RUTHFULLY YOURS

When does anti-Zionism become outright anti-Semitism? Since 7 October 2023, it has become disturbingly commonplace for ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations to demand the total destruction of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. Claims that Israel deliberately targets children have echoes of the ancient, anti-Semitic blood libel. Sympathy for Hamas, a terror group committed to the murder of Jews, is also disturbingly widespread in a protest movement that claims to stand for ‘peace’.

David Christopher Kaufman – editor and columnist at the New York Post – joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss why Jews need to be more vocal in standing up for Israel. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim that, in the aftermath of 7 October, people were marching against Israel, rather than against Jewish people?

David Christopher Kaufman: The horror of that statement is that, when people turn on Jews, the endgame is usually an attempt at mass extermination.

Jews have often been alright in history. They were alright in Weimar Germany. In many ways, Jews were alright in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand in late-15th-century Spain. But, suddenly, they weren’t alright. Millions of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, and millions of Jews were exterminated in concentration camps during the Second World War.

It pains me greatly to see so many Jewish people not speaking up. We had Adrien Brody winning an Oscar for playing a Holocaust victim for the second time in his career. Yet he said nothing about anti-Semitism, even while he was on the biggest stage in the world, benefiting from telling Jewish stories. In many ways, our own people are not doing their job. We’re allowing the bad guys to define the narrative.

The pro-Palestinian side, the anti-Zionist side, is banking on Jewish fear. It is counting on Jews being afraid, timid and silent. That’s the most important weapon it has in its arsenal.

Because of our history, Jews have not had many opportunities to defend themselves. We saw what happened in the ghettos in Warsaw under Nazi occupation. But now we have our own country. We have Jewish soldiers. We have Jews who are willing to risk their lives to defend other Jews. The way I look at it, Jews defending Jews is a revolutionary act. And we need Jews to be revolutionaries. No one is going to do it for us.

O’Neill: You come from both an African American and a Jewish background. What’s the relationship like between African Americans and Jewish Americans right now?

Kaufman: One thing that makes me irate is ‘movement mooching’. That’s what I call aligning the Palestinian struggle with the black struggle. I feel like my history has been hijacked. Because, if you look at the African American struggle for civil rights, it was, for the most part, a non-violent movement.

The cornerstone of everything Hamas does centres on killing Jews. When I see black people saying that African Americans and Palestinians share so much history and so much struggle, I just think: ‘Fuck you.’ It’s factually, philosophically and morally incorrect.

I also think celebrating these alliances just isn’t effective. In fact, it makes things worse. The average black American is far less economically stable than the average Jew. In many ways, blacks and Jews in America don’t have a lot in common any more. Instead, we need to be convincing young black kids that they have nothing in common with Hamas.

We need to be convincing young Jews, young LGBT people and the ‘Queers for Palestine’ crowd that everything they believe is derailed and denied by Hamas. There is nothing progressive, revolutionary or resistant about the people fighting for Hamas. They are fundamentalists, Islamists and mass murderers, who are committed to the destruction of Jews and Westerners, to the subjugation of women and to the murder of gay people.

O’Neill: I wanted to ask you about what you call ‘Israel erasure’. What do you make of it when Jewish representatives in the US, and maybe Europe as well, talk about rising anti-Semitism, while pushing Israel to one side?

Kaufman: I’ve never seen an American minority that is so willing to turn against its own people. You would never see blacks turning on blacks at the height of Black Lives Matter. Meanwhile, there is a group of American Jews that is desperate to clarify they’re Jews, not Zionists. They support the Jewish community, but they don’t support Israel. They’re critical of Netanyahu and the West Bank. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being critical. But Netanyahu did not cause Islamic fundamentalism. That has been around since the seventh century.

I want to tell these people leading anti-Zionist Jewish groups that when Hamas militants come to your door, they will still kill you. The people who are committed to our eradication do not care about our individual beliefs. The only thing they care about is that we are Jews.

O’Neill: How optimistic do you feel about the reckoning that America is currently having with its institutions? Will Trump do something real to tackle the problem of anti-Semitism?

Kaufman: Trump is an extremely problematic president. But when it comes to this issue, he’s cultivating an atmosphere that says institutional anti-Semitism will no longer be allowed. One of the big issues we had during the Biden administration, particularly in liberal cities like New York, is that there was no accountability. Trump is saying there will be consequences, and they will be similar to the consequences for any other form of discrimination.

My hope is that Jews themselves will begin to have more confidence. One of the reasons many Jews have been so quiet over the past 16 months is that they didn’t believe the system would protect them. In woke ideology, you hear so much about believing black women, believing trans people, and so on. Nobody believed Jewish people when they said that they couldn’t attend class, because pro-Palestinian mobs had barricaded the entrance.

Trump’s people say that they’re going to defend us. We’re going to make sure that they actually do, and hold them accountable.

David Christopher Kaufman was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: