Jewish Safety Will Not Come Through More Guns, Policing, and Repression

In the last few months, we witnessed two violent attacks on pro-Israel events organized by American Jewish groups, by perpetrators who shouted “Free Palestine!” as they acted. The attacks — which killed two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and severely burned participants in a “Run for Their Lives” event in Boulder, Colorado, in support of Israeli hostages — have been roundly condemned as antisemitic by politicians and Jewish groups, even though both attackers were vocal about targeting Zionists and seemingly motivated by anger at Israel’s actions in Gaza, rather than hatred toward Jews.

The attacks have led to calls for increased surveillance and security around Jewish institutions, as well as accusations that the Palestine liberation movement “radicalized” the assailants.

The response to these terrifying events is predictable and follows a long-established pattern: intense fear and anguish, cynical complaints that rising antisemitism is being ignored and Jews left unprotected, and fevered demands for action. Yet, despite an understandable craving for security, does resorting to increased surveillance, policing, and more severe crackdowns on protests actually make Jews safer? Or is it exacerbating the problem?

To address a problem, one must first have a clear idea of its causes. For many in the mainstream Jewish community, as well as in the Trump administration, the answer is simple: pro-Palestinian activism. After the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in D.C., the Zionist organization JewBelong put up billboards stating, “Make no mistake: if you screamed ‘Free Palestine’ you helped pull the trigger” and “When will you learn? ‘Free Palestine’ is a death chant.” Counterterrorism expert Seamus Hughes blamed “violent imagery” (presumably of Gazans being slaughtered) as “triggering” even though the images “may actually not be true or correct.” The Republican-led congressional resolution condemning the Boulder attack labeled “Free Palestine” an “antisemitic slogan that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Zionists have long asserted that “antisemitism on the left” is under-reported and not taken seriously, along with claiming that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” (another pithy JewBelong billboard). Yet over the past decade, this has morphed into the notion that progressivism itself, not just pro-Palestine activism, is inherently dangerous to Jews.

We hear this in Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s June 6th speech to an assembly of Republican Attorneys General, quoted in the Jewish Forward, in which he claimed that “the radical left” harbored the “real death threat” to Jews. “You have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what’s happening on the left. There is a throughline from Occupy Wall Street to BLM [Black Lives Matter] to ‘defund the police’ to ‘River to the Sea.’ They are the same people; these are the same kind of nihilists.” Hughes is less doctrinaire, but insists that “the rise in antisemitic attacks in recent years comes from all forms of ideologies and extremism — far right, far left, single issue.”

What should we on the left make of Hughes and Greenblatt’s assertions? Obviously, progressives sometimes make antisemitic comments, just as they may sometimes make sexist or racist or homophobic ones. But antisemitism is not a core part of left-wing ideology, as it is on the right. Antisemitism — along with anti-Blackness and Islamophobia — is definitively baked into right-wing ideology. That is the crucial difference.

Antisemitism, like anti-Black racism and Islamophobia, has deep roots in white Christian nationalism, an ideology that, by definition, considers nonwhite, non-Christians to be outsiders. Every major study of contemporary antisemitism, particularly antisemitic violence, ascribes it primarily to right-wing white nationalists. All sources on antisemitism, including the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, acknowledge that antisemitism is far more prevalent on the right than on the left. A 2022 survey, Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum, commissioned by Tufts University, concluded:

For overt measures, we find antisemitic attitudes are rare on the ideological left but common on the ideological right, particularly among young adults on the right. Even when primed with information that most U.S. Jews have favorable views toward Israel – a country disfavored by the ideological left – respondents on the left rarely support statements such as that Jews have too much power or should be boycotted.

But that study was done before October 7, 2023, and of course, both of these recent attacks were perpetrated by supporters of the Palestinian cause (although not Palestinians). Clearly there is a connection between the attacks and support for Palestine. There is deep frustration at the lack of attention to Palestinian suffering and continued U.S. backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and apartheid policies. Many U.S. Jews are rightly concerned that they are being blamed for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. But who is trying to distinguish between Jews and Zionists: the left, which includes anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace; or the right, and mainstream Jewish institutions which insist that there is no daylight between Judaism and Zionism, and call anti-Zionist Jews “fake” or “self-hating” Jews? It is this Zionist, right wing narrative conflating all Jews with the State of Israel, and thus with Israel’s war crimes, that is placing Jews in danger.

These right-wing voices are often loudest in condemnation of “progressive antisemitism,” largely because it deflects criticism of white nationalist antisemitism, the most prevalent, most dangerous source of antisemitism and racism. We hear it in Republican Nancy Mace’s patronizing dismissal of CodePink’s Medea Benjamin: “I love Jews! I love Israel! Even self-hating Jews like you.”

Yes, white nationalism is fully ingrained in American government and systems. White nationalists have been a major factor in the January 6 insurrection and in Trump’s cabinet. The White House Faith Office and “anti-Christian bias” task force are part of the implementation of Project 2025’s radical blueprint for installing Christian Nationalist governance throughout the federal bureaucracy. Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and House Speaker Mike Johnson all maintain connections to the movement, forming what the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has called a triangle of influence. While these men are all ardent Zionists, they are also connected to deeply antisemitic institutions; their reasons for supporting Israel have less to do with Jewish welfare than millenarian prophecies that see the ingathering of the Jews in Israel as a necessary step towards the apocalypse. Focusing on right-wing, white Christian nationalist claims of supposed “leftwing antisemitism” and allowing Trump, Mace, Johnson, and others to proclaim their “love for Jews and love for Israel” unchallenged gives them cover for antisemitism and racism, ultimately facilitating more attacks on people of color and the left.

