Conversation with Sara Kershnar
This episode was originally released on 15 April, 2024.
Transcript
Yulia Gilich: Hello and welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, your host and a member of the founding collective of ICSZ, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today, I am joined by Sara Kershnar and together we will try to unpack antisemitism as one of the keywords in critical Zionism studies.
In October 2023, Sara spoke at the Institute’s inaugural conference. Her talk about Israel, U.S. white nationalism, and transnational right-wing alliances is available on our website. In today’s conversation, we will pull on some of the threads Sara introduced in that talk, including why it is so hard and contentious to define antisemitism, how accusations of antisemitism are weaponized, and something that I’ve been thinking about since the conference last October – how Zionism is inherently antisemitic.
We will post Sara’s biography on our website and in the episode notes, but I want to highlight that Sara Kershnar is a co-founder of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, IJAN, and a member of the advisory board of our institute. Thank you for being here, Sara. Let’s jump right in. Sara, why is it so hard to define antisemitism?
Sara Kershnar: I think the reason it’s so hard is because Zionism has co-opted it and because Zionism has conflated what it means to be Jewish with what it means to be Zionist, Judaism with Zionism, Jewish with Zionist. That conflation means that it becomes very hard to define antisemitism. Even though we’ve had a definition of it that had nothing to do with the state of Israel or Zionism. That is the result of very, very solid propaganda.
Zionism claims to be a response to the history of European, Russian, what I would say, Western antisemitism against Jews as a people and as an ethnicity, almost more than as a religion. There is a history of antisemitism. It is very specifically European, Russian targeting with state repression, violence behind it, exploitation, and extraction.That is the historical reality, manifestation, and definition of antisemitism. That remains the definition of antisemitism. There were also places in other parts of the world where it didn’t look like genocide or isolation per se. It looked more like discrimination. Or different laws and rights, or moments when there was a lot of coexistence and then more subtle forms of exclusion. And then in Iran, it was a little more virulent, the antisemitism. But it’s a very European construct, and it was constructed by an antisemite, Jonathan Marr, who referred to Jewish people as Semites, and then his view of them as antisemitic.
And he also was one of the people who suggested that Jews leave Europe and go to Palestine. And so Zionism claims to be a response to antisemitism, but in doing so, they use it to shut down criticism of Israel, which is not only cynical, unprincipled, and dishonest. It also is a betrayal of that very real history.
Yulia Gilich: I’m glad you started untangling antisemitism and anti-Zionism from the get-go here. I think it’s very key. But I also want to point out something that feels like a contradiction to me. One of the main tenets of the work of the Institute is that we need to decouple the study of Zionism from Jewish studies and Israel studies. We also unequivocally state that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. So why is antisemitism still so central to the critical study of Zionism?
Sara Kershnar: Well, I think there’s three reasons why it’s very central and it’s a keyword.
One is because Zionism weaponizes it, and not only weaponizes it, but embodies it. Antisemites have always sought to destroy and erase and wipe off of the face of the earth not only Jewish people, but our culture, our history, our practices, our languages. Zionism has done that. It has replaced diasporic languages and the diversity of culture with a monolith of Hebrew.
Zionism also embraces many antisemitic concepts and it advances them. And I’ll give a couple of examples. One is that antisemites have always, particularly in Europe and Russia, isolated Jewish people geographically and as a community. And Zionism posits once again, that Jewish people belong together in isolation from the rest of the world and the rest of the region in which Palestinian Jews and Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Jews have lived in diaspora and across that region. So it actually replicates and embodies that antisemitism. It also disparages the Jewish diaspora, which is largely metropolitan, and laborers and workers historically. Another example is the way that it shamed and blamed Jews in Europe for the genocide against them. And again, that narrative that there wasn’t resistance, we didn’t fight back. And in fact, of course, that’s not true. Not only was there resistance, we had a lot of allies, but it also seeks to erase those histories, particularly the histories of coexistence, because it’s a threat to their narrative. And it’s another way that they embrace and reinforce that Jews are separate, Jews are isolated. They push the false argument that Jews have never had allies. Jews have never integrated. And none of that is true. And so it reproduces also this idea that Jewish people are all alone. And then it uses that fear. It uses that history to justify its genocide in Palestine. That misuse, that weaponization [of antisemitism] requires that we counter it.
