#6 Antizionism Is Not Antisemitism

Even talking about this stuff, it stirs me a bit. So if I, it's a stammer, I'm sorry. I David R and I live in North York, Ontario, Toronto. I have, uh, eye issues related to something called Choker, and it's an autoimmune disease, where you don't produce saliva in your throat or your eyes.

So I had to get some surgery done. They had to laser off some residual parts around my cornea. They head off theologist. A sense being to this person, this person's a doctor.

“So he's like, I think the second year of his fellowship,”

and he's in charge when the head isn't around. The person was of Middle Eastern background. Then he turned it look at his, at three in the chart.

And, uh, the first thing this person says to me is, "You Jewish?"

And I, I, I felt really defensive. You know, I, I said, "Yeah, but that's a German name too." He said, "Oh." And I said, "Is there another chair for my coat?" He said, "I'll just throw it in the floor."

So what happens is when you do this laser surgery, they make you open your eyes really wide, and you put your eyes into this thing, it looks almost like a periscope, right where you both eyes, and then they aim it, and then they zap, right?

It's just very painful. So, you know, I did well for the first few minutes. And then, the elderly, he said, "Keep your eyes open." I said, "I'm sorry, I have shoken since my, I explained it."

“He said, "Well, you have to try harder."”

That was like my third round of laser. When you laser, it's not just zap one second, zap one second. The zap can go on for more than a few seconds. Last time I was there, I had another fellow who was such a pro. He would take, and then he'd stop.

And I said, "Take a break now. I know must be hard for you." So there is a way of doing it better. But this person just kept zapping. Then my eyes were closing, he yelled at me more.

It was definitely painful, because he prolonged the hisaps. He did these long ones. I said, "Well, I'm sorry." I said, "Can we just have a break for a few minutes?" Because it's really hurting.

He said, "We will have five minutes. Let me just finish this one eye first, and then we'll do the other eye." I said, "Okay." So I just closed my eyes just to try to gather whatever moisture

I can to my eyes. He starts again. He said, "You're not keeping your eye open wide enough." I'm just like taking this. I just don't know any better.

I felt intimidated. Because this guy's behind the wheel of a laser machine.

I've never had that kind of experience with a doctor.

The more he yelled to me, the less able I was to keep my eyes open. It was more of the same with the other eye. Then at the end, the main ophthalmologist came in and looked. And he said, "Oh, this is still lost up here." So the fellow said, "Well, he wouldn't leave his eyes open."

Like, "Husatory." Anyway, when I went back to see the ophthalmologist, I said to him, "I can't see that person again." I just want you to know it didn't go well for me. He said, "Yeah, we've heard some other

comments about him. Now it's the where he used comments." And he's no longer here. So I have no idea what that means. But it was like a relief.

I said, "I just want you to know it." I called for a relief. I was like, "Yelling of me." I can tell that this guy didn't even want to hear that stuff. Do you think that you were treated differently

because you were a Jew? I definitely do, especially with him.

And I'm always giving people down to doubt.

People are like, "Sometimes people have bad days." And I just always figured, "I'm just having a bad day." But just bad day went on and on. And you just don't talk to people in that way. Right?

There's nothing I had done to warrant you anything remotely like that. When I grew up, I looked up to doctors. They were like role models. It's a very different kind of world, it seems.

“Was David correct in concluding that the doctor was anti-Semitic?”

Is it possible that he was simply an unskilled doctor

David's certainty that he was being discriminated against

“could arguably be dismissed as paranoia,”

projected onto somebody else because he happens to be Middle Eastern. Or, can David believe his own eyes does he know big a tree when he sees it? When he feels it?

I'm Jesse Brown, and today, on the final episode of what is happening here, what now? Where has the last two years of surging hatred against Jews in Canada left us? Are we past the worst of it?

Or are we living in a different world now? One in which anti-Semitism is back for good. So far, we've looked at things like vandalism, protests, violence, but today we'll look at everyday life. How have things changed for Jews here culturally?

“How have things changed for us in our relationships?”

And can they ever go back? We'll begin with a story that is not about violence or vandalism. It's about music. My name is Eric Stein. I'm the artistic director of the Ashkenaz Festival,

and I'm also a performing musician myself. Mandolin and bass are my two primary instruments. The Ashkenaz Festival is probably the biggest Jewish music festival in North America. Eric describes the whole thing as ardently a political.

90% of its programming is free to the public.

The festival's mandate has always been to spread Jewish culture

and music to Jews and non-Jews alike. We want to show you our horns, but not the ones on our heads. Ashkenaz has always taken place at the Harbor Front Center in downtown Toronto.

“It's a cultural organization founded by the government of Canada.”

But now, Eric's looking for a new venue. They kind of blindsided us with a proposal for security requirements that would be necessary in order for them to host our festival in 2024. And the initial presentation included a bill that we estimated that it was nearly a million dollars that they were telling us initially

would need to be spent in order for them to feel secure hosting our festival. Harbor Front disputes this. They say that their presentation was for no more than half a million. In either case, it was a massive jump from previous years when security costs were about $30,000.

