I think there's a little bit more to untangle here.
- Absolutely the Israeli government deserves massive criticism for its shortsighted and frankly inhuman handling of the Palestine situation since the Israeli center left collapsed. It's a disgrace, and as an American I am humiliated by how the Israeli government took advantage of our support while totally ignoring our request that they stop fucking around with West Bank settlements and their totally cynical support of Hamas in Gaza. I had fantasies of POTUS pulling Bibi into a room and reminding him of who the superpower is in this relationship. We absolutely should have slapped Bibi around a bit and called his bluff about cozying up to Russia/China, who, by the way, totally betrayed him when shit got real again. Major FAFO for the Israeli right and I hope this crisis results in major changes in Israeli politics
- The broad point about young progressives not being any more antisemitic than other groups in American life is absolutely correct. Beyond that, David Frum has been doing a good job deconstructing the "young people no longer support Israel" polling narrative by showing that more than half of younger Americans are either unaware or disinterested in the Gaza conflict, and those that do care support Israel 2-1 over those who do not.
- I'm going to grab a third rail here so buckle up. Going back to the Iraq War, campus leftists and Arab/Muslim student groups have been very friendly, and that alliance deepened during the Trump years. Also during the Trump years, there emerged a zero criticism mindset among campus leftists towards those from any marginalized groups, and this includes Arab/Muslim communities. Here's the third rail: in addition to legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, there is absolutely toxic real honest to God antisemitism among the more radical members of Arab/Muslim student groups, and because campus leftists forbid themselves from criticizing members of marginalized groups, they have basically stood by or even supported (in a "Go off King" kind of way) the harassment of Jewish students and student groups whenever the Israel situation gets hot. The Gaza crisis is the hottest situation since 2006, and I think it is forcing Jewish students as well as non-Jews who are allies and friends of the Jewish community to reconsider their place in campus leftist activity as well as how more radical Arab/Muslim groups fit in campus leftism more generally. The tension has been there for a while, but the realignment is happening now.
"White is bad; jews are white; jews are bad" is the general campus idiocy. I'm gonna push back on the 'anecdote is not data' — personal experience is personal data.
Good point re campus groups.
The amount of kids on my son's university campus, an extremely liberal north east public school, espousing this - are the majority of the marchers; and they are singling out Jewish kids and organizations with intimidation, and actual at this point, low stakes physical violence. There is very definite and active - not 'anti-semitism' - let's call it what it is - Jew hatred. So far some arrests re what i would characterize as low grade assault. But assault nonetheless [another ‘hit him with his own flagpole; like the guy who died; fortunately, didn’t happen to the students who were likewise clobbered]
I live in a liberal north east town. There is an active self-described communist advocacy group here, whose founder is an heir to a media fortune. They have been marching in our town, and harrassing Jewish owned businesses, by ‘flooding’ them (their description) with marchers, from the local college. As they’re marching they’re also yelling death threats to Jews on the streets. And they're training in MMA and have an active gun range on their ‘compound’ in a nearby town. So…is this just anecdote and not to be concerned about? Let’s ask the Jews on my son’s campus; and ask the people in my town.
Several people I hung out with in high school have become full-fledged tankies. As in the Soviets were the good guys in the Cold War and capitalism is inherently racist, all evils stem from capitalism etc. They are making outright antisemitic arguments on social media. People like that are a small minority on the left but they’re often the noisiest and they show up for everything.
Do people not get how this hatred and violence in places outside of the Middle East really doesn’t help the Palestinians at all? The goal, as I understand it, is to get the Jews to depart and leave “Greater Palestine” to the Arabs. Not my goal, but whatever. But if the Jews think they are going to be just as hated in America or Europe or wherever they won’t be eager to start packing their bags. What’s the point?
Jews in America - and everywhere else - dont have to spend any time wondering if our neighbors would kill us. What we DO with that ‘free time’, well that’s up to us. Me, I am helpful to my neighbors. And I’d never pack my bags and relocate to Israel or anywhere else, even though! i have the financial wherewithal (from running the media) to do so.
Jews were in “Palestine” continuously; so they’re not going anywhere. Even though ‘history’ is debatable and subjective; it’s worth knowing what the parameters of all sides are and were. Not just the Nakba, but the contemporaneous expulsion of Jews from all the other middle east countries; and to be aware of the carving up of the middle east post Ottomans; and post WW1; Sykes Picot, etc etc.
Jews are going to stay in Israel; there’s no bag packing that’s going to happen. And regardless, they’re there; are we going to ask all the immigrants and their descendants in the US to leave, because of xenophobia? Everyone all over is a colonizer and settler. It’s evolutionary, it’s been ‘human development’ since way before there was writing. We’re here; we’re aggravating; get used to it. Figure out the finances more equitably and then all the bullshit diminishes. [As a side note, why did Arafat die so wealthy? why are the leaders of Hamas & the PA likewise so wealthy? (and how about them US Senators and their excellent stock picking?)]
One of the best takes on this whole pile of bullshitery, is Matt’s Slow Boring from mid October, just after the marauding murder rape raid, referencing the Mexican American War. Same thing, only different.
Don’t disagree with anything you say here. My only point was that it is internally inconsistent to want a bunch of people to leave place X but then also make them feel unwelcome everywhere else. Not likely to work.
Isn't the argument about partitioning ALWAYS about the alternative? if you work backwards mentally from "world government" to "sovereign states" because there are groups of people with incompatible politics and just work in that direction forever until you find a somewhat stable equilibrium you probably end up with ethnically partitioned states most of the time. It's not necessarily horrible to not be on the majority side of that, like the Ainu in Japan, but where there's a clear path to having your own geographically contiguous majority it feels like it happens more often than not.
Ultimately the enormous, stable, multiethnic states like the US are both an historical and, to a lesser degree, contemporary oddity. Ethnonational politics remain alive and well almost everywhere, and they're potent politically because a lot of people buy into them. I imagine it's pretty scary to live as an ethnic minority in a lot of places that are still semi-amalgamated - think Kurds in Iraq, for example. Cross-border wars are harder to effectively execute than internal oppression in most cases, and raising the marginal cost of ethnic tensions by establishing separate countries feels like the smart move in many cases - including in some of the ones you list, and especially the Balkans.
In my personal experience; it's not exaggerated. Nor are peoples dislike for any other group other than their own. BUT! because it's an accepted cultural norm to hate/blame/scapegoat jews - a norm which has existed for literally millennia - it's an easy default, it's an easy angerly grumble. Like complaining about the weather, reflexive; and then of course synagogue shootings....well, they got what was coming to them, because. Just because. Just desserts. Etc.
There's no need to exaggerate anything. The very fact that Jews are attacked around the world by Arabs and leftists shows that those pro Hamas (sorry "pro Palestinian") movements are deeply antisemitic, because honestly WTF does attacking a Jewish person living in the UK or the US do for the cause of Palestinian liberation, unless the person who is pro Palestinian agrees with Hamas that it means a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews. Sorry, but these incidents are real, especially on campuses, and this hate shows what this conflict is about.
I have seen things like this happen, although much less extreme/scary. Oddly, not in my own neighborhood, which has a lot of very visibly Jewish people and six synagogues within walking distance, but in more upscale suburban area that has a fair number of Jews, but they are more secular. This suburb is one of the most highly educated in our region, and it is filled with families. There is no college and few young adults living on their own. I feel naive, but I don't understand it at all. Why can't people understand that a mere fact of your identity that you can't help or change has nothing to do with what is happening in Israel?
"Why can't people understand that a mere fact of your identity that you can't help or change..." - well, since we've replaced learning about history and actual events, with identity is everything, and the hierarchy of trauma....everything became identity before all. And since the highest prestige identities are now the ones with the most 'trauma', and also there's a hierarchy of 'righting historic wrongs' and the whole 'antiracist idea that if you are not doing X then you are Y...well then, any connection you can have with the top of the hierarchy makes you look good. Their enemy is your enemy. If their enemy is 'the jews', well then.
Strong agree, especially on the last point. I was an undergraduate back when anything other than strong support for all Israeli policies was labelled as antisemitic by most campus leftists. Even back then, I attended a SJP event where an external Palestinian speaker basically called for the genocide of Israelis. They shut the event down immediately, but the SJP leadership was really flippant about the whole thing and was unwilling to truly criticize the speaker they invited. It was really shocking, especially in contrast to how aggressive SJP members were about messaging normally.
Re: the "zero criticism" mindset, I find it especially jarring to see the double-standard that exists for social conservatism if it's coming from Christians/Jews or Muslims.
A lot of these folks (IMO, rightly!) care a lot about women's rights, gay rights, etc. and also don't want a society where religion is shoved in your face all the time. They actively fight for these things in the U.S., often against very conservative Evangelical Christians. But... if the people responsible are Muslim, they say you're not allowed to criticize because that is by default Islamophobic.
There was a reddit post about this the other with a lot of comments, and the overwhelming answer leftists gave is "it's right and good to be supportive of people who hate you".
I said "that's very Christian of you, but I promise you most people do not actually do this when the rubber hits the road".
Yeah, I think you're right about this, but the important distinction is that leftists in the west are not being actively persecuted by groups they support in the Middle East because they're physically separated and not subject to socially conservative rule emanating from that particular ideology.
If they were actively living in a place where the animating energy behind (as one example) anti-LGBT politics was Islamic and not Christian, they'd have a totally different tune.
Anti Zionist Jews like Matt don't live in Israel, so it's pretty easy to be critical of Israel from afar and dismissive of how genocidal some Palestinians actually are. The irony of the October 7th massacre is that the huge majority of people murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped were on the far left end of Israeli politics - pro peace, pro negotiated solution, working to help Palestinians (such as drive them to hospitals in Israel from the border). I want to see the good progressive folk hold on to their strongly held opinions if their families were massacred.
I think they’d throw LGBTQ people under the bus. White gay men are already getting squeezed out of the coalition because a lot of them are financially successful.
In re Hamtramck, the main explanation I see from progressives on that is to claim the local Muslims have been agitated into anti-LGBTQism by evil Republicans/conservatives/Christians. (See also the standard claim that, if Hispanic voters are trending Republican at all, it's mostly because of "misinformation" on Spanish-language radio.)
Rather like how they claim American Jews are agitated into liberal Zionism by Republican, conservative, Christian Zionists. "Republicans did it" is the standard explanation for any failure of a group in the Democratic tent to agree with the progressive party line.
I mean, certainly a part of why I hate US’ unconditional support of Israel is that the Christianists are trying to make Revelation happen.
Islamists and Christianists and the neo-Nazis and the Jewish fundamentalists and the Hindu nationalists…they’re all the same, they’re all bad, and they should all be locked in the same cage with a tenth of the food and water they need and lots of weapons with it televised. The cable networks could sell it with the sports package, it would beat most sports and most other reality tv
I've long been surprised that my fellow progressive friends are so intolerant of criticism of Islamist extremism. Years ago I posted this brilliant Onion cartoon and article https://www.theonion.com/no-one-murdered-because-of-this-image-1819573893 and several friends said they were offended because they saw it as Islamophobic, which is mystifying to me. There have been Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus who kill people for perceived religious blasphemy -- those religions are not inherently any better than Islam. But today, for whatever reason, the state of Islamic extremism worldwide is such that an image like this could get you killed, if it included a certain person who I'm literally afraid to even name right now. That's not a criticism of Islam at all, and certainly not an indication of irrational phobia. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that if Christian extremists were killing people for running insulting images of Jesus, all of my progressive friends would be outraged about this -- about the killing, that is, not the images.
This actually fits Matt's thesis pretty well, because a lot of those Arab/Muslim student groups simply aren't very liberal, progressive, or left-wing outside issues affecting them specifically. An important step to fight antisemitism in the United States, then, would be to stop treating "conservatives of color" (which would encompass Black Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam as well as CAIR or your average Arab Student Association) as a left-wing vanguard when they actually have thoroughly center-right policy views.
Never said Matt's thesis was wrong! Super agree on there being valid criticism of Israel and that criticism of Israel does not equal antisemitism. I think his third point arguing that young progressives not being any more antisemitic than other groups of Americans is broadly true but not true in specific, high salience ways.
Yeah I agree with you there. The Left constantly tries to "outflank" normie libs in ways that tend to amplify whatever stupid coalitional decisions the normie libs have made. Urban Democrats let the Nation of Islam inside the tent *at all*, and the Left brings the Nation of Islam into leadership of the Women's March. Progressives and Leftists willfully ignore their own amplification of otherwise objectively right-wing views, how this weakens their coalitions, and how it means they end up tailing the most milquetoast of Democrats that they otherwise despise.
The only problem is that "social justice" (as if supporting genocide of Jews is 'justice') leftists are completely in the pocket of pro Hamas propaganda. Something is wrong with the brains of those on the left engaged in "progressive causes" when it's a litmus test to talk about "Palestine" under the guise of any movement - climate change, social justice, prison reform, etc, etc. How has the left been captured to such an extent by a single conflict, if it isn't due to oil-money astroturfed antisemitism? Even if you believe the numbers from the Hamas-run "ministry of health", 11K dead (with magically no Hamas members, sure) compared to the Syrian civil war? Did you see anyone on the climate change left say a single thing about that far more bloody conflict?
Source for that claim about pro-Palestinian student groups? My experience (limited, but at three college campuses) is that they’re left-wing on all the issues you’d expect.
But he didn't say pro-Palestinian student groups. He said Arab and Muslim student groups. Those are typically not explicitly political and consist largely of cross-pressured "conservatives of color", same as a lot of the Black student groups or Orthodox Jewish student groups.
You seem to contradict Matt and be aware of rising antisemitsm, but you seem to find it necessary to say so after such a long anti Israeli apologia (far more viscerally expressed than your abhorrence of antisemitsm in the us) that one doubts how many people would notice it?
Insightful. Nothing has made me more angry than politicians antid the media lumping all 'pro-Palestinian' demos anti-Israel or pro-Hamas even if they were organized an dominated by those who support a two--state solution or Palestinian civil rights. They don't differentiate the make-up of protesters as American-born or International Students. Pro-Palestine is general enough to covers many shades of ideology and politics.
How insightful. This is exactly why I was questioning the media's lumping together every "pro-Palestinian" demo as anti-Israeli or pro-Hamas. There was, and still is, little distinction between those who are for a two-state solution as a solution to the decades of conflict and those who actually support Hamas s traight up. And how does the latter group break down as American-born or International Students on campus? There also seems to be a lot of 'leftists' who equate Ismail Haniyeh with Nelson Mandela or Patricoops,e Lumumba, leaders of national movements who had the active backing of the vast majority of the people who they pain-stakingly organized on the road. They may have attacked enemy installations and troops but resisted Hamas is a terrorist, false revolutionary group that believes individual or a series of terror attacks will somehow trigger a revolution for independence.
Yes, it souinds like your last point is definitely happening at my alma mater and alums of different ethnic and religious backgrounds are very upset about it ("school is too soft on those making antisemitic comments" AND "school always forefronts Jewish interests and ignores the Arabs/Muslims on campus") . So much so that many are saying they are cutting off donations. I do have concerns about academic freedom, but I am also glad I am not in charge because I have no idea how the administration should deal with this.
See, I don't think it's easy at all because some people think showing any support for the Palestinians as antisemitic and others see any pro-Israel message as anti-Arab. And students ages 18-22 aren't always known for their nuanced thinking, so any move the administration has made to calm tensions is being seen as support for one side or another.
It is easy. Don’t celebrate massacre, don’t target you colleagues or classmates based on identity (that’s illegal btw) don’t vandalize places of worship (or any place actually) don’t exercise hecklers veto, don’t be a jerk. Capiche?
P.S.
As a university - condemning an atrocity of epic proportions is a good idea, esp of your previous policy has been to forcefully condemn trivialities, otherwise you silenced is telling. Staying silent on only one kind of hate speech and actions of campus is likewise telling. By contrast if you were wiser and adopted (and adhered to!) the Chicago principles long ago then it’s a different story. Double standards are bad, if your standard is too murky to make a call it’s a bad standard.
Not a bad analysis. I’d say your no. 2 and possibly no. 3 are also antisemites. Willful blindness towards the persecution of one also of group suggests animus towards it.
Most people are just largely apathetic towards most other 'distant' groups, but may support or oppose them based on purely selfish motives.
For instance, I dont think that most Chinese people care much about Jews or Palestinians one way or the other...but based on 'enemy of an enemy is a friend' or 'friend of an enemy is an enemy'...their government seems to be indirectly supporting the Palestinians.
(Caveat that what the CCP does w.r.t. geopolitics doesn't necessarily reflect the populace's views.)
my point however was wilfull blindness to what's happening to jews on campus. If you partner up with and support haters, systemically ignoring their hate and their actions it's far to ask if you share their hate. All the more so if it's hard to fathom why you'd partner up with these people in the first place. There is zero in common ideologically between the far left and islamists, excepting anti americanism and anti semitism. Yes, in theory you can be only anti american, not antisemitic, and in bed with islamists. BUT at some point when you partiicipate in theiir antisemtiic chants, support their antisemitic aactivities, go out of your way to shield them in their hate, spreaad their lies, participate in their gaslighting etc. you basically have turned antisemite in acitons and frankly the most reasonable conclusion is that it's also in intent. however your intent doesn't really matter at this point. If you are fine with enabling and promoting aantisemitism you're part of the problem.
Sure, they were part of the soviet coalition and made some superficial verbal gestures, with zero actual policy or practice to back it up (By contrast to the zionist left, which actually took socialism more seriously than most) - hence why the far left was always pro palestinian and anti israel antisemtiic (British Jeremy Corbyn is a leftover piece of scum from that era). However now they don't even pretend to be left wing, so the support for them is more baffling, esp seeing that it's far more prevalent, in the us, than the support for the "socialist" palestinian terrorist ever was.
P.S.
It is a further irony that the Kibbutzim who were the chief victims of the Hamas attack were real socialists (by contrast to ivy league campus blabbers who have not the slightest sense of what the term means), and did more to advance human rights and justice for Palestinians and Jews alike than all of the so-called "pro Palestinian" westerners put together.
Governemnts can be cynical. At the same time China is now spreaading antisemitism to its populace and abroad. They may be doing it cyncially and not becaause they "really" believe it, but i doubt the authors of the protocls of the elders of zion "Really" believed it. Enough people exposed to it will believe it, and act upon it.
"And as I've pointed out before, young Gentiles outside of cities like LA and New York are pretty unaware of who Jews even are, and if you try to explain to them that they're historically oppressed, you'll be met with confusion because Jews are White in their minds."
This was kinda/sorta me when I was younger. I lived both just outside New York and in California (briefly, in both cases) as a kid, and my family is originally from New England. Obviously, I knew what Judaism was and that there were Jewish people, but I didn't really know any (that I know of). That said, I grew up in neighborhoods that were predominantly black/hispanic, so I had encountered racism IRL and obviously through media, but when I discovered that anti-semitism was a thing it blew my little noggin off. Racism was always bizarre to me, even as a kid, but then once you find out some people are so racist that they start weeding out *other white people* it's a banananpants crazy concept to take in as a 9 or 10 year old.
Hey, I had some college kid out of the blue tell me in line for snacks at the movie theater that "my rabbi probably wouldn't approve of that hot dog". I'm gonna guess it had to do with my nose. And he wasn't my people.
What I'm seeing a lot of is what I've been calling "asemitism": a complete lack of interest in what happens to Israeli Jews, paired with a passionate, impressionistic concern for Palestinian freedom. "Yeah, it'll be tough, but in the end it'll work out somehow. But Palestine must be free, at all costs, whatever those costs happen to be, and I can't be bothered to give the slightest thought to such mysterious matters."
Israeli Jews have plenty of advocates in the halls of Congress. No other group of ~7 million foreigners gets so much tlc from Congress. Not the Uighurs or the Rohingya nor the Kurds nor Turkish Armenians nor any of the other minority groups that are objectively far worse off.
We sent aircraft carriers to the Levant out of concern for Israeli Jews while they were decimating Gaza, and are sending them money even while they are plenty rich enough to retaliate on their own. If Israel were at a actual risk of being driven into the sea, the response would be massive.
Leftists are correct that we should care about Israel much less.
We sent carrier groups because they tend to have a calming influence on other nations. Iran getting active is bad for a lot of people who aren't Israeli Jews.
I don't know if this is actually responsive to what you're saying, but I feel like I'm seeing a common conceptual error here. US aid does not protect Israel from the middle east, hardly so much as it protects the middle east from Israel. It hasn't for decades. The IDF is easily the premiere power in the region, but it's not so powerful as to maintain the existing borders without international intervention. The war Israel would be forced into fighting, a war it would win, if it actually had to maintain a sort of defensible contiguous geography without US guarantied borders would be vast orders of magnitude more horrific than anything that's happened in the region to date. We're basically talking about turning all of Israel/Jordan/Lebanon/Egypt, maybe Iran too, into Aleppo. Cutting Israel lose would be legitimately catastrophic.
I don't think the nearby Arab states have any interest in fighting Israel. They turned their backs on the Palestinians long ago. This could radically change and push Israel to a region-wide war, but things can always change anywhere. I think we're closer to the US invading Mexico than Israel is to invading Jordan.
What exactly keeps Lebanon/Syria from dancing to Iran's tune without a US presence? When Israel starts doing to Hezbollah what it's currently doing to Hamas how long can the others stay in the sidelines?
Not that much. There's some medium/long term downside to just washing our hands and letting things really deteriorate over there, but it's probably not a huge deal for US based individuals. It would really suck a whole hell of a lot for people over there though, and the odds we'd actually sit on the sidelines as things went real bad seem pretty small.
I'm not gonna pretend to be some in the weeds military expert, but it really just comes down to the rules of engagement. Can Israel occupy and police southern Lebanon? No, not really. Can they absolutely flatten anywhere Hezbollah might want to launch attacks into Israel from? Yes, absolutely.
But would such military action make Israel safer as you said in your comment? Hezbollah has 150,000 missiles, so they can do a great deal of flattening themselves. The U.S. is not opposing Israel vigorously striking areas from which they are attacked; the Israelis themselves are cautious about escalation.
Because as opposed to messianic Shi'a kooks we don't think that "all the Jews dying will bring the 12th Mahadi out of occultation". Israelis actually want to live normal lives, not take incoming fire from religious maniacs on the border. But if we think we're facing genocide? Well check out how well those tunnels are working out for Hamas terrorists at the moment. It's amazing how much you're willing to fight when your family is under threat of torture, rape, murder and kidnapping.
It's also pretty funny how scared the "we love death" martyrs of Hezbollah are when they're facing even a partial military deployment from Israel, rather than Israeli civilians they can terrorize.
Compared to the current situation? Obviously not. Compared to the alternatives in a world where the international backers of Palestinian nationalism are not being checked by US commitments? It's probably an inevitability.
I get y'all's point, but I think you are actually wrong about the strategic viability of it. The existing occupations Israel is trying to maintain are already a bit of a disaster, as we are seeing, and attempting to expand that would pretty quickly push the Israelis into a set of lose-lose strategic propositions.
To be clear, I don't think they would lose a war. But at some point an expansion really would force them to choose between trying to maintain an occupation, trying to slow roll an even bigger ethnic cleansing project a la the West Bank (they literally had to redeploy the army to deal with rising violence, which left the Gaza border weaker, so I'm going to say that one isn't going totally great), and just doing a straight up expulsion that would turn them into an at least partial pariah state. And although the third one is the worst, the truth is that any of those three options is going to accelerate the already in-progress depletion of their political capital abroad.
