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ARE CRITICS OF STUDENT PROTESTS ANTI-SEMITIC?  
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Ajay Skaria
May 2, 2024
The Wire
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_ The distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is quite
simple, and the protesting students recognise it. _

Students protesting at the University of Minnesota. ,
X/@TwinCitiesDSA

 

The institution I teach in, the University of Minnesota, has joined
other universities across the US in the crackdown on students
protesting Israel’s killing of, as Senator Bernie Sanders noted,
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over 34,000 Palestinians (with another 78,000 wounded), 70% of them
women and children, in Gaza. Several students have been arrested since
the outbreak of protests on April 23. What has been striking
throughout the process of the crackdown on protesting university
students across the US is the claim by politicians and segments of
mainstream media that the students are being anti-Semitic.

As a scholar who has spent over two decades studying and writing on
M.K. Gandhi and non-violent movements, who follows Zionism closely
because it provides a model for the Hindu supremacist ideology called
Hindutva
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and who has also had many conversations with the students from whose
ranks the protestors come, I would argue exactly the opposite: it is
critics of the students who are being racist.

True, there is an enormous resurgence of anti-Semitism across the US
in the wake of October 7, as also of anti-Muslim sentiment. But in US
universities at least, the protests are not, barring some rare
exceptions, driven by anti-Semitism. In the classes I teach, for
example, these students see their opposition to what is happening in
Gaza as an extension of the anti-racist movements they have been
involved in at least since the George Floyd protests. Even the
organisational networks are often the same, and some of the same
students are participating in both protests.

I have also been struck by how, even as they consider themselves
fiercely anti-Zionist, these students come down sharply on positions
that bear any whiff of anti-Semitism. The distinction between
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is quite simple. As many have pointed
out for decades: while anti-Semitism is a hostility directed against
Jews because of their religious or cultural identity, anti-Zionism is
an opposition to Zionism as an ideology that is racist because it
claims the Israeli state and the land of Israel-Palestine exclusively
for the Jewish community. Zionism has not always been racist, of
course: many early Zionists, such as Martin Buber initially,
envisioned co-habiting in equality with the Arab community, rather
than creating an exclusively Jewish state. But that Zionist tradition,
always peripheral, is by now close to moribund.

Inevitably, Zionism as an ideology – like other analogous ideologies
such as white nationalism or Hindutva – will justify racism and
genocide, whether implicitly or explicitly. Many of the most
thoughtful Jewish thinkers recognised this danger. This is why Hannah
Arendt – herself by no means free of a Eurocentric mindset – was
quite emphatic
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“nation-states should never be able to found themselves through the
dispossession of whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea
of the nation.” Arendt’s fears about Zionism have by now come
entirely true, as Israel has developed into a Jewish supremacist state
organized around apartheid, and has deployed the structural,
institutional and physical violence that apartheid requires to
maintain itself.

And Zionism is by no means alone in having become a racism, in seeking
to transform a religious community into an ethnicity with supremacist
claims. The proponents of Hindutva are not only an analogous
phenomenon but have in recent years stressed their affinities to
Zionism and are allied closely with Israel, including supporting it
during the most recent genocide. Increasingly, just as Zionists have
sought to paint all criticism of the Israeli state and Zionism as
anti-Semitic, Hindutva’s ideologues have sought to portray criticism
of Hindutva or the Indian state under the BJP as “Hinduphobia
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“self-hating Hindus
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The students recognise this distinction, and when they demand
divestment from companies connected to Israel’s war machine and a
halt to US support for Israeli massacre of innocent civilians, they
most often see themselves as continuing the tradition of civil
disobedience – the tradition that peacefully breaks the laws of the
land or the rules of an institution in the name of a higher law called
justice – associated with Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It
is striking that most of the student protests have been overwhelmingly
non-violent: it is the university administrations that have unleashed
the punitive force of administrative sanctions and police action
against them.

§

The distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, then, is
analytically quite straightforward. The students have been emphatic in
reiterating it. The question we need to ask is therefore somewhat
different: what ideological blinkers seem to prevent the US House, or
for that matter liberal newspapers such as the _New York Times_, and
white liberals more broadly, from grasping it. (I say white liberals
because even more rightwing African American liberals such as John
McWhorter usually seem to get distinction: while he insists
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that the student protests are “not justice” – a claim that has
been disputed –
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clear that the students are not anti-Semitic.) Put differently: why
and how is the racism involved in Israel’s attack on Gaza, and in
the US support to Israel, invisible to Republicans and Democrats, and
why at the time of an actual ongoing racist genocide being carried out
with money and weapons they supply, is it that they see the students
as racist instead?

In many cases, of course, as for example with university
administrations, the Israeli state, organisations such as the AIPAC,
or powerful donors sympathetic to the Zionist cause, arguably all that
is going on is a cynical weaponisation of the charge of anti-Semitism,
which provides a quick way to shut down opposition.

But there are also deeper ideological affinities.

As far as Republicans and neo-conservative media outlets such as Fox
News are concerned, there is a direct ideological convergence. 
Zionism could well be described as an enhanced analogue of white
nationalist fantasies for Europe and the US; this after all is why so
many—including Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu—have described
Israel’s polity as an apartheid regime.  So, when Republicans
endorse Zionism, and push to have any criticism of Israel declared as
anti-Semitic
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they also (wittingly or not) extend a space for white nationalism.

A far more complex ideological affinity is at work in the mainstream
Democrats, as well as liberal media outlets such as the _New York
Times: _they exemplify what could be described as a subconscious
anti-Semitism that misrecognises itself as an anti-racism.

Till two decades back, the Democratic Party and the _Times _were,
while opposed to the explicit racism of the Republican Party, quite
complicit in dog whistle racism
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and quite incapable of comprehending structural racism. But both the
Democratic Party and liberal media have become more self-consciously
anti-racist over the last decade – witness, for example, the
brilliant 1619 project at the _Times, _or the wide-ranging Democratic
support to the George Floyd protests.

And yet, even as Democratic and liberal traditions have become less
tolerant of explicit racism in general (while continuing to be
complicit in systemic racism – this is why it has been described as
a racism without racists
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they have continued to aggressively support the explicit racism
involved in the Zionist project. A recent analysis by the Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] project provided detailed evidence that
liberal outlets show systematic bias towards the Israeli state
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An internal _Times _memo, for example, specifically asked reporters to
avoid certain words, including ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnic cleansing’,
‘“Palestine” (“except in very rare cases”), “occupied
territories” (say “Gaza, the West Bank, etc.”) and “refugee
camps” (“refer to them as neighborhoods, or areas”)’. The memo
claimed that this was to ‘provide clear, accurate information,’
and avoid ‘heated language’ but as the FAIR analysis noted,
‘highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like
“slaughter,” “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved
almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians,
rather than the other way around.

Ironically, in their support for Israel and their hostility to the
student protests, Democrats and the liberal media are themselves
practising an anti-Semitism thinking itself to be the converse. Like
Gandhi with Hinduism or King with Christianity, many protesting Jewish
students are drawing on Judaic traditions to oppose the killings in
Gaza (and the occupied West Bank) by the Israeli state; they are
insisting that to reduce Judaism and Jewish identity to Zionism
involves a most profound violence to Judaism and the Jewish identity.
Indeed, just as Gandhi tried to rescue Hinduism from becoming a racism
directed against Muslims and the dominated castes (and was killed by a
Hindutva ideologue for that), the Jewish students especially, but also
many of others, are trying to rescue Judaism from being complicit in
the racism that Zionism has become. They are saying that to be Jewish
is to be anti-racist.

When Democrats and liberal media fail to recognise this, they operate,
paradoxically, with a subconscious understanding of Judaism as a
tradition incapable of the moral compass necessary for
self-reflection, for critiquing Zionism. It is that moral compass that
figures like Arendt drew on in criticising Zionism, and that so many
young Jewish students on American campuses draw on in criticising the
genocide occurring in Gaza now. What could be more anti-Semitic than
denying these students the embrace of a Judaism that is sensitive to
the other, and instead conflating Zionism with Judaism and, thus,
Judaism to the genocide being conducted in its name!

Could it be the subconscious Democratic and mainstream white liberal
fear that they are themselves being profoundly anti-Semitic that
drives the hysteria and vehemence with which they declare that there
is no genocide occurring in Gaza, that it is the protesting students
who are being anti-Semitic? Could this also be a return of the
repressed: could it be that white liberals affirm in the Zionists the
explicit racism that they must repress and disavow in their relation
with African Americans and other people of colour here in the US?

_Ajay Skaria [[link removed]] teaches history
at the University of Minnesota. The essay is part of an irregular
series reflecting on contemporary forms of violence and resistance to
these forms, with a focus especially on psychic and epistemic
violence._

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Founding Editors of _The Wire_

* zionism
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* Anti-Zionism
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* anti-Semitism
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