Why Palestinian Solidarity is Essential to Fighting Anti-Semitism

It’s hard to find words to describe the horrors taking place in Gaza as I write this. The 2.3 million people, half of whom are children, who call this open air prison home, have known nothing but terror for over a month now. Israel, which exercises full control over everything that goes in and out of Gaza, has cut off food, water, medicine, electricity, and fuel while they relentlessly drop thousands of bombs on them. No target is off limits — every day hospitals, schools, churches, ambulances, health centers, bakeries, refugee camps, and civilian homes are being bombarded with weaponry supplied by the US, whose government continues to offer unconditional support to Israel no matter how many war crimes they commit, or how blatantly they express their genocidal intent. Every day, the world watches videos of children being pulled from the rubble while the residents of Gaza go to sleep every night not knowing if they will wake up in the rubble themselves — or not wake up at all. The Palestinian death count, which is almost certainly much higher than any official number due to the impossibility of actually finding all the bodies amidst the chaos and devastation, has already reached 10,000 and continues to soar. And there is simply no help in sight. The medical system is breaking down. Ambulances can’t get to many places. Hospitals with babies in their NICUs are dangerously close to running out of fuel, with some premature babies dying due to a hospital losing power as a result of Israeli airstrikes. Doctors are performing surgeries, including amputations, without anesthesia. There is nowhere safe to go. The international community is providing an embarrassingly insufficient amount of humanitarian aid. The Western powers whom Israel relies on for political and military support refuse to call for a ceasefire or hold Israel to account for the obvious war crimes they are committing.

Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum. It was nearly a century ago when the Nazis began to scapegoat Jews for Germany’s problems, which led to them rounding them up in concentration camps before Hitler eventually arrived at the final solution of attempting to exterminate the Jewish people. In the aftermath of World War II, the idea that traumatized Jewish people should have a homeland where they could feel safe was understandable, but the creation of a Jewish ethno-state should also have been seen as antithetical to the lessons learned from the holocaust. Maybe it’s possible things could have gone a different way, but the actual rollout of the state of Israel — Western imperial powers displacing Palestinian people from their land, and aiding the Israeli government in carrying out a brutal occupation — has been a monstrosity that has made peaceful co-existence amongst Jews and Palestinians an impossibility. An awful cycle of violence has persisted for decades, with Israel constantly hardening in its belief that they could create security for themselves by continuing to steal more land from the Palestinian people while exerting increasing control over their lives, curtailing their rights, and submitting them to degrading treatment.

John F Kennedy once remarked, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”. Palestinians certainly tried to assert their rights as human beings through peaceful means. But when they marched, they were attacked by the Israeli military. They tried to appeal to the International Criminal Court, but both Israel and the US have insisted that there is no basis for an ICC investigation, and that the courts holds no jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories. The BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement that draws on the most cherished principles of non-violent resistance has been slandered as anti-semitic, and 35 states in the US have outlawed it. The blame for the tragic and reprehensible October 7th attack by Hamas thus lies largely at the feet of Israel and its allies who made it impossible for the Palestinian people to achieve freedom through peaceful means. It also must be said that Israel has deliberately funded and supported Hamas over the years in an effort to prevent Palestinian self-determination, so they truly are responsible for the violence carried out against their own citizens by a group they expressly supported because of their extremism. When the attack happened, the Israeli military fired recklessly into the villages being attacked, undoubtedly adding to the number of Israeli people killed that day, just as they are indiscriminately bombing Gaza with no regard for the safety of the hostages they claim to be trying to free. The most obvious lesson people who truly care about the safety of Israeli people should learn from October 7th is that their authoritarian apartheid rule has accomplished the opposite of peace and security.