To be clear, I think Israel could survive that, in a the-state-is-viable sense. But I think Israeli voters don't want to be the next Myanmar or whatever, leading at some point to a pretty massive political crisis.
But this is precisely why it wouldn’t happen. Unless there was a massive change in the military capacity of the surrounding nations, Israel could and would carve out those spaces if threatened. No surrounding nation is going to make that threat because they know they would lose, and if they might win, Israel would resort to nuclear weapons. There’s no scenario where Israel isn’t the completely dominant military power for the foreseeable future.
It's mostly domestic politics, yes, undoubtedly. It might have made sense for the American Empire to have a militarily potent client state in that region when Soviet tanks surging south were a possibility, and when oil was the coin of the realm. Those days have long gone. America's policies wrt Israel have a very similar dynamic to our policies regarding Northern Ireland.
In fairness, the US is hardly the only country whose foreign policy is substantially driven by domestic politics. Still, Americans would be better off in 2023 if their government's relationship to Israel resembled its relationship to Madagascar or Uruguay. Cordial relations? Sure. Obsession and three billion a year? Not in the national interest.
No other conflict in the world, including mass murder of muslims, has drawn anyone from the left to protest, let alone assault Jewish students in their 'passion'. 500K dead civilians in the Syrian civil war, or a million Uyghurs in prison camps has a single protest by leftists, especially on campus.
Disregard for implementation challenges or unintended consequences is a common feature of certain people’s political positions. I’d guess many of these people are the ones who think you help Palestinians by putting Trump back in the White House, to teach Democrats a lesson.
So it doesn’t prove any particular anti-Jewish bias.
Are you serious? It might not be proof, but it is certainly very strong evidence of bias when advocates of a policy are obsessed with the welfare of one group and completely unconcerned about likely unintended consequences to another group.
But that is kind of the entire thing of all advocacy groups now. A sneering dismissiveness of anyone objecting to or made worse off by a policy objective is to be expected. If you are BLM, you are dismissive of safety concerns of officers. If you are thin blue line, you are dismissive of the concerns of people subjected to police misconduct. The same is true across the board. It is unfortunately how advocacy is done.
This one-sidedness might be how advocacy is done most of the time, but perhaps we'd arrive at saner solutions if we made good-faith attempts to arrive at solutions at least somewhat acceptable to most people. This kind of good faith thinking is what I love about Slow Boring.
I agree is isn’t helpful, but it does suggest that it’s unwise to impute antisemitism from a failure to recognize Israel’s legitimate safety concerns. It’s much more plausible that young progressives have chosen to advocate for a less powerful, marginalized group and put on blinders to everything else as they are generally prone to doing. None of this is good reasoning or productive, but it isn’t what I think is antisemitism. Certainly there are also antisemitics in the mix, especially among the Palestinians in the student groups, but it isn’t the general motivator among most of the pro-Palestinian protesters.
Completely, *completely* fucking different from what you previously said. Nobody in this comment section is an idiot or a child. Please do not piss on my boots and tell me that it's raining.
Are they spending a lot of time worrying about what happens in the DRC or Somalia? Must be racists. Most people don't pay attention to the nuances of a conflict thousands of miles away and leftists have spent a long time developing the idea that the underdog is always right. They aren't antisemitic because if they got their wish and Palestinians won, and immediately started unleashing genocide against the Jewish population, young leftists would immediately find themselves rooting for Israelis again. Their ideas are stupid, that doesn't make them antisemitic.
I think your second-to-last sentence assumes facts not in evidence. The anti-imperialist left was not particularly sympathetic about genocide against Bosnians or Kosovars, for instance, nor atrocities committed against Syrian civilians by their government.
Yes! I was trying to think what that word should be today, and you nailed it. It’s the willingness to discount Jewish historical attachment to and presence in the Land of Israel, perhaps because to many progressives, they just don’t understand Jewish history, or think that because it started in the Bible that it’s all just a religious fantasy for zealots, or the Jews they see in America pass as White, so they construct a framing that is not at all grounded in the reality of the region itself.
But asemitism is much more accurate way to describe that belief-set than antisemitism
"Let me paraphrase a strawman position of the opposition, without even staking out my own position, and hope nothing is misconstrued and everyone takes me seriously."
I agree with this article in a literal sense, but I think it missed something important. I don’t think the problem is a “mysterious, exogenous” rise in progressive antisemitism. The problem has been a more or less plausibly exogenous rise in mindless progressive *allyship*. And some of progressives’ allies are quite antisemitic.
1. Yes, there may be more people with consciously antisemitic attitudes on the right. But it’s leftists dancing in the street when Jews are massacred. This is because pro-Hamas activists (with the appropriate BIPOC credentials) tell them they should celebrate.
2. This is most obvious when you look at progressives’ attitudes towards Hamas and their slogans. Someone tells them “Hamas is anticolonial and from the river to the sea is about equality” and they just go along with it.
3. This also explains why, as Matt notes, “what Israel does matters.” Under Matt’s theory, it’s mysterious why what Palestinians do seems not to matter at all. The allyship hypothesis explains this: progressives are simply supposed to listen only to Palestinians, and questioning what they say is forbidden.
You can just look at Ezra Klein’s recent interviews. Ezra is obviously not an antisemite. But when a pro-Palestine person makes a claim, he’ll accept it without question. (E.g. he had multiple guests claim “Hamas was never given a chance!”)
Letting people talk is Ezra's whole deal though, he also let an ex-Israeli solider say that Israel's neighbors pose an existential threat to it without bothering to note that they could drop a nuke on Cairo or Tehran at the push of a button.
Israel can't nuke Gaza nor the West Bank, nor south Lebanon. That means that Hamas and Hezbollah remain existential threats. Maybe you didn't notice how 1200 Israeli civilians, tourists, Thai, Nepalese and Palestinian foreign workers were massacred on October 7th in savage ways? Did nukes help much with that?
Irregulars with machine guns are not an *existential* threat to a country with millions of people, a modern military, and a western economy. Israel could kill every man woman and child in a Gaza in a matter of days with drones and artillery, no nukes required. That’s not an existential threat, horrifying though the loss of a thousand plus people was. 50 years ago there was at least an argument that the other states, with their own militaries, in the region were an existential threat, that’s what a nuclear deterrent has taken off the table.
Israel hasn't killed every man, woman and child in Gaza, despite progressive hand wringing and leftists echoing Hamas propaganda. But progressives are in a hurry to safeguard Hamas from being eliminated through 'ceasefire now' calls, and leftists, well they're openly in support of the Hamas goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing of 7 million Israeli Jews.
When people like you are willing to live next to an ISIS controlled ex-territory you'll get to lecture about existential threats. No person is "the country". Real people were murdered, watched their wife, husband, children raped, tortured and murdered, so your argument is absolutely spurious. The 200K internally displaced Israelis lived within single-digit miles from Palestinian and Lebanese Shia death squad members. The massacre on October 7th is quite real, and that is a real existential threat to hundreds of thousands of Israelis on the borders. Had Israel given all of the West Bank to the PA, and like Gaza the PA lost it in a coup to Hamas less than two years later, nearly all of Israel would be within reach of such atrocities.
Of course they haven’t, because killing two million people in retaliation for killing 1,400 would be wildly disproportionate and immoral. The point is that if Israel were actually facing an existential threat--as that word actually is defined, not simply “something bad might happen and .03% of the population might die” or however you’re defining it down--they could eliminate it.
Again, does a family surrounded by sadistic murderers on meth care about the fraction of people from the country they and their entire community are as they and their children are being tortured and murdered? How absurd your entire claims are. You have the biggest single-day massacre of civilians since 9/11 and the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since WW2, and you're whipping out your calculator to assure hundreds of thousands within range of a repeat attack about how their deaths don't matter. That's your excuse for why Israel shouldn't go into Gaza to close contact with Hamas, kill the terrorists who carried out that massacre and blow up their tunnels and rockets?
I sure hope when someone murders you that you're comforted by the low statistical chance of that happening.
Ezra's interview with Amjad Iraqi was an absolute, embarrassing train wreck; best illustrated when Ezra tried to push Amjad on why he's against a two state solution and he said this galaxy-brain nonsense:
"I don’t think the answer to imagining something outside of Zionism, as manifested today, needs to be another kind of nationalism. It could be a state that could be broken down more. What is Jewish existence outside of the state of Israel? Outside in terms of the land, but away from those constructs. And to reorganize ourselves and rethink our identities in different ways. So how do you reflect the people on the ground?"
"How do we envision a more decentralized model of existence? How do we think about regions? How do we think about cities as leading our political and economic ways of life?"
"So I think trying to provide the legitimate spaces for Palestinians to think about that, and to say why Zionism is a problem, and to say that we can imagine something outside of nationalism and statehood, I think is much more realistic to who we are, much more realistic to the future that we want and to create something much better."
I think sometimes hearing people say such ridiculous things without pushback is good, because then we can dismiss it as nonsense. This man was given a chance to make his case as vigorously as he could, and he made excuses for Hamas and vaguely argued for a world without borders.
I found the interview with the pollster much more frustrating because that involved actual data being misrepresented, not just some dude popping off.
I found that interview very useful, because it reinforced for me how impossible it is to find any common ground between some-not-all Palestinians and anyone supporting a two-state solution.
And well ... maybe that was the point Ezra is trying to make. Maybe Ezra didn't challenge because he felt the statements themselves were so damning. IDK. I need to think about this. Regardless this is the risk when you leave too much of the interpretation up to the reader / listener.
As a diaspora Jew who is generally sympathetic to plight of Palestinians I found his answers about a solution and Jewish security to be wholly unsatisfying. You aren't going to win the hearts and minds of people if you can't articulate a solution that doesn't sound like it came from Balaji Srinivasan talking about the utopia of network states.
Sure you are. Look at the rise in pro Palestinian sentiment. It’s not about rational discourse. It’s about control of communications (social media algorithms) and coercion and intimidation to shut out all debate (hecklers veto on campuses). You’ve taken over an entire generation in the us in this manner.
From the perspective of someone hopelessly unqualified--yet not unhopeful--I long to hear something new said about the situation. Or at least new to me. This got my attention.
Of course you can’t pin anything real to such musing, or even define it--thus rendering it as anodyne as it is ethereal. Maybe what he’s saying is just complete BS. but it occurs to me that one way through this involves utter destruction; another way might combine new perspectives with the kind of inexorable pressure you use to get through, say, sturdy lumber.
I’ll agree with you that at least during the first interview in EK’s latest series lacked a certain (insert French phrase); basically, a number of missed opportunities to challenge. But though it may well be, this is not necessarily a reflection of poor journalistic instinct, or the weight of institutional pressures. To wit, his pre-interview intros have been heavy on the disclaimer that “I don’t agree with everything they’re saying, but I want you to hear these perspectives.” This stayed (somewhat) consistent with the aforementioned Israeli guest.
It’s a tough balance, allowing your guest to voice their stance versus pushing back, without devolving into zero-sum argument. After all, there’s plenty of that in other outlets. If you want your guests to answer the questions, you have to give them questions they feel they can answer. For what it’s worth, I suggest trying out Mike Pesca’s podcast. I think he finds that balance better than most.
Those of us with the privilege of relative detachment from the horror going on right now I guess have a choice: when our favorite pundits fail to push back on behalf of our understandings or sentiments, we can pick up that brick and throw it at the TV* or take a breath and absorb the words for a bit.
*Neither EK (or Matt, for that matter) is often on TV, to my knowledge. But I listen to podcasts via earbuds. So executing that brick maneuver would, in my case, cause some serious head trauma.
Yeah, one of my extremely pro-Palestinian friends listened to the last interview with the Palestinian who lives in Israel proper, and that made him more sympathetic to Israel than anything I’ve said. He was really disturbed to hear the guy shrug off Hamas. I wasn’t disturbed because I’ve heard much worse.
Not sure who was the interviewed, but by and large Palestinians in Israel proper, who are also Israeli citizens, are very hostile to Hamas, and their feeling of “Israeliness” rose dramatically in the aftermath of the attacks[1]. It’s worth noting that the terrorists killed and kidnapped some of them too (Hamas spared none who were in their path!). In fact I have heard an account (cannot confirm for certain)- warning description of murder ahead- that a hijab clad Muslim Palestinian (Israeli) woman begged for her life in Arabic to no avail- she was shot by a Hamas terrorist at close quarters. Israeli Arabs are very aware of all of this. They are in a uniquely complicated position being both Israeli annd Palestinian at the same time (and often targeted by extremists on both sides) and tend to hold more nuanced views as a result.
One thing I’m wondering given the West Bank settler violence is if there’s been violence between Jewish and Arab Israelis. If not, this should be highlighted as a disparate population that’s been able to hold together.
Almost nothing so far, by stark contrast to the major riots in 2021. Reportedly local Arab and Jewish community leaders are working very hard to prevent that from happening again. At the same time the Hamas Iran etc would love more than anything to foster such internal violence within Israel proper and work hard to try to encourage this by any means available to them. Extremist right wing Jews (including within the Israeli government) unfortunately share this nihilistic worldview.
This sounds like what people say in defense of Joe Rogan interviews. Not saying it's incorrect, just it seems like both Klein and Rogan are doing the same thing here.
My big problem with Rogan is that he platforms conspiracy theorists, and eggs them on. Nobody is well served by hearing that the moon landing was faked.
I think it’s useful to hear the perspective of an anti-Israel Palestinian who lives in Israel. There’s more than one truth in the world. Even if you think it’s nonsense, it’s good from a Sun-Tsu “know thy enemy” way.
In retrospect, I wish Ezra Klein had pushed harder for clarification on what the guy meant when he launched into his incoherent soliloquy on “different ways of living.” Because whatever he was saying, he was talking around it, and he had been quite direct that he didn’t care about 10/7. If you’re willing to be direct about that, what exactly are you unwilling to be direct about?
Based on the first few podcasts (totally unrelated to Israel or Jews) I concluded long ago that Ezra’s brain turned useless mush when he moved to NYT and that his podcasts there are a waste of time. Turns out I was more right than I knew !
Wow, that’s an uncharitable take. I find Klein’s podcast to be the best one out there when it comes to these kind of controversial issues, and the best political show in general for anything outside of economic policy.
I’ve tried The Daily, 538, Lex Fridman, all of Matt’s shows (RIP), Joe Rogan, Pod Save America, NPR’s Up First, Tim Ferris, Freakonomics, The Intelligence (Economist), Odd Lots, Econ 102, Breton Goods, Money Talks, Huberman Lab, The Indicator, Hexapodia, The Studies Show, EconTalk, several other NYT/Bloomberg/Economist podcasts, and a variety of other shows I’m sure I’m forgetting (not counting some domain-specific podcasts that wouldn’t really apply here).
The ones I come back to are Odd Lots, The Studies Show, Ezra Klein, and all of the Economist’s shows.
That's an impressive list! Interestingly my favorites aren't on it! I strongly recommend "the dispatch podcast". "talkig politics" was top notch but sadly ended, however there is now "these Times" also featuring Prof. Helen Thompson so it should be good!
I forgot to mention the Dispatch! I’ve tried them a couple of times, and I’ll queue up one of theirs occasionally. I enjoyed their recent episode on Romney quite a bit. I’ll try out “These Times.”
"The problem has been a more or less plausibly exogenous rise in mindless progressive *allyship*. And some of progressives’ allies are quite antisemitic."
Very much this. It's why I ultimately don't find the question of whether anti-Israel progressives are antisemitic in some deep subjective motivational sense all that important.
Not to go all Godwin's Law on this, but to me it's a bit like asking whether Petain was antisemitic. Maybe interesting from a biographical perspective. But all that really mattered was his first-order commitment to "allyship" with a nakedly and ferociously antisemitic regime, to the total exclusion of any will to criticize or resist its malicious acts toward Jews.
This is a good point, but I think in Matt’s framework of practical policy, the distinction is important. Matt often says that racism is a huge driver behind Trump’s popularity, but simply stating that isn’t an electoral strategy. You may have won the moral argument, but you also need to win elections.
I think that leads to two conclusions. First, helping people who haven’t thought through what anti-Zionism really means learn that a SS is a toxic fantasy. Second, as much as this bothers me personally, recognizing that you don’t have to agree with everything a potential political ally says. I already hated the DSA, so writing them off isn’t hard for me. But if we come together on, say, climate change, we shouldn’t demand they share our views on Israel.
It follows that Israel is the Great Satan, of course.
Now, why did Jews get lumped in with white people and colonizers? Some of the high priests who dictate progressive dogma may well be antisemites (I don’t know who popularized these ideas). But are their Jewish foot soldiers antisemites themselves, or just sheep following the herd?
I think Jews are also viewed with suspicion on the left because we tend to be be higher on the class hierarchy. The richer you are, the more evil you are.
Why do the rich, educated, successful, established and powerful ethnic group over represented in the highest halls of American society get more underdog points the post-9/11 brown folks the median America is afraid of, represented by a huge today-present diaspora in the Palestinians? That’s the question?
That’s not a good way to actually pick political allies but this should not be surprising to you.
So, I'm going to take the opposite tack from Grouchy here and concede for purposes of argument all your factual claims about American Jews' present level of comfort and security. As well as the rather more unhinged assertions about "post-9/11 brown folks the median America is afraid of."
The counterargument, even if all of that is true, is that insofar as "underdog points" are a thing, it's not clear why you should lose them simply by being successful notwithstanding your underdog status. Jews are manifestly a historically oppressed group. People were throwing them into fucking ovens within living memory. If you have a category of "historically oppressed groups" entitled to some solicitude, then if the "historically" is doing any work at all, then Ashkenazi Jews have to be on the list.
I'll go even further than that. Ashkenazi Jews are the paradigmatic "historically oppressed group" within any sensible meaning of the phrase. Such that if you generate a list labeled "historically oppressed groups" and Ashkenazi Jews somehow aren't on it, you need to go back and either change the label or scrap the list.
If what you really mean is just that whoever happens to be on the bottom at the moment is entitled to reparations from whomever happens to be on top, fine, that's an intelligible position. Just not one that very many people are likely to share.
Because we are still the biggest target of hate crimes, and not by a small amount. You’ve described the paradox of antisemitism. A highly successful and prominent minority still managed to be despised and disenfranchised enough to lose 30% of its entire population to systematic murder. In the past century, we’ve been expelled from Russia, Europe, all of the Middle East, and North Africa.
This is actually clarifying. I in fact meant why Israel isn't considered the underdog, but i think the entanglement with US identities is important. If you actually look at hate crime data you realize that American jews are far more persecuted than American muslims or arabs (the latter being majority christian btw). It's also the case that some ethnic groups "of color" are better educated and more successful than American jews (e.g. hindus, i believe),* and of course, that jews have a far far more difficult and traumatizing history, in living memory , than any other american minorities (though admittedly not in the American context). However, if you ignore the whole world, where muslims are over 1b and in almost every country (with multiple country of muslim majority), look solely at the American context, are reacting to the superficial, but vocal islamophobic discourse of the aemrican right in the past 20 years, have never met an Arab so can believe they are meaningfully "brown", are not aware of the prevalence of antisemitism in the us due to media bias which almost always ignores it, and have no sense of history (as most americans do not), then yes, at a squint i can kind of see how you get to the lopsided view according to which somehow they are the underdog in this conflict.
[*incidentally, if memory serves Muslim Americans, while not yet quite as successful as Jews, are better off than the median american. In terms of wealath and education, in other words, they are far closer to jews and hindus than blacks or hispanics.]
I think you are stacking the deck more than necessary in making the view seem crazy, but yes if you want to understand the perspective of American progressives on who to root for in an America context those are important factors to consider.
Remember many of them are quite young, and “the Muslim ban” and “refugees” are way more salient to them than Tsarist pogroms or even the Holocaust or other historical atrocities, as is the experience of Jews in large liberal cities as their mental models of the respective groups. In my experience, they tend to be later focused on the American experience (overstating American or British influence in the process) mixed with an idealized view of Europe and true communism etc. Also, it is more a vibe check then some historical analysis to begin with.
They are definitely not making an apples to apples of Iran or Jordan as compared to Israel qua Middle Eastern nation.
And I think you are right about relative Arab wealth vs Caucasian wealth in USA. But remember that South Asians still make the underdog list despite being the most succeeding ethnic group in America. Poor rural whites, despite being quite bad off, definitely do not.
I do not find the above surprising and if you do you may not be modeling the views of progressives accurately.
I think the whole identitarian hierarchy thing is morally corrupt and disgusting and have a as much contempt for young pseudo progressives as for their senile pseudo patriotic trump supporters l. I have no more patience for morons.
P.S
The idiots’ parents have a bit to answer for too, having allowed their children obviously sub par educations. However they get more sympathy than the rest- there are very few good school options left, and it’s very hard to know. Plus social media is far more influential than schools anyway and it’s dominated by evil actors due to America’s abysmal failure at regulation. Still, I hope that moderate parents start paying more attention to what their kids are taught at school and esp what they see online.
Just going to plug for Ezra Klein here — I don’t think he’s yet kept his promise of hosting guests to his right on the I/P conflict, but his last interview with the former Israeli soldier was excellent. He definitely has a viewpoint, but I think overall he’s done a good job.
It was originally "Black and Indigenous People of Color" as in "People of Color who are Black and Indigenous" but about a week after it became mainstream it turned into "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color" as though Black and Indigenous People weren't considered PoC when that was the popular phrase.
So it went from being a limiting phrase to a longer version of the same phrase
Why are Arabs considered "people of color?" I'm not saying they should or shouldn't be; the whole concept is inscrutable to me. But maybe I'm just ignorant and there's actually some sort of principled basis for determining who falls within the category. If so, I'd be quite curious to hear it.
They’re in that quasi-region of being not-quite-white. In the seventies with prominent terrorism attacks, hostage taking, etc, they were considered in America as bad, foreign, and therefore Not White. The original Star Trek has some hilariously racist aliens based on Arab stereotypes.
My sense is that they were on their way to whiteness prior to 9/11, and that made them extremely un-white.
I can't tell if you're seriously saying that's the principled basis, or if you're putting it forward as such a facially arbitrary criterion as to expose the absurdity of the concept.
I actually have no idea what the average European melanin level is or whether my own skin tone falls above or below that line. I can't see how anyone honestly thinks the answers to those questions have any relation to any variable of interest.
Because for some bizarre reason (as I have ranted elsewhere before), the term "white" has become practically coterminous with "WASP" in US political discussions in the past 25 years or so, which is how you get, for example, Ashkenazic Jewish people referring to themselves as being "non-white," or the closely related, "iTaLIaNs HiStORiCalLy wEReN't CoNsidEreD whItE," discourse.
… but they weren’t considered white. Why does that discourse frustrate you?
I am mostly Jewish, and always considered myself white. After Trump was elected, I realized there was less consensus on that than I thought. Basically all Jews are Mediterranean, except to the extent they intermarried, and that’s generally reflected in our looks.
The idea was to be specific about American race relations and point out that Black people and American Indians have had an especially hard time becoming part of the national project. It's the other side of the coin of the "Italians weren't white" idea: who can be a "real American" has gotten more inclusive but has still managed to largely exclude the minorities who have been here since the beginning.
