The exploitation of the accusation of antisemitism, especially to delegitimize criticism of Israel or opposition to Zionism, is sometimes called weaponization of antisemitism.Illustrative examples:
: "The weaponizing of antisemitism against US critics of Israel was evidenced in 2019 when Florida's upper legislative chamber unanimously passed a bill that classifies certain criticism of Israel as antisemitic"
Cases of weaponizing antisemitism have arisen in various contexts, especially regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. There has been controversy over the concept of new antisemitism and the IHRA definition of antisemitism, both of which characterize some criticism of Israel and opposition to Zionism as antisemitic. Charges of antisemitism made in bad faith have been described as a smear tacticExamples of criticism as smear tactics: : "Delegitimizing Solidarity: Israel Smears Palestine Advocacy as Anti-Semitic" : "because [former U.S. President Jimmy Carter] suggests that Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories resemble South Africa's apartheid regime and said publicly that pro-Israel groups make it hard for U.S. leaders to pressure Israel to make peace, a number of these same groups launched a vicious smear campaign against him." : "...organizations challenging Israel's violations would be fully exposed to smear campaigns based on bad-faith allegations of antisemitism" : "Smearing one's opponents is rarely a tactic employed by those confident that justice is on their side. If Israel's case requires branding its critics antisemites, it is already conceding defeat." and likened to "playing the race card".Examples of the term "antisemitism card":
Some anti-Zionist Jews have been accused of antisemitism and labeled "self-hating Jews".See: : "The traditional response to this problem has been to label anti-Zionist Jews as 'self-hating Jews'" : "It is now necessary to identify criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism—or in the case of Jews, as 'self-hatred'..." : "Chomsky (1989) shows how Zionists have endeavoured 'to identify criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism—or in the case of Jews, as "self-hatred"'"
The charge of weaponization has itself been criticized as antisemitic or rooted in antisemitic tropes, and as a rhetorical device employed across the political spectrum to delegitimize concerns about antisemitism, especially in anti-Zionist discourse.
History
In 1943, when a British court heard a case about Jews engaged in smuggling weapons into Palestine, future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion called the case "a crude frame-up designed to defame the Jewish people" and called the speech of the defence counsel, who sought leniency for the defendants on the ground that they had been ensnared by a gun-running ring, "characteristic of the lowest type of anti-Semitism". Christopher Sykes wrote in 1965 that this incident began "a new phase in Zionist propaganda" in which "to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic". Propaganda theorist and activist Noam Chomsky has written that, although Sykes traced the origins of weaponized antisemitism to this episode, it was not until "the post-1967 period that the tactic has been honed to a high art, increasingly so, as the policies defended became less and less defensible".: "The Perlmutters deride those who voice 'criticism of Israel while fantasizing countercharges of anti-Semitism,' but their comment is surely disingenuous. The tactic is standard. Christopher Sykes, in his excellent study of the pre-state period, traces the origins of this device ('a new phase in Zionist propaganda') to a 'violent counterattack' by David Ben-Gurion against a British court that had implicated Zionist leaders in arms-trafficking in 1943: 'henceforth to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic'. It is, however, primarily in the post-1967 period that the tactic has been honed to a high art, increasingly so, as the policies defended became less and less defensible."
Post-1967 Arab–Israeli War and new antisemitism After the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—with AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen's support, according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé—sought to "portray certain 'anti-Israel' actions as anti-Semitic", especially with regard to international calls for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank. In 1974, ADL leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein published The New Anti-Semitism, which identified anti-Zionism as a "new antisemitism", an idea the ADL has sought to popularize since the early 1970s.
In 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban wrote: "One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism."Dencik, Lars. "13. Antisemitisms in the Twenty-First Century: Sweden and Denmark as Forerunners?" In Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research, edited by Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß, 233–268. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634822-015. "Writing in 1973 in the publication of the American Jewish Congress, Congress Bi-Weekly, the Foreign Minister of Israel, Abba Eban [...]" Of Eban's statement, Chomsky later said: "That is a convenient stand. It cuts off a mere 100 percent of critical comment!"Quoted by Menachem Wecker, "In Defense of Self-Hating Jews", May 2007, Jewish Currents, online at
In 1980, Edward Said said that, since its inception, Zionist discourse had aimed "to lay claim to Palestine both as a backward, largely uninhabited territory" and as a place where Jews had "a unique historical privilege" to rebuild a homeland. As a result, he said, this meant anyone who opposed Zionism "immediately aligned oneself with anti-Semitism". Said said this routine conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism functioned to suppress criticism of Israel and was reinforced by simplistic media narratives, the influence of pro-Israel pressure groups, and academics' and intellectuals' uncritical repetition of political clichés.
