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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ISRAEL’S DESCENT  
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Adam Shatz
June 20, 2024
London Review of Books
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_ Exterminationist violence is almost always preceded by other forms
of persecution, which aim to render the victims as miserable as
possible, including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoization,
ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanization. _

If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace join together in demonstration,
calling for ceasefire and an end to US support for occupation and
apartheid in Washington, DC, October 16, 2023., (Photo credit: If Not
Now)

 

When Ariel Sharon​ withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers
from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate
Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population
immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another
purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will,
something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The
Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky.
They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and
not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but
the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass
bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of
Gaza every few years.

BOOKS REVIEWED:

The State of Israel v. the Jews
by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor.
Other Press
[[link removed]],
352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5
 

Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme
by Shlomo Sand.
Seuil
[[link removed]],
256 pp., £20, January, 978 2 02 154166 3
 

Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78
by Geoffrey Levin.
Yale
[[link removed]],
304 pp., £25, February, 978 0 300 26785 3
 

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the
Future of Jewish Life
by Joshua Leifer.
Dutton
[[link removed]],
398 pp., £28.99, August, 978 0 593 18718 0
 

The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance
by Shaul Magid.
Ayin [[link removed]], 309 pp.,
£16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3
 

Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.
OR Books [[link removed]], 336 pp., £17.99,
April, 978 1 68219 619 9

.

The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective
punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has
launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and
cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing
thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and
hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7
October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is
different in kind, not merely in degree. Over the last eight months,
Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians. An untold number
remain under the debris and still more will die of hunger and disease.
Eighty thousand Palestinians have been injured, many of them
permanently maimed. Children whose parents – whose entire families
– have been killed constitute a new population sub-group. Israel has
destroyed Gaza’s housing infrastructure, its hospitals and all its
universities. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been
displaced, some of them repeatedly; many have fled to ‘safe’ areas
only to be bombed there. No one has been spared: aid workers,
journalists and medics have been killed in record numbers. And as
levels of starvation have risen, Israel has created one obstacle after
another to the provision of food, all while insisting that its army is
the ‘most moral’ in the world. The images from Gaza – widely
available on TikTok, which Israel’s supporters in the US have
tried to ban, and on Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem office was shut down
by the Israeli government – tell a different story, one of famished
Palestinians killed outside aid trucks on Al-Rashid Street in
February; of tent-dwellers in Rafah burned alive in Israeli air
strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This
is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of
Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.

The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the
meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and
even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after
one of them has slaughtered the other in such staggering numbers. The
scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology:
‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock;
‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system,
including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed);
‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural
landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the
daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of
‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its
constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of
Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since
1967.

But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an
older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term
is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts
there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or
at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of
international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of
circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is
involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch.

The charge of genocide isn’t new among Palestinians. I remember
hearing it when I was in Beirut in 2002, during Israel’s assault on
the Jenin refugee camp, and thinking, no, it’s a ruthless, pitiless
siege. The use of the word ‘genocide’ struck me then as typical of
the rhetorical inflation of Middle East political debate, and as a
symptom of the bitter, ugly competition over victimhood in
Israel-Palestine. The game had been rigged against Palestinians
because of their oppressors’ history: the destruction of European
Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of
the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a
bid to even the score, something that words such as ‘occupation’
and even ‘apartheid’ could never do.

This time it’s different, however, not only because of the wanton
killing of thousands of women and children, but because the sheer
scale of the devastation has rendered life itself all but impossible
for those who have survived Israel’s bombardment. The war was
provoked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack, but the desire to inflict
suffering on Gaza, not just on Hamas, didn’t arise on 7 October.
Here is Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad in 2012: ‘We need to flatten
entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans
didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering
fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity
in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.’ Today this reads
like a prophecy.

Exterminationist violence is almost always preceded by other forms of
persecution, which aim to render the victims as miserable as possible,
including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic
cleansing and racist dehumanisation. All of these have been features
of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people since its
founding. What causes persecution to slide into mass killing is
usually war, in particular a war defined as an existential battle for
survival – as we have seen in the war on Gaza. The statements of
Israel’s leaders (the defence minister, Yoav Gallant: ‘We are
fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly’; President
Isaac Herzog: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is
responsible’) have not disguised their intentions but provided a
precise guide. So have the gleeful selfies taken by Israeli soldiers
amid the ruins of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been a
source of pleasure.

