Jewish Fear in a Zionist Unreality
Note: I consider this essay an important topic that all Jews, but especially anti-zionist Jews, should seriously engage with. But I want to be clear that the settler fears of zionist Jews are irrelevant to the needs of the movement for the liberation of Palestine.
In the rubber hand illusion, an experimenter places a rubber hand on a table next to a subject’s real hand. The experimenter covers the subject’s hand so they can only see the fake rubber hand and, with a paint brush, caresses both hands at the same speed and in the same place. As this experiment continues, the subject eventually looks at the fake rubber hand as if it’s their own hand.
Without any notice, the experimenter picks up a hammer and smacks the rubber hand. Despite the fact that only the fake hand was hit by the hammer, initially, people react as if their own hand had been smashed. They jump in shock, their heart rate spikes, and they laugh in relief when they realize that they were tricked and their hand is perfectly safe. Through continued reinforcement that the rubber hand is actually their hand, people come to, at least temporarily, adopt a distorted view of reality. In this view, they fear a hammer strike that poses no real threat.
During the summer semester of 2020, a student at Florida State University became the first Palestinian elected as president of the FSU student senate. What followed was a horrendous racist campaign to unseat him, alleging that he was an antisemite based on social media posts he made as a child and his opposition to zionism. The president of the university, Florida elected officials, national and international zionist organizations, zionist student groups, and even entire cities in Florida all joined this racist campaign to remove him from his position and to silence anyone who supported him.
During a meeting where the student senate was voting on a resolution to condemn antisemitism and adopt the IHRA definition, the public comments period was replete with melodramatic and fantastical allegations. One Jewish zionist student after another filled their apportioned speaking time with assertions that Jewish students’ desperate cries were being ignored and that FSU had a major antisemitism problem. Some students even claimed that they or their younger siblings didn’t feel safe attending FSU at all. They shared horrific stories of the antisemitism their ancestors faced, as if to say they know danger, and this felt similar. If their comments were taken at face value, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine a second Holocaust lurking in the corner of every FSU dorm room.
As I watched these Jewish zionist students practically beg the senate to condemn antisemitism, as if they were fighting for their lives and the resolution was their only chance for survival, something deeply unsettling struck me. I believed them.
The Rubber Hand Illusion As Zionist Practice
Just as I believe that someone fears the hammer on its way to smash the rubber hand, I believe that those students were really scared. Yet, at the heart of both of these fears, there’s a lie.
Through decades of continued reinforcement at the familial, communal, and institutional levels that zionism is Judaism and that Jews are israel, many Jews have entirely subsumed israel and zionism into not just Jewish identity in general, but into their own personal identity. This marks the zionist unreality.
Brush Strokes
Our brains don’t, immediately upon starting the experiment, adopt the rubber hand as our own. This entanglement requires a process. The more comprehensive that process is, the more completely we accept the fake hand. Each separate element — covering our real hand, uncovering the fake hand, softly brushing both the real and fake hand — makes the situation feel more real. While the rubber hand illusion is temporary and the participant knows what’s happening, the entanglement process between zionism and Judaism is made inescapable in most Jewish communal spaces from the time we are children.
The little brush strokes that conflate Jewishness with zionism are commonplace. Our shuls display the settler-colonial israeli flag on their bema, they host visiting IOF soldiers, they push us to attend “birthright” (often implying it’s a Jewish rite of passage comparable to B’nai Mitvot), they distort both Jewish history and the history of zionism to falsely assert that zionism has always been a part of Judaism, and they celebrate israeli national holidays as if they are Jewish holidays instead of the holidays of a settler-state thousands of miles away from us.
The brush strokes continue in many secular Jewish spaces as well. Nearly every mainstream Jewish organization is zionist and peddles the lie that anti-zionism is antisemitism. Some go as far as labeling israel the “Jew among nations.” Our institutions defend non-Jewish zionist politicians who make antisemitic remarks by claiming they can’t be antisemitic since they support israel and then condemn as antisemites politicians who, even tepidly, speak out against israel. They erase, debase, de-platform, and ostracize the Jewish scholars, leaders, and community members who oppose zionism and then enthusiastically welcome non-Jewish zionists.
Understanding that people can come to adopt a rubber hand as their own, in only a few minutes at a folding table by the beach, how complete then must the entanglement process between Judaism and zionism be that it’s continually reinforced in nearly facet of Jewish life? No surprise that many Jews come to view israel as a piece of themselves. and correspondingly, view threats against israel or zionism as threats against Jews.