Of course, concept creep, pop-bastardization, blah blah, and whatever utility that framing had was lost pretty quickly once people knew what it was.
I think Matt might be engaging in a bit of projection, attributing anti-Israel sentiment to the settlements because that’s what bothers him the most (and rightly so – the settlements are abhorrent). But I continually hear complaints about Israel that aren’t framed in those terms, but rather against Israel’s very existence for being “settler colonial“ and “an ethnic religious state,” as if the latter aren’t common the world over. I’ve never heard progressives argue against the existence of any other state, and certainly not against the self-determination and sovereignty of a historically persecuted people.
When progressives are accused of unfairly, singling Israel out, they argue that their tax dollars, support Israel, distinguishing it from other conflict in the world. First, that would not explain the anti-Israel, progressive fervor in Europe, which doesn’t give Israel aid. And second, American tax dollars spent the last 20 years funding wars in the Middle East, and nobody’s bothered protesting them since 2003.
There are simply a lot of young progressives, who would never openly profess anti-Jewish bigotry, but fundamentally don’t think Jews have the right to self determination.
>And second, American tax dollars spent the last 20 years funding wars in the Middle East, and nobody’s bothered protesting them since 2003.
Sorry, but did we live through two entirely distinct twenty-first centuries? Because in my recollection the issue of wars in the Middle East spent two decades as one of the most central issues in American politics.
We are talking about the progressive movement, not what’s being debated in Congress and Iraq blame games in electoral politics. When, since 2003, did progressives take to the streets en masse to demand a US withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan? Demand an end to air strikes and drone strikes? The way they’re protesting Israel now?
The aftermath of the killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 is the first thing that comes to mind. Big protests that might well have continued (there were actions planned for the 17th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq) if not for COVID making everyone stay home for a few months shortly afterwards.
But it simply isn't true that the actual anti-Iraq War groups haven't protested other wars. Groups like Code Pink, etc. have protested almost every US military action since then, even (at least in the particular case of Code Pink, and presumably some other groups) US military aid to Ukraine. It's just that in Afghanistan the US was attacked first, so it got less opposition from the general public, and other Middle Eastern conflicts like Syria and Yemen were across sectarian lines that also divide Western Arab+Muslim communities, which are a huge contributor to protests against Israeli actions. Syria had the additional complication that, like in Ukraine, the side doing most of the bombing was a US enemy under sanctions.
I wouldn’t characterize any of those as mass protests. The DC march after Soleimani’s killing had a couple hundred people. I’ve seen Code Pink (which ARE consistent, I’ll grant them that) disrupt congressional hearings and stage sit ins, but they usually have like 40 people. Where were the thousands of students? The busloads headed to DC?
Protests on that scale take time to organize. The "emergency protests" held in the days after Soleimani's killing were motivated largely by the fear that the situation would escalate to an all-out war between the US and Iran. Within a week it became clear that that wasn't going to happen right that moment, and with the immediate crisis resolved, the logical thing to do was hold a coordinated day of protest on the anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was conveniently only ~2 months away at the time.
Which was exactly what the various groups involved were planning to do, but COVID cancelled those plans.
Considering the short prep time available for the protests that did happen shortly after Soleimani's killing, I'd say that their scale was pretty impressive.
I’m not trying to impugn that protest. My point is that the US airstrikes and occupations went on for 18 years without any mass protest from progressives. It’s not like civilians stopped dying right after the invasion. The airstrikes went on for two decades and there was more than enough time to organize. But there was no “Free Iraq” movement. It just wasn’t a priority.
But now that Israel is attacking Hamas (in response to an actual attack, which is more than we can say about Iraq), airstrikes are genocide and progressives organize. After 18 years of not bothering when it was our own military. THAT’S why they seem to be operating hypocritically and with a special animus for Israel.
Re: settlements - In an confusing and intractable moral dilemma like Israel/Palestine, the aspects that are more obviously "right vs. wrong" will the drive a lot of the sentiment.
I'm not sure what, exactly Palestinians should do, but Hamas killing babies is obviously wrong and bad.
The Israel version of this is the settlements. I'm not sure what Israel should do, but f them for expanding settlements. That's the issue that makes it impossible for me to just say "Israel's in an impossible situation, how can I judge them?"
There would definitely be Americans against Israel even w/o settlements, but for me, it's the aspect of the conflict that demonstrates that the Israeli government is a bad actor.
And yet, even here there is Palestinian agency involved. The ongoing threat of terrorism has tilted Israeli politics in such a way that, politically, no Israeli government can take on the settlers and stay a government, no matter how counterproductive the settlers are. Just one of the many unintended consequences in this long, long war.
Yours is a reasonable response re:the conflict, but that’s not the topic of this piece . The topic is American antisemitism on the left. It’s *their* attitudes were judging and they are very bad and have nothing in common with your analysis.
Israel is “settler colonial” much like the US was in, say 1920. The bulk of the ethnic cleansing occurred in 1947 and 1948, on the verge of living memory
otoh, nothing like present day israel could have existed without that war.
in the mid 40s, the arabs were not going to let the jews muscle their way in without a fight. few give up their homeland lightly. how could the balfour declaration have had any authority in the eyes of arabs?
israel has roughly as much right to exist as did any of the minor nations that popped up after the fall of the roman empire. its postimperial origins are broadly similar.
In the end it exists because it survived. There are now nearly 7 million Jews living there. They have the right to live in their home. That to me is the first and only important fact. The rest of the argument is just wind.
Palestinians who live in Israel proper (20% of the population) ARE full citizens, with more rights than anywhere in the Arab world. That didn’t stop Arab armies from invading to eradicate Israel, and it doesn’t stop leftists from claiming that ALL of Israel is illegitimate.
No one is disagreeing about that, the problem is the West Bank, which apparently is (1) Israel for purposes of deciding if Israelis can move there but (2) definitely not Israel for purposes of deciding if people born there can vote in Israeli elections. (Also on the reservations point, does anyone think that if a bunch of fundamentalist Mormons tried to start building towns on reservation land in Utah we would do anything other than simply through them in prison?)
well put. the difference is smallpox and warfare killed enough indigenous inhabitants to politically neuter them in basically every state other than alaska and hawaii. if native americans were a big and powerful voting block, whites would have enforced apartheid much longer
The idea that Palestinian citizens of Israel are "full citizens" needs some pretty giant asterisks. Large segments of Israeli society see them as disloyal. There is widespread discrimination, particularly in housing and land use. Arab parties have participated in government exactly once in 75 years and and the current Prime Minister demagogued relentlessly about it when his opponents did that to keep him out. The Jewish ethnoreligious character of the state is not a little symbolic thing; it pervades policy, and protecting this is why the Israeli right constitutionalized it with the nation-state law (and part of why they want to defang the judiciary).
There have been Arab parties in the Knesset the whole time, and they have had the right to vote the entire life of the state, which is not something you can say about black people in the US. I agree that Netanyahu and Likud have been trying to reduce that, but it looks very likely that their epic screw-up on October 7th has shot their chances at power for a long, long time.
This is great - Israel is the most diverse country in the middle east, with 21% of the population being Arab Israeli, and 4% neither Jewish nor Arab Muslim or Christian, and Arab Israelis have equal rights as citizens, sit on the Israeli supreme court, were ministers, sat in government, lead military units. At the same time Hamastan Gaza is 99% Sunni Muslims, and the goal of their Hamas rulers is a complete genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews (and likely other non-Sunni Muslims) and the establishment of a caliphate.
But when people are criticizing Israel for being an "ethnostate" do they mean what you are talking about (plus the occupations) or do they mean the fundamental existence of Israel?
Who is "people"--it depends. Israel is, de jure, an ethnostate, which is reflected both in its national symbols and in its concrete policy. I think it should be a state of all its citizens (which won't stop it from being a "Jewish state" in the sense of the only state in the world with a large majority of Jews). Obviously (I hope!), Israel having some unjust policies doesn't mean that Israel should be destroyed or that it loses the right to defend its citizens against terrorist murderers.
If Isreal were pursuing either genocide or apartheid as a policy, there wouldn't be that many Palestinians in Israel. Instead there would be ~0, just like there are almost none left in most Muslim countries.
One day a Palestinian leader will arrive on the scene urging nonviolent resistance and demanding voting rights for the all people between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. That's the end game absent a two state deal.
Precisely. I probably wouldn't either were I Israeli. Which is why separation—the two state solution—isn't dead. Though in 2023 it definitely appears to be on life support.
I don’t think this is an apt comparison For whatever reason, you care to suggest, the Palestinians have yet to accept themselves as being defeated, at least in the way that many of the Native American groups have.
That’s the simple truth but peole refuse to hear it. My impression is the denial comes from two places: 1. Jews like Matt who’d are more comfortable in denial for understandable reasons. 2. Gentiles more comfortable in denial for less understandable ones.
Some of that is the burden of high expectations of being a First World USA ally. If the Netherlands becomes a religious ethnostate with tiered citizenship you can be sure they would draw some ire. People (rightly!) expect more of Israel than of Iran.
I am obviously not outraged by Germany extending citizenship to a bunch of refugees. I don't really understand the question to be honest. Israel accepting a bunch of Jewish refugees is not really the gravamen of people's objection to their conduct, but rather their treatment of the Palestinians, especially (i) expanding settlements in the West Bank (and lack of political rights of residents there) and (ii) maintaining a pretty terrible status quo in Gaza as their solution to resolving their legitimate security concerns. Part of the justification for that being "well it is important to us to that we continue to privilege a particular religion" is not sympathetic to many Western observers who are not hot on Zionism as a project in itself.
We do business with many regimes that much worse than Israel (for example, literally every other Middle Eastern country), and the plight of the Palestinians does not rank very high on my list of world injustices the USA needs to spend a lot of time and attention to address--if we want to intervene in the internal politics there are many more obvious candidates from a humanitarian perspective across Africa and Asia but "the Israeli government is no worse than modern Germany because something something 1940s something" is not a compelling view.
I don't have any bright ideas on how to materially improve the situation given the positions and preferences of Israel and, especially, Palestinians and I think a "one state solution" very likely leads to a horrifying civil war (at best) not a secular democracy, but that is separate from the simple observation of "well, that religious ethnostate objective and the oppression necessary to secure it seems pretty bad on its own terms, even if I understand the historical context for why it exists".
Israel isn't a "religious ethnostate", doesn't have a state religion, and doesn't have a religious test for any Jewish immigrants. Nor does a state having preferential naturalization for a specific ethnic group make it an "ethnostate" - and if so then Germany, Ireland, Greece, and many others, all of which have such laws are "ethnostates" too. Oddly, nobody throws that word around in a derogatory way, except when a Jewish state is involved. Just so we're clear, Hamastan Gaza is 99% Sunni Muslims, Israel is 21% Arab citizens.
I'm glad that you're sane and understand that forcing Israelis and Palestinians into a single state is untenable and asking for a civil war just like Yugoslavia had...which resulted in multiple independent states. The Israeli left's idea is to first destroy the terrorist capability of Hamas, reduce its threat to a minuscule portion of what it had on October 7th, and then negotiate on the West Bank. The global left likes to ignore that Palestinians already had all of Gaza since 2005, as the basis for a state - but they chose to turn it into an Iranian proxy artillery base instead. Most of the West Bank was offered in 2008, with sane land swap options, and again, the Palestinians rejected that. So there are things to resolve, but mainly the global left should press on Palestinians to finally agree to a deal and reject terrorism and the concept of an ethnic cleansing of Jews from all of Israel.
I think Matt is letting these people off the hook too easily - I honestly don't think many of these leftists even realize what they're arguing for is in fact Antisemitic. They may not be openly professing explicit Antisemitism but if you're advocating for the destruction of the *only* Jewish state, and no other state in the world, then what's really the difference? That they're too dumb to realize their stated goals would result in the ethnic cleansing of Jews doesn't mean they aren't Antisemitic in a more insidious way than what you'd expect from Right wing Antisemites who overtly and proudly express their bigotry towards Jews.
In Britain at least, progressive opposition to Israel is tied up with 1. post-colonial guilt and the Balfour declaration and 2. more concretely albeit historically with the pre-Good-Friday northern Irish situation (the British left looking generally more favourably on the Irish nationalist cause, and the realities of weapons smuggling in the late 20th century somewhat tying those causes together ('staggering on as a cause of the left' as Matt recently put it').
Somewhat outside of the topic, but there's also an undercurrent, more present in the right, of incredulity probably best expressed as: 'This level of violence was available to us THE WHOLE TIME!?!' - It's probably for the best that, say, the Thatcher government didn't realise that in the late 1980s. The Good Friday agreement really is a much better outcome overall.
You ignore the elephant in the room. There is a substantial Muslim population in London, with well known activity by the fundamentalist antisemitic “Muslim brotherhood” there. That’s the no 1 key to rise in both antisemitism and anti Israel activism there. All the rest is a side dish (add to that traditional Christian British antisemitism!).
I was in London for the 2012 Olympics and went to watch the Opening Ceremony in a large court yard with probably 5,000 people. The crowd cheered for every single country except for when it was Israel’s turn in which the boos from the crowd far exceeded the cheers for any other country. It was frankly a shocking experience that made me realize how wide spread Antisemitism is in London.
I'm very willing to believe that, but it seems like there is an important qualitative distinction between "genteel" anti-Semitism and violent anti-Semitism, with the latter in the UK being overwhelmingly the province of British Muslims (often immigrants or first-generation UKers) in the last 20 or 30 years, although maybe that is the result of media reporting.
Exactly. It’s Muslims currently making life intolerable for Jews in Europe. Needless to say, Europe’s native Christians have done far worse in living memory, but currently aren’t the main problem.
I just don't think that's true - and the broader British left isn't especially centred in London anyway.
What probably is true is that a vocal diaspora promotes the issue to the attention of the broader left, and that the ambiguity of the 'from the river to the sea' slogan is papering over some differences between the international left and Palestinian nationalists, although that wasn't quite your point.
That’s very interesting. To me, the obvious difference that dooms the analogy is that the Irish were not attempting to completely eradicate Britain. They had a specific territorial dispute. I think British leftists would have still been sympathetic to some aspects of the cause, but not up for their own eradication. Much like the Israeli left.
We don't perceive Israel as equivalent to Britain. We perceive Israel as equivalent to the Unionists in Northern Ireland - a group that the IRA was definitely trying to eradicate. The equivalent to Britain in this perception is, well, Britain (or the USA, but the sort of people who think like this think that Britain has far more influence in the USA than it actually does: I have literally heard people saying that the USA would cut off aid to Israel if Britain asked it to).
They don’t want to kill or expel all Protestants and their “threat” is to have Northern Ireland join the Republic of Ireland. A pleasant rich modern democracy where Protestants and other minorities have no problem to live.
P.S.
As I recall in the Good Friday agreement ira also agreed to disarm ?
"They don’t want to kill or expel all Protestants" - they very much did want all Unionists to go "back" to Britain. Not Protestants, no, but that is comparable to saying "we have no problem with Palestinian Jews" - and the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s or 1970s, while it was a democracy, had a formal recognition of the supremacy of the Catholic church and certainly wasn't rich and not all that modern. The transformation of the Irish economy really began with EU membership in 1973.
There are British people who seriously compare Israel to the old (pre-1972) Stormont Northern Ireland and say that "we" should restore direct rule of Israel, abolish the Knesset and push through a Good Friday-style power-sharing arrangement (by "we", they mean "the Americans doing what we, superior British people, tell them to")
These are not serious people who understand anything about Israel/Palestine, they are people who think that the State of Israel doesn't really exist and is just an American puppet and the USA could abolish it as easily as the British abolished the House of Commons of Northern Ireland, ie by just announcing that it's gone.
Well, if you think the British left isn't self-destructive...
You're correct though, Israel is in a tough spot. The Good Friday agreement is a long way from perfect, but it does seem to be the only peaceful resolution of a similar conflict. Maybe there are others of which I'm unaware?
First off, I should state that I have a deep affinity with secular Jews and secular people of all stripes. J Street Jews, Reform Jews, are generally cool as hell. Shoot, I’ve paid Matt for 4 years and read him for 14 years. I read the Source and at one point thought there was justification for Israel - the Holocaust, like, happened. We should have instead resettled those who were willing in the US, where we are more pluralistic (though we should have made the Haredim get vaccinated at the barrel of a gun, bc fuck them for bringing polio back)
But at least for me, it is the continued settlements, the apartheid, the failure to prosecute crimes against Palestinians, the espionage (Jonathan Pollard et al), the failure to let America dictate its behavior when it would have been annihilated but for US support, it’s export of surveillance tech to even worse actors, its political assassinations (I read Rise and Kill First), truly evil folks like Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu, AIPAC and ADL and the people conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and the alignment of Israel’s government with Cheeto von Tweeto, and the alignment of Israel with Christianists that want to bring about revelation and should be locked in cages or deported there. Fuck Hamas but F U C K Israel. We shouldn’t be involved. We shouldn’t give either side a dime in aid nor even the most wishy-washy statements or support. It will only harm the US, which I do care about. There are no good guys here. Boycott, divestment, and sanctions to both parties.
I don’t think anyone has the right to self-determination bc you can’t get that way without ethnic cleansing. Ideally, we’d have one world government that banned people from procreating with people of the same race or religion for 2 generations and afterward we’d all just look like hot Brazilians and could get on to killing each other over really important controversies, like dog people vs cat people, not dumb things like race and religion…not gonna happen but I’m not gonna support malicious actors in the world.
This is not exclusive to Israel. The other settler colonials who tried formal large scale oppression, the Rhodesians and the South Africans, got similar amounts of shit despite killing far fewer people. To Matt's point, there are data points regarding other Western-coded people doing similar stuff, and getting massive progressive pushback despite not being Jewish at all
You do know that the first Zionists bought their land, right. “Settler-colonialist” is a political phrase that does not relate to historical reality at any point.
Yeah… as much as settlements dominate among smart and savvy people who like to think about the topic, Gaza and its blockade has always been the focus I’ve see among younger people.
Which is so backwards! The Gaza blockade is a terrible thing, but it was a response to the takeover of the jurisdiction by genocidal maniacs. I never heard any other particularly good suggestions for what a country should do if ISIS takes control next door. The settlements, however, are just wicked land grabs without provocation.
This seems like reaching to be even-handed. The provocation is the war. The transgression is only meaningful in the context of an intended peace. There is no intended peace. Therefore there is no deal or if there was during Oslo it is off the table now, thanks to Arafat. And there is certainly no equivalency with what Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists have done and are doing. Frankly the Palestinians are lucky the settlers haven’t taken more. They are certainly in no position to stop it.
It's because the leading visual of the conflict since the early 2000s has been of Israel bombarding Gaza, in full view of the world media and reported on in detail by the trusted international NGOs on the ground.
The flipsides of Iron Dome++ were that (a) everything looks like Israeli violence against peaceful people and (b) Likud does not pay much price for its policies.
It’s the eternal low-intensity conflict we were all warned automated systems would create, just without the automated systems.
Scott Alexander did a post about how activists choose the more squirmy edge cases precisely because they're controversial and involve more fighting, which draws attention, which is what the activists want. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
I could believe someone honestly _wanted_ to celebrate "heritage not hate". However....
That person can't be unaware of how the symbol would be viewed, by pretty much everyone, and therefore what message they're sending.
No matter what message they intend to send, it's not, and if they have any concern about the feelings of Black people they should not put it up, no matter what they wanted to say.
And then that means if they're _still_ flying it, they at best don't care about the feelings of Black people.
I think that's a little too categorical, because it definitely wasn't that way in the relatively recent past.
Like, The Dukes of Hazzard was super popular in the 1970s and 80s. And while black people were probably not top of mind as the target audience, it was still a network TV show that wanted to get ratings and sell ads. The producers presumably wouldn't have put a confederate flag on the protagonists' car if they thought it was going to gratuitously offend and alienate viewers. And having the flag appear in every episode *was* gratuitous; it's not as if people were otherwise going to miss the point that the show was set among Southern rednecks.
CBS at the time almost certainly thought of the flag as just a humorously over-the-top symbol of Southernness and "rebel" spirit and not any sort of statement about racial politics, and the show certainly depicted the characters as having that intent. In hindsight, it seems equally clear that many blacks probably were in fact offended. But it strains credulity to think that everyone at the time automatically recognized that it would have that effect.
It's easy to say "that was then, this is now." But the pace of cultural change isn't uniform across geographic, generational, or class lines. There are still a lot of people in the rural South who in flying the flag see themselves as doing the same thing the Dukes of Hazzard were portrayed as doing, and don't believe that "pretty much everyone" does or should perceive it otherwise. I don't particularly approve, but I also don't think they're all being disingenuous or willfully blind.
In re, "The Dukes of Hazzard," it's probably worth adding that the main (possibly only?) recurring black character on the show was Sheriff Little of Chickasaw County (played by Don Pedro Cooley), who was generally portrayed as non-corrupt and much more competent than Sheriff Coltrane, et al. from Hazzard County.
In general, I remind people tha the FA is free. The cost of the FO is set by the Marketplace of Ideas. The spicier the view, the more likely a buyer is gonna set the price at an ass kicking.
From the river to the sea, Palestine was ruled by Britain, which ignored native opinion and let Jews immigrate en masse. A European political problem was imposed on Palestine, for reasons sentimental and strategic to the United Kingdom in 1922.
To want this area free is a fine aspiration. Wanting the unlikely is not unreasonable.
It’s an interesting question because that definition was imposed on them by people who are hostile to them. It’s ugly even if it comes to the right answer
Josh Barro's take last week was the right one. Leftists aren't tearing down posters of Israeli children hostages because they're antisemitic, they're doing so because of cognitive dissonance.
If your totalizing worldview separates evil oppressors and good victims, then it makes sense how you can see the Israel-Palestine conflict both without nuance and as a fault entirely of the Israeli side.
This event has sent me back to Hannah Arendt: "Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations."
This passage applies equally to ideologues of the alt-right and of progressivist extremists.
Yes, yes, yes: "Leftists aren't tearing down posters of Israeli children hostages because they're antisemitic, they're doing so because of cognitive dissonance."
I've been wondering why instead of tearing down the posters, they don't put up posters with pictures of the (far more) Gaza children killed in the Israeli response.
I can't delve into their psyche but part of me thinks it's a mirror reflection of the Trumpists as Adam Serwer memorably said: the cruelty is the point.
They don't want to make an argument. They want to inflict emotional pain.
I think I actually did see some posters in LA mirroring the "Kidnapped" posters that said "Murdered" with pictures of killed Gazan civilians. My feeling about that is, yes, put up those posters! Make people aware! Just don't tear down the equally valid posters of killed and kidnapped Israeli civilians!
I don't think most of these protesters care about the Palestinian dead at all. The bodies are just props for their playacting.
I'm sure there are tons of people who are truly anguished about the cost the Gazans are paying, but I just get the feeling that many of these demonstrators are simply poseurs.
Someone who I consider reasonable said he struggled not to tear them down. I think he felt that they were manipulative. I was shocked when I saw people tearing them down, but I have to admit, I’ve been tempted to tear down Trump posters.
I think back to when South Africa ended Apartheid. I wrote some letters for Amnesty International, and the thought that I, a teenager with a 10 pm curfew, had helped topple an evil regime was thrilling.
I’ve realized most people don’t know anything about Israel’s history, and you can be sure they’re not getting a full version from their fellow protestors. They really do believe Israel is an evil white country that started in a similar manner to Haiti.