In their reaction to the attacks, Israel offered the clearest evidence yet that their agenda is to completely expel the Palestinian people from their land by any means necessary. They had been committing a slow ethnic cleansing for decades. Their endless displacement of Palestinians from their homes and villages had turned Gaza into one of the most densely populated places in the world, and they then built a wall around it and blockaded it from the world. There can be no clearer symbol of the genocidal intent in this than the decision to restrict their access to their own water, the most essential component of life. Gaza should have always been best understood as a concentration camp, with Israel controlling every thing that goes in and out, and Palestinians having little economic choices but to perform cheap labor in Israel to survive, which involves going through degrading and inhumane security checkpoints every day. In the West Bank, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has been steadily being carried out through the endless establishment of illegal settlements in which Palestinians are violently driven from their homes.. Once you go down the road of dehumanizing a population of people whose land you want for yourself, you must either change course or you will eventually arrive at genocide. A similar thing took place when Europeans showed up in America and decided they wanted the land for themselves. Settlers cast the Native Americans as dangerous savages, pushed them out of their land, forced them into reservations, and eventually adopted genocide as the official policy towards the Native population. Rather than viewing every act of Native resistance as further justification for further repression, the US government could have changed course and respected the sovereignty of Native tribes and their right to the land. But such a dramatic shift change would require acknowledgement of the atrocities already committed, and a repudiation of the ideology that had animated their conquest of America. Israel likewise could shift course by ending the occupation and allowing Palestinians to live free, but they have shown no capacity for introspection, and a complete unwillingness to even entertain the validity of the complaints being leveled against them. Instead, they are doubling down on a course that inevitably leads to genocide, and are attempting to use October 7th as a justification to enact a final solution to their “Palestinian problem”.

The history of the region is of course complicated, but one doesn’t need a P.h.D. in Middle Eastern studies to see clearly what is taking place right now. Israel’s Minister of defense referred to Palestinian people as “animals” while announcing that he would be committing the war crime of collective punishment by cutting off food, water and electricity to the entire civilian population of Gaza. The former minister of the Israeli National Security Council has called for Israel to turn Gaza into “a place where no human can exist”, arguing there is “no other option for ensuring the security of the state of Israel.” Israel’s Prime Minister has said he would retaliate by “flattening” Gaza in an attack against the Palestinian people that would “reverberate with them for generations”, and justified himself by quoting a bible passage that instructed the Jews to “go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey”. The Israeli President declared that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” for the October 7 attacks, and various Israeli officials have admitted that they have knowingly dropped bombs on innocent civilians, with one even saying “the emphasis is on damage and not accuracy”. An uncovered internal document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence proposed the forced expulsion of every single Palestinian in Gaza to Egypt. And as the IDF massacres and displaces people in Gaza, Israeli settlers in the West Bank (where Hamas is not active) are intensifying their attacks and expansion with the support of the Israeli military. What should be obvious is that these acts have little to do with self-defense, but are instead aimed at pursuing the overarching agenda of pushing more Palestinians out of their homeland and annexing more territory into the state of Israel. Claims by Israeli officials that they are trying minimize civilians casualties should be viewed as pathetic attempts at propaganda that are clearly contradicted by their words and their actions.

Most of the world, especially the global South, is clear-eyed in what they are seeing, and they are calling for a ceasefire while correctly labeling it as a genocide. But here in the US, those of us who feel compelled to vocalize our outrage at the atrocities being funded with our tax dollars are often attacked for being anti-semitic. It is of course ridiculous to argue that criticism of the policies of the Israeli government is an incitement of violence against Jews, but that doesn’t stop people from shamelessly using the hardships endured by Jewish people throughout history as a shield against accountability for violations of international law by the Israeli government. As an American Jew whose grandmother escaped the Holocaust as a teenager by coming to this country, it’s outrageous to hear the Holocaust constantly invoked as a reason to commit genocide, instead of as reminder of the ugliness that can follow when an entire ethnic group is deemed subhuman and dangerous. There is indeed a rising tide of anti-semitism that is making Jewish people less safe, but the discourse around the topic too often has people looking in the wrong direction. Right wing conspiracy theorists and white supremacists who are most responsible for the increase in hate crimes against American Jews are often huge supporters of Israel, while the people who are smeared as anti-semitic for their criticism of Israel are often those working the hardest to fight against the rise of anti-semitism. The problem is not just the conflation of the state of Israel with the world’s entire Jewish community (a large percentage of whom do not support the actions of Israel), but also that anti-semitism is largely viewed as an irrational hatred of Jews rather than a symptom of Western imperialism and the racism it uses to justify itself. When we look at instances of attacks on and incitement of violence against Jews in America, it is almost always coupled with anti-black racism, xenophobia, or some other form of white supremacist thinking. While radical Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and Never Again Action are regularly on the front lines protesting racist treatment of Black and Brown people, they somehow get called anti-Semitic by people who push anti-Semitic ideas about Jews being puppet masters orchestrating people of color to rebel against the white power structure, and whose support of Israel is based on Islamophobia instead of concern about the safety of Jewish people. The reality is of course that Jews who oppose Israeli occupation, militarization of the Southern US border, and police violence against black people understand that Never Again means Never Again for Anyone, and that their safety is very much linked to the safety of all oppressed groups of people, who would be fighting for their rights with or without the allyship of Jewish people. It’s important to contextualize both history and current events through these lens so we can make these links that will help us understand how to combat anti-semitism, and create a world that is safe for everyone instead of allowing false accusations of anti-semitism be wielded as a weapon to justify a genocide that will inflame geopolitical tensions, spark larger conflicts, and tear the world apart.

