Congress To Pass Law Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

It's an ominous trial run.

Above: Trumper forebears filled Madison Square Garden In 1939. Including a Stephen Miller lookalike in the back.

By MJ Rosenberg

The House just passed the so-called Antisemitism Awareness Act. With a name like that, you’d think it was about protecting Jews from hate. It’s not. It’s about shielding Israel—and specifically the Israeli government—from criticism, especially on college campuses. It’s a speech suppression bill dressed up as a civil rights measure. And if it becomes law, it will be a devastating blow to the First Amendment.

Let’s be clear from the outset: antisemitism is real. It’s dangerous. It’s on the rise. But this bill does nothing to address actual antisemitism. It doesn’t go after Trump allies like the Proud Boys, or Charlottesville-style marchers yelling “Jews will not replace us.” It doesn’t protect synagogues or Jewish cemeteries or target the far-right poison flooding social media. Instead, it targets students, professors, and activists who criticize Israel. It targets ideas.

The bill requires the Department of Education to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism when investigating discrimination cases on campus. Sounds innocent enough. But the IHRA definition includes language that equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. That means statements like “Israel is a racist state” or “Israel enforces apartheid” could be considered antisemitic—even when those statements are backed by facts and supported by human rights groups, many based in Israel.

I’ve spent my life working in Jewish organizations, in both houses of Congress, and writing about the Middle East. I know antisemitism when I see it. And I also know when the term is being manipulated for political purposes. This bill is about politics, not protection.

We’ve seen this playbook before. You criticize Israeli settlements, or Netanyahu, or the occupation, and suddenly you're labeled antisemitic. Jewish or not. It's absurd. What’s more, it’s dangerous —to Jews, to Palestinians, to anyone who believes that Israel, like any state, should be held accountable for its actions.

Once the Zionists established their “state like any other” (as the Zionist pioneers liked to say), they lost the right to call criticism, or even hatred of, that state racist, or a hate crime. Does France have that right? Does Japan? Do any of the 194 nations in the world have that right except Israel?

Since when is opposition to Zionism—an ideology—a form of bigotry? There are plenty of Jews who are anti-Zionist, including about half of college-age Jews. That doesn’t make them antisemitic. It makes them critics of a political project. That is what free speech looks like. You don’t have to agree with it. But you can’t criminalize it.

But that’s exactly what this bill tries to do. And it’s not just a conservative idea. That’s the truly cynical part. Republicans are leading the charge, but too many Democrats are going along. Why? Fear. Fear of being labeled antisemitic, fear of losing AIPAC donors, fear of Jonathan Greenblatt’s McCarthyist ADL, fear of standing out in a political environment where criticizing Israel is still, incredibly, a third rail.

This is where the genius of this Republican move comes in. Trump, Ron DeSantis, JD Vance, Elise Stefanik—none of them are concerned about antisemitism. Trump dined with Holocaust deniers and has invoked anti-semitic canards in speeches. Stefanik ran “great replacement” ads. Marjorie Taylor Green, Nancy Mace, Pete Hegseth with his Nazi tattoos.

But suddenly they’re champions of Jewish safety? Sorry. These are the types who led pogroms rather than defend Jews against them, led by the psychopath Stephen Miller (of Jewish origin, to his great shame) and whose own family, liberals like 75% of Jews, has cast him out.

What they see is an opportunity. They’ve found one issue—Israel—where they can use the language of anti-hate to crack down on speech they don’t like. And Democrats, especially centrist ones, won’t fight back. The Israel lobby is too powerful, the risk of being smeared too high.

That’s what makes this so dangerous. If they can get away with calling criticism of Israel hate speech, what’s next? Will support for reproductive rights be labeled as anti-Christian? Will opposing fossil fuels be hate speech against oil companies? They’ve already made moves in those directions. But with Israel, they’ve found the sweet spot—a subject where mainstream institutions are already afraid of dissent.

This is why the Antisemitism Awareness Act is not really about Israel either. It’s about free speech. Or more precisely, about shutting it down. And the way they’re doing it is by hiding behind Jews—using our history, our trauma, as cover for their authoritarian goals.

They don’t want a conversation about Gaza. They want to end the conversation altogether.

And that’s exactly what this law would do on college campuses, where support for Palestinian rights and rage against the slaughter in Gaza has been growing, especially among young people, especially young Jews. The people pushing this law don’t want young Americans to hear the other side. They don’t want anyone questioning a 57-year occupation or a two-tier legal system, or the idea that Israel should be a state for Jews only. Or that killing thousands of babies and children is a legitimate exercise of Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

So they call it antisemitism and try to make it illegal. That’s not protecting Jews. It’s setting us up. For what, I don’t know, but I suspect something terrible.

I’ve been around long enough to remember when real antisemites wouldn’t hide behind faux love for Israel. Today’s antisemites, the ones marching for Trump, have figured out the game. They say “Israel is great” while they target George Soros and spread white nationalist propaganda. Meanwhile, the actual Jewish kid speaking out for human rights on campus gets labeled a bigot.

This isn’t just dishonest. It’s dangerous.

The truth is, if we allow this bill to pass, we’re not just losing the ability to talk honestly about Israel and Palestine. We’re setting a precedent that will be used again and again to silence dissent on other issues. Abortion. Climate change. Voting rights. Once you establish that political opinions can be redefined as hate speech, there’s no limit to what can be banned.

This is not really about Israel at all? It is a clever strategy to go after free speech using the one issue where they know they can get away with it—thanks to a powerful lobby, bipartisan cowardice, and decades of conditioning Americans to equate Israel with Judaism? (Is it any wonder real antisemitism is on the rise when Americans have been told for years that “We Are One,” which not surprisingly leads some to conclude that if you are “One,” then the Gaza genocide is on you too. We are not One any more than Irish-Americans are One with the Irish Republic. We were never One.

This is bigger than the Israel debate. This is about whether we allow the government to dictate what ideas are acceptable and which ones are too dangerous to say out loud.

Because once they silence us on Israel, they won’t stop there. Next up: squashing dissent on issues the right really cares about. Abortion and workplace equality for women, re-establishing white supremacy, eliminating the separation of Christianity and State, gutting government programs that help the needy and the sick, destroying public education, returning to pre-Brown vs Board of Education America, and stopping African Americans from voting.

Look at what they are already doing on their favorite issue: “illegal” immigration. We see where that leads: to exile or prison. Or worse. Kafka and Orwell would not be surprised. They thought dystopia was the future. Apparently, here and now it is.