I saw some of the counter-posters in my neighborhood. I find the whole poster war to be a really baffling and farcical addendum to this whole clusterf-ck.
It's strange to attempt to paraphrase someone else's position with such superficial terms, but then to also reach such firm conclusions based on that strawman.
I've been thinking about the posters thing because they are plastered around the campus next to me, and they do make me feel weird, when you see them as you are literally walking along listening to an NPR story about deteriorating conditions and the rising civilian death toll in Gaza. I was trying to think about why and whether I'm secretly anti-Semitic in my heart or something--I grew up Southern Baptist, so it's not an idea I would totally dismiss--and I was trying to think about how I would feel if the Russians put up posters like that after a Chechen attack, or the Chinese put them up after an act of Uighur or Tibetan terrorism.
Honestly, I wish we could just be equally sad about all deaths of children in the region, regardless of who killed the children in question, and I wish we could condemn actions that result in the deaths of children without needing to slice the salami so carefully and describe who has the better moral claim to the acceptability of their child-death-causing actions, but I get that doesn't actually solve anything.
Anyway, just wanted to put that in because I've been thinking about it ever since it happened the other day. I don't really have any answers about it, and I didn't tear any posters down. But I do think you can feel a kind of cognitive dissonance about the posters, or at least I hope my own feelings of discomfort reflect that, rather than revealing that I have an antisemitism that I did not recognize hiding in my own self, if that makes sense.
“…I wish we could condemn actions that result in the deaths of children without needing to slice the salami so carefully and describe who has the better moral claim to the acceptability of their child-death-causing actions…”
It’s not that complicated: The October 7th deaths, the fate of the hostages, and the deaths of children in Gaza are all the responsibility of Hamas.
As I have said many times on this forum, I'm a global health guy--taught it for a decade before going back to nursing school--and I just don't agree. Everyone can always say that pretty much any action is someone else's fault. And that's not a theoretical claim I'm making; I brought up the Chinese and the Russians specifically because both of those governments made precisely this claim about their actions in Xinjian, Tibet, and Chechnya: we had to do this as a response to terrorism.
If there is one principle I ascribe to in the human rights / global health space, it's that governments are and must be responsible for the things they do. That's not the same as saying that I don't think they have reasons for doing what they do. That's not the same as saying that I don't understand the strategic logic of choices they make.
But no: Hamas is responsible for the actions of Hamas, and the facts of Israeli government actions over the last two decades do not in any way, ever, under any circumstances give Hamas some kind of free pass on behavior. And the same is true of the Israeli government. Everyone's motives are pure in their own minds--no one gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and is like, "I'm going to do evil for no reason today because I'm an evil person." And in a world where everyone's motives are pure in their own minds, all you have left for making moral judgements is to look at their actual actions / behavior. At least, that's how I see it. It really is possible in a given situation to not be excited about the behavior of any of the players (I would offer, as an example, both the Iran-Iraq war and the conflict between ISIS and the Assad government.)
One thing this conversation does make me think is that the non-Jewish citizens of Israel are an under-discussed part of this question. They have very circumscribed political power, but they have political power, and it's pretty clear that they have not been wielding it effectively to move Israeli government policy in a more productive direction. I assume that is a big hill to climb, but that doesn't make it not worth making the attempt.
+1 If chinese students put up posters after a terrorist attack by tibet, a nation they are occupying, I would have a hard time sympathizing. If you saw china and israels land occupations as simular.
Yeah: I think that is right. As I said, I'm not a tear-down-posters guy. I just kind of found them personally unsettling, in a this-feels-like-propaganda kind of way. But I also don't like that feeling, because the plight of the hostages is genuinely awful, as was the terrorism that preceded it.
That was why I put that comment up; I was trying to flag that I think the cognitive dissonance angle has some explanatory power, because I feel like that articulates a feeling I was trying to understand in my own self.
Hanlon's razor really has to do a whole ton of work to give a pass on people chanting, "from the river to the sea", but overestimating the stupidity of average political thought hasn't failed me yet.
Protests are often full of idiots who will chant anything that rhymes. There is a plausible positive interpretation of the slogan, provided that you know nothing about the issues (which most protesters do not).
"Twenty (miles per hour) is plenty" is becoming a common rallying cry in urban infrastructure and public policy. Is there anything unique about 21mph or 19mph? Lol hell no! It rhymes so we love it.
Yeah but you do need to draw a limit somewhere, and in practice virtually everywhere does speed limits that are divisible by five (regardless of if it’s MPH or KPH) for easy memorability.
When deciding what blood alcohol content counts as drunk driving, with any given number, you could always says, “Why not a smidgen higher or a smidgen lower?” and the answer is “Because we need to draw a line somewhere and this is that line.”
A car traveling at 20 mph is very unlikely to kill a pedestrian that they hit, meanwhile a car traveling at 40 mph is very likely to kill a person that they hit. (You can look up various studies with slightly different probabilities found.) At some point you have to draw a line—and yes, it will be partially arbitrary. But this isn’t about having a cute rhyme.
It rhymes and it’s evocative. Just miles ahead of your average protest line. As a Youth who has personally had conversations where I asked friends to say something else, I’d wager ~50% don’t know what it means at all, ~40% have heard, but are negatively polarized and/or propagandized into simply not believing that it has antisemitic connotations, and ~10% are fully on board with saying it more broadly (even though I’d wager that of those 10%, 10% or fewer are genuinely antisemitic, while the remainder are some combination of edgy revolution-larping assholes and people who feel a social obligation to side with the most extreme elements of whichever political group they’re in). I think Casey’s comment was also spot on.
It’s even more scary in its own way that antisemitic speech can spread so far beyond antisemitic sentiment. It reminds me of the revolutions in Russia and China, where surely most people did not actually like the mass slaughter of “political enemies”, the constant fear of receiving their own accusation... and yet the social dynamics were such that it happened regardless. This is the sort of thing that strong protection of free speech prevents!
To be clear, I can’t see a revolution, good or bad, antisemitic or not, happening in the states. But there is a history of horrific ideas riding popular sentiments to dizzying heights, and I think conservatives might be more willing to entertain the idea that most of these campus radicals are not antisemitic if they felt that to do so wasn’t also conceding that they aren’t dangerous.
This get's into a whole uncomfortable thing, where people want to posit that, like, all bad things proceed from bad ideas, when the truth is people don't usually do terrible things because they're racist or whatever. There are plenty of benign racists out there, and plenty of people who commit atrocious racist violence who, if they didn't happen to believe stupid things about race, would find other excuses to motivate their terrible acts. A lot of people seem to have convinced themselves of bad, utopian sort of assumptions, that simply correcting people's obviously dumb ideas is all that's necessary, and it's really, really not. History has shown that the real danger on the political scale is not so much the truly individual evil actor as much as it is the social and cultural dynamics that cause vast numbers of scared, ignorant, tribal people who otherwise know better to play along with the nakedly amoral leadership.
So I agree, that most of those people don't mean the phrase in the mustache twirlingly evil, openly genocidal way it was conceived, but I'm not sure how much less deplorable that actually makes them than if they did.
They know. They enjoy it. It’s evil and vile and excuses shouldn’t be made against all evidence.your percentages are wishful thinking divorced from reality. They need to be condemned and ostracized like all racists.
I think some know and a lot don’t. I agree with you that many people (including Matt) are disregarding clear malicious anti-Semitism, but I think you’re too quick to assume malice from *everyone* in the movement when ignorance (granted it’s somewhat willful ignorance) is more plausible. It really doesn’t take much to get people to turn a blind eye to badness in their ideological allies!
Rashida Tlaib probably legitimately thinks it's a peaceful phrase as she is rivaled in congress perhaps only by MTG and Lauren Boebert on an intellectual level.
This is an excellent post, and I think it touches on the larger problem of what I've come to think of as politics by mind reading. Which isn't to say there's no such thing as anti-semitism (or any other form of ism) out there. Just that the assumption without evidencd is lazy intellectually and has the convenient effect of relieving the person making the assertion from grappling with complicated facts, interests, and issues. I think it's exactly where the Kendian stuff was (which I very much hope has crested and that we are on the down slope) and I agree it's where pro-Israeli rhetoric has gone.
I can grant that Israelis have a right to be very upset about the attack October 7. I grant it is understandable for the Jewish diaspora to have a lot of deep feelings about Israel, including deeply sympathetic feelings. What I can't and don't think anyone can grant is that Israel and its supporters can wash their hands of a bunch of stateless people under the de facto control of the Israeli state, as if it's totally irrelevant to the violence.
By no means is the accusation of anti-Semitism from reasonable people based on “you must wash your hands of the Palestinians or else you’re anti-Semitic.”
I'm pretty sure the accusation of anti-semitism is being leveled at any and all people who fail to get on board with maximalist Israeli aims and actions, not just the crazy activists.
Yes, some people are leveling the charge too broadly. Some people also level the charge of anti-black racism too broadly, but I’m not sympathetic to those who respond by treating all charges of anti-black racism as spurious.
I think that's kind of the point of Matt's article though. An accusation is just an accusation. I am sure that you can uncover what fair minded people would have to conclude is anti-semitism in pro Palestinian activist groups. But there's also a point where if one doesn't want to have all accusations treated as spurious you have to stop crying wolf all the time on issues of legitimate disagreement.
But who is "you"? If the post is directed at neocons, then I agree that those are people who cry wolf and treat legitimate disagreement as anti-Semitic. However, I don't know why Matt would aim a post at ideologues who as far as I can tell don't listen to him on anything and aren't to be found among his commenters (and hence, probably not among his readership). I took him as talking to other centrist/left-of-center people who see an anti-Semitism problem; Jonathan Chait, say. Is that someone who cries wolf all the time?
Maybe Matt will jump into the comments and tell us who the message is intended for, but failing that, I interpret it as being for (i) Israel sympathizing center left people who are struggling with the response if the larger left to events since October 7, and (ii) the heteodox group of writers and readers of substacks and similar publications with whom SB is in regular dialogue.
Everyone wants to be a victim. All those Trump voters who shrug at the threat to democracy because coastal elitists look at them with contempt, in their mind.
Yeah, coupled with lots of insinuations in this thread and elsewhere that amount to “The Eternal Mussulman is conspiring to overthrow your society from within!”
Yeah, you can also think of it as the politics of bullying. Like longstanding attempts to "cancel" various forms of activism around the IP conflict on campus, some partisans on the pro-Israel side really do try to equate criticism of Israel to antisemitism as a way to make people shut up. Personally I think it's pretty foolish in the long term in a "boy who cried wolf sense" where if you're constantly calling your opponents bigots they tend to close ranks and ignore the real bigotry when it does appear on their side (as it certainly can with some pro-Palestinian activist groups as we've seen recently). It's like turning the conversation into people having to line up "Defund the police!" or "Back the blue!" and nothing else in between, it leads to a very dysfunctional and unhealthy discourse.
I appreciate the distinctions you draw in this article, Matt, but I think there are a few important points you don't consider.
1. It's worth re-emphasizing the stakes here, as you and I both see them: "The implementation of the progressive left’s favored one-state solution would, I believe, lead to civil war and bloodshed." To me, that's more than just an oopsies. That's a group that would, cavalierly and with little thought, endanger the lives of my friends and family in Israel. I don't think it requires me to go full Kendi to believe that it shades into anti-Semitism to be so massively wrong about a basic fact that so obviously and extremely puts Jews at risk of massive violence. (Please tell me if there's a different widely-held position in US politics today with comparable consequences.)
2. You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine. I agree that Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe (due to its Hamas-run government and military posture). But since 2008, we've seen 500,000 civilian deaths in Syria, and hundreds of thousands in Yemen. Ethnic Armenians are being cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh essentially as I type this. Two million people were internally displaced in Ethiopia last year. Genocide in Sudan may be making a comeback. All of these are catastrophes on a similar or much vaster scale than what we've seen in Gaza, but there's no international coalition coming to their rescue. People will say that it's because the US gives Israel aid, but the US continues to allow Saudi Arabia (a repressive monarchy!) to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of military equipment, which it then uses to fund e.g. slaughter of civilians in Yemen. Once the left gets mobilized about all these tragedies, I'll be more sympathetic to the idea that they're not anti-Semitic, no matter how many of them do or do not check a box on a survey that says "I hate Jews."
I'd just like to add here that the Israel-Palestine situation is extremely difficult to understand for most Americans and a vanishingly small percentage of them have anything approaching a real grasp on it. I'd say that I barely understood it until Matt wrote a primer a few weeks back myself, and I'm more plugged-in than most.
With that said, the "one-state" solution doesn't seem prima facie like a bad idea (or antisemitic) if it just falls broadly in line with your own progressive ideas of everyone living in harmony. It comes down to what Matt has said about "everyone having different opinions from the ones they actually hold" - the one state solution is, in fact, bad, but if you don't really know all the important factors (a high bar for most people!) it doesn't sound all that different from South Africa or Ireland or anywhere else different people have joined to live together in harmony in the same state.
The one-state solution is not going to cause massive slaughter. The "one-state solution" is, of course defined as "every single person between the river and the sea wants to live in a single multinational state with open borders and in harmony with each other; this then leads them to create such a state".
Obviously the problem with this is that you need to wave a magic want to achieve the first clause.
OK, then by that definition it's just a made up fantasy world and we can talk about it the same way we talk about just moving all the Palestinians to Atlantis.
When I ask people about it, they will literally tell me that Hamas doesn't actually want to kill the Jews and would happily live side by side with them as citizens of a Palestine from the river to the sea and the only problem is Israelis who don't want that.
It's gibberish, it's childish nonsense, it's complete denial of the reality of the world. It's on the level of thought of the song from Coca-Cola advert ("I'd like to teach the world to sing") or John Lennon's "Imagine".
You don’t seem to know the facts of reality on campuses and elsewhere. We’re talking plain and simple antisemitism , being excused or ignored. Jews, especially the young and visibly Jewish, are under attack at levels not seen for many decades. That’s the discussion. You’re missing the point.
No, *you're* missing the point. The article isn't about the rise of antisemitism. It's about the source of antisemitism (which is on the right, based on available data) and the motivation of anti-Zionists (which may be based on antisemitism, but not necessarily, and is less likely on the left, again based on available data).
No, Matt is ignoring (and probably not fully aware) of what’s going on. But there is tons of civil rights litigation against universities right now for creating a hostile environment for Jews (aka institutional antisemitism) and letting their student antisemites run amock. Hopefully some of the results of all that will make Matt, yourself and others belatedly go “oh, now I get it” in a few years time. It’s unfortunate that Jews have to suffer while you very very slowly digest the facts.
“The data” doesn’t speak for itself. It needs interpreting (and methodology in producing it). Matt ignores the data he doesn’t like and interprets that which he likes tendentiously. Any educated person knows you can’t form an opinion on a topic based on reading one essay by one person. If you do it shows you don’t particularly care about the topic. You don’t seem to care about this one. Fine (sad, but that’s life), however at least realize your ignorance here.
Generally incidents on campuses that the administrators choose not to classify as a civil-rights matter don't show up in civil-rights data. It's self-reported. So we have to actually wait to see how the lawsuits turn out and then see what the potentially corrected data says.
Whatever one chooses to call the thing currently going on campuses and in other left-leaning spaces that involves hostility and even occasional violence toward Jewish persons, that its "source" is not "on the right" is so manifestly obvious that any suggestion otherwise strikes me as frivolous.
I don't particularly care if one wants to use the same word to describe left-wing anti-Jewish sentiment and right-wing anti-Jewish sentiment, though they seem to me different enough in substance to justify having distinct labels. But the likelihood at least that expressions of such sentiment on the right and the left will differ from each other verbally and attitudinally makes me highly skeptical of trying to use polling data to compare them.
After the Charleston church shooting*, there were a lot of posts on social media about an increase in churches burning down. Lots of news reports pointed out these incidents of fire. Analysis later concluded that these fires were not statistically significant - some number of fires happen, some happen in churches, and we were all paying more attention to this kind of thing at the time so it seemed manifestly obvious that arsonists were afoot.
Nothing is manifestly obvious. Everything must be borne out by data. If one wants to make a point, for instance, that antisemitism is up on campuses and in other left-leaning spaces, this must be shown by actual facts comparing "now" to "before" and controlling for other factors. I'm no more skeptical of this idea than any other - maybe you're right! Maybe you're EXTREMELY correct and Jews in these spaces are more in danger than I'd ever considered! But the fact remains that anecdotes (or a few news stories) are not data.
*I think this was the inciting event at the time; I don't remember. This is all from memory and memory is faulty. But the point stands
I completely agree with you that people's intuitive impressions about things being "on the rise" often turn out to be overblown or even directionally wrong when one examines the empirical data.
In this case I have a pretty strong prior that there were more pro-Palestine/anti-Israel demonstrations on American college campuses in October 2023 than there were in October 2022, and that such events were more likely to be associated with acts of overt hostility toward Jewish students. That's not to say my assumption isn't rebuttable by strong evidence to the contrary. But I also don't have to walk around in a state of complete agnosticism about an apparent social trend just because I haven't seen it precisely quantified.
At any rate, I don't think you're really responding to what I wrote. I didn't make any claim about whether the thing "currently going on" was going on more in the past, less in the past, or to exactly the same extent in the past. What I said was "manifestly obvious" wasn't anything about antisemitism being up or down. It was simply that whatever may or may not be happening on the right, it's plainly not the "source" of Israel-related attitudes animated by leftist political commitments, which are what everyone is discussing here.
"You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine. I agree that Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe (due to its Hamas-run government and military posture). But since 2008, we've seen 500,000 civilian deaths in Syria, and hundreds of thousands in Yemen."
I'm very much on the pro-Israel side of things, but I've always found this particular argument a bit unpersuasive. People are always somewhat parochial and care about some things and not others in ways that don't really stand up to logical inspection. There are any number of plausible non-antisemitic reasons why many Americans might fixate on Israel while ignoring other places that are by the same standards objectively worse.
Israel is a major US ally, in a region that's been a strategic focus of US foreign policy as far back as most people alive today can remember. The roots of its current dilemmas have some parallels to America's own history of settlement and Native dispossession. A major US ethnic group has a close relationship to Israel that's unusual in its being not so much a place American Jews *came from* -- which tends to recede in significance for later generations -- as a place to which they *might go.* It has a broadly Western culture and standard of living, which makes it superficially easy to think it can be evaluated by familiar norms, whereas most Americans would probably feel a lot less confident making judgments about Ethiopia.
And I'd add that Israel is in many ways just an intrinsically atypical and therefore interesting kind of country that would probably attract a certain amount of attention and debate even if none of the above were true. That's not to say that the degree of criticism leveled at Israel is necessarily unrelated to antisemitism. But I'm not persuaded the selectivity of focus in and of itself is evidence of a connection.
"It has a broadly Western culture and standard of living, which makes it superficially easy to think it can be evaluated by familiar norms"
Plus Israeli political leaders for decades have explicitly emphasized Israel's liberalism/progressiveness in making their case for Western support. Almost none of the factions in Syria or Yemen even make serious efforts to claim that they would try to implement a liberal democracy if they succeeded in establishing a government. ("Rojava" in Syria is the only one I can think of to make that claim with any force and they are undermined by pretty clearly being a Kurdish separatist stalking horse with good PR.)
Why does the nation pay so much more attention to Israel/Palestine than these other horrific conflicts?
For the same reason that there are 340 comments on today's post and counting, and if Matt wrote a post on the what's going on in Sudan and Ethiopia there'd be fewer than half that, with many digressing to other subjects like, oh, Israel/Palestine.
Anti vax and climate change denial both strike me as examples of obviously wrong positions that stand to kill lots of people which require no special malice to explain. Just a bad mistake! Lots of foreign policy views are like that too, one state solution among them.
Good examples, thanks! Perversely, though, in both of those examples it's more or less the entire world that's harmed. Whereas in a "one-state solution," it's specifically Jews (and Palestinians) who suffer.
There aren't pro-Saudi Arabian organizations in Congress who will primary you if you point out Saudi Arabia is a bad country who does bad things, as many Congresspeople and normal people do.
"You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine. "
A disproportionate focus on this conflict does not only exist on the pro-Palestinian side by any means. On the contrary, Israel itself has campaigned extensively for almost it's entire existence to put their "plight" at the center of U.S. policy and to engage in all sorts of soft power campaigns and lobbying efforts to turn Israel into the "51st state" in the eyes of many. This status quo of Israel as an elevated issue in America has been the case since before almost any of these campus leftists were born, and Israel does not get to lobby endlessly for U.S. support when it suits them and then suddenly say "why do you care so much about us" when this attention doesn't suit them.
I think this is a fair criticism. I will add though that protests have been widespread throughout pretty much all of the West, including in countries with little to do with Israel. I realize that the OP was about "Antisemitism in America," but to the extent that these protests are continuous with protests elsewhere, I think my point stands.
Rightly or wrongly, the left clearly believes that a one-state solution is manageable with minimal bloodshed. I tend to think Matt's wrong and they're correct - and when you really get under the hood of the Good Friday agreement, you can start to see how that could be managed. But - and jumping back to the formation of the Republic of Ireland - you can see that on the Israeli side the IDF can probably behave professionally and suppress settler violence with minimal bloodshed... and that the Palestinians are likely going to have to remove Hamas, who'll likely resist violently, and that is going to be ugly (see also 1922 Irish Civil War).
Do you believe in full right of return, including Palestinians who fled to neighboring countries? Because that would immediately turn the area to 75/25% Muslim/Jewish. This is obviously a non-starter for Israel. The country would become an Islamic caliphate within minutes.
I mean, you're basically asking me to pop the bonnet on the Good Friday agreement and get deep into nuts and bolts of whether that engine could be used in the Israel-Palestine conflict car.
In short, strong constitutional protections both on an individual and community level, mandatory cross-community voting, and a power-sharing executive would prevent the 'a single election results in a government that never holds another and imposes Islamic rule' outcome.
Note that the one-state solution does away with the right/claim of return. All citizens within the new state would be citizens of the new state (NS). Likely, those living abroad as refugees without another citizenship would also become citizens of the NS (since it is illegal to make someone stateless).
I'm assuming Jewish Israeli's would wish to keep the 'law of return' so the NS would remain a 'place to run to' without restriction for all Jews, which would presumably have to be extended to all Palestinians as well. But that doesn't have anything to do with the right of return as Palestinians currently claim it, and it would in fact extend enough beyond the right of return claim that it would subsume it.
That's one of the attractions of a single-state solution, it's not necessary to unpick all the details around the right of return issue.
And... it's worth noting that the scenario where you really could end up with a Caliphate is where the Palestinians take their right of return claim to some international court or body which then requires Israel to readmit them without restriction (i.e. without the buttressing structure of something like the Good Friday agreement).
"Please tell me if there's a different widely-held position in US politics today with comparable consequences."
Police abolitionism seems like an obvious candidate.
"You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine."
The anti-war left did do a lot of protests against the war in Yemen. A number of Pro-Palestinian groups even added their signatures to petitions against the war.
