DC rally equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism draws meager crowd and divides Jewish community

There was a rally against antisemitism outside the Capitol in Washington yesterday equating antisemitism with sharp criticism of Israel, and while a lot of big Jewish groups sponsored it, the good news is that liberal Zionists ran away from the event, and there weren’t many people there.

The Washington Post said “hundreds” were at the rally. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency says “thousands” were at the rally, but the screenshot above doesn’t support that claim. MJ Rosenberg said there were more people at his bar mitzvah.

Ron Kampeas reported last week that while leading Jewish groups sponsored the rally– including the Jewish Federations of North America, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the leading Jewish Republican and Democratic committees– liberal Zionist groups wanted nothing to do with it.

Steve Rabinowitz, a longtime Democratic consultant, couldn’t get them because Israel is too “divisive” an issue!

[Rabinowitz said] he hit a brick wall with a few large left-leaning organizations — including J Street, T’ruah and Americans for Peace Now, which declined invitations to cosponsor the rally. A number of other groups on the left whose representatives declined to speak on the record got wind of the rally through email blast solicitations and decided against participating.  

Rabinowitz, speaking only for himself and not for the organizers, said Israel has become too divisive an issue among Jews, and he wished the organizers opted to solely focus on antisemitism in order to create a more potent message.

“We can have an agreement on antisemitism, but there are a million differences on Israel,” he said. “I wish we could leave that debate for another day.”

Hadar Susskind of Americans for Peace Now characterized the rally as rightwing in a statement:

“It’s not just that we disagree with these groups on other issues, we disagree with these groups on this issue…This rally looks like it will conflate criticism of the occupation and criticism of Israeli actions with anti-Zionism, and will say anti-Zionism is antisemitic, and we want no part of that”

J Street had no comment on the rally to the JTA, but it issued a statement on “a shocking wave of… often deadly antisemitism” in which it tried to walk a middle way:

Those who conflate Jewish identity with support for the actions of the Israeli government — or who seek to classify fair criticism of the Israeli government as a form of antisemitism — only divide us further…”

I watched a bunch of the rally, and it had a religious/rightwing flavor. Many speakers equated criticism of Israel, including the BDS campaign, –Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions–with murderous antisemitism. Norm Coleman of the Republican Jewish Coalition linked “violent attacks on Jews” with criticism of Israel.

We see [antisemitism] in the attempts to push Jewish out of academia and communities just because they are Jews. We see it in the chants of Jews Will Not Replace Us that we heard in Charlottesville. We see it in campaigns such as BDS that demonize the Jewish state of Israel, delegitimize Jewish identity and seek to destroy Jewish peoplehood. Anti Zionism is a cloak for antisemitism.”

Israeli actress Noa Tishby said that Judaism really is Zionism, and anti-Zionism fuels violent attacks on Jews:

Today in many polite circles, it’s not acceptable to identify as antisemitic. That’s because today’s Jew haters simply no longer have to. So much of the antisemitism of today simply attributes all the evil tropes, lies and libel that have been used for centuries to justify the worst horrors against Jewish people to the Jewish state… This hatred is being used to attack our Jewish communities, it is being used to impose a heavy cost on anyone who identifies as Jewish or God forbid Zionist…

Zionism is a movement for Jewish liberation and self-determination in a Jewish not exclusively Jewish state. It’s about the Jews, their right of Jewish people to live as a free people, after millennia of persecution in our ancestral land. When ignorant crowds and some supermodels on Instagram hatefully and irresponsibly spread these lies about Zionism, when they chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, when they engage in the modern day libel of blaming Israel as a genocidal state, they shouldn’t be surprised when that demonization results in Jews being attacked on the streets of this beloved country.

Liberal Zionist groups ran away from a rally in DC equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism-- as even an organizer admits that Israel is just too "divisive" an issue in the Jewish community these days. The Washington Post said "hundreds" were at the rally. MJ Rosenberg said there were more people at his bar mitzvah.
Israeli actress Noa Tishby and Meghan McCain embrace one another at antisemitism rally, July 11, 2021. Screenshot from video posted of rally.

It’s a good thing that IfNotNow mocked the rally for not opposing the occupation.

The open divisions in the American Jewish community over Israel are clearly putting pressure on J Street, which is positioned on the left but also doesn’t want Israel politicized. Two years ago J Street championed legislation that equated the BDS campaign with antisemitism. It can’t push too hard on that claim now when so many liberal Democrats want sanctions on Israel.

By the way, also equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is Taffy Brodesser-Akner in the New York Times, in a review of a new novel about the Netanyahu family, by Joshua Cohen. Brodesser-Akner used the review as an occasion to explain why she wasn’t moved during the Gaza onslaught to support the “oppressed people” of Palestine, and quickly segued to antisemitism and Nazis.

This was a good book to read as I searched in my mind for other times that we cheer on terrorism except for when it’s happening to the Jews. This was a good book to read as the meme of asserting that the “questioning” of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitism morphed into something that was, by some parties, actually yes quite gleeful and strenuous anti-Semitism, until finally my sisters in Crown Heights began to beseech their male children to cover their yarmulkes with baseball caps and the world around me was heartbreakingly silent as Jews were cornered and threatened here in America for something going on very far away. This was a good book to read as my Jewish friends texted me that this would stop if we could just get Bibi out of power, and I wondered what they texted each other in 1935 as the streets in Europe overheated with pogrom energy and there was no Bibi and no Israel to blame.

Yes, this book was a good place to turn … while smart people I know shared the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as cherry-picked by an Instagram influencer or by a tweet thread that had similarly squishy origins. It was good to actually know the history of the Jews and the founding of Israel.

This really is all Israel supporters have got in the quiver now that the country has been branded an apartheid state, has just finished another Gaza slaughter, and is being investigated for war crimes by the ICC… Smear the critics as antisemites.

h/t Scott Roth, Michael Arria.

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