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Weaponization of antisemitism
Politically motivated accusations of antisemitism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The exploitation of accusations of antisemitism, especially to counter anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel, is sometimes called weaponization of antisemitism.[1] Claims of weaponizing antisemitism have arisen in various contexts, including the Arab–Israeli conflict and debates over the concept of new antisemitism and the IHRA definition of antisemitism.[2][3]
Charges of antisemitism made in bad faith have been described as a form of smear tactic[4] and likened to "playing the race card",[5] while critics have said the charge is often used to delegitimize concerns about antisemitism.[6]
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In 1943, David Ben-Gurion called a British court antisemitic after it "had implicated Zionist leaders in arms-trafficking".[7][8] Christopher Sykes said the incident began "a new phase in Zionist propaganda" in which "to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic".[7][9] Noam Chomsky said that while Sykes had traced the origins of weaponizing antisemitism to this episode, it was not until "the post-1967 period that the tactic has been honed to a high art, increasingly so, as the policies defended became less and less defensible".[9] In 1973, Israel's foreign minister Abba Eban wrote: "One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism."[10] Of Eban's statement, Chomsky said: "That is a convenient stand. It cuts off a mere 100 percent of critical comment!"[11]
In the early 1950s, U.S. journalist Dorothy Thompson, a former advocate of Zionism, was called antisemitic after she began to criticize Zionism, and as a result of these accusations "she lost friends, work, and political influence".[12] Thompson's transition to anti-Zionism and advocacy for Palestinian refugees began after a trip to Palestine in 1945.[13] Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote, "today, many see the silencing of a bold humanitarian advocate in her story, and it is not difficult to understand why", but also that "there can be no doubt that anti-Semitism was a theme in Thompson's later writing".[14]
In his 1956 memoir, British military officer John Bagot Glubb denied accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of Israel, writing: "It does not seem to me to be either just or expedient that similar criticisms directed against the Israeli government should brand the speaker with the moral stigma generally associated with anti-Semitism."[15][16] Israeli historian Benny Morris said that this was due to a "tendency among Israelis and Jews abroad to identify strong criticism of Israel as tantamount to, or as at least stemming from, anti-Semitism", although Morris also said Glubb's anti-Zionism was "tinged by a degree of anti-Semitism".[16]
According to Cheryl Rubenberg, in the 1980s, journalists Anthony Lewis, Nicholas von Hoffman, Joseph C. Harsch, Richard Cohen and Alfred Friendly; authors Gore Vidal, Joseph Sobran, and John le Carré; and American politicians Charles Mathias and Pete McCloskey were among those whom pro-Israeli groups called antisemites.[17] In 1989, Rubenberg wrote of Mathias and McCloskey: "The labeling of individuals who disagree with the lobby's positions as 'anti-Semitic' is a common practice among Israel's advocates."[17] In 1992, American diplomat George Ball wrote in his book The Passionate Attachment: America's involvement with Israel that AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups "employ the charge of 'anti-Semitism' so carelessly as to trivialize it", suggesting this was due to the lack of any "rational argument" with which to defend the state.[18]
Critics such as the Israel-Palestine researcher Suraya Dadoo, journalist Ben White, and English scholar Matthew Abraham suggest that international Israeli advocacy groups have charged prominent individuals expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment, such as Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu, with antisemitism. Abraham says this is a form of "political correctness" that undermines "greater understanding about the conditions producing conflict in the Israel-Palestine conflict".[19][20][21]
Chomsky and the academics John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Norman Finkelstein have said accusations of antisemitism increase after Israel acts aggressively: following the Six-Day War, the 1982 Lebanon War, the First and Second Intifadas, and the bombardments of Gaza.[22][23][24] In 2002, Chomsky said "the distinguished Israeli statesman" Abba Eban had said Israeli propaganda sought "to make it clear to the world there's no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism", meaning "criticisms of the current policies of the State of Israel".[25]
Mearsheimer and Walt wrote in 2008 that the charge of antisemitism can discourage others from defending in public those against whom the charge has been made.[26] They said that rhetorical accusations of antisemitism put a burden of proof on the accused person, putting them in the "difficult" position of having to prove a negative.[27] They said "we should all be disturbed by the presence of genuine anti-Semitism" but suggested that "playing the anti-Semitism card stifles discussion" and "allows myths about Israel to survive unchallenged".[28] In 2010, Kenneth L. Marcus wrote that although Mearsheimer and Walt called such accusations "the Great Silencer", they had not themselves been silenced, having received a wide audience for their book and appearances. Marcus also wrote that many pro-Israel commentators had also taken pains to say that not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic.[29]
