The first D stands for double-standards. 

Let’s start with one of the favourite canards of Israel’s detractors: genocide. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, genocide is defined primarily as including “violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Guided by this internationally-accepted definition, can we build a case that Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinians or not? 

The Palestinian population in 1950 stood at 944,087. As of today, Palestinians number more than 5.4 million. While the suffering and devastation from the current conflict in Gaza are heart-rending, based on this stunning statistic alone, the charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is completely counterfactual and patently absurd.

But real-world facts that challenge their hallowed narrative haven’t prevented the U.N., most NGOs, media outlets, governments around the world, academics, social justice activists of all stripes, celebrities from incessantly declaring that Israel is committing genocide while they simultaneously ignore the very real genocides that have taken millions of innocent Ethiopian, Syrian, Sudanese, Rwandan, Yemenite lives and thousands more in recent years. Such charges are intellectually lazy, downright ignorant, and evidence of an obvious and pernicious double standard toward Israel.   

The second D is for delegitimization. 

Israel has fought multiple defensive wars against existential threats and has been in a constant state of war with most of its neighbours since the day it was founded. In every case — 1948, 1967, 1973, 2023 —Israel was attacked first and responded in self-defence, winning each of those wars and gaining territory in the process. Yet Israel is expected to just give it all up, whether it be Gaza and the West Bank, the Golan or, indeed, the entire land of Israel. When you label Israel, a U.N. member nation, a settler colonial state and question Israel’s right to exist (whether on legal or moral grounds), you are guilty of delegitimization.

The final D is demonization. 

When demonstrators adopt terrorist slogans by chanting “long live the Intifada” and relentlessly accuse Israel of imperialism, settler colonialism, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide and apartheid, they not only don’t know what those terms actually mean, they are demonizing Israel.

Double-standards, delegitimization and demonization: These are the three hallmarks of modern-day antisemitism masquerading as anti-Israel criticism.

I honestly believe that many people who chant “from the river to the sea” are not antisemitic. They just really want peace. I would simply remind them that what happened on Oct. 7 is but a small taste of how their dream would devolve into an unimaginable nightmare if Israel were to lay down its arms.

It would be a real genocide, but not of the Palestinians. Of millions of Jews. Again.

To paraphrase the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks from a keynote speech he delivered to the European Parliament in 2016 entitled “Understanding Antisemitism: The Mutating Virus,” it is not antisemitic to not like Jews. Nor is it antisemitic to not like Israel. But when anti-Zionists categorically deny the legitimate right of Jews to live as Jews in their own land, and lend their voices to those who actively seek the destruction of the Jewish state — especially when claiming to defend human rights — then they are, indeed, guilty of antisemitism. 

DO NOT BE GUILTY OF ANTISEMITISM