Anti-Black and Xenophobic Anti-Semitism

During the Freedom Summer of 1964, two Jewish civil rights workers from New York, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, travelled to Mississippi as part of a larger effort to register black voters in the South. The efforts of civil rights activists in the South had brought attention to the horrors of Jim Crow to the nation, and many white people from the North had their conscience’s so shocked that they decided to take action — even if it meant risking their own safety. Perhaps because of their own history of persecution, the issue took particular resonance with American Jews, who made up a disproportionate share of the white allies who joined in on the civil rights movement. In Mississippi, segregationist newspapers began referring to the intensifying efforts to secure civil rights for black people living in the south as a “pending invasion”, and the KKK became more aggressive with their terror tactics. Lynchings of black people were too commonplace to draw much attention, but the murders of Goodman and Schwerner along with James Chaney, a local black civil rights worker, drew national headlines.

Segregationists often insisted that their arrangement was working just fine for both black and white people, and that the federal government was overstepping by involving itself in matters it didn’t understand. In this version of reality, black people were content with their status as second class citizens, and “outside agitators” like Goodman and Schwerner were disrupting the peace as part of some nefarious plan to destroy the Southern way of life. The reality of course was that black southerners were not satisfied with their situation, and were very determined to secure rights for themselves. Segregationists were desperate to prevent black people from voting because it would bring an end to their legalized exploitation of black people. Telling the truth — that people like Goodman and Schwerner were answering a desperate plea from black Southerners for help — was not going incite the response that they needed to create outrage against voter registration drives. By trafficking in anti-Semitism, segregationists were able to maintain a false reality where Jim Crow was natural and necessary, and was being disrupted by godless non-christians with ulterior motives. This line of attack allowed them to cast black people as unwitting pawns instead of giving them credit for their own agency or acknowledging the sophistication of the tactics they used to spark the civil rights movement. In this way, anti-Semitism and anti-blackness were used to reinforce eachother and create an environment where white southerners felt under attack and motivated to violently defend white supremacy. Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner would be among the many victims of the violence that flowed as a result.

Fifty four years later, in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, then-President Donald Trump was casting a dark picture of the threats facing America, using a migrant caravan coming from Central America to rally his base. Using apocalyptic language, Trump, other GOP politicians, and various right wing media personalities stoked fear about these “invaders” who were coming to destroy America. There was an obvious contradiction here between the way these people talked about the greatness of America and the way they cast the country as fragile and vulnerable to being overtaken by a ragtag group of a few thousand migrants.

White supremacy has never been coherent. People made it up as they went. Slavery and colonialism were profitable, so its benefactors rationalized it however they could, even if it meant making contradictory arguments. To make things seem more humane, slaves and colonized subjects were cast as benevolent, simple-minded, and subservient. But at the same time, the brutal force required to crush resistance was justified by hysteria about how devious and violent the same people were. The obvious question here is if white people are the superior race, why are they always so afraid of inferior people? This central contradiction of white supremacy is what Trump found himself caught in as he tried to incite hysteria about the danger of a group of people that so many Americans have come to rely on to grow and cook their food, clean their homes, and watch their children. Trump didn’t come up with anything new and clever — he instead reached back to an old tactic that other racist leaders have used to thread the needle between manufacturing consent for exploitation of brown people and manufacturing hysteria about how dangerous they are. The truth — that the caravan was a natural consequence of the US destabilizing Latin American countries so they could engage in resource extraction — doesn’t help advance the right wing political agenda. But what if the caravan wasn’t full of refugees coming here to work difficult labor jobs for substandard wages, and was actually comprised of terrorists and gang members who were being financed by white traitors who want to destroy America? Using just the right buzzwords, Trump began to ask questions about who was actually behind the caravan, and the right wing media ran with it exactly as intended.