What is most sinister is how these two tragic attacks have been exploited by the right to criminalize and subdue not only Palestinians, but immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. One of Trump’s first actions in response to the Boulder attack was to issue a travel ban against citizens of 12 countries and restrictions on seven more, declaiming, “This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.” The congressional resolution tying Boulder to the Free Palestine movement also claims the attack “demonstrates the dangers of not removing from the country aliens who fail to comply with the terms of their visas” and expresses gratitude to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “for protecting the homeland.”

The tragedy here is that by clinging to the chimera of “leftwing antisemitism” and making common cause with the right, the mainstream Jewish community is allowing itself to be isolated from other marginalized populations. When Greenblatt identifies Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and “Islamist groups” as part of this leftwing cabal, he is telling Jews that to survive they must turn against people of color, progressive movements, and the poor. When he claims that recent attacks against Jews are “the worst expression of hate against any group in the country for the last 100 years” he dismisses and minimizes the lynchings, dispossessions, and deportations of African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, and Japanese Americans. Only Jewish oppression counts, only Jewish oppression is real.

This blinkered view not only traps the Jewish community in a funhouse of paranoia and isolation, it also threatens other marginalized communities and deprives us all of desperately needed solidarity. The typical, ADL-advised response to incidents of antisemitism builds physical and emotional walls and fortresses within and around our communities, creating a perceived sense of protection and certainty. (“Does your church need armed guards? ‘Cause our synagogue does” JewBelong dutifully reminds us.) Safety plans devised by groups like ADL and the Jewish Federations rely heavily on working with police. In its guide to protecting religious and communal institutions, the ADL suggests that congregations volunteer their sites to serve as locations for local SWAT teams to train, with no consideration for how this may affect Black, Latino, Muslim, or LGBTQ members or neighbors.

Many of these “safety measures” are blatantly racist. Take the police “antisemitism” training for New York City officers provided by Combat Antisemitism and the Program on Extremism, which listed the keffiyeh and the watermelon as examples of images that “incite hatred, violence, or discrimination against Jewish individuals or communities.” Hughes’s description of the Boulder and D.C. attackers as “self-radicalized” is disturbingly similar to the discredited Countering Violent Extremism programs, which focused on infiltrating mosques and Muslim community centers to identify “self-radicalized” Islamist terrorists, creating a broad net of surveillance and repression and fear in Muslim communities.

A better route to Jewish community safety lies in building solidarity with all marginalized groups: people of color, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, and those with disabilities. There are historical precedents: in the 1970s, Jews for Urban Justice released a manifesto titled “The Oppression and Liberation of the Jewish People in America,” outlining their ideology as an anti-racist, anti-war, Jewish socialist organization. The manifesto called for white Jewish solidarity with African American, Native American, Chicano, Italian American, and Appalachian communities, and was also critical of Israeli policy towards Palestinians.

In the late 1980s and 90s, Portland, Oregon, responded to a wave of skinhead neo-Nazi racist and homophobic violence with an “unlikely collaboration between groups of activists, immigrants, militant youth and queer organizers.” The Coalition for Humanity that formed was made up of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and Jews, using street defense and community activism rather than policing to make Portland safer for everyone. This sounds very similar to the Jews For Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) community safety pledge, which suggests:

Start or deepen conversations with your community about what safety can look like beyond the narrow confines of police and militarization.

Reach out to neighboring communities and organizations — particularly Muslim communities, Black communities, including churches, immigrant communities and other communities of color who have had to navigate their own safety outside of a police framework.

The Community Safety Campaign (CSC), a national project led by a multiracial, cross-class, multidenominational, and gender-diverse team of Jewish organizers, political educators, researchers, healers, and spiritual leaders, recently produced a 100 page guide for Jewish communities and partners seeking to transform their safety practices. CSC helps congregations build community safety plans and teams based on political education about antisemitism, antiracism, white & Christian nationalism, and transformative justice.

These efforts have one thing in common: They do not look at antisemitism in isolation, but recognize its connections to all forms of racism and oppression. This is the approach taken by PARCEO’s (Participatory Action Research Center for Education Organizing) “Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation” curriculum, which points to the historical commonalities and parallels between the oppression of Jews and that of other marginalized populations. The PARCEO framework is central to Jewish Voice for Peace’s Principles for Dismantling Antisemitism.

During the first Trump administration, many Americans were horrified by the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, which called for the unification of the white nationalist movement, and exemplified the nature of white nationalist violence in action. Its leaders chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” insisting that Jews are an evil cabal infecting white America by supporting inferior races. Unlike “radical leftists,” these people are actually in power — and they are actually a threat to Jews, unlike keffiyeh-wearing students at Columbia University. If we truly value Jewish safety we must throw off the isolationist mentality. We must give equal value to Black, Brown, queer, and Palestinian safety. We must focus on the true enemy — white supremacy and white nationalism — and not look to ethnonationalism, militarism, and policing to protect us, while endangering those who should be our allies.