Israel’s methods may bear a closer resemblance to those of the
French in Algeria, or the Assad regime in Syria, than to those of the
Nazis in Treblinka or the Hutu _génocidaires_ in Rwanda, but this
doesn’t mean they do not constitute genocide. Nor does the fact that
Israel has killed ‘only’ a portion of Gaza’s population. What,
after all, is left for those who survive? Bare life, as Giorgio
Agamben calls it: an existence menaced by hunger, destitution and the
ever present threat of the next airstrike (or ‘tragic accident’,
as Netanyahu described the incineration of 45 civilians in Rafah).
Israel’s supporters might argue that this is not the Shoah, but the
belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in
Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that
Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions
of our time.

In Israel, this belief amounts to an article of faith. Netanyahu may
be despised by half the population but his war on Gaza is not, and
according to recent polls, a substantial majority of Israelis think
either that his response has been appropriate or that it hasn’t gone
far enough. Unable or unwilling to look beyond the atrocities of 7
October, most of Israel’s Jews regard themselves as fully justified
in waging war until Hamas is destroyed, even – or especially – if
this means the total destruction of Gaza. They reject the idea that
Israel’s own conduct – its suffocation of Gaza, its colonisation
of the West Bank, its use of apartheid, its provocations at Al-Aqsa
Mosque, its continuing denial of Palestinian self-determination –
might have led to the furies of 7 October. Instead, they insist that
they are once again the victims of antisemitism, of ‘Amalek’, the
enemy nation of the Israelites. That Israelis cannot see, or refuse to
see, their own responsibility in the making of 7 October is a
testament to their ancestral fears and terrors, which have been
rekindled by the massacres. But it also reveals the extent to which
Israeli Jews inhabit what Jean Daniel called ‘the Jewish prison’.

Zionism’s original ambition was to transform Jews into historical
actors: sovereign, legitimate, endowed with a sense of power and
agency. But the tendency of Israeli Jews to see themselves as eternal
victims, among other habits of the diaspora, has proved stronger than
Zionism itself, and Israel’s leaders have found a powerful
ideological armour, and source of cohesion, in this reflex. It is
hardly surprising that Israelis have interpreted 7 October as a sequel
to the Holocaust, or that their leaders have encouraged this
interpretation: both adhere to a theological reading of history based
on mythic repetition, in which any violence against Jews, regardless
of the context, is understood within a continuum of persecution; they
are incapable of distinguishing between violence against Jews as Jews,
and violence against Jews in connection with the practices of the
Jewish state. (Ironically, this vision of history renders the
industrialised killing of the Shoah less exceptional, since it appears
simply to be a big pogrom.) What this means, in practice, is that
anyone who faults Israel for its policies before 7 October, or for its
slaughter in Gaza, can be dismissed as an antisemite, a friend of
Hamas, Iran and Hizbullah, of Amalek.

It also means that almost anything is justified on the battlefield,
where a growing number of soldiers in combat units are extremist
settlers. It is not uncommon to hear Israeli Jews defending the
killing of children, since they would grow up to be terrorists (an
argument no different from the claim by some Palestinians that to kill
an Israeli Jewish child is to kill a future IDF soldier). The
question is how many Palestinian children must die before Israelis
feel safe – or whether Israeli Jews regard the removal of the
Palestinian population as a necessary condition of their security.

The Zionist idea of ‘transfer’ – the expulsion of the Arab
population – is older than Israel itself. It was embraced both by
Ben-Gurion and by his rival Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionist
Zionist who was a mentor to Netanyahu’s father, and it fed directly
into the expulsions of the 1948 war. But until the 1980s, and the rise
of the New Historians, Israel strenuously denied that it had committed
ethnic cleansing, claiming that Palestinians had left or ‘fled’
because the invading Arab armies had encouraged them to do so; when
the expulsion of the Palestinians and the destruction of their
villages were evoked, as in S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella _Khirbet
Khizeh_ and A.B. Yehoshua’s 1963 story ‘Facing the Forests’,
it was with anguish and guilt-laden rationalisation. But, as the
French journalist Sylvain Cypel points out in _The State of Israel v.
the Jews_, the ‘secret shame underlying the denial’ has
evaporated. Today the catastrophe of 1948 is brazenly defended in
Israel as a necessity – and viewed as an uncompleted, even heroic,
project. Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance, and Itamar
Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, are both unabashed
advocates of transfer. What we are witnessing in Gaza is something
more than the most murderous chapter in the history of
Israel-Palestine: it is the culmination of the 1948 Nakba and the
transformation of Israel, a state that once provided a sanctuary for
survivors of the death camps, into a nation guilty of genocide.

