Barbara Kay: How anti-Zionists demonize Jews for remembering their own history

An anti-Zionist Orthodox Jew holds a sign during a protest outside of the Parliament Hill in Ottawa Tuesday Nov 16, 2010. Photo by ANDRE FORGET/QMI AGENCY

Article content

Conservative panjandrum Ben Shapiro told attendees at a debut Toronto symposium on anti-Zionism last Sunday that anti-Zionists are so committed to the premise that Israel, alone of the nations, is unworthy of existence, that they cannot make their case without lying: “They must lie about Israel, lie about its army, lie about its enemies, and ultimately lie about Jews themselves.” True, but how they lie falls along a spectrum.

Article content

Article content

Decent people are not recruited to anti-Zionism by the cretinous behaviour of the “Death to the IDF” rabble. But they are susceptible to the blandishments of the more-in-sorrow ideologues and thought leaders that gussy up their anti-Zionism with custom-made “theories” and “reports” whose thrust just happens to demonize Israel.

Article content

Article content

Article content

For an extreme example of the type, in 2005, Hebrew University sociology student and ardent anti-Zionist Tal Nitzan began work on a Master’s thesis examining the (presumed) systemic rape of Palestinian women by the IDF. To her chagrin, Nitzan couldn’t find a single documented case of rape by any IDF soldier. Undeterred, she adjusted her thesis. The IDF were now still bent on humiliating Palestinian women, but her new “theory” had them accomplishing this by refusing to rape them. Nitzan wrote: “The lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences — just as organized military rape would have done.”

Article content

For a more famous and recent example, Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, with a known tendency to ski off his professional piste and down into rabbit holes, is still weathering blowback from high-integrity critics for his May 11 opinion column, “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” In it, he compares “the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7” to sexual violence against imprisoned male Palestinians he says is happening “day after day.” His charges are unreliably sourced, and he did not ask the Israel Prison Service for comment, yet claims sexual violence is, as a United Nations report put it, “standard operating procedure” in Israeli prisons. Kristof’s acceptance of implausible unverified personal accounts of rape by purpose-trained dogs is especially repulsive and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Article content

Article content

Ironically, Kristof began his column with the thesis, “It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.” But it’s not simple at all when perceived through a political lens. Indeed, Kristof’s whole column belies his own assertion, as his clear “whataboutist” intent is to deflect attention from the uniquely sadistic features of October 7’s sexual violence — gross sexual torture and mutilation, necrophilia, forced family participation — in order to indict the entire nation of Israel for the crimes of individual rogue officers. Such crimes are deplorable in Israel, but no different from abuses practiced at prisons all over the U.S.

Article content

Kristof crossed the line from bias to propaganda, which is presumably why even the woke-leaning New York Times did not follow his “scoop” with a report in the news section.

Article content

Then there’s academic Naomi Klein, Canada’s leading Marxist public intellectual, who chose a more inventive and sophisticated form of whataboutism in a lengthy feature she wrote for The Guardian in October 2024, titled, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”