This entanglement was and still is intentional, as Anthony Lerman notes in an essay titled “Antisemitism Redefined.” There were campaigns within zionist circles to link anti-zionism and antisemitism as closely as possible. Lerman writes:
A key player in and growing influence on this campaign was the Israeli government, pursuing a new policy since the late 1980’s, through its then-recently-established Monitoring Forum on Anti-Semitism. The policy aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism by Jewish groups worldwide. This was coordinated and mostly implemented by Mossad representatives working out of Israeli embassies.
The “Antisemitism Problem” Problem
The racist events that took place at FSU are certainly unique due to the degree of national media attention they received and the bizarre attempts by outsiders to manipulate the outcome. But these zionist antisemitism spectacles take place frequently. Typically, these episodes start as zionist attempts to stifle burgeoning pro-Palestine sentiment or activism, whether that be in u.k.’s labour party or at a university with a strong Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.
First, zionists generate publicity around the situation, usually by claiming that there is an “antisemitism problem.” Then zionists call on the relevant authorities to rectify that alleged antisemitism problem by, for example, expelling the alleged antisemites, defunding anti-zionist student organizations, initiating disciplinary processes against anti-zionist students, condemning antisemitism, and/or adopting the zionist IHRA definition. Next, the zionists use the institution’s failure to immediately acquiesce to these demands as confirmation that there is an antisemitism problem and that it actually reaches far deeper levels than was initially thought. A whole host of organizations have popped up to incite and support these zionist theatrics.
Canary Mission, for instance, is an organization that claims to track and expose antisemites on college campuses. Zionists regularly utilize Canary Mission’s profiles of alleged antisemitic students as evidence. However, Canary Mission is not simply a benign organization that exposes antisemites. The founder of Palestine Legal, Dima Khalidi, describes Canary Mission as an “anonymous cyber-bullying endeavor dedicated to profiling advocates for Palestinian rights in an effort to malign them and ruin their reputations and career prospects.” She’s right- Canary Mission’s website showcases almost entirely Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students who have spoken out against zionism.
The AMCHA Initiative is a zionist legal organization similar to Canary Mission. Notably, the AMCHA Initiative maintains an extensive database of what they claim are antisemitic incidents and publishes reports with their data. As is the case with Canary Mission, these ‘antisemitic incidents’ are anything but. One recent addition to their database is the publishing of a powerful op-ed by a queer Jewish student at the University of Chicago inviting people to stand with Palestine. Another recent addition to their database claims that the spray-painted slogans “Fuck Israel” and “Boycott Israel” are “antisemitic expressions” at the University of Michigan.
The recently founded zionist organization JewishOnCampus (JOC) takes a more grassroots approach. Founded by young zionist students, JOC invites Jews and non-Jews to send in accounts of alleged antisemitism at school. JewishOnCampus then posts these anecdotes as anonymous quotes, highlighting what they believe are the most egregious and antisemitic components. As is the case with the two images below, their highlights often exhibit opposition to israel, not hatred of Jews. Of course, to JewishOnCampus, israel is Jews.
Whether it’s intentional or not, publishing these posts as “Anonymous” adds subconscious credence to the idea that Jews are imperiled and their fear is justified. While in reality, zionist students who publicly cast anti-zionists as antisemites are launched into the spotlight by zionist organizations and publications, JOC pretends it’s actually dangerous or stigmatized to make those claims. Additionally, the anonymity renders any investigation into the context of or truth behind their stories impossible.
What JewishOnCampus does recreationally, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) does professionally. Like the AMCHA Initiative, the ADL maintains a database of what it claims are antisemitic incidents. However, because the ADL conflates Judaism and zionism, many of the incidents they count are opposition to israel or zionism, not Jews. Understanding this, it’s not surprising that as anti-zionist protests spread globally (in response to israel’s recent spate of increased violence against Palestinians) the ADL reported a massive spike in alleged antisemitism. The ADL’s ominous statistics of ‘surging antisemitism’ then appeared in news articles, op-eds, talk shows etc., where they were used to justify racist, zionist, and Islamophobic arguments. After weeks of doomsday messaging, that is intentionally designed to stoke fear, the ADL then reports that Jews are, unsurprisingly, more fearful.