Conspiracies theories spread quickly throughout the right wing ecosystem, one more absurd than the next. The general thrust of them was that the caravan did not organically form, but was instead assembled and brought here by internal enemies of America, who planned to have these migrants illegally vote in the upcoming election, carry out terrorist attacks, spread disease, rape women, and commit various other crimes. One name that frequently popped up in these conspiracy theories was Jewish billionaire and Democratic superdonor George Soros. Like many other billionaires, Soros is able to use his money to give himself an inappropriate level of influence over American politics, but other billionaires don’t get talked about in the same manner. Republican super donors like Charles Koch and Robert Mercer don’t draw the same suspicion from the Soros’ conspiracy theorists, who are also somehow against publicly funded elections, and are perfectly fine with the absurd Citizens United SCOTUS decision that gave corporations license to make unlimited political donations. The outrage against Soros is not part of any principled stance against corruption and oligarchy, but is rather a classic form of anti-Semitism, with Soros being conveniently used as a villainous puppet-master every time movements form to fight back against white supremacy.

Migrant caravans are ultimately acts of resistance. The US pillages Latin American countries for their natural resources, destabilizing nations by funding coups and installing regimes that are friendly to American business interests. This is coupled with cruel border policy that features a militarized border, inhumane detention centers, denial of legitimate asylum claims, and huge numbers of deportations. To get to America, migrants are thus forced to take dangerous treks through the desert, putting them at the mercy of the elements, exploitative smugglers, sadistic border patrol agents, and migrant-hunting vigilantes. By forming a caravan, migrants were refusing to choose between the terrible options they had been presented with, and had instead chosen to join together and protect each other. The alternate explanation that George Soros sent them allowed conservatives to deflect outrage away from the policies that had created the refugee crisis, make the migrants seem less sympathetic, and incite anger against their political enemies. The anti-semitic George Soros as puppet master trope would also be deployed in other situations, including the uprisings that were sparked by police killings of black people. In doing this, it was possible to cast the protestor not as an outraged citizen, but a paid actor or “outside agitator” who was furthering a radical agenda. This helped to delegitimize the protests, rationalize the brutal violence exacted on the protestors by police, and incite vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse to show up at protests armed and ready for battle.

Robert Bowers was deep into the conspiracy theories. For months, he had been publicly obsessing about the “invasion” at the southern border and the Jews — whom he referred to as “enemies of white people” and “children of satan”- who were funding it. As Trump and the rightwing media amped up their rhetoric On October 27, 2018, Bowers posted on social media “HIAS (a Jewish nonprofit that provides aid to refugees) likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, he then entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA and slaughtered 11 people. He has hardly been the only mass murderer in recent years to share similar sentiments before going on a killing spree, but he was the only one to specifically target Jews. In 2015, Dylan Roof entered a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed 9 people. In 2019, a man targeting Muslims attacked a Mosque and killed 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand. Months later, a man targeting Latinos shot up a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and killed 23 people. In 2022, a man targeting Black people shot up a grocery store, killing ten. Every one of these mass shootings was, based on the accounts of the shooters themselves, motivated by fear of what is known as the Great Replacement Theory. The basic idea behind this theory is that “elites”, who are usually Jewish, are bringing black and brown immigrants to majority white countries to replace the white population. The theory is of course reinforced by racist ideas about sexually out of control brown people having high birth rates, and raping white women, thus creating a demographic shift and degrading the purity of the white race. Depending on where one lives, belief in that theory can lead them to carrying out violence against different groups of people, but the attacks are nonetheless being animated by the same dangerous world outlook that intertwines anti-blackness, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism.

A big part of why America is struggling to combat anti-Semitism is that we have a tendency to isolate it from other forms of bigotry as if they are not interconnected. Mainstream discourse routinely fails to recognize the way anti-Semitism in the US flows from more accepted forms of racism, even when recent events make it incredibly clear. In 2017, tensions were coming to a head in Charlottesville, VA over the proposed removal of a statue of confederate general, war criminal and sadistic slaveholder Robert E Lee. Right wingers who embraced a revisionist version of history that celebrated Lee staged a march to protest this attack on their cherished heritage. This was hardly a fringe position — denial of the severity of the nation’s oppression of black people is incredibly mainstream in the US. When we argue today about things like police killings, systemic racism, mass incarceration, affirmative action, we invariably end up arguing about what actually happened in the past as if it is up for debate. While the reality on these topics should be clear to all, both sides are generally accepted as valid when it comes to anti-black racism in America, and the confrontation over the removal of Lee’s statue seemed poised to be the same. But then something happened that changed how the nation looked at the situation — the people marching in support of Lee’s statue showed up wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us”, and other anti-Semitic slogans. But why were they talking about Jews when the conflict was about the legacy of a general who fought to continue the practice of enslaving black people?

