Untangling opposition to Israel's war crimes from antisemitism

The masked vandalizer painting Free Palestine on a sign at a messianic synagogue. Not sure why police blurred the image out.

In Vaughan on Monday, someone dressed in a mask sprayed pro-Palestinian messages on several banks, a Starbucks and a Sobeys supermarket. The individual also hit the United Jewish Appeal and, according to CP24, a synagogue. The act, we are told, is being considered a hate crime.

The headline is as straightforward as you might expect: Police seek masked suspect after businesses, synagogue targeted with pro-Palestinian graffiti. Journalist Joshua Freeman doesn’t list which banks (many of which have invested in the Israeli war machine) nor does he mention that Starbucks is the target of a global boycott campaign because of the support of its owners for Israel’s genocide. Though he does guess that Sobeys may have been hit because it has a large Kosher section. Strange journalism to guess why Sobeys was hit and not state plainly why the banks and Starbucks were hit, but anyway. 

Like the banks and Starbucks, the United Jewish Appeal is fair game to have a pro-Palestine message spray painted on it. The UJA is one of Toronto’s most ardent supporters of Israel. They have a donor program that helps young Torontonians to move to Israel permanently, including “preparation for IDF enlisting.” While they claim that conflating Israel with Jewishness is anti-semitic, they also coordinated the largest show of support for Israel in Canada since the start of the war without condemning any of Israel’s actions, the way that hundred of thousands of Israelis have done in the streets of Tel Aviv. Supporting Israel is absolutely within their right. Just as it is within the right of anyone who is horrified by Israel’s deeds to peacefully express their opposition.

But the vandalism at the synagogue crosses the line (that is, if the synagogue isn’t being used to host a real estate sale for stolen Palestinian land). Except even this is a curious point on the list, one that CP24 manages to jump over entirely. Free Palestine was scrawled across a sign that said The Gates Of Zion - a place of worship that isn’t regular synagogue – it’s a messianic synagogue located beside the Starbucks in a strip mall. Messianic. As in, they believe that Jesus is the Messiah – something that’s, you know, not exactly inline with Jewish belief. 

Messianic Jews are a bizarre mix of Jews who want to convert to Christinianty (as in, they believe that Jesus is the Messiah) but also want to maintain some traditions of Judaism, and evangelical Christians. You might know them as Jews for Jesus, a group that when I was first starting university was the first cult I had ever come across. Messianic Jews believe that the true path to salvation is through Christianity and weirder, you can believe in Christ’s salvation but also observe the Sabbath in a traditional Jewish way. 

The tensions that flow from the question: is Jesus the Messiah? form the basis of classic antisemitism. The Christian majority has found biblical reasons to oppress the Jewish minority for centuries and they all relate to whether or not Jesus is the son of God. How ironic, then, that vandalizing the strip mall “synagogue” of Messianic Jews is considered antisemitism when their very existence brings antisemitism well beyond hatred and into its own religion! 

I don’t know if Freeman knows any of this or perhaps it doesn’t matter – because right now, anything that mentions Palestine in Vaughan, a city with a sizable Jewish population, is considered to be antisemitic by supporters of Israel. Freeman doesn’t mention why Starbucks would be targeted, or why which bank would be targeted, just that they were. And that’s enough. No context required, unless it’s Sobeys’ Kosher food section.

Here’s the inconvenient truth for Zionists who want to drape themselves in the cloak of antisemitism to boost support for Israel: they have done more than any other group to conflate Jews with the massacre that is happening in Gaza. They have done more conflating of Israel with Jewishness, more conflating of pro-Palestinian graffitti with antisemitism, than any other group in Canada. The principal lobby organization, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs conflates the two in its name. And here, in a news report about police investigating hate crimes, it isn’t even necessary to mention that this branch of not actually Jewish Jews are actually Christians. Can you be antisemitic against Christians? Certainly Marco Mendicino wants that to be possible. Did the vandalizer know any of this context? Were they attracted by the word Zion alone? Do they hate so-called Messianic Judaism specifically? We’ll probably never know.

Israel’s genocidal war has done so much damage to the safety and security of Jews worldwide, more than any other entity on the planet. Israel’s genocidal war is the biggest threat to the success and security of Israel. The country’s leadership is trying to provoke a regional war that they have no hope of winning, buoyed by the fake confidence that comes with having the world’s police force funding your war machine, and the rampant racism that considers Arabs subhuman. And average Israelis will pay the price, at some point. 

No reasonable person sees a father picking up the limbs of his exploded child, or a journalist whose head was blown off or the skin diseases that Gazans are living with and says to themselves: this is just; this is good; this is proportional and this will create peace. And yet, those who seek to boost support for Israel see these images, knowing that on the balance of probability that average people will be appalled, and employ Jewishness to justify these crimes. It’s not only horrible and outrageous, it’s also deeply unstrategic: by conflating the Jewishness with Israel’s genocide, antisemitism does rise. Zionists know this and they do not care.

Take Pierre Poilievre, who to advance his agenda to defund the CBC, uses the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh (and then randomly, to defund the CBC). CIJA and the UJA aren’t going to condemn this, call it out or even appeal to Poilievre to be a bit more careful with how he uses Jewishness to defend a war crime (regardless of what you think of Hamas). Because ultimately, these groups are all-in for Israel. 

Average people are left in the crosshairs. Average Jews who feel their security vanishing, or who see fire at a Jewish elementary school and who instantly feel like it’s an attack on them, (and not simply an unhoused individual who started his own fire, which is also detailed in this CP24 story) are the victims in this game. The anxiety is real and the antisemitism out there is real too. But violent antisemitism isn’t coming from Palestinian solidarity activists. It comes from the far right, the white supremacists, the ones who engage in terror tactics not just against Jews but against other religious and ethnic minorities too. It comes from Poilievre expressing hardcore Zionism while he plays footsies with hardcore antisemites. 

Oh but those antisemites and racists matter way less. Despite the risk they pose, despite the quiet organizing and the work they’re doing to push someone like Pierre Poilievre to be even more racist and hateful, they aren’t the ones to be worried about. Instead, it’s the person wearing a mask spray painting banks and the UJA, whose identity we likely will never know, and with not knowing, knowing his motivations either. 

But if Jews can be kept scared and be made to believe that any criticism of what Israel is doing is a personal and dangerous attack on them, very well, in the mind of the Zionist propaganda machine. Solidarity messages with Gaza will always be seen as an attack on Jews. Groups like CIJA, who conflate Jewishness with the State of Israel, can claim victory over the battle while Israel blunders itself into a historic defeat of its own war.

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