Zionists invoke white Jewish fear of anti-zionism as proof that anti-zionism is antisemitism. The JewishOnCampus stories and the ADL incidents are rendered coherent through this rationale. According to their logic, because Jewish students are scared of anti-zionism, it is antisemitism. However, this backwards premise must be rejected. It’s no different than proving that the rubber hand is one’s real hand by citing the fear one felt as the hammer came down.
White Jewish fears that anti-zionism is antisemitic are similar to white nationalist fears of the “great replacement.” The two are in fact mirror images of each other and of settler fear in general. In “Two Degrees of Separation,” Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS Movement, writes, “colonizers always fear that the colonized will one day rise against them and do to them what they have been doing to the colonized.”
How the Zionist Unreality Harms the Struggle Against Antisemitism
Canary Mission, the AMCHA Initiative, JewishOnCampus, and the ADL all do occasionally condemn or expose real antisemitism, which is, put simply, the hatred of Jews because they are Jewish. However, these efforts are not sincerely intended to fight antisemitism. Instead, condemning real antisemitism is, for these organizations, an attempt to obscure the fact that their primary focus is defending zionism and lend legitimacy to the idea that they are organizations who fight antisemitism. If they never mentioned neo-nazism or fascism, it would be much easier for the average person to recognize the disingenuous nature behind their actions. Occasional condemnations of real antisemitism serve an additional purpose- to stoke ever greater fear about the alleged threat posed by anti-zionism. In a video that the ADL posted about 2020’s “historic high” rate of antisemitism, the ADL equated nazis seig-heiling while holding a banner that reads “K*kes lie whites die 1488” with bathroom graffiti that says “fuck hillel free Palestine” as if to prove that those both present a danger to Jews and that said danger is similar.
By focusing the struggle against antisemitism on israel, zionists ignore the Jewish communities throughout the world who are harmed by real antisemitism and assert that the only path to Jewish safety or security is in supporting colonial genocide. This positioning ensures that those who would fight by our side against real antisemitism cannot do so without supporting their own oppression. It’s unreasonable to expect the people who are victimized by zionist organizations to stand with those same organizations as they ‘condemn antisemitism.’
Make no mistake, the primary victims of the zionist unreality are the victims of zionism in general. We should never, in acknowledging the ways zionism also endangers Jews, ignore that zionism is a colonial movement in Palestine, not a theoretical project. False antisemitism allegations are wielded against Palestinians and others to cause not only immense direct harm by justifying zionist colonization but also bolster and reproduce Islamophobic, white supremacist, and anti-Black ideas such as the orientalist “clash of civilizations.”
The zionist unreality is deeply connected to philosemitism. In 5 Philosemitic Dog-Whistles to Watch Out For, I define philosemitism as the basis of white euro-american identity formation vis-à-vis treatment of Jewish people, where white euro-america presents itself as the protector of Jews and other societies as a threat to the Jews. Philosemitism developed primarily after the Holocaust, as the white euro-american world needed to retain all it had stolen while simultaneously ‘forgiving itself’ for the Holocaust. Further, as I write in On the Dangers of Fighting Antisemitism, “white euro-america discovered that by assigning itself the task of ‘protecting the Jew’, it could grant itself the power to determine both who is a Jew and who is an antisemite.” In committing to “fight antisemitism” the white euro-american world erases its history and creates justification for its ongoing white-supremacist colonial projects- the colonized are labeled “antisemites” and the “commitment to fight antisemitism” is colonization.
In upholding the colonial world, the zionist unreality both fosters real antisemitism and makes fighting it impossible. It is the same colonial systems that produce fascism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that also produce antisemitism. Consequently, there is no way to uphold colonialism without producing antisemitism. This is why, as long as zionism has existed, zionists have allied with antisemites. Zionists can look past antisemitism because of a shared interest in the continued existence of the colonial world. Barghouti, again, writes that zionism “has always thrived on real antisemitism, including during the rise of nazi anti-Jewish legislation in Germany in the 1930’s.” Herzl, one of the founders of zionism, asserted that antisemitism provided the “requisite impetus” for Jews to join the settler-colonial zionist project. He believed that antisemitic countries would be the greatest allies to the zionists because they both shared a common goal of having Jews leave europe.
