On Sunday May 31, 2026 there will be an Israel Day Parade in New York City. Its theme is “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.” I will not attend.
I agree with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen who wrote in a recent New York Times opinion essay “Attempts to conflate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism do not combat that hate. They only undermine the fight against antisemitism by equating the Israeli government with all Jews, and they empower the enemies of free speech.”
I am a Jew and I do not support Israel’s decades long occupation of the West Bank, Israeli settlers victimizing Palestinians and attempting to push them off their lands and out of their homes, Israel’s destruction of Gaza, Israel’s manipulation of American politicians and drawing the United States into a war with Iran, and I oppose stereotypes about Jews and antisemitism.
Antisemitism remains real in the world today, as does hostility to other religious groups. As a high school teacher, I had students who were surprised when I described myself as a Jew because they either identified being Jewish with New York’s ultra-Orthodox community or thought of the word Jew as a curse.
Israel contributes to the rising tide of antisemitism. The Basic Law of Israel was passed in 2018 when Benjamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister and the rightwing Likud Party controlled the Israeli Knesset. It identified Israel as the “Nation-State of the Jewish People, declared “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” and that “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Netanyahu defended the law because he believes Israel is solely “The nation-state of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people alone.” Critics, including me, charge the “Basic Law,” passed seventy years after the founding of Israel, formally redefined Israel as an Apartheid state and no longer a multi-ethnic democracy.
A big problem facing Jews living in the United States and Europe today is that by equating Israel with Jews and dismissing disagreements with Israel as antisemitic, the Israeli government and Zionists organization are intensifying antisemitism and in some ways justifying it. If opposing Israeli actions in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and on the West Bank makes you antisemitic, it becomes legitimate to being an antisemite.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance proliferated a now widely accepted, but also highly criticized, definition of antisemitism that includes questionable examples as evidence of antisemitism. According to the American Jewish Committee the IHRA definition used by the U.S. State Department and Department of Education to identify antisemitism and has been adopted by over 35 U.S. states. It is also used by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related political PACs in their lobbying efforts and decisions to endorse and donate to candidates.
According to one clause, “Applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is considered antisemitism. The problem with this clause is that no other recognized “democratic” nation today continues to forcibly occupied neighboring territory, subjects its inhabitants to a separate system of law, seeks to evict the indigenous population, and defines the country as only belonging to one religious or ethnic group.
A second clause says it is antisemitic to accuse “Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” is considered antisemitism. The problem with this clause is that pro-Israeli lobbies in the United States, especially AIPAC, have spent tens of millions of dollars to influence the United States government to endorse pro-Israeli policies that seem counter to American interests. In his opinion essay, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen accused some of his colleagues in the Democratic Party of providing “reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” Van Hollen warned his colleagues against being “complicit in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or what human rights organizations and scholars have determined to be genocide in Gaza.” That clause defines both Van Hollen and me as antisemites.
It is also considered antisemitism to make “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and to claim the “existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” But Israeli is violating the 1951 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that was written in response the European Holocaust and extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and signed by both the United States and Israel. According to the Convention, “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” constitute genocide. It includes “killing members of the group;” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” These are all actions Israel is committing in its war on Gaza and is likely committing in its treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank.
The equation of protests against Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza and Israeli colonialism on the West Bank with antisemitism has had a devastating impact on freedom of speech on American college campuses. Following the October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, protests against the Israeli response were dismissed by the Trump administration and Zionists organizations as antisemitic. Colleges were punished by Trump with threatened loss of federal grants and with forced financial payments. Student exercising freedom of speech and assembly were suspended, blacklisted, denied diplomas, and some faced revocation of visas and green cards and deportation.
On Sunday May 31, 2026 there will be an Israel Day Parade in New York City. Its theme is “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.” I will not attend.
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