Today, Israel/Palestine touches the work of nearly all progressive organizers. Not only are our struggles interconnected, but our entire movement ecosystem is under attack from authoritarian forces that are using Israel/Palestine as a wedge issue, a pretext to intimidate funders, undermine leaders, isolate organizations, and dismantle organizing infrastructure.
Authoritarians claim they are “fighting antisemitism” as they go about strong-arming universities, detaining students, screening visa applicants, and dividing coalitions. But their crusade isn’t about protecting Jews: it’s about distracting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and dismantling democracy in the process.
By trying to deflect attention from the genocide with cynical appeals to Jewish safety, Israel’s defenders and authoritarian enablers put their own moral bankruptcy on full display. Those of us concerned with actually fighting antisemitism recognize these divide-and-conquer, smokescreen tactics as incredibly dangerous. To respond effectively, we need to sharpen our understanding and organize with a politics of shared safety in solidarity, grounding the fight against antisemitism in joint struggle for collective liberation.
Why anti-Zionism is not antisemitism
It is not inherently antisemitic to oppose Israel’s policies of genocide, apartheid, and other forms of oppression against Palestinians. Israel is a nation-state, and Jews are a people. Materially grounded critiques of state policy should not be confused with bigotry against a people.
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It’s also not inherently antisemitic to oppose Zionism, understood as the ideology undergirding the political project to create a “Jewish state” in the Levant. Since it arose in the late 1800s, this ethnonationalist project has privileged Jews over Palestinians and disregarded Palestinian humanity. An intersectional, materialist analysis places Zionism alongside similar forms of apartheid and settler-colonialism across history, from South Africa and the Jim Crow South to Algeria and Turtle Island.
The state of Israel was founded under the slogan, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” More than half the Palestinians living on the land were expelled when the state was founded, and the state has always required laws and policies to preserve its Jewish demographic majority and to privilege Jews over Palestinians. Palestinians have faced second-class citizenship at best and systemic apartheid, expulsion, and genocide at worst.
Materially grounded critiques of state policy should not be confused with bigotry against a people.
For decades, Israel’s advocates have been unable to defend its unjust policies on their own terms. Since the 1970s, when Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and other territories was met with a growing chorus of global condemnation, organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have advanced the harmful narrative that critique of Israel or Zionism is rooted in antisemitism. The “new antisemitism,” they argued, no longer had Nazi race science or “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracies at its core: now it had refashioned itself as political opposition to Jewish nationalism, and its most virulent culprits were on the Left, not the Right.
Since the rise of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement in the 2000s, these weaponized antisemitism campaigns have gone into overdrive. Advocates for Israel have pursued vigorous policy and narrative initiatives in legislatures and courts of public opinion around the world. In recent years, many have sought to enshrine the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into anti-discrimination law. This definition conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel. Though originally developed by scholars only as an advisory tool, it has been misused to penalize criticism of Israel and Zionism in federal, state, and local governments, and in universities, corporate boardrooms, and beyond.
The weaponization of antisemitism has been a bipartisan project, embraced in various forms by establishment Democratic and Republican lawmakers; conservative, centrist, liberal, and some progressive civic leaders; and not only by Jewish groups like the ADL but also by Christian Zionists and many others. Other supremacist movements have sought to emulate its success in rebranding repression with the moral cover of anti-discrimination. Hindu nationalists, for example, increasingly claim they are fighting “Hinduphobia” as they seek to suppress criticism of Narendra Modi’s illiberal (and Israel-friendly) regime.
Project Esther targets dissent
After October 7, Israel’s defenders were desperate to repress mounting campus and community opposition to US support for Israel’s genocide. University administrators fired professors, disbanded student organizations, and ruthlessly suppressed speech, while mayors and police forces violently cracked down on community protest. Wall-to-wall media coverage conflated instances of real antisemitism with the more common experience of political discomfort, whipping up a moral panic that painted Palestine solidarity as a threat to Jewish safety—all while US taxpayer–funded Israeli bombs continued to flatten Gaza.