‘There are decades​ where nothing happens,’ Lenin wrote, ‘and
there are weeks where decades happen.’ The last eight months have
seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel’s long war against the
Palestinians. Could the history of Zionism have turned out otherwise?
Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination, driven in
large part by his appetite for power and his desire to avoid
conviction for fraud and bribery (his trial has been running
intermittently since early 2020). But he is also Israel’s
longest-serving prime minister, and his expansionist, racist ideology
is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish
privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary
nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively
to its Jewish citizens. Or in the words of the nation-state law of
2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: ‘The right to exercise
national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the
Jewish people.’ It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters
proclaim: ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.’
What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is,
for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the
entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.

It isn’t surprising that on the student left the word ‘Zionist’
has become an epithet for those who oppose equal rights and freedom
for Palestinians, or who, even if they claim to endorse the idea of a
Palestinian state, persist in thinking that the desires of Israeli
Jews, by virtue of their ancestors’ persecution in Europe, outweigh
those of Palestine’s indigenous Arabs. But, as Shlomo Sand reminds
us in _Deux peuples pour un état?_, there was another, dissident
Zionism, a ‘cultural Zionism’ that advocated the creation of a
binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted
among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah
Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the
Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there
is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it
for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein
and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in
1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any
attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn
Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent
warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit
Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist
movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for
dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country.
We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set
ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into
conflict.’

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the
Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of ‘muscular Zionism’, as
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in
Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the ‘negation of
exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as
citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of
Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and
co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most
Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on
sacred Jewish land. And, as Ben-Gurion put it, ‘we don’t want
Israelis to be Arabs. It’s our duty to fight against the Levantine
mentality that destroys individuals and societies.’ In 1933, Brit
Shalom folded; a year later, Kohn left Palestine in despair, convinced
that the Zionist movement was on a collision course with the
Palestinians and the region.

Ben-Gurion’s movement was also on a collision course with those who,
like Kohn and Arendt, sympathised with the idea of a Jewish cultural
sanctuary in Palestine, but rejected the maximalist, exclusionary,
territorial vision of the state associated with Israel’s creation in
1948. Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural
Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor
Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors.
In _Our Palestine Question_, Geoffrey Levin shows how American Jewish
critics of Israel were dislodged from Jewish institutions in the
decades following the state’s formation. After the 1948 war, the
American Jewish press featured extensive, and largely sympathetic,
coverage of the plight of Palestinian refugees: Israel had not yet
declared that it would not readmit a single refugee. ‘The question
of the Arab refugees is a moral issue which rises above diplomacy,’
William Zukerman, the editor of the _Jewish Newsletter_, wrote in
1950. ‘The land now called Israel belongs to the Arab Refugees no
less than to any Israeli. They have lived on that soil and worked on
it ... for twelve hundred years ... The fact that they fled in
panic is no excuse for depriving them of their homes.’ Under Israeli
pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the
London-based _Jewish Chronicle_. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul
general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.

Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris
Lazaron recited a prayer of atonement in the Shatila refugee camp in
Beirut, declaring ‘we have sinned’ and calling for the immediate
repatriation of a hundred thousand refugees: as members of the
‘tribe of the wandering feet’, he said, Jews should stand with
Palestine’s refugees. The leading expert in the US on the
Palestinian refugees, Don Peretz, was employed by the American Jewish
Committee (AJC). After the 1948 war, he worked with a Quaker group
that distributed food and clothing to displaced Palestinians living
under Israel’s military government. Horrified to discover ‘an
attitude towards the Arabs which resembles that of American
racists’, Peretz wrote a pamphlet on the refugees for the AJC.
Israeli officials responded by trying to have him fired; Esther
Herlitz, Israel’s consul in New York, recommended that the embassy
‘consider digging him a grave’ at the Jewish college in
Pennsylvania where he taught. Peretz was not a radical: he simply
wanted to create what he called ‘a platform from which to voice not
only eulogies of Israel, but a critical concern about many of the
problems with which the new state has become involved’, above all
the ‘Arab refugee problem, the condition of Israel’s Arab
minority’. Instead, he encountered an ‘emotional environment’
that made it ‘as difficult to create an atmosphere for free
discussion as it is in the South today to discuss interracial
relations’.

Among the most illuminating episodes recounted in Levin’s book is
the campaign to smear the reputation of Fayez Sayegh, the leading
Palestinian spokesman in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s. A
native of Tiberias, ‘Sayegh understood acutely that any Arab
flirtation with antisemites tarnished their cause,’ Levin writes,
and so steered clear of neo-Nazis and other anti-Jewish activists who
turned up at his door. He joined forces with an anti-Zionist rabbi,
Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, who had already
established himself as a critic of Zionism in his 1951 book, _A
Partisan History of Judaism_, in which he assailed the movement for
embracing ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism’ and betraying
Judaism’s universalist message. Described by a pro-Israel activist
as ‘one of the most competent polemicists that American Jewry has
ever had to counteract’, Sayegh was considered especially dangerous
because he could not easily be painted as an antisemite. In their
efforts to combat this Arab ally of a prominent, if controversial,
rabbi who never succumbed to antisemitic rhetoric, Zionist activists
were forced to invent a novel charge: that anti-Zionism was itself a
form of antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League developed this
argument into a book in 1974, but, as Levin shows, it was already in
circulation twenty years earlier.

Sayegh eventually moved to Beirut, where he joined the PLO. And in
the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, the American Jewish community
underwent what Norman Podhoretz called a ‘complete Zionisation’.
As Joshua Leifer argues in his new book, _Tablets Shattered_, the
Jewish establishment became increasingly ‘particularist, their
rhetoric blunter in its defence of Jewish self-interest’. That
establishment continues to exert influence in American institutions of
power and higher learning: the downfall of Claudine Gay, the Harvard
president, engineered by the Zionist billionaire Bill Ackman, is just
one illustration. As Leifer writes, the uncritical embrace of Zionism
has ‘engendered a moral myopia’ with respect to Israel’s
oppression of Palestinians. The far left’s denial that Hamas
committed any atrocities on 7 October is mirrored by the genocide
denialism of American Jews who claim there is plenty of food in Gaza
and that Palestinian starvation is simply a form of theatre.

This moral myopia has always been resisted by a minority of American
Jews. There have been successive waves of resistance, provoked by
previous episodes of Israeli brutality: the Lebanon War, the First
Intifada, the Second Intifada. But the most consequential wave of
resistance may be the one we are seeing now from a generation of young
Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly
racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to
stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment
asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s
door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their
Zionism instead.’

The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In
1967, I.F. Stone wrote:

Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In
the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of
secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds
itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be
legalised, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in
which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews must fight elsewhere
for their very security and existence – against principles and
practices they find themselves defending in Israel.

Among many young American Jewish liberals, this contradiction has
proved intolerable: Jewish students have made up an unusually high
number of the protesters on campus.

They have also tried to develop what Leifer calls ‘new expressions
of Jewish identity and community ... untethered to Israeli
militarism’. Some, like Leifer, express an affinity for traditional,
even Orthodox Judaism, because of its distance from the anything-goes
liberalism of American Judaism, even as they deplore Israel’s human
rights abuses. The most radical among them have espoused a ‘soft
diaspora nationalism’, disavowing any ties to Israel, proclaiming
their support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and
embracing the symbols of the Palestinian struggle. Leifer is troubled
by the failure of some Jews to criticise the 7 October attacks. He
accuses them of ‘callousness towards the lives of other Jews, whose
ancestors happened to flee to the embattled, fledgling Jewish state,
instead of the United States’.

