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For decades, Jewish leaders have said the main fight against anti-Semitism should be a fight against unfair criticism of Israel. The Anti-Defamation League, which was started after the lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia in 1913, spends increasing amounts of time on dubious projects to defend the Israel state. Other Jewish organizations use their political capital trying to ban Americans from boycotting Israeli institutions that are assisting in Israeli government repression.

All the while anti-Jewish racists in this country are coming out of their holes and striking, They started using triple parenthesis to mean Jew on Twitter and their messages were retweeted literally billions of times. They marched in Charlottesville screaming, Jews will not replace us. An immigrant-hating man massacred 11 Jews at a temple in Pittsburgh. Anti-Jew hate appeared in QAnon and from the Proud Boys. Trump flirted with them, retweeting their venom, and at the same time pretending not to know them.

Yet whats the burning issue for our Jewish establishment leaders? Its a campaign to force a definition of anti-Semitism onto world governments to protect Israels government from criticism. It came from an organization representing governments and Holocaust scholars called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA. The group was created to expose those who would disguise their hatred of Jews by doubting the reality or the extent of the Holocaust. That effort is undoubtedly worthwhile.

But in 2016 the group came out with a Working Definition of anti-Semitism complete with examples, and many of the examples had to do with Israel. Supposedly anti-Semitism included targeting the state of Israel, saying that Israel was a racist endeavor, applying double standards to Israel, and comparing things the Israeli state has done with things German Nazis had done. Human rights supporters including organizations like the (120-year-old Jewish group) the Workmens Circle, and Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now took exception. Nevertheless, the definition/examples were adopted by the British government and it became the subject of one of Trumps executive orders.

All the while the far right was organizing. On Jan. 6, its followers exploded in attempted insurrection. That one of the rioters wore a Camp Auschwitz shirt seemed to bother none of them.

Something is really wrong with the conventional wisdom on how to oppose anti-Semitism. Even some establishment figures are realizing it. The Israeli paper Haaretz on Feb. 21 interviewed leading Holocaust scholar Professor Deborah Lipstadt who said if you look at the IHRA definition, You wont find right-wing anti-Semitism there; you wont find Pittsburgh there; you wont find Poway there; you wont find Halle, Germany, there; you wont find what we saw from some of the groups on January 6 at the Capitol there.

Yet the establishment continues on as if nothing was happening. There is a post in the State Department called Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Anti-Semitism. The media is speculating that the Biden administration will give it to Abraham Foxman, who led the ADL for decades. What a mistake!

In 1993 it came out that the ADL had run for years a vast spying operation on Arab-Americans, African-Americans, Native Americans and left-wing groups. Foxman defended the program vehemently. Ten years ago Foxman had the ADL oppose the building of the Park-51 Islamic Center in Manhattan because it supposedly was too close to the site where al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center. Worse than all this is the ongoing ADL-sponsored police exchange programs with Israel. Through it police, ICE, border patrol and FBI from the U.S. mix with soldiers, police, border agents, etc. from Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace which opposes the program, says worst practices are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries. The police exchange is another Foxman program.

A new approach is needed, one that realizes what our grandparents knew, that hatred of Jews mostly comes from the far right, from fascists, white nationalists, alt-right or whatever they call themselves. We need leaders who realize that the fight against anti-Semitism is a fight against all racism and not an effort to advance Jewish nationalism. We need a special envoy, a Jew or non-Jew, whose record reflects that understanding.

Stanley Heller is executive director of the Middle East Crisis Committee and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. He can be reached at mail@thestruggle.org.

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Opinion: We're fighting anti-Semitism the wrong way - The Wilton Bulletin