And as the conversations continued, they were not warm conversations. They were officious and just kind of cold and kind of gave us the feeling

like, you guys don't really want us here because this is basically our entire budget for the whole year.

They were proposing that we needed to fence the entire site and have bomb sniffing dogs. All of this on the bill for us to pay. After a difficult negotiation, Eric was able to get the costs down low enough for the show to go on. In the end, the festival went off without a hitch.

No bombs. Just music. I don't think I can answer the question was it anti-Semitic with a yes or a no. It was like, well, it's inconvenient. It's inconvenient that you guys are Jewish.

You know what I mean? What you're conveying to us is that you're not our ally. That experience left a bad taste in Eric's mouth. But it's not the only reason why he's looking for a new venue. The bigger problem with last year's festival was that attendance was way down.

There were a lot of Jewish people that would ordinarily come to our festival who weren't comfortable coming to a space like that, a really open public space in the middle of downtown Toronto for fear of the potential that they would have to encounter protest and disruption. The Jewish community has gradually been moving north in Toronto, the fastest growing part of Jewish Toronto is north of steals.

So now, Eric is thinking about moving the festival to the suburbs where Jewish people have been steadily migrating. It's part of a larger trend. Jews pulling back from public life. There are now fewer Jewish teachers and students in our public schools.

Fewer Jewish journalists in our newsrooms. Fewer Jewish people living in non-Jewish neighborhoods. If the Ashkenos festival follows them to a Jewish area, they might be able to attract their core audience again. But I'll come at the expense of sharing Jewish culture with everybody else.

That's really, really hard and sad. Jewish artists are feeling this across the country. Cartoonist and art instructor Miriam Lubicki was briefly banned

her service in the Israeli military as a file clerk 25 years ago

“presented, quote, public safety concerns to the comic book community.”

She has felt less welcome in the arts ever since. If you're doing anything with Jewish content, there is a little bit more of a side I have definitely seen a downturn in that. Opportunities that I feel I would have been easily accepted for prior to two years ago had a very good track record of receiving grants

of receiving certain drum offers and that they definitely have suffered in the last two years. After October 7, a Jewish film festival was canceled by a movie theater in Hamilton, Ontario. A play about an Israeli was canceled by theaters in Vancouver and Victoria. And the work of a Jewish artist was pulled from a major gallery in Vancouver.

For Jewish people working in the arts, these cancellations can be especially cruel. They cost people professionally, but they can also sever people from their communities. Of course, this has also happened to many Jews and other communities.

Before October 7, I would have always said I was queer first.

The queer community was where I've always felt safe and where I came of age. My name is Rachel Matlow, people call me Archie these days. It's a lot easier to come out as gay and friends than someone who questions anti-Semitism. It was really shocking on October 7 to immediately see many queer friends of mine who changed their profile picks to the Palestinian flag, like without even pausing to show a shred of sympathy

or the mostly Jewish Israelis who are slaughtered. Like, you can't just show a bit of human empathy, like, you know, I'm a pro-Palestine too. But people were just murdered. And it just became painfully clear that no one really cared that a terrorist organization raped and killed and kidnapped hundreds of Jews.

“And, you know, just even being at a queer bar, I remember only like a week or two after”

and there was a comedian making jokes about how hot hummus fighters are. She'd like to date them, they had such good organizational skills and everyone's laughing.

And it just was like way to second, like the hypocrisy here was really astounding.

You know, and then the rate denialism, and it was supposed to believe women, but not Jewish women. It also became clear that I wasn't allowed to show any sympathy for the Israelis who are murdered and taken hostage, like, they call me as "inists." Just dismissed, mocked, condescended too. There was this litmus test I felt that you had to pass to be acceptable and not deemed erasist.

And, you know, just the irony that the queer community and left when circles in general hides itself on being inclusive, intersectional, anti-racist, but now for Jews, it seems that the acceptance is conditional. So it's like, I can't acknowledge that Israel is a country without putting quotation marks around it. You can't even hope for a true state solution without being deemed racist, colonists. You know, it's either renowned Israel, except that October 7th was legitimate resistance

or your Zionist pro-Israel racist, genocidal, baby killer. And just like, even going to the Dyke March or the Transmarch places where I used to feel safe, it just suddenly felt very hostile. Friends and minds say, "All Israelis deserve to die. All Zionists are genocidal, baby killers."

Like, why does no one blink?

“Like, why is that acceptable in progressive spaces?”

It's troubling. I bet my tongue a lot. They say, "This party no Zionists allowed." It's a common phrase. It's the acceptable, no Jews allowed.

A person I know is opening a bar, no Zionists allowed in the bar. You are allowed to say, "No Zionists allowed is if that somehow different." You know, and I must renounce Israel and cast all Israelis as bad and complicit to be accepted at the party.

