The charge that alleged antisemites represent the opposition to the current genocide in Gaza illustrates the turnabout that history has wrought. The charge that this opposition reflects a hatred of Jews is a non sequitur. Was opposition to the Holocaust also the product of hatred of Jews? No? Then opposition to genocide bears no necessary relation to hatred of Jews. Only by 1) defining antisemitism as opposition to the policies of the nation-state of Israel and 2) defining the interests of Israel as the interests of all Jews, does this formulation have logic. Neither of these is true.
For those who missed it, the effective legal definition of antisemitism that is now being deployed across the West is opposition to the policies of the nation-state of Israel. This is more likely than not the result of actual antisemites being hard to find amongst Western opponents of the US – Israeli genocide. Nevertheless, the leaderships of both parties in the US are taking a hard line against the Americans opposed to genocide. The sense now being put forward that there is disagreement amongst the party leaderships over it is misplaced. They both support genocide and ethnic cleansing.
In this regard, I was recently ambushed by longtime friends who are American Jews connected to the top of the Democratic party over my opposition to the genocide currently underway in Gaza and the West Bank. What took most of an hour to understand was that their poorly informed discussion of ‘antisemitism’ had anything to do with my politics. Again, opposition to genocide and antisemitism are neither logically nor factually related to one another except in the minds of political marketing agents for Israel. This now apparently includes the very top of the Democratic Party.
(I am not a party partisan. I voted for Jill Stein in 2016 and supported Bernie Sanders in 2020 and Jill Stein again in 2024).
Preceding party loyalties is that the position of my Jewish, Democrat, friends with respect to Israel is indifferentiable from that of Donald Trump and most of MAGA. But my friends imagine that they are opposing Trump by siding with Israel. Their logic is: 1) Trump is fascist, 2) fascists hate Jews, 3) Israel supports Jews, therefore 4) Trump hates Israel. A poorer reading of the current political schema is difficult to imagine. But this is American party politics in 2026. Great policy differences are claimed based on what people don’t know.
Since 1948 the phrase ‘antisemitism’ has been used as a political bludgeon to great affect against critics of the policies of the nation state of Israel. While by definition, the most antisemitic people on the planet are Israelis— Israel’s Arab neighbors are Semites, the term is used to conflate hatred of Jews with opposition to the policies of the nation-state of Israel. Left unexplained is how one would criticize these policies without being accused of antisemitism? Without an alternative, the charge is but a way to shut down criticism of Israel.
The fraud lies in the conflation. I don’t hate or even mildly dislike Jews. I have lots of Jewish friends, many of whom I have great affection for. But I vehemently oppose the policies and actions of the nation state of Israel and the foreign policy of the US that makes it possible. The unwillingness of the US and Israeli political establishments to grant that legitimate criticism is possible without having at its core hatred of Jews is political posturing intended to silence dissent. The move is to exert fascistic control over legitimate political discourse.
Graph: American neocons (neoconservatives) migrated to the Democratic Party following George W. Bush’s military catastrophe in Iraq. But very little of the Democratic Party rank-and-file have supported the neocon project since it emerged in the 1990s. This has placed the leadership of the Party in the position of trying to ‘manage’ rank-and-file views to keep donations from Zionists flowing to Democrats. That this places the Democratic Party leadership on the side of genocide and ethnic cleansing is being hidden behind misdirection regarding antisemitism. Source: Gallup.
With a genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank still underway, the slander behind the antisemitism charge has come full circle. ‘Antisemites’ in 2026 are people who oppose fascist governments using genocide to exterminate a people. And the fascist exterminationists in 2026 are Western liberals allied with Christian evangelicals to empty Palestine of Palestinians. The blind spot of my Jewish friends comes from using opposition to a genocide that ended in the 1940s to legitimate the genocide that Israel is carrying out right now.