Second reason it’s important is because fighting antisemitism is part of anti-racist struggle as is anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is central to anti-racism. It is central to anti-colonialism. It is central to anti-apartheid. And so we need to reclaim it away from the way that Zionists misuse it and in doing it separate it from our natural allies, which is any people who have experienced genocide, ethnic cleansing, persecution because of ethnicity and because of race. We can’t give them antisemitism. We have to define it. It’s ours. It’s part of our struggle against racism, apartheid, and colonialism.
And then the third reason that it’s central is because of the ways that Zionism actually endangers Jews. The way in which both Zionism and Israel very intentionally and incorrectly conflate what it means to be Jewish and what it means to be Zionist. Zionists often argue that Israel keeps Jews safe. We all know that that’s not true. The biggest danger to the largest number of Jews is Jewish people living in Israel because you cannot maintain a colonial state and not expect resistance. That’s not why we fight Zionism, but it is such a contradiction to claim that Zionism in Israel keeps people safe, while actually it produces the greatest amount of unsafety.
Yulia Gilich: As you were speaking, I was also thinking of how Israel’s actions directly endanger Jews in Israel and beyond. Like what Avi Shlaim and others, in fact, write about Mossad’s bombings and attacks on the Jewish communities in Iraq in the 1950s to drive Iraqi Jews to move to Israel. Or thousands of Jews in Argentina who were arrested, imprisoned, and often disappeared, or subjected to torture and execution by the military junta whose weapons were supplied by Israel.
It’s just so disingenuous that these, as you say, deadly examples of state violence are erased or swept under the rug. But when a college student in the United States says “From the river to the sea,” that is somehow cast as more dangerous to Jews worldwide.
Sara Kershnar: That is why it feels very important that we are in conversation about antisemitism, that we reclaim it, that we clarify what it is and what it is not, and that’s why it’s a keyword.
Yulia Gilich: I want to tease out some of the ideas that you laid out already. So you named the weaponization of antisemitism as one of the reasons why we need to unpack this term so urgently. Weaponization in the sense of throwing the accusation of antisemitism at those who criticize Israel and Zionism in order to discredit, censor, and vilify them. So I want to ask you, who are the primary targets of this weaponization of antisemitism?
Sara Kershnar: First and foremost, it gets used against Palestinians and it’s an attempt to shut down their protected speech in this country, their First Amendment rights. Protected speech is specifically about the right for a targeted and oppressed people to speak out against particularly state repression. And for Palestinians in this country, they’re experiencing double repression. One is by the state of Israel itself, which not only is targeting and committing genocidal violence against their families at home, but also in this country is criminalizing and attempting to shut down the voices in the anti-racist struggle of Palestinians and other people from that region, other Arab communities, speaking out against the way that both Israel endangers their families and the way that Zionism and U.S. support also targets them here. And so the first example is when Palestinians speak out, their jobs are threatened. They get doxed. They’re physically threatened. As students, their student groups get shut down. They get put on academic probation. They get expelled. Faculty can lose their jobs. They get denied tenure. They get removed even with tenure. Their studies get defunded. All of these things are consequences of the misuse of antisemitism.
Another one is the targeting of particularly Black, Indigenous, people of color-run organizations who stand in solidarity with Palestine. Very grassroots organizations are speaking in solidarity based on their own experience of similar state violence, genocidal police and military violence, the occupation and invasions of their homelands, the state repression and attempts to silence their liberation struggles. One of the couplings that Zionist organizations and the state of Israel does is in claiming that solidarity with Palestine and criticism of Israel is antisemitic. When people speak on that, their funding gets threatened. So coupled with the misuse and weaponization of antisemitism it is economic coercion.
Yulia Gilich: Does it also affect your work and the work of IJAN, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network?
Sara Kershnar: I mean, IJAN gets death threats on a regular basis from Zionists who are claiming that we are self-hating Jews, that we are not Jewish because we don’t subscribe to Zionism. So despite the fact, for example, that my family goes back thousands of years in terms of Jewish experience, Jewish diasporic experience, and yet I’m not Jewish because I don’t subscribe to an ideology of Zionism that was created a hundred years ago by a very elite and minority sector of Jewish people, there was no support for it at the time. So there’s that impact, right?
Yulia Gilich: Right. So in fact, the very people who claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism are engaged in obviously antisemitic behavior. And this seems to be a trend, right?