Why isn't it enough that I've been critical of Israel's government for decades,

I just don't want to be told what kind of Jew I have to be, to be accepted by my friends. I think it's important to analyze, unpack this different kind of anti-semitism that's happening in progressive left circles. It's different from the blatant overt forms that we associate with the far right. Violence, swastikas, the Nazi stuff.

“And that's why I think many people don't see it, because it's subtle.”

It's the kind that doesn't even acknowledge that anti-semitism is racism. I think a lot of people on the left, including many Jewish friends of mine, have absorbed these old anti-semitic myths

that Jews are rich and powerful, capitalistic, colonizing, secretly controlling the world.

People insist that Jews are not worthy of the same anti-racist protections given to other minorities. We don't tell any other minorities what they're facing isn't really racism. We don't tell women that they're exaggerating sexism, like we don't correct their lived experience. But Jews are told all the time to stop overreacting. Archie says that some of the most troubling behavior that they've experienced has come from anti-semitist Jews.

There's a lot of guilt and shame about being Jewish, and so they make a point of how they hate Israel, and how they're not that kind of bad Jew, like maybe their older conservative family members are.

“So they are the good Jew, and they'll be on the front lines attacking the wrong kind of Jews.”

They'll speak out the loudest. I don't think they realize that they're giving permission to other people to hate Jews, because people can say, "Well, my Jewish friends are anti-semitists too. It becomes a shield for other people's bigotry." To Archie, this isn't just about losing their community. It's also about what that community itself has lost.

It's lost sight of its own principles,

such as always standing against racism of any kind,

and always standing in solidarity and celebration of queer rights. Even if the queer people in question happen to be Israeli. Yes, Israel might pinkwash and try to use queer rights there to bolster its image.

“But why does that mean you have to dismiss all the genuine hard-fought gains made by queer activists in Israel?”

It's dishonoring what the activists have achieved. It's shocking that people think it's helpful to boycott Israeli filmmakers and artists, and the queer community, like those are the people who are most critical of their own government, who advocate for Palestinian rights, who are working for dialogue and peace,

banning books, protesting bookstores, book prizes, film festivals, filmmakers, artists, queer people.

This is who are protesting. These are the enemies. The thing about the queer community is that, you know, it's more than just a community for so many, right? It's chosen family. The bonds are so tight for many people.

It's like the only place that they feel accepted. A lot of people have been rejected by family members. So it's a lifeline. There have been some lefty Jewish people in the queer community that have privately told me that they feel uncomfortable about the antisemitism, but that they don't feel comfortable saying anything.

Because they don't want to lose all their friends. I get it. Nobody wants to be ostracized from their community. I really, really hope people will start being more curious about antisemitism, and not assume they already know what it is or isn't,

and stop policing people's Jewish identities. Recognizing antisemitism does not diminish Palestinian suffering. You know, it doesn't weaken the fight for Palestinian rights. It actually strengthens the coalition. The queer Jews kicked out of their chosen families.

Jewish artists unwelcome in galleries, concert halls, and theaters. Jewish elders, unsure if their own doctor might mean them harm,

Just last weekend, as I record this, somebody went door to door

“in an apartment building for seniors on Bathor Street.”

Members of the city's Jewish community are coming together to support residents after Jewish prayer scrolls, or taken from more than 20 doorways. It's elderly Jewish seniors and Holocaust survivors. This is not an acceptable way to live. These are not a handful of emotional outbursts.

These are not a few bad apples. This goes to the core. There is something about this ideology. Something about this movement that I don't yet understand. Adam Lewis Klein is a scholar.

He's completing a PhD in anthropology from McGill University. He's been writing about all of this to a growing audience. And he thinks that this whole exercise of trying to determine if antisemitism is good or bad, acceptable, or unacceptable, based on whether or not it's antisemitic. Well, that misses the point completely.

If we want to understand what is happening, we need to examine antisemitism as its own ideology. One that has its own unique history. I spoke to Adam in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

And the first thing he helped me to understand is that the common notion that antisemitism

has been with us forever, it's been around for centuries and centuries. Well, that's not really accurate. Yes, people have been persecuting Jews for millennia. But antisemitism will that term has only existed since 1870. And antisemitism emerged in modernity framed itself as science.

And said, this is different than medieval opposition to Judaism as a religion. It's not about killing Jesus. It's about something else. It's about the Jews as a people. Or a malevolent influence on our societies.

Jews were a kind of invasive foreign body. Antisemitism on the other hand does not hate Jews on the basis of bogus race science. Adam understands antisemitism as its own thing completely. Individual Antisionists might bore a material from Nazi era antisemitism, or from Christkiller Jew hatred.

But those liables are not core to what antisemitism is.

“If you want to understand that, you have to trace antisemitism back to its origins.”

