Getting Real About Jew Hatred
(Washington Jewish Week) – Spontaneous memorials, like the dozens of glowing yahrzeit candles on the sidewalk near the White House on May 22, and empathetic statements after the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim like the one by Mayor Muriel Bowser that Washington, D.C., “will not tolerate antisemitism” were necessary. But insufficient.
Grief over the May 21 killings of the two young Israeli Embassy staffers just outside the Capital Jewish Museum should yield, finally, clarity for American Jews, Israelis and our supporters about our changed reality. Otherwise, the next such crime, and more are likely, will leave us again grieving and insisting antisemitism will not be tolerated while Jew hatred continues to spread.
Lischinsky and Milgrim were not murdered “only because they were Jewish,” as sympathetic politicians and some of our own community leaders told us. They were shot down exactly because they were Jewish, or thought to be. The killings were not a case of mistaken identity or misunderstanding on the part of the attacker but a result of a widespread and still growing quasi-religion called “Palestinianism.”
In a Jerusalem Post commentary headlined “Antisemitism and Jewish Destiny,” written just before his death in 2015, Hebrew University Prof. Robert S. Wistrich, author of “Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred,” noted that anti-Zionism, by labeling the Jewish state “racist” and “apartheid,” made Zionism “a synonym for criminality. … Hence, every Jew (or non-Jew) who supports the totally ‘illegitimate’ or immoral ‘Zionist entity’ is thereby complicit in a cosmic evil.” Therefore, killing them is not murder but as Hamas insists and “pro-Palestinian” Hamasnik demonstrators chant, “resistance by any means necessary” in the “globalized intifada.”
According to Wistrich, “when it comes to the Palestinian ideology and the millions around the world who support it, virtually all actions of self-defense by Israel are instantly classified as ‘genocide,’ demonized and treated as part of a sinister Jewish-imperialist conspiracy.” In the cult of what Wistrich identified as Palestinianism, ridding the world of Zionists, of Israelis, of Jews, amounts to sacred acts, not crimes.
The accused killer of Lischinsky and Milgrim, Elias Rodriguez, appears to epitomize true believers in the church of Palestine. In custody moments after the murders, the 30-year-old Rodriguez reportedly declared “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza,” and pulled a keffiyeh from his backpack.
This writer has long argued, including in Washington Jewish Week last year, that the keffiyeh, a traditional Arab headdress first popularized in the West by Yasser Arafat as head of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, amounts to a cloth swastika. But whereas the swastika still remains tainted for many by its Nazi association, the keffiyeh provides a fashionable workaround. It proudly announces the wearer’s enlightened hatred for the Jewish state, its citizens and their backers.
Rodriguez’s associations also seem to reflect a key pathway for resurgent antisemitism: the red-green or neo-Marxist-Islamist alliance. He was once connected with the anti-capitalist Party for Socialism and Liberation. According to The Wall Street Journal, a 2017 GoFundMe post “was raising money to send Rodriguez to the People’s Congress of Resistance” in Washington to “confront the Congress of the millionaires.”
Marxist attacks on Zionism were underway by 1920 with the Congress of the Peoples of the East. Organized by the Communist International, the conference attempted to incite Muslim rebellions against British and French imperialism, examples of which allegedly included Zionist resettlement of Jews in British Mandatory Palestine.
The Soviet Union accelerated demonization of Israel by inspiring the 1975 United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. This slander was Moscow’s psychological warfare response to defeat of its Syrian and Egyptian clients by Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Though repealed in 1991, it remains an article of faith with postliberal or antidemocratic leftists. And “Israeli racism” is the contemporary equivalent of “Christ-killer” accusations against Jews by medieval Christians.
What to do? Speaking in Jerusalem in 2019, Elan Carr, then-U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, said every American synagogue, school and community center should post armed guards. Unfortunately, Carr said, the threat worldwide and in the United States comes from both “a pathological, ethnic, supremacist right” and “an anti-Zionist left.”
Heightened security, of course. But that is defensive. To counter today’s anti-Zionist antisemitism, Israel, Jews and our supporters must deflate the “Palestinian narrative.” We must take the offensive to expose that narrative — it is not history — of lies about nonindigenous dispossession, apartheid and genocide. Our response to grief must include reasserting Judaism as the source code of ethical monotheism and Israel as the most successful, democratic, prosperous and multiethnic of all postcolonial countries. Period.
