Weaponization of antisemitism

Post-1967 Arab–Israeli War and new antisemitism

After the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—with AIPAC founder Isaiah L. Kenen's support, according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé—sought to "portray certain 'anti-Israel' actions as anti-Semitic", especially with regard to international calls for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank. In 1974, ADL leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein published The New Anti-Semitism, which identified anti-Zionism as a "new antisemitism", an idea the ADL has sought to popularize since the early 1970s.

In 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban wrote: "One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism." Of Eban's statement, Chomsky later said: "That is a convenient stand. It cuts off a mere 100 percent of critical comment!"

In 1980, Edward Said said that, since its inception, Zionist discourse had aimed "to lay claim to Palestine both as a backward, largely uninhabited territory" and as a place where Jews had "a unique historical privilege" to rebuild a homeland. As a result, he said, this meant anyone who opposed Zionism "immediately aligned oneself with anti-Semitism". Said said this routine conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism functioned to suppress criticism of Israel and was reinforced by simplistic media narratives, the influence of pro-Israel pressure groups, and academics' and intellectuals' uncritical repetition of political clichés.

Under Communism in the Eastern Bloc

In 1952, a "confession" was extracted under torture from Rudolf Slánský, former general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, of "shield[ing] Zionism" by accusing its critics of antisemitism. David Hirsh describes this as a deployment of the Livingstone Formulation characteristic of Soviet antisemitism.^{[page needed]} The British Communist Party denied that the Slánský trial was antisemitic, and rejected the charge of Soviet antisemitism altogether as "emanating from unreliable, capitalist, and pro-imperialist sources".

According to Isi Leibler, starting in the late 1950s the Soviet Union produced literature for Western consumption on the supposed nonexistence of a Jewish question in the Soviet Union, accusing those who alleged mistreatment of Soviet Jews of being "cold warriors" who sought to slander the USSR. Between 1958 and 1964, western Communists reproduced and distributed these publications uncritically, and generally responded to examples of antisemitic Soviet productions by defending them aesthetically or denouncing them as propaganda. In 1964, Bertrand Russell published an open letter protesting the notion, which he said was promulgated by Soviet authorities and Western defenders of communism, that the charge of Soviet antisemitism was an expression of a "cold war attitude" made to distract from Western racism. In 1962, American Marxist historian and activist Herbert Aptheker published a pamphlet titled The Fraud of "Soviet Anti-Semitism". The Communist Party of Australia opposed Leibler's campaigning for Soviet Jews, and republished the pamphlet domestically with a foreword decrying the raising of the issue of Soviet antisemitism at the United Nations by Australia as a "right-wing Cold War plot intended to divide the labour movement".

In 1963, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said at an address to Soviet intellectuals that "the bourgeois press is conducting a campaign of slander against us ... [Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem about the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar] presents things as if only Jews were the victims ... For whom and for what purpose has it been necessary to present things as if someone is discriminating against the Jews in our country? ... There is no Jewish question in our country, and those who invent it are slavishly repeating what other people say."

In 1967, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) withdrew a draft resolution by the party's Jewish commission calling for Soviet authorities to restore "the administratively suppressed Jewish cultural institutions", including Jewish theaters and Yiddish-language newspapers. Though it rejected claims of antisemitism in the Soviet Union as "a slander and an outright fraud", the draft acknowledged Soviet authorities' "shortcomings", including suppression of Jewish prayer books. Explaining the draft's withdrawal, a CPUSA leader wrote that it had to be edited so that it "unequivocally reject[s] any idea of 'Soviet anti-Semitism' in whatever guise it may appear, and any campaign of public criticism". Another party leader said he had visited Soviet Jews and found no antisemitism, but only Jews angry about the "campaign of falsehoods" against the USSR.

Sociologist Anna Zawadzka has argued that the Livingstone Formulation was already in use in Poland in 1968, such that Jews "could not articulate their experiences of antisemitism" without having their testimony "diagnosed as either cynical victim-playing or an emotional disorder." She interpreted this response as a form of "paternalistic violence", viewing the traumatized Polish Jews as deserving of sympathy, but not of trust in their view of antisemitism in the decades since the Holocaust. Zawadzka wrote that this paternalistic view has changed, with Jews now being seen as cynical and manipulative rather than as traumatized and paranoid in their articulations of antisemitism. According to Polish historian Alina Cata, "There was [by 1968] a widespread charge that Zionists incited the West to make groundless accusations of antisemitism against Poles."