The cool response to the events of 7 October that critics such as
Leifer find so disturbing, particularly when expressed by left-wing
Jews, may not reflect callousness so much as a conscious act of
disaffiliation, bred by shame and a sense of unwanted complicity with
a state that insists on loyalty from Jews throughout the world – as
well as a repudiation of the Zionist movement’s claim that Jews
comprise a single, united people with a shared destiny. Leifer’s
book is a critique of the Jewish prison, written from within its
walls: ‘renunciation’ of Israel, he insists, is impossible because
it will soon contain the majority of the world’s Jews, ‘a
revolution in the basic conditions of Jewish existence’. Those who
prioritise their membership of a larger secular community seek to
liberate themselves from the prison altogether, even at the risk of
being excommunicated as ‘un-Jews’. For these writers and
activists, many of them gathered around the revived journal _Jewish
Currents_ and the activist organisation Jewish Voice for Peace,
fidelity with the principles of ethical Judaism requires them to adopt
what Krakotzkin calls ‘the perspective of the expelled’ – who,
since 1948, have been Palestinian, not Jewish.

‘We have​ no known Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubinstein
to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements,’ Edward Said
wrote of the Palestinians in 1986. ‘We have had no Holocaust to
protect us with the world’s compassion. We are “other”, and
opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement and exodus.’
Palestinians are still ‘others’ in the moral calculus of
the US and Western powers, without whose support Israel could not
have carried out its assault on Gaza. But they can now invoke a
genocide of their own, and though it may not yet offer them
protection, it has done much to diminish Israel’s already eroded
moral capital. Palestinian claims to the land and to justice, already
embedded in the conscience of the Global South, have made
extraordinary inroads into that of the liberal West, as well as that
of American Jewry, in no small part thanks to Said and other
Palestinian writers and activists. The birth of a global movement in
opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza, and in defence of Palestinian
rights, is, if nothing else, a sign that Israel has lost the moral war
among people of conscience. While the Palestinian cause is wedded to
international justice, to solidarity among oppressed peoples, and to
the preservation of a rules-based order, Israel’s appeal is largely
confined to religious Jews, the far right, white nationalists and
Democratic politicians of an older generation such as Joe Biden, who
warned of a ‘ferocious surge’ in antisemitism in America following
the protests, and Nancy Pelosi, who claimed to detect a ‘Russian
tinge’ to them. When the Proud Boys’ founder, Gavin McInnes, and
the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, descended on Columbia’s New York
campus to defend Jewish students from ‘antisemitic’ protesters
(among them Jews holding liberation seders), they looked as though
they’d convened a 6 January reunion. For all their claims to
isolation in a sea of sympathy for Palestine, Jewish supporters of
Israel, like the state itself, have powerful allies in Washington, in
the administration and on university boards.

The excessive, militarised reactions to the encampments at
Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, along with the furious responses of
the British, German and French governments to demonstrations in
London, Paris and Berlin, are a measure of the movement’s growing
influence. As Régis Debray put it, ‘the revolution revolutionises
the counterrevolution.’ A worrying development for anyone who cares
about free speech and freedom of assembly, the clearing of the
solidarity encampments by the police was a reminder that the rhetoric
of ‘safe spaces’ can easily lend itself to right-wing capture. The
antisemitism bill recently passed in the House of Representatives
threatens to stifle pro-Palestinian speech on American campuses, since
university administrations could become liable for failing to enforce
the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of
antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Like the
anti-BDS measures adopted by more than thirty states, the
Antisemitism Awareness Act is an expression of what Susan Neiman,
writing about Germany’s suppression of support for Palestinian
rights, has called ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’, and will almost
certainly lead to more antisemitism, since it treats Jewish students
as a privileged minority whose feelings of safety require special
legal protection. It only adds to the unreal quality of the debate in
the US that the threat of antisemitism is being weaponised by
right-wing Evangelicals who have otherwise made common cause with
white nationalists and actual antisemites, while liberal Democratic
politicians acquiesce.