Despite the zionist weaponization of antisemitism allegations against anti-zionists, antisemitism is real and it is vital that we struggle against it. But “Jewish fear” and specifically, Jewish fears regarding anti-zionism, cannot be the basis of that struggle. White euro-america only validates or attempts to redress the fears of Jews when those fears can be used to support colonial white supremacy. Thus, philosemitic white euro-america ignores the fears of Black Jews, non-Black Indigenous Jews, and non-Black Jews who speak out against zionism. This is proven by the response to both the Pittsburgh and Poway pogroms. After each of these synagogue shootings, white Jewish zionists called on the state to ramp up its ‘protection of Jewish communities’, which it gladly did by placing cops in and outside of shuls and Jewish institutions. As Black Jews spoke out against this, their cries were ignored.
The zionist unreality harms the struggle against antisemitism because it abandons the Jews who are victimized by the white euro-american colonial project and strengthens the systems that produce antisemitism.
For Judaism to Live, Zionism Must Die
In an essay that appeared recently in the Tablet, Natan Sharansky contrasts Jews who oppose zionism (which he dubs “Un-Jews”) against “actual Jews” (a term he uses to mean zionists.) He writes “the anti-Zionists know exactly what they are doing, and what they are undoing. They are trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish people-hood, while undoing decades of identity-building.” Elsewhere in his essay, Sharansky writes, “a century ago, when Zionism was still a marginal movement, and there was no Israel, Jews nevertheless had a strong sense of Jewish solidarity, of people-hood.”
In simultaneously acknowledging that Jews had a strong sense of people-hood before the emergence of zionism while also asserting that zionism is the sense of Jewish people-hood, Sharansky unintentionally uncovers the lies of the zionist unreality exquisitely. Jewish zionist identity and the zionist unreality was manufactured through decades of the zionist destruction, co-option, and distortion of Judaism, a process he reduces to “identity building.” Explaining why he uses the term “un-Jews,” Sharansky writes:
We call these critics “un-Jews” because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness. They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent. Many un-Jews are active in forms of Jewish leadership, running Jewish studies departments, speaking from rabbinic pulpits, hosting Shabbat dinners.
He so readily admits information you think he’d want to guard tightly. One can remain dedicated to Jewish practices, be deeply involved Jewishly, and host Shabbos dinners, but that does not matter. Failure to support a settler-colonial movement younger than my grandma means we are “un-Jews.” To be an “actual Jew,” to Sharansky, means supporting zionism. Sharansky reveals that, in many ways, the zionist unreality goes even deeper than equating Judaism and zionism. Instead, it seeks to replace Judaism with zionism.
For decades, Jewish institutions and leaders have raised young Jews to hear calls for freedom and liberation as calls for mass Jewish death. They have used the painful history of antisemitism to justify colonization and make Jewish children terrified. As young Jews grow up and are faced with those righteous calls for freedom, they cower and adopt racist reactionary zionist positions. The right response is not to dismiss their fear, but to point out that their fear response to anti-zionism, and broader anti-colonialism, is built on a lie. No matter how convinced one is that the rubber hand is really their hand, it isn’t! and no matter how convinced one is that zionism is Judaism or that Jews are israel, it is not true. The fears do not reflect the reality. Despite Flayton’s fear that he can’t wear a kippah outside, thousands of Jews wear their kippot throughout the streets of New York City every single day.
The zionist unreality marks a monumental Jewish communal failure and disentangling Judaism from zionism is necessary to begin repairing that harm. Anti-zionist Jews must do everything in our power to expose the zionist unreality. Imagine how different the rubber hand illusion would look, in-practice, were there people standing by the table going “that is not your real hand!” The entanglement would be less complete and the hammer smack less startling. We must educate both Jews and non-Jews about the horrific history of zionism and make clear that Judaism is not zionism and israel is not Jews. Judaism has existed for millennia before zionism was even a thought! Additionally, we must demand the complete destruction of all of the organizations who uphold the zionist unreality. We must refuse to collaborate with the ADL and other zionist “anti-antisemitism” organizations, recognizing them as an enemy even when they condemn real antisemitism. We must stand firmly against the organizations who argue that Jewish safety is only possible through colonialism.
From another perspective though, I believe this disentanglement is somewhat inevitable. Zionists maintain their unreality by spreading absurd claims that BDS, a Free Palestine, or anti-zionism would be the death of Judaism (or, as Seffi Kogen claims, the end of Shabbos dinners). I almost pity them for the lack of faith they put in Jews to be Jewish, something we have done for thousands of years. The zionist settler-colonial project won’t exist forever. The colonial world is not immortal and the movement for the liberation of Palestine grows stronger every single day. The best way to disprove the zionists who claim that “zionism is Judaism” is to end zionism. Because, when Palestine is free, there will still be Shabbos dinners.
