How to spot an antisemite? Ask about Israel’s right to exist

These positions certainly include the new music emanating from the Glastonbury Festival. “Death to the IDF” is fully equivalent to “Death to Israel”. As an Israeli who served in the IDF – as did my parents, husband, and two sons – I may be furious at the way our government has mishandled the Hamas-Israel war, squandered the huge international sympathy after the Hamas massacre, and allowed the transgressions of some military commanders and soldiers to go mostly unpunished. But the heroes of Glastonbury need to know that the IDF is the only army I have, and the only power that has kept every Jewish Israeli – and probably many Arab Israelis – from being slaughtered en masse. So yes, I want justice for the Palestinians, but I also want my new granddaughter to grow up Israeli, safe, and free. If you insist on seeing these goals as contradictions, you force me to choose the latter. Every time.

Such assertions, jointly or separately, are antisemitic in the simple and intuitive sense of racist generalisation – and in the comparative sense, implying that of all states in the world, only Israel is illegal, retractable, and disposable.

And that is precisely why we need to corner potential Israel-annihilators by testing their virtue-signalling layers.

You think that Israel should never have been founded? Legitimate opinion, even if I dislike it. Just don’t confuse it with the pipe dream of shutting the place down and killing off my national and cultural identity. You’re fine with Jews unless they are Zionists? Unacceptable – as most Jews, and many non-Jews, are Zionists, in the simplest sense of supporting a national home for the Jewish people in its ancestral land. Many of us acknowledge the parallel right of the Palestinians, but do not want Israel to be annihilated. That goes for your constituency too, Mr Mamdani. New York may be made of islands, but no New Yorker is an island, and therefore you cannot cleverly avoid the conversation. We need to see you carefully disentangle your Israel critique from any hint of delegitimisation.

Similarly, it’s time for the responsible media to unpack the “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestine” muddles. Are those two mutually exclusive? Does each of these “pros” signify “Death to the other side”? Many reporters and commentators are intellectually lazy enough to make this automatic assumption. Few are attentive enough to work around it. As my late father used to say: “I am neither pro-Israel nor pro-Palestine. I am pro-peace.”

The same wisdom applies, of course, to the so-called pro-Israelis who wish death or eternal submission on all Palestinians. Those are far fewer, but equally dangerous – especially when they sit in the Israeli coalition government as partners of the notoriously indiscriminate Mr Netanyahu. I hope that, just like the would-be Israel-annihilators of this world, the Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs will be pushed back where they belong: to the wrong side of the red line of decent political conversation.

Thus, one great lesson to draw from the current murkiness of global debate is: demand clarity. From yourself first, and then from others. If you want Israel (or the Palestinians) dead, make sure you say it, so that I can walk away or block you from my feed – and we don’t waste our time on a useless argument. We come from different moral galaxies.

But even among the well-meaning, it is difficult to heal reality when language is getting so badly distorted. Here is one profound example: debate on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is currently pitting two ancient words and great values – peace and justice – against one another.

“Peace” has become almost solely a “pro-Israel” term. Well-intentioned people use it to support the two-states solution or the shared-homeland solution. “Justice” has become almost solely a “pro-Palestinian” term. It is very often a polite euphemism for ethnic cleansing of all Israeli Jews “back to Europe” – a statement as vicious as it is historically mendacious. Other minds, evil ones, equate "justice" with the genocide of the Jews, pure and simple.

In my view, “justice” is an unreachable Platonic ideal in any international rivalry – especially one as monumental and labyrinthine as the Israeli–Arab conflict. “In the place where we are right,” wrote the wonderful Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, “no flowers will grow.”

By contrast, fair compromise is reachable. A more just coexistence is reachable. A well-intentioned negotiation for peace is reachable. Letting time heal both sides is reachable – provided that clarity, subtlety, some genuine acquaintance with historical facts, and a distinct refusal to kill off the other side are brought into the conversation.

We pro-peaceniks should page each other more assertively. We need every nuanced voice we can find out there.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Haifa’s Law School and an activist in Israel’s pro-democracy movement. Her books include Jews and Words (Yale University Press), co-authored with her father Amos Oz