In 1970, Ron I. Rubin wrote, "Nations raising charges of Soviet antisemitism [at the United Nations] are accused of attempting to subvert the Soviet Union by destroying its multinational character through the introduction of the poison of nationalism", and that Soviet denials of antisemitism are generally irrelevant to the accusation and contradicted by "certain official admissions".

In the 1980s, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (AKSO) was formed, led by David Dragunsky. It issued articles and propaganda denouncing "international Zionism" and rebutting the claim of a "Jewish question" in the USSR as a lie spread by Zionists: "those Zionist wheeler-dealers try to persuade the world's public opinion that, allegedly, in the USSR there exists the 'Jewish question.' … It is with contempt that Soviet Jews cast aside the attempts by Zionist propagandists to interfere in their life." The U.S. State Department decried the AKSO's publications as antisemitic propaganda meant to shield the Soviet Union from scrutiny of the plight of Soviet Jews. The Committee's founding article in Pravda shortly followed the 1983 World Conference on Soviet Jewry in Jerusalem, where the Soviet Union's treatment of Jews had been harshly criticized.

Aleksander Smolar wrote in 1987 that Communist Polish authorities wielded "real and imagined" charges of antisemitism against their opposition, particularly in the Catholic Church. He added that the Communists' image as the defenders of Jews might have inhibited the Church's willingness to defend Jews from pogroms, as Church authorities would not want to be interpreted as giving support to the Communists.

Jovan Byford writes that the Serbian Orthodox Church responded to accusations of antisemitism in the 1980s and 1990s by denying antisemitism: "literal denial is routinely accompanied by the questioning of the morality of the critics and the veracity of their claims. The topic of debate is regularly re-directed towards the accusers, whose position is constructed, in very elaborate ways, as mistaken, intolerant, biased, and malicious."

András Kovács has written that antisemitic discourse after the replacement of the Communist Hungarian People's Republic held that, during the Communist era, powerful Jews used "the charge of antisemitism [to] de-legitimize [...] the anticommunist national forces and places them in a disadvantageous position both in politics and in public life", and that Communist Jews then allied with liberal Jews to retain political power after the establishment of the Republic of Hungary.

During the Gaza war

After examining appearances of the word "antisemitism" before and after October 7, 2023, in The Jewish Chronicle, Neve Gordon wrote, "the data reveals that TJC has been exaggerating and instrumentalising a Zionist notion of antisemitism to foment moral panic, mobilising the language of trauma and injury to continuously reassert a notion of Jewish victimhood" in support of a "justificatory framework that operates by claiming injury and then using the alleged injury to set in motion a series of oppressive actions against individuals, groups and institutions." Gordon has also written that the scores of civil society organizations, primarily in Israel, North America, and Europe, that are invested in shielding Israel from criticism by smearing Palestine advocacy with accusations of antisemitism represent "by far the largest group of apartheid enablers".

According to legal scholar Shirin Sinnar, university administrators' repression of campus protests in the 2023–24 academic year weakened academic liberty in the face of authoritarianism under the Trump administration: the "failure to rebut politicized narratives that pro-Palestine protests were rampant with violence, antisemitism, and lawlessness has made it harder for academic institutions to resist the even greater weaponization of such caricatures now." Some^[who?] have called the exploitation of the accusation of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel or Zionism during the Gaza war a "new McCarthyism".

Israel and Zionism

Some activists and scholars have said that weaponization of antisemitism, and new antisemitism in particular, has been used to stifle criticism of Israel.

In the early 1950s, U.S. journalist Dorothy Thompson, a former advocate of Zionism, was publicly called antisemitic when she began to criticize Zionism after a visit to Palestine in 1945. Thompson felt the accusations, which persisted throughout her career, amounted to a "type of blackmail" or character assassination. Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote, "today, many see the silencing of a bold humanitarian advocate in her story, and it is not difficult to understand why", but also that "there can be no doubt that anti-Semitism was a theme in Thompson's later writing."

In his 1956 memoir, British military officer John Bagot Glubb denied accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of Israel, writing: "It does not seem to me to be either just or expedient that similar criticisms directed against the Israeli government should brand the speaker with the moral stigma generally associated with anti-Semitism." Israeli historian Benny Morris linked such allegations against Glubb to a "tendency among Israelis and Jews abroad to identify strong criticism of Israel as tantamount to, or as at least stemming from, anti-Semitism", although Morris also said Glubb's anti-Zionism was "tinged by a degree of anti-Semitism" and his "outlook on the history of the Jews ... is jaundiced, inaccurate, and, at times, blatantly anti-Semitic".

Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in 1982 that, in response to the notion that criticism of Israel can euphemistically conceal antisemitism, some critics of Israel "now routinely start out by asserting that of course they are going to be smeared as anti-Semites for their remarks [...] These attempts too often sound like a tacit attempt to identify Jews as people whose first loyalty is to a troublesome group outside America." Rosenfeld wrote that he found this current deeply troubling, even as he condemned attempts to intimidate critics of Israel. In 1989, Cheryl Rubenberg wrote that it was "a common practice among Israel's advocates" to call opponents of "the [Israel] lobby's positions" or supporters of a Palestinian homeland antisemitic, referring to incidents involving U.S. politicians Charles Mathias, Pete McCloskey, and Jesse Jackson. In a 1992 book, the American diplomat emeritus George Ball wrote that AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups "employ the charge of 'anti-Semitism' so carelessly as to trivialize it", suggesting that this was due to the lack of any "rational argument" with which to defend the state's actions.

Critics such as the Israel–Palestine researcher Suraya Dadoo, journalist Ben White, and Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona Matthew Abraham have suggested that international Israeli advocacy groups have charged prominent people who express pro-Palestinian sentiment, such as Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu, with antisemitism. Abraham says this is a form of "political correctness" that undermines "greater understanding about the conditions producing conflict in the Israel–Palestine conflict". In 2002, Tutu said, "to criticise [Israel] is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic ... People are scared in this country [the US] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful." South African Muslim scholar Farid Esack wrote that it was unfortunate that Tutu's statement "verged into antisemitic tropes" but "this misspoken moment unfolded because of his prophetic support of Palestinians".

In the 21st century, various writers have suggested that charges of antisemitism in discussions of Israel can have a chilling effect, deterring criticism of Israel due to fear of being associated with beliefs linked to antisemitic crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust. In 2004, Joel Beinin wrote that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other organizations used the "well-established ploy" of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, exposing Jews to attack by suggesting they are responsible for the Israeli government's actions.

In a 2005 interview with Campus Watch, Norman Finkelstein said, "Whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle such as the Intifada or international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, American Jewish organizations orchestrate this extravaganza called the 'new anti-Semitism.'"^{[unreliable source?]} Jonathan Judaken said Finkelstein's dismissal of new antisemitism was "the mirror-image of the alarmists he seeks to denounce". In 2008, Finkelstein said that organizations such as the ADL had advanced charges of new antisemitism since the 1970s "to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism". Finkelstein has said that use of "the anti-Semitism card" attempts to displace "fundamental responsibility for causing the conflict from Israel to the Arabs, the issue no longer being Jewish dispossession of Palestinians but Arab 'opposition' to Jews". He compared claims of antisemitism against critics of Israel to Soviet censorship. In 2008, he wrote that some of what "the Israel lobby" suggests is antisemitism is in fact "exaggeration and fabrication", "mislabeling legitimate criticism of Israeli policy", and "the unjustified yet predictable 'spillover' from criticism of Israel to Jews generally".

In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2008), John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote that Israel's supporters have sought to shield it from criticism and pressure using fears of a "new antisemitism", naming as examples ADL publications raising concerns of antisemitism at moments of particular political pressure against Israel. They wrote that the charge of antisemitism can discourage others from defending in public those against whom the charge has been made. They said that rhetorical accusations of antisemitism put a burden of proof on the accused person, putting them in the "difficult" position of having to prove a negative. They wrote, "we should all be disturbed by the presence of genuine anti-Semitism", but suggested that "playing the anti-Semitism card stifles discussion" and "allows myths about Israel to survive unchallenged". In 2010, Kenneth L. Marcus wrote that although Mearsheimer and Walt called such accusations "the Great Silencer", they had not themselves been silenced, having received a wide audience for their book and appearances. Marcus also wrote that many pro-Israel commentators had also taken pains to say that not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Ross Douthat wrote that the Mearsheimer and Walt are more the beneficiaries of "a calculated decision to take a highly-polemical approach to a hot-button topic" than they are victims of a supposed "suffocating and dangerous atmosphere of lockstep philo-Zionism in the American intelligentsia". Debates about the "antisemitism card", Douthat wrote, take place in a political environment where explicit political antisemitism is a "live and potent political force", whereas "race card" debates take place in a context where racism has been banished from open expression and exists only in "the realm of symbolism and subliminal messaging".

