The Case for Antisemitism on the Pro-Palestinian Left

No, really.

Tovi Rose

May 27, 2026

Yes, reader, you read that right. “The Case for Antisemitism.” Shush, don’t be scared, it’s okay. I can see that you’re already on hold with Jewish Voice for Peace, no doubt ready to report this problematic substack you found that dared to conflate Judaism with the Jewish State. Just for a second, though, put down the phone. Try opening your mind to the possibility that maybe — just maybe — there’s something worthwhile further down this page. No one here likes ethnic cleansing (the opposite, in fact), and no one’s going to praise Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson. Nazis are very bad, and this isn’t going to be a defense of them. What it is going to be is a fair examination of the benefits for the Western Left in explicitly criticizing Judaism. Okay, somehow you got a second phone. That’s fine, I guess. I think JVP has another uber-effective “radical singing and wearing matching t-shirts” protest going on today, so hopefully I can win you over before they’re done and I get thrown in Leftist Jail.

Since we only have so much time (I think they’re at the part where they get photographed performatively yelling), let’s get the important stuff out of the way. Jews are not oppressed. They haven’t been for a long time. We need to do away with the notion that there is a “crisis of antisemitism,” an outright fabrication that for some reason remains an incessant refrain amongst many on the Left. Those statistics you see about threats to Jewish safety are totally falsified. Over half of the incidents on the ADL’s yearly audit are explicitly tied to anti-Zionism, and the bulk of the others are minor infractions like teenagers drawing swastikas on the sides of buildings.

A very large, very monied, and very, very compromised media apparatus has a vested interest in making you think there is a crisis that there isn’t. In Australia, there was a coordinated effort to fake a series of antisemitic attacks. Once exposed, it was quickly buried, and the first actual attack on Jews, in December 2025, was immediately used to justify sweeping anti-Palestinian solidarity measures and a general sentiment of Islamophobia. In England, Islamophobia has been pushed to the mainstream, with the explicitly anti-Muslim Reform UK party emerging as one of the strongest electoral forces in the country. The rapid increase in Islamophobic attacks gets relatively little coverage, while the few antisemitic attacks become front page news for weeks. The most notable of these was in Golders Green, where the media mass reported that two Jewish men were stabbed by a Muslim man, conveniently leaving out that the perpetrator was mentally ill, and appallingly failing to report that there was a third victim who was Muslim. Similar galling incidents of Islamophobia and Judeophilia have played out across Europe, with incidents like Amsterdam locals attempting to prevent Israeli soccer hooligans from engaging in mass vandalism and anti-Arab racism being branded a “pogrom.”

Here in the Great Satan, we’re especially inundated with daily propaganda about the scourge of antisemitic violence. Naturally, this is total bullshit. Here are a couple of the most widely condemned attacks: the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence was set on fire because of Governor Josh Shapiro’s support for the genocide in Gaza; a mentally ill man in the process of converting to Judaism drove his car into the door of the Chabad headquarters, injuring nobody; and two Israeli embassy staffers (one of whom was not Jewish) were shot in response to the genocide in Gaza. See, these are a worrying pattern of religiously motivated violence. The fatal shooting of three men at a mosque? The attempted assassination of a prominent Palestinian Muslim activist by a member of an explicit Jewish terrorist group? The murder of a Palestinian-American six-year-old? Pure coincidence. Do you get how this works yet?

The uncomfortable truth is that Jews are the single wealthiest group in the United States, and disproportionately represent nearly a third of American billionaires. There is no systemic oppression against Jews, who also disproportionately occupy the upper echelons of business, law, medicine, entertainment, publishing, and media. The “crisis of antisemitism” is nothing more than a very obviously manufactured moral panic used to garner support for the American-Zionist project of imperialism, of which Jewish supremacy is as integral an arm (tentacle?) as white supremacy.

The populist Right, a group famous for their ability to recognize but not diagnose, has been rapidly adopting a lens that ascertains — in their crude, childish way — that cries of antisemitism are, to use their parlance, an “op.” Now, this isn’t to laud them; it’s quite apparent that they hate Muslims and Arabs more than anyone. It’s merely to point out how behind the Western Left is. Palestine has become our focal point, the Vietnam of our era, and deservedly so. Yet, a stubborn trend of equivocating and centering the voices of Jews who falsely claim oppression remains. The truth needs to prevail and an actual line needs to be established if we are ever going to build effective strategy. Right now, by playing into this myth, we give the other side all the ammunition they need to kill us.