I'm going to play with significant chunk of my conversation with Adam Lewis Klein, because for me, this was a breakthrough in my understanding of what antisemitism is and where it started. My first surprise was to learn that it does not come from the Arab world. So if we look at the protocols of the elders of Zion, this classic text, that the world Jewish conspiracy created by Russian polygamous in the late 19th century,

but then really popular with the Nazis, that's where you can trace the emergence of antisemitism. The protocols of the elders of Zion claims to be a transcript of the meeting of the world Zionist organization.

So from the beginning, Zionism was always seen as particularly suspect,

because it was a clear case of Jews organizing themselves collectively. It's certainly interesting to note that Nazi spoke directly about Zionism and imperialism, and that was part of their case against the Jews. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's where the Palestinian cause got it from. Is there a direct connection?

Yes, there is. So by the end of World War II, the Nazis were moving their propaganda, their understanding of Jews towards Zionism. Since most of the Jews have been eliminated from Eastern Europe, and they started talking more and more about Israel as a center of the world Jewish conspiracy.

“And then what you had afterwards, you had important Nazis, like Johannes von Lears, for example,”

who moved to Cairo, Lears converted to Islam. He became deeply involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is one of the largest Islamist movements. He was an advisor to Nasser and Nasser's Arab Nationalist program, and Nasser was leading essentially the Arab League at this time,

and their wars against Israel. And he set up an institute in Cairo, which was a so-called study of Zionism Institute. And it's there that these anti-Zionist notions were sort of fermented.

And they established networks then with what the Soviets were doing in terms of creating Zionology.

“So you can actually trace these pathways and networks through which anti-Zionist ideologies were transmitted”

from Nazism into the Arab and Islamic world and also into the Soviet Union and back into the Arab and Islamic world. What is Zionology? Zionology is what the Soviets called their pseudo-scientific study of Zionism.

It was basically a propaganda doctrine that was directly sponsored by the KGB

to construct Zionism in these terms as imperialistic, as racist, as fascist. It was a piece of a larger Soviet propaganda campaign where they would reframe anyone they didn't like as Nazi collaborators, or Zionist agents completely reinvent biographies. They did this to Pope Pius 12. They did this to a number of Catholic bishops would call them Nazi collaborators.

And so there is very much a history that you can trace of anti-Zionist rhetoric that anti-Zionists themselves are completely unaware of. The Soviets really invented so much of the labels today that are used against Israel. The colonizer libel, apartheid libel, they invented in the 70s and late 60s. They pushed through in the UN, the Zionism, his racism, resolution.

Zionism, his racism, and his realism. Those are like the slogans of the current anti-Zionist. That comes from the Soviet Union. Yes, and you have to understand it in terms of the resonances those tropes had for the Soviet Union at the time. So their main argument against the US, right, was that the US is racist country.

So the US might have these freedoms and stuff, but it's capitalist and evil and there's inequality. So when the Soviets were calling something racist, it was part of a very specific anti-American campaign. When they were calling things fascist, it had a lot to do with their own national mythology of having defeated the Nazis. So you can understand how those emerged at the Soviet context.

“The key to it is there is the whole set of post holocaust inversions.”

Anti-Semitism was a form of racism against Jews, but Jews as Zionists are themselves racist. Jews suffer to genocide, but Jews as Zionists are committing a genocide. Zionists are Nazi. We hear this all the time. This is an incredibly compelling idea to millions of people.

There's like a perfect irony that people can immediately understand. You were once the victim, now you're the victimizer. You were once the victims of holocaust, now you're perpetrating all the cause. You've become what you hate.

This makes sense to people on kind of an essential level.

You often hear the idea that Jews are white Europeans, their imposters. There's been a recent research and popularity of the cause or theory, which is a theory that Ashkenazi Jews today are all basically converts from this medieval Turkish kingdom. And it's actually a way in which pseudo-genetic racial arguments are actually smuggled back into Zionism. When we hear this idea that Jews are white colonists or their Europeans, and for that reason they don't have any indigeneity to Israel, Jews don't belong in Israel.

There's a kind of attempt to erase Jewish history. For many Western audiences, they don't necessarily recognize this as anti-Semitism, which is kind of crazy because these people are so deeply hateful.

“But why don't they recognize this as anti-Semitism?”

Because it is actually a different set of tropes and liables than the ones we might associate with classical anti-Semitism. The guy's there, he's not wearing a swastika, he's not a skinhead, he hasn't said Jews are non-white race polluters, he's using a whole different arsenal. The redefinition of Jews as a religion and not a distinct ethnic group, which we hear so much in anti-Semitism. This was like, you're not a people, you're not an ethnicity, you're just a religion. I thought this was just sort of like school ground taunting when I would say something racist has happened in Canada to Jews, and then sometimes the response would be Jews are in a race.

That would be news to Hitler, but I never didn't even respond to those because it seemed like such a preschool level of retort.

