(This is severely rewritten from this morning and even more severely from late last night. The original draft to which people might take offense is back up, but after many post edits, this version is far more articulate.)
Buckle up. This won't be fun.
I didn't want to do this post, but I have to, no matter whom it alienates.
So the most basic point is this: Jews don't count. The very antiracists who use every other oppressed demographic as a trump card to correct injustices don't care a fig for how Jews are oppressed. They see the majority of Jews in a whole country of Jews as the oppressor, and millions of Jews in the US as manipulative enablers.
But the corollary point is not that people should be a better anti-antisemite, the point is that the very ideas of antiracism and its related concepts are a farce that created more people who mean to be racist, sexist and LGBTQ-phobic than it ever neutralized.
Eventually, all of us have to come to terms with this. If it's meant to foster dialogue then it's done the exact opposite: there is no dialogue to be had if the dialogue comes to a foregone conclusion that we have no right to tell a member of a minority demographic that their notions are incorrect.
We oppressed minorities are not children. Don't treat us like children by assuming that we are automatically correct in our assumptions - a notion you will probably find more necessary to acknowledge as you read this post...
The reason I stopped writing this the other day is that there's no way to sugarcoat that truth. It's a farce when some left-crank on Medium demands it, it's no less a farce when some right-crank in Tablet Magazine demands the same special treatment for Jews.
It's a literally impossible standard of human interaction, and the more you demand it, the more totalitarian groups like Hamas and the FSB can exploit your ideals to perpetrate the worst sort of human crime.
Once upon a time, Marxists demanded similar sorts of interactions to be the ally of the lower classes, and it lead to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and at least a dozen other genocidal dictators - probably well over 100 million people murdered total - not counting the wars in which they partook.
You may laugh at these warnings or think you're preventing mass murder exactly like this, but many well meaning groups before you have done exactly the same, and their impossible ideals lead the world to mass murder in every one of the last five centuries.
But if we're going to have a reasonable dialogue about this, we have to consider the points of both sides without getting angry. If you find yourself getting angry with the points I'm making, take a breather and perhaps come back when you find yourself able to approach things with a cooler head. But, be warned, this is a post about antisemitism, not about Islamophobia.
There are so many antisemitic acts currently that I think anybody with the most basic understanding of the world would understand what they are the moment they read them. They're just a google search away, and the people who would read them and not consider them antisemitic are beyond reaching.
It's not worth talking too much about slogans, but when you say 'From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free', or a simple 'Free Palestine,' whatever meanings that holds about freeing Palestinians from oppression, you also have to take into account that it means many other things: does it mean two states living side by side?
From the river to the sea certainly sounds as though there is no room for Israel, and it's meant to recall the PLO charter's line that Jews should be 'tossed in the sea.'
And even if you believe there should only be one un-Jewish state, there are hundreds of millions of people who hear those slogans as a call to the murder of Jews, not just a few Jews, millions.
Both sides have to take the other into account, and just because you've chanted it does not mean you're an antisemite, but if you want a peaceful solution, you will stop partaking of those chants.
If, however, you want a war against the Jewish state, there's no reason to stop. If that's what you want, you're not necessarily even an antisemite, just incredibly naive for thinking that a Palestinian army as currently constituted would seek vengeance rather than targeted strikes with a clear objective in mind.
If you believe that indiscriminate vengeance against Israeli civilians is justified, then yes, I'm afraid you're an antisemite and a particularly dangerous one - there are a few hundred thousand in every major first world country, a few thousand of whom intent to become violent themselves.
If you think there's at least a good reason for that sort of vengeance, you're not necessarily an antisemite, but you're nearly as bad - you've become a slimy, ugly fellow traveler to antisemites enabling the wars you claim you want to end. Of these, there are millions everywhere. Among Americans 18-24, polls determine this is 51% of the country's population.
But there is something arguably worse than an antisemite, and so common that there are tens of millions in every first world country, and that is an anti-Jew. Antisemitism as we currently think of it is a racial prejudice, and as so many specialists on the issue from David Nirenberg to Max Diamant point out, it really only goes back to the mid-19th century.
But anti-Judaism, or anti-Hebraism, goes back at least 3000 years, and with that, there is almost no daylight between being anti-Judaism and being anti-Jew. That doesn't mean Jews automatically get a pass for their own exclusionist policies and rhetoric, but it does mean that Zionism is indivisible from the core of the religion.
Zionism is not just a fringe part of the religion that one can divorce from it.
The longing for Zion is not like the injunctions against homosexuality and permission to own slaves that are mentioned once each in the Torah. Zionism is Judaism's eleventh commandment, only not listed among them because the covenant to the land of Israel is scrawled around nearly every one of the Torah's other columns.
And if you have a problem with that, you have a problem with Judaism. You can say that Zionism is a catchall excuse for the militant among Zionists to inflict pain on other peoples: and you would be correct, but if you do not allow for labor Zionism, liberal Zionism, moderate Zionism, even of religious and conservative and orthodox Zionisms of principle, you have a problem with Judaism.
If you have a problem with Judaism, you have a problem with every one among the millions of Jews who practice it. You can reconcile yourself to having this problem and still think yourself a decent person with much justification - there are more important moral issues in the world than bigotry - but you should have no illusion for what this means to your relationship to Jews.
This belief probably comprises a near-majority of people in every first world country. Saying that Zionism does not mean Judaism is as illogical as saying that you can be Jewish while believing that Jesus is the Messiah.
We may not have called it Zionism until the late 19th century, but the longing for Zion goes back to the second century expulsion. It is in well over a dozen prayers Jews have chanted multiple times every day ever since. Believing that Jews are white, or European, or not native of Israel, in every sense, a denial that Jews are from the Middle East.
Think about it for a minute, how do you think so many European Jews got white skin? Jews were low enough in the social hierarchy that it was unthinkable to marry a Jew in well over 90% of European societies. What was, though, permissible was rape. The only reason Jews look white is because the European gene pool was forcibly introduced into Judaism from the invasion of the Greeks, continuing unabated for 2300 years with only a few interruptions.
Even if a Jew has European blood, Jews are Jews, Jews are Israeli, Jews are Judean, Jews are citizens of the Palestinian land. There is no conceding an inch on this, and anyone who denies it is anti-Jew. We were thrown off of it by the very imperialism today's anti-Jews so decry, and we have always deserved our own country upon it, even if other people deserve their own country in it too.
There are other precepts that make a Jew, but alongside those others, Zionism is far more Jewish than corned beef and matzoh balls. If you throw us out again, we will never stop longing for Zion and never stop trying to get it back. You may think that when the most violent anti-Zionists come for us, you will stand up for us, but why should we ever believe you if you didn't stand up for us when we still had a state?
Zionism IS Judaism. Anti-Zionism IS anti-Judaism. A person who seeks to divorce Judaism from Zionism is, at best, a person whose prejudices should be viewed with suspicion. You may disagree with that, you may disapprove of that, but it is what it is and it's never going to change. If you don't like that, you don't like Jews. The rest is commentary.
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