Since October 7, anti-Zionist politicians and political institutions have relied more than ever on a specific tactic to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism: putting liberal and leftist Jews front and center and using them, essentially, as human shields.
This puts the global Jewish community in a bind. How do we call out this rank tokenism without allowing the debate to descend into an intra-Jewish fight that leaves the politicians unscathed but the Jews further fragmented?
The answer is to focus most of our ire on those responsible for pitting the Jews against each other. Obviously, Jews who allow themselves to be used in this manner are not without agency and therefore their actions can and should be criticized—just without losing sight of the way political systems historically take advantage of Jewish infighting.
Sometimes, the institutions that deserve to come under withering rhetorical fire aren’t political in the classic sense. Take the media. A couple of months ago, I noticed something reading the stories about Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s trip to Australia after the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre.
The Guardian headlined its story: “Isaac Herzog’s four days in Australia left him ‘energised’. For the Jewish community, some saw solidarity while others felt ‘serious angst’.”
The article claimed the trip brought “significant disquiet within Australia’s Jewish community.”
Commenting in favor of Herzog’s visit were the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. The ECAJ is the umbrella organization of Australian Jewry that represents over 200 Jewish organizations. The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, which is listed as a territorial body of the ECAJ, oversees 55 such Jewish organizations.
The quotes from officers of these two organizations, therefore, can be reasonably said to represent Australian Jewry.
On the other side, being quoted against Herzog’s visit was… something called Jewish Voices of Inner Sydney. The leftist organization does not have much of a footprint and appears to have launched in 2024. Judging by its occasional forays into the public discourse, I can say with some confidence that it has a membership of at least 25 people. As of this writing, it has a whopping 126 followers on Facebook. It is a complete nonentity.
To say that it was unethical of the Guardian to frame its story this way based on some As-a-Jew garage band is to understate the point. The one person from this group the Guardian quotes hardly seems worth spending much time and energy on. The Guardian, on the other hand, is an influential tool of anti-Zionist agitation and ought to be subjected to heaps of scrutiny before anything it writes about Jews and Judaism are to be treated with a grain of seriousness or credibility.
The Guardian uses liberal Jews as human shields, and until it can prove that this has changed, it should be branded as such. Make the paper the primary target.
What about political parties that engage in tokenism? We have two current examples in the UK Green Party and Canada’s New Democrats, the latter of which named its new leader on Sunday.
But first, the Greens: If you’ve followed their new leader, Zack Polanski, on social media for any period of time, you’ll surely have noticed his hellishly aggressive, crazy-eyes anti-Zionism that just keeps getting louder and farther removed from reality. On his watch, the party became a vehicle for attracting the “too anti-Semitic for Labour” crowd and is barreling toward voting on a resolution in favor of disestablishing the State of Israel and flirting with banning Zionists.
Stephen Pollard, in the Jewish Chronicle, put it succinctly:
“Most notably, he leads a party which has gone from being misguided but well-meaning when it was focused on green issues, to one which has taken the Corbynite playbook and transplanted into a different party without even the constraints of the Labour rule book. Specifically, the Greens under Polanski now provide a home not just for Islamists but also for antisemites who were too blatant even for Corbyn’s Labour, such as Tony Greenstein, whom a judge held could honestly be described as a ‘notorious antisemite’ and who has now joined the Greens. In November 2024 Greenstein was charged with a terrorism offence and accused of supporting Hamas. His trial is due later this year.”
Polanski is unhinged and he also comes from a Jewish family, so he checks both the As-a-Jew and anti-Zionist boxes. The perfect frontman for a party that has rebranded itself as the premier safe haven for Jew-hating politicians who don’t even pretend to care about something other than Israel’s elimination.
In this case, criticizing Polanski isn’t really “infighting”; he wears his family’s Jewishness as a costume and a punch line. He shows no signs of wanting to be part of the Jewish world beyond its utility for his demented political theater, and he is turning the Greens into a Hamasnik bloc. Let the nutcase have it. Rather than trying to lure him back to civilization, just change the locks. Both Polanski and the Green Party he leads are soot in the lungs of a healthy society.
As for Canada’s New Democrats, who have named Jewish anti-Zionist filmmaker Avi Lewis as their new leader, it remains to be seen whether the party is preparing a Greens-like push as a national Gaza-left party. But the New Democrats are floundering in part because voters and politicians driven by anti-Israel fervor can go along with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party. Canada, in fact, is becoming a place where you don’t have to tone down the Jew-baiting in order to stay in the mainstream. That might mean Lewis sees a need to take the party in an even more extreme direction, however.
The overarching problem, then, is the fact that Canadian politics is in the process of rotting from the inside out thanks to its tolerance of anti-Semitism. That, in fact, is what all of the aforementioned countries have in common. And that is yet another reason to be concerned about U.S. politics, which is home to the largest As-a-Jew movement in all the West. We call out tokenism not because we are trying to pick fights with other Jews, but because by the time a society sees token Jews being used as human shields for national parties and institutions, it is well on its way to losing the war against anti-Semitism entirely.