The Community Security Trust's 2008 report on antisemitic discourse in Britain says that, despite British Jewish community leaders' statements that Israel is legitimately subject to criticism, "some mainstream media commentators and political activists regularly accuse Jewish representative bodies of manipulating antisemitism as a smear with which to target any criticism of Israel." The report says that British Jewish representatives who raise concerns about antisemitism "are often treated with derision and contempt" and that "the false accusation [of manipulating antisemitism to smear Israel's critics] is often accompanied by the claim that politicians and journalists are too fearful for their careers and personal safety to speak out against Israel and the alleged Jewish cover-ups on its behalf. This charge is partly reliant upon the antisemitic notion of an all pervasive and all powerful pro-Israeli conspiracy." In 2025, Lilach Marom wrote, "universities cannot dismiss antisemitism as a political whip by conservatives, since by doing so they reproduce conspiracy tropes and downplay the sincerity of Jewish experiences".

In 2009, Tamar Meisels wrote that it is "very convenient for Jews, Israelis and Americans… to counter political attacks with the victim's cry of anti-Semitism. After all, in the post-Nazi era, no one wants to appear anti-Semitic. After the gas chambers, it is hardly bon ton to be an anti-Semite. So such accusations should be enough to shut anyone up." But she notes that many criticisms of Israel are antisemitic, giving the example of antisemitic tropes in statements by two western writers, Breyten Breytenbach and Jose Saramago. Responding to her article, Brian Klug agreed that unwarranted accusations "devalue the word [antisemitism], cheapen the charge and alienate people of goodwill", but that antisemitic criticisms of Israel exist and should be called out as such. The next year, Klug wrote: "Critics of Israel, crossing an invisible line in the sand, find themselves accused of anti-Jewish hatred (or self-hatred if Jewish). They react by accusing their accusers, alleging that so-called antisemitism is nothing more than a machination of 'the Israel lobby'. At once, this is seized upon as an antisemitic slur; which in turn is denounced as a Zionist smear. Round and round they go, down and down they go, in a circle that gets ever more vicious. One of the depressing things about this vicious circle is that so many virtuous people—people of goodwill—get caught up in it."

Commenting on a 2015 Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) poll of British Jews that found that 77% of respondents had "witnessed antisemitism that was disguised as a political comment about Israel", Jonathan Sacerdoti said, "often people are told that it's the other way around—that Jews silence criticism of Israel by invoking antisemitism [... the results show that] there are people who use a legitimate debate about Israel to prevent Jews from speaking out when they feel they have been the victims of antisemitism."

In 2019, Joshua Leifer, an editor of Dissent magazine, wrote that campaigns that consider anti-Zionism antisemitic aim to shift criticisms of the Israeli government "beyond the pale of mainstream acceptability". In December 2023, antisemitism expert David Feldman said that, while "some anti-Zionism takes an antisemitic form", the context must be considered when differentiating antisemitism from legitimate discourse and that there is "a long history of Israel and its supporters portraying anti-Zionism and other criticisms of Israel as antisemitic" to delegitimize them.

In the 2020s, some authors have accused the ADL of advancing false claims of antisemitism against anti-Zionists.

In 2024, during the Gaza war, Raz Segal wrote that conflating the state of Israel with Jews is part of the weaponization of antisemitism discourse that protects Israel from criticism, especially in discussion of Israeli settler colonialism. Political scientist Omar Shahabudin McDoom wrote in 2024 that the identification of "critic[ism] of the conduct of the Israeli government" with antisemitism is not necessarily in bad faith but may be attributed to conscious or unconscious "prosemitic" bias: "Although it has long been argued the antisemite label has been used instrumentally to silence critics of Israel, it may not always be disingenuous behaviour." In 2024, Marshall Ganz accused the Brandeis Center of McCarthyism in its responses to critics of Israeli policies as antisemites. In a 2026 editorial in Critical Research on Religion, Warren S. Goldstein of the Center for Critical Research on Religion wrote, "the conflation of being critical of Israel and being antisemitic is an attempt to deflect criticism of the policies of the state of Israel and instead displaces blame on to all Jews" and "it is the poor unhumanitarian behavior of Israel which is the prime driver of antisemitism."

In 2024, Irish president Michael D. Higgins dismissed claims by the Israeli ambassador about antisemitism in Ireland as a "PR exercise", saying "It is absolutely outrageous to be abusing the Jewish community by saying that there is widespread antisemitism" and calling it "deep slander" to suggest that Irish people are antisemitic. Members of Ireland's Jewish community criticized Higgins for these comments. The choice of Higgins to deliver a speech at the next year's Holocaust memorial day generated controversy among Irish Jewish groups, who said he had denied Irish antisemitism and dismissed Jewish concerns.

