#6: On Antisemitism in the Movement for Palestine
February 20, 2024
Cambridge
Van Morrison–Saint Dominic’s Preview
Opposing the state of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. Supporters of Palestinian liberation — among them, me — have recited that principle over and over again since the war on Gaza began.
Maintaining that distinction has meant looking people in the eyes and asking them to trust me. They point out that the war on Gaza is retaliation for a vicious attack on civilians by Hamas, whose founding charter proclaimed: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” They ask how I could join a coalition that includes those terrorists. I answer that the same sense of justice that would make me defend Jewish people is what calls me to defend Palestinian people. Perhaps they believe me; perhaps not.
Maintaining it has been an honor: it affirms that, to paraphrase Howard Zinn, there is no cause righteous enough to escape the shame of killing innocent people. Israel, “a machine for converting grief into power,” invokes the death of Jewish people — in pogroms, in the Holocaust, and in terrorist attacks against it — to justify oppressing and killing innocent Palestinians. The current conflict follows the pattern of Israeli-Palestinian violence: ten to twenty Palestinians have died for every Israeli who died. Nothing can excuse that wrong.
Opposing the state of Israel means only that one opposes killing innocent people, especially because the United States contributes billions to Israel’s military. But yesterday, a number of prominent pro-Palestine groups on Harvard’s campus shared a plainly antisemitic cartoon: “a hand branded with the Star of David with a dollar sign at the center of the star holding a noose that circles the necks of two men who appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Nasser.” This was nothing new; I have witnessed campus groups and individual students recklessly or intentionally peddle antisemitic tropes before.
Antisemitism is evil. It has no place in the movement for Palestinian liberation, yet it seems to excite the quiet or not-so-quiet interest of some in the movement. When it surfaces, supporters of Palestine often explain it away or reject their obligation to condemn it. Here, I want to defend the view that supporters of Palestinian liberation should affirmatively condemn acts that could reasonably be interpreted as antisemitic and that they should be criticized for failing to do so. I’m going to do so using an (overly formal) set of premises that I hope will make my thinking clear and help people who disagree articulate why they do.
First: Israel is analytically distinct from Judaism. In the same way that opposing Israel does not mean opposing Jewish people, actions that Israel takes cannot be imputed to Jewish people. The facts that some Jewish people identify Israel as their protector and others advocate for Jewish self-determination through a method other than this particular state do not support the inference that Israel is coextensive with all Jewish people. Indeed, many Jewish people support Palestinian liberation and oppose the Israeli state; yet more support peace and are critical of the Netanyahu regime. Hating Israel for its wrongs cannot provide any excuse for hating Jewish people.
Second: antisemitism is real and dangerous. I am not an expert on this topic, and I don’t have all of the evidence at my command. But people—in the United States and across the globe—are murdered each year for being Jewish. In the Holocaust and in other instances throughout centuries of history, Jewish people have been murdered en masse, and those moments have often arisen unpredictably and rapidly. Concern that Jewish people will be targeted for violence is valid and should be taken into account by anybody who cares about identity-based harm.
Third: in relation to antisemitism, Jewish people are oppressed. That is to say that antisemitism is part of the same set of social phenomena as racism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, fatphobia, etc. A person who is anti-oppression in a general, intersectional sense should apply the same analysis to antisemitism within her movement as she would to, say, homophobia within her movement. A few additional ideas that are generally widely accepted within progressive movements thus also apply here: first, that Jewish people should be entitled to a presumption that they are authorities on their own oppression, and second, that antisemitic oppression cannot be excused simply by the fact that the person enacting it belongs to another marginalized group.
From these premises, I think we can conclude that a person who claims to oppose oppression must oppose antisemitism within the movement for Palestine, and she should listen to Jewish people on the question of whether a particular act is antisemitic. Failing to do so has serious consequences. First, it is simply wrong. It means sanctioning the real oppression of Jewish people. Second, it is a strategic misstep. It suggests that the person only cares about certain kinds of oppression, and thus that her support for Palestine has something to do with the particular people who are being oppressed and doing the oppressing. This inconsistency invites the inference that the coalition that supports Palestine is also, in part, antisemitic — and thus that opposing antisemitism requires opposing Palestine. Particularly for people in the United States with no direct connection to the conflict, there is an obligation to avoid making strategic missteps whose consequences will be felt by those on the ground.