Despite all of this, some real progress has been made. You’ll hardly ever come across any serious voices on the left still playing the “condemning Hamas” game, and the general collective perspective has moved far from the pre-Toofan al-Aqsa myth of the existence of an anti-Zionist Israeli Left. However, much more needs to be done. We still need to kill the beast that is Judeophilia. To do that, a very bitter pill needs to be swallowed. The time has long since come for us to acknowledge that Judaism as it exists now is Zionism.

Judaism & Zionism

I know that you probably didn’t love to read that. You’re a good anti-Zionist. You hate Israelis, you believe in land back, you hate the two-state solution. You just also hate all forms of hate, and that includes the conflation of Judaism and Zionism. Did I get that right? Well, just hear me out.

The least important part of any of this is who I am, but I’m cynically aware that you’re more likely to listen to me if you know. I come from a very Jewish family, from whom I am entirely estranged. I am mixed Ashkenazi, ‘Mizrachi’, and Bukharian. My family has connections to the Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, Renewal, and Hasidic movements. My father is a rabbi, and so are his father, his three brothers, his brother-in-law, and many cousins. Not only that, but he is an Israeli, born in occupied al-Quds. My mother’s father led the infamous study on Jewish continuity in the 80s, which sparked the so-called “Continuity Crisis” and led directly to the creation of the Jewish Youth Israel Program Industrial Complex of which Birthright is the most notable example. I was raised to be fluent in Hebrew, and have many detestable blood relative living in occupied Palestine. If you don’t know what any of this means, I’ll make it simple: in all likelihood I should be one of the most Jewish people you’ve ever heard of. A lot more than any JVP-er. Yet I reject not just Zionism, but also Judaism, for the simple reason that the latter is totally inextricable from the former.

This is not me trying to “As a Jew.” Neither my ethnic background nor my religious upbringing confer upon me a special ability to deem anything right or wrong. Instead, I tell you in the hopes that you’ll understand that I’m not coming from a place of ignorance. I was a JVP-type, once up a time, before Toofan al-Aqsa. I was exactly where you are now, fingers in my ears, furiously shaking my head and screaming as soon as anyone dared commit the crime of putting two and two together. All I ask of you is that you open your mind, not for me, but for the Palestinians who have been saying this for a hell of a lot longer. If you’re reading this and you don’t trust me because you would rather never have to listen to another (technically) Jewish voice, and would rather only listen to Palestinians, then you’re one of the people whom I respect most in this world, and you’re not who I’m speaking to with this article. However, if you’re someone who has ever found themselves assigning reverence to the bravery of anti-Zionist Jews, then you need to keep reading.

To be a Jew is to be complicit. Such a controversial statement, and yet, when the same is said of whiteness, the only argument you’ll hear is from reactionaries on the Twitter short bus. The same people who rend their garments in denunciation of their white privilege find the idea of Jewish privilege to be sacrilegious. Make that make sense.

With all that being said, the title of this piece is a misnomer. Antisemitism has no real case, and that’s not even for any moral reason. The main reason is just because it’s kind of dumb. Antisemitism is a fairly continuous and unbroken tradition of anti-Jewish sentiments, stretching back to a time when Jews were actually a very marginalized group, and continuing into today’s completely antithetical age of Jewish exceptionalism. It’s muddied, contradictory, and often pretty esoteric. As such, it conflates very real critiques of Judaism with some rather unhelpful ones. When we critique Judaism for being nothing more than an extension of the Zionist entity, we cannot implicate those Jews who lived and died before the advent of Zionism itself. This is a hard line to walk, but a necessary one. Go too far on one end, and you’re stuck in a world that mixes real critique with reactionary conspiracy. Go too far on the other and you’re right back to condemning “problematic conflations.”

The trick to it is to recognize that a very real religion called Judaism once existed, and it was once the victim of those selfsame external bigotries that all faiths are subject to, though it was more susceptible to harm than many (though not all), due to a variety of factors. Starting in the late 19th century, that old version of Judaism started to die, finally perishing sometime in the middle of the 20th century. What exists now is an evolution of Judaism that is in every way complicit in the displacement, occupation, and genocide of the Palestinian people, as well as the century-long destabilization of of Southwest Asia and North Africa.

