The pro-Israel community is struggling to figure out a strong response to the frightening rise of antizionism. Should we call out the libels? Should we describe it as a hate movement? A racist movement? Should we seek more security? All of the above?
These are urgent questions because real incidents keep occurring and require a response. How should we react, for example, to pro-Palestinian mobs assaulting our synagogues, as we saw last week at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple? Or to a campaign led by Hollywood luminaries to secure the release of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian terrorist serving five life sentences for orchestrating deadly terror attacks against Israeli civilians?
Evidently, no one pays a price for hating Israel, a sentiment that is growing in popularity.
As Charlotte Lawson writes in The Dispatch, “It’s now mainstream to identify as an anti-Zionist, particularly among young people. In a Harvard Harris poll conducted in August, 60 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 said they supported Hamas over Israel in the war.”
This may help explain why it’s so hard these days to defend Israel. Fair or not, in the wake of the Gaza war too many people simply hate the idea of Zionism. We can rightfully call antizionism a hate movement, but for a world that sees Zionism itself as worthy of hate, antizionism is actually a good thing.
In other words, if haters feel their hate is justified, telling them they’re part of a hate movement is like giving them a compliment.
Given all that, how best to respond to Jew-hating antizionists in a way that will undermine their movement? Beyond the usual condemnations against antisemitism and calls for greater security, what truth can we convey that will put the haters on the defensive?
The truth that is most lethal is not that antizionists are haters, but that they are traitors to their own cause.
Antizionists claim to fight on behalf of Palestinians, but they’ve never lifted a finger to help them. If they really cared about Palestinians, they would have agitated years ago in support of Palestinian refugees living in misery in Jordan and Lebanon. But they never did, because Jews are not involved.
The hard truth is that antizionist protesters base their whole activism around bashing Israel rather than helping Palestinians.
Who understands that best? Palestinians.
“The best thing to happen to Palestinians is the defeat of the terrorists,” Nuseir Yassin, a popular Palestinian vlogger also known as Nas Daily, said in a recent interview. “By far the worst thing for a Palestinian is not Israel. It is our fellow countrymen,” he added, describing Hamas as “terrorists” and asserting that Palestinians with weapons “are the worst threat to our own society.”
Yassin refutes the libel of Israel as an apartheid state, citing his own experiences with employment, voting, and freedom of movement to show that “inside Israel, there is no place I cannot go as a Palestinian-Arab Muslim.”
Those truths don’t get much exposure, because they contradict the narrative of blaming Israel for all Palestinian problems. But it’s been true for a long time that the biggest enemies of the Palestinian people are their own corrupt leaders.
Antizionist protesters hate that truth. They’d rather keep the focus on undermining Zionism with lies and libels while the image of Zionism is already at a low point. Their venom is even more reason to move quickly to turn the tables on antizionists by exposing their shameful failure to help Palestinians. It’s not an exaggeration to say that “Antizionists are Anti-Palestinian.”
Next time a mob attacks a synagogue, we might consider this statement:
“These protesters have never done a thing to help Palestinians. They’re cowards and hypocrites. They pretend not to know that the biggest enemies of Palestinians have been the terrorists from Hamas who hide behind their own people to get them killed so they can win over public opinion.
“Their real cause is to destroy Israel, not help Palestinians.
“They pretend not to know that corrupt Palestinian leaders, who for decades have refused every Israeli peace offer, are most responsible for keeping their own people in misery, indoctrinating them in Jew-hatred and glorifying terrorists.
“Instead of yelling their hate-filled messages in front of synagogues, if they really want to help Palestinians, these protesters should go in front of Palestinian leaders at the United Nations and yell, ‘Stop killing your people!’”
Taking the fight to the enemy is a Jewish value in the spirit of Hanukkah. With the courage of our ancestors behind us, and with Zionism under siege, it’s time to delegitimize antizionism by exposing its hypocrisy. Who can trust a movement that betrays its own cause?