In April 2025, American children's educator Ms. Rachel, who has advocated for children experiencing trauma and starvation in Gaza, featured in an "Antisemite of the Week" column by the pro-Israel advocacy group StopAntisemitism, which accused her of spreading Hamas propaganda. In November 2025, the group named her a finalist for its "Antisemite of the Year". Jews for Racial and Economic Justice defended Ms. Rachel, saying that StopAntisemitism "solely exists to punish and harass private and public individuals who criticize the actions of the State of Israel or simply express sympathy for and solidarity with Palestinians."

The left and the right

In a 2021 independent study funded by the office of the UK Government's Independent Adviser on Antisemitism (Lord Mann), academics Daniel Allington and Tanvi Joshi found that alternative media outlets, including The Skwawkbox and The Canary on the left and Tommy Robinson's TR News on the right, often represent Jews and Zionists as raising antisemitism in bad faith.

German anti-antisemitism

The culture of anti-antisemitism in Germany has been described by Gert Krell [de], Heidrun Friese [de] and Yuval Abraham as weaponizing antisemitism and compared by Candice Breitz to McCarthyism. Similar criticisms have been made about Austrian politics and academia by Author Collective scăpa شاه.

In 2019, the German Bundestag passed resolutions declaring the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement antisemitic and compared it to the 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. This comparison—and the belief that BDS is "nothing less than the start of a road to another Holocaust"—is prevalent in German discourse.

240 Jewish and Israeli intellectuals, including some specialised in antisemitism and Holocaust research, wrote an open letter criticizing the resolution. Signatories included Alon Confino, Amos Goldberg, and Avi Shlaim. The letter said:

We conclude that the rise in anti-Semitism is clearly not the concern which inspired the motion adopted by the Bundestag. On the contrary, this motion is driven by political interests and policies of Israel’s most right-wing government in history.
For years, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been labelling any opposition to its illegal and peace-undermining policies as anti-Semitic. No one can be surprised that Netanyahu warmly welcomed the motion by the Bundestag. This embrace illustrates how the fight against anti-Semitism is being instrumentalized to shield policies of the Israeli government that cause severe violations of human rights and that destroy the chances for peace.

Commenting on German anti-antisemitism, Esther Bejarano wrote that criticism of Israel's policies is not antisemitism, and that "I did not survive the Auschwitz extermination camp, the Ravensbrück concentration camp and the death march, to be insulted as an 'anti-Semite'."

IHRA working definition of antisemitism

The IHRA definition of antisemitism is the "non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism" that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted in 2016. It is also known as the IHRA working definition of antisemitism (IHRA-WDA). It was first published in 2005 by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), a European Union agency. Accompanying the working definition are 11 illustrative examples, seven of which relate to criticism of Israel, that the IHRA describes as guiding its work on antisemitism.

In 2011, the UK's University and College Union Congress debated a motion to formally reject the IHRA's working definition of antisemitism.^{[page needed]} Antisemitism scholar David Hirsh said the definition was "denounced as a bad-faith attempt to say that criticism of Israel was antisemitic".^{[page needed]} According to Małgorzata Waśniewska, the IHRA definition and the Three Ds of antisemitism criteria sought to counter the notion that claims of antisemitism are a ploy used to silence critique of Israel.

In 2019, 2024, and 2025, Kenneth S. Stern, the lead author of the original definition, said it had become weaponized by Donald Trump and right-wing Jewish groups in ways that threatened to suppress and limit free speech in the U.S. Stern said Trump's Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, aimed at university campuses in particular, would "harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself".

A 2023 report by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies analyzed 40 cases where UK university staff and/or students were accused of antisemitism on the basis of the IHRA definition between 2017 and 2022, and found that in 38 cases, the accusations were dismissed, with two yet to be resolved. According to the report, false accusations of antisemitism have caused staff and students severe stress.

In 2023, Middle East scholar Nathan J. Brown and Israeli academic and peace activist Daniel Nerenberg wrote in +972 Magazine that the definition, though created in good faith, had been weaponized by groups including the Zionist Organization of America, the American Jewish Committee, and the Brandeis Center. In 2024, Holocaust scholar Raz Segal wrote: "The weaponization of antisemitism by Israel and its allies, including the U.S. government, draws on the deeply problematic 'working definition of antisemitism' adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)." Jonathan Hafetz and Sahar Aziz made a similar argument about the definition's use against critics of Israel's actions during its war on Gaza.