Instead of antisemitism, a collection of truths and lies thrown carelessly together, I suggest anti-Judaism, a more targeted approach that focuses on the contemporary iteration of the religion. If you struggle with the implications of that, imagine I said “anti-whiteness.” Many rightly champion anti-whiteness as a natural extension of anti-colonialism, and the same can and should be done with anti-Judaism. Whiteness and Judaism are abstractions that uphold imperialist structures. This isn’t a call for violence based on identity, it is a call to recognize a fundamental truth.

Judaism by the Numbers

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, which you do (it’s fine, no need to pretend you have a life), then you’ve likely not only come across many a brave Jewish voice yapping about peace, but also heard every leftie non-Jew’s anecdotal experience of “never having even met a Zionist Jew before.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but many people seem to be of the belief that anti-Zionism is a common position amongst non-Israeli Jews. I’m here to tell you that it’s not. In fact, in order to be Jewish, you actually have to be a Zionist.

The first thing for you to understand is what Judaism is. More specifically, what it was before Zionism. You think you get it, I know. It was broadly a religion, but more importantly also an ethnicity, right? Well no, actually. A purely Yemeni Jew is genetically… a Yemeni Jew. Shocking, right? That Yemeni Jew is going to have no ethnic overlap with a German Ashkenazi Jew, with whom they potentially have a common ancestor two thousand or more years ago. Just like how Egyptian Copts and Assyrians are distinct ethnic groups that nonetheless practice a similar religion, the same is true of Moroccan and Iranian Jews.

It is true that many Jewish communities have intermarried throughout the years, particularly the Sephardic community, who fled from Spain and found refuge in both the Ashkenazi and North African Jewish communities. It is also true that the original Russian Jewish community and the Ashkenazi community have a long history of intermixing. However — here’s the mind-blowing part — this is true of non-Jews as well. People travel, people marry and have children in other places, and yet ethnic boundaries nevertheless remain. The Sephardic, Ashkenazi, North African, Iraqi, Kaifeng, and pretty much every other Jewish community were, historically, ethnically distinct.

So what was Judaism, then? Easy, a religion. Practiced in different ways by different people across different places. There were a set of rites, practices, and beliefs that made one a Jew. Same as in any other religion. Today, that’s no longer the case. Religiosity is completely untethered from Jewish identity. There are many Jewish atheists, and even Jews of other faiths. What makes one a Christian is a belief in Trinitarianism. What makes one a Muslim is summed up pretty handily in the shahada. No central tenet unites Jews. Save for one.

What Israel did to Judaism was an irreversible coup, turning it unambiguously into a transnational national identity. I’m not mourning that fact, only stating it. Zionism made Jews one people, united under Israel. To pretend this is not the reality is to deny one of the primary tools of the Zionist Entity. Existing as an active participant in the Jewish national identity without fighting against it is tantamount to being a Zionist, since it takes the Jewish connection to Palestine as fact. So then, next time you’re speaking with an “anti-Zionist” Jew, see if they mention the word “diaspora” or refer to “the Jewish people.” Maybe they offhandedly refer to Palestine as the “Holy Land.” If they do any of those things, it means that they are a Zionist.

Zionism is difficult to define, precisely because it needs to be. Zionism must expand its definition, as it is a project of pure expansion. That expansion is a Jewish supremacist one, meaning that anyone who goes around denying the existence of Jewish supremacy, or — even worse — pretending that there is a “crisis of antisemitism” is also a Zionist. Zionism can be defined only by what it opposes, and that is the total control over Palestinian land by the Palestinian people.

Here you come citing the statistics. You’ll frantically google “How many Jews are anti-Zionist,” and be met with a litany of results. Oh, looks like some new polling just came out that’s sure to prove me wrong. Click on an article about it! How about this one, a Times of Israel article about a new study from just a few months ago? Its title rather boldly asserts that, “Even most Israel-supporting US Jews don’t identify as ‘Zionists,’ JFNA survey finds.” Right off the bat, there’s a contradiction. How can someone not be a Zionist, but still support Israel? A read through the actual study will tell you that, in fact, the only noticeable change in the Jewish community has been an increased understanding that the label of “Zionist” is bad for online dating and making new friends. Despite only a third of American Jews calling themselves Zionists, 88% still “support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state.” That overlaps almost entirely with the 87% who believe that “Israel has valid reasons for fighting Hamas.”

