The Emerging War over Anti-Semitism

This spring’s iteration of warfare between Israel and Hamas once again occasioned passionate lacerations of Israel. Amnesty International accused it of a “horrific pattern” of “brazen deadly attacks on family homes,” which it called on the International Criminal Court to investigate “urgently” as “war crimes.” Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate to block military aid to the Jewish state, joined by progressive members of the House where Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Israel an “apartheid state,” adding the catechism, “apartheid states are not democracies.” The New York Times combined inflammatory headlines on news stories (“Israel Opts for Brute Force”) with an almost-daily sequence of anti-Israel columns by Sanders, Nicholas Kristof, Peter Beinart, various residents of Gaza, and others. Meanwhile, on the small and smaller screens, John Oliver and other personalities of the entertainment world struck up a chorus of denunciations of Israel’s actions.

All of this came in response to a war in which Israel was plainly reacting to an unprovoked bombardment of rockets and missiles that Hamas launched by the thousands against Israeli populations centers, every one of them a genuine, unmistakable war crime. Such an outpouring of blaming the victim seemed, in some Jewish eyes, to border on anti-Semitism—or to cross that border.

By chance, this followed just a month after the outbreak of a different but related conflict—a war of words that could turn out to be as consequential as this most recent round with Hamas, first for the diaspora and ultimately for Israel. This second war was launched in March, with the release of something called the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (JDA), signed by over 200 leading lights of the Jewish intellectual world, including figures ranging from Beinart to A.B. Yehoshua, one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, to Michael Walzer, one of America’s premier teachers of political thought.