By Stephen Rohde* – LA Progressiv
Misleading list of “The Top Ten Worst Global Antisemitic Incidents for 2024” conflates criticism of Israel with virulent hatred of Jews
The Simon Wiesenthal Center just released its list of “The Top Ten Worst Global Antisemitic Incidents for 2024.”
It would be more accurate to call the list “Blatant Examples of Smearing Political Opposition to Israel’s Violations of Human Rights with the Odious Epithet of Antisemitism.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center identifies itself as “a global Jewish human rights activist organization that confronts antisemitism and hate, defends the safety of Israel and Jews worldwide, and teaches the lessons of the Holocaust.” The Center has done good work over the years calling attention to the history and ongoing threat of antisemitism, an ancient and despicable form of prejudice and bigotry that needs to be exposed and condemned. The Center’s educational arm in Los Angeles is the Museum of Tolerance, where for many years I was invited to teach about hate crimes and the First Amendment, explaining why robust protection of free speech is a friend, not a foe, in the ongoing effort to eliminate hatred and discrimination in all forms.
Unfortunately, in issuing its deceptive “Top Ten” list, the Center has willfully ignored the most important “lessons of the Holocaust,” in the words of its namesake Simon Wiesenthal: “For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, ‘I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.’ ” He also astutely observed that the “history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition.” “Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.”
Today, history is repeating itself—but with a tragically ironic twist: Today, Palestinians are the ones who are being exterminated, and they are being murdered by Israel. Israel does not get a free pass because six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Nor does Israel get a free pass because it declares itself a Jewish State. If anything, of all the nations in the world, Israel should know better. If Simon Wiesenthal were alive today, I hope he would be telling the world: “We must learn from our tragedy. It is not written that the victims are only Jews. Today, in Gaza and the West Bank, the victims are Palestinians and the perpetrator is Israel. I will fight for justice. There must be no limitations. I will condemn mass murder wherever I see it, even if that means condemning my beloved Israel.”
Those who blindly support Israel—from the Wiesenthal Center to the Anti-Defamation League, to Republican members of Congress, to Benjamin Netanyahu, to the Biden and Trump administrations—cannot ignore the appalling facts on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank. Instead, they try to distract and confuse the world by demonizing Israel’s critics with incessant accusations of “antisemitism.” Defenders of Israel hope to intimidate, shame, and silence critics of Israel, and the quickest, most expedient way to do that is to simply call the critics “antisemitic.” Once they succeed in blurring the line between legitimate criticism of Israel’s government and illegitimate expressions of general Jew-hatred, they can get professors fired and students expelled, and they can force colleges and universities to crack down on lawful protests. Meanwhile, all of these actions distract the general public’s focus from what Israel is actually doing.
The Netanyahu regime is a threat to the peace and safety of Israel and Jews around the world. He has inflamed the world, putting his own country and Jews everywhere at risk. By design, the nation of Israel has tightly linked itself to the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. The founders of Israel chose the sacred religious symbol of the Star of David (Magen David) as the official state insignia on the nation’s flag and the menorah as the official state emblem, and they designated Hebrew as the state’s official language. In 2018, the Knesset doubled down by passing a law designating Israel the “Nation-State of the Jewish people.” By closely associating itself with all Jews, Israel ran the risk that if it violated human rights, or even worse, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, Jews around the world would serve as proxies for Israel and would bear the brunt of criticism and protest along with Israel.
Keen observers of the Middle East have exposed the ploy of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. In August 2024, Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, issued a comprehensive and illuminating report entitled “Global Threats to Freedom of Expression Arising from the Conflict in Gaza.” She found that “blanket bans of Palestinian symbols, by linking Palestinians as a people to terrorism or antisemitism, demonize and stigmatize them and seek to delegitimize their liberation struggle.” She noted that “equating advocacy of Palestinian rights with terrorism or antisemitism is not only a disproportionate response, but may indicate an underlying institutional racism against Palestinians, violating fundamental human rights.”
