Keeping Questions Open: Risks of a Libel Framework

Let's not build cages of our own.

This article was originally published in The Times of Israel.

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A few days ago, Rachel Burnett published a sharp critique of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) in the Times of Israel. Her central argument is that labeling accusations against Israel as “libels” functions as a way to avoid engaging with their substance — and that the libel framework is particularly unjust to Palestinians, whose opposition to the state that they see as having displaced them cannot be reduced to irrational hatred. She’s right about this. But there’s a harder argument to be made — one that neither the libel framework nor its critics are making, and one that matters more.

Here it is: the same accusation can be worth taking seriously and can be used for distortion. These are not contradictory observations — they describe different registers of analysis. The first asks: is this true? The second asks: how is this being used? Neither question dissolves the other — a true accusation doesn’t settle how it’s being used, and a distorted use doesn’t settle whether it’s true.

Think of a screenshot of something you said ten years ago. The quote is accurate, but now, it’s being deployed to an audience to end a conversation rather than have one. Both questions stay open: did you say it, and what is it being used to do? The first doesn’t settle the second. Even if accountability is warranted, the way it’s being used does something else, and both are worth noticing.

The libel framework refuses both questions by declaring accusations “libels” in advance; the content is dismissed before it is examined, and the way accusations circulate is reduced to a single explanatory key: hatred. Antizionists also refuse both questions, but from the opposite direction — the accusations are treated as proven before the evidence arrives, and the question of how they are being used is dismissed as deflection.

Neither side asks the questions before deciding. And engaging with antisemitism requires both questions, asked honestly. The system doesn’t require bad faith — it works on true claims as readily as false ones, impervious to intent.

Content and Use

Start with something almost nobody wants to say plainly: Israel is an ethnostate and pluralistic at the same time.

The 2018 Nation-State Basic Law explicitly reserves the right of national self-determination for the Jewish people. Arab citizens serve in the Knesset, the judiciary, and some serve in the military. It is worth noting that “ethnostate” here does not carry the white-supremacist connotation it typically holds in Western discourse — Israel’s Jewish population is predominantly non-white, with the majority tracing their origins to the Middle East and North Africa.

The word “ethnostate” captures something real about Israel’s legal structure, but to call it only an ethnostate — to treat the label as exhaustive — erases the pluralistic dimensions entirely. This is not a contradiction to be resolved by picking a side; it’s a tension to be described accurately.

Israel is hardly alone in this. The friction between ethnic particularism and democratic pluralism runs through dozens of modern nation-states — from India’s Hindu nationalism to Hungary’s constitutional identity provisions to the ethnic definitions embedded in the Baltic citizenship laws that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. The question of how a state can enshrine a particular national character while guaranteeing equal citizenship to all who live within it is one of the central unresolved problems of modern political life. Israel is a specific instance of this problem, not an aberration from an otherwise settled norm. Treating it as uniquely monstrous shuts down the comparative analysis that would make the problem legible, and treating it as uniquely virtuous shuts down the criticism that would make reform possible.

Holding this tension is unpopular. But any framework that treats calling Israel an ethnostate as inherently false — as a libel, axiomatically illegitimate — cannot hold this tension. When debunking this supposed libel, substantive policy arguments are made: non-Jewish citizens serve in public life, many nations define themselves through ethnicity or faith. As Burnett correctly observes, this is precisely the kind of engagement with “specific laws, leaders, or actions” many define as legitimate criticism. This prevents many from staying on the meta-level they claim to occupy. They end up making exactly the kind of argument they say no one should have to make.

Antizionists have their own version of this evasion — and it is not, as one might expect, that they do the evidentiary work and merely skip the structural question. They skip both. The accusations are treated as self-evident: Israel is a settler-colonial state, Israel is committing genocide, Israel is an apartheid regime. These are presented as premises — starting points from which all subsequent reasoning flows. And because the conclusions are installed in advance, the question of how they are being used — whether they are doing analytical work or something else entirely — never arises. Often, to raise it is to be accused of deflection, or worse.

When Meaning Arrives First

Take the genocide accusation. Terrible things have happened in Gaza. The destruction of infrastructure, the displacement of populations, the killing of civilians — these are documented realities that demand serious moral and legal engagement.