Philosopher Eve Garrard countered the idea that the IHRA definition suppresses free speech critical of Israel, writing that the IHRA definition and examples are "peppered with conditional verbs", which Garrard attributes to an adherence to necessary caution in discussions of racism. "The only view which this definition threatens", she wrote, "is the view that criticism of Israel can never, ever, in any circumstances, be antisemitic. But this is not a view which is even remotely plausible (although some critics of the IHRA definition do seem to find it attractive)." Responding to widespread criticism that the definition classifies legitimate speech on Israel as antisemitic, philosopher Bernard Harrison and legal scholar Lesley Klaff argued that such criticism was unfounded.

UK Labour Party

In 2018, in light of accusations of antisemitism in the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid called a debate on antisemitism in Parliament. At the debate, Jewish Labour MPs Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth spoke of their experiences of being accused of weaponizing antisemitism. Lesley Klaff says Berger experienced online antisemitic and misogynistic harassment by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn who saw her "as deliberately manufacturing a crisis within the Labour Party by making false accusations about antisemitism". Anthony Lerman said that "many hyperbolic claims" were made against Corbyn himself and that such claims "politicized antisemitism" and emptied the word of utility. Ronnie Kasrils, writing in Palestine Chronicle, compared the charges to a witch hunt and to rhetorical strategies against the South-African anti-apartheid movement. A 2018 YouGov poll of paying Labour members found that 77% believed that the "extent [of the issue of antisemitism] is being deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Jeremy Corbyn or to stifle criticism of Israel". Support for Labour among British Jews fell to 13% during the affair.

In 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigated claims of antisemitism in the UK Labour Party, concluding that investigators should treat complaints of antisemitism in good faith according to the Macpherson principle, and that dismissing reports of antisemitism without investigation could itself be antisemitic. It said party agents who suggested complaints of antisemitism were "fake or smears" could be guilty of "unlawful harassment". It also said that Jewish members, in particular, were accused of trying to "undermine the Labour Party" with reports of antisemitism, and that this "ignores legitimate and genuine complaints of antisemitism in the Party". In response to the report, several formal complaints were filed against Labour MPs. The Jewish Labour Movement said, "We were told that this racism was imagined, fabricated for factional advantage or intended to silence debate. Today's report confirms that our voices were marginalised and our members victimised". Gideon Falter, leader of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said that the EHRC report "utterly vindicates Britain's Jews who were accused of lying and exaggerating, acting as agents of another country and using their religion to 'smear' the Labour party". Similarly, the Antisemitism Policy Trust's 2020 report on antisemitism in the Labour Party said that some Labour activists had "dismissed [Anti-Jewish hatred] as a 'smear' or as being 'weaponised' by its victims for political ends", which they said was against the Macpherson principle and not supported by the evidence. In 2022, Corbyn's successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, commissioned the Forde Report, which said antisemitism had been used as a "factional weapon" between the party's anti-Corbyn and pro-Corbyn factions.

Michael S. Broschowitz writes that Labour leadership responded to the controversy using a pattern of DARVO tactics: "denying the antisemitic character of documented incidents by reframing them as 'legitimate criticism of Israel,' attacking complainants as politically motivated actors seeking to 'weaponize antisemitism allegations,' and ultimately reversing victim-offender relationships by characterizing Jewish members raising concerns as the primary threat to party unity and progressive values." According to Dave Rich, Labour's worldview "made it possible for antisemitic ideas to be expressed and defended as legitimate political discourse, while Jewish concerns about antisemitism were dismissed as attempts to silence criticism." Of the Labour affair, Howard Jacobson wrote: "That Jews invoke anti-Semitism primarily to silence critics of Israel is a tired canard, but it continues to be pressed in to service. It serves a purpose: It libels the Jews as liars in the act of protesting innocence of any such offense."

Balazs Berkovits wrote that defenders of the Corbyn left throughout the scandal employed rhetoric similar to French discourse about a supposed "state philosemitism", according to which "Jewish middle and upper classes willingly identify and collude with power elites [and attack] left-wing and working-class Jews." According to Berkovits, this idea "strives to legitimize attacks and critiques conducted against Jews [...] as something that is just targeting power elites", by first asserting that "power elites, Jews included, attack left-wingers with the antisemitism smear, [such that] the concept of antisemitism is hollowed out, instrumentalized in an absurd fashion, and turned into its opposite."