The answer to the question goes back to the same pattern we have seen. The statue of Lee was a perfect symbol of the incoherent and contradictory nature of white supremacy. Lee was a part of the slaveholder class that argued there was nothing cruel about slavery, but also used brutal punishment to keep slaves from resisting. Their denial of reality allowed them to paint the anti-slavery movement as an unprovoked attack on them, justifying the Confederacy in starting a war with the Union, and justifying Lee in slaughtering black soldiers after they had surrendered (rather than being seen as people making an understandable choice to fight for their freedom, they were viewed as ungrateful traitors). The erection of his statue during the Jim Crow era served the dual purpose of sanitizing history, while also reminding people of the violence that would be visited upon people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner if they tried to upend segregation. And now in present day, the racists denying the reality of who Lee was feel under attack by the antiracists who justifiably want to remove the statue. Because according to them oppression of black people is nonexistent, and black people are also incapable of effective resistance, it must be those nefarious Jews that were orchestrating things to erase their proud history. It is thus unsurprising that a march in support of the Lee statue would result in people chanting anti-Semitic slogans and a Nazi committing a terror attack that took the life of Heather Heyer, a white ally to the antiracist cause.

This presented a political challenge for Trump, a provocateur who hated to his discourage his most passionate supporters, but who also needed distance himself from their indefensible acts. He tried to walk a line that led to his “very fine people” comment, which drew massive outrage, but his defenders were largely successful using the explanation Trump layed out earlier in the same press conference:

“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee”

There is ultimately very little appetite for outright Nazism and Holocaust denial in the US. Our defeat of the Nazis is one of the nation’s proudest achievements, and the books and movies we consume about WWII don’t allow for any ambiguity about how evil the Nazis were. There is however plenty of appetite and acceptance for denialism when it comes to America’s crimes against black people, which are too foundational to the nation for many of us to look at them squarely. It’s important to remember that defenders of the Nazis don’t defend the gassing of Jews, just like defenders of Robert E Lee don’t defend the torture of slaves. In both cases they justify their support by denying atrocities, with the key difference being that the efforts to whitewash slavery and the horrors that followed have been incredibly successful within America. Anti-black racism is so normalized in the US that it feels like common sense to many, even when it is refuted by hard facts. Many Presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have rode anti-black rhetoric to the White House. Even the nation’s first black president found it politically necessary to traffic in anti-black racism to make sure he wasn’t perceived as too extreme. So given that context, it is not surprising that much of the public found Trump’s stance quite reasonable, because it just doesn’t feel right to put supporters of Robert E Lee in the same basket as Nazis. It is unthinkable to imagine the number of people who would be implicated if we directly connected Nazism to anti-black racism, but the link is nonetheless clear to see. Of course not everyone with racist views ventures into nazism, but anti-black racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia are certainly gateway drugs to anti-Semitism and Nazism.

In 2020, when the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others amidst the backdrop of a pandemic propelled millions of Americans into the streets to protest racist police violence, we would once again see the same anti-semitic tropes deployed as a means of delegitimizing the protests. Police responded by viciously attacking these protestors with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons while drawing no distinction between peaceful and violent protestors, and illegally conducting mass arrests of people lawfully exercising their first amendment rights. If people viewed these protestors as concerned citizens who are tired of their tax dollars going towards police abuse, then the violence being unleashed upon them by police in graphic videos circulating across social media would obviously by unacceptable. But if viewers could be convinced that these protestors were in fact being paid by nefarious actors whose agenda was to destroy the social fabric of America, then the violence being visited upon them by police could not only be be justified, but celebrated. Like clockwork, the name George Soros began to circulate in right wing ecosystems, suggesting that he was paying people to protest and riot. Protestors could thus be cast as “outside agitators”, and the riots could be seen not as natural human responses to police repression, but as orchestrated attacks on American cities. This type of messaging helped encourage vigilante violence against protestors, which discouraged protestors from showing up as fears for their safety increased. Additionally, this messaging helped push back against the validity of the complaints about police abusing their authority by regularly racially profiling black people and killing them without justification. The counter-narrative was that opportunists were seizing upon a few isolated incidents of police misconduct to sow discord, when in actuality black people were only targeted more by police because they committed more crimes. While the cross-racial solidarity exhibited during the 2020 protests represented a grave threat to white supremacy, the use of anti-semitism and anti-blackness to reinforce one another helped prop up white supremacy.

Anti-Semitism or Legitimate Grievance?