Under Communism in the Eastern Bloc In 1952, a "confession" was extracted under torture from Rudolf Slánský, former general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, of "shield[ing] Zionism" by accusing its critics of antisemitism. David Hirsh describes this as a deployment of the Livingstone Formulation characteristic of Soviet antisemitism.
Sociologist Anna Zawadzka has argued that the Livingstone Formulation was already in use in Poland in 1968, such that Jews "could not articulate their experiences of antisemitism" without having their articulations "diagnosed as either cynical victim-playing or an emotional disorder." She interpreted this response as a form of "paternalistic violence", viewing the traumatized Polish Jews as deserving of sympathy, but not of trust in their view of antisemitism in the decades following the Holocaust. Zawadzka wrote that this paternalistic view has changed, with Jews now being taken as cynical and manipulative rather than as traumatized and paranoid in their articulations of antisemitism.
In 1970, Ron I. Rubin wrote, "Nations raising charges of Soviet antisemitism [at the United Nations] are accused of attempting to subvert the Soviet Union by destroying its multinational character through the introduction of the poison of nationalism", and that Soviet denials of antisemitism are generally irrelevant to the accusation and contradicted by "certain official admissions".
Aleksander Smolar wrote in 1987 that Communist Polish authorities wielded "real and imagined" charges of antisemitism against their opposition, particularly in the Catholic Church. He added that the Communists' image as the defenders of Jews might have inhibited the Church's willingness to defend Jews from pogroms, as Church authorities would not want to be interpreted as giving support to the Communists.
András Kovács has written that antisemitic discourse after the replacement of the Communist Hungarian People's Republic held that, during the Communist era, powerful Jews used "the charge of antisemitism [to] de-legitimize [...] the anticommunist national forces and places them in a disadvantageous position both in politics and in public life", and that Communist Jews then allied with liberal Jews to retain political power after the establishment of the Republic of Hungary.
During the Gaza war After examining appearances of the word "antisemitism" before and after October 7, 2023, in The Jewish Chronicle, Neve Gordon wrote, "the data reveals that TJC has been exaggerating and instrumentalising a Zionist notion of antisemitism to foment moral panic, mobilising the language of trauma and injury to continuously reassert a notion of Jewish victimhood" in support of a "justificatory framework that operates by claiming injury and then using the alleged injury to set in motion a series of oppressive actions against individuals, groups and institutions." Gordon has also written that the scores of civil society organizations, primarily in Israel, North America, and Europe, that are invested in shielding Israel from criticism by smearing Palestine advocacy with accusations of antisemitism represent "by far the largest group of apartheid enablers".
According to legal scholar Shirin Sinnar, university administrators' repression of campus protests in the 2023–24 academic year weakened academic liberty in the face of authoritarianism under the Trump administration: the "failure to rebut politicized narratives that pro-Palestine protests were rampant with violence, antisemitism, and lawlessness has made it harder for academic institutions to resist the even greater weaponization of such caricatures now." Some have called the exploitation of the accusation of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel or Zionism during the Gaza war a "new McCarthyism".
Examples of allegations In 1990, the Argentine newspaper Buenos Aires Herald defended President of Argentina Carlos Menem against charges of antisemitism, writing that the allegations "may have been prompted by President Menem's good relations with Jews which constitutes 'a perceived threat to the [opposing] Radical Party's traditional Jewish constituency'".
After American author Alice Walker was accused of antisemitism for recommending a book by Holocaust denier David Icke and for her 2017 poem "It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud", Walker wrote in response that the "attempt to smear David Icke, and by association, me, is really an effort to dampen the effect of our speaking out in support of the people of Palestine." Palestinian American writer and activist Susan Abulhawa wrote that Walker's "real offence [in the eyes of her critics] is her defiant support for Palestinian liberation" and called the backlash against her the "clawing [of] Zionist machines".
After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was criticized for saying that "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people [and] the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese", Kennedy said that the allegations against him of antisemitism were hurtful, that his words had been "distorted and weaponized", and that he had "literally never said an antisemitic word in my life".
Areas of controversy The charge of weaponization has been raised across the political spectrum, especially in anti-Zionist discourse on the left and right. Scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in the 2000s and Matthew Abraham in the 2010s suggested that the charge of antisemitism was becoming less effective when applied to criticisms of Israel.