It’s time that we precisely define an ‘antisemite’
The rise of Jew-hatred in America can be reversed, but only if it is fought differently. The hate-mongers have been successful in obtaining legitimacy for their absurd argument that being anti-Zionist and supporting the eradication of the State of Israel does not make them antisemites.
The fact is that in order to argue that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, the haters have to do two false things.
First, they need to argue that Judaism has nothing to do with Zionism. They attempt to prove that with Neturei Karta demonstrators and assimilated Jews with no knowledge of Judaism. The fact that the Neturei Karta represents a tiny, insignificant group that in no way represents Orthodox Jews (despite their traditional dress) is ignored in the media.
Second is the false narrative that denies Jewish history and Jewish connections to the land of Israel. Just as denying that the Holocaust happened would mean you are an antisemite, if you deny that King David ruled over Jerusalem you are also an antisemite.
If you believe in the rights of indigenous people to their land, except when it comes to the indigenous Jewish people of Israel, you are antisemitic. If you try to claim some random time in history when Jews were not the majority and not go back to who was first in Israel — namely, the Jews — or who is a majority in Israel today — namely, the Jews — then you are antisemitic.
The Jews were militarily forced from their homeland by the Romans in the year 70 CE and then in the Bar Kokhba revolt in the years 132 to 136, in which the Jews, except for a few, were forcibly evicted from their ancestral homeland and not allowed freely to move back in big numbers until a Jewish state was re-established in 1948. The land of Israel was mostly empty, as American essayist Mark Twain described during his visit in 1867.
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I asked Thomas Nides, the former US ambassador to Israel, to name a Palestinian Arab leader from before 1867. He could not because those who were called Palestinian in 1867 were Jewish and not Arab. Even the Muslim Waqf, in its 1925 tourist guide to the Temple Mount, wrote that it was the site of the Temple of King Solomon. It acknowledged that Muslims occupied the site in the seventh century when they built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque.
After being forcibly removed, the Jewish people never gave up their claim to Israel. That is why Jews face toward Jerusalem when they pray, and why returning to Jerusalem is in the main Amidah prayer of the Jewish service. Now, nearly 8 million Jews live in Israel.
Those who advocate for the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state to replace the indigenous Jewish state are the advocates for apartheid, since a majority of the people living in the land of Israel are Jews. If they support the physical murder of this Jewish population, then they are supporters of a real genocide.
The bottom line is that the Jewish people and Israel have the winning argument. They can overcome the antisemites. They do, however, need to change tactics in how to fight back because the current tactics aren’t working in America.
Farley Weiss is co-author, with Leonard Grunstein, of “Because It’s Just and Right: The Untold Backstory of the US Recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel and Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.”
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