After a New York City police officer took down a Palestinian flag at
City College and replaced it with an American flag, Mayor Eric Adams
said: ‘Blame me for being proud to be an American ... We’re not
surrendering our way of life to anyone.’ This was, of course, a
ludicrous expression of xenophobia – and it’s hard to imagine
Adams, or any American politician, making such a remark about those
who wave the Ukrainian flag. (The NYPD filmed the clearing of the
Columbia campus for a promotional video, as if it were an
anti-terrorism raid.) But it’s indicative of the casual racism,
often laced with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice, that has long
been directed against Palestinians. Said was called the ‘professor
of terror’, Columbia’s Middle East Studies Department ‘Birzeit
on the Hudson’. Bari Weiss, the former _New York Times_ columnist
who sees herself as a ‘free speech warrior’, cut her teeth as an
undergraduate at Columbia trying to have members of the Middle East
faculty fired. The campaign against Palestinian scholars, which helped
lay the intellectual groundwork for the attack on the encampments, is
instructive. Arafat was wrong when he said the Palestinians’
greatest weapon is the womb of the Palestinian woman: it is the
knowledge and documentation of what Israel has done, and is doing, to
the Palestinian people. Hence Israel’s looting of the Palestine
Research Centre during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the attacks on
professors who might shed light on a history some would prefer to
suppress.

Has some of the rhetoric on US campuses slid into antisemitism? Have
some Jewish supporters of Israel been bullied, physically or verbally?
Yes, though the extent of anti-Jewish harassment remains unknown and
contested. There is also the question, as Shaul Magid writes in _The
Necessity of Exile_, of whether ‘the single umbrella of
antisemitism’ best describes all these incidents. ‘What is
antisemitism if it is no longer accompanied by oppression?’ Magid
asks. ‘What constitutes antisemitism when Jews are in fact the
oppressors?’

Amid all the attention on heightened Jewish vulnerability, there has
been little discussion of the vulnerability of Palestinian, Arab and
Muslim students, much less an academic commission or political bill to
address it. Unlike Jews, they have to prove their right simply to be
on campus. Palestinians – particularly if they take part in protests
– risk being seen as ‘trespassers’, infiltrators from a foreign
land. Last November, three Palestinian students visiting relatives in
Vermont were shot by a racist fanatic; one of them will be paralysed
for life. Biden did not respond to this or other attacks on Muslims by
saying that ‘silence is complicity,’ as he did about antisemitism.

It was, in fact, the refusal of silence, the refusal of complicity,
that led students of every background into the streets in protest, at
far greater risk to their futures than during the 2020 protests
against police killings. Opposition to anti-black racism is embraced
by elite liberals; opposition to Israel’s wars against Palestine is
not. They braved doxxing, the contempt of their university
administrations, police violence and in some cases expulsion.
Prominent law firms have announced that they will not hire students
who took part in the encampments.

The political establishment and the mainstream press were largely
disdainful. Liberal commentators belittled the students as
‘privileged’, although many of them, particularly at state
colleges, came from poor and working-class backgrounds; the protests,
some claimed, were ultimately about America, not about the Middle
East. (They were about both.) The protesters were also accused of
making Jews feel unsafe with their ritualised denunciations of
Zionism, of grandstanding, of engaging in a fantasy of 1968-style
rebellion, of ignoring Hamas’s cruelties or even justifying them, of
romanticising armed struggle in their calls to ‘globalise the
intifada,’ of being possessed by a Manichean fervour that blinded
them to the complexities of a war that involved multiple parties, not
just Israel and Gaza.

There is, of course, a grain of truth to these criticisms. Like
‘defund the police,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ is appealing
in its absolutism, but also dangerously ambiguous, fuel for right-wing
adversaries looking for evidence of calls for ‘genocide’ against
Jews. And there was, as there always is, a theatrical dimension to the
protests, with some students imagining themselves to be part of the
same drama unfolding in Gaza, confusing the rough clearing of an
encampment (‘liberated zones’) with the violent destruction of a
refugee camp. But the attacks on the demonstrators – whether for
‘privilege’, supposed hostility to Jews or fanaticism –
weren’t a fair portrayal of a broad-based movement that includes
Palestinians and Jews, African Americans and Latinos, Christians and
atheists.

