Weaponization of antisemitism
The exploitation of accusations of antisemitism, especially to delegitimize criticism of Israel or opposition to Zionism, is sometimes called weaponization of antisemitism. Cases of weaponizing antisemitism have arisen in various contexts, including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and debates over the concept of new antisemitism and the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Charges of antisemitism made in bad faith have been described as a smear tactic and likened to "playing the race card". Some anti-Zionist Jews have been accused of antisemitism and labeled "self-hating Jews".
The charge of weaponization has itself been criticized as antisemitic or rooted in antisemitic tropes, and as a rhetorical device employed across the political spectrum to delegitimize concerns about antisemitism, especially in anti-Zionist discourse.
History
In 1943, future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion called a British court antisemitic after it "had implicated Zionist leaders in arms-trafficking". Christopher Sykes wrote that this incident began "a new phase in Zionist propaganda" in which "to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic". Propaganda theorist Noam Chomsky has written that, although Sykes traced the origins of weaponized antisemitism to this episode, it was not until "the post-1967 period that the tactic has been honed to a high art, increasingly so, as the policies defended became less and less defensible". In 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban wrote: "One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism." Of Eban's statement, Chomsky said: "That is a convenient stand. It cuts off a mere 100 percent of critical comment!"New antisemitism
After the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the Anti-Defamation League —with the support of AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen, according to historian Ilan Pappé—sought to "portray certain 'anti-Israel' actions as anti-Semitic", especially with regard to international calls for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank. In 1974, ADL leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein published The New Anti-Semitism, which identified anti-Zionism as a "new antisemitism", an idea the ADL has sought to popularize since the early 1970s.In 1980, Edward Said said that, since its inception, Zionist discourse had aimed "to lay claim to Palestine both as a backward, largely uninhabited territory" and as a place where Jews had "a unique historical privilege" to rebuild a homeland. As a result, he said, this meant anyone who opposed Zionism "immediately aligned oneself with anti-Semitism". Said said this routine conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism functioned to suppress criticism of Israel and was reinforced by simplistic media narratives, the influence of pro-Israel pressure groups, and academics' and intellectuals' uncritical repetition of political clichés.
In 1989, Cheryl Rubenberg wrote that it was "a common practice among Israel's advocates" to label opponents of "the lobby's positions" or supporters of a Palestinian homeland as antisemitic, referring to incidents involving U.S. politicians Charles Mathias, Pete McCloskey, and Jesse Jackson. In 1990, the Argentine newspaper Buenos Aires Herald defended the Peronist President of Argentina Carlos Menem against charges of antisemitism, writing that the allegations "may have been prompted by President Menem's good relations with Jews which constitutes 'a perceived threat to the Radical Party's traditional Jewish constituency'".
In a 2005 interview with Campus Watch, Norman Finkelstein said, "Whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle such as the Intifada or international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, American Jewish organizations orchestrate this extravaganza called the 'new anti-Semitism.'" Jonathan Judaken said Finkelstein's dismissal of new antisemitism was "the mirror-image of the alarmists he seeks to denounce".
Examples
In the early 1950s, U.S. journalist Dorothy Thompson, a former advocate of the movement, was publicly called antisemitic when she began to criticize Zionism after a visit to Palestine in 1945. Thompson felt the accusations, which persisted throughout her career, amounted to a "type of blackmail" or character assassination. Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote, "today, many see the silencing of a bold humanitarian advocate in her story, and it is not difficult to understand why", but also that "there can be no doubt that anti-Semitism was a theme in Thompson's later writing."In his 1956 memoir, British military officer John Bagot Glubb denied accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of Israel, writing: "It does not seem to me to be either just or expedient that similar criticisms directed against the Israeli government should brand the speaker with the moral stigma generally associated with anti-Semitism." Israeli historian Benny Morris linked such allegations against Glubb to a "tendency among Israelis and Jews abroad to identify strong criticism of Israel as tantamount to, or as at least stemming from, anti-Semitism", although Morris also said Glubb's anti-Zionism was "tinged by a degree of anti-Semitism" and his "outlook on the history of the Jews... is jaundiced, inaccurate, and, at times, blatantly anti-Semitic".
Critics such as the Israel-Palestine researcher Suraya Dadoo, journalist Ben White, and British scholar Matthew Abraham have suggested that international Israeli advocacy groups have charged prominent people who express pro-Palestinian sentiment, such as Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu, with antisemitism. Abraham says this is a form of "political correctness" that undermines "greater understanding about the conditions producing conflict in the Israel-Palestine conflict". Tutu said in 2002 that "to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic... People are scared in this country to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful." South African Muslim scholar Farid Esack wrote that it was unfortunate that Tutu's statement "verged into antisemitic tropes", but "this misspoken moment unfolded because of his prophetic support of Palestinians".
American child educator Ms. Rachel has faced allegations of antisemitism after advocating for children experiencing trauma and starvation in Gaza. In November 2025, the pro-Israel advocacy group StopAntisemitism accused her of spreading Hamas propaganda and named her a finalist for its "Antisemite of the Year". The left-wing group Jews for Racial & Economic Justice defended Ms. Rachel, saying that StopAntisemitism "solely exists to punish and harass private and public individuals who criticize the actions of the State of Israel or simply express sympathy for and solidarity with Palestinians."