But it actually is based on a thought system that's trying to de-racialize the notion of a Jew to just a white person. Exactly, that's a huge thing in anti-Semitism is to kind of erase our existence as a people, as a distinct people, and that is different from classical anti-Semitism. What the Nazis have was the opposite in this case. What the Nazis said is the Jews are pretending to assimilate. The problem is Jews entering into our societies acting as if they're Germans when actually they're this other alien people.

80 years ago they were telling us your assimilation is a problem in our nation. They've already flipped and said the problem is no you have your own nation and you're not assimilating and you should just be minority in other nations.

“And it's when they get go back to Poland, that's what they're saying.”

Just like you're a settler in Poland, you're a settler here in Canada, and it seemed like there was a gearing that reminded me of like this notion of the stateless like wandering Jew.

So our curse were cursed to be nationless. Theologically under Christianity and Islam, because we rejected their religions, we are permanently exiled. And that's a sign of our humiliation of our sin, et cetera. We have this in Christiano the gusten, and you also have this in Muslim theology and it's reiterated inside Couturban and Muslim Brotherhood ideology. But this is not explicitly voiced in campus antisemitism that we are ordained by God to be stateless. When we hear the certainty with which Israel will fall and Palestine will be free, it is spoken of as a political argument basically that fascists and imperialists are destined to fail and the will of the people can only be suppressed for so long.

I don't know that it would be as palatable to a lot of the people who have taken up the propelstein cause if they were aware that this is based on a religious doctrine that Jews are cursed to be stateless.

“I mean, of course, many of the leftist activists see this in terms of like a secular moral imperative and they don't have an Islamist theology, right?”

But I'm not sure if they really have a problem with Islamist movements, right? If you look at the Iranian Revolution in 1979, many left wing revolutionary supported the rise of a community and the Shi'a clerics controlling the government because they saw that as a kind of anti-imperial reaction. So I think that's the same basic assumption that the anti-iscience are using today. Yeah, Hamas is this right wing of theocratic organization, but they're carrying out this broader secular liberation process.

The aspects of religious fundamentalism that are not compatible with a North American progressive mindset, the anti-queer aspect, gets a pass.

And as seen as like, well, we understand different cultures and we understand that oppressed people have their, I don't know, eccentricities, but that's not what's important here. It's an exoticizing. Yeah. And in some ways, it can even increase the appeal. I don't know that the millions of people around the world who are taking to the streets out of genuine horror at the images they're seeing from Gaza. And out of a genuine feeling of wanting to do something about it, I don't know that they carry with them preexisting animus towards Jews.

So of course, we can't read people's minds, and we don't have any reason to think that they're lying when they say that they don't consciously hold animus towards Jews or towards Jews as such.

And if we did say they were consciously lying, I agree. We would sound like what they sometimes claim about us, the when we say something is anti-Semitic in the first place, we have a malevolent intent to hide the atrocities of Israel. We are ourselves, these evil Israeli agents. Any time you say something's anti-Semitic to an anti-Signist, they say, I was just criticizing Israel and you're just trying to stop me. Are they anti-Semitic in the sense that they hate so-called all Jews? Maybe not. Some of them, their objective hate really is fixated on what they conceive of as the Zionist.

And as Israel and as Israelis, right? But that is not anymore legitimate. It's also a form of hate. I mean, I've had people directly tell me, you know, I don't hate Jews, I hate Zionists. Okay, so you just told me that you do hate. You're point being that we are lost in a semantic battle over whether this is a hatred against Jews or against Israel or against Zionism.

“And the focus should be well, why have we accepted that a hate movement is legitimate to begin with?”

And the point of view of moral justification, a hate movement against Israel, even the state, and a hate movement works through libel's, which aren't acceptable. It's not acceptable to spread defamatory false or decontextualized claims about anyone. People who spread libel's are very invested in establishing consensus is all the time, because it's one of their central arguments. One of their central arguments is a fallacy of majority. You will hear this all the time, you know, well, these organizations or these genocide scholars, it's sort of self-propagating. You know, the more people are saying that's just repeating it like a herd.

The more people have justification and feelings of legitimacy to continue repeating it until it grows and it grows and it grows.

One understands, unlike an almost cellular level, that it's dangerous to contradict those repeated assertions, the very fact that you're arguing with it proves that you are the enemy Jew.

The desire to have a reasonable conversation where you might persuade someone to those things are actually not accurate. Often feeling possible, because people don't want to be persuaded to believe something that is going to come at a huge social cost to them to agree with you.

“I think from a psychological point of view, it's incredibly difficult if not impossible at this point to convince and designists that they are anti-seemites.”

You know, you call them an anti-seemite, it's not going to do anything, because they've constructed a whole ideology that's built around inverting anti-Semitism itself. We have to sort of take them out there terms just enough, so okay, maybe you don't hate Jews as such, but you really hate Israel. Like you really think this one country is like the most evil thing in the world, you want to destroy it, you think Israelis are completely fake. Well, you'll hear virulent and I think well-founded arguments against what China is doing, what Russia is doing or North Korea does with some citizens. You do not hear people say that those countries should be wiped from them out.