For all their missteps, the students drew attention to matters that
seemed to elude their detractors: the obscenity of Israel’s war on
Gaza; the complicity of their government in arming Israel and
facilitating the slaughter; the hypocrisy of America’s claim to
defend human rights and a rules-based international order while giving
Israel carte blanche; and the urgent need for a ceasefire. Nor were
they cowed by Netanyahu’s grotesque comparison of the protests to
anti-Jewish mobilisations in German universities in the 1930s (where
no one was holding seders). If Trump wins they will be blamed, along
with Arab and Muslim voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for a
president who armed Bibi, but they deserve credit for mobilising
support for a ceasefire and for helping to shift the narrative on
Palestine.

The destruction of Gaza will be as formative for them as the struggles
against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and the Iraq War
were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a
genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the
six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car
pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives.
When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the
same feeling of solidarity that led students in 1968 to chant ‘Nous
sommes tous des juifs allemands’ after the German-Jewish student
leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France. These are emotions
of which no group of victims can forever remain the privileged
beneficiary, not even the descendants of the European Jews who
perished in the death camps.

As the historian​ Enzo Traverso has argued, a particular version of
Holocaust remembrance, centred on Jewish suffering and the
‘miraculous’ founding of Israel, has been a ‘civil religion’
in the West since the 1970s. People in the Global South have never
been parishioners of this church, not least because it has been linked
to a reflexive defence of the state of Israel, described in Germany as
a Staatsräson. For many Jews, steeped in Zionism’s narrative of
Jewish persecution and Israeli redemption, and encouraged to think
that 1939 might be just around the corner, the fact that Palestinians,
not Israelis, are seen by most people as Jews themselves once were –
as victims of oppression and persecution, as stateless refugees – no
doubt comes as a shock. Their reaction, naturally, is to steer the
conversation back to the Holocaust, or to the events of 7 October.
These anxieties shouldn’t be dismissed. But, as James Baldwin wrote
in the late 1960s, ‘one does not wish ... to be told by an
American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s
suffering. It isn’t, and one knows it isn’t from the very tone in
which he assures you that it is.’

The question is how, if at all, these movements can help to end the
war in Gaza, to end the occupation and the repressive matrix of
control that affects all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens
of Israel, who make up a fifth of the population. While the justice of
the Palestinian cause has never enjoyed wider or more universal
recognition, and the BDS movement (vilified as ‘antisemitic’ and
‘terrorist’ by Israel’s defenders) has never attracted
comparable support, the Palestinian national movement itself is in
almost complete disarray. The Palestinian Authority is an authority
only in name, a virtual gendarme of Israel, reviled and mocked by
those who live under it. It has been unable to protect Palestinians in
the West Bank from the wave of settler attacks and military violence
that has killed five hundred Palestinians in the last eight months and
resulted in the theft of more than 37,000 acres of land, a creeping
Gaza-fication. Palestinians inside Israel are under intense
surveillance, ever at risk of being accused of treason, and left to
the mercy of the criminal gangs that increasingly tyrannise Arab
towns.

The future of Gaza looks still more bleak, even in the event of a
long-term truce or ceasefire. ‘Gaza 2035’, a proposal circulated
by Netanyahu’s office, envisages it as a Gulf-style free-trade zone.
Jared Kushner has his eye on beachfront developments and the Israeli
right is determined to re-establish settlements. As for the survivors
of Israel’s assault, the political scientist Nathan Brown predicts
that they will be living in a ‘supercamp’, where, as he writes
in _Deluge_, a collection of essays on the current war, ‘law and
order ... will likely be handled – if they are handled at all –
by camp committees and self-appointed gangs.’ He adds: ‘This seems
less like the day after a conflict than a long twilight of
disintegration and despair.’

Disintegration and despair are, of course, the conditions that
encourage the ‘terrorism’ that Israel claims to be fighting. And
it would be easy for Gaza’s survivors to succumb to this temptation,
particularly since they have been given no hope for a better life,
much less a state, only lectures on the reason they ought to turn the
Strip into the next Dubai rather than build tunnels.

Over the last eight months, Palestine has become to the American
and UK student left what Ukraine is to liberals: the symbol of a
pure struggle against aggression. But just as Zelensky’s admirers
ignore the illiberal elements in the national movement, so
Palestine’s supporters tend to overlook the brutality of Hamas, not
only against Israeli Jews but against its Palestinian critics. As
Isaac Deutscher wrote, while ‘the nationalism of the exploited and
oppressed’ cannot be ‘put on the same moral-political level as the
nationalism of conquerors and oppressors’, it ‘should not be
viewed uncritically’.

