Two years after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, anti-Semitic violence seems to be on the rise throughout the West. On Yom Kippur, a man drove a car into a crowd outside a synagogue in Manchester, England, then got out and stabbed members of the congregation before he was also killed. On June 2 in Boulder, Colorado, an Egyptian national threw Molotov cocktails at protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages, killing one of them. Such incidents have grown more frequent as the Israeli military’s deadly operation in Gaza grinds on. All hate crimes are reprehensible. Supporters of the Palestinian cause should recognize that attacks against Jews are also highly damaging to their movement. That’s true even though such attacks are typically the work of deranged or hyper-radicalized individuals, not organizations, and do not represent the Palestinian national movement as a whole.Many figures not only on the Israeli right, but also in the West, argue that the Palestinian people and their cause are inherently hateful and prone to anti-Jewish violence. This is analogous to declaring that “Zionism is racism,” despite the numerous divergent strands of Zionism. The truth about the Palestinian movement is of course far more complex, but the simplistic narrative has gotten a boost from Western populists, including those whose own ranks include openly anti-Semitic factions.[Read: The pro-Israel right is shifting the definition of anti-Semitism]Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly linked the quest for Palestinian statehood to anti-Semitic violence: He argued that the recent recognition of Palestinian statehood by several Western countries “rewards Hamas terror, hardens Hamas’s refusal to free the hostages, emboldens those who menace” Jews, and “encourages the Jew-hatred now stalking your streets.” A persistent trope on the American right holds that Palestinians teach their children to hate Israel and Israelis—even though a comprehensive study of more than 3,000 Palestinian and Israeli textbooks found that, although both are highly nationalistic, neither routinely dehumanizes or demonizes the other side.No good will come to the Palestinian cause from any association, however misconstrued, with violent attacks such as the one in Manchester. For this reason, supporters of the Palestinian cause have to be careful not just about what they do but about what they say. Uttering, promoting, and in some cases even tolerating anti-Israel rhetoric that crosses the line into anti-Semitism does double damage: It can help fuel violent attacks, and it creates the impression that the broader Palestinian and pro-Palestinian community supports such action.[Read: America’s anti-Jewish assassins are making the case for Zionism]For the past two years, students on American college campuses have mounted a formidable movement against the Gaza war. The protests were inspired by concerns of humanitarianism and justice. But at Columbia, for example, that passion spilled over into hatred. In April of 2024, Khymani James, a student protester at the university, said in a video that went viral that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” The student movement should have immediately excommunicated him. He rightly apologized, but then, in an act of breathtaking moral and political stupidity, he and his student group retracted the apology.Campus protesters in the United States unwisely adopted slogans that were open to misinterpretation. “Globalize the intifada” was one; “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was another. Activists explained “Globalize the intifada” as a call for a generalized uprising against the international order in the name of Palestine—an agenda likely meaningless to most Palestinians struggling to remain in their homes in the West Bank, or simply to stay alive in Gaza. The movement’s critics pointed to the history of intifada-related violence against Israeli Jews and cast the slogan as a call to arms against Israeli institutions and Jews all over the world.“From the river to the sea” was even more ambiguous. The second part of the slogan, “Palestine will be free,” suggests to a suspicious Jewish or pro-Israel mindset that the speaker is calling for only a Palestinian future in this land. But many people who use this slogan are in fact calling for a single democratic state, to include Jewish Israelis. They would be far better advised to conclude the slogan with “everyone, everyone will be free.”The Palestinian national cause can indeed be a magnet for anti-Semites looking for excuses to censure Jews or Israel, such as David Duke and Candace Owens. Such disingenuous opportunists should be shunned and condemned. (Some of us did exactly this in 2010–11, with regard to a writer calling himself Israel Shamir) Denouncing an unquestionably brutal Israeli war in Gaza is not the same as denouncing all Israelis, Jews, or Zionists, but the line dividing the two can sometimes be dangerously fine. A student group adopting a “Zionists are not invited” policy, for example, crosses it, veering from political opposition to exclusionary bigotry.The pro-Palestinian movement in the West needs to decry anti-Semitism for what it is: the ultimate poison for the Palestinian cause. Threatening and terrifying Jews or Israelis will not help persuade the state of Israel to agree to allow Palestinians citizenship in any state, let alone one of their own. Nor will it win support from the all-important United States. Rhetoric that tips into anti-Semitism, whatever its intent, contributes to rising violence—and to an indefinite Palestinian future of statelessness and conflict.Combatting anti-Semitism might seem like a diversion from the more urgent work of opposing war and occupation, especially after two years of unspeakable carnage in Gaza—but this issue is far too important for the pro-Palestinian movement to ignore.