Charges of antisemitism are being used as a weapon to weaken Palestinian solidarity. It is time for this tactic to be called out and confronted head-on.

Supporters of Palestinian human rights are always accused of antisemitism. Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s gave a strong answer to such charges when he said he is “totally fine” with them because they are absurd. “I mean, What? I’m anti-Jewish! I mean, I’m a Jew, all my family is Jewish, my friends are Jewish.”

Britain’s pro-Israel lobby gained another victory last week after a prolonged campaign of intimidation finally pushed a major UK university into firing one of its lecturers. Bristol University dismissed David Miller, a political sociology professor, even though an official investigation had concluded that accusations of antisemitism against him were unfounded. Research by Miller, a leading scholar on propaganda, had charted networks of influence in the UK in relation to Islamophobia that included the very pro-Israel lobby groups that worked to get him fired.

The pogroms against Palestinians that are a weekly occurrence, and the long reign of Netanyahu, have all been rendered “understandable” by a crew of hasbara culture journalists like Yair Rosenberg, Bret Stephens, David Frum, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who have purveyed a mythology of Jews as the sacred special victims of history. The ethnocentricity has laid waste to Jewish political culture.

Pro-Israel writers have dismissed all criticism, opposition and even enmity to Israel and its actions as springing from an ancient malady, antisemitism. They thereby erase the true history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in a so-far successful effort to discredit the critics. Israel’s actions exist very much in history, and its supporters use very sharp elbows and knees to get its way.

The chief judge of the federal Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals used Zionism to argue for a religious exemption to Colorado’s anti-discrimination act.

When Rep. Rashida Tlaib faulted people for making record profits from Gaza tp Detroit, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL accused her of antisemitic “dogwhistling.” And Bari Weiss joined in the smear campaign, saying, “So many people have been willfully blind toward the worldview of this congresswoman.” Tlaib’s actual crime is being Palestinian.

“I am proud to stand with the good friends and comrades victimised by the purge,’ filmmaker Ken Loach says of his expulsion from the Labor Party over bogus antisemitism allegations. It was predicted that once Jeremy Corbyn was out, the “antisemitism” claims within the UK Labour Party would suddenly vanish. Instead, the purge of Labour’s anti-Zionist left has adapted to the new battlefield.

The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has ventured into a territory– Judeophobia– that is nowadays mostly occupied by ardent Zionists intent on proving that Jew hatred is eternal and that the state of Israel is the only place where the Jews can feel safe. In today’s Europe, argues Sand, Judeophobia has been largely replaced by Islamophobia, while erstwhile Antisemites have become admirers of Israel, particularly of its way of “dealing with the Muslims”.

Maurice Samuel’s 1924 tract, “You Gentiles,” is cherished by antisemites and Zionists alike because it says that a Jew can never mix successfully in a non-Jewish world because the Jew’s concerns are more serious, and the gentile’s more playful, so the Jew will always be “a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him.” Samuel’s book insists on the impossibility of Jews and non-Jews living in stability and respect, and thus, the necessity of Jews living in their own land.