Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of the past month has been watching some of the world’s most wretched antisemites lining up to give their unalloyed support to Israel. Even more jarring has been their embrace by those who are supposed to advocate for Jewish safety.
These people include the radical US pastor John Hagee, who previously claimed that Adolf Hitler had been born from a lineage of “accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews” and sent by God to help the Jews reach the promised land. (He apologized in 2008 for some of his remarks.) He was invited to speak last Tuesday to an audience of thousands at the March for Israel in Washington, organised by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to help “condemn the rising trend of antisemitic violence”.
Tommy Robinson, a leading member of the British far right, recently called on people to go to the Cenotaph, a war memorial in central London, to “protect” it from pro-Palestinian protesters. Last year Robinson defended Kanye West, saying it was obvious that “there are powerful Jewish people, claiming to be Zionists, who have their fingers on buttons of power in the entertainment industry, in big tech … and in governments” and that Jews “generally speaking, at least the white European Jews, have an average IQ of 110, so inevitably those Jews will rise to the top of corporations”.
Despite Robinson’s history of inflammatory and conspiratorial remarks, a 2019 Guardian investigation found that many of the groups bankrolling or supporting his organisation were rightwing pro-Israel thinktanks in the US, including Middle East Forum and the Gatestone Institute.
Then there’s US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, who earlier this year repeated the conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was “targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people. When he was accused of propagating antisemitism, which he denies, Kennedy chose to blast representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for insufficient support of Israel, saying that “criticism of Israel is a false narrative” and “Israel is a shining star on human rights in the Middle East”.
Kennedy was rewarded with an op-ed in Jewish Journal, a pro-Israel publication, titled “RFK is an Ally, not an Antisemite”, which argued that despite his comments “RFK’s unwavering commitment to Israel as a Jewish state is sincere and integral to his political values”.
Europe’s far-right political parties have a long history of promoting antisemitism. Yet Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the AfD in Germany and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary all have given unequivocal support to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Indeed, Netanyahu considers Orbán a close ally and often tweets support for him.
In the US, there is Donald Trump, whose election was heralded by antisemites’ biggest public rally in the US in a generation, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet because Trump was also demonstrably pro-Israel in his foreign policy stances, notably moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, he receives ongoing support and endorsements from many pro-Israel pressure groups. Some of them were nervous when he criticised Israel’s lack of military preparedness for the Hamas attacks, but he’s now back in the fold, adding “#IStandWithBibi”to his Truth Social posts.
This month Elon Musk agreed with a post on Twitter that said Jewish people have been pushing “dialectical hatred against whites”. The owner of the account, which had fewer than 6,000 followers, went on to say he was “deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations”.
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk said. This was not an unusual stance for Musk, who denies that he is antisemitic. He has flirted with white nationalism many times, and earlier this year he remarked that the Jewish billionaire George Soros “reminds me of Magneto” (the evil X-Men villain, who, like Soros, is a Holocaust survivor).
As expected, Musk was admonished by the Biden administration, advertisers on X and Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, the world’s most prominent pressure group in protecting Jews from antisemitism. Musk has attacked Greenblatt and the ADL many times, threatening them with lawsuits, saying the group over-polices language on social media and calling them “ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform”.
Netanyahu didn’t bother to admonish Musk at all – the pair are friends, and Netanyahu has called him the “Edison of our time” even after many examples of Musk giving a platform to antisemites.
Musk did not remove the original post; instead he denied he was an antisemite and promised to come down hard on those who defended Palestinian rights on X, saying he would remove users who posted phrases like “decolonization” and “from the river to the sea”, which he said were “euphemisms” that “necessarily imply genocide”.
Greenblatt was thrilled: “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”
Over and over again, alleged antisemites or those who give platforms to antisemites have had their offenses chalked off by some in the pro-Israel movement, as long as they show sufficient deference to the Israeli project.
For decades, groups like the ADL have made it clear that one can only go so far in criticising the actions of the Israeli state before that critique can be dismissed as antisemitism – that some hand-wringing over settler violence in the West Bank is permitted, but that anything beyond that is in the danger zone of hate speech. Greenblatt said in a speech last year that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”, a statement he only slightly qualified in a tetchy New Yorker interview.
This is an idea promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), whose definition of antisemitism, adopted by many organisations, states and legal frameworks, includes examples that conflate Judaism with Zionism and suggest the state of Israel embodies the self-determination of all Jews. The IHRA definition has been used in many cases to label groups and movements like the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitic.
This straitjacket definition of who is antisemitic apparently includes some Jews themselves who are horrified by the inhumanity of Israeli violence and apartheid. Compare the ADL’s reaction to Musk with their words last month when an alliance of Jewish Americans met in New York and Washington DC to protest against the relentless and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
I was at the New York event and was incredibly moved by speakers who talked about the importance of Jews coming together, in spite of our collective trauma, to say that violence will not be carried out in our names. Greenblatt responded to these tender protests by saying that the protesters were “hate groups” that “don’t represent the Jewish community” – essentially, that we are not real Jews.
Greenblatt’s remarks echo similar claims he made last year, that groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are “radical actors [who] indisputably and unapologetically regularly denigrate and dehumanize Jews”.
The rationale behind these reactions is twisted and wrong: Israel is supposed to be a homeland for Jews from the horrors of the pogroms, the Holocaust and antisemitism. Yet we are now reaching an illogical conclusion where organisations supposed to protect Jewish rights turn a blind eye to antipathy towards Jews as long as proponents support Israel.
This does not make Jews safer. It does not even make sense.
Sam Wolfson is a writer and senior editor at the Guardian US
