Emma Teitel: Anti-Israel activists — stop gaslighting Jews and leave our communities alone

In the aftermath of last week’s antisemitic massacre at Bondi Beach in Australia, the Jewish world is engaged in a seemingly endless procession of calls to action. Action on hate speech; action on education for young people who are terminally online and primed for Jew hatred; action on heightened security outside synagogues and Jewish day schools.

These are all urgent and necessary measures. But I am, at present, more interested in a call for inaction. Specifically, this one:

To those in Toronto and elsewhere who demonstrate in front of our schools, our synagogues, and in our residential neighbourhoods: Please stop.

Leave us alone.

Focus your efforts where they belong: protesting the Israeli government at Israeli consulates and embassies.

An Israeli flag flown in front of a Jewish community institution does not render that space an appropriate site for political demonstration. It doesn’t matter if you suspect the people inside a school or synagogue are card-carrying Zionists; they are not political targets. And if you feel you must descend on our communities chanting about intifada, at least afford us the dignity of our fear.

Since October 7, 2023, diaspora Jews have not merely experienced a surge in antisemitic violence and incidents worldwide but a loud and calculated effort by activists and political figures to downplay, dismiss and deny our reality. Indeed, there is an almost pathological tendency on the left — and particularly among anti-Zionist Jews — to claim that antisemitism allegations are overblown, and to characterize Jewish people as paranoid kvetchers in tin foil hats. “Lived experience” is sacred, I suppose, unless Jews are the ones living it.

Here’s David Meslin, writing in Rabble.ca in November; a piece that — to put it lightly — has not aged well.

“I believe the current level of panic about antisemitism is a trauma-induced hysteria, not supported by facts,” Meslin writes. “Further, I think there are harmful consequences of this hysteria, for Jews and non-Jews alike. If you asked me to list my top 100 fears, antisemitism is simply not on the list.”

It is unlikely the girls who attend Bais Chaya Mushka Elementary School in Toronto — which has been shot at three times — are so blasé about Jew hatred, though Meslin is keen to point out that the school was sprayed with gunfire at night, long after the students had gone home for the day. An after-supper shooting. How civilized.

This cruel minimization of domestic antisemitism often runs in tandem with a meticulous effort to cast doubt on hate crime statistics when they are reported by Jews.

Anti-Zionist activists argue that they must call these statistics into question because the pro-Israel lobby has a history of “weaponizing antisemitism” to delegitimize the anti-Israel protest movement. But these activists do a fine job delegitimizing themselves on their own, when they cast as complicit in war crimes, anyone who went to camp with Shmuli, the Israeli water ski instructor.

Recently, a Canadian activist-journalist launched a website called GTA-to-IDF identifying “GTA institutions associated with Canadians who served in Israel’s military.” The site includes the names of Canadians who served in the Israel Defense Forces, and the Canadian Jewish institutions they once frequented: Jewish schools, synagogues and summer camps in the greater Toronto area, some of them already previous targets of threats or harassment. How this database of minority faith institutions in Ontario serves to stop the bloodshed in Gaza is unclear, though B’nai Brith Canada suggests it could make a handy “catalogue for hostile actors looking for targets.”

I’ll say it again. Please keep our community out of your demonstrations, out of your “research,” and out of your tirades. Forget our names; forget our synagogues; forget our schools; forget our summer camps; forget our community-centres.

They were never legitimate political targets. I pray they don’t become a different kind of target. If they do, we will not be the ones with blood on our hands.

Emma Teitel is a Senior Consultant at Navigator Limited. She was previously a member of the Toronto Star’s editorial board and a Star opinion columnist with a focus on city issues.