She took exception to the “tendency to confuse and conflate criticism of the policies of Israel, which is a legitimate exercise of freedom of expression, with antisemitism, which is racial and religious hatred against Jews that must be condemned.” She was very clear that “antisemitism is a serious form of religious and racial hatred, and States and private actors must take all necessary measures to fight it.” But she hastened to add that it is “vital that the fight against antisemitism be framed according to international human rights standards, so that there is a shared understanding of the problem and its root causes and, consequently, more effective responses to eradicate it.” Otherwise, “there is a risk that discrimination against one vulnerable group will be replaced with discrimination against another group, which, far from reducing antisemitism, will fuel more hatred and intolerance.”
The Special Rapporteur also criticized “the inherent conflation of Zionism, a political ideology, with antisemitism.” The practical consequence “is the suppression of legitimate criticism of Israel, not the enhancement of protection of Jews from racial and religious hatred and intolerance.” The hypocrisy that she noted is obvious: Jewish groups and individuals “who engage in anti-Zionist protests have been labeled as antisemitic,” but when “Jews celebrating Jewish festivals in solidarity with Palestinians were attacked by pro-Israel supporters, the incident was not considered to be antisemitic.”
Khan explained that “Zionism is not an inherent characteristic of an individual or group, and so it is wrong to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” Where there is concern in a specific situation that the term “Zionist” is being used as a proxy for hatred against Jews, Khan recommended that “a contextual analysis should be made on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the universally applicable standards.”
In the war raging in Gaza, Israel has killed over 43,000 innocent Palestinians (60% of whom are women, children and the elderly), injured another 102,000, and destroyed over 70% of housing. That war has now spread to the West Bank and elsewhere. Israel’s actions deserve to be subjected to thorough scrutiny, debate, and protest, as would any other country that engaged in such atrocities. In his recent wrenching New York Review of Books article A Deadly Apathy, New York Review of Books article A Deadly Apathy David Shulman describes horrible “war crimes, man-made famine, and ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank.”
Shulman is no distant arm-chair critic of Israel. A Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he emigrated to Israel in 1967 at age 18. He served in the Israel Defense Forces and was called up to serve during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He was a MacArthur Fellow from 1987 to 1992 and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016.
In stark contrast to the Wiesenthal Center, which refuses to acknowledge any of the death and destruction Israel has rained down on Gaza and the West Bank for over 400 days, Shulman describes what is actually happening in gruesome detail. On October 29, 2024, “after four soldiers were killed in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza,” Shulman writes, “the army bombed a five-story apartment building; it claimed that a ‘lookout’ had been sighted on the roof.” Nearly a hundred people died, at least twenty of them children, and there is yet no count of the wounded. “An obscene question arises: Was it worth it—for a presumed lookout? But I can’t help asking myself: For this we created a Jewish state?”
He cites “a high-ranking theorist of the current catastrophe in Gaza—retired major general Giora Eiland—who thinks that besieging a city or a country is perfectly legitimate under the rules of war, even if innocents who can’t or won’t get out die of starvation or illness.” Reports from early December 2024 describe the situation in Beit Lahiya “as unthinkable misery—rotting corpses in the ruins, no food, no water, no place to hide, no let-up in the bombings,” while mass starvation has taken hold in the south of Gaza. “What is striking and horrific,” according to Shulman, “is the fact that Israel has embraced cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war.”
“What we are experiencing now in Israel is a profound failure of our shared humanity, a deadly apathy of the soul. Worse still is the taste for killing and inflicting pain that has infected so many, beginning at the top.” As Shulman sees it, “Israel is well on its way to an authoritarian government—actually a dictatorship on the model of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. The extreme right wing, represented in the government by the Jewish supremacists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, despises the very concept of democracy; they march to a higher principle.”
“The government is not, however, simply corrupt, incompetent, and morally obtuse. It is now planning to enact a law that will decimate the Arab parties in the Knesset on the ridiculous grounds that their candidates supposedly support terror, thereby effectively disenfranchising a fifth of Israel’s population and ensuring a permanent majority for the right,” Shulman writes. “These days, the uncontested rulers of the West Bank are the marauding Israeli settlers in the illegal outposts that are popping up everywhere. Their express goal is a second Nakba—the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population in Area C, some 62 percent of the West Bank, over which Israel has sole control.”