In _The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine_ (2020), Rashid Khalidi
writes that when the Pakistani activist Eqbal Ahmad visited
the PLO’s bases in southern Lebanon, ‘he returned with a critique
that disconcerted those who had asked his advice. While in principle a
supporter of armed struggle against colonial regimes such as that in
Algeria ... he questioned whether armed struggle was the right
course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel.’
As Ahmad saw it, ‘the use of force only strengthened a pre-existing
and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified
Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism
and bolstered the support of external actors.’ Ahmad did not deny
the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance, but he
believed it should be practised intelligently – to create divisions
among the Israeli Jews with whom a settlement, a liberating new
dispensation based on coexistence, mutual recognition and justice,
would ultimately have to be reached.

Today it is difficult to imagine an alliance between Palestinians and
progressive Israeli Jews of the kind that flickered during the First
Intifada. Groups pursuing joint action between Palestinians and
Israelis still exist, but they are fewer than ever and deeply
embattled: advocates for the binationalism sketched out by figures as
various as Judah Magnes and Edward Said, Tony Judt and Azmi Bishara,
have all but vanished. Nonetheless, one wonders what Ahmad would have
made of Hamas’s spectacular raid on 7 October, a daring assault on
Israeli bases that devolved into hideous massacres at a rave and in
kibbutzes. Its short-term impact is undeniable: Operation Al-Aqsa
Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international
agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and
Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and
the myth of Israel’s invincibility. But its architects, Yahya Sinwar
and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza’s own
people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they
recently appeared on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list,
they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence
but possessing little strategic vision. ‘Tomorrow will be
different,’ Deif promised in his 7 October communiqué. He was
correct. But that difference – after the initial exuberance brought
about by the prison breakout – can now be seen in the ruins of Gaza.

Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at
the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever more committed to
its colonisation project and contemptuous of international criticism,
ruling over a people who have been transformed into strangers in their
own land or helpless survivors, awaiting the next delivery of rations.
The self-styled ‘start-up’ nation has leveraged its surveillance
weapons into lucrative deals with Arab dictatorships and offers
counterinsurgency training to visiting police squads, but its
instinctive militarism leaves no room for new initiatives. Israel
cannot imagine a future with its neighbours or its own Palestinian
citizens in which it would no longer rely on force.

The ‘Iron Wall’ is not simply a defence strategy: it is Israel’s
comfort zone. Netanyahu’s brinkmanship with Iran and Hizbullah is
more than a bid to remain in power; it is a classical extension of
Moshe Dayan’s policy of ‘active defence’. The violence will not
cease unless the US cuts off the delivery of arms and forces
Israel’s hand. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon: Netanyahu
is due to address Congress on 24 July, after receiving an unctuous,
bipartisan invitation to share his ‘vision for defending democracy,
combating terror and establishing a just and lasting peace in the
region’. Biden’s call for a ceasefire has been met with another
humiliating rejection by Netanyahu, who knows that the administration
isn’t about to suspend military aid or observe any of its own ‘red
lines’. But the encampment movement, and the growing dissent among
progressive Democratic leaders from Rashida Tlaib to Bernie Sanders,
foreshadows a future in which Washington will no longer provide
weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes. Whether
Palestinians will be able to hold onto their lands until that day, in
the face of the settler zealots and ethnic cleansers who have captured
the Israeli state, remains to be seen.
 

_[ADAM SHATZ is the LRB’s US editor. He is the author
of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which
includes many pieces from the paper, and The Rebel’s Clinic: The
Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. He has written for the LRB on
subjects including the war in Gaza
[[link removed]], Fanon
[[link removed]],
France’s war in Algeria
[[link removed]], mass
incarceration
[[link removed]] in
America and Deleuze and Guattari
[[link removed]]. His LRB podcast
series, Human Conditions, considers revolutionary thought in the
20th century through conversations with Judith Butler, Pankaj
Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards. Sign up here
[[link removed]].]_

* Genocide
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Hamas
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* Hostages
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* West Bank
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* Rafah
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* Occupied Territories
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* ethnic cleansing
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* racist dehumanization
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* Racism
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