What was different about Yemen and Syria was that those conflicts cut across sectarian lines that also divide Western Arab and Muslim communities, so those communities weren't as united as they are when it's a non-Muslim Western country/Western ally bombing Muslim Arabs, as was the case in Iraq and Israel/Palestine (Afghanistan was complicated by the US having been unquestionably attacked first). Basic diaspora tribalism, the same thing that, as Matt Y discusses in this article, leads many American Jews to be reflexively defensive about Israel, or leads Armenian and Azerbaijani-Americans to get into a brawl on a Los Angeles street over events on the other side of the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgX3XHjkIJs).
But this discussion is specifically about the Western *left*, not Western Arabs and Muslims, many of whom are cross-pressured conservatives.
I was thinking about police abolitionism as well, actually. But that's a case where I think if anything even remotely like it were implemented, the problems would manifest so quickly that you'd get the National Guard are something called in to restore order and things would quickly revert more or less to the status quo. Unfortunately, in interstate/interethnic conflict, there's no single military to appeal to.
I agree that other conflicts in the Arab world cut against sectarian lines, so there isn't a massive religious constituency to draw attention to it. But also, that's kind of the point. Most of the time, people's reaction is "there's violence somewhere in the world, seems bad and complicated, probably not worth my time." But then a conflict breaks out involving the Jews, and many people on the left (perhaps following their Arab/Muslim "allies") jump to "well clearly the Jews are committing genocide." I'm gonna go ahead and venture that there wasn't as much interest in those Yemen protests you mention.
> "Afghanistan was complicated by the US having been unquestionably attacked first." This is one of the things that upsets me most about the current display of support for Hamas. We just witnessed the most deadly terrorist attack on a Western-aligned country since 9/11, and people's reaction is "immediate ceasefire." Which to me implies a fundamental denial of Israel's presumptive right to self-defense, which is to say, very existence.
Iraq 2003-2011 saw protests of a similar scale if not even larger. The relevant factor here isn't "Jews", it's "non-Muslim and non-Arab people occupying and/or bombing Arab Muslims outside of either intervening in a sectarian civil war or in service of a cause that a majority of Muslim Arabs actually agree with". (And even in IE Gulf War 1 there were complaints about the way in which America conducted that war, bombing civilian infrastructure and so on.)
I've heard that the Kashmir issue gets a significant amount of attention in the UK, where a lot of local Muslims are South Asian, and local left-wingers can claim historical responsibility and so on. For example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JV7g4Jqfjg0
> This is one of the things that upsets me most about the current display of support for Hamas. We just witnessed the most deadly terrorist attack on a Western-aligned country since 9/11, and people's reaction is "immediate ceasefire." Which to me implies a fundamental denial of Israel's presumptive right to self-defense, which is to say, very existence.
Israel and Palestine were already at war, and had been for a very long time. Even looking at Gaza in isolation, maintaining a naval and air blockade for 16 years is generally considered an act of war. Then there was the occupation of the West Bank, with regular land confiscations, home demolitions, etc. Try to argue over who started it, and you end up bringing up things that happened many decades ago.
Bin Laden's stated primary causus beli was US military bases in Saudi Arabia. A much harder sell outside of his own esoteric belief system.
And even with all of the above taken into account, it seems worth noting that total civilian deaths of the war in Afghanistan over 20 years in a country with a population of 20-40 million were around 46,000 (https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022), whereas Israel has killed at least several thousand civilians in Gaza, with a population of 2.3 million people, in a little over a month. The March 2003 invasion of Iraq had a similar civilian death rate (7000-8000 in 3 weeks), in a full scale invasion of a country of 29 million people, and again that war did draw widespread condemnation and protest. The per-capita level of death and destruction in this particular war is, in fact, unusually high.
The Iraq war was prosecuted by the US, which is a much better reason for protests in the US.
Israel and Palestine were already at war in some sense, but a ceasefire was in effect on 10/6. The idea that you would go back to that status quo is quite frankly offensive after the events of 10/7.
It is no doubt true and incredibly sad that the civilian death toll is quite high in Gaza (just how high is impossible to know at this point given that we're relying on Hamas statistics that can't be confirmed by outside observers). But it's also a consequence of Hamas intentionally embedding itself within civilian areas and actively preventing evacuation of said civilians despite repeated warnings and weeks of notice. I realize that's little comfort to civilians whose family members are killed in the crossfire. But as outside observers we should remember which group has tried to increase civilian deaths, and which has tried to minimize them
Leaving aside obvious questions about aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean, there were numerous large protests against the Iraq War outside of the US and other countries that participated in it, including the Guiness Book of World Records' largest anti-war protest in history in Rome in February 2003, with an estimated 3 million attendees, as well as numerous large protests in many Muslim-majority countries. This Wikipedia article includes a non-comprehensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
It seems obvious to me that it’s much harder for the public to get interested when the people fighting each other are the same color. Yugoslavia, Armenia, Syria, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Yemen. Not many people realize Israelis and Palestinians are the same color.
Maybe that’s the solution — we widely share this information, and everyone gets confused and bored.
"Ethnic Armenians are being cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh essentially as I type this."
Is kind of a strange example to use given Israel's extensive arm sales to Azerbaijan. Quoting CNN:
"Azerbaijan and Israel are close military partners. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), more than 60% of Azerbaijani weapons imports came from Israel between 2017 and 2020, making up 13% of Israeli exports during the same period. SIPRI research reveals that Azerbaijan purchased a wide variety of drones, missiles, and mortars from Israel between 2010 and 2020.
However, according to SIPRI senior researcher Pieter Wezeman, certain specifics are unknown about the extent of the ongoing Azerbaijani-Israeli weapons trade.
“We had quite some information before 2020 and then it stops,” Wezeman said. “And that doesn’t really make sense because in 2020 Azerbaijan used a significant amount of its equipment… Most likely they have continued their relationship with Israel, but that’s about as far as we know.”
The trade is believed to be particularly active in periods just before Azerbaijan has gone to war. A March 2023 investigative report by Haaretz found that flights by an Azerbaijani airline between Baku and Ovda air base, the only airport in Israel through which explosives can be flown, spiked in the months just before Azerbaijan attacked separatist positions in Karabakh in September 2020.
Likewise, Haaretz reported in mid-September that the same company flew between Baku and Ovda less than a week before Azerbaijan began its latest assault in Nagorno-Karabakh. CNN reached out to the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense and the airline in question, but did not receive a response. The Israeli Ministry of Defense, which oversees Ovda Airport, had no comment.
“We don’t know what was on board, but very likely it is something related to the military equipment that Israel already has supplied to Azerbaijan before,” Wezeman said."
The relative lack of attention that this issue got is, IMHO, evidence that it is not, in fact, the involvement of Israel or Jews that is the most important explanatory factor.
(1) was mostly directed at people who already accept the premise that it would lead to bloodshed on an unacceptable scale. I'm reluctant to go down the rabbit hole here actually arguing that point, but here's the one thing I'll say about it. South African apartheid did not have a strong religious dimension to it. Yes, you had decades of violence, but you also had a leader in Nelson Mandela who could credibly disavow violence and enjoyed widespread support. Hamas, on the other hand, is a jihadist movement. Here's an excerpt from its charter, quoting a hadith:
"The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"
While Hamas appears to be unpopular in Gaza due to corruption (not its stance toward Israel), polls suggest that it would almost certainly win if free elections were held in the West Bank. Its whole reason for existence is the expulsion and/or genocide of the Jews in Israel. This is not an unpopular opinion in the Palestinian territories.
(2) There are many reasons. Evangelicals have their own weird eschatological reasons that I don't really understand. The national security apparatus realizes that the Middle East is a dangerous place with imperial ambitions that actually believes what it says and wants to end the Western, liberal international order, and Israel is a critical ally in that fight. And I'm invested because I'm Jewish, and I'm also a secular, liberal Zionist.
Incidentally, that last point underlies my response to (1). Because even if it were true that a peaceful one-state solution were possible (which, I repeat, it is emphatically not), it would mean abandoning the dream of self-determination for the Jewish people, which could only be secured in a democratic, majority-Jewish state. In the same way, I desire self determination for Palestinian Arabs within their own future state, and for the 22 existing Arab states (many of which sadly deprive their citizens of that right with brutal oppression), and for the 50-some Muslim majority nations (ditto).
I am old enough to remember the days when advanced thinking in the Arab world was not about self-determination but about unification of all the Arabs. Nasser was big on that. What is self-determination among people whose primary identity is as Muslims and Arabs and whose national existence was created to make war on the Jews?
That's a good question. I genuinely don't know. Obviously there are many Israelis who say there are plenty of Arab states, Palestine is essentially coextensive with (Trans)Jordan, etc. etc. But clearly there is no turning back the clock on the Palestinian national movement, so all we can hope now is that it is sublimated into something less violent and more conducive to peaceful long-term coexistence.
No, there is another possibility, which is that the Palestinians will finally fuck up so bad that some other country will beat it out of them to end the war quickly. After which the survivors will understand what a disaster this war has been. They will become peaceful people like the Japanese and they will make a future for their grandchildren. Numerous things will finally become possible. It is very harsh but options have narrowed so much that this may be the only path left for peace. Hamas have put the world on a knifes edge now. If a big shooting war with a draft breaks out, literally anything could happen. The Palestinians are in the crosshairs of history and they don’t seem to know it.
1. My understanding is that their more recent update never actually renounces the 1988 charter explicitly. Also, take a look at some of the 10/7 footage to see how they feel about murdering Jews (answer: positively ecstatic).
2. Clearly the inequality is a huge driver behind people's intuitions. I just think it's more complicated than that. "The party with less power deserves are sympathies" is a reasonable heuristic to start with, but it's far from the end-all be-all.
I wonder if part of the increasing hostility of the the secular left against the state of Israel reflects that conservatives and white evangelicals have become such partisan and one eyed supporters of it. Perhaps that's a task for historians but I think it all too probable that it has strengthened the hostility.
There's the weird twist of the antisemites who are pro-Israel. By which I mean many in the Christian fundamentalist community, who look forward to the death of the vast majority of Jews and the forced conversion of the remaining 144,000 during the tribulation.
I think there are other frameworks to understand this too. Like the disharmony between stated and revealed preference.
Some people might not express animus and bigotry in surveys, but then reveal it when they show a lack of concern for truth (like the total disregard for physical security concerns of Jews) and magical thinking that runs counter to evidence. The choice to show selective outrage at one tragedy while disregarding larger and more horrendous crimes that are both geographically and temporally proximate suggests there is something underlying that makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict salient.
I hate Bibi. I loathe Likud’s “mowing the grass” strategy and West Bank settlements. I am not chanting “from river to sea.” I don’t say Israel is an illegitimate state. I don’t debase the word “genocide.” People who choose to speak these words and choose to hold theses ideas are making a choice. We can interpret those choices.
We cannot know motive unless someone states it truthfully. We can observe choices and what ideas they find salient and what ideas they discard or ignore.
The problem is that we cannot determine whether animus, intellectual laziness, or in-group signaling are driving this. We cannot determine if motivations are antisemitic, but we can determine if actions are antisemitic.
People often conflate actions with intent, like some folks assert that failing to support “defund the police” means the moral character of someone is inherently racist. This type of reasoning is what MattY is critiquing.
You can identify antisemitism as well as any kind of racism and should apply the same criteria. If you do you’ll see the campus left is steeped in it. If you refuse to do so only for antisemitism while accepting it for all other racism question is why?
There's a common tactic in leftish spaces of implying your opponent is racist to win fights. People will usually back off or switch to trying to prove they're not racist, or switch to trying to trying to show that the other side is racist, all of which get away from clarity and truth. I appreciate this article because I feel like something similar is happening with the concept of antisemitism, and we need to push back against this way of doing things in all its forms.
But, I don't have to believe that large numbers of people in higher education are racist against Asians to believe that their ideology is leading to injustice towards Asians. I try not to be influenced by anecdotes, but the stories I see about things pro-Palestinian protestors are getting away with on campus makes me wonder if the administrators, whether or not they personally are antisemitic, are running their institutions in a way that is unfair to Jewish students.
If an ideology leads to its proponents behaving unjustly, I think that's worth pointing out.
I think Asians are something of a threat to a lot of Left ideologies about race and victimhood. Here's this group that faced enormous prejudice in America-- internment camps and the Alien Land Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act may not be on the level of slavery, but they represent enormous amounts of historic state-imposed bigotry-- and yet they do incredibly well and in fact have surpassed whites in any number of "objective" measures such as test scores and wealth building.
Which raises the question, why are they doing better than other groups? Now, there are answers to this that are compatible with Left-wing thought, such as differential access to capital, but it's also kind of obvious that even if we leave aside possible genetic explanations (as I would strongly advocate we should), there are some pretty obvious cultural explanations that aren't the sorts of things that Lefties like to talk about.
As a result of this, Lefty theorists end up saying some really embarrassing things about Asians-- really, they're "white adjacent"?-- ignoring mass Asian opinion in favor of the few elite Lefty Asians who are already in the door and don't mind a ton of gatekeeping, focusing on the few acts of anti-Asian racism of whites and ignoring the many acts of non-whites, or just writing them out of the story entirely (how many discussions of affirmative action have you seen that focus solely on stuff like the history of the Freedmen's Bureau and don't even mention Asians?).
None of it, I would say, is exactly racism. But it's all kind of ugly.
Internment for Japanese-Americans is a particularly critical detail because not only was it obviously massively discriminatory, but it effectively dialed most Japanese-American households' accumulated wealth down to zero. (I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if average and median household wealth for Japanese-Americans in 1946 was below that of black Americans.) Japanese-Americans, however, completely recovered from that in less than 20 years -- i.e., there was no "intergenerational wealth" issue, people literally built back their lives within their lifetimes by and large -- and I believe surpassed median white American household wealth within 20 or so years after that.
The Japanese internment was a panic move with which the courts refused to interfere because it was wartime. We were later sorry about that, and apologized and paid reparations but in the context that the Japanese Americans were 100 percent loyal to their country. Their young men volunteered to fight in the US Army starting within a few weeks of Pearl Harbor and of the thousands of Hawaiian Japanese handling top secret signals traffic there was not a single instance of disloyalty.
I read a really fascinating book on the Great Migration of blacks from the Jim Crow South (The Warmth of Other Suns). It outlined the incredible racism black people faced, not just in the South but the North and West as well.
But. When explaining how other white immigrants were able to grab a piece of the American Dream, it said that other immigrants could change their names and pass, completely ignoring that Asians can’t do that.
But do they celebrate massacres of Asians? Do most of them come from cultures with long anti Asian tradition and institutions infamous for national Asian discrimination ? Do they go on to accuse Asian students of the actions of Asian countries? Demand special loyalty oaths from them to allow them to progressive spaces etc? There is something to the analogy but only so much. The campus left goes far beyond that with regards to Jews.
1) antizionists rarely criticize Israeli policy. They criticize Israeli legitimacy. That's why the West Bank settlements seem irrelevant. When they chant against Israelis as settlers, they're talking about *all* Israelis.
2) much of the criticism of Israel is also rooted in an idea that there is no particular need for a guarantee against Jew hatred worldwide. Given two thousand years of history, that seems wildly moronic. So people who are indifferent to the need for special protections against Jew hatred are either (a) ignorant of that history (rarely true), (b) morons, or (c) engaging in motivated thinking. That motivated thinking may take many different flavors, but they can all reasonably be called antisemitic.
This is my issue with the article as well. I think Matt’s larger point is a good one: that Israel’s actions do affect its reputation and that criticizing Israel or having a bad view of it is not by definition anti-semitism.
That said, if ONLY Israel’s actions affect your opinion of the I/P conflict and not the Palestinians’, if you constantly spread lies or dangerous hyperbole exclusively at Israel’s expense, if you hold Israel to a standard that you hold no other country to, and if Israel is the only country in the world that you completely delegitimize and believe should be dismantled (or even believe that it doesn’t count as a country), than I think it’s hard to argue that anti-semitism doesn’t play a role in your views. Sure you could chalk all that up to bad takes or general stupidity, but if the Jewish state is the only one that you’re selectively stupid about, than I think it’s somewhat naive to think that this is all just a misguided response to the Netanyahu administration (which I agree has been awful).
The left isnt chanting to end the settlements. It’s chanting to end Israel.
I think your first point is too categorical about opposition to Israel. Or, maybe it's true of ideological antizionists, but it supposes that critics of Israel are broadly "antizionists" in this sense. I am one guy who criticizes the West Bank settlements but believes in Israel's legitimacy; there are lots of other people with that stance, including in this comment section and in Israel. That said, I agree with you that denying Israeli legitimacy is anti-Semitic since it relies on a standard for legitimacy that almost no one applies consistently.
Young white liberals are not exactly anti-Semitic. But many of their Muslim and Arab peers are absolutely anti-Semitic, in the wildest and most extreme way that would not have shamed Germans in the 1930s. And the young liberals are their collaborators, enabling them.
This exactly. If you support bad people you are bad.
Exact same argument as all cops are bad. If you vote for and pay money to the thuggish police union then you support their racist illegal policies. People can't wash their hands.
There is another option for determining if anti-Israel rhetoric and arguments is rooted in antisemitism besides 1) it's bad for the Jews so it's antisemitic or 2) there is other evidence of antisemitic intent. That is, do you deny only Jews the right to have a state of thier own (i.e., Zionism). If you do, there is strong evidence that antisemitism is involved. After all, we Jews have a particularly strong case for a state of our own, having been (as Hakim Jeffries pointed out at the March for Israel yesterday) expelled from so many countries (and otherwise very badly mistreated) over so many centuries, and having such a long history of connection to the land of Israel.
Honestly this comes across that you’ve just found a way to convince yourself it’s illegitimate to oppose Israel. There are separatists in tons of places and in basically every case the international community supports fair treatment of minorities but not state creation because it risks a ton of violence. As has proven the case in Israel.
I'm not sure "basically every" is right here, there are plenty of recent examples of separatists getting their own state (East Timor, Western Sahara, whatever). Now, why the international community decided that East Timor should get its own state but West Papua or Aceh shouldn't? IDK, I'm not an Indonesia scholar but someone probably has some ideas (the massive global influence of Portugal maybe?).
And of course, there is the fact that we are talking about an existing state. Is this the only homeland you are seeking to eliminate? Even stronger evidence of antisemitism than if we were talking about whether a group of people should be able to form their own state.
I don't think a group of people who are a minority everywhere (as Jews were and Roma are) are entitled to make themselves a majority somewhere and form a state.
But, having done so, I think they are entitled to continue having a state. Ethnic cleansing is wrong, but having done it, you can't "reverse it", you can't "not kick someone off their land", you can only revert the land to the heir of the previous owner and kick off the current owner. And that's not reversing ethnic cleansing, that's repeating it.
Nice how that “ethnic cleansing” thing just flowed right out of your sentence. The Palestinians were certainly displaced by the war of 1948 that took place right at their homes, but ethnic cleansing? By Jews? Hard to really make this case on facts and especially since those Arabs who did not flee are still there and are Israeli citizens. Now Arabs, that’s another thing. It’s what they tried and failed to do in that war. A disturbingly high proportion are still in favor.
To quote from the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the Nakba - not an ideal source, but one with sources that you can check:
"the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 villages by Zionist militias and, later, the Israeli army"
Just because not all Palestinians were driven out doesn't mean that none were - and it's a lot more than that; when about 90% of the population flees, that just doesn't happen without a lot of violence.
But even regardless, if Palestinians were only, as you admit "displaced by the war of 1948 that took place right at their homes" and then not allowed back, when Jews who were so displaced were allowed back (thanks to the Law of Return, which Palestinians do not have access to), then how is that other than ethnic cleansing? If you drive people out of their homes and then selectively let them back based on ethnicity, what other reasonable name is there for that?
Come now. Surely you must know that controversial topics attract a lot of back and forth editing on Wikipedia with no checking. They have flame wars a mile long in the editing record. What it says today, it could say the opposite tomorrow. All it shows is that Palestinians and their supporters are good at propaganda which we already know.
There are various legends and self-interested claims about the Nakba. Some say they were encouraged (ordered) to leave by their leadership, with the promise that they could come back when the Arab armies had killed all the Jews. Radio broadcasts, pronouncements and other things to this effect have been documented. Some also say that Jewish militias did it. That (on a small scale) has also been documented. And, there are contemporary accounts (and photographs) of Arab peasants just picking up and hitting the roads to get away from the fighting. These things are not mutually exclusive. I think that all three of those happened to varying degrees. It would have to be, to add up to that many people.
There is a big conceptual difference between "driven off the land in a war between the Jews and the Arabs" and "driven off the land by the Jews." That is a pretty breathtaking rhetorical move, especially given that the Arabs started that war (openly and proudly - also well documented). You need to have a prejudice going in to make that move.
In any case, "responsibility" is a meaningless concept here. It was the first phase of a long, long war, in which the Arabs failed to achieve their objectives. Who knows if the Israelis might have let the Palestinian Arabs back, if the war had actually ended then and the Arabs made peace? But in fact, the Arabs didn't make peace. The Arab leadership instead founded the PFLP and kept fighting. They are fighting still. The war continues to this very day and hour. So the matter of what happens after the peace is as yet untested.
We do know that many Arabs did not flee, and their descendants are 20% of the Israeli population today. It seems to me that if the Israeli Jews were bent on ethnic cleansing, they would not have failed to drive those people out, too. The distinction is, the Israel Arabs kept the peace and the others did not.
Who lets a mortal enemy into their own house, because their neighbors tell them they should? This is what is meant by "applying standards to Israel that aren't applied to other people." "Ethnic cleansing", like "genocide" is a swear word that the Palestinians use to get attention for their cause (which intends that very thing), from largely ignorant people worldwide. For the rest of the world to take sides and go along with this blood libel - well, that is more than shameful.
I agree with you on the facts, but I do think ethnic cleansing is incorrect, or unnecessarily inflammatory. We generally used “expelled” in these types of situations. I’ve mentioned before one of my close friends is Indian, and he was expelled from Uganda on the basis of his race.
We could argue whether Israel should have been created but the fact is it exists and a surprising amount of people have no problem ethnically cleansing Jews from a state that has existed for several generations based on the justification that the current inhabitants live there because of ethnic cleansing.
I think that's fine practically speaking. I disagree with you about the history–I think Zionism was probably far and above the most justified and admirable "ism" of the 20th century–but that doesn't really matter for determining contemporary policy.
I have a hell of a lot of time for Jewish people who wanted to go to the land of Canaan and live somewhere where they would have the protection of the state and to establish a safe place where every Jew could go regardless, and all the more so after the Shoah.
I don't think they had the right to drive Palestinians out of their homes (as distinct from buying them out which they absolutely had the right to do), and they should have the right to a state that will welcome and protect Jews. But the determination that that should be a Jewish state that means that non-Jews are, by the nature of saying that it's a Jewish state, some sort of second-class citizen at best has always rubbed me the wrong way.
But I can absolutely understand why Jewish people don't feel safe in a state ruled by non-Jews regardless of the constitutional and other guarantees, and incorporating the entire West Bank and Gaza into Israel and accepting all the residents there as citizens (ie the one-state solution where the one state is Israel) would result in 40% of the Knesset being the Arab parties, and it would take an awful lot of reconciliation before most Israelis would feel safe under those conditions.
I can see where you got the number, but only about 7.5 of Israel's 9.2 million population are actually Jewish, the balance are Israeli Palestinians who didn't flee during the Nakba and a grab-bag of minority groups (like Christians), so a one-state solution would be about 45% Jewish, 50% Palestinian, and 5% other. But see the Good Friday agreement for how this could be managed/has been managed on the island of Ireland.