Analysis
The charge of weaponization has been raised across the political spectrum, especially in anti-Zionist discourse on the left and right. Scholars such as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Matthew Abraham have suggested that the charge of antisemitism is becoming less effective when applied to criticisms of Israel.In 2021, religion scholar Atalia Omer of the University of Notre Dame said that weaponization of antisemitism is bad for all involved, including Israel and the broader Jewish community. In 2022, Nick Riemer, a Palestine solidarity activist and linguist at the University of Sydney, said that antisemitism "provides the excuse for a heavy-handed and highly irrational assault on fundamental democratic liberties", comparing it to how "Islamophobia has been politically instrumentalized in the service of neocolonial control of Muslim populations".
While warning in 2010 against denying or minimizing antisemitism, attorney and academic Kenneth L. Marcus also cautioned against overuse of the "anti-Semitism card", paralleling concerns raised by Richard Thompson Ford with the broader misuse of "the race card": that it can be dishonest and mean-spirited, risks weakening legitimate accusations of bigotry, risks distracting socially concerned organizations from other social injustices, and hurts outreach efforts between Jewish and Arab or Muslim groups.
Tamar Meisels has written that, though she suspects "that some fierce anti-Zionism is tainted with old-fashioned anti-Semitism... being an anti-Semite does not actually disqualify someone from also making rational criticisms of Israel and the US... even a stopped clock is right twice a day".
Israel and Zionism
Some activists and scholars have said that weaponization of antisemitism, and new antisemitism in particular, has been used to stifle criticism of Israel. Claims of antisemitism against critics of Israel have been compared to Soviet censorship, McCarthyism, and rhetorical strategies against the South-African anti-apartheid movement.In his 1992 book The Passionate Attachment: America's involvement with Israel, the American diplomat emeritus George Ball wrote that AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups "employ the charge of 'anti-Semitism' so carelessly as to trivialize it", suggesting that this was due to the lack of any "rational argument" with which to defend the state's actions. In 2004, Joel Beinin wrote that the Anti-Defamation League and other organizations used the "well-established ploy" of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, exposing Jews to attack by suggesting they are responsible for the Israeli government's actions.
In 2008, Norman Finkelstein said that organizations such as the ADL had advanced charges of new antisemitism since the 1970s "to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism". Others have also accused the ADL of advancing false claims of antisemitism against anti-Zionists. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write that Israel's supporters have sought to shield it from criticism and pressure using fears of a "new antisemitism", naming as examples Anti-Defamation League publications raising concerns of antisemitism at moments of particular political pressure against Israel. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has said, "anti-Zionism is antisemitism."
Various writers have suggested that charges of antisemitism in discussions of Israel can have a chilling effect, deterring criticism of Israel due to fear of being associated with beliefs linked to antisemitic crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust. Finkelstein has said that use of "the anti-Semitism card" attempts to displace "fundamental responsibility for causing the conflict from Israel to the Arabs, the issue no longer being Jewish dispossession of Palestinians but Arab 'opposition' to Jews". In 2008, he wrote that some of what "the Israel lobby" suggests is antisemitism is in fact "exaggeration and fabrication", "mislabeling legitimate criticism of Israeli policy", and "the unjustified yet predictable 'spillover' from criticism of Israel to Jews generally".
In 2008, Mearsheimer and Walt wrote that the charge of antisemitism can discourage others from defending in public those against whom the charge has been made. They said that rhetorical accusations of antisemitism put a burden of proof on the accused person, putting them in the "difficult" position of having to prove a negative. They wrote, "we should all be disturbed by the presence of genuine anti-Semitism", but suggested that "playing the anti-Semitism card stifles discussion" and "allows myths about Israel to survive unchallenged". In 2010, Kenneth L. Marcus wrote that although Mearsheimer and Walt called such accusations "the Great Silencer", they had not themselves been silenced, having received a wide audience for their book and appearances. Marcus also wrote that many pro-Israel commentators had also taken pains to say that not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
In 2019, Joshua Leifer, an editor of Dissent magazine, wrote that campaigns that consider anti-Zionism antisemitic aim to shift criticisms of the Israeli government "beyond the pale of mainstream acceptability". In December 2023, antisemitism expert David Feldman said that, while "some anti-Zionism takes an antisemitic form", the context must be considered when differentiating antisemitism from legitimate discourse and that there is "a long history of Israel and its supporters portraying anti-Zionism and other criticisms of Israel as antisemitic" in order to delegitimize them.
In 2024, Raz Segal wrote that conflating the state of Israel with Jews is part of the weaponization of antisemitism discourse that protects Israel from criticism, especially in discussion of Israeli settler colonialism. Political scientist Omar Shahabudin McDoom wrote in 2024 that the identification of "critic of the conduct of the Israeli government" with antisemitism is not necessarily in bad faith but may be attributed to conscious or unconscious "prosemitic" bias: "Although it has long been argued the antisemite label has been used instrumentally to silence critics of Israel, it may not always be disingenuous behaviour."