the members of the task force were oblivious to the conflation problem. The report itself acknowledges that “criticism of the policies of elected or ruling governments can be legitimate and protected.” But the concern is “when — in the current context — such criticism veers into antisemitic and anti-Israeli” discrimination. Sadly, the task force could have rendered an extremely useful public service if it had carefully designed a survey to distinguish between a respondent’s reaction to Jew-hating slurs and epithets and the expression of grief and outrage over Israel’s mass killing of innocent Palestinians.
Evidence that many UCLA respondents did in fact confuse political criticism of Israel with “antisemitism” and “anti-Israeli bias” can be found in the brief excerpts of individual survey responses contained in the report. One respondent candidly admitted that “[i]t is also difficult for people to separate Jews and the religion from Israel and the decisions of the government.” As examples of what they considered “antisemitism,” students cited videos and pictures from the protest referring to “death to Israel,” “Israel=Nazis,” “burn Tel Aviv,” “Israelis are native to hell,” “[You] are terrorism,” and “long live the intifada.”
Another comment provided a perfect example of the conflation issue as well as misinformation:
“Today, continuing to allow campus groups and faculty to promote propaganda vilifying Israel, Israelis, and Jews, (e.g. by saying Israel is committing a genocide, which is so obviously untrue to anyone who looks at facts in the region, and especially in a context of worldwide wars and countries that are committing actual genocides), in what is a modern-day blood-libel, the antisemitic/anti-Israel/anti-Zionist campus climate is essentially repeating the German Universities climate that preceded World WarII Nazi Germany.”
In fact, last January, the UN International Court of Justice found a plausible case that in Gaza Israel is engaged in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur
This past August, in stark contrast to the worthless — yet dangerous — UCLA report, Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, issued a comprehensive and illuminating report entitled “Global Threats to Freedom of Expression Arising from the Conflict in Gaza.” She documented a “pattern of killings and arbitrary detention of journalists and destruction of press facilities and equipment in Gaza” demonstrating a “deliberate strategy of the Israeli military to silence critical reporting and obstruct documentation of possible international crimes.”
Khan found that “blanket bans of Palestinian symbols, by linking Palestinians as a people to terrorism or antisemitism, demonize and stigmatize them and seek to delegitimize their liberation struggle.” She noted that, “equating advocacy of Palestinian rights with terrorism or antisemitism is not only a disproportionate response, but may indicate an underlying institutional racism against Palestinians, violating fundamental human rights.”
For example, Khan explained that the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” “has been the subject of blanket restrictions by some states and private actors, on the grounds that it is a sign of support for Hamas and shows genocidal intent or incitement to violence against Jews.” But Khan points out that that interpretation of the slogan “has been challenged by scholars, human rights experts and Palestinian advocates, including many Jewish groups and scholars who see it as a call for the right to self-determination of Palestinians.” While some Western countries have criminalized or otherwise condemned the use of the slogan, elsewhere “the courts and law enforcement agencies have recognized the different meanings of the slogan and have refused to impose blanket bans on it.” She concludes, “general ban or criminalization for the mere utterance of the slogan in all circumstances is disproportionate and not in line with international human rights law.”
For present purposes, the most meaningful section of the Special Rapporteur’s report is a clear and cogent explanation of how, in response to Palestinian advocacy, “there has been a tendency to confuse and conflate criticism of the policies of Israel, which is a legitimate exercise of freedom of expression, with antisemitism, which is racial and religious hatred against Jews that must be condemned.”
As an example, Khan examined the global “boycott, divest and sanctions” movement, which makes three demands on Israel: ending the occupation; ensuring full equality of all citizens and not privileging the rights derived from Jewish identity; and respecting and allowing the right of return for Palestinian refugees. “All three are aligned with the international obligations of Israel, which it has so far failed to uphold,” Khan notes, adding that “many civil society organizations and individuals, including some Jewish groups, support and participate in the movement.”
Nevertheless, while the BDS movement is labeled in some Western countries, including Germany and the United States, as “discriminatory” and “antisemitic,” after extensive review, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that a boycott by BDS protestors in France was a legitimate means of expressing political opinion. According to Khan, the court “drew a distinction between expression that serves as a call for antisemitism and is not protected by international law, and political expression, such as the boycott, divest and sanctions movement, which aims to condemn a Government and is unquestionably protected by international law.” Khan concluded that this decision “vindicates the movement as a valid means of protest and pressure on Governments.” (The ECHR ruling is consistent with US law. In 1982, in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Claiborne Hardware Co., the US Supreme Court unanimously held that although states have broad power to regulate economic activities, they cannot prohibit peaceful advocacy through a politically motivated boycott, which is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment).
The Special Rapporteur is very clear that “antisemitism is a serious form of religious and racial hatred, and States and private actors must take all necessary measures to fight it.” But she hastens to add that it is “vital that the fight against antisemitism be framed according to international human rights standards, so that there is a shared understanding of the problem and its root causes and, consequently, more effective responses to eradicate it.” Otherwise, “there is a risk that discrimination against one vulnerable group will be replaced with discrimination against another group, which, far from reducing antisemitism, will fuel more hatred and intolerance.”
Jewish Dissent and Zionism Today
Marjorie Feld ends her book by observing that “[a]cross the last century, American Jewish Zionist leaders enforced a threshold of dissent by marginalizing progressive American Jews who were able to see Palestinian suffering.” It is likely that with the return and expansion of the Trump-Netanyahu military alliance, we will see even more Palestinian suffering, combined with even greater marginalization of dissent. The ruling governments in Israel and the United States will step up the suppression of protests and will stifle opposition in the name of combating “antisemitism” and “anti-Zionism.” In response, civil society, the media and institutions dedicated to the rule of law must ignore such diversionary tactics and instead focus public attention on the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza and the West Bank.
The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice will need public support as they hold Israel accountable for its war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the US Senate, efforts by Sen. Bernie Sanders and several other senators to pass three Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block the sale of $20 billion in offensive weapons to Israel need public support. The effort is endorsed by J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Arab American Institute, and the Service Employees International Union. SEIU issued a statement declaring that its members “want an end to taxpayer dollars being used to fund military aid that enables attacks against innocent civilians in Gaza.”
Sanders is setting a good example by refusing to be intimidated by name-calling. When Netanyahu called pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses examples of “antisemitism,” Sanders fought back. “No Mr. Netanyahu, it is not anti-semitic… to hold you accountable for your actions.”
As the Palestinian people suffer annihilation, the least the rest of us can do is risk being labeled “antisemites” as we do everything in our power to end Israel’s genocide and US complicity in it.