No, it's unique, right? It's unique. That's how you know when anti-Israel rhetoric is anti-Semitic. They will largely ignore you, because they don't really care if they're doing double standards. They don't care if they're demonizing. They like demonizing. The whole point is you can construct the Zionist with the Israeli as the figure of all evil. I think that there are a lot of Jewish people in North America and in the diaspora, younger ones especially, who are negotiating a divorce with Israel.

“These are positions and affiliations that come at a great cost and what is it to them if they accept that their Judaism is separable from Israel?”

They hate Israelis. At that level, it makes sense that certain Jews could disconnect from it. Right? There is an out. There's an out for diaspora Jews who want to separate themselves from the hated Israel. There's an out for anti-Sionist Jews who want to join this movement and act as tokens, and it's also the case that we shouldn't be telling every Jew they need to be a so-called Zionist. They need to have a connection to Israel. As natural as that feels for the most Jews, both from a religious point of view that Israel is a sacred land in our texts.

Both from just a more prosaic point of view, many of us have family and friends in Israel from the sense of our story in our trauma. We suffered the Holocaust, but then miraculously we came home. It makes perfect sense for most Jews to be connected to Israel, but it doesn't work that well.

You're against Jews because you're against Israel and Israel is part of our identity. It doesn't work that well because there can always be Jews for whom Israel is not part of their identity.

“Why shouldn't Jews take that out if they can? What are the consequences for being a Canadian or an American Jew if Israel is continued to be made a prior state and an anti-Sionism sort of triumphs?”

I think that anti-Sionism does impose this dilemma upon all Jews, so all Jews are affected, of course, by anti-Sionism. Because if anti-Sionism takes over an institutional space and you're a Jew, you have three options. One is that you don't accept it, you reject anti-Sionism. You might not even be a so-called Zionist or even identify in that way. As long as you reject anti-Sionism, call it out, call it anti-Semitic, just say this is wrong. They'll call you as Zionist, they'll abuse harass you and discriminate against you.

That's one option. You'll be perched. You'll be perched. The other option is you just be silent and hope that you fade into the crowd.

And the third option, of course, is that you become an explicit token anti-Sionist Jew, engage in Jewish self-shaming and help anti-Sionists to abuse and discriminate against other Jews.

So that in itself is unfair. That is discriminatory against all Jews, at that level. So that is a litmus test that is, in fact, imposed on all Jews via assumed association with this evil libeled Israel, the anti-Sionism constructs. So you see what I mean, even if anti-Sionism is true, it's main hate object is Israel and not all Jews. Of course it will affect all Jews via association.

Prescription is, we're not against you, Jew, you just have to denounce Israel.

I have no problem with you, you just have to denounce radical Islam. You are kind of guilty until you take a vow and I'm not a witch. To internalize that and say, I accept your definition of what's religious and what isn't. To concede to the argument, if you don't want to be targeted, just to touch yourself from Israel.

Yeah, it's an operation of force, basically where the majority, so we decide what's legitimate.

You're in minority, so you don't have a right to tell us that our hate of you, that our representations of you were wrong, you know, we decide. So we'll decide who you are such that we will be legitimate in what we do. One aspect of this is we're told anti-Semitism doesn't mean anything anymore because you have cried wolf too many times.

“You have conflated anti-Semitism with anti-Semitism. I've heard anti-Semitism say, you know what?”

I don't even care if you call me anti-Semitism anymore. You know what? I'm proud of it if you do.

I mean anti-Semitism has been watered down. I don't think it's because Jews have been falsely calling people anti-Semites.

I think it's because there's been so much anti-Semitism that we are calling people anti-Semites all the time, and so it no longer has that force. To bring up the question of anti-Semitism is enough to brand you as an evil Zionist. It's not only that they're claiming anti-Semitism accusations no longer have any weight, they are incriminating in themselves. I think that this is dangerous for Jews everywhere. If you can't speak up in your defense, then anything can be done to you.

“Yeah, I think we need to be able to do both. I think we have to be able to keep talking about anti-Semitism.”

You know, we have a right to stand up against Jew hatred as an oppressed minority, but we also have to meet them on their own terms, and really understand anti-Semitism as a distinct ideology of anti-Jewish hate. That is distinct from classical anti-Semitism and from medieval anti-Judism. Then we can show that anti-Semitism itself is hate. And anti-Semitism is wrong. It's a form of anti-Jewish hate. It's a hard idea to get across the other slogan, anti-Semitism is not anti-Semitism has already gone viral and being kind of cast into stone for people.

Anti-Semitism is a hate movement. When I began this series, I thought that anti-Semitism was anti-Semitism. But I set out to investigate that belief, to subject it to challenges and scrutiny, to see if it would hold up. It didn't.

But it's no less of a threat to Jews for that fact. That's the first bit of clarity that I took from my conversation with Adam.

The second is that anti-Semitism is not pro-Palestinian. It has no practical, actionable plan to free Palestinians into statehood or even to free them from violence.