Sara Kershnar: That’s right. I was in the Czech Republic recently and, because of its own participation and collaboration, there existed significant opposition to the Nazis, there was also collaboration, like much of Eastern Europe and Western Europe, all of it. So they now are very strong supporters of Israel. And you’re really not allowed to say anything critical of Israel.
I was there and I went to a rally and we spoke in front of the Israeli ambassador’s house. So there’s a movement. It’s fantastic. It’s strong, but they are, like in the United States, swimming upstream because the claim is that out of the history of the Nazi genocide, never again will they betray the Jews. And the way they show that is with support of Israel. But we also know that’s BS. An assistant member of parliament said, Israel’s too important, like they are the center of our interests as Europe and the United States in the region and we’re not going to give that up. And I said, “Great. So that’s antisemitism. So you are benefiting off of the Jewish history, deadly genocide against Jewish people that the Czechs participated in.” They resisted the Nazis on their own terms, but they didn’t particularly resist the antisemitism. “That is antisemitic to exploit our history of genocide for your state interests. We’ve heard that before. And to stereotype our point of view, or who we are, in the name of state interests, is also very familiar and antisemitic.” And so that’s another misuse of it that’s very insidious.
Yulia Gilich: Yes, thank you for laying it out so clearly. So you named some already, but who are the primary actors who weaponize antisemitism to protect Israel’s interests or, as you already demonstrated, to advance some other interests that clearly have nothing to do with Jews or Jewish safety?
Sara Kershnar: I would say there’s a couple of actors. So one is of course the state of Israel itself and claims that the resistance of the people they’re colonizing is antisemitic. They don’t resist Israel because it’s a Jewish state; they resist Israel because it’s their colonizers. It wouldn’t matter what ethno-national state colonized them. It’s colonialism. And as Jabotinsky said, if you learn anything from the United States and that colonial project, what you know is no people willingly undergo colonization and the only way to maintain it is with brutal force. They did it in the United States. And if you want to do it in Palestine, you’re going to have to do the same thing. And they have, and they continue, and we’re seeing the escalation of it. Of course, Israel uses it up and down.
When anyone in the UN criticizes Zionism, they’re antisemitic. So then the UN is another actor. So even though there are individual organizations in the UN that counter it, the UN was born out of the Nazi genocide.
Yulia Gilich: Right. The UN has played a central role in Israel’s establishment in 1948, and continues to play a central role in propping up Israel’s genocidal settler colonial project. And within the UN, there are definitely states who are primarily responsible for shielding Israel of any accountability or even criticism. The US is definitely being one of them. But can you clarify how the weaponization of antisemitism enters this equation?
Sara Kershnar: So they use that framework in order to avoid their own accountability. When Bill Clinton decided not to go to the World Conference on Racism, he said he wasn’t going because of the relifting up of the equation that Zionism is racism, which it is, and which was passed and then overturned by Zionist lobby. Really, he didn’t go because African Americans had organized for reparations for slavery. But he used the claim of antisemitism for that. That’s another example of self-interest.
The other actors are largely like the US, European, Australian, Canadian, generally Western investment in Israel because of the role they play in the repression industry. They provide arms, surveillance, 65 percent of drones are produced in Israel. They play a very crucial role in state repression and surveillance. And they also, of course, are the neo-colonial imperialist outpost, right? They are the protectorate of Western interests, resources, and political power against oppositional politics in that region.
But that’s an example of the misuse of antisemitism because all of those leaders, like I remember Hillary Clinton speaking about, “We will never forget the Nazi genocide” when she defended the first bombings of Gaza and Lebanon. And I was just like, “You are disgusting. How dare you use my history, my family’s history, our history, to justify U.S. military occupation and control of that region.”
That is antisemitism. And that’s the misuse of it. It’s both. In the misuse of it, it’s antisemitic because it’s all about state interest and provoking fear, particularly among Jewish people. There’s absolutely no evidence that Israel produces any safety. Israel makes everyone living there unsafe. Okay.
So they’re an actor, but the other group of actors is Zionist organizations and Christian Zionists. So Jewish Zionist organizations, which claim to be Jewish community organizations, Jewish Community Relations Council, but exist almost exclusively to shut down criticism of Israel and harness support among particularly elected officials and important community leaders. And so anyone who criticizes or tries to pass a ceasefire resolution, anything that opposes Israel’s unrestrained right to expand their colonial project to continue to commit genocide and occupation and apartheid, they are antisemitic.