Why the charge of antisemitism persists is that for the last seven decades it has worked to silence critics of Israeli policy. While hatred of Jews most certainly exists, how does it differ in type from Israeli hatred of Palestinians? In other words, if ethnic hatred defines both certain forms of antisemitism and the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as a people, why would Israelis be in any way privileged over Palestinians in the American psyche? The answer is that Israelis have claimed an historical exception because of the Holocaust.
The problem for Israel and Zionism in the present is that what the US and Israel are doing in Gaza and the West Bank has its closest historical parallel in the actions of the Nazis in the Holocaust. This isn’t meant as slander. It isn’t to call Israelis Nazis as an insult. It is to make an historical analogy between the Nazi treatment of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s and the US – Israeli treatment of Palestinians living in Palestine in 2026. To those currently making legalistic distinctions regarding the definition of genocide, history will be the ultimate judge.
A reason to avoid and / or reject legalistic definitions of genocide is that seven decades of effort have been put into claiming that the Holocaust was a political and moral exception. But what the US and Israel are demonstrating in the present is that it was neither. Earlier political logic suggested that a resurgence of fascism would presage a new genocide. Well, Israel is widely regarded to be a fascist state in the present. And it is committing genocide. Israel is a fascist state committing genocide. This seems a weak basis for asserting it moral authority.
To Holocaust deniers, the Holocaust happened. Six million Jews were systematically slaughtered by the Nazis. And 27 million Soviets were murdered by the Nazis in WWII. For American and Israeli genocide deniers, the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon, is still underway. The question for American Zionists is how they can condemn one genocide while actively supporting another? This is more than just hypocrisy. It is a matter of social logic. If genocide is wrong, why are Zionists gleefully engaging in it?
In terms of social logic, to oppose one genocide while actively supporting another means that genocide isn’t the issue being contested. American supporters of Israel aren’t anti-genocide; they are pro-genocide. Their implied objection to the Holocaust isn’t that it occurred. It is that their forebears were on the losing side of it. But today Israelis are on the ‘winning’ side of a genocide. And according to polls, they couldn’t be happier. According to the polls, Israelis love genocide. Not the one that was a pogrom against Jews. The one that is a pogrom against Palestinians.
Ironically, Western leaders spent their time from the Russian Revolution (1917) to WWII conflating Judaism with Bolshevism. The word ‘ironically’ is applied because leaders like American President Woodrow Wilson conflated his hatred of Bolshevism with his hatred of the Slavic people. The Nazis targeted Jews, Bolsheviks and Slavs as ‘peoples’ to ‘be exterminated’ without the distinctions being claimed in the present. In other words, if genocide is the topic, cleaving Jews from the Soviets in the treatment that they received isn’t as clean as parsing the Holocaust by religious affiliation suggests.
The question needs to be asked why religious affiliation is considered the relevant parsing of the victims of the Nazis? The long history of anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe provides one answer. But the conflation of Judaism with Bolshevism that was prevalent at the time (WWII) provides another. Western capital feared a worker revolt at the same time that it lusted after vast Soviet resources. The Business Plot (1933) promoted by Wall Street financiers was the only attempted fascist coup in the US that is publicly known. The argument that led to it was economic. It was promoted by opponents of the New Deal.
Graph: beginning around 2020 (before October 7, 2022) a dramatic shift began in the way that younger Americans perceive Israel and the Palestinians. While Americans are told that the problem is messaging, Israeli dependence on the Holocaust for its ‘permanent victim’ status tells a different story. Was the problem with the Holocaust simply messaging? No. The problem with the Holocaust was its facts. Why then would the problem with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon be ‘messaging’ rather than similar facts? Because facts can be changed. With opinions, not so much in the near term. Source: Gallup.