“Yes, anti-Semitism asserts Palestine will be free, but how?”

This certainty of a Palestinian state stretching from the river to the sea is chanted and repeated in the language of prophecy. A prophecy is not strategy. Butchering 1200 Israelis, so they will massacre tens of thousands of Palestinians, well that was a strategy. But not a strategy for freedom or for peace. It was a strategy intended to light a flame of hatred around the world to pull all of us into an endless cycle of destruction. Intesignism is not just spreading through the diaspora while being focused on Israel. I think that anti-Semitism is a larger complex through which the conflict itself has been sustained.

And in order to reframe and even maybe solve this conflict, what we have to do is stop talking about Israeli's versus Palestinians and start talking about anti-Semitism as a driver of endless wars. And so I see anti-Semitism as the basic driver of this conflict. It's the desire to annihilate Israel, to reject Israel's sovereignty, to reject the right of a Jewish state, and to use violence to achieve those aims. And that is what has driven the conflict from the beginning and it's caused immense suffering for Palestinians.

At this point, I don't think that this can be discussed as an opinion. It's just factual to say that anti-Semitism has been a catastrophe for Palestinians. But who am I or who is Adam for that matter to say what's best for Palestinians?

Later in his life, he was shot by an Israeli settler while he was changing a tire.

“And as you'll hear, that's not the worst of what he has suffered at the hands of Israelis.”

And yet he's dedicated his life to advocating for non-violence, to Palestinians and to Israelis. I ask him what he thinks about the harm being done to Jews around the world in the name of anti-Semitism.

When people take sides, whether you are a pro-azerider or a pro-partisan, you're not telling anyone.

Ali tells me a story about a recent trip he took to Europe. After he gave his presentation, he was approached by an emotional young pro-Palestine activist, who was not herself, Palestinian.

“Ali says that she was in a state of disbelief that a real-life Palestinian person could be in favor of non-violence.”

Listen, Jesse, I came from France and I met the Foreign Minister of France and I met many Jewish leaders, Muslim leaders, Palestinian activists as well.

The lady in France who came to me after my presentation, she was wondering like, "Where do I live?" She's sure I'm not fast.

The lady I'm because I speak about solution and she was so angry, almost yelling on me. Then I said, "Okay, you know, you are here, it's nice to live in Paris, come up with whatever statement you believe, but believe me, as long as you're doing this, we keep dying." Because this is the fuel that gives BB Natanyahu and his right wing government to try to justify their acts against us, but the one who are dying are us every day. And she remains silent and she starts crying because she hears it from a Palestinian.

We need a lot of help and a lot of support. We don't need you to hate Jews if you are pro Palestine, be pro Jewish people to stand for the Palestinian right not to be against Jewish people. If you are pro Israel, don't think that the Israeli security will be built ever at the expense of Palestinian dignity, freedom and rights. That's obvious, believe me, Jesse. It's much comfortable and easier for me to take the Palestinian just side.

“Because I believe in my just cause, especially with my background, I was trained on Kalashnikov in the last 15.”

My mother was a political prisoner for more than five years. I served four years in the Israeli prison. In 2000, my brother was murdered very violently by Israeli soldier. You think it's so easy for me to sit here and talk about recognition of my enemies, it's talk about like empathy of my enemies, it's not easy, but I know on the other side that I'm not on the only victim in the Middle East. I could see my enemies as victims and this is where solutions start. When we humanize each other, if you are not part of the problem, try to be part of the solution.

But if you cannot be part of the solution, don't be part of the problem, don't feel this conflict, fanatics will not help Palestinian to be free. You know, I wasn't invited here, and I hear a lot about you, and I know that what is happening to Jewish people is so hard. I mean, I have Jewish friends who cannot walk with a keeper and friends. I know, and I experienced this. But on the other hand, I said, I'm going to bring my voice, whether people agree or disagree with me. I am non-violence activist who doesn't label or hate or criticize anyone. I'm here with a message to welcome and to engage people in that approach that I believe that we lead both of us, to that future otherwise, we just keep killing each other.

You know, I'm not here for hope. I'm not telling people, let's have hope, let's just march together and raise the peace flag. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about help us to find the way from this darkness. Help us because enough is enough, believe me. What do you think when you hear people trying to globalize this movement? When you hear people say that this is about dismantling Zionism everywhere. This is about white supremacy around the world. It's about settler colonialism. What do you think when you hear people say globalize the antifata?

I think we have to see each other as human-first, number two. We have to understand that whether we like it or not, none of us going anywhere.

If we think that the world one of the Jews, we have to study history. If the Jews think that Palestine will just take their luggage and leave to the Middle East, they're doing a huge mistake. Look at the hate. Look at anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, like the world is getting so much fuel for hate. And then we end up divided, conflicted, but back home we keep dying. Why this earthquake has to happen for people to wake up and with my sorrow, they wake up with hate. These two identities belong to that piece of land we put off call home. We have to understand that whether we like it or not, none of us going anywhere.