Will Shulman make the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2025 list of “anti-Semites”? Given the omnibus definition of “antisemitism” the Center uses in its 2024 “Top Ten,” Shulman is a likely candidate.
Simon Wiesenthal Center “The Top Ten Worst Global Antisemitic Incidents for 2024.”
“#1 Iran’s Axis of Evil: War Against the Jews”—For its first entry, the Center picks Iran for launching hundreds of drone barrages and hypersonic missile strikes at Israel. There is certainly a lot of antisemitism in Iran and among its leaders, but instead of treating this as a geopolitical war against Israel, the causes of which could be analyzed as such, the Center calls it “Iran’s war against the Jews” turning it into an example of “antisemitism.” And in the same breath, it suggests that “protesters on university campuses and on social media” are the tools of Iran. More about that later.
“#2 UNRWA: The Problem, Not the Solution”—The Center’s second example of “antisemitism” is the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). The Center alleges that UNRWA has a “pro-war curricula,” fails to recognize Israel’s right to exist in its classrooms, and promotes “murderous terrorists as role models for generations of Palestinian children.” These are all political and ideological accusations rather than examples of “antisemitism,” unless that term is stretched to mean anything negative about Israel.
“#3 Synagogues Targeted Around the World”—It takes until the third example for the Center to identify real acts of antisemitism. “Synagogues targeted in 2024 included Sfax, Tunisia; Oldenburg, Germany; Moscow, Russia; Trondheim, Norway; Athens, Greece; Los Angeles, USA; La Grande-Motte, France; Philadelphia, USA; Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, and multiple threats and attacks across Canada.” This is where the fight against antisemitism should be focused, rather than diluting the term by sweeping in political opposition to Israel.
“#4 ICC and ICJ: Weaponizing the Judicial Process”—But the Center is unable to stay focused on combating genuine antisemitism. Instead, it makes the outlandish claim that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the U.N. International Court of Justice (ICJ) are both guilty of “antisemitism.” After a year-long investigation, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. After hearing extensive evidence and legal arguments presented by lawyers for both South Africa and Israel, the ICJ found a plausible case that Israel has engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people.
The ICC, with 125 member countries, is dedicated to what Kofi Annan called “the cause of all humanity.” The Center fails to mention that in addition to Netanyahu and Gallant, the ICC also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. Yet the Center accuses the three judges, who are from France, Benin, and Slovenia, of being motivated by “antisemitism.”
The first Members of the ICJ were chosen on February 6, 1946, at the First Session of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council. The Court is composed of fifteen independent judges, who shall be “persons of high moral character, who possess the qualifications required in their respective countries for appointment to the highest judicial offices, or are jurisconsults of recognized competence in international law.” Yet when the ICJ makes rulings against Israel, the Center claims it is guilty of “antisemitism.”
“#5 Prominent Influencers of the Far-Left and Far-Right”—Ignoring the role of free speech in the raging debate over Israel’s war in Gaza, the Center claims that “Prominent influencers across the ideological spectrum, ranging from left-wing progressives such as environmental justice activist Israel-hater Greta Thunberg (24 million social media followers), to far-right commentator Candace Owens (20 million+ social media followers), have each demonized both Jews and Israel.”
Thunberg isn’t accused of saying anything about Jews—only Israel. According to the Center, she called for Israel to be expelled from a Eurovision song contest and to be boycotted by Stockholm University, and she publicly “cursed” Israel. And then Thunberg had the audacity to report that “Today youth and activists from all over the world protested outside the U.N. climate talks in Bonn to highlight the links between fossil fuels and violence like the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” These are all criticisms of Israel, and for that the Center smears Thunberg as being an anti-Semite.
On the other end of the political spectrum, the Center accused conservative commentator Candace Owens of calling what Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele did to Jewish women and children at the Auschwitz death camp “propaganda” and suggesting that education about the Holocaust amounts to “indoctrination” akin to “Soviet tactics.” I too can spot false, antisemitic tropes, so we’ll chalk that one up for the Center. Owens has a right to free speech, and the rest of us have the right to condemn the hateful things she says.