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The charge of weaponization has been raised across the political spectrum, especially in anti-Zionist discourse on the left and right.[30][31][32] Scholars such as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Matthew Abraham have suggested that the charge of antisemitism is becoming less effective when applied to criticisms of Israel.[33][34] The culture of anti-antisemitism in Germany has been criticized as weaponizing antisemitism and compared to McCarthyism.[35] Similar concerns have been raised about Austrian politics and academia.[36]
While warning in 2010 against denying or minimizing antisemitism, American attorney and academic Kenneth L. Marcus also cautioned against overuse of the "anti-Semitism card", paralleling concerns raised by Richard Thompson Ford with the broader misuse of "the race card": that it can be dishonest and mean-spirited, risks weakening legitimate accusations of bigotry, risks distracting socially concerned organizations from other social injustices, and hurts outreach efforts between Jewish and Arab or Muslim groups.[37]
In 2021, religion scholar Atalia Omer of the University of Notre Dame said that weaponization of antisemitism is bad for all involved, including Israel and the broader Jewish community.[38] Nick Riemer, a Palestine solidarity activist and linguist at the University of Sydney, wrote in 2022 that antisemitism "provides the excuse for a heavy-handed and highly irrational assault on fundamental democratic liberties".[39]
Charges of weaponization by the right
The German far-right has accused Jews of "using the Antisemitismuskeule" (lit. 'antisemitism club/cudgel') in relation to new antisemitism, nationalism, and neo-Nazism.[31][40][41] German studies scholar Caroline Pearce describes the phrase as a "common far-right term" in contemporary German politics.[40] For example, Jörg Meuthen initially described criticism of Wolfgang Gedeon's writings—which have been widely described as antisemitic—as attempts by political opponents to wield the Antisemitismuskeule against the AfD. He later reversed his position, calling Gedeon's statements "crystal clearly anti-Semitic".[30] Gideon Botsch, a German scholar of the far right and antisemitism, says that the far right's claims of weaponization of antisemitism in relation to criticism of Israel are often overlooked because far-right antisemitism is typically treated as a separate, historical phenomenon.[31]
IHRA working definition of antisemitism
In 2011, the UK's University and College Union Congress debated a motion to formally reject the IHRA's working definition of antisemitism.[42] Antisemitism scholar David Hirsh said the definition was "denounced as a bad-faith attempt to say that criticism of Israel was antisemitic".[43]
In 2019, 2024 and 2025, Kenneth S. Stern, the lead author of the original definition, said it had become weaponized by Donald Trump and right-wing Jewish groups in ways that threatened to suppress and limit free speech in the U.S. Stern said Trump's Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, aimed at university campuses in particular, would "harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself".[44]
In 2022, responding to widespread criticism that the definition classifies legitimate speech on Israel as antisemitic, Bernard Harrison said such criticism was unfounded.[45] A 2023 report by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies analyzed 40 cases where UK university staff and/or students were accused of antisemitism on the basis of the IHRA definition between 2017 and 2022, and found that in 38 cases, the accusations were dismissed, with two yet to be resolved. According to the report, false accusations of antisemitism have caused staff and students severe stress.[46]
In 2023, Nathan J. Brown and Daniel Nerenberg said that the definition, created in good faith, had been weaponized by groups including the Zionist Organization of America, the American Jewish Committee, and the Brandeis Center.[47] In 2024, Holocaust scholar Raz Segal wrote: "The weaponization of antisemitism by Israel and its allies, including the U.S. government, draws on the deeply problematic 'working definition of antisemitism' adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)."[48] Jonathan Hafetz and Sahar Aziz made a similar argument about the definition's use against critics of Israel's actions during its war on Gaza.[49]
In the UK Labour Party
In 2018, in light of accusations of antisemitism in the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid called a debate on antisemitism in Parliament. At the debate, Jewish Labour MPs Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth spoke of their experiences of being accused of weaponizing antisemitism.[50] Lesley Klaff says Berger experienced online antisemitic and misogynistic harassment by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn who saw her "as deliberately manufacturing a crisis within the Labour Party by making false accusations about antisemitism".[51] Anthony Lerman says that "many hyperbolic claims" were made against Corbyn himself and that such claims politicized antisemitism and emptied the word of utility.[52]
