In response to backlash from pro-Israel groups the Sierra Club has reversed its decision to cancel a series of educational trips to the country.

In 1948 an Israeli leader assured the U.N. that American Jews would be Israel’s “hostage” to the world to guarantee that Israel behaved itself well. But Israel didn’t behave well, and after failing to change Israel’s conduct, American Jewish organizations soon interpreted their role to mean denying Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights, and labeling all criticism antisemitic. Abba Solomon shares how the mission of American Jewish organizations, once centered on the rights and welfare of Jews in the United States and elsewhere, was affected and — ultimately — distorted by the success of militant Jewish nationalists in Palestine.

Israel advocates are pushing a new front. They say that progressive are antisemitic when they characterize Jews as privileged, and don’t acknowledge history and “the unique collective Jewish vulnerability.” So the anti-Zionist understanding that Israel is a powerful settler-colonial state is antisemitic because that leaves out the origins of Zionism in Jewish persecution in Europe, according to Jonathan Greenblatt of ADL and the Reut Group of Tel Aviv.

Right after Israel’s foreign minister derided social media portrayal of Israel at an ADL conference, two New York Times staffers came on to criticize social media for spreading antisemitism and conspiracy theories. Their appearance was an implicit endorsement of the Israel lobby group, with the imprimatur of the New York Times.

Sunrise Movement DC’s decision to withdraw from a voting rights rally because of the participation of three Zionist groups reflects the view of many on the left that you can’t be progressive and be a Zionist. This political future is disturbing to the Jewish establishment and rightwing groups called the decision “antisemitic” while liberal Zionists condemned the decision on cancellation grounds (though they cancel anti-Zionists all the time).

Israel suffered a P.R. disaster in the last Gaza attack: western media for once openly questioned the reasoning and morality behind yet another murderous onslaught on an imprisoned population, the fifth in the last 12 years. Even the NYT runs an op-ed saying that “legitimate resistance” to violence is a Palestinian right. Pro-Israel voices in the media are pushing back by saying sharp criticism of Israel is antisemitism.

Bari Weiss says antisemites convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to back out of a Rabin memorial. AOC actually was concerned with Rabin’s human rights record. But she and her supporters now join the “three-headed dragon of modern anti-Semitism” living in Bari Weiss’s imagination. And in Weiss’s perspective of sacred Jewish victimhood, defamation and dishonesty are no vice when fighting the enemies of the Jews.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s withdrawal last Friday from an October memorial to Yitzhak Rabin is an act of irreverence for an Israeli leader we’ve not seen before at her political level; and the drama has roiled the pro-Israel community. Even the Biden campaign spoke up, an aide saying that AOC’s decision was “problematic” for the Democratic Party.

Annexation will cast Israel as an “ethnonationalist country” that practices apartheid in the West Bank and Israel will become a “wedge issue” in the 2020 election, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL says. Yes but what about the downside?

Many pro-Israel organizations have condemned the systemic racism in the George Floyd killing while remaining silent on Palestinian treatment. J Street did link the Floyd killing to that of Eyad al-Halaq in Jerusalem, but said the US suffers “deeply entrenched… structural racism,” while Palestinians suffer “deeply entrenched occupation.”