The New York Times has published a number of articles making the analogy between the current antiwar demonstrations and the earlier ones. The comparison is fair enough, since the United States has not seen protests on this scale since the Vietnam War. Students are well aware of this. In the 1960s, an American army was engaged in war in Southeast Asia; today, Israel is destroying Gaza with weapons supplied by the United States.
The accusation is as serious as it is false. When I join pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Cornell University campus, I see many Jewish students, often waving signs of endorsement from their organizations. At the rallies, Jewish students and professors—sometimes also Israeli students—express their anger at the massacre in Gaza. United in their demand for justice and equality, Jews and Palestinians display brotherly feelings toward each other.
When I go home and turn on the TV, I am immediately confronted, flipping through the main U.S. and European channels, with a talk show on the antisemitism of the antiwar movement. Mike Johnson, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, appears on every channel. Surrounded by policemen and people holding Israeli flags—not one of them young enough to be a student— Johnson positions himself next to the pro-Palestinian encampment at New York’s Columbia University and denounces antisemitism.
Shortly afterward, I see him again at a press conference, and still later at a ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. This same man, a member of the Republican Party and an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, has been repeating for three and a half years that Joe Biden stole the election.
Should we believe that the students demonstrating for Palestine are deplorable antisemites and the attackers of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, true defenders of democracy? It strikes me that the journalists, special correspondents, and newscasters who tour American campuses, some with entire crews of photographers and cameramen, and who then tell us about the antisemitism of American students are lying and dishonoring their profession.
The reality is that antisemitism has been weaponized, to use the current expression. Not the antisemitism of yesteryear, which was directed against the Jews, but a new, imaginary antisemitism aimed at criminalizing any criticism of Israel. The antiwar movement is very broad and diverse, in the United States as in Europe.
Within this large constellation, three main clusters stand out quite clearly. The first consists of young people of postcolonial origin, born in Europe or the Americas into families originally from Africa or Asia. For them, the Palestinian cause is a new stage in the struggle against colonialism.
Next come African Americans, who identify the liberation of Palestine with a global fight against racism and inequality. Palestinian lives matter. Israel has relegated Palestinians to an apartheid system comparable to what once existed in South Africa.
And finally, there are those who are reactivating a specifically Jewish universalist and internationalist tradition, though one that has always stood apart from Zionism—when not opposing it outright. Many of these youths are “non-Jewish Jews,” in the sense that Isaac Deutscher gave that term: “heretics” who take part in the Jewish tradition by transcending Judaism. Others are what we might call “Dreyfusards,” Jews who will not stand for discrimination, oppression, or killing to be carried out in their name, just as there were French citizens who, believing in a republican ideal of equality and justice, supported the Algerian cause.
In the twentieth century, this tradition placed Jews in the vanguard of liberation movements. Clearly, the tradition is still very much alive, and we should be thankful. The media campaign denouncing the alleged antisemitism of students who rally in support of Palestine is a direct attack on these three groups. Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism kills three birds with one stone, striking at anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and Jewish nonconformism.
The link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, a Jewish nationalist movement was always going to be viewed with hostility by European nationalists who found in antisemitism one of their baseline elements. On the other hand, Zionism sought from the outset to use antisemitism to achieve its own ends. Antisemites wanted to drive out Jews, and Zionists wanted to persuade Jews to emigrate to Palestine—there was ample room for a meeting of minds. (...)
There is no question that, especially on the right, many anti-Zionists were antisemitic. Moreover, after the birth of Israel, the Arab world imported many antisemitic stereotypes from Europe, which became widespread just as they were waning in their countries of origin.
But it’s also true that Zionism has always been criticized, and often vehemently rejected, by a large part of the Jewish world. A list of anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals would fill several volumes. Zionism was one of the many offshoots of the secularization and modernization that transformed the Jewish world starting in the nineteenth century, but for a long time it had relatively few adherents. Today the situation has changed, because Israel is a state, and in a secular world the memory of the Holocaust and the existence of Israel mark out the landscape in which the identity of diasporic Jews is defined.
by Enzo Traverso, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel (ProPublica).]
The link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, a Jewish nationalist movement was always going to be viewed with hostility by European nationalists who found in antisemitism one of their baseline elements. On the other hand, Zionism sought from the outset to use antisemitism to achieve its own ends. Antisemites wanted to drive out Jews, and Zionists wanted to persuade Jews to emigrate to Palestine—there was ample room for a meeting of minds. (...)
There is no question that, especially on the right, many anti-Zionists were antisemitic. Moreover, after the birth of Israel, the Arab world imported many antisemitic stereotypes from Europe, which became widespread just as they were waning in their countries of origin.
But it’s also true that Zionism has always been criticized, and often vehemently rejected, by a large part of the Jewish world. A list of anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals would fill several volumes. Zionism was one of the many offshoots of the secularization and modernization that transformed the Jewish world starting in the nineteenth century, but for a long time it had relatively few adherents. Today the situation has changed, because Israel is a state, and in a secular world the memory of the Holocaust and the existence of Israel mark out the landscape in which the identity of diasporic Jews is defined.
by Enzo Traverso, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
