Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 61: Is criticizing Israel antisemitic?

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East. Our current question: Is criticizing Israel antisemitic? If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

And on to my next question. Every time somebody criticizes Israel, you accuse them of being anti-Semitic. I hear this a lot. I'm going to take it as a question. It's something you hear from very senior people as well, not just trolls, not just ordinary people. President of Ireland, Higgins recently, Michael Higgins said something very similar. If you criticize Netanyahu's policies, you're then described as anti-Semitic. And that campaign against Ireland claiming that it is anti-Semitic is in fact hurting in

in Ireland from America, for example. What's fascinating about this argument is that there's nothing complicated about the answer. It's actually unbelievably simple. Criticism of Israel, criticism of Israel's actions, criticism of Netanyahu or his policies is not anti-Semitic. There's nothing anti-Semitic about them. I say that as somebody with several hundred essays, podcast episodes, interviews, etc. over the last 20 years criticizing Netanyahu, Netanyahu's policies, other Israeli prime

ministers and leaders and governments and ministers and the things they have done, sometimes very fierce critiques, including, by the way, of their behavior during this war, including decisions that unnecessarily hurt Palestinians during this war. I promise you, I have not spoken a word of anti-Semitism in all of my critiques of the Israeli government. Where does the anti-Semitism come into play? Because it's still there. Anything Israel does, fair game. Israel's very existence as a Jewish polity, the very idea that Jews are a people capable of self-determination is contested by most of the activist corps of the pro-Palestinian campaign. They insist that they understand what Jewish identity is,

and they'll always find that one Jew or the 100,000 Jews in 13 million who agree with them and argue that Judaism is not a people, not a nation. Jews were always a nation, always in their own. official definition, in their religious legal definition, they were always a people. And in Europe and in the Muslim world, they were always defined as a separate people. The idea that the Jews of Iraq are Arab Jews, the Iraqis, is a new Arab idea. Arabs treated them and thought of them and told them that they were a different people for all the centuries in which they lived together. And that's absolutely true of Poland and Russia and Dostro-Hungary and Prussia and Germany and France even.

You had to get to the French Revolution to find French people who were willing to have the Jews be French. We call that emancipation. The end of the ghetto laws, the separation laws, the laws telling Jews where they could live and where they can't live. Jews were always a separate people, but it's not just that others said so. Jews themselves believe they are separate people and always have. And if you deny that, yeah, that's anti-Semitic. And therefore, if you deny that Jews are a thing that can have a state, which is core dogma, the pro-Palestinian campaign. The pro-Palestinian campaign is not a campaign to end war and build a state

for Palestinians and give the Palestinians independence. That's something a lot of Jews and a lot of Zionists would sign on to. It's a campaign that argues that Israel is not legitimate, cannot exist, and at its core, its very existence, is a great and vast crime. That's anti-Semitic. Critic anything Israel does. But the last eight million Jews living in the Eastern Hemisphere after a century in which all others could not survive. And by the time they moved to Israel, there was nowhere else to go. All the immigration quotas were already in place. The idea that they should not have done what they did,

which is the only strategy that actually allowed them to survive, the idea that that is illegitimate, the idea that their survival is a crime, which is what the argument is. People dress it up differently. They pretend there were other options. They pretend that wasn't what was at stake for them. them. They pretend like the mass Arab invasion in 1948 that actually precipitated that war,

that turned that war into what it was. Wasn't a genocidal attempt to destroy this last refuge, while Jews still languish in displaced persons' camps in their hundreds of thousands on German soil three years after the Holocaust, because even three years after the Holocaust, nobody would take them in anywhere on Earth. The idea that that is a crime, their very existence and survival, is anti-Semitic. The idea that Jews and Jewish self-determination, Zionism, is somehow the distillation of all the evils of the world. That Zoran Mamdani himself participated in for years publicly, explicitly, arguing that the New York Police Department, how did he put it about police abuse and police violence in New York, that the IDF laced their boots, that their tiny little program of coordinating and training with Israel. police, which they also have with Jordan and with Columbia and with a thousand other countries,