In 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigated claims of antisemitism in the UK Labour Party, concluding that investigators should treat complaints of antisemitism in good faith according to the Macpherson principle,[a] and that dismissing reports of antisemitism without investigation could itself be antisemitic.[54] It said party agents who suggested complaints of antisemitism were "fake or smears" could be guilty of "unlawful harassment". It also said that Jewish members, in particular, were accused of trying to "undermine the Labour Party" with reports of antisemitism, and that this "ignores legitimate and genuine complaints of antisemitism in the Party".[55] Similarly, the Antisemitism Policy Trust's 2020 report on antisemitism in the UK Labour Party noted that some Labour activists had "dismissed [Anti-Jewish hatred] as a 'smear' or as being 'weaponised' by its victims for political ends", which they said was against the Macpherson principle and not supported by the evidence.[56] In 2022, Corbyn's successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, commissioned the Forde Report,[57] which said antisemitism had been used as a "factional weapon" between the party's anti-Corbyn and pro-Corbyn factions.[58][59][60]
International organizations
When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was rumored to be preparing arrest warrants for Israeli officials, including Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Aryeh Neier said that Netanyahu's assertion "that ICC indictments would be antisemitic is indicative of his promiscuous use of antisemitism allegations".[61][62] Shortly thereafter, on 20 May 2024, the ICC announced that it was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, and Netanyahu called chief prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan one of the "great antisemites in modern times", saying that Khan was "callously pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are raging across the world".[63] Kenneth Roth said Netanyahu's response was a "common last resort for defenders of Israel" that endangered Jews: "if people see the charge of antisemitism as a thin cover for Israeli war crimes, it will cheapen the concept at a time when a strong defense is needed."[64]
In February 2024, Israeli officials accused the International court of Justice of antisemitism following South Africa's genocide case against Israel.[65] Writing in Declassified UK, Anthony Lerman noted the officials' "deployment of weaponised antisemitism to deflect criticism" and said that "using past experience of anti-Jewish persecution to neutralise criticism of, and generate sympathy for, the Jewish state [...] is decades old".[66]
Israel and Zionism
Activists and scholars have said that weaponization of antisemitism, and new antisemitism in particular, has been used to stifle criticism of Israel.[67][68][69] Norman Finkelstein says that organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have advanced charges of new antisemitism since the 1970s "to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism".[70] In 2004, Joel Beinin wrote that the "well-established ploy" of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism exposes Jews to attack by suggesting they are responsible for the Israeli government's actions.[71]
Various writers have suggested that charges of antisemitism raised in discussions of Israel can have a chilling effect, deterring criticism of Israel due to fear of being associated with beliefs linked to antisemitic crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust.[72][73][74] Finkelstein says that use of "the anti-Semitism card" attempts to displace "fundamental responsibility for causing the conflict from Israel to the Arabs, the issue no longer being Jewish dispossession of Palestinians but Arab 'opposition' to Jews".[75][76] In 2008, Finkelstein wrote that some of what "the Israel lobby" suggests is antisemitism is in fact "exaggeration and fabrication" and "mislabeling legitimate criticism of Israeli policy".[77]
Raz Segal writes that conflating the State of Israel with Jews is part of the weaponization of antisemitism discourse that protects Israel from criticism, especially in discussion of Israeli settler colonialism.[78] In 2019, Joshua Leifer, an editor of Dissent magazine, wrote that campaigns that consider anti-Zionism antisemitic aim to shift criticisms of the Israeli government "beyond the pale of mainstream acceptability".[79] In December 2023, antisemitism expert David Feldman said that, while "some anti-Zionism takes an antisemitic form", the context must be considered when differentiating antisemitism from legitimate discourse and that there is "a long history of Israel and its supporters portraying anti-Zionism and other criticisms of Israel as antisemitic" in order to delegitimize them.[80]
In 2018, Jewish Voice for Peace authored an open letter signed by over 40 Jewish organizations saying that pro-Palestinian organizations were the subject of "cynical and false accusations of antisemitism" to protect Israel.[67][68] Claims of antisemitism against critics of Israel have been critically compared to Soviet censorship, McCarthyism, and rhetorical strategies against the South-African anti-apartheid movement.[81][75][82]
On February 1, 2022, Amnesty International published a report that said Israel was committing apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.[83] Israel rejected the report's findings and denounced it as antisemitic.[84] Amnesty secretary general Agnes Callamard rejected the Israeli officials' responses as "baseless attacks, barefaced lies, fabrications on the messenger".[85] Human rights advocates subsequently argued that the criticism of the report constituted weaponization of antisemitism.[86][87]
Opposition to immigration
