New definition of antisemitism includes progressive ‘threat’ to Democratic Party support for Israel

Now that the Biden administration and dozens of European governments have adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism that makes it antisemitic to single out Israel for criticism or compare Israel to Nazi Germany, an Israeli thinktank wants to take the definition further. Merely excluding Israel from the progressive agenda, and thereby endangering Israel’s bipartisan support in the U.S., shows antisemitic tendencies, it argues.

The report is a call to censor the progressive discourse as “antisemitic”– everything from Rashida Tlaib saying Israel is a racist apartheid state to the the SNL bit saying that Israel is only vaccinating Jews– out of a political fear: that Israel’s “bipartisan status” is under “threat.”

The argument that the “positioning” of the pro-Israel agenda inside the “progressive discourse is a defining battle” comes from the Reut Group, an Israeli thinktank dedicated to fighting Israel’s delegitimization globally. Its report focuses on the politics of Jewish identity: that the new progressive “antisemitism” seeks to “erase” the Jewish narrative of “vulnerability” and thereby dislodge Israel from the Democratic Party. Unsurprisingly, it is written by a veteran of the rightwing Israel lobby; Daphna Kaufman worked at AIPAC and the Israel Project.

Reut says that in the world of identity politics, Jews are lumped with the oppressor, because of the American Jewish success story and Israel’s might. And it’s political. Israel is going to lose the Democratic Party. So let’s call this a new form of “erasive” antisemitism:

Progressive ideological paradigms and conceptual frameworks lend themselves to effectively silencing Jewish voices on self-defining, on claiming vulnerability, and in pursuing Jewish agendas…

‘Erasive anti-Semitism’ fundamentally threatens the positioning of Jewish and pro-Israel communities on the U.S. left, and thus the delicate equilibrium of bi-partisan political support for Jewish and pro-Israel agendas….

In short, Israel is in danger of losing the Democratic Party, so let’s describe the progressive framing as a form of antisemitism. Very close to the political agenda of the group Democratic Majority for Israel, which threw its weight around in the last election.

The heart of the argument is a claim on Jewish identity. Jews have the exclusive right “to define their identify, vulnerability, and experience.” They have the right to describe themselves as “unique historic” victims, and the leftwing is “usurp”ing that narrative so it is… antisemitic.

‘Erasive anti-Semitism’ is characterized by:
• Denying Jews and Jewish communities the right to self-define and to represent their own narrative and instead externally imposing definitions, such as characterizing Jews ethnically as white European, and as one-dimensionally ‘privileged.’ The unique historic persecution and continuous vulnerability of the Jewish People are erased of significance.
• Blaming Jews for the current discriminatory social power structure that the progressive movement is fighting against – More or less extreme allusions to Jewish power feed a conception of Jews as disproportionately responsible for oppressive power structures..

It is all about Israel, in the end. Israel is not the victimizer.

[P]rogressive conceptual categories, when applied to the Jewish national collective, amplify the framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one dominated by a racially privileged white oppressor.

The report is like so many other pro-Israel efforts in that it seeks to limit Americans’ free speech. The Israel lobby is telling Democrats that they must describe Israel as a progressive cause, or they’re antisemitic.

There is no doubt, as the report says, that the “expectation that Jews renounce support for Israel or Zionism as a basis for progressive allyship and inclusion” is advancing on the left. It may even be a litmus test at the grassroots. But that expectation grows out of solidarity with oppressed people, Palestinians. The giveaway in this long report is that it mentions “Palestinians” as a group only once! And that is a footnote in which an eminent scholar Barbara Ransby, speaking on a Jewish Voice for Peace panel, describes the urgency of recognizing “racism toward the Palestinians.” The report’s failure to grapple with the Palestinian experience at all reflects a racist discourse of focusing only on supposed Jewish rights in Israel and Palestine.

The report also wants to bar as antisemitic any discussion of the Israel lobby or its reliance on Jewish wealth, “economic and social advantage” — those “extreme allusions to Jewish power.”

Reut criticizes the “class-based societal categories” of the left:

Jews tend to fall squarely within the oppressor category as complicit with the status quo, and identifiable by contemporary degree of economic and social advantage. The notion of Jews as uniquely an oppressor reverberates historically, as does that of the illegitimacy of Jewish influence on institutions. Conspiracy theory-based anti-Semitism, in both left- and right-wing forms, advances a perceived illegitimate seizure of privilege by Jews, presented as all-powerful controllers of dominant institutions. The categorization of Jews as an oppressor extends to demonization of Israel as an inherently oppressive system and thus fundamentally flawed

Again, this is a free speech issue. The whole Israel lobby conference that I am going to be participating in next month (which combines realist and leftist perspectives) is off-limits in this view. In this critique, I suppose it is also antisemitic to refer to the many experts telling us that Jews make up upwards of 50 percent of Democratic Party giving or even quoting the Pew study of 2016 finding that 44 percent of Jewish households have incomes over $100,000, far outstripping any other U.S. religious group (and the national average of 19 percent).

Reut fears that even having this discussion will split Jews, and threaten the Jewish connection to Israel:

Moreover, dividing Jews on the basis of progressive conceptual categories undermines Jewish self-perception as a collective and the notion of Jewish peoplehood. Doing so generates rancor within Jewish communities, exacerbates tensions around the role of race within Jewish communities, and threatens the basis of connection between
world Jewry and Israel…

That seems an implicit reference to B’Tselem declaring in January that Israel is an “apartheid regime of Jewish supremacy” from river to the sea. Leftwing Jews are part of the threat!

h/t Dave Reed and Joshua Leifer’s twitter.