There is indeed a long history of solidarity amongst Jewish people and various groups of non-white people. We have seen it in black people enlisting to fight in World War II, Jewish participation in the Civil Rights movement and demonstrations against racist policing, Jewish advocacy for refugees from the global South, and in Muslim and Jewish communities rallying for each other in the aftermath of attacks on Synagogues and Mosques. Being that all these groups of people are the ones who find themselves in the crosshairs of white supremacy, it is a natural alliance.

However, it must be said that Jewish people are different from these groups because they have mostly been allowed to assimilate into whiteness. In America, this functionally means they are given the opportunity to improve their socioeconomic standing by participating in the exploitation and oppression of black and brown people. For a variety of reasons, different groups of white people who had faced discrimination both in Europe and as immigrants to the US, found specific niches in which they were able to establish a foothold for themselves. The Irish, for instance, joined police forces in large numbers. The job elevated many of them out of poverty and into the American middle class, and their whiteness allowed them to purchase homes with FHA loans and build generational wealth. It also required them to act as middle managers in an unequal society in which black people’s very existence was criminalized. Black people expressing resentment towards Irish people based on bad experiences with Irish police may be prejudiced, but it is not the same as justifying the discrimination and subhuman treatment of an entire group of people based on lies about their racial inferiority. Jewish people were able to find opportunity within the entertainment business, managing record labels, movie studios, and sports teams. Black people, systemically excluded from academia and much of the labor market, often found that their best opportunities at prosperity were to become athletes, musicians, or actors. This dynamic often put Jewish people in the position of being gatekeepers of the entertainment industry, deciding which black people would be given opportunities. Additionally, black people were formally excluded from much of the housing market, and were segregated into ghettos where they largely did not own the homes or businesses. What little money they made in the exploitative labor market that they were generally confined to was extracted by those who owned the homes and businesses in black neighborhoods, and the Jews got in on that action as well.

Black people sometimes say prejudiced things about Jewish people based on this lived experience, but that is not the same as the more dominant form of right wing anti-semitism that promotes conspiracy theories about Jews as part of a white supremacist worldview. Hate crimes against Jewish people are rarely committed by black people, and are almost always committed by people who subscribe to some kind of far-right, great replacement theory ideology. But when you look at what draws the loudest cries of anti-semitism, it is all too often the statements of black celebrities instead of things like TV anchors delivering great replacement theory talking points into American living rooms, or right-wing politicians claiming that protests and migrant caravans are being funded by wealthy Jews.

Likewise, the attitudes of Palestinians towards Jews also get condemned as hateful anti-semitism more strongly and loudly than the more dangerous and prevalent form of right wing anti-semitism. But Palestinian’s anger is not towards all Jewish people, but rather the Israelis who have stolen their land and are actively oppressing them. Such anger is dangerous and can make people susceptible to being recruited into extremist groups like Hamas, but the anger is rooted in outrage about the human rights violations of the state of Israel, not racist ideas about Jewish people. Given the history of colonialism in the Middle East, it should at least be understandable why Arabs would be hostile to the formation of a settler colonial state like Israel, and why that hostility has increased over the years based on the actions of the Israeli government. It is of course appropriate to correct prejudiced statements towards Jews from Arabs when they go beyond critiques of the Israeli government and into broad statements about Jewish people, but it is still wildly inappropriate to invoke the holocaust in this context. If we are unable to differentiate between the righteous anger felt by people who have been horribly oppressed, and the poisonous racist ideas invented to justify such oppression, we have no chance at fighting the rising tide of anti-semitism.

Nazism

Because Jews were the main targets of the Nazis, the Holocaust may be thought of as a rebuttal to the arguments I have made about Western imperialism and anti-blackness being the primary catalysts of anti-semitism. But such analysis only holds if we take a simplistic view of how Nazism developed. Prior to the first World War, Germany was one of the world’s major colonial powers, with numerous colonies under their control in Africa and elsewhere across the globe. In 1904, the Herero people of modern-day Namibia rebelled against their occupation. In response, Germany sent its army to squash the rebellion, and German General Lothar Von Trotha ordered the extermination of the Herero people — “Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at.” The Herero people who managed to flee to the desert mostly died of dehydration and starvation as German Soldiers poisoned waterholes and fired upon any Herero who attempted to return to their land. Those who did survive were imprisoned in concentration camps, where they were forced into labor, raped, and experimented upon. The experiments conducted by Dr. Eugen Fischer, which concluded that bi-racial children borne out of these rapes were inferior to pure-blooded Germans, would end up serving as an inspiration to Hitler. Fischer would later join the Nazi party and teach his theories to Nazi doctors, who conducted experiments of their own in their concentration camps.