Only 7% of respondents in the survey oppose Israel existing as a Jewish state. This lines up almost exactly with the statistic stating that “94% of Jews agree [that] the way Hamas carried out its 10/7 attack was unacceptable,” meaning 6% believe Hamas was justified. These numbers further correlate with the statistic showing that only 7% actually identify themselves as explicitly “Anti-Zionist,” and also with the statistic that gives us 6% “[indicating] that following October 7th they avoided Jewish institutions more.” We can pretty easily surmise that these are the same people.

6 to 7 percent. Out of all American Jews. I’ll inform those who are unaware that American Jews account for at least 40% of the world’s Jewish population, and 75% of the non-Israeli Jewish population (these numbers come from before Oct. 7, and are likely to be higher now). When one adds France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Argentina (all countries with strikingly similar polling) to the US’s numbers, this accounts for just shy of 90% of the total non-Israeli Jewish population.

Now, if you don’t at least see a problem with that, I don’t know what to tell you. What I see, though, are further questions. How many among those 6 to 7 percent are “Holy Land” types themselves? How many do not believe in unilateral Palestinian land-back, but instead some tepid, “power-sharing” arrangement that pretends at democracy? How many, in their heart of hearts, believe truly in the total dismantling of the Israel state and the full sovereignty of Palestinians over the land of Palestine? For that, I’ll admit I don’t have the polling data. However, my gut and my anecdotal experience tell me that it’s at least not most of them.

Yet, whether is is every single one of that meager percentage, or next to none, it would not matter. This is because Judaism is not merely a group of people. The collective body of Jews are, of course, but the religion itself is by definition institutional. That “ancient, sacred religion” you’re defending is pretty much a collection of nonprofits. You might think I’m being glib, but I’m really not. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the Orthodox Union are all literally 501(c)(3)s. Ditto every Jewish organization within the United States, save for those that are actually for-profit, of which there are many.

Don’t get me wrong here, this is typical of American religious institutions. However, what makes Judaism unique is that each of those large, interconnected umbrella organizations has an affiliated equivalent within all other countries with major Jewish populations. Put together, these groups operate as complex machines that funnel money and support to Israel. Synagogues within the Conservative movement, for example, are explicitly Zionist. As someone who grew up in a half-dozen Conservative Jewish communities, I can tell you that my Jewish communal experience was incredibly Israel focused. Conservative synagogues not only have prayers for the State of Israel and the IDF, they have special services, memorials, and even three holidays dedicated to Israel. Holidays that are older are retroactively inflected with a shiny new Zionist lens. At the end of almost every Shabbat service, the president of the synagogue will typically take the stage to try and raise money for Israeli groups, if not the IDF itself. Any Conservative synagogue you walk into is going to be full of Israeli flags, posters advertising Israel programming or Israeli charities, and so much more. To add to it all, most Conservative communities organize annual (if not more frequent) trips to occupied Palestine. All of this is also true of Modern Orthodox and Reform congregations.

It isn’t just the synagogues, either. Jewish summer camps, day schools, men’s clubs, women’s associations, and youth groups are all the same. In most egalitarian, non-denominational Jewish day schools, K-12 students will take “Judaic Studies” courses that center Israel, and high school students take “Israel Advocacy” classes in order to indoctrinate them further. These schools will almost always additionally take their students on trips to Palestine, usually when they are in high school (this separate from the many ‘Israeli trip’ programs). That is what it means to be a Jewish institution.

I know, I know, you’ve heard online about anti-Zionist rabbis and institutions. Allow me to correct the record; the anti-Zionist rabbis you’ve heard of are an infinitesimal group. “Rabbi” is not a mystical title, it requires a degree from an accredited institution, all of which fall under the umbrella of the aforementioned Zionist organizations. As part of their training, rabbinical students typically have to go and spend at least one year in occupied Palestine. For the most part, those people you follow on Twitter are ordained rabbis who have broken with the Jewish community, often having undergone cherem (Jewish excommunication) for being vocally pro-Palestine, and now no longer serve in a clerical capacity. Most are also two-staters. Those “anti-Zionist” synagogues? Well, to officially be a synagogue, you — again — must be part of one of the broader organizations. To call yourself a “community” or a “congregation” though, you can be a handful of people who meet up to pray. That’s precisely what the ones you’ve heard of are.

Am I in any way saying that there is no world in which someone could come along, call themselves a Jew, and be truly anti-Zionist? No, I am not. However, in order to actually be anti-Zionist, that person would in fact need to either create a wholly new religion, or revive a previous incarnation of Judaism. That would require totally detaching from all institutions and individuals who now identify as Jewish. This has not happened to any meaningful degree. As it stands, Judaism is Zionism.