There's also no need to give up on Israel as the Jewish homeland in a one state solution. It just also needs to be the homeland of the Palestinian people. And both peoples, wherever they live, could have an unrestricted right of immigration based on descent (my understanding is the concept of Israel as a 'place to run to' is an important concept for the Israel as a state.
>> But the determination that that should be a Jewish state that means that non-Jews are, by the nature of saying that it's a Jewish state, some sort of second-class citizen at best has always rubbed me the wrong way.
I don’t think it’s meant to make anyone second class. In fact I think Israel’s Declaration of Independence goes out of its way state full equality as a core principle of the state. The record has admittedly been mixed but that need not be a permanent state of affairs and some things in fact improved (eg education gaps between Israeli Jews and Arabs, Arabs in positions of power and prestige) even as others have worsened (tolerance for racist political discourse).
It's exactly the same claim to self-determination as white people in the USA or Canada or Australia or New Zealand, or Unionists in Northern Ireland, or Turks in Turkey.
Granted that that happened in the early 90s, but I bet if you polled anti-zionists you’d find a substantial number would say that South Africa abolishing Apartheid was a good thing. Didn’t that have the effect of denying white Afrikaners a then-extant homeland to at least the same extent that making Israel a binational state of everyone living in historical Mandate Palestine would for Jews?
First, white Afrikaners didn’t have a two thousand year history of persecution. They were differently situated than the Jews (or Kurds or Armenians, for that matter) in terms of the imperative of a state for self protection.
Second, the Afrikaners didn’t have any black equal citizens; the entire premise was racist exclusion, not self-determination. Israel grants equal rights to all citizens.
Third, the Afrikaners hadn’t made multiple offers of statehood that were met by violence.
Everything is different from everything else, but none of these is an argument that Afrikaners didn’t have a state in South Africa that they lost when Apartheid was abolished.
And your first argument is just a species of Micah’s (1): Jews need a state, anti-Zionism would deny them one, therefore anti-Zionism is objectively antisemitic. (And I bet that an Afrikaner could tell you a whole history of his people’s sufferings, from the Huguenot persecution in Europe that led them to move to Africa in the first place to being rounded up in concentration camps—so called—during the Boer Wars. Maybe you don’t think that makes them as deserving as Jews, but maybe he’d think they rate with the Armenians or Kurds?)
The Boers are not remotely similar to the Kurds or Armenians. The Boers were Dutch farmers who were taken to the cape by the Dutch East India Company to live in a Dutch colony. Afrikaans is a Dutch dialect. Boer is Dutch for farmer. Boers derived entirely from Dutch colonialism. Certainly they developed their own culture and suffered atrocities in their wars with the British. But they are not a historically oppressed group in any way comparable to what the Armenians and Kurds suffered.
Two things: One, many, if not most of the black people in South Africa are descended from people who migrated there from other parts of Africa, in large part *after* the Afrikaners came there. Two, in my view, the "historical oppression" argument is always, and everywhere, something that angry and morally deficient people say to whitewash and excuse their own desire to oppress people they don't like in the here and now. This is certainly true of the South African government, which is a basket case that that has systematically excluded white South Africans from a large part of the economy. The only reason they haven't confiscated their land already is that they rely on them to keep the whole country from starving. A lot of Afrikaners are desperate to emigrate, but doors are prejudicially closed to them. Maybe the Americans bring all these "colonialists" here, where they would make fine, productive, loyal citizens. That would be good for them, but very bad for South Africa.
I actually think it would have been fine if SA had simply been a little white state with a 20% black population that was treated equally. Saying the population *must* be majority white would obviously be problematic, but Afrikaners have much less of a persecution claim, and they never went in with the intention to build an equal state. The problem was the Apartheid. Israel and Palestine can have two states.
And with respect to the second, you could argue that the intermediate status of Indians and “coloureds” under apartheid was at least broadly analogous to the citizenship granted to Palestinian citizens of Israel—inferior to that given Jewish citizens, but clearly superior to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza.
Except this literally is not true. Citizens of Israel have equal rights. Arab Israelis vote, serve in parliament and the judiciary, and have every other civil right. Certainly there’s discrimination, just like minorities face in literally every other democracy.
"Didn’t that have the effect of denying white Afrikaners a then-extant homeland?"
No, because black South Africans wanted to be South African. It changed the nature of what being "South African" meant, but it didn't eliminate South Africa as a homeland for the Afrikaans.
But polling and policy decisions repeatedly show that most Palestinians do not want to be Israeli, even if that meant a magical binational state.
Do you believe in a national homeland for white Southerners? I don’t have a national homeland!! I’m forced to vote in elections where people with other identities have way too much influence. Why can’t I live in a national homeland for white Southerners, and maybe have a wee little guest worker program so someone can mow my lawn and clean my house? Why do you hate white Southerners so much?
I do believe in a state for Kurds, to take another example. But you ignored the reasons why it is particularly appropriate for Jews to have a homeland in Israel.
I don’t what your level of factual knowledge is or isn’t. I’m only pointing out that your opinion is in fact only an opinion. You don’t need to impress anybody - I’m confident nobody here is in favor of slavery or secession or wishes the South had won.
I mean, if the South had won the war, the North would have had to deal with it. 🤷🏻♀️ You’d probably end up with something like East/West Germany because all the black people (and poor whites) would constantly try to escape.
Only a damn Yankee would say that. You clearly didn’t have a good Southern upbringing. (But I’m old enough to remember when it was a real thing and that was 100 years after the event)
There isn’t much of an argument against Jews having a state in principle but it can’t be implemented in practice without dispossessing or even oppressing other people. The 1947 partition and most peace plans aim to keep that to a minimum, but it’s unavoidable.
"do you deny only Jews the right to have a state of thier own"
What are some other examples of comparable stateless people that they should deny a homeland to in order to prove their bona fides on this? I'm not sure there are that many leftists hypocritically hyping up Kurdish independence or a Hmong home state.
Well, "Free Tibet" was a cause celebre on the Left for a while. I think the activism about East Timor came from the Left as well? But you're right that the Left is not advocating for a policy of ethnic self-determination in every case (e.g. there was a lot of left-wing skepticism about our intervention on behalf of the Kosovars).
"I think the activism about East Timor came from the Left as well?"
Calling upon my vast knowledge from having written a paper on East Timor in a high school class 30+ years ago (which to be fair, probably actually is enough to put me in at least the 75th+ percentile of Americans for knowledge about East Timor), I absolutely agree that activism about East Timor was pretty much exclusively left/progressive driven, but I think a huge part of that was because being pro-Timorese independence was the "anti-American" position since the Ford administration had blessed the Indonesian invasion in 1975 for anti-communist reasons.
Yes, I think that's a good point, just as "Free Tibet" was partly due to the Left wanting to throw wrenches into the neoliberal rapprochement with China developing in the 90's (seems like the Left was correct on this one!).
"Free Tibet" strikes me as having largely come from a much different side of leftism, namely the types of "leftists" who are into woo-woo spirituality, and it mostly seems to have been driven by the uniquely effective activism of the Dalai Lama more than anything. Also that shit's ancient, I don't think any of the new generation of campus activists even know anything about it.
The woo is part of it; I also think that the Left wasn't inclined to view China favorably, or as "enemy of my enemy," since (as I mentioned in a comment above) at the time we were trying to build better trade relations with them, so making a big deal about China in Tibet was a way of being anti-neoliberal. The point is that the Left, like most factions, uses independence, self-determination, and sovereignty in an ad hoc way rather than as consistent principles.
Ethnic groups demand and receive their own states all the time. We take it for granted now that Yugoslavia could never work, and that’s entirely based on ethnic nationalist claims. Many of the problems in Africa snd the Middle East arise from arbitrarily established borders that don’t correspond to ethnic/linguistic lines.
IDK, they made Yugoslavia work for almost 75 years, that's almost as long as Israel has existed. One can easily imagine it having worked longer with some better leadership and some other left turns in history. There are plenty of other examples of multi-ethnic/multi-linguistic populations like Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, even India to some extent.
Yugoslavia survived as a dictatorship. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of the pluralistic secular democratic state, and bravo to countries that pull it off. I just don’t think one can plausibly argue that nation states based on *nations* are somehow deviant. Especially if they’re democracies that give full rights to minorities.
Useful thing about comments is it can help to clarify arguments. Important point I initially forgot to mention was that we are talking about an existing state.
Useful thing about comments is it can help to clarify arguments. Important point I initially forgot to mention was that we are talking about an existing state.
Very important point. Ultimately the historic arguments matter much less to me than the fact that two peoples are there, they aren’t going anywhere, and they both have strong nationalisms and want sovereignty.
In your tweet yesterday (https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1724403191071002689) you said, “tomorrow I will reveal which criticisms of Israel are the antisemitic ones.” But this piece doesn’t do that, and even if you were joking I think it would be stronger if it did. You seem to be suggesting we can *only* tell that attacks on Israel are anti-Semitic if we can show the attacker has other, anti-Semitic views independent of Israel. I think we can be more analytical than that.
Here’s an example: there’s a secular Jewish organization here in LA called The Workmen’s Circle. 10 or 15 years ago, someone tagged a mural on their wall with “Free Palestine.” “Free Palestine” is not, in itself, an anti-Semitic thing to say, even though it can be construed as an attack on Israel. But why did the graffitist choose this mural to tag with it? Obviously, because it’s on the wall of an organization that identifies as Jewish, and the tagger thought that made it fair game for that critique. To me that is obvious, collective-guilt anti-Semitism. I’m curious to know if any of the other attacks on Israel strike Matt in similar ways.
I also think the Medicaid expansion comparison is not apropos because Matt is comparing disparate effects of a policy with disparate *discourse* about a nation and a people, and discourse is a much more reliable guide to one’s attitudes and motivations. When Reagan inveighed against urban “welfare queens,” or when a Reagan spokesperson responded to a question about AIDS with “I don’t have it, do you?”, it becomes much easier to say the administration’s stinginess on social and public health spending was specifically due to its problems with groups of people, not with something about the policies themselves.
I think there's a little bit more to untangle here.
- Absolutely the Israeli government deserves massive criticism for its shortsighted and frankly inhuman handling of the Palestine situation since the Israeli center left collapsed. It's a disgrace, and as an American I am humiliated by how the Israeli government took advantage of our support while totally ignoring our request that they stop fucking around with West Bank settlements and their totally cynical support of Hamas in Gaza. I had fantasies of POTUS pulling Bibi into a room and reminding him of who the superpower is in this relationship. We absolutely should have slapped Bibi around a bit and called his bluff about cozying up to Russia/China, who, by the way, totally betrayed him when shit got real again. Major FAFO for the Israeli right and I hope this crisis results in major changes in Israeli politics
- The broad point about young progressives not being any more antisemitic than other groups in American life is absolutely correct. Beyond that, David Frum has been doing a good job deconstructing the "young people no longer support Israel" polling narrative by showing that more than half of younger Americans are either unaware or disinterested in the Gaza conflict, and those that do care support Israel 2-1 over those who do not.
- I'm going to grab a third rail here so buckle up. Going back to the Iraq War, campus leftists and Arab/Muslim student groups have been very friendly, and that alliance deepened during the Trump years. Also during the Trump years, there emerged a zero criticism mindset among campus leftists towards those from any marginalized groups, and this includes Arab/Muslim communities. Here's the third rail: in addition to legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, there is absolutely toxic real honest to God antisemitism among the more radical members of Arab/Muslim student groups, and because campus leftists forbid themselves from criticizing members of marginalized groups, they have basically stood by or even supported (in a "Go off King" kind of way) the harassment of Jewish students and student groups whenever the Israel situation gets hot. The Gaza crisis is the hottest situation since 2006, and I think it is forcing Jewish students as well as non-Jews who are allies and friends of the Jewish community to reconsider their place in campus leftist activity as well as how more radical Arab/Muslim groups fit in campus leftism more generally. The tension has been there for a while, but the realignment is happening now.
"White is bad; jews are white; jews are bad" is the general campus idiocy. I'm gonna push back on the 'anecdote is not data' — personal experience is personal data.
Good point re campus groups.
The amount of kids on my son's university campus, an extremely liberal north east public school, espousing this - are the majority of the marchers; and they are singling out Jewish kids and organizations with intimidation, and actual at this point, low stakes physical violence. There is very definite and active - not 'anti-semitism' - let's call it what it is - Jew hatred. So far some arrests re what i would characterize as low grade assault. But assault nonetheless [another ‘hit him with his own flagpole; like the guy who died; fortunately, didn’t happen to the students who were likewise clobbered]
I live in a liberal north east town. There is an active self-described communist advocacy group here, whose founder is an heir to a media fortune. They have been marching in our town, and harrassing Jewish owned businesses, by ‘flooding’ them (their description) with marchers, from the local college. As they’re marching they’re also yelling death threats to Jews on the streets. And they're training in MMA and have an active gun range on their ‘compound’ in a nearby town. So…is this just anecdote and not to be concerned about? Let’s ask the Jews on my son’s campus; and ask the people in my town.
Several people I hung out with in high school have become full-fledged tankies. As in the Soviets were the good guys in the Cold War and capitalism is inherently racist, all evils stem from capitalism etc. They are making outright antisemitic arguments on social media. People like that are a small minority on the left but they’re often the noisiest and they show up for everything.
They don’t show up to work though.
A magnificent hippy-punch, Mr. Vice President.
Sir, I am a quail.
Bloop bloop.
Do people not get how this hatred and violence in places outside of the Middle East really doesn’t help the Palestinians at all? The goal, as I understand it, is to get the Jews to depart and leave “Greater Palestine” to the Arabs. Not my goal, but whatever. But if the Jews think they are going to be just as hated in America or Europe or wherever they won’t be eager to start packing their bags. What’s the point?
Jews in America - and everywhere else - dont have to spend any time wondering if our neighbors would kill us. What we DO with that ‘free time’, well that’s up to us. Me, I am helpful to my neighbors. And I’d never pack my bags and relocate to Israel or anywhere else, even though! i have the financial wherewithal (from running the media) to do so.
Jews were in “Palestine” continuously; so they’re not going anywhere. Even though ‘history’ is debatable and subjective; it’s worth knowing what the parameters of all sides are and were. Not just the Nakba, but the contemporaneous expulsion of Jews from all the other middle east countries; and to be aware of the carving up of the middle east post Ottomans; and post WW1; Sykes Picot, etc etc.
Jews are going to stay in Israel; there’s no bag packing that’s going to happen. And regardless, they’re there; are we going to ask all the immigrants and their descendants in the US to leave, because of xenophobia? Everyone all over is a colonizer and settler. It’s evolutionary, it’s been ‘human development’ since way before there was writing. We’re here; we’re aggravating; get used to it. Figure out the finances more equitably and then all the bullshit diminishes. [As a side note, why did Arafat die so wealthy? why are the leaders of Hamas & the PA likewise so wealthy? (and how about them US Senators and their excellent stock picking?)]
One of the best takes on this whole pile of bullshitery, is Matt’s Slow Boring from mid October, just after the marauding murder rape raid, referencing the Mexican American War. Same thing, only different.
Don’t disagree with anything you say here. My only point was that it is internally inconsistent to want a bunch of people to leave place X but then also make them feel unwelcome everywhere else. Not likely to work.
Partitioning isn't a great answer (cf Ireland, India/Pakistan, Cyprus, Kosovo, Serbia/Montengergo, etc). But given the alternative?
Isn't the argument about partitioning ALWAYS about the alternative? if you work backwards mentally from "world government" to "sovereign states" because there are groups of people with incompatible politics and just work in that direction forever until you find a somewhat stable equilibrium you probably end up with ethnically partitioned states most of the time. It's not necessarily horrible to not be on the majority side of that, like the Ainu in Japan, but where there's a clear path to having your own geographically contiguous majority it feels like it happens more often than not.
Ultimately the enormous, stable, multiethnic states like the US are both an historical and, to a lesser degree, contemporary oddity. Ethnonational politics remain alive and well almost everywhere, and they're potent politically because a lot of people buy into them. I imagine it's pretty scary to live as an ethnic minority in a lot of places that are still semi-amalgamated - think Kurds in Iraq, for example. Cross-border wars are harder to effectively execute than internal oppression in most cases, and raising the marginal cost of ethnic tensions by establishing separate countries feels like the smart move in many cases - including in some of the ones you list, and especially the Balkans.
The point you’re missing is that none of these haters care about the Palestinian one bit. It’s just a cudgel against Jews.
I was attempting to be charitable about people’s motivations.
In my personal experience; it's not exaggerated. Nor are peoples dislike for any other group other than their own. BUT! because it's an accepted cultural norm to hate/blame/scapegoat jews - a norm which has existed for literally millennia - it's an easy default, it's an easy angerly grumble. Like complaining about the weather, reflexive; and then of course synagogue shootings....well, they got what was coming to them, because. Just because. Just desserts. Etc.
There's no need to exaggerate anything. The very fact that Jews are attacked around the world by Arabs and leftists shows that those pro Hamas (sorry "pro Palestinian") movements are deeply antisemitic, because honestly WTF does attacking a Jewish person living in the UK or the US do for the cause of Palestinian liberation, unless the person who is pro Palestinian agrees with Hamas that it means a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews. Sorry, but these incidents are real, especially on campuses, and this hate shows what this conflict is about.
"There is an active self-described communist advocacy group here, whose founder is an heir to a media fortune."
What is it with these people?? Patty Hearst lives!
Patty Hearst could at least claim Stockholm syndrome / brainwashing. This guy....not.
I have seen things like this happen, although much less extreme/scary. Oddly, not in my own neighborhood, which has a lot of very visibly Jewish people and six synagogues within walking distance, but in more upscale suburban area that has a fair number of Jews, but they are more secular. This suburb is one of the most highly educated in our region, and it is filled with families. There is no college and few young adults living on their own. I feel naive, but I don't understand it at all. Why can't people understand that a mere fact of your identity that you can't help or change has nothing to do with what is happening in Israel?
"Why can't people understand that a mere fact of your identity that you can't help or change..." - well, since we've replaced learning about history and actual events, with identity is everything, and the hierarchy of trauma....everything became identity before all. And since the highest prestige identities are now the ones with the most 'trauma', and also there's a hierarchy of 'righting historic wrongs' and the whole 'antiracist idea that if you are not doing X then you are Y...well then, any connection you can have with the top of the hierarchy makes you look good. Their enemy is your enemy. If their enemy is 'the jews', well then.
Kingston, NY?
Umass Amherst and Berkshires Mass.
Ah yeah I forgot about the Berkshires communist guy. That's my alma mater, so let me know how I can help beat these guys down!
Strong agree, especially on the last point. I was an undergraduate back when anything other than strong support for all Israeli policies was labelled as antisemitic by most campus leftists. Even back then, I attended a SJP event where an external Palestinian speaker basically called for the genocide of Israelis. They shut the event down immediately, but the SJP leadership was really flippant about the whole thing and was unwilling to truly criticize the speaker they invited. It was really shocking, especially in contrast to how aggressive SJP members were about messaging normally.
Re: the "zero criticism" mindset, I find it especially jarring to see the double-standard that exists for social conservatism if it's coming from Christians/Jews or Muslims.
A lot of these folks (IMO, rightly!) care a lot about women's rights, gay rights, etc. and also don't want a society where religion is shoved in your face all the time. They actively fight for these things in the U.S., often against very conservative Evangelical Christians. But... if the people responsible are Muslim, they say you're not allowed to criticize because that is by default Islamophobic.
So when you get something like what happened with the all-Muslim council banning pride flags on city property in Hamtramck, a lot of these folks seem to have no clue what to do, because the homophobic religious social conservatives are Muslim and not Christian. (https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2023/06/14/hamtramck-city-council-ban-lgbtq-pride-flags-property/70318779007/)
There was a reddit post about this the other with a lot of comments, and the overwhelming answer leftists gave is "it's right and good to be supportive of people who hate you".
I said "that's very Christian of you, but I promise you most people do not actually do this when the rubber hits the road".
Link to that loony reddit thread?
Yeah, I think you're right about this, but the important distinction is that leftists in the west are not being actively persecuted by groups they support in the Middle East because they're physically separated and not subject to socially conservative rule emanating from that particular ideology.
If they were actively living in a place where the animating energy behind (as one example) anti-LGBT politics was Islamic and not Christian, they'd have a totally different tune.
Anti Zionist Jews like Matt don't live in Israel, so it's pretty easy to be critical of Israel from afar and dismissive of how genocidal some Palestinians actually are. The irony of the October 7th massacre is that the huge majority of people murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped were on the far left end of Israeli politics - pro peace, pro negotiated solution, working to help Palestinians (such as drive them to hospitals in Israel from the border). I want to see the good progressive folk hold on to their strongly held opinions if their families were massacred.
I think Matt is a Zionist. He believes Israel should exist as a Jewish state. Are you using a different definition?
I think they’d throw LGBTQ people under the bus. White gay men are already getting squeezed out of the coalition because a lot of them are financially successful.
Of course you're right, I just couldn't leave the irony unstated
In re Hamtramck, the main explanation I see from progressives on that is to claim the local Muslims have been agitated into anti-LGBTQism by evil Republicans/conservatives/Christians. (See also the standard claim that, if Hispanic voters are trending Republican at all, it's mostly because of "misinformation" on Spanish-language radio.)
Rather like how they claim American Jews are agitated into liberal Zionism by Republican, conservative, Christian Zionists. "Republicans did it" is the standard explanation for any failure of a group in the Democratic tent to agree with the progressive party line.
I mean, certainly a part of why I hate US’ unconditional support of Israel is that the Christianists are trying to make Revelation happen.
Islamists and Christianists and the neo-Nazis and the Jewish fundamentalists and the Hindu nationalists…they’re all the same, they’re all bad, and they should all be locked in the same cage with a tenth of the food and water they need and lots of weapons with it televised. The cable networks could sell it with the sports package, it would beat most sports and most other reality tv
At some point, however, they'll all turn their ire against the atheists chomping at the bit to watch them fight.
Hence the cage
Who's gonna lock them all in a cage? For that, you'll need secret police -- but, of course, it's to protect "our" democracy. ;-)
Yes utter and complete imbeciles are part of the problem. But I think it goes beyond that.
I've long been surprised that my fellow progressive friends are so intolerant of criticism of Islamist extremism. Years ago I posted this brilliant Onion cartoon and article https://www.theonion.com/no-one-murdered-because-of-this-image-1819573893 and several friends said they were offended because they saw it as Islamophobic, which is mystifying to me. There have been Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus who kill people for perceived religious blasphemy -- those religions are not inherently any better than Islam. But today, for whatever reason, the state of Islamic extremism worldwide is such that an image like this could get you killed, if it included a certain person who I'm literally afraid to even name right now. That's not a criticism of Islam at all, and certainly not an indication of irrational phobia. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that if Christian extremists were killing people for running insulting images of Jesus, all of my progressive friends would be outraged about this -- about the killing, that is, not the images.
This actually fits Matt's thesis pretty well, because a lot of those Arab/Muslim student groups simply aren't very liberal, progressive, or left-wing outside issues affecting them specifically. An important step to fight antisemitism in the United States, then, would be to stop treating "conservatives of color" (which would encompass Black Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam as well as CAIR or your average Arab Student Association) as a left-wing vanguard when they actually have thoroughly center-right policy views.
