‘Israel is focus of today’s Jews-hatreds’

The following is an article that I wrote, which appeared in the February 8, 2024, edition of the Washington Jewish Week:

In this month’s installment of “Remember When,” we look back at our coverage from Feb. 19-25, 1976, which included an article by Shlomo Avineri titled ‘Israel is focus of today’s Jew-hatreds’ in which he examined “contemporary forms of anti-Semitism.”

Avineri, who was born in Poland in 1933 and immigrated to pre-state Israel with his family in 1939, was a leading Israeli political scientist and a longtime professor at Hebrew University. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appointed Avineri as director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry in 1975, a position he held until Prime Minister Menachem Begin came to power in 1977.

“Today, the Diaspora Jew is not, as such, the target of anti-Jewish criticism; it is a criticism of Israel – its very existence, its legitimacy, its policies, its links of Diaspora Jews to it – which are the main targets of this new wave of attacks on the Jewish people. The sad irony is obvious, and the natural tendency is to deny or belittle the significance of this phenomenon. Yet, it cannot be escaped that it is Israel, and especially its post-1967 successes and post-1973 agonies, that appear to have granted a new appearance of legitimacy to a criticism of Jews; and if this criticism starts with Israel, it sometimes very quickly reverts to some of the traditional anti-Semitic patterns.”

Forty-eight years later, Avineri’s words seem almost prophetic. Today we are witnessing the same sort of “phenomenon” that he described. We see people marching in the streets, waving Palestinian and Hamas flags, yelling “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and decrying the state of Israel. The heated anti-Israel demonstrations and the rhetoric being used are ostensibly meant to criticize Israel, yet they very easily cross over to antisemitism. Jews are being collectively blamed for what they call Israel’s aggression against the people of Gaza, despite the fact that Israel was the target of a savage attack on Oct. 7 that resulted in Israel having to defend itself and its people yet again from terrorists intent on destroying the Jewish state. As Avineri said, if the criticism starts with Israel, “it sometimes very quickly reverts to some of the traditional anti-Semitic patterns.”