To all of those who will say, let's kill them all, let's destroy them all, let's transfer them all, good luck, and what kind of solution we need, a solution that will guarantee these two identities.

The minute that we stop arguing identities and changing behaviors, solution will start. My problem is not with Judaism or Zion, my problem is with the occupation. Why we keep going around the problem and keep falling in these arguments that endless argument, because you're not going to change me, I'm not going to change you, but for sure we need to change each other behaviors. This political reality has to be changed of the people. I mean, people has to choose who they are, it's up to them, but people are not free to humiliate other or to control others. That's it.

I know the criticism that I'm going to receive for even speaking with you. Oh, look, he found the one Palestinian who thinks that we should have peace and non-violence. Everybody else is talking about the legitimacy of armed resistance, he found the one guy, it's tokenism.

“I'm not here to discuss legitimacy of armed or legitimacy of armed struggle, I'm here to tell that do you want to be right or do you want to succeed?”

Because this is what keep going in the conflict, both sides fear right for all of these years of conflict, what we have got so far. Look at Gaza today, Gaza was smashed, look at the whole society in Israel, living under collective trauma. Ali, you support non-violence, but are you in the minority as a Palestinian who supports non-violence? We are not the minority, we are the active minority that represent silent big majority. How do you know?

“How do I know how many Palestinians in the West Bank leave Gaza? Gaza has been destroyed, how many Palestinians are engaging themselves directly in killing Jews every day? How many?”

I don't know, but I think it's probably very few. Why do you think? And we live behind gates, and we live with the most miserable conditions, we live without food, we get humiliated and killed by settlers, we're not able to harvest our olives, why we don't suicide ourselves every day? Bombing ourself, why? Because we want to live, because we know that very life still has value, and that's why what gives me hope, believe me, is my people, but also, is the majority of Jewish people in Israel, who I know that they want peace yesterday.

I experience this everyday, I see Jews standing for Palestinian threatening their lives, being beating up, getting arrested by the Israeli army, to protect Palestinian, and this is not fake.

“This is happening, standing against violence is not a favor to Jews, actually a favor to my freedom, because this is the only way. I'm not sure that my freedom will be built on Jewish bodies and graves.”

My freedom has to pass through Jewish hearts, and mine to wake up and say, these Palestinians doesn't deserve to be occupied, or deserve to be destroyed like what we did in Gaza. This is not going to happen by threatening each other.

It's a position that seems so impossible right now that people just laugh at it, even more than they used to.

“The solution sounds impossible. Then, okay, so what is the alternative? Can you see any alternative approach for us?”

I can't. I don't see any other solution for the Middle East, but Ali's question assumes that a solution is what the Middle East is looking for, and I don't have a lot of faith in that. Because there is an alternative to peace. It's called permanent suffering for everyone involved. It's not a solution to anything, but for as long as I've been around, that's the option that's been chosen in the Middle East.

But I don't live in the Middle East. And so for years, I've just opted out.

I didn't think that I could help the situation by talking about it in Canada, and I didn't want to hurt anyone, either.

“I was terrified of the power this has, just as a conversation topic, to enrage people, to harm people, and to destroy relationships.”

So I put up a wall. Of course, if there's one thing that we can agree is true about this conflict, it's that it is not constrained by walls. It's come for us. Here. But I'm not going anywhere. This series was made possible by the generous support of the Bissal Family Foundation, George Berger, Dan Dubo, Gideon Hayden, Daniel Klass, Norman Levine, Nanette Oken, Leslie Scanlin, Marjorie Skolnik, and Lee Zentner.

Thanks to them and many others, we've finished making these episodes. But now they need to be heard by many more people.

We think that the stories and voices that you heard on this podcast have the power to make people reconsider their words and their actions.

“To think about how their neighbors are being harmed, and to change the course that we are all currently on.”

We want what is happening here to reach an audience of younger listeners, and not just Jewish ones. We want to take its message to platforms like TikTok and YouTube, where many people are otherwise being served a constant stream of divisive and hateful content about Jews. Lastly, we want to take this series to universities and colleges across the country for town hall discussions about how to make campuses safe again for Jews. To do any of that, we need financial support. Those who donate to this project will receive a tax deductible donation receipt through our project partner, the Canadian Jewish News,

a registered journalism organization with the CRA. Contributing is easy, just email me personally at [email protected]. I spell my name [email protected]. I will take you through it. What is happening here was written and reported by me, jessie brown. Research and story editing by Kate Minsky, original music by so-called, with Fred Wesley.

Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Caleb Thompson. Editorial input from Michael Freeman. Thank you to Stephen Marsh, Jonathan Rothman, Mark Musselman, David Kaufman, and the entire team here at Canada Land for their input and for their support. To help us continue to do journalism like this, become a Canada Land supporter at Canadaland.com/join. Thank you for listening.