“#6 Elite Universities Demonizing Zionism, Normalizing Antisemitism”—It doesn’t count as an example of “antisemitism” to quote others who mistakenly label criticism of Israel as “antisemitism.” So it’s no surprise that an investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, led by conservative Republican Virginia Foxx (N.C.), found that elite universities failed to effectively address “the surge of antisemitism” on their campuses. An examination of that investigation reveals that legally protected political chants such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were lumped in with disgusting face-to-face confrontations in which Jewish students were subjected to ugly and threatening antisemitic slurs.
Likewise, an examination of the December 2024 decision by the U.S. Department of Education to reach a settlement with five UC schools, including UCLA, over “anti-Israel and antisemitic incidents” once again reveals a mixture of legitimate “anti-Israel” political protests and shameful antisemitic incidents during face-to-face confrontations. Since these complaints were settled without full-dress hearings, the Department made no effort to distinguish between the two very different situations.
The Center also mislabels as “antisemitism” campus protests over Zionism and calls “to divest from Israel-linked companies and/or boycott Israeli institutions” at universities in the U.K., Australia, Copenhagen, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Norway, The Netherlands, and Belgium. Yet again, classic forms of legitimate political protest are dismissed as “antisemitism.”
“#7 Francesca Albanese: Blaming Israel for Hamas Murdering Jews”—The Center alleges that Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “excused or legitimized mass murdering Hamas terrorists, both before and after Oct 7, 2023, while questioning whether Israeli women were raped by Hamas, and accusing Israel of genocide and ‘colonial erasure.’” Furthermore, the Center accuses Albanese, in August 2024, of declaring “Israel’s military actions in Gaza akin to the Nazi Holocaust, referring to Gaza as a ‘21st-century concentration camp.’” Even before we dissect these accusations, it is immediately apparent that they all relate to Albanese’s views on Israel, its war in Gaza and the West Bank, and its treatment of the Palestinians. None of this qualifies as “antisemitism.”
No wonder Israel and its allies want to undermine Albanese’s credibility and stature. She was appointed Special Rapporteur on May 1, 2022, for a three-year term, and there is no question that she has been highly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In her first report issued in October 2022, she recommended that UN member states develop “a plan to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime,” citing “an intentionally acquisitive, segregationist, and repressive regime designed to prevent the realization of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.” In July 2023, she accused Israel of turning the West Bank into an open-air prison, pointing out that since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians, including children as young as 12, had been arrested and detained by Israeli authorities.
During the Israel-Hamas war, Albanese called for an immediate ceasefire, warning that “Palestinians are in grave danger of a mass ethnic cleansing.” She urged the international community to “prevent and protect populations from atrocity crimes”, and contended that “accountability for international crimes committed by Israeli occupation forces and Hamas must also be immediately pursued.
In February 2024, when French President Emmanuel Macron described the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel as “the largest antisemitic massacre of our century,” Albanese responded that “the victims of the October 7 massacre were killed not because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression.” After the Israeli government declared her persona non grata in Israel and denied her future entry to the country, she said “I regret that some interpreted my tweet as ‘justifying’ Hamas’s crimes, which I have condemned strongly several times. I reject all forms of racism, including antisemitism. However, labeling these crimes as ‘antisemitic’ obscures the real reason they occurred.”
On March 26, 2024, Albanese issued a report entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide,” describing “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel is intentionally committing at least three “genocidal acts” against an identifiable group: “killing members of the group”; “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”; and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
In December 2022, sixty-five scholars of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Jewish studies observed: “It is evident that the campaign against [Albanese] is not about combating today’s antisemitism. It is essentially about efforts to silence her and to undermine her mandate as a senior UN official reporting about Israel’s violations of human rights and international law.” In January 2023, a statement was issued in defense of Albanese by a number of human rights organizations, academic institutions, and other civil society organizations as follows: “We commend UNSR Francesca Albanese’s tireless efforts toward the protection of human rights in the OPT and in raising awareness of the alarming daily violations of Palestinian rights. We call on third States to strongly condemn this politically-motivated attack on the Special Rapporteur’s mandate and to compel Israel to comply with its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations.”
