It’s Not Antisemitic to Say That Israel Is Responsible for the Unfolding Genocide in Gaza

July 8, 2025
By: Dave Zirin

The contention that the US is in the driver’s seat with Israel the “cop on the beat” is an old and musty one from the 1990s that has not aged well.

In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s resounding defeat of Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, politicians in both parties have tried to destroy the democratic socialist’s campaign with slanderous claims that he is antisemitic.

Defending Mamdani from defamation has prompted a renewed call to be hypervigilant about anything that could be deemed antisemitic among his supporters. The strategy among anti-Zionists hoping to avoid charges of antisemitism has been to argue that the issue should be less about Israel and more about our military and political support of Israel: The United States is driving this ethnic cleansing, and Israel, as in the past, is our attack dog—our “cop on the beat”—in the “dangerous neighborhood” of the Middle East. Therefore, the instruction goes, we need to push back when people say that US government policy is controlled by Israel—that it is their lobby, their influence, and their own fascistic political agenda that the US is following in canine fashion.

But the US is following Israel here. We are the dogs—a country leashed to a genocide, without an electoral path to stop the arming of a military that is killing Palestinian children seeking food for sport. The contention that the US is in the driver’s seat with Israel the “cop on the beat” is an old and musty one from the 1990s that has not aged well. It does not correspond with what Israel is perpetrating, nor does it take into account the politics of genocide.

The malignant growth of end-times Christian Zionism—there are more Christian Zionists in the US than the entire Jewish population of the world—has metastasized within the GOP over the past 15 years. What started with accruing votes from megachurch freak shows has become a powerful bloc central to all decision-making in foreign and domestic policy. Christian Zionist anti-intellectualism—which simultaneously seeks dominion in all walks of life while waiting impatiently for the Rapture—also needs to be central to our understanding, foremost because Benjamin Netanyahu has largely played its adherents like a fiddle.

We can’t allow an endless argument about what is and isn’t antisemitism when it moves us away from confronting the central issue: the question of how to stop a genocide. A recent poll shows that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support “the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries.” In other words, a majority of Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing. “Genocide is not just a murderous madness,” the author Michael Ignatieff wrote. “It is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics—one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.”

This is what we are dealing with: a quasi-religious, sub-imperial madness beyond anything seen since the Nakba. It’s not antisemitic to point out that this is no longer about the needs of the United States, whether for oil or cultivating influence in the Middle East. Trump has already shown in the Abraham Accords of his first term that the US can buy friends—or, in the case of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, that countries can be bribed and bought off. This is not 1993, with the US seeking friends in the region and a “cop on the beat.” It is about Israel’s desire—and the US’s Christian Zionist Pavlovian response—to eliminate Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, “from the river to the sea.” It is driven by fascist Israeli politicians and an Israeli public overwhelmingly comfortable with this agenda. It is being supported by this administration because it dovetails with the end-times fascism that drives much of their agenda and inhabits their base. Southern Baptist—not a Jew!—Mike Huckabee’s appointment as the US ambassador to Israel gives the game away.

These annihilators of Palestinian culture and history—antisemites waiting for a rapture that will see Jews go to hell—have become Israel’s most dependable ally. Now Trump is trying to simultaneously support Israel’s agenda without starting a war with Iran—an impossible position that gave us the fruitless and deadly bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities to assuage Israel while not angering new allies.

Israel has its share of apocalyptic religious holy warriors in government, but it’s not a group of Hanukkah Huckabees. The Netanyahu circle has cannily taken advantage of the global right-wing, white nationalist, deeply antisemitic, and authoritarian wave by allying with them and taking their place as a junior player. And if you don’t support this? They or their US apparatchiks will brand you as antisemitic and try to destroy you. But if you support their expansionist operation, you can hate Jews all you want. That’s why Trump gets to call us “shylocks” and shamelessly fill his cabinet with antisemitic, Stormfront message board scum.

Love Israel. Hate Jews. And joyfully, without hesitation, bomb Iran while funding a genocide. That’s all that Bibi and 82 percent of Israel’s population asks. Hell, burn a cross in your backyard as long as you support the burning down of Gaza. Nepo-bigot John Podhoretz made this clear—and shamed the ancestors—when he tweeted this week, “Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I’m concerned.”

This gets us to the Biden Dems. They don’t repeat the rapture fantasies of Christian Zionists, but they will hold hands with them, even if it means slandering and rejecting base-expanding candidates like Mamdani. Instead, they join the far right in slandering Mamdani as an antisemite, that classic reactionary Trojan horse used to attack leaders fighting for democratic socialism—who are currently overwhelmingly young and pro-Palestinian. They do this even though Netanyahu openly, and with a smirk, led the Democratic Party off a cliff in 2024. People like Hakeem Jeffries are fine raking in AIPAC cash and losing elections—because they are terrified: of youth, of the left, of taxing the rich, of challenging the tech oligarchs who smirk at them just like Bibi, of losing AIPAC money, and of being branded as antisemitic. A centrist liberal fears being called anti-Israel more than being called anti-genocide.

In 2025, even though the pro-genocide position makes it impossible to draw in masses of young voters or even campaign on college campuses, as Cuomo fearfully refused to do, the centrist Democrats don’t shift. When anti-Zionism is tied to social democracy, they attack. No one wants to end up like Jamaal Bowman. Better to lose an election than stand up to a fascist Israeli government and risk possible irrelevance.

Of course, we need to challenge antisemitism wherever we see it. But I’m Jewish, and fielding bad-faith accusations of antisemitism is far from the priority in my mind. A genocide is happening. There is nothing antisemitic about pointing out the global influence of Christian Zionism and the open thirst for ethnic cleansing among this generation of Israeli leadership. They are driving this train, though we are certainly paying for the engine and the tracks. We are not ordering them to commit war crimes, though we are giving them the thumbs up to do it. We are the cheerleaders and weapons dealers. Even Reagan, who tried to freeze Israeli settlements, was far tougher than 98 percent of Democrats on this.

If anything, people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor-Greene will benefit from the Democrats’ cowardice—both are now publicly challenging Israel in a way that the Democratic Party is not. The left needs to fill that space. And while we have a responsibility to oppose our own government’s support for genocide, we also need to rightfully point out that Israel is at the heart of this atrocity without fearing that it comes across as antisemitism. Not doing so is a dead end—it’s a dead end for young people, and it’s a dead end for the brave students who populated last year’s encampments.

We need to catch up to the current reality. The attack dog is not only off the leash. It’s out for the kill. To say so loudly and clearly matters now more than ever.