Political left

Rensmann has said that some Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers, such as Judith Butler, do not "recognize current antisemitism" but only the "chilling effect" of "bad-faith" charges of antisemitism. Robert Fine has criticized progressive perspectives (such as those of Butler, Alain Badiou, Tony Judt, and Göran Therborn) on the charge of antisemitism as primarily weaponized, saying they abandon "inclusive universalism" to stigmatize others and treat "instrumentalizing the charge of antisemitism" as intrinsic to antisemitism itself.

In Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance, Philip Mendes quotes Noam Chomsky as an example of a denier of Jewish experiences of victimhood typical of the post-1967 left: "Jews in the USA are the most privileged and influential part of the population. … Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 per cent control." Mendes also writes that the little seriousness with which the contemporary left treats antisemitism is partly because "Some [left] anti-Zionists openly reject the right of Jews to define what they experience as racism, and imply that Jews only raise accusations of anti-Semitism as a manipulative and dishonest strategy to suppress legitimate criticisms of Israel."

Sina Arnold and Blair Taylor say charges of weaponizing antisemitism are a common way of "shutting down" discussions of antisemitism in the contemporary American Left, along with changing the subject to Israel or right-wing antisemitism. Arnold and Taylor attribute this to "unexamined political assumptions" and ignorance about the nature of antisemitism rather than "conscious antisemitic intent". Rıfat Bali writes that the left's "sensitivity toward the phenomenon of antisemitism in Turkey tends to be quite low" due to the belief that Israel weaponizes the charge of antisemitism against criticism. Bali cites the example of Nuray Mert, who said that Israel "tries to pressure everyone who opposes Israel's policies, whether in the Muslim world or in general [by accusing them of being anti-Semites]" in the context of her criticism of antisemitism in Islamist Turkish media responses to the 2006 Lebanon War.

Mikael Shainkman writes that the contemporary left openly condemns right-wing antisemitism but is unable to recognize antisemitism disguised as criticism of Israel, instead calling those who raise the issue Zionists acting in bad faith. Jovan Byford says there has been a "contamination" of antisemitic motifs in leftist politics due to the belief that antisemitism is less of a social problem than the accusation of antisemitism itself, "which 'the Lobby' uses to silence opponents and de-legitimize criticism of Israel".

Emanuele Ottolenghi wrote in 2007 that the political left "sees itself as immune from anti-Semitism, which it considers the exclusive province of the xenophobic right". In the view of Israel's leftist critics, Ottolenghi writes, "Instead of crying wolf and allowing Israel to use the charge of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism, Jews should denounce both Israel and the misuse of anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for injustice." Ottolenghi criticizes the notion in leftist discourse of a "moral imperative" for Jews to denounce Israel and "to save themselves from moral complicity with its policies and in order to escape 'the blackmail of anti-Semitism'—the crude equation of any criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism which, critics say, is used to silence Israel's detractors."

Izabella Tabarovsky has compared contemporary left-wing antisemitism to Soviet antisemitic campaigns between 1967 and 1988 that said Zionists "complain about antisemitism in order to smear the left", rejecting allegations of antisemitism as "Zionist tricks" and "nefarious imperialist scheming".

In 2026, Jewish Studies scholar Joel Swanson wrote: "The tendency among some progressives to dismiss most antisemitism complaints as presumed to be in bad-faith unless proven otherwise has real costs. When allegations of antisemitism are reflexively treated as a political tactic, it becomes easier to ignore actual antisemitism, even when it's claiming lives and burning down religious buildings." Becker et al. wrote in 2026 that dismissal of claims of antisemitism as fabricated or weaponized is a common manifestation of antisemitism in Israel–Palestine discourse, and found in an analysis of online audience responses to online commentary on Zohran Mamdani by left-wing personalities, including Hasan Piker, Vaush, Guy Christensen, and Kyle Kulinski, that such dismissals "reliably activate prejudiced audience responses".

Israel and anti-Zionism

Scholars such as Ben Cohen, Shany Mor, Lars Rensmann, and Efraim Sicher say that anti-Zionist statements and criticism of Israel are sometimes framed as neutral while often relying on traditional antisemitic tropes.^{[page needed]} Werner Bonefeld says this is more common among those who view antisemitism as "a phenomenon of the past". David Schraub says that the statement "criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic", while true, falsely implies that "any non-trivial number of individuals" must believe the opposite, recentering discussions of antisemitism from Jewish victims to the way charges of antisemitism are "allegedly abused to victimise innocent bystanders".