The MAGA Right quickly folded this moral panic into its broader agenda. Fighting antisemitism, they claimed, meant dismantling DEI and rolling back the anti-racist reckoning catalyzed by the George Floyd uprising; defunding public and higher education; deporting immigrants and refugees; expanding the police, “counter-terrorism,” security, and surveillance state; and destroying the Left writ large. Predictably, centrists and liberals played along.
The authoritarian strategy was laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, published in October 2024. Framed as an addendum to Project 2025, Project Esther outlined a comprehensive McCarthyist onslaught to systematically dismantle progressive infrastructure, cut off funding streams, incapacitate organizations, and isolate leadership. Though pitched in the name of protecting Jews, Project Esther had little Jewish participation. It was mostly led by Christian nationalists, including Christian Zionists whose apocalyptic fantasies of End Times war in the Middle East don’t bode well for Jewish safety, to put it lightly.
The second Trump administration quickly moved to implement Project Esther, with the ICE kidnapping of Palestine solidarity activists and students like Mahmoud Khalil; the authoritarian capture and extortion of institutions like Columbia University; aggressive federal lawfare and other action against Palestine solidarity organizations and activists; surveillance of visa applicants for possible “antisemitic bias”; and more. In Orwellian inversion, the same authoritarians spreading deadly conspiracy theories, making Nazi salutes, and shredding the rights-based order cast themselves as defenders of the downtrodden, charged with the holy crusade, as Trump’s White House Faith Office puts it, against “antisemitic, anti-white, and anti-Christian bias”.
But as with other authoritarian advances, Project Esther’s success is far from inevitable. Detainees like Mahmoud Khalil have been released, while many institutions and civil society voices have spoken out against the administration’s cynical abuse of antisemitism. Some initiatives to further suppress speech have been stymied amidst vocal opposition from across the spectrum, including from libertarian free speech advocates and conservative Israel-skeptics. As widespread opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues to grow, authoritarian overreach could continue to generate blowback.
Conspiracy theories, tropes, and Identitarian politics
The causes of Palestinian freedom, and emancipation more broadly, are principled and just, but this doesn’t mean they won’t attract or reproduce antisemitism. Antisemitism is part of our world, just like misogyny, anti-Blackness, and other kinds of oppression, and we needn’t be surprised that any of it can and will show up in our movements if we don’t actively work to unlearn and counter it.
There have been real incidents of what historian Peter Beinart calls “pro-Palestinian antisemitism” since October 7, as there have been during previous Israeli assaults on Gaza. These have included violence and intimidation directed at Jews and Jewish institutions. These antisemitic acts have been carried out by individuals across the political spectrum, and they deserve unequivocal condemnation. Any move to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions or to harmfully conflate Jews and Judaism with Zionism plays into the (also antisemitic) narrative used by advocates of Israel to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
As the genocide in Gaza rolls on, millions of people are learning about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians for the first time. Under Trump 2.0, many are radicalizing and asking tough questions about who’s in charge and how to fight back. When it’s hard enough to make rent, nobody has time to read dissertations about the root causes of Western support for Israel. Media literacy is at an all-time low, and while a superficial version of Holocaust awareness is ubiquitous in popular culture, this doesn’t translate to a substantive analysis of antisemitism.
On Elon Musk’s Twitter, antisemitic conspiracy theories run rampant: popular anonymous accounts that push out fascist rhetoric claim “Zionists” control the money supply and the media, and have covertly engineered every war on the planet since 1914; or that every pro-Israel US senator is a dual Israeli citizen; or that Israel’s dismal human rights record is rooted in the dark Jewish magic of the Kabbalah…the scripts are endless. Well-meaning progressives have shared some of these, especially when the tropes are more subtle, without understanding where they come from.
As discussed in part 1, antisemitism tells a false story about the nature of power. The antisemitic version of anti-Zionism—especially popular on the Right, where criticism of Israel is on the rise as well—claims that Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and Western support for that oppression, is due to some singularly powerful and demonic Jewish or ‘Zionist’ conspiracy.
In truth, the US supports Israel due to many factors, including the profit motives of the military-industrial complex; America’s bipartisan quest for imperial dominance in the Middle East in the unending war on terror; the broad and deep influence of Christian Zionist ideology on MAGA leaders, their core evangelical base, and beyond; a shared settler-colonial legacy of manifest destiny and exceptionalism; Israeli state diplomacy; pro-Israel lobbying, including by self-appointed “leaders” of the American Jewish community; and more.
