A 6 June article by the Times reporter Josie Einsor explored the fears of the American Jewish community amidst the huge post-Oct. 7 spike in antisemitism, a tsunami of hate which includes several shocking acts of antisemitic violence: A fire bombing attack on the official residence of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, while Shapiro and his family were at home; the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington, DC; and a molotov cocktail and flamethrower attack on Jewish peace activists in Colorado by an Egyptian national.
Though there are certainly some differences between the last three attacks, they all share one common demonolater: The antisemitic perpetrators were all anti-Israel activists, again showing the empirically demonstrated fact that those who hate the Jewish state are dramatically more likely than most people to hate Jews qua Jews.
For the most part, Einsor, in her piece titled “‘Jews have never been more terrified for their safety in the US’”, does a good job of reporting on the profound anxieties of Jews in the US who have experienced anti-Jewish incidents since Hamas’s massacre.
However, towards the end of her piece, she deemed it necessary to give ‘the other side’ – those who attributes attacks on Jews to Israel’s behavior during their war against Hamas. The article conveys this theme by citing photos coming out of Gaza, showing:
babies trapped in the rubble of bombed-out buildings, the aftermath of strikes on markets and hospitals. More than 50,000 have died since Israel began its offensive on the occupied strip nearly 20 months ago, the majority of whom are women and children, according to Gaza’s health authority, which is run by Hamas.
On Tuesday, Israeli soldiers opened fire near crowds of Palestinians walking towards a food distribution site, leaving 27 people dead. “Incidents like this are radicalising individuals living in the West, continuing a cycle of conflict, terrorism and violent extremism,” said Colin Clarke, an expert on extremism and director of research at the non-profit Soufan Center.
Tellingly, one of the alleged examples cited by Ensor is inaccurate.
As the Times admitted in a correction we prompted to an earlier story by another journalist, it’s an unproven Hamas accusation that Israeli soldiers killed dozens of Palestinians queing for food. In fact, the article linked to in the sentence makes the ambiguity of the circumstances surrounding the shooting clear. So, the incident in question, which the extremism expert cites as among the events “radicalising individuals”, likely didn’t happen.
However, even leaving that one faux example aside, it’s disturbing to see the Times legitimise someone who’s effectively blaming Israeli policy for “radicalising” people into carrying out antisemitic attacks and perpetuating the “cycle of violence” – a narrative which denies agency to the perpetrator of violent attacks against Jews, while instead blaming the Jewish state.
The Times is promoting what was aptly referred to by the late Norman Geras, in a 2012 speech, as “alibi antisemitism”: the argument that Israel’s putatively oppressive policies render antisemitism understandable. The accusation that Jews as a people are responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group of Jews is codified as antisemitic by the IHRA Working Definition.
To understand why, Geras noted, imagine someone attributing the growth of hostility towards black people or South Asians as an understandable phenomenon because of the way some blacks or South Asians behave.
Here’s another way to understand how morally defensible it is to blame Israel for the antisemitism and radicalisation of individuals who attack Jews: Imagine if Zionist Jews in the US or UK had, after the collective Jewish trauma of Hamas’s Oct. 7th massacre, began attacking Muslims or those of Palestinian descent. Is there really any question that such Jewish perpetrators would be (rightly) seen as violent racists? Such incidents certainly wouldn’t have been defended as a result of the understandable radicalisation of Jews stemming from the barbaric antisemitic attack by Muslims on Oct. 7.
It’s extremely dispiriting that the Times reporter, in anotherwise solid report about anti-Jewish racism post Oct. 7, felt the need to promote such a morally unserious and dangerous myth about the ‘root cause’ antisemitism, one which exculpates the perpetrators while effectively blaming the victim.