Several experts have suggested that political groups on the populist right and far-right weaponize antisemitism to demonize immigrants, especially Muslims, and obscure their own antisemitism.[88][89][90] Political scientist Jelena Subotić suggests that parties such as the AfD and Fidesz first declare support for Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, then portray their "hostility to Islam and Muslim immigration to Europe" as defending European Jews, as a "shield" from their own antisemitism. She describes this as part of a growing "pro-Israel antisemitism".[88]
Stanford University professor Cécile Alduy (fr) says the National Rally has "started to target the supposed entrenched antisemitism of immigrants of Muslim heritage" and pretends to "protect the Jewish community from them" as a way to obscure its own antisemitic past.[90] Rachel Shabi writes that "wrapped in the Israeli flag, far-right parties with fascist roots and current displays of antisemitism cast themselves as defenders of Jews against an antisemitism claimed to be coming from Muslims and migrants".[89]
Pro–Palestinian activism
Multiple scholars have said that allegations of antisemitism have been weaponized against pro-Palestinian protesters.[91][92][36] According to Mitchel Plitnick and Sahar Aziz, a presumption that all Muslims are antisemitic has been "increasingly deployed by Zionist groups to eliminate critical debate inclusive of Palestinian experiences".[93] Scholar Raz Segal, former Harvard Hillel executive director Bernie Steinberg, and former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy have said that the weaponization of antisemitism claims has been used to silence pro-Palestinian voices, especially in regard to Israel's human rights abuses.[94][92]
In reference to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, Segal wrote, "the blanket assertion [of 'rampant antisemitism' at the protests] by pro-Israel advocates is intended as a political cudgel: weaponizing antisemitism to shield Israel from criticism of its attack on Gaza".[95] Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, says that the American right has weaponized claims of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian activism to ban boycotts of Israel and curtail the right to protest, and has also used similar tactics to "protect other causes beloved by the right", such as fossil fuels and the gun industry.[96]
University campuses
Critics have said that claims of antisemitism have been particularly weaponized against pro-Palestinian university campus demonstrations and boycotts of Israel.[97][98][96] Angel says Republicans and the Anti-Defamation League have attempted to portray pro-Palestinian student protesters as "terrorists".[96] Steinberg wrote that "fabricated and weaponized" charges against campus protesters must be "put aside" in order to deal with the "real and dangerous" antisemitism posed by "alt-right white-supremacist politics".[99]
Before Columbia University President Minouche Shafik appeared at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, 20 Jewish Columbia and Barnard professors published an open letter saying they "object to the weaponization of antisemitism" to "caricature and demonize universities" as places of "woke indoctrination".[100] Harvard appointed antisemitism scholar Derek Penslar to head a task force on the issue. Following criticism of Penslar, who had signed an open letter critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, Slate columnist Emily Tamkin said his critics were weaponizing antisemitism.[101]
Following restrictions on pro-Palestinian protests at universities, several Jewish organizations, activists, and scholars said the second Trump administration was using antisemitism as a pretext for anti-democratic and authoritarian actions.[102] Kenneth S. Stern said the Trump administration was "absolutely weaponizing antisemitism" to curtail "speech we don't like", in "a total assault on the university".[103] Representative Jerry Nadler said Trump was "weaponizing the real pain American Jews face to advance his desire to wield control". Nadler also criticized cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which terminated nearly half its staff, as contradicting Trump's claim to combat antisemitism.[104][105]
Lara Deeba and Jessica Winegarb suggest antisemitism has been weaponized in the U.S. against pro-Palestinian students and university staff in an attempt to "silence pro-Palestinian speech, abolish anti-racist teaching and diversity initiatives, eliminate academic freedom, and question the value of higher education in general".[106] In 2024, a group of Germanophone scholars said the weaponization of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian protesters, people of color, and post- and decolonial scholars, by universities and the Austrian political right means the "recent increase of antisemitic crimes and the structural antisemitism across Austrian society are thereby obscured".[36] Rabbi Shaul Magid, a Jewish studies scholar, has suggested that Republicans used congressional hearings about antisemitism to attack universities' diversity, equity and inclusion policies rather than to address campus antisemitism.[107]
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Multiple scholars have said that accusing someone of weaponizing antisemitism aims to delegitimize complaints of anti-Jewish sentiment and may itself draw on antisemitic tropes.[108][109][110] Political scientist Lars Rensmann suggests that while complaints about "illegitimate racism charges" are generally unacceptable in society, accusations that Jews are weaponizing antisemitism are "almost ubiquitous" and nearly always unevidenced.[111]