An antisemitic power analysis flattens all this into an oversimplified caricature of a many-tentacled cabal that doesn’t help Left analysis or strategy. We should call out the real power that groups like AIPAC and the ADL wield, but we shouldn’t mistake one pillar of empire for the entire cathedral.
It’s also important not to confuse real analysis for antisemitic tropes. Using classical Christian imagery to depict Jews as bloodthirsty predators of children is antisemitic; but when activists condemn Israel’s horrific mass murder of children in Gaza, this isn’t a blood libel. Writing “free Palestine” graffiti on a random synagogue is antisemitic; but when a synagogue hosts a speech by an Israeli war criminal, or a real estate auction selling land in occupied territories, activists aren’t protesting outside the building because it’s a synagogue. Of course, most pro-Israel advocacy relies upon blurring these crucial distinctions.
In many cases, Israel advocates mistake campist politics for antisemitism. One tendency in the Palestine solidarity movement—far from the only tendency, but often the loudest on social media—insists that supporting the international legal right of colonized peoples to resist their colonization means enthusiastically embracing every action taken by every resistance actor, suspending any political and moral judgment in the process. It names its opposition solely as “Zionists,” an indiscriminate identitarian category that flattens any meaningful distinction between the head of the Israel Defense Forces or the CEO of Boeing on the one hand and someone’s reactionary grandpa, or a small synagogue holding a bake sale on the other. From there it adds another flat injunction, “resistance by any means necessary,” against any and all of these “Zionists” anywhere in the world.
In a time of felt despair and powerlessness, this tendency confuses the feeling of moral righteousness and grievance for the hard political work of consensus and movement-building, and substitutes the immediacy of redemptive ultraviolence for a deeper theory of change. This approach is ultimately rooted in a political shortcoming, rather than bigotry against Jews or a conspiratorial worldview, but regardless it blunts analysis and strategy with Manichean rigidity, weakens our movements, makes the Right’s work of repression easier, and doesn’t move us towards the world we want to build.
Safety through solidarity
Understanding the connections between antisemitism and other forms of oppression can inform our most effective resistance to it. The dominant view advanced by groups like the ADL sees antisemitism as ‘the oldest hatred’, singular and exceptional. This clouds our analysis and feeds the sense of isolation and fear the Right—and the Zionist project—preys upon. It leads to a strategy for Jewish safety that relies on protection from the police, the military, and other state authorities: vertical alliances.
If we want Jews to reject nationalism as a safety strategy, we need to demonstrate that solidarity is a surer route.
Yes, progressives should extend unequivocal solidarity towards Jews in the face of antisemitism, irrespective of political differences, as we would defend any other group; and we should remain cognizant of the valid communal fears that lead many to identify as Zionist, while remaining principled and steadfast in our support for Palestinian freedom. And if we want Jews to reject nationalism as a safety strategy, we need to demonstrate that solidarity is a surer route.
To disrupt vertical alliances with state power, we need to cultivate horizontal alliances between Jews and other marginalized groups. In this moment, this can look like interrupting the Right’s weaponization of antisemitism by building a bigger “we” at every turn. Institutions like universities, labor unions, nonprofits, and media bodies can unequivocally reject pressure campaigns to stifle speech, and build broad, popular coalitions in defense of core democratic freedoms. At a time when more people than ever are questioning US support for Israel, these coalitions should be principled, not purist, welcoming in as many as possible.
With both antisemitism and Islamophobia on the rise, solidarity can look like communities defending each other’s places of worship. It can look like fighting for policies which combat social alienation at its root: greater economic equality, a robust social safety net, and investment in housing and shelter, well-resourced mental health services, restorative justice programs, and other infrastructure for community resilience.
As Jews take our place in the bigger “we,” in the big-tent front against authoritarianism, we fight for not only our own right to stay safe and flourish, but that same right for other communities as well.
Since antisemitism is fueled by the systemic alienation endemic to racial capitalism, we can only combat it at the root by moving together towards a more just and democratic world.
Featured illustration by Kimmie Dearest
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