“#8 NGOs’ Poisonous Agenda”—In December 2024, Amnesty International released a report concluding that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide. Shortly thereafter Human Rights Watch found that Israel is intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians in Gaza of water, leading to thousands of deaths. HRW’s Executive Director, Tirana Hassan charged, “This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease that is nothing short of the crime against humanity of extermination, and an act of genocide.”
For describing what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, the Center labeled these human rights organizations as examples of “antisemitism.”
“#9 Presidents Targeting Israel”—The Center accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of “antisemitism” for allegedly comparing Prime Minister Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler during a speech at the 79th UN General Assembly, while reiterating “support for Hamas” and “hinting at an incursion into the Jewish State,” and stating “Just as Hitler was stopped by the alliance of humanity 70 years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must also be stopped by the alliance of humanity.” For making what the Center calls “anti-Israel moves” and joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, the Center accused Ireland and its President Michael Higgins of “antisemitism.”
For accepting a Palestinian flag from “anti-Israel fanatic Roger Waters” and for recommending that the South African legal team receive the Nobel Prize for presenting its case against Israel at the ICJ, the Center accused Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, of “antisemitism.”
Clearly, according to the Center, anyone who speaks out against Israel is guilty of “antisemitism.”
“#10 Israeli Olympians and Other Athletes Targeted”—The Center alleges that at a UEFA football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam, as Israeli soccer fans exited the game they were attacked by “organized rioters,” in what was described [by whom?] as a “Jew hunt.” Were the fans attacking all Jews or were they in fact protesting against Israel’s genocide?
At the Paris 2024 Olympics, Israeli athletes faced Nazi salutes and unspecified “antisemitic gestures” from some spectators. Were the spectators attacking all Jews or were they in fact protesting against Israel’s genocide?
An Israeli Frisbee team was excluded from an international competition in Ghent, Belgium, following what the Center calls an “antisemitic incident” where the slogan “Boycott Israhell Now!” was spray-painted near the field. Was the exclusion an act of protest against Israel’s genocide?
In November 2024, players from TuS Makkabi, an under-17 youth soccer team in Berlin were chased by a crowd wielding sticks and knives, according to German media reports, “while opposing players reportedly yelled “Free Palestine” at the “Jewish team,” [that is, the Israeli team] whose players were allegedly spat upon. Were the spectators attacking all Jews or were they in fact protesting against Israel’s genocide?
When it issues its next “Top Ten” list, if the Simon Wiesenthal Center won’t heed the warnings of two Special UN Rapporteurs about what constitutes antisemitism, perhaps it will give more credence to other pro-Israel organizations. In offering a “working definition” of antisemitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) cautioned that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
Likewise, a member organization of The Jewish Federations of North America also made it clear that “criticism of Israel, its policies, its government, or its politicians is not in and of itself anti-Semitic. Criticism of Israel, even harsh or strident criticism, just like the criticism of any country’s actions or policies, including what happens with respect to Palestinians, is not in and of itself antisemitic. Israelis do this all the time.”
Peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians will never come if organizations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center persist in stoking the flames of hatred and stigmatizing one side of that conflict. It will only come by soberly considering the facts on the ground and upholding the principles of international human rights of all inhabitants in that troubled region.
*Stephen Rohde is a writer, lecturer and political activist. For almost 50 years, he practiced civil rights, civil liberties, and intellectual property law. He is a past chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and past National Chair of Bend the Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice. He is a founder and current chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; member of the Board of Directors of Death Penalty Focus, and a member of the Black Jewish Justice Alliance. Mr. Rohde is the author of American Words of Freedom and Freedom of Assembly and numerous articles and book reviews on civil liberties and constitutional history for the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Prospect, LA Times, Ms. Magazine, Los Angeles Lawyer and other publications. He is co-author of Foundations of Freedom published by the Constitutional Rights Foundation.