Letters / On “Joe Kent’s Resignation Was Brave. His Analysis Is Faulty.”

In his March 24th article “Joe Kent’s Resignation Was Brave. His Analysis was Faulty,” Peter Beinart conflates speculative statements concerning Israel’s actions with antisemitic claims about “Jewish conspiracy” that have been historically mobilized to justify the displacement, disenfranchisement, and mass murder of Jews. Near the end of the article, Beinart writes: “Joe Kent’s claims about Israel’s role in the Iraq and Syrian wars are not isolated inaccuracies. They are symptoms of a conspiratorial worldview that puts Israel at the center of a number of nefarious plots for which there is no credible evidence.” This shifts the critique from what Beinart finds to be empirically wrong—the idea that the Iraq and Syrian wars were fought for Israel—to Kent’s “conspiratorial worldview,” which must be rejected as a “habit of mind.” Beinart does not directly charge Kent with mobilizing antisemitic tropes, but the implication is clear: “Hidden treacheries” and “nefarious plots” are very suggestive phases.

But these ideas are mobilized here in a nonsensical way. Historically, claims about Jewish malfeasance, perfidy, power, and threat were not “conspiracy theories” in the sense that they lacked the right level of “credible evidence.” They were outright fictions propagated by the state specifically to justify genocide. The transhistorical collective “Jew” that had the agency and power to destroy Germany, for example, never existed.

In contrast, Kent’s claims, even when inaccurate, refer to actually existing political entities—Israel, AIPAC, Mossad. There is no slippage in Kent’s language that confuses these things with “the Jews” as some shadowy or nefarious force, and even when he is conspiratorial he can’t be said to be “tapping into” antisemitic tropes simply because Jews run the Jewish state. (A conspiracy about Israel doing 9/11, for instance, is no different than one about Bush or the CIA doing it.) It is likely true that some people, like the streamer Nick Fuentes, say “Israel” but mean “Jews” in an antisemitic sense. But this does not imply that antisemitism must be made the vector through which to make sense of what anyone says about Israel.

In the past months, many people—including most leaders of institutional Jewish life—have engaged in such a conflation between Israel and Jews. They have argued that the existence of antisemitism mandates policing any criticism of Israel, based on a fear that some of the people who say bad things about Israel are bigots and mean harm to Jews qua Jews. This false equivalency is often deployed to discredit and defame anti-Zionist Jews, pro-Palestinian activists, anti-war leftists, anti-AIPAC Democratic candidates, and even Peter Beinart himself. To turn to it after so many months of intense weaponization is wrong and counterproductive.