In 2016, Schraub wrote that the presumption "that most anti-Semitism claims related to Israel are leveled in bad faith" is "very common" and itself antisemitic, relying on the belief that Jews are largely either dishonest or delusional. Schraub writes that the ubiquity of this presumption among progressives contrasts with the general unacceptability of similar claims about complaints made by groups such as women and black people. He writes that "most Jews and Jewish organizations" are reluctant to raise claims of antisemitism, since the "default response" to even clear-cut cases of antisemitism "will be to fulminate about oversensitive Jews always playing the anti-Semitism card". Shany Mor wrote of the frequent charge of weaponization in discussions of anti-Zionist antisemitism: "It is a weak defense to rely on the very antisemitism you are supposing try to abjure in order to exculpate oneself from the charge of antisemitism—so weak, in fact, that its repeated use is the best evidence that it represents a deeply held belief." Derek Spitz, John Hyman, and Anthony Julius have called this a form of victim blaming that places a large burden of proof on Jews. In 2025, Gabriel Sacks wrote, "There is no meaningful way to combat this claim [that Jews weaponize antisemitism to deflect criticism of Israel]: Jews could protest, or merely ignore and not even dare challenge the allegations. Either route has proven to be insufficient for centuries."

Michael S. Broschowitz calls the weaponization charge antisemitism's "most sophisticated defensive evolution", wherein Jewish identification of antisemitism is reframed as a dishonest deployment of victimhood meant to suppress legitimate criticism and "maintain perceived institutional privilege". Broschowitz also writes that deployers of the weaponization charge "may weaponize their own minoritized identities as defensive shields ... [creating] "a perfect defensive inversion: Jews are accused of weaponizing antisemitism while accusers weaponize anti-racism to protect their own antisemitic expression." Broschowitz calls this "weaponization inversion", and writes that it is particularly effective in progressive discourse because it allows Jews to become the "designated repository for colonial shame and white supremacy", allowing progressive actors to "resolve white guilt while maintaining anti-racist legitimacy".

According to Iraqi historian Omar Mohammed, attempts to discuss Islamic antisemitism with Muslims or Arabic speakers are frequently met with accusations of "being pro-Israel or attempting to whitewash Israel’s policies", sometimes in the form of the Livingstone Formulation, with those who raise the issue of antisemitism being accused of being "Westernized" and "attempting to impose a Western problem onto Muslim communities, which purportedly have no connection to hatred against Jews". Mohammed writes that this makes discussions of the matter of Islamic antisemitism in Muslim or Arabic-speaking social contexts difficult and potentially dangerous. Esther Webman wrote in 2010 that Arab leaders have responded to increasing charges of antisemitism "mainly by denial and accusing Israel of using it as a ploy to mute criticism."

Political scientist Gideon Botsch [de] has said that because anti-Zionist antisemitism is often associated with the left and Muslims, the German far-right's claims of weaponization of antisemitism have often been overlooked. Daniel Sugarman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews has said that while the left downplays antisemitism as criticism of Israel, the right often denies or downplays its antisemitism by citing its support for Israel.

Psychologists Miri Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman say the propagation of the notion that "Jews weaponize antisemitism to stifle criticism of Israel" is an example of traumatic invalidation for Jews since the October 7 attacks. Lili Levi writes that some progressives in the U.S. Democratic party deny that anti-Israel rhetoric can have an antisemitic character, and that those progressives "may ignore the threat of growing antisemitism to American democracy".

Fine and Philip Spencer say that while antisemitism may be weaponized to stifle criticism of Israel in some cases, "the reverse is more plausible: that there are many who cry 'Israel' in order to shut down debate on antisemitism". Bernard Harrison says this "stock" rebuttal attempts to portray complaints of antisemitism as "putatively absurd".^{[page needed]}

In 2021, religion scholar Atalia Omer said that weaponization of antisemitism is bad for all involved, including Israel and the broader Jewish community. Nick Riemer, a Palestine solidarity activist and linguist, said in 2022 that antisemitism "provides the excuse for a heavy-handed and highly irrational assault on fundamental democratic liberties", comparing it to how "Islamophobia has been politically instrumentalized in the service of neocolonial control of Muslim populations". Miriam F. Elman wrote in 2019 that anti-Israel advocates "refus[ing] to hear" complaints of antisemitism behave similarly when they dismiss criticism of Palestinian policy by "smearing the reputations of those who raise the criticisms" as Islamophobes.