Two-and-a-half millennia ago, the prophet Jeremiah berated the people of Israel and the political leadership of the kingdom of Judah.
According to the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah denounced “faithless Israel” for corruption, societal injustice, brutality and general moral decay. He was called a traitor forappearing to support the Babylonian Empire, the kingdom’s eastern enemy. His preaching earned him beatings, death threats, imprisonment from the religious and political establishment and ultimately exile.
Today, there is evidence of the equally corrosive effect recent hostilities have had on the modern Jewish State’s populace. The Guardian sees a “‘deep moral deterioration’ being normalized in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Civilians are being slaughtered in Gaza, and in the West Bank, face-to-face killing, vandalism and land and agricultural theft abound. Looking to a prophet like Jeremiah seems appropriate.
By his standards, and from this retrospective view, Israelis — especially the government — might have more to fear from the wrath of God than the International Criminal Court.
Consider a few of Jeremiah’s lines.
“As a well pours out its water, so she pours out her wickedness. Violence and destruction resound in her; her sickness and wounds are ever before me.” (Jer 6:7)
“This is what the Lord says: ‘Go down to the palace of the king of Judah and proclaim this message there: Hear the word of the Lord to you, king of Judah, you who sit on David’s throne—you, your officials and your people who come through these gates. This is what the Lord says: ‘Do what is just and right.’” (22:1-3)
“But you only look for and think about what you can get dishonestly. You are even willing to kill innocent people to get it. You feel free to hurt people and to steal from them.” (22:17)
My Christian friends and colleagues, especially evangelicals, taught me that applying Scripture to the modern world can be informative, provided the ancient verses’ context legitimately supports drawing contemporary parallels. Sadly, these verses seem applicable to Israel today.
I have reported on antisemitism and its intersection with anti-Zionism for a decade in both Jewish and secular outlets. I charted the relatively stable trends of antisemitic incidents, with periodic explosions of violence like Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue shooting. This world changed totally on Oct. 7, with Hamas terrorists’ barbarous attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people, soldiers and civilians, and taking 250 hostages.
As the war has persisted, and attacks on West Bank Palestinians have also escalated, so too the debate within the North American Jewish community has escalated and become more bitter, dipping into recrimination.
Some today feel any criticism of Israel is now antisemitic, but is that realistic? By this Alice-in-Wonderland standard, Jeremiah’s prophecies would make him an antisemite, at least per party-line Benjamin Netanyahu-supporting organizations like AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League. Not to mention certain attention-seeking, bandwagon-loving members of Congress.
The debate in North America about Israel/Palestine is on an increasingly slippery slope, gaining velocity in recent weeks. Inexorably, some now want to broaden the term “antisemite” to include all not in lock step with Netanyahu’s far-right government.
Moreover, the charge is now used as guilt by tenuous associations, akin to the 1950s Red baiting. Some party-line Israel supporters use connect-the-dots tropes, asking insinuating questions like: “Who once liked a tweet by someone who liked another tweet we construe as antisemitic?” Or: “Who attended a banquet with someone who attended another banquet held by an anti-Zionist group?” Or: “What university president didn’t punish campus protesters soon enough or harshly enough?”
Now, these pro-Israel groups want university officials to ban peaceful student demonstrations supporting Palestine, labeling them antisemitic before they take place. Or paying for ads attacking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — the highest-serving Jewish person in American government — for not accepting pro-Israel partisans’ definition of antisemitism. Welcome back, Joe McCarthy!
This latter-day Inquisition is now a full-blown campaign to delegitimize any criticism of Israel’s government or military. How? By cynically conflating all sympathy for Palestinian causes with support for Hamas, and by implying that protesters are in the pay of Iran’s regime.
These smearing efforts range from Netanyahu addressing Congress to a drumbeat generated by leaders of old-line, establishment Jewish organizations. Recently, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) accused Vice President Harris of “emboldening pro-Hamas demonstrators outside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress, as well as the Iranian regime, merely by not presiding over the Netanyahu speech.”
To be fair, some pro-Palestinian protesters’ misguided, infantile leftism has unintentionally aided this weaponization of antisemitism. This through their inflammatory chants and graffiti, thuggish campus and rally behavior and by flag burning — as well as by denying Hamas’s mass sexual assaults on Oct. 7.
The antisemitism branding effort seeks to intimidate all critics of Israeli government war policy. But its bull’s-eye is on left-of-center Jews who oppose Hamas but find appalling Gaza’s civilian death toll and West Bank Jewish settler vigilantes, who are sometimes abetted by Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli army is also taking thousands of captured and seized Palestinian hostages and abusing them while in custody, according to the United Nations and Ha’aretz. For establishment pro-Israel groups, Gaza’s story has only one legitimate interpretation, and American Jews are expected to line up or risk being labeled “self-hating.”
In fact, these modern critics are Jeremiah’s spiritual heirs, calling on Israel to be its best self, as the Torah tells us God intended. Despite efforts to marginalize us, we are not going away.
We have a right to Judaism’s honorable prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power in the cause of social justice.
Mark I. Pinsky is a Durham, N.C.-based journalist and author who served as a civilian volunteer attached to the Israeli Defense Force in El Arish, Sinai, in 1967.