After World War I, Germany’s colonies were confiscated from them by the colonial powers who had defeated them. Demoralized and economically crippled, the country became ripe for a demagogue to rise to power with a message that would restore national pride. It was in this depressed state that Hitler was able to successfully revive German nationalism by blaming Jews for the country’s downfall, and offering the promise of a bright future once the country had been purified. Hitler, who had come of age during the Namibian genocide, leaned into the ideology that had been used to justify Germany’s atrocities in Africa, and took them to their next step. Hitler’s anti-semitism did not come out of the blue — it was built upon anti-black racism, which was built upon imperial conquest. What could have been a moment for Germany to reckon with the way their racism, greed and imperial over-reach had brought them to ruin turned into an even harder embrace of white supremacy. Much like in America, where racist policies have created turmoil that has hurt the country, conspiracy theories about Jews became a convenient explanation for those unwilling to face that reality. When we analyze Hitler’s rise to power from this perspective, it starts to become clear that his targeting of Jews indeed did originate in anti-black racism and the ideology that allowed European countries to justify themselves in land theft, enslavement, and exploitation.

Because the US fought the Nazis in the war, it’s easy to forget how much support there was for Nazism in the US at the time. The Nazis themselves drew great inspiration from America. In 1916, New York-born eugenicist Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, a book that Hitler would later refer to as his “bible”. When the Nazis began writing the Nuremberg Laws, they studied Jim Crow laws as an example of successful racial apartheid law. In 1939, a group of 20,000 people gathered in Madison Square Garden for a “Pro American Rally” featuring the open display of swastikas, people dressing in Nazi storm trooper uniforms, and posters reading “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America”. One of the main speakers, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, spoke proudly of the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration quotas, and Jim Crow and miscegenation laws, proclaiming “The spirit which opened the West and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man…It has then always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation.” The infamous Charlottesville rally where we saw the anti-black racism of defending a monument to a Confederate general transform into blatant anti-semitism and nazism falls into a long line of KKK members and other white nationalist groups who are primarily animated by anti-black racism using swastikas.

With all this in mind, we should think of Nazism as much broader ideology than belief in a white master race or hatred of Jews. It is settler colonialism taken to its nihilistic extreme. Domination, subjugation, and extermination of groups of people become self-justifying acts. Nazi politics will always show a disregard for human life that renders disabled, marginalized and other vulnerable people as disposable. Those who disagree with it are to be considered enemies to be vanquished through violence, intimidation, manipulation and subversion. It is also entirely incoherent, alternatively casting those it seeks to dehumanize as violent and devious, or as helpless and uncivilized to serve their purposes.

The use of propaganda is thus crucial to Nazism. While Hitler openly used language meant to dehumanize Jews and prime his soldiers to slaughter them, Nazis denied doing so, and even tried to present their concentration camps to the world as retirement homes and cultural centers. Hitler also spoke of Germans as a master race with the implication that they should conquer the world, but pretended that wasn’t what they were doing. As explained in the Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Throughout World War II, Nazi propagandists disguised military aggression aimed at territorial conquest as acts of ethnic self-defense necessary for the survival of ‘Aryan civilization.’ They portrayed Germany as a victim or potential victim of foreign aggressors, as a peace-loving nation forced to take up arms to ensure the security of the German people, or to defend Europe against Communism.” All of this mirrors the doublespeak discussed earlier in regards to justifications for Jim Crow, and hysteria about migrants arriving at the Southern border. In all cases, we see dehumanization and incitement of violence disguised by a thin veneer of humanitarianism that is backed up by intimidation instead of facts.

All of this should feel familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the actions of the state of Israel over the year and especially during the past month. Racism has consistently been used to justify their conquest of Palestinian land. At every turn, they have claimed that their expansion was necessary as an act of ethnic self-defense. As they relentlessly bombard Gaza, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman tweets conspiracy theories about “Pallywood” propaganda films being made in which Palestinians fake injuries to gain the world’s sympathy. While they tell the world they are massacring civilians to defeat Hamas, they make no mention of the fact that they materially supported Hamas for years as a means of preventing the formation of a Palestinian state. They boldly deny easily provable violations of international law, pretend the repeated calls for them to be prosecuted by the ICC are some kind of worldwide anti-semitic conspiracy, and then use that to justify committing more atrocities. They repress their own citizens and arrest them on terrorism charges if they dare to criticize their policies or show sympathy to the Palestinian cause, and use a powerful propaganda machine to encourage censorship in the US and other countries, where people are often afraid of the consequences they may face for voicing support for Palestine. The path they have set out upon has not only brought endless unimaginable suffering to the Palestinian people, but has inflamed geopolitical tensions across the world in a way that could spark a much larger war and result in a complete disintegration of legitimacy for the international governance that was established after World War II. The signing of pacts like the Geneva Convention, and the formation of bodies like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court was meant to make sure that humanity never descended into that kind of barbarism again. The lesson from the holocaust wasn’t supposed to be Never Again for Jews, but Never Again for Anyone. Many Jewish people understand this quite clearly, and are working to dismantle the white supremacy that makes everyone less safe. But tragically, many Jews have lost their way and now find themselves doing unto the Palestinian people a version of what was done unto them by the Germans.