Never said Matt's thesis was wrong! Super agree on there being valid criticism of Israel and that criticism of Israel does not equal antisemitism. I think his third point arguing that young progressives not being any more antisemitic than other groups of Americans is broadly true but not true in specific, high salience ways.
Yeah I agree with you there. The Left constantly tries to "outflank" normie libs in ways that tend to amplify whatever stupid coalitional decisions the normie libs have made. Urban Democrats let the Nation of Islam inside the tent *at all*, and the Left brings the Nation of Islam into leadership of the Women's March. Progressives and Leftists willfully ignore their own amplification of otherwise objectively right-wing views, how this weakens their coalitions, and how it means they end up tailing the most milquetoast of Democrats that they otherwise despise.
The only problem is that "social justice" (as if supporting genocide of Jews is 'justice') leftists are completely in the pocket of pro Hamas propaganda. Something is wrong with the brains of those on the left engaged in "progressive causes" when it's a litmus test to talk about "Palestine" under the guise of any movement - climate change, social justice, prison reform, etc, etc. How has the left been captured to such an extent by a single conflict, if it isn't due to oil-money astroturfed antisemitism? Even if you believe the numbers from the Hamas-run "ministry of health", 11K dead (with magically no Hamas members, sure) compared to the Syrian civil war? Did you see anyone on the climate change left say a single thing about that far more bloody conflict?
Source for that claim about pro-Palestinian student groups? My experience (limited, but at three college campuses) is that they’re left-wing on all the issues you’d expect.
But he didn't say pro-Palestinian student groups. He said Arab and Muslim student groups. Those are typically not explicitly political and consist largely of cross-pressured "conservatives of color", same as a lot of the Black student groups or Orthodox Jewish student groups.
You seem to contradict Matt and be aware of rising antisemitsm, but you seem to find it necessary to say so after such a long anti Israeli apologia (far more viscerally expressed than your abhorrence of antisemitsm in the us) that one doubts how many people would notice it?
Insightful. Nothing has made me more angry than politicians antid the media lumping all 'pro-Palestinian' demos anti-Israel or pro-Hamas even if they were organized an dominated by those who support a two--state solution or Palestinian civil rights. They don't differentiate the make-up of protesters as American-born or International Students. Pro-Palestine is general enough to covers many shades of ideology and politics.
How insightful. This is exactly why I was questioning the media's lumping together every "pro-Palestinian" demo as anti-Israeli or pro-Hamas. There was, and still is, little distinction between those who are for a two-state solution as a solution to the decades of conflict and those who actually support Hamas s traight up. And how does the latter group break down as American-born or International Students on campus? There also seems to be a lot of 'leftists' who equate Ismail Haniyeh with Nelson Mandela or Patricoops,e Lumumba, leaders of national movements who had the active backing of the vast majority of the people who they pain-stakingly organized on the road. They may have attacked enemy installations and troops but resisted Hamas is a terrorist, false revolutionary group that believes individual or a series of terror attacks will somehow trigger a revolution for independence.
Yes, it souinds like your last point is definitely happening at my alma mater and alums of different ethnic and religious backgrounds are very upset about it ("school is too soft on those making antisemitic comments" AND "school always forefronts Jewish interests and ignores the Arabs/Muslims on campus") . So much so that many are saying they are cutting off donations. I do have concerns about academic freedom, but I am also glad I am not in charge because I have no idea how the administration should deal with this.
easy. don't tolerate any kind of racism, antisemitism very much included. it's a no brainer.
See, I don't think it's easy at all because some people think showing any support for the Palestinians as antisemitic and others see any pro-Israel message as anti-Arab. And students ages 18-22 aren't always known for their nuanced thinking, so any move the administration has made to calm tensions is being seen as support for one side or another.
It is easy. Don’t celebrate massacre, don’t target you colleagues or classmates based on identity (that’s illegal btw) don’t vandalize places of worship (or any place actually) don’t exercise hecklers veto, don’t be a jerk. Capiche?
P.S.
As a university - condemning an atrocity of epic proportions is a good idea, esp of your previous policy has been to forcefully condemn trivialities, otherwise you silenced is telling. Staying silent on only one kind of hate speech and actions of campus is likewise telling. By contrast if you were wiser and adopted (and adhered to!) the Chicago principles long ago then it’s a different story. Double standards are bad, if your standard is too murky to make a call it’s a bad standard.
Not a bad analysis. I’d say your no. 2 and possibly no. 3 are also antisemites. Willful blindness towards the persecution of one also of group suggests animus towards it.
I don't agree with this.
Most people are just largely apathetic towards most other 'distant' groups, but may support or oppose them based on purely selfish motives.
For instance, I dont think that most Chinese people care much about Jews or Palestinians one way or the other...but based on 'enemy of an enemy is a friend' or 'friend of an enemy is an enemy'...their government seems to be indirectly supporting the Palestinians.
(Caveat that what the CCP does w.r.t. geopolitics doesn't necessarily reflect the populace's views.)
my point however was wilfull blindness to what's happening to jews on campus. If you partner up with and support haters, systemically ignoring their hate and their actions it's far to ask if you share their hate. All the more so if it's hard to fathom why you'd partner up with these people in the first place. There is zero in common ideologically between the far left and islamists, excepting anti americanism and anti semitism. Yes, in theory you can be only anti american, not antisemitic, and in bed with islamists. BUT at some point when you partiicipate in theiir antisemtiic chants, support their antisemitic aactivities, go out of your way to shield them in their hate, spreaad their lies, participate in their gaslighting etc. you basically have turned antisemite in acitons and frankly the most reasonable conclusion is that it's also in intent. however your intent doesn't really matter at this point. If you are fine with enabling and promoting aantisemitism you're part of the problem.
The PLO and PFLP were explicitly Marxist until not too long ago.
Sure, they were part of the soviet coalition and made some superficial verbal gestures, with zero actual policy or practice to back it up (By contrast to the zionist left, which actually took socialism more seriously than most) - hence why the far left was always pro palestinian and anti israel antisemtiic (British Jeremy Corbyn is a leftover piece of scum from that era). However now they don't even pretend to be left wing, so the support for them is more baffling, esp seeing that it's far more prevalent, in the us, than the support for the "socialist" palestinian terrorist ever was.
P.S.
It is a further irony that the Kibbutzim who were the chief victims of the Hamas attack were real socialists (by contrast to ivy league campus blabbers who have not the slightest sense of what the term means), and did more to advance human rights and justice for Palestinians and Jews alike than all of the so-called "pro Palestinian" westerners put together.
Governemnts can be cynical. At the same time China is now spreaading antisemitism to its populace and abroad. They may be doing it cyncially and not becaause they "really" believe it, but i doubt the authors of the protocls of the elders of zion "Really" believed it. Enough people exposed to it will believe it, and act upon it.
"And as I've pointed out before, young Gentiles outside of cities like LA and New York are pretty unaware of who Jews even are, and if you try to explain to them that they're historically oppressed, you'll be met with confusion because Jews are White in their minds."
This was kinda/sorta me when I was younger. I lived both just outside New York and in California (briefly, in both cases) as a kid, and my family is originally from New England. Obviously, I knew what Judaism was and that there were Jewish people, but I didn't really know any (that I know of). That said, I grew up in neighborhoods that were predominantly black/hispanic, so I had encountered racism IRL and obviously through media, but when I discovered that anti-semitism was a thing it blew my little noggin off. Racism was always bizarre to me, even as a kid, but then once you find out some people are so racist that they start weeding out *other white people* it's a banananpants crazy concept to take in as a 9 or 10 year old.
Hey, I had some college kid out of the blue tell me in line for snacks at the movie theater that "my rabbi probably wouldn't approve of that hot dog". I'm gonna guess it had to do with my nose. And he wasn't my people.
"Spicy white" as the infamous Clubhouse expression went!
What I'm seeing a lot of is what I've been calling "asemitism": a complete lack of interest in what happens to Israeli Jews, paired with a passionate, impressionistic concern for Palestinian freedom. "Yeah, it'll be tough, but in the end it'll work out somehow. But Palestine must be free, at all costs, whatever those costs happen to be, and I can't be bothered to give the slightest thought to such mysterious matters."
Israeli Jews have plenty of advocates in the halls of Congress. No other group of ~7 million foreigners gets so much tlc from Congress. Not the Uighurs or the Rohingya nor the Kurds nor Turkish Armenians nor any of the other minority groups that are objectively far worse off.
We sent aircraft carriers to the Levant out of concern for Israeli Jews while they were decimating Gaza, and are sending them money even while they are plenty rich enough to retaliate on their own. If Israel were at a actual risk of being driven into the sea, the response would be massive.
Leftists are correct that we should care about Israel much less.
We sent carrier groups because they tend to have a calming influence on other nations. Iran getting active is bad for a lot of people who aren't Israeli Jews.
Therapeutic carrier deployments? Maybe emotional support carriers?
There’s definitely something hilarious in here.
"The US has deployed the CVN-13 'USS Weighted Blanket' battle group to a position off of the cost of Israel..."
It's like a ship name from the Iain M Banks "Culture" universe
I wouldn't know anything about that. Neither would Ethics Gradient.
I don't know if this is actually responsive to what you're saying, but I feel like I'm seeing a common conceptual error here. US aid does not protect Israel from the middle east, hardly so much as it protects the middle east from Israel. It hasn't for decades. The IDF is easily the premiere power in the region, but it's not so powerful as to maintain the existing borders without international intervention. The war Israel would be forced into fighting, a war it would win, if it actually had to maintain a sort of defensible contiguous geography without US guarantied borders would be vast orders of magnitude more horrific than anything that's happened in the region to date. We're basically talking about turning all of Israel/Jordan/Lebanon/Egypt, maybe Iran too, into Aleppo. Cutting Israel lose would be legitimately catastrophic.
I don't think the nearby Arab states have any interest in fighting Israel. They turned their backs on the Palestinians long ago. This could radically change and push Israel to a region-wide war, but things can always change anywhere. I think we're closer to the US invading Mexico than Israel is to invading Jordan.
What exactly keeps Lebanon/Syria from dancing to Iran's tune without a US presence? When Israel starts doing to Hezbollah what it's currently doing to Hamas how long can the others stay in the sidelines?
What is the US's vital interest in Lebanon/Syria?
Not that much. There's some medium/long term downside to just washing our hands and letting things really deteriorate over there, but it's probably not a huge deal for US based individuals. It would really suck a whole hell of a lot for people over there though, and the odds we'd actually sit on the sidelines as things went real bad seem pretty small.
Is Israel quite that dominant? They seem reluctant to engage with Hezbollah, beyond any restraint the US may be imposing.
I'm not gonna pretend to be some in the weeds military expert, but it really just comes down to the rules of engagement. Can Israel occupy and police southern Lebanon? No, not really. Can they absolutely flatten anywhere Hezbollah might want to launch attacks into Israel from? Yes, absolutely.
But would such military action make Israel safer as you said in your comment? Hezbollah has 150,000 missiles, so they can do a great deal of flattening themselves. The U.S. is not opposing Israel vigorously striking areas from which they are attacked; the Israelis themselves are cautious about escalation.
Because as opposed to messianic Shi'a kooks we don't think that "all the Jews dying will bring the 12th Mahadi out of occultation". Israelis actually want to live normal lives, not take incoming fire from religious maniacs on the border. But if we think we're facing genocide? Well check out how well those tunnels are working out for Hamas terrorists at the moment. It's amazing how much you're willing to fight when your family is under threat of torture, rape, murder and kidnapping.
It's also pretty funny how scared the "we love death" martyrs of Hezbollah are when they're facing even a partial military deployment from Israel, rather than Israeli civilians they can terrorize.
Compared to the current situation? Obviously not. Compared to the alternatives in a world where the international backers of Palestinian nationalism are not being checked by US commitments? It's probably an inevitability.
Yeah, like lots of wars we don’t get involved in…
I get y'all's point, but I think you are actually wrong about the strategic viability of it. The existing occupations Israel is trying to maintain are already a bit of a disaster, as we are seeing, and attempting to expand that would pretty quickly push the Israelis into a set of lose-lose strategic propositions.
To be clear, I don't think they would lose a war. But at some point an expansion really would force them to choose between trying to maintain an occupation, trying to slow roll an even bigger ethnic cleansing project a la the West Bank (they literally had to redeploy the army to deal with rising violence, which left the Gaza border weaker, so I'm going to say that one isn't going totally great), and just doing a straight up expulsion that would turn them into an at least partial pariah state. And although the third one is the worst, the truth is that any of those three options is going to accelerate the already in-progress depletion of their political capital abroad.
To be clear, I think Israel could survive that, in a the-state-is-viable sense. But I think Israeli voters don't want to be the next Myanmar or whatever, leading at some point to a pretty massive political crisis.
But this is precisely why it wouldn’t happen. Unless there was a massive change in the military capacity of the surrounding nations, Israel could and would carve out those spaces if threatened. No surrounding nation is going to make that threat because they know they would lose, and if they might win, Israel would resort to nuclear weapons. There’s no scenario where Israel isn’t the completely dominant military power for the foreseeable future.
It's mostly domestic politics, yes, undoubtedly. It might have made sense for the American Empire to have a militarily potent client state in that region when Soviet tanks surging south were a possibility, and when oil was the coin of the realm. Those days have long gone. America's policies wrt Israel have a very similar dynamic to our policies regarding Northern Ireland.
In fairness, the US is hardly the only country whose foreign policy is substantially driven by domestic politics. Still, Americans would be better off in 2023 if their government's relationship to Israel resembled its relationship to Madagascar or Uruguay. Cordial relations? Sure. Obsession and three billion a year? Not in the national interest.
The aircraft carrier was to deter a broader war.
No other conflict in the world, including mass murder of muslims, has drawn anyone from the left to protest, let alone assault Jewish students in their 'passion'. 500K dead civilians in the Syrian civil war, or a million Uyghurs in prison camps has a single protest by leftists, especially on campus.
Should we care more about the underlying ideology that makes all of this impossible?
Disregard for implementation challenges or unintended consequences is a common feature of certain people’s political positions. I’d guess many of these people are the ones who think you help Palestinians by putting Trump back in the White House, to teach Democrats a lesson.
So it doesn’t prove any particular anti-Jewish bias.
Are you serious? It might not be proof, but it is certainly very strong evidence of bias when advocates of a policy are obsessed with the welfare of one group and completely unconcerned about likely unintended consequences to another group.
But that is kind of the entire thing of all advocacy groups now. A sneering dismissiveness of anyone objecting to or made worse off by a policy objective is to be expected. If you are BLM, you are dismissive of safety concerns of officers. If you are thin blue line, you are dismissive of the concerns of people subjected to police misconduct. The same is true across the board. It is unfortunately how advocacy is done.
This one-sidedness might be how advocacy is done most of the time, but perhaps we'd arrive at saner solutions if we made good-faith attempts to arrive at solutions at least somewhat acceptable to most people. This kind of good faith thinking is what I love about Slow Boring.
I agree is isn’t helpful, but it does suggest that it’s unwise to impute antisemitism from a failure to recognize Israel’s legitimate safety concerns. It’s much more plausible that young progressives have chosen to advocate for a less powerful, marginalized group and put on blinders to everything else as they are generally prone to doing. None of this is good reasoning or productive, but it isn’t what I think is antisemitism. Certainly there are also antisemitics in the mix, especially among the Palestinians in the student groups, but it isn’t the general motivator among most of the pro-Palestinian protesters.
I think a more concerning issue is does this lead to actual antisemitism. I think it’s a risk over time.
The latter is a very a bold and totally unsubstantiated claim, as I have come to expect from you.
They couldn't really say that with a straight face, because the Hamas terrorists bragged by splashing video of their atrocities all over the internet.
Completely, *completely* fucking different from what you previously said. Nobody in this comment section is an idiot or a child. Please do not piss on my boots and tell me that it's raining.
Okay, so there are more. Does that suggest that Stephen is wrong about the people he’s talking about?
Are they spending a lot of time worrying about what happens in the DRC or Somalia? Must be racists. Most people don't pay attention to the nuances of a conflict thousands of miles away and leftists have spent a long time developing the idea that the underdog is always right. They aren't antisemitic because if they got their wish and Palestinians won, and immediately started unleashing genocide against the Jewish population, young leftists would immediately find themselves rooting for Israelis again. Their ideas are stupid, that doesn't make them antisemitic.
I think your second-to-last sentence assumes facts not in evidence. The anti-imperialist left was not particularly sympathetic about genocide against Bosnians or Kosovars, for instance, nor atrocities committed against Syrian civilians by their government.
Have they ever protested for those other causes? Have they assaulted other students over those causes?
Yes! I was trying to think what that word should be today, and you nailed it. It’s the willingness to discount Jewish historical attachment to and presence in the Land of Israel, perhaps because to many progressives, they just don’t understand Jewish history, or think that because it started in the Bible that it’s all just a religious fantasy for zealots, or the Jews they see in America pass as White, so they construct a framing that is not at all grounded in the reality of the region itself.
But asemitism is much more accurate way to describe that belief-set than antisemitism
"Let me paraphrase a strawman position of the opposition, without even staking out my own position, and hope nothing is misconstrued and everyone takes me seriously."
Love this.
I agree with this article in a literal sense, but I think it missed something important. I don’t think the problem is a “mysterious, exogenous” rise in progressive antisemitism. The problem has been a more or less plausibly exogenous rise in mindless progressive *allyship*. And some of progressives’ allies are quite antisemitic.
1. Yes, there may be more people with consciously antisemitic attitudes on the right. But it’s leftists dancing in the street when Jews are massacred. This is because pro-Hamas activists (with the appropriate BIPOC credentials) tell them they should celebrate.
2. This is most obvious when you look at progressives’ attitudes towards Hamas and their slogans. Someone tells them “Hamas is anticolonial and from the river to the sea is about equality” and they just go along with it.
3. This also explains why, as Matt notes, “what Israel does matters.” Under Matt’s theory, it’s mysterious why what Palestinians do seems not to matter at all. The allyship hypothesis explains this: progressives are simply supposed to listen only to Palestinians, and questioning what they say is forbidden.
You can just look at Ezra Klein’s recent interviews. Ezra is obviously not an antisemite. But when a pro-Palestine person makes a claim, he’ll accept it without question. (E.g. he had multiple guests claim “Hamas was never given a chance!”)
Letting people talk is Ezra's whole deal though, he also let an ex-Israeli solider say that Israel's neighbors pose an existential threat to it without bothering to note that they could drop a nuke on Cairo or Tehran at the push of a button.
Those nukes are only good if the adversary can be deterred. Turning Middle Eastern cities into smoking ruins would not be a win for Israel.
Israel can't nuke Gaza nor the West Bank, nor south Lebanon. That means that Hamas and Hezbollah remain existential threats. Maybe you didn't notice how 1200 Israeli civilians, tourists, Thai, Nepalese and Palestinian foreign workers were massacred on October 7th in savage ways? Did nukes help much with that?
Irregulars with machine guns are not an *existential* threat to a country with millions of people, a modern military, and a western economy. Israel could kill every man woman and child in a Gaza in a matter of days with drones and artillery, no nukes required. That’s not an existential threat, horrifying though the loss of a thousand plus people was. 50 years ago there was at least an argument that the other states, with their own militaries, in the region were an existential threat, that’s what a nuclear deterrent has taken off the table.
Israel hasn't killed every man, woman and child in Gaza, despite progressive hand wringing and leftists echoing Hamas propaganda. But progressives are in a hurry to safeguard Hamas from being eliminated through 'ceasefire now' calls, and leftists, well they're openly in support of the Hamas goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing of 7 million Israeli Jews.
When people like you are willing to live next to an ISIS controlled ex-territory you'll get to lecture about existential threats. No person is "the country". Real people were murdered, watched their wife, husband, children raped, tortured and murdered, so your argument is absolutely spurious. The 200K internally displaced Israelis lived within single-digit miles from Palestinian and Lebanese Shia death squad members. The massacre on October 7th is quite real, and that is a real existential threat to hundreds of thousands of Israelis on the borders. Had Israel given all of the West Bank to the PA, and like Gaza the PA lost it in a coup to Hamas less than two years later, nearly all of Israel would be within reach of such atrocities.
Of course they haven’t, because killing two million people in retaliation for killing 1,400 would be wildly disproportionate and immoral. The point is that if Israel were actually facing an existential threat--as that word actually is defined, not simply “something bad might happen and .03% of the population might die” or however you’re defining it down--they could eliminate it.
Again, does a family surrounded by sadistic murderers on meth care about the fraction of people from the country they and their entire community are as they and their children are being tortured and murdered? How absurd your entire claims are. You have the biggest single-day massacre of civilians since 9/11 and the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since WW2, and you're whipping out your calculator to assure hundreds of thousands within range of a repeat attack about how their deaths don't matter. That's your excuse for why Israel shouldn't go into Gaza to close contact with Hamas, kill the terrorists who carried out that massacre and blow up their tunnels and rockets?
I sure hope when someone murders you that you're comforted by the low statistical chance of that happening.
if the only way to fend off an existential threat would be "disproportionate and immoral," one is already facing an existential threat.
Ezra's interview with Amjad Iraqi was an absolute, embarrassing train wreck; best illustrated when Ezra tried to push Amjad on why he's against a two state solution and he said this galaxy-brain nonsense:
"I don’t think the answer to imagining something outside of Zionism, as manifested today, needs to be another kind of nationalism. It could be a state that could be broken down more. What is Jewish existence outside of the state of Israel? Outside in terms of the land, but away from those constructs. And to reorganize ourselves and rethink our identities in different ways. So how do you reflect the people on the ground?"
"How do we envision a more decentralized model of existence? How do we think about regions? How do we think about cities as leading our political and economic ways of life?"
"So I think trying to provide the legitimate spaces for Palestinians to think about that, and to say why Zionism is a problem, and to say that we can imagine something outside of nationalism and statehood, I think is much more realistic to who we are, much more realistic to the future that we want and to create something much better."
I think sometimes hearing people say such ridiculous things without pushback is good, because then we can dismiss it as nonsense. This man was given a chance to make his case as vigorously as he could, and he made excuses for Hamas and vaguely argued for a world without borders.
I found the interview with the pollster much more frustrating because that involved actual data being misrepresented, not just some dude popping off.
I found that interview very useful, because it reinforced for me how impossible it is to find any common ground between some-not-all Palestinians and anyone supporting a two-state solution.
And well ... maybe that was the point Ezra is trying to make. Maybe Ezra didn't challenge because he felt the statements themselves were so damning. IDK. I need to think about this. Regardless this is the risk when you leave too much of the interpretation up to the reader / listener.
I have no idea what the quoted sentences actually mean. I'll listen to the interview to try to figure them out.
Good luck. I listened to a couple of the answers 2-3 times and then even went back to the transcript because it was such stunning nonsense.
As a diaspora Jew who is generally sympathetic to plight of Palestinians I found his answers about a solution and Jewish security to be wholly unsatisfying. You aren't going to win the hearts and minds of people if you can't articulate a solution that doesn't sound like it came from Balaji Srinivasan talking about the utopia of network states.
Sure you are. Look at the rise in pro Palestinian sentiment. It’s not about rational discourse. It’s about control of communications (social media algorithms) and coercion and intimidation to shut out all debate (hecklers veto on campuses). You’ve taken over an entire generation in the us in this manner.
