Children outside the synagogue at 784-788 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday. Photo by Mira Fox

By Mira Fox January 10, 2024

We can’t have anything fun online anymore. The story about a tunnel dug by a group of Chabad men under the movement’s main synagogue, known colloquially as 770 because of its address in Brooklyn, seemed tailor-made for a day of harmless jokes on Twitter about the simple fact that the diggers managed to get away with their project, unnoticed, for so long. Instead, with the site reinvented as Elon Musk’s X, the discourse devolved, nearly instantly, into antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The turn of events reveals the irony of Musk’s attempts at moderation on X, where he has banned some pro-Palestinian slogans, such as “from the river to the sea,” while open antisemitism continues to flourish — often in the guise of pro-Palestinian activism.

Accounts with names like EndZionism, Visrael and DefundIsraelNow present themselves in their bios as accounts devoted to causes generally aligned with pro-Palestinian advocacy, such as reducing or ending American military aid to Israel. But their feeds mix lists of Gazan death tolls with others claiming that Israel secretly runs the U.S. government or accusing Jews of being “satanic.”

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For these accounts, the tunnels have provided an opportunity to more overtly link the war to conspiracy theories about Jews as a whole, and transition from arguing that the issue is Zionism to more openly arguing that their issue is with Judaism at large. After all, the people who dug the secret tunnel were very visibly religious Jews, not just Zionists, digging a tunnel that has nothing to do with Palestinians. 

“The Jewish playbook: 1. Jews get caught committing crimes 2. the Jewish community calls it an antisemitic conspiracy theory 3. they come together and mass censor you or get you fired for reporting the crime” reads one post from DefundIsraelNow, along with a screenshot of another post worrying that the tunnel is stoking antisemitism.

While many actual pro-Palestinian activists have made valid arguments that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, or that intifada is not a violent word, Musk’s policies have increasingly limited their ability to speak out. Meanwhile, bad actors pretending to be activists have been free to post about how, say, Zionists are sewer rats. And Musk has done little to moderate these blatantly antisemitic accounts — in fact,  Defund Israel Now boasts a gold check mark, which the platform awards to accounts it says represent “an official organization,” as opposed to the blue check marks that simply indicate a paid account.

The account appears to have merited that gold check mark by having a shell website, which declares that it is an “organization that aims to revolutionize the way people learn and share knowledge about American politics,” but contains no other information. The website was only registered in November 2023 by an anonymous individual — they used a proxy to register the site — and simply links back to the X account.

And on X, the conspiracy theories aren’t just flowing, unmoderated; they’re boosted by that golden official check mark. Elon Musk may have banned any use of the term “decolonization” from his platform, to much fanfare from the Anti-Defamation League, but antisemitic memes of caricatured Jewish men popping out of sewers labeled “rats” are apparently fair game.

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