Just last month, a man wielding a machete stabbed five Jews rejoicing during a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York — an area with a large population of Orthodox Jews. One man was put into a coma.
The next day, reports emerged about the suspect. Grafton E. Thomas, who has a history of mental illness and is being charged with a hate crime, had conducted various online searches in the weeks leading up to the attack, one of which was “Zionist Temples” in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and in Staten Island.
“Zionist” meaning Jewish, of course. Or did he mean pro-Israel?
This was at least the second time inside a month that an anti-Semitic attacker confused the two targets. David Anderson, one of the Jersey City kosher supermarket shooters, posted, “Jews were using the police to [carry] out a well planned agenda [against black people]” to a thread discussing the 2016 police killing of Alton Sterling.
Jews? Or did he mean Zionists? A more popular version of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, spread by anti-Zionists and now becoming normalized on the far left, actually replaces “Jews” with “Israel.”
One of the more prominent anti-Zionist organizations spreading this theory is the ironically-named Jewish Voice for Peace, which developed a campaign called “Deadly Exchange” to scapegoat Israel for police brutality in the United States. JVP claims that Israel is the root of anti-black police brutality, with practices that include “extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders.”
Another leader of the anti-Zionist movement, former Women’s March co-chairwoman Linda Sarsour, called the anti-Semitism watchdog Anti-Defamation League, “An organization that takes police officers from America … to Israel so they can be trained by the Israeli police and military, and then they come back here and do what? Stop and frisk, killing unarmed black people across the country.”
Sarsour’s fellow co-chairwoman Tamika Mallory has taken this conspiratorial rhetoric a step further. When Starbucks announced it planned to work with the ADL on anti-bias training, the activist demanded the public boycott the coffee conglomerate because Jewish organizations like the ADL are “CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people.” When asked to clarify how, she wrote, “The ADL sends U.S. police to Israel to learn their military practices. This is deeply troubling.”
JVP, Sarsour, and Mallory all insist that their beef is with Israel and not with Jews. But whether or not this argument is made in good faith, the distinction is lost on anti-Semites. With Zionism and Israel integral parts of Jewish identity, the terms “Jews,” “Israel,” and “Zionism” become interchangeable to anti-Semites. As a result, conspiracy theories about Israel easily become dog whistles for anti-Semites.
Meanwhile, prominent anti-Semites such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (whom Mallory called the “GOAT” — the “greatest of all time”) deliberately blurs this line by alternately weaving between Jews, Zionists, and Israel in his speeches, largely treating them with the same disdain. (Anderson, the Jersey City shooter, once called Farrakhan a “con” because he maintains a relationship of political convenience with anti-Zionist Jews.)
Of course, anti-Zionism is not solely to blame for the Jersey City or Monsey attacks. But words matter and certain kinds of speech can be damaging when absorbed into the minds of impressionable individuals, no matter what side of the political spectrum they come from. The massacre of eleven Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018, for example, was inspired by rhetoric on the alt-right.
However, the notion that anti-Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism is dubious when Jews are murdered in the name of a conspiracy theories promoted by anti-Zionist activists. This is especially true when the distinction between “Israel” and “Jews” is habitually blurred by anti-Semites.
The baseless blaming of Israel for police brutality against black people in this country is truly reckless. We now clearly see that anti-Semites are embracing and acting on these concepts. We must condemn such rhetoric with equal force as when it comes from far right groups. Failure to do so compromises our ability to root out this kind of hate and puts Jewish lives at risk.
Hen Mazzig is editor-at-large of the J’accuse Coalition for Justice. Follow him: @HenMazzig
