Are Divestment Campaigns Targeting Israel Anti-Semitic?
Yes
Over at www.BainbridgeOnCorporations.com, my corporate law/governance Substack newsletter, I’ve got a couple of posts on divestment campaigns seeking to have university endowments divest from certain investments for non-financial reasons (usually ESG/DEI causes). The first focused on legal issues, while the second focused on policy.1
In those posts, I drew on some work I did back circa 2004-05 criticizing the Presbyterian Church’s—the PC(USA)—adoption of “a process of phased, selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel.”2
One of the issues I grappled with back then departed from the corporate law/governance issues raised by divestment; namely, whether divestment campaigns targeting Israel—such as the PC(USA)’s—are anti-semitic.
To be clear at the outset, I believe that not all criticism of Israeli policy is anti-semitic.
My own view is that the IHRA’s definition, which has been adopted by our State Department, is correct:
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
…
Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to: …
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
When the PC(USA)’s General Assembly voted to divest the denomination’s funds from corporations doing business with Israel, many folks in the blogosphere jumped to condemn the action as anti-Semitic (e.g., Instapundit).
Initially, it struck me that people were being too quick to play the anti-Semitism card. Playing that card whenever Israel comes into criticism is a problem for two reasons. First, it tends to silence legitimate criticism of Israel, which is no more perfect and no more immune from constructive criticism than any other polity. Second, over time, playing the anti-Semitism card every time somebody criticizes Israel tends devalue the moral authority of that card. (Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf?)
In a 2004 Opinion Journal column, however, Jay Lefkowitz invoked a standard that strikes me as consistent with the IHRA standard:
A more nuanced standard, … that properly recognizes that legitimate criticism of Israel is perfectly appropriate, was articulated last year by Natan Sharansky. A member of the Israeli cabinet who for years had been a prisoner of conscience in the Soviet gulag, Mr. Sharansky defined one current expression of anti-Semitism by three features: the application of double standards to Israel, the demonization of Israel and the delegitimization of Israel.
Fair enough. Applying that standard, Lefkowitz went on to make a persuasive case that the Presbyterian divestment was anti-Semitic:
The recent action by the Presbyterian Church sadly satisfies Mr. Sharansky’s test. The church has singled out Israel, alone among all the nations of the world, for divestment. It has demonized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and it has delegitimized Israel’s right to self-defense.
The church is not calling for divestment of its $7 billion portfolio from China, despite China’s denial of the most basic political and religious rights and its particularly harsh treatment of followers of Falun Gong. It is not condemning Russia, even though Russia’s policies in Chechnya are by any human-rights standard atrocious. It is not even calling for economic sanctions against Syria or Iran, whose human-rights records for their own people are egregious and whose Jewish citizens are denied the basic civil rights and liberties afforded to all Israelis, including its Arab citizens, some of whom even serve in the Knesset.
Exactly right.
As a matter of personal interest, I was pleased that Lefkowitz also noted:
In contrast to the action taken by the Presbyterian Church this month, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized that one-sided criticism of Israel can at times be so grotesque that there is no name to describe it other than anti-Semitism. And in a document ironically signed the same week as the Presbyterian General Assembly, the Catholic Church equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
When I left the Presbyterian Church in the late 1990s and converted to Catholicism it was largely because of the sort of knee-jerk political correctness that the PC(USA) was substituting for faith in God. To be sure, we Catholics have the church’s social teaching, but at least in my parish we talk about salvation a lot more than the latest progressive talking points.
As usual with that newsletter, those posts are behind a paywall. In contrast, this blog is and will remain free. But I welcome voluntary paid subscriptions to support my efforts.
In 2006, the PC(USA) revised its policy in response to charges of anti-semitism. In 2014, the PC(USA) voted to divest from U.S. companies (Caterpillar, HP, Motorola Solutions) deemed to be supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. In 2024, the PC(USA) voted to divest Israeli government bonds. Also in 2024, the PC(USA)’s Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) sent a letter to university presidents urging that their endowments divest from companies “profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in 2014.” The Israel/Palestine Mission Network eventually renamed itself the Palestine Justice Network.