Now, as Israel wages war against the civilians of Gaza, Kraft is again flexing his financial and political muscles in order to defend the indefensible. His Foundation of Combat Antisemitism, or FCAS, will be spending an estimated $7 million to buy a Super Bowl ad titled “Stop Jewish Hate” that will be seen by well over 100 million people.
Under Kraft’s direction, the ad’s goal is to create a propaganda campaign to counter the reports and images from Gaza that young people are consuming on social media. Without a sense of irony or the horrors happening on the ground, Kraft says he is giving $100 million of his own money to the Foundation Against Antisemitism because hate leads to violence — Just not violence against Palestinians, apparently.
Let’s be clear. What Kraft is doing politically and what he’ll be using the Super Bowl as a platform to do is dangerous. He appears to think that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. For Kraft, it is Jews like myself, rabbis, and Holocaust survivors calling for a ceasefire and a free Palestine that are part of the problem. And Kraft seems to think that opposition to Israel, the IDF, and the AIPAC agenda is antisemitism.
There is a Red Sea of distance, as I’ve written, between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Antisemitism is the pernicious hatred of a beautiful religion and culture that has been with us for over 5,000 years. Anti-Zionism means opposing a once negligible 125-year-old colonial project in the Middle East.
Zionism was a minor strain in Jewish life until the Holocaust, where, in a state of unspeakable trauma, Zionism rose triumphant after World War II with a new state built on the backs and land of the Palestinian people, a new outpost of what columnist Bari Weiss, with shameless racism, calls the West, albeit located in the Middle East. Now, for Kraft and Bari Weiss, building a highly militarized nuclear state built on stolen land is the only true hedge against another Holocaust.
Cementing this idea that to be anti-Zionist means that you are anti-Semitic has also been the lifelong project of Israel’s corrupt prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu attempts to shame anyone on the left who dares criticize Israel as crypto antisemites. Even the rabbis calling for a free Palestine are not free from this slander.
But right-wing Christian nationalists, with their belief in a Jewish state existing alongside their conviction that we’re all going to hell, are welcome in Netanyahu’s Israel and Kraft’s coalition.
And the greatest foghorn of this evangelical, right-wing, love Israel hate the Jews perspective is, of course, Donald Trump. And let’s talk about Robert Kraft and his relationship with Donald Trump.