And organizations like the Jewish Community Relations Council, less known for this role the Anti-Defamation League, I mean, among us it’s very well known, but the Anti-Defamation League was initially created to combat actual antisemitism, spends almost all of its time accusing people who criticize Israel of antisemitism and went as far as to hire a South African investigator to surveil a thousand social justice organizations to ensure that their anti-apartheid, anti-racist, farmworker rights, politics never built solidarity with Palestine.
So these are the organizations that claim to represent Jewish people, but who don’t, but also unfortunately, and this is where the conflation becomes very confusing. Zionists, Zionism, Zionists and Israel have done a very good job of convincing large populations of Jewish people (though a growing number of us see it for what it is) that our safety is somehow connected to this country that is a brutal occupying force.
Jews have never found safety in state power. When we have tried to align ourselves with dominant power, that dominant power has always turned against us. Why we think state power produces safety is ahistorical. So it gets complicated because then synagogues, Jewish community centers, they do have a range of soft affinity to very strident affinity with Israel and Zionism. And so it’s almost like a poison that’s really like changed what our historical compass has been, which is Jewish ethics and Jewish values and the history of Jewish participation and collective liberation and working class struggle.
And then we can’t forget Christian Zionists, right? Because there’s about 30 million Christian Zionists in this country. That is four times the actual entire Jewish population. And they send more money and have more political power than any of the Zionist groups, even the Jewish Zionists. So these are the organizations and institutions. that advance these ideas and they do it all in self-interest of one kind or another. For the Christian Zionists, it’s the rapture, ensuring that Israel has all the Jewish people to be destroyed for the coming of the Messiah. Like, if that’s not antisemitic, I don’t know what is, but Zionists have always aligned themselves with antisemites.
Yulia Gilich: I want to go back to the ADL specifically. So the Anti–Defamation League, ADL, is officially counting instances of anti-Zionist speech and activism and campaigns to boycott Israeli products in their antisemitic incidents tracker. And in the episode about DEI, Amira Jarmakani talks about how insidious those trackers are. But it strikes me that by lumping all of these very different acts, behaviors, campaigns together as examples of antisemitism, the word is just starting to lose meaning. How do we counter that?
Sara Kershnar: That’s what I mean about the betrayal is that it’s a misuse of our history, but it makes it obsolete of meaning. You know, simply put, it’s the boy who cries wolf, right? When this and that, which has nothing to do with hatred of Jewish people and everything to do with a completely legitimate critique of a nation state, much less an ethno-nationalist state, it starts to lose meaning. And that’s very dangerous.
In a moment when we see a rise of white nationalism and we’re facing another four years of a truly authoritarian and fascist president, and his base are actually Islamophobic, antisemitic, of course also anti-queer. Like everyone the Nazis targeted, these people are targeting – people with disabilities, queer, transgender, BIPOC people, Muslims, Jews, anyone, right? But once you devalue, conflate, and collude the meaning of a thing, it can get misused in every single way.
Because if people can’t tell the difference between self-defense and genocide, between anti-hate and liberation speech, that is a very, very dangerous environment to be creating. And that’s why the resolution passed in the House equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is so dangerous. It is true government negligence because it creates a national context in which there are no distinctions between those things. And so that’s dangerous.
I think the other thing that is dangerous is that Zionism has done a very good job of separating Jewish people and the struggle of antisemitism from its natural allies at a time where we really need to be united. And if the Nazi genocide and the rise of the Nazis taught us anything, it’s that when the left is divided, there are very, very serious consequences for all of us.
Yulia Gilich: Absolutely. One of the things that contributes to this confusion and that codifies the conflation of Zionism and antisemitism is IHRA, right, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and their definition of antisemitism. We at the Institute devoted our inaugural conference to thinking about how to battle the IHRA definition. It has been adopted institutionally so widely and it provides a kind of legal and procedural framework to censor Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech. And there are so many other definitions that deliberately or inadvertently do the same thing, be it the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, the Nexus Definition, whatever. And I want to ask you, what should we be looking for in these definitions to make sure they are not weaponizing antisemitism against the movement for Palestinian liberation?
Sara Kershnar: So what are we looking for in defining antisemitism? I think a couple things. One is, it needs to be historical as opposed to ahistorical.
