In an odd and (sadly) entertaining series of events this week, several public figures regularly accused of antisemitism attempted to flip the script and accuse their accusers of anti-semitism. Without delay, dozens of others jumped in to offer their disparate opinions.

There are topics I don’t wade into very often and other topics I tend to avoid entirely — for a variety of reasons. One of those topics is the confluence of the nation of Israel, Palestinians, evangelical Christian Zionism, Judaism, and — you might have noticed — foreign policy in general. Whether my reasons for avoiding these are legitimate or not, one fairly obvious one is that I don’t think about them very often. (The whole point of this blog is to write about things I’m thinking about.) This week’s events, likely to be entirely overshadowed by something very different in a few days, forced me to think about them. So, after much hesitation on my part, here we are.

A brief summary for my readers who don’t follow political news (or future readers looking for context): Freshman U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, posted on Twitter her opinion that pro-Israel lobbyist money is primarily responsible for pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. This drew hearty backlash from both Republican and Democratic leaders, including TAINTUS. Omar’s statements were derided as “deeply hurtful to Jews” (Max Rose, D-N.Y.), “ill-informed” (AIPAC), “terrible” (TAINTUS), and “prejudicial accusations” (House Democratic leaders). Omar has since apologized.

The first thing that struck me about this debacle is that some of Omar’s loudest accusers have themselves been accused of antisemitism in the past. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was just last year tweeting about Jewish money in politics and was roundly criticized for it. And TAINTUS’ 2016 campaign was riddled with alleged antisemitism (including regularly retweeting neo-Nazis).

But the second thing that struck me is probably more important: it looks like most of us disagree on what actually constitutes antisemitism. (And this reminded me of many conversations in which people I know argued over what exactly constitutes racism or sexism.) Wikipedia says it’s “hostility to, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews” and is “generally considered to be a form of racism”. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) basically says the same thing. Other sources followed suit. Yet many of the stories I examined on this topic, and many more comments underneath them, conflated opposition to the policies of Israel with antisemitism. This apparently became fairly common while I have been paying attention to other things.

Undoubtedly, some (maybe even most) anti-Israel sentiment is indeed rooted in hostility toward or prejudice against Jews. But — and I think this is fairly obvious — “Israel” and “Jews” are not synonyms. Yet it wasn’t difficult at all to find a plethora of opinion pieces like this one, which proclaims “Anti-Israel Is Anti-Semitic”, or this one: “Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism. Get Over It.” (Note: Anti-Zionism is a less specific term than the other two, but nevertheless is often equated with antisemitism.)

Maybe it’s more nuanced than it seems. Or maybe it isn’t. On one hand, humanity has long been afflicted with tenacious, often violent strands of antisemitism. This blog entry isn’t the best place to relate centuries of history, of which most of us are already at least partly aware. It continues, including the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 (by a man known online to be antisemitic), and the general uptick in recent hate crimes. Though I never knowingly associated with a neo-Nazi or white supremacist, the idealogies are difficult to avoid in southern states so I have occasionally heard the bigoted tropes about secret Jewish money controlling the halls of power. None of that ever made sense to me; if secret Jewish cabals were so influential in western society, surely things would have turned out differently in the second World War. When I was younger, “Jews in Hollywood” was sometimes mentioned, but usually by the same people who told me Star Wars was going to lead me to Satan, so I never paid them much heed. Knowing all this, it wouldn’t take much to convince me that much of the anti-Israel sentiment is indeed rooted in antisemitism.

On the other hand, a Venn diagram of “Israel” and “Jews” doesn’t entirely overlap. About 75% of the people living in Israel are listed as Jews; only about 40% of humans identified as Jews live in Israel. The modern nation of Israel has policies like any other nation, some of which (like the world-leading spending on research and development) are admirable, and others of which are not admired by everyone. For example, the 2018 law that declares only Jews have the “right to national self-determination” smacks of apartheid, segregation, and other policies motivated by racism in other nations. Many regularly criticize Israel’s continued military occupation of territories annexed in 1967, or sketchy record on human rights. Some have called the U.S.’s favoring of Israel hypocritical, given how our government often calls out human rights abuses in other (non-Israel) nations. From fringes on both the left and the right in the U.S. have some criticisms of our military aid package (signed by President Obama), currently worth about $3.8 billion per year.

As much as I follow politics, I freely admit I’m ill-informed on foreign policy. What I know about the current nation of Israel (off the top of my head) wouldn’t fill a single page of college-ruled notebook paper. I did read Exodus by Leon Uris, but admit that what little I remember was about the characters and settings; not the geopolitical circumstances. I’m aware of the anti-Israel position that the Israelis carved out their current territory by taking land from people who already lived there and that this was wrong. And I’m aware of the opposite viewpoint that the Israelis previously held that land and had it taken from them first. (And of course, I’m very aware of the biblical account of how the Hebrews stole the land in the first place via multiple genocidal campaigns, allegedly sanctioned by an invisible sky wizard.)

None of that, in my mind, excuses any human rights violations on Israel’s part, nor does any of it excuse any antisemitism on the part of anyone today.

When I was young, the churches I attended were intensely pro-Israel. Part of our eschatology involved Israel holding onto its original homeland as militaries of the world turned against Israel and brought about Armageddon. Why anyone would want to rush or even assist Armageddon is something I’ve never figured out, but it seems that the evangelical churches continue to hold this absurd position.

Back to current politics, I think my position on the Omar matter is close to that expressed by Nicky Woolf in The New Statesman, here:

“The controversy around Omar’s tweets troubles me, because it feels like the accusation of anti-Semitism is being wielded here in a way that actively does damage to legitimate discourse not only about the behaviour of the state of Israel, but about the very real dangers of true anti-Semitism, too.

“It’s time to put cards on the table. Many Jews, myself included, find the question of Israel’s behaviour towards Palestinians deeply uncomfortable, and find the aggressive stance pushed by lobby groups like AIPAC counterproductive and even wrong. I am proud of my heritage, but do not see much of it reflected in Israel’s gung-ho militarism — a militarism enabled by the unquestioning support of the American political establishment, which is in turn activated by the lobbying of AIPAC.”

In other words, most of us could certainly be more careful with the words and tones we choose, to make sure we’re not inadvertently regurgitating offensive tropes or characterizations of historically oppressed groups. But at the same time, what Rep. Omar pointed out in the currently debated series of tweets appears to be unassailable fact. As left and liberal and “woke” as I have come to be in the past few years, I have tried every angle and can’t find where what she tweeted is antisemitic.*