The impossibility of separating anti-Zionist agitation from Jew-hatred - by Jonathan S. Tobin

A “Forward” editor learns that those who seek to delegitimize Israel and its supporters are more than willing to tolerate anti-Semitism.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
16 October '19..

Forward opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon got a shock last week when she discovered while taking part in a conference at Bard College that it is impossible to separate the discussion of anti-Semitism from one that focuses on Israel and Zionism. But while her experience was surprising on one level, it really should have been a given.

Ungar-Sargon was asked to speak at the conference hosted by Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center, where she was to be part of a discussion on “Racism and Zionism: Black-Jewish Relations.” Prior to that, she was slated to take part in another panel that was to discuss anti-Semitism along with Harvard University scholar Ruth Wisse and a Holocaust survivor. Students for Justice for Palestine, a group that actively promotes the BDS movement and which engages in anti-Semitic incitement, planned to protest at the conference. But what threw Ungar-Sargon for a loop was that these opponents of Israel weren’t going to be satisfied with protesting at the session about Zionism but would first seek to disrupt the one about anti-Semitism.

That session was the only one at the conference where the entire panel would be composed of Jews—and it was also the one that Israel haters planned to target. But what really shocked Ungar-Sargon was that members of the Bard faculty, as well as some of the other scholars and writers participating in the conference, supported this effort to challenge the presentation on anti-Semitism.

Not unreasonably, Ungar-Sargon understood this effort essentially to silence a discussion about Jew-hatred and to single out three Jewish speakers for opprobrium as itself an act of anti-Semitism.

But the conference organizers, along with many of the intellectuals present for the show, disagreed. As far as they were concerned, any talk about anti-Semitism was fair game for being hooted down because part of that discussion would inevitably focus on how Israel and its supporters are targeted in ways that are indistinguishable from classic hatred aimed at Jews. As Ungar-Sargon tried to point out, protesting Jews because of anger about Israel even when they are speaking about Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic. As she later wrote: “Right-wing anti-Semites see any accusation of anti-Semitism as a Jewish conspiracy to take away the rights of whites, while left-wing anti-Semites sees the same accusation as an attempt to silence Palestinians.” The mere raising of the issue is unacceptable since it makes those who hate Israel feel “unsafe.”

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