It has to be material and not a-material. So antisemitism like all racism has features like targeting of people, and often stereotyping them for the ways they resisted and survived, right? So the whole Jews and money piece being actually a reflection of the fact that that was one of the few things Jews could do was lend money and then the synagogues would stockpile money to pay off the rulers for protection and still there would be pogroms when the rulers needed access to that money or the people they owed money to, they would give permission for a pogrom so that they could pay off their debts. All that. So it has to be material in that way. And it’s very much about state power.
So two things about that that you’re looking for in a definition. One is it has nothing to do with the state of Israel. If a definition of antisemitism says anything about the state of Israel, you know it’s not a legitimate definition because the state of Israel is that – it is a colonial state. That’s it. It’s an apartheid, colonial, ethno-nationalist state that happens to be Jewish. Criticism of it – totally legitimate. And that also includes the Jerusalem definition that says that Israel has a right to exist as a state. Why? What does that have to do with antisemitism?
And I think the third is, is it part of the tradition of liberatory struggle? Is it part of the framework of liberatory struggle? And any definition that pits Jewish safety against the safety of other people facing state violence, dominant power and civil society violence because of who they are, then that is not a legitimate definition.
And so those are the things we’re looking for: historical, not ahistorical; Material, not a-material; and part of liberatory struggles, not against them.
Yulia Gilich: Let me ask you something else. One accusation leveled at us, specifically as anti-Zionist Jews, and all anti-Zionist movements, is not only that we’re antisemitic, but also that we deny the existence of antisemitism and that we don’t take it seriously. I think it’s misguided and disingenuous and I find it ironic to hear it from people who align with the far right, with literal fascists. But I wonder if you have a response to this.
Sara Kershnar: I’m gonna tell a story. My cousin said to me, and he’s not super invested in Zionism or Israel, but he’s like, “Why are you always for the other side?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Why are you always defending Palestinians? Why aren’t you standing up for Jewish people?” I said, “Hey cousin, if there started to be a serious attack against Jewish people, who do you think would be organizing? Who do you think is going to organize to defend Jewish people against genocide, persecution, and targeting?” And he’s like, “You’re right, it’ll be you.” I said, “That’s right. Who do you think the first people will be to do that? Anti-Zionist Jews.”
Because we understand that there is no safety in aligning with dominant power, and we see the signs of genocidal racism when they show themselves. And so, we are the ones who are really building the defenses against antisemitism with our comrades across community, history, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and race. Because we understand that really, really, really, never again for anyone either means never again for everyone, or it literally means nothing at all. Because the tolerance built, the dehumanization, the lack of willingness to lift up humanity above profit and power only repeats itself when it’s not stopped.
Combating antisemitism is central to anti-Zionism because anti-Zionism is central to liberation movements, not because of its role in the Palestinian struggle, right? Like Jamal Juma said to me, Jamal Juma is a Palestinian organizer in the West Bank and he’s organized Stop the Wall and he was really one of the original organizers of the BDS call and pulling together civil society around it, and when we talked to him about building the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, he said, “Look, for the Palestinian resistance movement, we don’t need it. We’re going to have it with or without you, but as part of a broader internationalism committed to human emancipation, we need anti-Zionist Jews because you are an important part of that struggle because of your own history.”
And so in that vein, it’s important because that’s part of our location. That’s why we understand what a betrayal Zionism is. It’s not only a betrayal to the world and all liberation struggles, it’s a betrayal to us, because our history of liberation was against this kind of state violence and genocide.
And so we have to fight it and we have to define it on our terms because we want it to rejoin the collective liberation and fights against all forms of genocide and racism. You cannot be anti-fascist, anti-colonial, anti-racist without being anti-Zionist and wherever there is Zionism, people are going to miss other forms of racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, fascism, and authoritarianism. And they’re going to cloud the waters in very dangerous ways that we already talked about. And, you know, to put it bluntly, if you are not anti-Zionist, you really are not ultimately going to be able to stand firmly against antisemitism. Because Zionism has always found allyship with the people and the organizations who actually hate Jews and who actually have acted to commit genocide, persecution, and targeting of them.
Yulia Gilich: Sara, thank you so much for this conversation and for the work that you and IJAN are doing. And to our listeners, you can find Sara’s talk and the transcript of this conversation on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.