Comparing Holocausts

With all that being said, the most important question is this: How does anti-Judaism help us? I argue that it is beneficial in a number of ways, all of which further the causes of the Left. The shedding of Judeophilia benefits the pro-Palestinian movement, and the explicit adoption of anti-Judaism alongside anti-whiteness serves to benefit the broader anti-imperialist currents that are crucial in Western Left discourse.

To free ourselves from Judeophilia means to center Palestinian voices. I live in the heart of the Imperial Core, New York City, where — most are aware — pro-Palestine sentiment and organizing run strong. Yet, I have been to more events and actions that bring out Jewish speakers than those that do not. I want to be clear, this is not the fault of Palestinian groups, like the Palestinian Youth Movement or Within Our Lifetime, that often put on these events. These organizations, composed of the marginalized and oppressed, are just utilizing the solidarity available to them. The fact that they must center Jewish voices in order to attract that solidarity is an indictment of all of us non-Palestinians.

To many, Palestine stand out as a peculiar case of settler-colonialism. While in some ways it is very accessible, in others, many have difficulty grasping what should come across as a straightforward project of imperialism. Unsurprisingly, a lot of this has to do with the oppressors (if you have engaged with the great canon of Palestinian academics, this will be well-tread territory). In Western pro-Palestinian spaces, the Nazi holocaust is upheld as the arch-comparison to the current genocide being conducted in Gaza, as well as to the broader occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. In reality, the oppression of the Ashkenazi Jews by the Nazis is a poor analogy for the oppression of the Palestinians by the Jews. Sure, both contain ethnic marginalization, criminalization of identity, and mass systemic death. However, this analogy belies by far the most crucial aspect of the oppression of the Palestinians: Palestine.

Land is the center of the Palestinian struggle. Land is at the heart of every injustice committed against Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, in 48, and across the world. Thus, the genocide of the Ashkenazi is perhaps the single worst historical point of comparison, given that almost every other genocide contains within it that crucial component that is land. The Nazi holocaust has far more in common with the genocides of the Yazidi, Darfuri, Tutsi, Circassians and the Bosniaks. Meanwhile, the genocide of Palestinians is a distinctly colonial one, more reminiscent of the genocides of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, and the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the rest of the Arab World. By crippling our historicity to placate Jews, we do a massive disservice to Palestinians, one that actively harms them.

The situation in Palestine is, in actuality, not a complex one. However, by so often going out of our way to contextualize the Jewish colonization of Palestine, we normalize it. It is as if, in discussions of the colonial genocide in Australia, we constantly felt the need to preface that the First Fleet was mostly made up on unwitting convicts. This is true, of course, but it does not absolve any settlers of their participation in the colonization of Australia. Many pro-Palestinian voices who consider it their solemn duty to bring up the legacy of the Nazi holocaust in discussions of Palestine have little sympathy in their hearts for the Boers or pieds-noirs. By constantly invoking the trauma of the Nazi holocaust, we participate in the imperialist Holocaust Industry, setting Jewish suffering apart, and thus relieving the colonizers of the Palestinians of a portion of their responsibility. We further obscure the reality that Zionism predates Nazism; the Haganah began its colonial operations over twelve years before the Nazis took power.

The victims of the Nazi holocaust are dead, and the legacy of that tragedy does not reverberate in the form of its victims’ descendants continued suffering. In other words, that genocide has fully ended. However, its omnipresence in pro-Palestinian spaces does a major degree of harm, obscuring the simple nature of Palestine’s colonization. The situation in Palestine is as straightforward as the situations in Algeria or Canada, yet Judeophilia tells us otherwise. In discussions of Palestine, the Palestinian struggle becomes secondary to a long-dead European catastrophe. Palestine becomes a stranger in its own home.

Jewish Land Theft

Whiteness is pervasive in every aspect of social existence, using many intersecting systems to maintain a default state of racial oppression. Judaism functions in much the same way. A prime example is the Jewish monopoly on real estate. Here in New York, there exists a predatory, Jewish hold over commercial and residential real estate. That might touch a nerve, but its an indisputable fact. A disproportionate number of the largest real estate firms in New York are Jewish-owned, many are Israeli as well. However, for the purposes of this piece, we’ll focus only on the Hasidic community, which controls billions in Brooklyn residential real estate alone.

