Ten ways Christians can criticize Israel that aren’t antisemitic
Since October 7, many well-intentioned statements have undercut progressive Christians’ moral high ground by invoking antisemitic tropes. It’s an avoidable problem.
Century illustration
In her book Antisemitism, historian and diplomat Deborah Lipstadt offers this definition: “An antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary.” When someone criticizes Jews more or more intensely than they would criticize someone else for the same conduct, this is a measure of their antisemitism. We believe that many progressive Christian leaders have failed by this standard in their criticism of Israel over the war in Gaza following Hamas’s horrific attacks on October 7.
Respected colleagues and friends have accused Israel of genocide—a trope akin to Holocaust inversion and deeply painful to those of us who have family trees more dead than alive. Others speak of apartheid in Israel—not just in the West Bank, where one might make a problematic case for it—even though Palestinian Israeli citizens comprise 20 percent of the population and serve in high office. We see antisemitism when Christian leaders label Israeli Jews “White colonialists” even though the Jewish people are indigenous to Israel and the majority of Israeli Jews are people of color who have returned to their ancestral homeland—one which some never left at all. We observe it in an excessive focus on the war in Gaza and relentless criticism of Israel to the exclusion of other countries.
Such antisemitic rhetoric about Israel is uniquely painful given Christianity’s longstanding history of anti-Jewish hatred. Antisemitism as we know it today would not exist without Christianity and the early Christian leaders who began spinning a web of hate against those who did not wish to join a new religion. It would not exist without Martin Luther, who redoubled the hate and created many of the ideological preconditions for the Holocaust. Even this venerable publication has received credible criticism for denying the extent of the Holocaust as it was unfolding in Europe and undermining the efforts of American Jewish leaders to raise awareness and galvanize American intervention against it.