Recall, partially motivating this essay was a recent ambush by friends regarding ‘antisemitism.’ Their effort included using AIPAC’s self-serving definition of antisemitism, a Reader’s Digest history of Israel, and near complete ignorance of events in Gaza and the West Bank since 1975 or thereabouts. Their ignorance regarding the current US – Israeli genocide in Gaza disqualifies them from having an opinion on antisemitism worth listening to. An analogy would be Germans in the 1960s defending Nazism without acknowledging the Holocaust. This unwillingness to take to heart inconvenient news regarding Israel is tragic given the stakes for large numbers of human beings.
Of current relevance is that my friends are connected to the very top of the Democratic Party. The Democrats face the conundrum that the rank-and-file oppose the US – Israeli genocide while the national Democrats support it. The same ‘leaders’ who lost two elections to Donald Trump now imagine it to be good strategy to run on the same issue that the Democrats lost to Trump on in 2024, the genocide in Gaza. Not only is this the wrong moral and strategic choice, but it is bad politics. Democrats would rather lose elections and keep their donors than win elections and have to legislate.
The problem with Democrats claiming that Donald Trump is a threat to the nation is that they support most of the same policies. Part of why my Jewish, Democrat, friends support the genocide in Gaza is because Joe Biden launched it. The (Joe) Biden administration rushed the 2,000 lb. bombs used to level Gaza to Israel and Biden personally, and against repeated ‘corrections’ made by his staff, lied about ‘babies baked in ovens’ to promote the genocide. But those who get their news from CNN or the New York Times don’t know anything about this.
What this implies is politics as usual. And in fact, when it comes to the US participating in genocide and ethnic cleansing, the difference between the leaderships of the parties is their level of candor. What remains of MAGA openly loves genocide and ethnic cleansing. Seeing three-year-old Palestinian children shot is the head is what they live for. Amongst Democrats, these are favored by the party leaders and Zionist oligarchs. The problem for the rank-and-file is that the party leaders are impervious to electoral losses. The only way to get rid of them is to end the party.
As Israel re-escalates its genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, Americans need to come to terms with the twin facts that 1) the US is currently engaged in a genocide— the extermination of a people, and 2) why we have a duty to stop it isn’t liberal interventionism— telling other nations what to do. Rather, the US is paying for the genocide and supplying the weapons, materiel and political cover that allows Israel to carry it out. We are withholding our consent to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing using our resources.
What stood out in my friends’ ‘intervention’ was how poorly informed it was. After running through two relatively benign instances of (real) antisemitism that affected their own lives, what became apparent is that they have no idea what life is like for the other 345,000,000 of us. What was missing is perspective. As a bougie white kid in the early 1970s, I experienced roughly 50X the violence that my friends claimed was evidence of intolerable antisemitism. It also trivializes genocides both past and present. Question: without knowing how others live, how is it possible to know that one’s experiences are exceptional? Answer: there is no way.
My father, who was gay (he passed a few years back), was nearly beaten to death twice in gay-bashing incidents. He was fired from jobs or denied promotions for being gay multiple times. He moved all of his possessions into a new apartment and then had the locks changed and all of his possessions confiscated when the landlord discovered that the was gay. This isn’t to deny or to minimize my Jewish friends’ experiences. It is to argue that claiming special victimhood requires knowing enough about the lives of others to plausibly claim that it is special.
It is this closed, self-referential, aspect of the victimhood narrative that made my friends come across as clueless and frivolous. The Holocaust happened. While people can debate its meaning, communists (Soviets) were the central target of the Nazis. The inhabitants of the first Nazi concentration camps were German and later Soviet communists. Twenty-seven million Soviets were murdered by the Nazis in WWII versus six million Jews.
The religious / moral answer to this question that emerged from the Holocaust is that it was the drive to exterminate ‘a people’ (Jews) that made the Holocaust a moral outlier in human history. Granted. And it is the Israeli effort to exterminate a people (Palestinians) in Gaza that unites the current genocide being carried out by the US and Israel with the Nazi Holocaust. Israelis can parse and prevaricate regarding their intentions to the extent that they care to. Outside of clueless and / or genocidal Zionists, no one is buying it.
