Katie Godowski/MediaPunch /IPX
Pro-Palestine protesters gather in Brooklyn to demand a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, October 28, 2023, in New York.
On Sunday, the Anti-Defamation League published its latest report on the upsurge of worldwide antisemitism, in collaboration with two research institutes at Tel Aviv University. The report found that the number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. more than doubled between 2022 and 2023, from 3,697 to 7,523. Of that increase, 52 percent of the 2023 total occurred after October 7. In France, the number of incidents quadrupled.
“For those whose views serve an anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist ideological and instrumentalist purpose, October 7 was a golden opportunity to advance further their hateful and racist fringe perspectives into mainstream conservative discourse, using it to attack rivals, mobilize supporters and attract new followers,” the authors of the U.S. chapter of the report wrote.
“The year is not 1938, not even 1933,” professor Uriya Shavit, head of the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute at Tel Aviv University, added in an accompanying press release. “Yet if current trends continue, the curtain will descend on the ability to lead Jewish lives in the West—to wear a Star of David, attend synagogues and community centers, send kids to Jewish schools, frequent a Jewish club on campus, or speak Hebrew.”
Most American Jews have never had to ask themselves whether it is prudent to live unapologetically Jewish lives. Now, this is becoming an open question.
As campus protests have escalated, President Biden has spoken out only intermittently, strongly condemning the increased antisemitism, and warning that rights of free expression do not extend to intimidation and violence. For his first major speech on these issues, Biden has chosen today—May 7, the day after Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day—as the occasion, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as the venue.
Biden will probably stick closely to the narrative themes of the ADL report. If so, he will be missing an opportunity to sort out all that is darkening democracy, and to demonstrate real leadership that could help resolve the impasse in the Mideast, disassociate himself from the Netanyahu government’s vile killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and restore his own credibility as president.
The crisis that has escalated since October 7 is partly about antisemitism, but that’s not all it’s about. And as even the ADL report obliquely concedes, Israel’s behavior since then has been a gift to antisemites.
Biden will likely begin, as he should, by affirming the horror of the Holocaust and resolving with Jews everywhere, “Never again.” He will deplore the increase in antisemitic threats and actions, and commit his presidency to keeping Jews safe and free in America.
All good, and necessary. The challenge is where Biden goes from there.
Given his temporizing on conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel on an end to the killing, starvation, and forced removal of Palestinians in Gaza, I am not optimistic that Biden will seize the moment to broaden the conversation. But no American president has better bona fides on these issues than Joe Biden, who went far beyond what might have been expected to help Israel after the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.
A majority of Americans now oppose what Israel is doing to Gaza, and a majority of Americans are not antisemites.
Biden needs to point out that after the Hamas massacres of October 7, there was worldwide compassion for Israelis and near universal condemnation of Hamas. But Prime Minister Netanyahu has squandered that goodwill and isolated Israel as a global pariah.
A majority of Americans now oppose what Israel is doing to Gaza, and a majority of Americans are not antisemites. According to the latest Gallup poll, Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza by a stunning margin of 55 to 36 percent. And that poll was taken in March. If anything, the disapproval has grown since then.
Most younger American Jews oppose the barbaric acts of the Netanyahu government. To conflate criticism of Netanyahu’s own corruption and destruction of Gaza with antisemitism, however, only plays into Netanyahu’s hands.
Paradoxically, Holocaust Remembrance Day would be an ideal moment for Biden to distinguish antisemitism from criticism of the actions of the Netanyahu government. Biden should finally make clear that American military aid to Israel will end if Netanyahu carries out his new orders of forced relocations to Palestinians who have already been forced out of their homes at least once, as the prelude to an invasion of Rafah that the U.S. says it can’t accept.
Until now, the White House language on that subject has been equivocal and mealymouthed. At the press briefing last Friday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “There’s more than a million Palestinian civilians living in—well, seeking refuge in—in Rafah. And we want to make sure that their lives are protected.” This implies that if Netanyahu can protect their lives with another round of forced removal, then invasion under those conditions is somehow OK.
Biden also needs to make it crystal clear that Netanyahu must stop sabotaging talks on a cease-fire and hostage release, just as he sabotaged the terms of the Oslo Accords. Otherwise, U.S. military aid will halt.
On the related topic of the campus protests, Biden can help Americans sort out some key distinctions that have gotten blurred in the welter of hysterical press coverage and the craven behavior of too many college presidents. Last Thursday, Biden said, “Violent protest is not protected. Peaceful protest is … Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law.”
Yes, but the reality is more complicated. There are large gray areas in recent protest activities, and panicky college presidents have been too quick to call in police. Most college protests have included a range of protesters, from critics of Netanyahu’s inhuman actions who defend Israel’s right to exist, to militant supporters of Palestine for whom “From the river to the sea” really does mean the obliteration of Israel.
And while even vile speech is protected by the First Amendment, explicit threats and violent acts are not. But the most extremist of the protesters, both pro-Palestine and pro-Zion, have deliberately and opportunistically used violence in order to provoke excessive responses, and college presidents have played into their hands. As our colleague Harold Meyerson has reported, at one of the most violent campus episodes, at UCLA, the violence was instigated by far-right Jews, who are the domestic counterparts of Netanyahu.
As an Irish American, Biden may know the old Irish pub joke in which a brawl is in progress at a bar and a bystander asks, “Is this a private fight or can anybody get into it?”
The simplest way that Biden can cut these several knots is to end the unqualified support for Netanyahu’s actions.
Once campus protests turn into brawls, they attract a range of militants with their own opportunistic agendas, from genuine antisemites to far-right Jews. Biden has no power to contain student protests. But he does have the power to address their root cause—Israel’s brutalization of civilians in Gaza.
Yes, antisemitism has been on the rise for several years, and one cause was Trump’s dog-whistle signals to the far right and his occasionally explicit defense of overt thuggery directed against Jews, as in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march of August 2017. But what supercharged the latest upsurge are events the Mideast. Netanyahu, his apologists, and true antisemites are doing each other’s bidding.
Once again, Netanyahu has mocked Biden. On Sunday, in a speech marking Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu said in English, “If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.” And on the same day, Israel issued explicit warnings to residents of part of Rafah to flee for their lives in advance of the latest invasion, Washington’s objections be damned.
The simplest way that Biden can cut these several knots is to end the unqualified support for Netanyahu’s actions, thus making clear by his own actions that criticism of the Israeli government is not tantamount to antisemitism.
Will Biden rise to the occasion? Or will he take his cue from the narrative of the ADL and AIPAC, which work to brand all such criticism as per se antisemitic?
The fact is that conservative Jewish organizations do not speak for most American Jews. But they have inordinate influence in the corridors of power.
Biden has surprised us before. Given his own history, he has turned out to be a far more progressive president that most of us anticipated. Reflexive support for Israel is part of Biden’s history. But the Israel of that era is not the Israel of Netanyahu. Perhaps Biden will surprise us again.
Coda: Alas, Biden delivered a powerful speech appropriately condemning antisemitism, but fell right into the trap of equating the Jewish people with the current Israeli government. The closest he came to a whisper of criticism came when he said, “My commitment to the Jewish people and the State of Israel and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree.” This is virtually identical to his statement of April 21. All that’s new is “even when we disagree.”
As he spoke, the first wave of Israeli tanks was in eastern Rafah, against Biden’s wishes, and Netanyahu was doing his best to sabotage talks on a hostage agreement.