First, let’s clear up some misconceptions. Haredi is synonymous with ultra-orthodox, of which the Hasids are merely one type. They look mostly the same, they act mostly the same, but the big difference is that Hasids follow specific dynastic teachers. In occupied Palestine, Hasids make up a sizeable minority of the total ultra-orthodox community, while in New York, they make up the vast majority. The misconception that either the Haredi or Hasids are largely anti-Zionist stems from two places. The first is that, historically, they were opposed to the creation of the State of Israel, for the religious reason that — theologically — Jews are not supposed to go to Zion until the messiah arrives. Some dynasties, like the Satmar, still subscribe to this tenet. This does not make them anti-Zionist. They oppose a Jewish state in Palestine irrespective of the Palestinian people, and many live in occupied Palestine. The second source of this misbelief is their protesting of the draft. Within Israeli society, Haredi are very against the mandatory draft. Once again, though, this is not out of a sympathy for Palestinians. They just really hate having to do anything that isn’t studying Torah.

In actuality, the only truly pro-Palestinian Haredi group are the Neturei Karta (the ones from all the protests), who number in the low thousands worldwide. The Neturei Karta have been condemned numerous times for their activism by other Haredi sects, including by all of the major Hasidic groups. This includes the Satmar and the Bobov, who compose the majority of NYC’s Hasids, alongside Chabad-Lubavitch and Ger, who are explicitly politically Zionist. Chabad and Ger even encourages participation in the IDF, which Haredi are typically exempt from. In summary: Haredi are Zionist, Hasids are very Zionist.

Another common misconception that many have is that Hasids in New York and surrounding areas are very poor. This belief is understandable, largely because, in a sense, they are. Hasidic households often fall below the poverty line, but this obfuscates a more complicated truth. They fall below the line mostly because they are single income homes that typically have a very high number of children. The women will not work, and the men will almost always work within the economic enclave of the community. Most money will go to the broader community, which allows each household to apply for welfare (there have been many fraud cases that stem from this). However, Hasids have the support of their larger communities, which control billions in capital. Those who have passed through Hasidic towns or neighborhoods can attest to the fact that they have their own self-contained economic ecosystems, with Hasidic industries, businesses, schools, hospitals, ambulance services, vigilante police services, television networks, and everything else you could imagine.

Unlike the rest of the Jewish community, the ultra-orthodox population is growing fast. In accommodation of this, there is a widespread phenomenon of towns across the northeast being “taken over” by Hasids, with non-Jewish residents being largely driven out. In NYC, this is taking place on the level of individual neighborhoods, primarily through what amounts to illegal expansion.

With all that being said, allow me a brief story. In early 2025, shortly before I went to the occupied West Bank and witnessed the depravity of Jewish supremacy in Palestine, I attended a local protest in Flatbush. I was one of the only non-Black attendees, and it was a far cry from the well-funded, packed actions I was used to. These were residents of Flatbush with deep roots in the neighborhood, protesting the active depopulation of the neighborhood’s Black community through deed theft and unlawful evictions. Hearing them speak, I was shocked at how open they were in their rhetoric. There was none of the gymnastic elocution I was used to hearing at those larger protests, here they named their persecutors outright. It was the Jews. Even more to the point, I was heartened to hear how strongly they sympathized with the Palestinian struggle, comparing their misfortunes at the hands of Jewish supremacy to those of the people in Palestine who they were seeing in the news.

It’s been a year and change since then, and some things have certainly shifted. When I went to that Flatbush protest, few people outside the affected communities were talking about deed theft or racially motivated evictions. Now, far more voices in activist spaces are willing to touch the issue. More and more, concerned citizens of New York are becoming aware of the fact that thousands of cases of deed theft have been occurring in historically Black neighborhoods, and that illegal, racially motivated evictions are an epidemic in this city.

However, what hasn’t changed is the Judeophilia. Few outside the Black community are admitting that the perpetrators are all Jewish. When Black protestors identify their tormenters as Jews, they are not joined by non-Black allies. Similarly, those Palestinians who choose to identify Judaism as an integral element of their oppression are met only with uncomfortable stares. The message is clear: If a Jew is oppressing you, you get support so long as that fact is concealed. This comes back to the vaunted falsehood that is the “crisis of antisemitism”. In the United States of America, we are taught that the single wealthiest religious group is as oppressed as the Black community, who live as second-class citizens in a country that was built on their subjugation. Due to this fabrication, Jews are allowed to operate on a special plane, treated as the oppressed while carrying out the actions of the oppressor, mirroring the fallacy that undergirds the question of Palestine.

