Zionist Institutions Spread Antisemitic Propaganda

Linking Jewish identity to war and atrocity harms Jewish people

Following the terrifying attack on a Michigan synagogue, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to social media to attempt to make things worse, as is his wont. After a pro forma denunciation of antisemitism, he rushed to link attacks on civilians in the United States to attacks on Israel—a nation which this month joined the United States in an illegal war of aggression. “Israel is attacked because it is the Jewish state,” he insisted. “Temple Israel was attacked today because it is a Jewish house of worship.”

Netanyahu’s cynical deployment of diaspora Jews as a human shield for Israel’s bad actions is neither new nor surprising. Zionists have for decades claimed that Israel is the core of Jewish identity, and that, therefore, criticism or resistance to Israel national policy is equivalent to antisemitism.

Thus, the peaceful movement to boycott Israel for its treatment of Palestinians has been slandered by the high court of Israel as a “terrorist” campaign analogous to the Holocaust. Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) rushed to condemn New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for having dinner with Mahmoud Khalil—a pro-Palestinian demonstrator illegally targeted for deportation by the Trump administration—claiming that acknowledging a victim of government censorship and authoritarian brutality was equivalent to an effort to “legitimize hate.”

Using Jewish identity to justify war

There are limitless other examples—and things have only gotten worse since over the last years as Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, and now has joined the US in an illegal war on Iran.

That illegal war is widely, and even wildly, unpopular in the US. Yet US Jewish institutions have rushed to declare their enthusiasm. The ADL says it “stands with the United States, Israel and the Iranian people”—as if the Iranian people are eager to have their school children murdered and their populace poisoned. AIPAC announced that “We have a critical role to play to ensure America stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel until victory.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) insisted that “The world will be a safer place” because of the war. Which is a manifest and disgusting lie.

It is bad enough that Jewish institutions, claiming to represent and speak for Jews, have embraced a horrific, illegal, unpopular war. But it’s even worse that these institutions constantly insist that Jewish identity is inseparable from support for Israel, and now from support for the quagmire in Iran.

Last week the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jewish think-tank linked to Zionist institutional Judaism in the US, released a poll that 68% of “connected” Jews back the Iran war. The methodology of the poll is incredibly murky, but it looks like the JPPI essentially picked Jews who it thinks represent authentic Jewishness for its survey.

“In presenting its results as representative of ‘connected’ Jewish opinion, JPPI implies that connection to the American Jewish community means connection to the institutions of the Jewish establishment,” Jewish Currents writes. In other words, JPPI assumes that real Jewish identity is establishment Zionist Jewish identity and then uses massaged evidence of Zionist Jewish support for the war as evidence that Jewish people as a whole support the war.

JPPI’s poll and Netanyahu’s social media post both deceitfully link Jewish people as a whole, and Jewish identity as a whole, to a massively unpopular, immoral, and evil war. A campaign to link Jewish people to an unpopular war, conducted by non-Jewish people, would be considered antisemitic propaganda—a blood libel.

And you know what? When Jewish people link Jewish identity to war and atrocity, that is also antisemitic propaganda.

Our own institutions are smearing us

It’s important to recognize that Israel is not all Jewish people. Antisemitism (like all bigotry) collapses a whole range of individuals into a single identity in order to justify collective punishment.

Jewish people in the US at a random congregation are not responsible for the Israeli states decision to commit genocide against Palestinians or to go to war against Iranians. When people attack synagogues to protest Israeli actions, they are engaged in antisemitic collective punishment, just as Stephen Miller is engaged in racist collective punishment when he holds up some immigrant who committed a crime as a reason to throw thousands of immigrants into concentration camps, and just as people who attacked Mulsims after 9/11 were engaged in Islamophobic collective punishment.

These forms of collective punishment do not generate spontaneously. In order to get people to see all immigrants as part of a single, dangerous group identity, someone has to prime people to think of them as a part of a single, dangerous group identity. Someone has to create propaganda which tells the public that “these people” act as a unit and should be considered as a unit. That’s why the right has spent years and longer demonizing Muslims and immigrants in order to justify domestic persecution and foreign wars.

Jewish people have not been subject to the same kind of organized, relentless targeting by the right (though that looks like it’s changing.) But antisemitism has still been rising, as attacks on synagogues show. Why?

The answer is straightforward. Israel and Zionist orgs in the US have effectively been releasing huge amounts of antisemitic propaganda, linking Jews to the action of a violent nation state and its policies of sweeping censorship, apartheid, genocide, and war. When people protest a genocide, they are beaten, arrested, and threatened with deportation—and they are told that this is done in the name of Jewish identity, because any objection to Israel policy is supposedly antisemitic. Now Jewish orgs are insisting, through bogus polls, that Jewish identity legitimizes the war—blind or indifferent to the ways in which this will, instead, delegitimize Jewish identity itself.

The very organizations which were created to protect Jewish people and to combat antisemitism—the ADL, the AJC—are instead doubling and tripling down on essentializing Jewish identity and linking it to a violent ethnonationalist regime and its list of horrors.

When American Jews in the diaspora object to being used in this way, we are told that we are too secular, or too disconnected from community, or too far left to be real Jews, and that if we don’t shut up they’ll sic the fascist police on us too. Escalating antisemitism, spurred in part by the antisemitic propaganda unleashed by Zionist orgs (both Jewish and non-Jewish), is immediately turned into more antisemitic propaganda (by Netanyahu and others) linking Jewish identity to Israeli atrocities. We are caught in a seemingly endless spiral of blood and hate.

How do we stop this?

I wish I had a clearcut way to end that spiral. But there are some hopeful approaches. Jewish leaders like Bernie Sanders and Brad Lander help all Jews when they speak forcefully against Israeli atrocities and against Islamophobia. Organizations like Judaism Unbound and Jewish Voices for Peace are a vital way of asserting a Jewish identity and community that is not bound to Israel’s (unbelievably bad) geopolitical decisions.

Ultimately the only way forward is for Jewish people and non-Jewish people alike to reject bigotry, collective punishment, and violence—against Jews, against Palestinians, or against anyone. And that means we need to condemn all antisemitic propaganda whatever its source, from the antisemitic anti-Zionist screeds of Tucker Carlson and his ilk to the antisemitic broadsides of the Zionists who falsely reiterate, over and over, that Jewish identity means war.