Moving Forward

At some point, this current siege on Gaza will come to an end. There’s no telling how many Palestinians will have been slaughtered before that day comes, but there will undoubtedly be some that survive. Those of us calling for a ceasefire so that day can come sooner than later are often pressed with the impossible question of what can be done to create peace in the region. But we do not need to have a solution figured out to know that there is no chance of achieving peace through the means Israel is pursuing, and that even if there was, the human cost is completely unacceptable.

Another thing that we can conclude without having all the answers is that the only route to peace is a free Palestine. Peace can’t be achieved through domination and subjugation. In the US, many people (most notably Abraham Lincoln) who thought slavery was immoral were still hesitant to support abolishing it in large part because they weren’t sure how to integrate black people into society once the chains were removed. The hard truth is that it will always be difficult for two groups of people to live peacefully together after one group spent generations committing unspeakable atrocities to the other, but we still know for certain that going down that road is better than continuing with the atrocities. Right now, it’s hard to imagine how Palestinians can ever forgive Israel for what they have done, but one thing we can learn from the Black Freedom Struggle in the US, it is that the oppressor’s fears of revenge, and the ways in which they use that as a justification to violently hold onto power, are the bigger impediment to peace than any actual revenge taken from oppressed people, who are usually just happy to be free.

Whatever peace can be achieved will have to start with accountability. Members of Israel’s government responsible for their war crimes must be tried before the ICC, and they must face consequences. Some form of reparations must be given to the Palestinian people who survive this genocide. After decades of living with the primary purpose of not allowing themselves to be ethnically cleansed, they need to be able to heal that trauma without being under the rule of the government that tried to exterminate them. But perhaps most importantly, the International community, and particularly people in the US, must learn what it actually means to fight anti-semitism. The entire twisted ideology of white supremacy has to be rejected, and people need to stop trying to disentangle anti-semitism from other forms of racism as if they are not built upon each other. We can create a world where holocausts don’t happen by stopping the genocide happening before our eyes, and by fighting for a society that actually makes good on the promise of equal rights for all. The struggles for black liberation, a free Palestine, a safe haven for Jewish people, and countless other important causes are all interconnected.

One thing that is clear is that when we see anti-semitism on the rise like we are right now, it should be recognized as evidence that white supremacy, and the fascism that spawns from it, are spiraling out of control. The Palestinian genocide, this generation’s holocaust, will only be the beginning of the horrors we will soon see if the world allows this to pass. The credibility of the institutions meant to prevent such things will forever be shot, and autocrats across the world will be emboldened to commit their own genocides. There will be no safety for Jewish people without liberation of the Palestinian people, not because of more attacks by groups like Hamas, but because unchecked white supremacy will always ultimately turn Jewish people into its targets. Tragically, the state that was formed with the idea of the aftermath of one of the world’s worst explosions of white supremacy has become an instrument of white supremacy. In this way, there are few things more anti-semitic than support of the state of Israel.

It’s true that white supremacy is so embedded in the structure of everything we see that it is hard to imagine a world without it. The idea of a free Palestine is as hard to imagine as black people actually having equality in America, world peace, or an end to the burning of the fossil fuels that will eventually make this planet uninhabitable. And yet, we have to imagine it anyway and earnestly attempt to realize it. The work of building a better world won’t be easy, and will require endless experimentation and trial and error. It will not yield immediate results, and close-minded people who believe the world can only be one way will take it as evidence that they were right, and yet we will have to keep dreaming, one generation after another. No matter how hard that road may be, it is better we struggle on that one than continue on the road to certain death we are currently on. When both Jewish and Palestinian people, and all the other marginalized people of the earth are finally safe, we will know we have finally arrived at our destination. For now, standing with Palestine is undoubtedly the first step on the long road ahead.