Scholars such as Matthias J. Becker, Mark Goldfeder, Robert Fine, and Kenneth Waltzer have said charges of weaponization are themselves antisemitic and rely on stereotypes of Jews that portray them as dishonest or greedy.[112][113][108] David Schraub says the charge of weaponization is "a first-cut response that presents marginalized persons as inherently untrustworthy, unbelievable, or lacking in the basic understandings regarding the true meaning of discrimination".[114] John Hyman and Anthony Julius say this stereotype of dishonesty is part of the "established antisemitic defamation" polemicized by Martin Luther in On The Jews and Their Lies and Heinrich von Treitschke's view that "Jews stand for 'Lug und Trug'" (lit. 'lying and cheating').[115]
Becker, a hate speech scholar, says the charge that Jews "instrumentalize antisemitism" for political or financial gain is connected to the claim they "instrumentalize the Holocaust", which he says can lead to Holocaust distortion and denial. Becker interprets the "instrumentalization" trope in post-WWII German and Austrian society (in German, die Antisemitismus- oder Auschwitz-Keule schwingen, lit. 'wielding the antisemitism or Auschwitz club') as a "collective reflex" in the context of the reckoning with Nazi history.[110]
Scholars Schraub, Dov Waxman, and Adam Hosein have said that accusations of bad faith are often made about those who raise charges of antisemitism—especially Jews—because "antisemitism today is not always easy to identify or even define".[2] They suggest that accusations of bad faith may be defused by clarifying which of the potential understandings of antisemitism is being invoked, and that "persons who encounter a Jewish claim of antisemitism [should] at least adopt a presumptive disposition towards taking that claim seriously and considering it with an open mind".[2]
Politics
Sina Arnold and Blair Taylor say charges of weaponizing antisemitism are a common way of "shutting down" discussions of antisemitism in the contemporary American Left, along with changing the subject to Israel or right-wing antisemitism. Arnold and Taylor attribute this to "unexamined political assumptions" and ignorance about the nature of antisemitism rather than "conscious antisemitic intent".[116] Rensmann says that some on the left do not "recognize current antisemitism" but only the "chilling effect" of "bad-faith" charges of antisemitism.[117] Izabella Tabarovsky has compared contemporary left-wing antisemitism to Soviet antisemitic campaigns that sought to accuse Zionists of "complain[ing] about antisemitism in order to smear the left" between 1967 and 1988.[118]
In 2005, sociologist David Hirsh coined the term "the Livingstone Formulation" for "responding to an accusation of antisemitism with a counter-accusation of Zionist bad faith".[119] It is particularly used to describe charges of weaponization of antisemitism from those on the left of politics or who are anti-Zionist,[120][116][121] although Hirsh says the formulation "long pre-dates antizionist antisemitism".[122] Hirsh gives as examples comments by former President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, American white supremacist David Duke, British National Party leader Nick Griffin, and American aviator Charles Lindbergh;[123] as well as passages from 19th-century German antisemites Heinrich von Treitschke and Wilhelm Marr.[124]
Daniel Sugarman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews says that while the left downplays antisemitism as criticism of Israel, the right often denies or downplays its own antisemitism by citing its support for Israel.[120] Gideon Botsch, a German political scientist specializing in the far right and antisemitism, says that, in Germany, far-right claims of weaponization of antisemitism, especially in relation to criticisms of Israel, are often overlooked because of a tendency to attribute anti-Israel antisemitism to the left and Islam, and to treat far-right antisemitism as a separate, historical phenomenon.[31]
Israel and anti-Zionism
Scholars such as Ben Cohen, Shany Mor, Lars Rensmann and Efraim Sicher say that anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are often used as defences against antisemitism while often relying on traditional antisemitic tropes.[111][125][126] Werner Bonefeld says this is more common among those who view antisemitism as "a phenomenon of the past".[127] David Schraub says that the statement "criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic", while true, falsely implies that "any non-trivial number of individuals" must believe the opposite, reframing discussions of antisemitism from Jewish victims to the way charges of antisemitism are "allegedly abused to victimise innocent bystanders".[128] Derek Spitz, John Hyman and Anthony Julius have described this as a form of victim blaming which places a large burden of proof on Jews.[129][115]
Fine and Philip Spencer say that while antisemitism may be weaponized to stifle criticism of Israel in some cases, "the reverse is more plausible: that there are many who cry 'Israel' in order to shut down debate on antisemitism".[130] Bernard Harrison says this "stock" rebuttal attempts to portray complaints of antisemitism as "putatively absurd".[131][129] In a 2025 report for the Toda Peace Institute, Lisa Schirch wrote, "both the weaponization of antisemitism and the left's dismissal of antisemitism disrupt solidarity and coalition building" in regard to the Israel–Palestine conflict.[32]
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See also
Notes
- This is the principle that all complaints of racism should be recorded and investigated as such when the complainant or someone else perceives them as acts of racism.[53]
References
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