Mexico, Qatar, Singapore, many non-democracies. They are the New York NYPD trains and collaborates and shares intelligence with the police forces of dictatorships. But the only program that Zoran Mamdani has publicly come out against again and again over the years is the sharing with the Israeli police. And that helped teach the NYPD to be violent is his argument. The NYPD is 34,000 people. 20 participate annually in the exchange program with the Israel police. The NYPD learned from Israel some counterterror tactics. They learned some community policing, how you do policing that is gentle in complicated multi-ethnic areas. for example building police stations in Arab towns composed of Arab cops who speak Arabic,

which is a whole thing the Israel police tried to do over the years. The NYPD I happen to know because I happen to once have met one of these delegations as a journalist was coming to study that because it was thinking about having Haredi, Hasidic, cops, and Muslim cops and Sikh cops and cops that are Puerto Rican for a majority Puerto Rican neighborhood. That's anti-Semitism. If, for example, 150,000 dead in Sudan, in a war involving various versions of radical Islam, involving Western weapons, involving forces backed by the allies of Western countries, and it's nowhere.

I don't mind that the young people in the world were radicalized against Israel by seeing the images of the victims of war on their phones. I actually don't mind that. If that's the beginning of a new way of thinking about war, Every war will now have all of its victims on everybody's phones everywhere around the world, and it'll be impossible to have war again. Great. I'll be the last bad guy because there won't be any more bad guys because war won't be possible anymore. Let's do that. Let's have that be what this is. But it's not what this is. Because you'll never see images of victims of war ever again if Israel isn't involved. because those very algorithms that drive the images from Gaza to your phone

hide images of Syria and Yemen and Sudan. Because TikTok actually is manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party. Because social media is not the breaking of structures of power. It is used by those very structures to manipulate you at a mass scale. Any criticism of this war, a terrible war, war in an urban setting, with mass numbers of civilians, I want to talk about Hamas's strategy of hiding in tunnels. It built the most comprehensive bomb shelter system in the history of war,

and not a single Gazan child was allowed into those bomb shelters in the entirety of the two years of war. But you don't have to forgive me that. You don't have to listen to that. You don't have to let me exonerate myself that way. No, it's a terrible bad war with thousands of dead kids, full stop. Fine. That is a legitimate position. Nothing anti-Semitic about that position,

unless it's the only war you'll ever care about. and anybody will ever care about. And the unbelievable, unprecedented marches in every Western capital will never recur for any other war that Israel isn't involved with. And the last living Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere have to justify their existence before the world. Then it's all just anti-Semitic. And even your love and decency that were mobilized by those images, by those manipulations. But you were manipulated into only seeing the right images.

Because the people manipulating you don't care about war and they don't care about dead kids. We saw in this two years, images from Syria of murdered children laundered on TikTok as images from Gaza and getting millions and millions of views until it was floated up to the top of the comments that this is actually an image from three years earlier in Syria. And then the image disappeared. Faded away. Nobody cared anymore. nobody wanted to advance it anymore, it didn't matter anymore. So it's about Jews. If you have marches

that dwarf anything that ever happened in Vietnam, anything that ever happened about apartheid South Africa, in regularity, in scale, in coordination, the exact same rituals, the exact same vocabulary, the same signs, the signs are all in English, even if they're in other countries that speak other languages. The signs are in English. Every name was deployed at Israel, colonial imperialism, apartheid, genocide, ecocide, there's no word invented for evil that hasn't been deployed at Israel. Is Israel really that much

worse than every bad thing that has happened to the Muslim world? Now, in the last 10 years, full-on genocides with 10 times the death toll of Gaza? Is Israel really the worst thing on earth? Or is this a vast campaign? Which is what it feels like to most Jews and most Israelis.

none of that exonerates Israel. If you come to Israel with critique in the middle of a terrible war, you are totally legitimate. The anti-Semitism is in the uniqueness of all of this, just exclusively for Israel, and the anti-Semitism is in the demand that millions of Jews not have survived the 20th century. If I give you the benefit of the doubt, I tell you that you're ignorant of our history, so you don't know that that's what you're actually demanding when you're demanding that Israel never be established. or arguing that its establishment was a crime. But ignorance only covers you so far.

Ignorance is only a limited defense for bigotry. It is ultimately bigotry. And the people selling you on it, they know. They know.