What needs contesting is not the suffering but the timing: when the word “genocide” appears within twenty-four hours of October 7 — before any investigation, before any evidentiary process, before the military operation has even begun in earnest — what is that word doing? Some would say the answer is straightforward: the accusation draws on decades of prior evidence, and October 7 simply confirmed what was already documented. That argument deserves to be taken seriously. But taking it seriously means asking the question the essay insists on: whether the word arrived as a conclusion or as a frame is not settled by the existence of prior evidence — and the timing makes it worth asking.

This doesn’t mean the underlying realities are fabricated. It means the accusation was recruited into a structure that was no longer interested in whether it was true.

None of this requires denying that civilians are suffering. It requires noticing that the machinery was already running before the facts arrived.

Analysis or Reflex?

Those leaning into the libel framework see something real — that accusations against Israel often circulate within a repetitive, self-reinforcing structure that bears uncomfortable resemblances to older patterns of antisemitic thought. They are not wrong about this. The problem is their response.

Rather than analyzing how accusations get recruited into that structure — which would require distinguishing between what is being said and what it is doing — accusations automatically convert to libels. This empties the question before it can be asked.

And then something revealing happens — and Burnett deserves credit for surfacing this. When UNICEF Lebanon reports on airstrikes that killed over 250 people, “ALERT! NEW ANTIZIONIST LIBEL CIRCULATING!” is posted fifty-nine times by a proponent of the libel framework.

The framework has become a machine for converting any empirical input into confirmation of itself. At that point, it is just a reflex.

The irony is: this is the very structure we all claim to oppose.

Because this is how antisemitism works — as a system that decides in advance what Jewish actions mean, where every act of self-defense is aggression, every claim of victimhood is manipulation, every piece of counterevidence is proof of the conspiracy.

Content differs, but the operation is the same.

The Jewish Antizionism Question

There is a further problem.

With regard to antizionism, the libel framework carves out one exception: Jewish anti-Zionism before 1948 — the internal communal debates about whether a Jewish state was desirable. This, they say, was legitimate. Contemporary Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, by contrast, are treated as “tokenized” Jews recruited by a hate movement, analogous to the Yevsektsiya in the Soviet Union.

Burnett notices the asymmetry but doesn’t press it theoretically. It needs pressing.

This framing assumes that Jewish antizionists are externally manipulated — pulled into a framework that is foreign to them. This gets the mechanism exactly backwards. If antizionism operates within the broader system of antisemitism — and it does — then it does not stop at the boundary of the Jewish community. Systems like these do not respect group membership; they work on the targeted group as well as around it.

And here is where the institutional failure and the personal vulnerability meet. When the available defenses against antisemitism are themselves dishonest — when the structure that claims to protect you demands that you stop seeing what you can see, that you treat every accusation as a libel and every report as propaganda — it offers no real shelter. It offers an enclosure.

A person who cannot find a truthful account of their situation within the institutions that claim to represent them is not thereby freed from the system those institutions failed to confront—they’re left more exposed to it. Antisemitism doesn’t need a failed defense in order to work. It was working before the libel framework existed and will work after. But when the only available defense demands dishonesty — when holding the line means pretending you can’t see what you can see — it doesn’t protect anyone.

When Jews adopt the framework that treats Jewish sovereignty as inherently illegitimate, that is not an exception to antisemitism. It is antisemitism working on Jews—the system’s logic becomes the subject’s own reasoning, experienced as authentic conviction. This claim doesn’t need an exception for Jewish antizionists.

The Cage and the Bird

Franz Kafka wrote: “A cage goes in search of a bird.” That is what antisemitism looks like as a system — a structure that decides what Jews mean before Jews act and recruits everything that follows to confirm the decision; a structure with categorical certainty that resists every correction. This is dangerous; it’s the same pattern that Jews have encountered for centuries. We all see the cage clearly.

But Kafka did not write about the bird that goes in search of a cage. And yet that is what internalization looks like.

When Jews adopt, as their own conviction, the framework that was built to contain them — when the system works so thoroughly that the bird no longer needs to be caught — it enters the cage and calls it freedom. This is what Jewish antizionism looks like from here: not tokenization, not manipulation, but the system working from the inside.

Let’s not build cages of our own. The system works by making you believe you have to — and there is no comfortable place to stand for those who refuse.

The task is not to choose between these observations; rather, to develop a way of thinking capable of holding both. We have to ask — is the accusation true and what is it doing? — and refuse to let either question silence the other.