Particularly offensive in the ‘antisemitism’ chide is ignorance of what Israel has been doing in Gaza and the West Bank. If an Islamic nation were to regularly ‘mow the lawn’ by murdering Jewish Israelis, chances are that Israelis and Western Zionists would rightly charge religious persecution (antisemitism). How is what the US and Israel are doing in Gaza and the West Bank not ethnic persecution that has been elevated to a genocide? An analogy would be the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) claiming that objections to lynching are ‘anti-white.’ Possibly. But they are definitely anti-lynching.
So why not take assertions that the objections are to genocide and ethnic cleansing at face value? Actual antisemites couldn’t care less what Israelis think of them. So why would they hide antisemitism as their motive if it were their motive? They wouldn’t. And what would staying silent about their actual antisemitism buy them? Credibility? With whom? Regarding what? Neither the US nor Israel could care less about credibility unless it supports their own foreign policy. So ‘secret’ antisemitism seems a low-probability description in this context.
As long as the KKK controls ‘the conversation,’ there exists no room to legitimately criticize lynching. If you do, you are charged with being anti-white (in this analogy). Anti-genocide protesters across the West are being charged with ‘antisemitism’ as they state plainly that their motive is anti-genocide, not hatred of Jews. This resulted in the definition of antisemitism being changed from hatred of Jews to criticism of the nation-state of Israel. If it relied on a robust definition of antisemitism, it would be clear that opposing the US – Israeli genocide isn’t antisemitic, it is anti-genocide.
My friends put themselves forward as representing the political center in the US. Democrats represent 28% of registered voters. But registered voters are but 65% of eligible voters. This leaves 18% of eligible voters (28% X 65% = 18%) being registered Democrats. Putting the split at 10% leadership, 90% rank-and-file, 1.8% of eligible voters (10% X 18% = 1.8%) are claiming that they represent the political center of the US. The arrogance is stunning. How can 1.8% of eligible voters claim to be the political center of anything? In terms of numbers, they don’t even qualify as a faction.
The national Democrats are caught in the paradox that to govern they must win elections, but to win elections means that their donors, not they, govern. This makes a more descriptively accurate name for legislators ‘political bribe launderers.’ So, the national Democrats can’t be honest about their actual agenda because it is to serve donors, not voters. But the system needs voters to provide a patina of legitimacy to fake democracy. How is Republicanism a form of representative democracy when it is the interests of donors, not voters, that are being represented?
While the same is true of Republicans— that they openly and proudly serve the interests of capital; they openly and proudly serve the interests of capital. So, the question for many of us isn’t whether or not Republicans openly and proudly serve the interests of capital. It is whether or not there exists an alternative to the Republicans? In a nominal sense, of course there is. In terms of policy, not so much. The American MIC, the oil and gas industry, tech, Wall Street, finance and infrastructure industries run US foreign policy. The parties answer to these through donors.
To understand how cynical conflation of opposition to genocide with antisemitism is, here is US Representative Randy Fine ‘translating’ the ‘actual’ motives of anti-genocide protesters into ‘Jew hatred.’ Question: if people’s words are meaningless in the sense that they can be mischaracterized with impunity, couldn’t it be just as easily argued that Fine’s ‘true’ motive is that he gets sexually aroused watching Palestinian children being shot in the head? And if anti-genocide protesters are by definition antisemitic, what does this imply about opposition to the Holocaust?
What Fine, Trump and their ilk are suggesting is that there are good and bad genocides, and that they support the good genocides. Isn’t that exactly what the Nazis thought as well? The Nazis used their bogus theory of genetic ‘hygiene’ to argue that their genocide was a good genocide because it benefitted the species. Those of us who oppose genocide on principal don’t find the Nazi argument compelling. Nor do we find the US – Israeli explanation for their genocide compelling. This isn’t ‘Jew hatred.’ It is ‘genocide hatred.’
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