Jewish Fascism

As I said earlier, the title of this piece is sensationalist. There is no case for antisemitism, sorry to disappoint. However, antisemitism is an understandable outlet in an era of totalizing Jewish supremacy, particularly when Judaism is not being properly scrutinized. What we need is anti-Judaism, by which I mean a similar rejection of Jewish supremacy as the one we assign white supremacy. We need to maintain an across-the-board denunciation of supremacism based in ethnically-aligned social constructs. This requires a sober acknowledgement of the extant racial and ethnic hierarchies, and an end to the Jewish exception. In that vein, we must come to terms with the fact that Judaism is Zionism.

One more story. Not long after the Flatbush protest, I attended one of those aforementioned well-funded actions, this one a live event in support of a Palestinian activist who had been illegally kidnapped by ICE on the orders of the president. After what I had seen in Flatbush, you can imagine the jolt that it was to hear, at an event for an abducted Palestinian activist, another student activist brought up and lauded incessantly for being a “Jew of conscience.” This activist had not been arrested or kidnapped, but rather expelled from school and his union for his work at the Columbia encampment. Yet, little mention was given to this, and he was instead extolled for his Jewish bravery. There was also no discussion of the fact that the activist who the event was purportedly in support of had been kidnapped directly by an administration full of powerful Jewish supremacists working alongside white supremacists.

The current Trump administration is filled with overt fascists, many of them just as strong proponents of Zionism as they are of white supremacy. People like Stephen Miller, Stephen Feinberg, and Jared Kushner hold high-level positions in the administration, and have a direct say in executive decisions. The rest of the administration is made up of staunch ideological Zionists, to say nothing of the powerful Jewish capitalists that have the president’s ear.

It’s time to face the facts. On every level, the manufactured “crisis of antisemitism” has been used to grant Jews explicit protections and privileges that elevate them to a status of legal supremacy that matches their economic and social supremacy. This should not be ignored simply because the language of oppression is invoked. Judaism is protected by the forces of global imperialism and capitalism because it is one of those forces. The religion that was Judaism has been thoroughly transformed, now existing as little more than a supremacist identity used to justify hierarchy and oppression.

As we saw earlier, this is not just true of Judaism, it is also true of the vast majority of Jews. This mirrors the reality of whiteness, wherein most Whites are complicit in the crime of white supremacy. Of course, this does not mean that no White people can fight against white supremacy. Recall all the White activists who fought alongside Black South Africans to end apartheid. The same is true of those pro-Palestinian activists that come from a Jewish background. The key difference, though, is that those White activists were not constantly praised for being “Whites of conscience,” nor was there a consistent attempt to separate whiteness from South African colonialism. Instead, the opposite was true. An acknowledgement of the nature of white supremacy in colonialism was integral to the fight against apartheid.

For the sake of the Palestinian struggle, we on the Left need to platform and center Palestinian voices, and we cannot simultaneously elevate the voices of those who champion the oppressor ideology. Anti-Judaism is a progressive force, elucidating the simple colonial nature of the occupation of Palestine. It further allows us to view Zionism as the expansionist force that it is, one that centers on Palestine’s destruction, but at the same time transcends borders and is tied on every level to global capitalism and imperialism.

I’ll leave it off with this. In September of 2023, eleven days before October 7th, the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd wrote an article in Mondoweiss entitled, “Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.” In the article, el-Kurd, whose family were forcefully evicted from their home in the al-Quds neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, writes about the unfair responsibility placed on Palestinians in navigating the minefield that is identifying the Jewish supremacy of their oppressors, for fear of being labelled antisemites. Inspired by illustrious Black writer James Baldwin’s 1967 article, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” el-Kurd expresses a frustration at not being able to call Jewish supremacy what it is.

“Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives–by force—in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree.” Many others reside—by force—in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish.”

— Mohammed el-Kurd

The Left is quick to acknowledge that the fight at home and the fight everywhere relies on a clearheaded assessment of imperialism and its manifestations. Yet, right now we stand unprepared to engage in the most pressing form of that assessment. Let’s not force Palestinians, nor any of the other marginalized people being oppressed by Judaism — whether they be Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, or Black — to go through this humiliating, pointless song and dance every time they need to speak up about their persecution. Let’s call out Judaism as we call out whiteness, not from a place of hate, but from a duty to those who live under injustice and tyranny.