I’m afraid listening won’t help you. It makes exactly as much sense in the interview.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
Sounded to me like he is longing for a Pre-WW1 Palestine ruled by the Ottomans.
Diaspora is a decentralized model of existence
Wait. So he was saying his vision for Israel is a secular state, and if Jews are subject to violence, then they can leave?
It’s just a mechanism
I don’t understand.
It’s just another way to attain his actual goal which is Palestine with no Jews in it
From the perspective of someone hopelessly unqualified--yet not unhopeful--I long to hear something new said about the situation. Or at least new to me. This got my attention.
Of course you can’t pin anything real to such musing, or even define it--thus rendering it as anodyne as it is ethereal. Maybe what he’s saying is just complete BS. but it occurs to me that one way through this involves utter destruction; another way might combine new perspectives with the kind of inexorable pressure you use to get through, say, sturdy lumber.
There’s a term for that...
I’ll agree with you that at least during the first interview in EK’s latest series lacked a certain (insert French phrase); basically, a number of missed opportunities to challenge. But though it may well be, this is not necessarily a reflection of poor journalistic instinct, or the weight of institutional pressures. To wit, his pre-interview intros have been heavy on the disclaimer that “I don’t agree with everything they’re saying, but I want you to hear these perspectives.” This stayed (somewhat) consistent with the aforementioned Israeli guest.
It’s a tough balance, allowing your guest to voice their stance versus pushing back, without devolving into zero-sum argument. After all, there’s plenty of that in other outlets. If you want your guests to answer the questions, you have to give them questions they feel they can answer. For what it’s worth, I suggest trying out Mike Pesca’s podcast. I think he finds that balance better than most.
Those of us with the privilege of relative detachment from the horror going on right now I guess have a choice: when our favorite pundits fail to push back on behalf of our understandings or sentiments, we can pick up that brick and throw it at the TV* or take a breath and absorb the words for a bit.
*Neither EK (or Matt, for that matter) is often on TV, to my knowledge. But I listen to podcasts via earbuds. So executing that brick maneuver would, in my case, cause some serious head trauma.
Yeah, one of my extremely pro-Palestinian friends listened to the last interview with the Palestinian who lives in Israel proper, and that made him more sympathetic to Israel than anything I’ve said. He was really disturbed to hear the guy shrug off Hamas. I wasn’t disturbed because I’ve heard much worse.
Not sure who was the interviewed, but by and large Palestinians in Israel proper, who are also Israeli citizens, are very hostile to Hamas, and their feeling of “Israeliness” rose dramatically in the aftermath of the attacks[1]. It’s worth noting that the terrorists killed and kidnapped some of them too (Hamas spared none who were in their path!). In fact I have heard an account (cannot confirm for certain)- warning description of murder ahead- that a hijab clad Muslim Palestinian (Israeli) woman begged for her life in Arabic to no avail- she was shot by a Hamas terrorist at close quarters. Israeli Arabs are very aware of all of this. They are in a uniquely complicated position being both Israeli annd Palestinian at the same time (and often targeted by extremists on both sides) and tend to hold more nuanced views as a result.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-war-poll-finds-arab-israelis-sense-of-kinship-with-state-at-a-20-year-high/amp/
One thing I’m wondering given the West Bank settler violence is if there’s been violence between Jewish and Arab Israelis. If not, this should be highlighted as a disparate population that’s been able to hold together.
Almost nothing so far, by stark contrast to the major riots in 2021. Reportedly local Arab and Jewish community leaders are working very hard to prevent that from happening again. At the same time the Hamas Iran etc would love more than anything to foster such internal violence within Israel proper and work hard to try to encourage this by any means available to them. Extremist right wing Jews (including within the Israeli government) unfortunately share this nihilistic worldview.
This sounds like what people say in defense of Joe Rogan interviews. Not saying it's incorrect, just it seems like both Klein and Rogan are doing the same thing here.
My big problem with Rogan is that he platforms conspiracy theorists, and eggs them on. Nobody is well served by hearing that the moon landing was faked.
I think it’s useful to hear the perspective of an anti-Israel Palestinian who lives in Israel. There’s more than one truth in the world. Even if you think it’s nonsense, it’s good from a Sun-Tsu “know thy enemy” way.
In retrospect, I wish Ezra Klein had pushed harder for clarification on what the guy meant when he launched into his incoherent soliloquy on “different ways of living.” Because whatever he was saying, he was talking around it, and he had been quite direct that he didn’t care about 10/7. If you’re willing to be direct about that, what exactly are you unwilling to be direct about?
Based on the first few podcasts (totally unrelated to Israel or Jews) I concluded long ago that Ezra’s brain turned useless mush when he moved to NYT and that his podcasts there are a waste of time. Turns out I was more right than I knew !
Wow, that’s an uncharitable take. I find Klein’s podcast to be the best one out there when it comes to these kind of controversial issues, and the best political show in general for anything outside of economic policy.
What else are you listening to?
I’ve tried The Daily, 538, Lex Fridman, all of Matt’s shows (RIP), Joe Rogan, Pod Save America, NPR’s Up First, Tim Ferris, Freakonomics, The Intelligence (Economist), Odd Lots, Econ 102, Breton Goods, Money Talks, Huberman Lab, The Indicator, Hexapodia, The Studies Show, EconTalk, several other NYT/Bloomberg/Economist podcasts, and a variety of other shows I’m sure I’m forgetting (not counting some domain-specific podcasts that wouldn’t really apply here).
The ones I come back to are Odd Lots, The Studies Show, Ezra Klein, and all of the Economist’s shows.
That's an impressive list! Interestingly my favorites aren't on it! I strongly recommend "the dispatch podcast". "talkig politics" was top notch but sadly ended, however there is now "these Times" also featuring Prof. Helen Thompson so it should be good!
I forgot to mention the Dispatch! I’ve tried them a couple of times, and I’ll queue up one of theirs occasionally. I enjoyed their recent episode on Romney quite a bit. I’ll try out “These Times.”
"The problem has been a more or less plausibly exogenous rise in mindless progressive *allyship*. And some of progressives’ allies are quite antisemitic."
Very much this. It's why I ultimately don't find the question of whether anti-Israel progressives are antisemitic in some deep subjective motivational sense all that important.
Not to go all Godwin's Law on this, but to me it's a bit like asking whether Petain was antisemitic. Maybe interesting from a biographical perspective. But all that really mattered was his first-order commitment to "allyship" with a nakedly and ferociously antisemitic regime, to the total exclusion of any will to criticize or resist its malicious acts toward Jews.
This is a good point, but I think in Matt’s framework of practical policy, the distinction is important. Matt often says that racism is a huge driver behind Trump’s popularity, but simply stating that isn’t an electoral strategy. You may have won the moral argument, but you also need to win elections.
I think that leads to two conclusions. First, helping people who haven’t thought through what anti-Zionism really means learn that a SS is a toxic fantasy. Second, as much as this bothers me personally, recognizing that you don’t have to agree with everything a potential political ally says. I already hated the DSA, so writing them off isn’t hard for me. But if we come together on, say, climate change, we shouldn’t demand they share our views on Israel.
The problem with your analysis is why Palestinians are seen as deserving of “allyship” in the first place and not the Jews?
Interesting point. But what explains the disturbing number of Jews among this rabid genocidal anti-Israel crowd?
I see this choice of “allies” as a direct consequence of progressive dogma.
1. “White bad, Jews white, Jews bad” (as someone said above)
2. “Colonialism bad, Jews colonizers”
It follows that Israel is the Great Satan, of course.
Now, why did Jews get lumped in with white people and colonizers? Some of the high priests who dictate progressive dogma may well be antisemites (I don’t know who popularized these ideas). But are their Jewish foot soldiers antisemites themselves, or just sheep following the herd?
I think Jews are also viewed with suspicion on the left because we tend to be be higher on the class hierarchy. The richer you are, the more evil you are.
I really should atone for arriving in the US with nothing and now having something. What a class traitor I and other Jews are.
You're guilty of willfully fulfilling the American Dream, which discredits a lot of what these people believe.
It’s about the fking settlements and the Netanyahu government
Are Hamas terrorists?
Yeah, but so are the settlers that are like “my house now, piss off,” and so is Mike fucking Johnson
Have settlers ever massacred, raped, tortured and kidnapped 1200 Palestinians?
Why do the rich, educated, successful, established and powerful ethnic group over represented in the highest halls of American society get more underdog points the post-9/11 brown folks the median America is afraid of, represented by a huge today-present diaspora in the Palestinians? That’s the question?
That’s not a good way to actually pick political allies but this should not be surprising to you.
So, I'm going to take the opposite tack from Grouchy here and concede for purposes of argument all your factual claims about American Jews' present level of comfort and security. As well as the rather more unhinged assertions about "post-9/11 brown folks the median America is afraid of."
The counterargument, even if all of that is true, is that insofar as "underdog points" are a thing, it's not clear why you should lose them simply by being successful notwithstanding your underdog status. Jews are manifestly a historically oppressed group. People were throwing them into fucking ovens within living memory. If you have a category of "historically oppressed groups" entitled to some solicitude, then if the "historically" is doing any work at all, then Ashkenazi Jews have to be on the list.
I'll go even further than that. Ashkenazi Jews are the paradigmatic "historically oppressed group" within any sensible meaning of the phrase. Such that if you generate a list labeled "historically oppressed groups" and Ashkenazi Jews somehow aren't on it, you need to go back and either change the label or scrap the list.
If what you really mean is just that whoever happens to be on the bottom at the moment is entitled to reparations from whomever happens to be on top, fine, that's an intelligible position. Just not one that very many people are likely to share.
Because we are still the biggest target of hate crimes, and not by a small amount. You’ve described the paradox of antisemitism. A highly successful and prominent minority still managed to be despised and disenfranchised enough to lose 30% of its entire population to systematic murder. In the past century, we’ve been expelled from Russia, Europe, all of the Middle East, and North Africa.
This is actually clarifying. I in fact meant why Israel isn't considered the underdog, but i think the entanglement with US identities is important. If you actually look at hate crime data you realize that American jews are far more persecuted than American muslims or arabs (the latter being majority christian btw). It's also the case that some ethnic groups "of color" are better educated and more successful than American jews (e.g. hindus, i believe),* and of course, that jews have a far far more difficult and traumatizing history, in living memory , than any other american minorities (though admittedly not in the American context). However, if you ignore the whole world, where muslims are over 1b and in almost every country (with multiple country of muslim majority), look solely at the American context, are reacting to the superficial, but vocal islamophobic discourse of the aemrican right in the past 20 years, have never met an Arab so can believe they are meaningfully "brown", are not aware of the prevalence of antisemitism in the us due to media bias which almost always ignores it, and have no sense of history (as most americans do not), then yes, at a squint i can kind of see how you get to the lopsided view according to which somehow they are the underdog in this conflict.
[*incidentally, if memory serves Muslim Americans, while not yet quite as successful as Jews, are better off than the median american. In terms of wealath and education, in other words, they are far closer to jews and hindus than blacks or hispanics.]
I think you are stacking the deck more than necessary in making the view seem crazy, but yes if you want to understand the perspective of American progressives on who to root for in an America context those are important factors to consider.
Remember many of them are quite young, and “the Muslim ban” and “refugees” are way more salient to them than Tsarist pogroms or even the Holocaust or other historical atrocities, as is the experience of Jews in large liberal cities as their mental models of the respective groups. In my experience, they tend to be later focused on the American experience (overstating American or British influence in the process) mixed with an idealized view of Europe and true communism etc. Also, it is more a vibe check then some historical analysis to begin with.
They are definitely not making an apples to apples of Iran or Jordan as compared to Israel qua Middle Eastern nation.
And I think you are right about relative Arab wealth vs Caucasian wealth in USA. But remember that South Asians still make the underdog list despite being the most succeeding ethnic group in America. Poor rural whites, despite being quite bad off, definitely do not.
I do not find the above surprising and if you do you may not be modeling the views of progressives accurately.
I think the whole identitarian hierarchy thing is morally corrupt and disgusting and have a as much contempt for young pseudo progressives as for their senile pseudo patriotic trump supporters l. I have no more patience for morons.
P.S
The idiots’ parents have a bit to answer for too, having allowed their children obviously sub par educations. However they get more sympathy than the rest- there are very few good school options left, and it’s very hard to know. Plus social media is far more influential than schools anyway and it’s dominated by evil actors due to America’s abysmal failure at regulation. Still, I hope that moderate parents start paying more attention to what their kids are taught at school and esp what they see online.
Just going to plug for Ezra Klein here — I don’t think he’s yet kept his promise of hosting guests to his right on the I/P conflict, but his last interview with the former Israeli soldier was excellent. He definitely has a viewpoint, but I think overall he’s done a good job.
It was originally "Black and Indigenous People of Color" as in "People of Color who are Black and Indigenous" but about a week after it became mainstream it turned into "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color" as though Black and Indigenous People weren't considered PoC when that was the popular phrase.
So it went from being a limiting phrase to a longer version of the same phrase
Why are Arabs considered "people of color?" I'm not saying they should or shouldn't be; the whole concept is inscrutable to me. But maybe I'm just ignorant and there's actually some sort of principled basis for determining who falls within the category. If so, I'd be quite curious to hear it.
They’re in that quasi-region of being not-quite-white. In the seventies with prominent terrorism attacks, hostage taking, etc, they were considered in America as bad, foreign, and therefore Not White. The original Star Trek has some hilariously racist aliens based on Arab stereotypes.
My sense is that they were on their way to whiteness prior to 9/11, and that made them extremely un-white.
Because they're skin tone reflects more melanin than the average European's.
I can't tell if you're seriously saying that's the principled basis, or if you're putting it forward as such a facially arbitrary criterion as to expose the absurdity of the concept.
I actually have no idea what the average European melanin level is or whether my own skin tone falls above or below that line. I can't see how anyone honestly thinks the answers to those questions have any relation to any variable of interest.
Can you tell apart an average Israeli Jew from an Israeli Arab? Melanin claims are beyond idiotic, especially in that conflict.
Yeah? Look at a picture of Bibi Netanyahu and look at a picture of Mahmoud Abbas and I think you'll be able to tell the difference.
"Why are Arabs considered 'people of color?'"
Because for some bizarre reason (as I have ranted elsewhere before), the term "white" has become practically coterminous with "WASP" in US political discussions in the past 25 years or so, which is how you get, for example, Ashkenazic Jewish people referring to themselves as being "non-white," or the closely related, "iTaLIaNs HiStORiCalLy wEReN't CoNsidEreD whItE," discourse.
… but they weren’t considered white. Why does that discourse frustrate you?
I am mostly Jewish, and always considered myself white. After Trump was elected, I realized there was less consensus on that than I thought. Basically all Jews are Mediterranean, except to the extent they intermarried, and that’s generally reflected in our looks.
Basically it's Mike Tirico.
The forbidden Meadow-Noah coupling from Sopranos season 3.
I still read it as bisexuals and people of color. It’s an asinine word
I always read it as “BIOPIC.” I think, oh, there’s an interesting documentary, who is the subject, wait.
You can always add AAPI. BIPOCAAPI.
The idea was to be specific about American race relations and point out that Black people and American Indians have had an especially hard time becoming part of the national project. It's the other side of the coin of the "Italians weren't white" idea: who can be a "real American" has gotten more inclusive but has still managed to largely exclude the minorities who have been here since the beginning.
Of course, concept creep, pop-bastardization, blah blah, and whatever utility that framing had was lost pretty quickly once people knew what it was.
I think Matt might be engaging in a bit of projection, attributing anti-Israel sentiment to the settlements because that’s what bothers him the most (and rightly so – the settlements are abhorrent). But I continually hear complaints about Israel that aren’t framed in those terms, but rather against Israel’s very existence for being “settler colonial“ and “an ethnic religious state,” as if the latter aren’t common the world over. I’ve never heard progressives argue against the existence of any other state, and certainly not against the self-determination and sovereignty of a historically persecuted people.
When progressives are accused of unfairly, singling Israel out, they argue that their tax dollars, support Israel, distinguishing it from other conflict in the world. First, that would not explain the anti-Israel, progressive fervor in Europe, which doesn’t give Israel aid. And second, American tax dollars spent the last 20 years funding wars in the Middle East, and nobody’s bothered protesting them since 2003.
There are simply a lot of young progressives, who would never openly profess anti-Jewish bigotry, but fundamentally don’t think Jews have the right to self determination.
>And second, American tax dollars spent the last 20 years funding wars in the Middle East, and nobody’s bothered protesting them since 2003.
Sorry, but did we live through two entirely distinct twenty-first centuries? Because in my recollection the issue of wars in the Middle East spent two decades as one of the most central issues in American politics.
We are talking about the progressive movement, not what’s being debated in Congress and Iraq blame games in electoral politics. When, since 2003, did progressives take to the streets en masse to demand a US withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan? Demand an end to air strikes and drone strikes? The way they’re protesting Israel now?
The aftermath of the killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 is the first thing that comes to mind. Big protests that might well have continued (there were actions planned for the 17th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq) if not for COVID making everyone stay home for a few months shortly afterwards.
But it simply isn't true that the actual anti-Iraq War groups haven't protested other wars. Groups like Code Pink, etc. have protested almost every US military action since then, even (at least in the particular case of Code Pink, and presumably some other groups) US military aid to Ukraine. It's just that in Afghanistan the US was attacked first, so it got less opposition from the general public, and other Middle Eastern conflicts like Syria and Yemen were across sectarian lines that also divide Western Arab+Muslim communities, which are a huge contributor to protests against Israeli actions. Syria had the additional complication that, like in Ukraine, the side doing most of the bombing was a US enemy under sanctions.
I wouldn’t characterize any of those as mass protests. The DC march after Soleimani’s killing had a couple hundred people. I’ve seen Code Pink (which ARE consistent, I’ll grant them that) disrupt congressional hearings and stage sit ins, but they usually have like 40 people. Where were the thousands of students? The busloads headed to DC?
Protests on that scale take time to organize. The "emergency protests" held in the days after Soleimani's killing were motivated largely by the fear that the situation would escalate to an all-out war between the US and Iran. Within a week it became clear that that wasn't going to happen right that moment, and with the immediate crisis resolved, the logical thing to do was hold a coordinated day of protest on the anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was conveniently only ~2 months away at the time.
Which was exactly what the various groups involved were planning to do, but COVID cancelled those plans.
Considering the short prep time available for the protests that did happen shortly after Soleimani's killing, I'd say that their scale was pretty impressive.
I’m not trying to impugn that protest. My point is that the US airstrikes and occupations went on for 18 years without any mass protest from progressives. It’s not like civilians stopped dying right after the invasion. The airstrikes went on for two decades and there was more than enough time to organize. But there was no “Free Iraq” movement. It just wasn’t a priority.
But now that Israel is attacking Hamas (in response to an actual attack, which is more than we can say about Iraq), airstrikes are genocide and progressives organize. After 18 years of not bothering when it was our own military. THAT’S why they seem to be operating hypocritically and with a special animus for Israel.
They are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests
Yeah, I was there. My comment specifically said “since 2003.” We waged war for 20 years, and the latter 18 years brought no mass protests.
Re: settlements - In an confusing and intractable moral dilemma like Israel/Palestine, the aspects that are more obviously "right vs. wrong" will the drive a lot of the sentiment.
I'm not sure what, exactly Palestinians should do, but Hamas killing babies is obviously wrong and bad.
The Israel version of this is the settlements. I'm not sure what Israel should do, but f them for expanding settlements. That's the issue that makes it impossible for me to just say "Israel's in an impossible situation, how can I judge them?"
There would definitely be Americans against Israel even w/o settlements, but for me, it's the aspect of the conflict that demonstrates that the Israeli government is a bad actor.
And yet, even here there is Palestinian agency involved. The ongoing threat of terrorism has tilted Israeli politics in such a way that, politically, no Israeli government can take on the settlers and stay a government, no matter how counterproductive the settlers are. Just one of the many unintended consequences in this long, long war.
Yours is a reasonable response re:the conflict, but that’s not the topic of this piece . The topic is American antisemitism on the left. It’s *their* attitudes were judging and they are very bad and have nothing in common with your analysis.
Israel is “settler colonial” much like the US was in, say 1920. The bulk of the ethnic cleansing occurred in 1947 and 1948, on the verge of living memory
And in the context, let us remember, of a war that the Arab Leadership started, and that didn’t go the way they planned.
otoh, nothing like present day israel could have existed without that war.
in the mid 40s, the arabs were not going to let the jews muscle their way in without a fight. few give up their homeland lightly. how could the balfour declaration have had any authority in the eyes of arabs?
israel has roughly as much right to exist as did any of the minor nations that popped up after the fall of the roman empire. its postimperial origins are broadly similar.
In the end it exists because it survived. There are now nearly 7 million Jews living there. They have the right to live in their home. That to me is the first and only important fact. The rest of the argument is just wind.
Have you ever watched The West? Really brings it home…
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west
Palestinians who live in Israel proper (20% of the population) ARE full citizens, with more rights than anywhere in the Arab world. That didn’t stop Arab armies from invading to eradicate Israel, and it doesn’t stop leftists from claiming that ALL of Israel is illegitimate.
No one is disagreeing about that, the problem is the West Bank, which apparently is (1) Israel for purposes of deciding if Israelis can move there but (2) definitely not Israel for purposes of deciding if people born there can vote in Israeli elections. (Also on the reservations point, does anyone think that if a bunch of fundamentalist Mormons tried to start building towns on reservation land in Utah we would do anything other than simply through them in prison?)
well put. the difference is smallpox and warfare killed enough indigenous inhabitants to politically neuter them in basically every state other than alaska and hawaii. if native americans were a big and powerful voting block, whites would have enforced apartheid much longer
I don’t see how this can even be logical.
The idea that Palestinian citizens of Israel are "full citizens" needs some pretty giant asterisks. Large segments of Israeli society see them as disloyal. There is widespread discrimination, particularly in housing and land use. Arab parties have participated in government exactly once in 75 years and and the current Prime Minister demagogued relentlessly about it when his opponents did that to keep him out. The Jewish ethnoreligious character of the state is not a little symbolic thing; it pervades policy, and protecting this is why the Israeli right constitutionalized it with the nation-state law (and part of why they want to defang the judiciary).
There have been Arab parties in the Knesset the whole time, and they have had the right to vote the entire life of the state, which is not something you can say about black people in the US. I agree that Netanyahu and Likud have been trying to reduce that, but it looks very likely that their epic screw-up on October 7th has shot their chances at power for a long, long time.
This is great - Israel is the most diverse country in the middle east, with 21% of the population being Arab Israeli, and 4% neither Jewish nor Arab Muslim or Christian, and Arab Israelis have equal rights as citizens, sit on the Israeli supreme court, were ministers, sat in government, lead military units. At the same time Hamastan Gaza is 99% Sunni Muslims, and the goal of their Hamas rulers is a complete genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews (and likely other non-Sunni Muslims) and the establishment of a caliphate.
What a gotcha you found there, buddy.
But when people are criticizing Israel for being an "ethnostate" do they mean what you are talking about (plus the occupations) or do they mean the fundamental existence of Israel?
Fundamental existence of Israel. I have no problem with any aspersions people might hurl a the occupation of the West Bank.
Who is "people"--it depends. Israel is, de jure, an ethnostate, which is reflected both in its national symbols and in its concrete policy. I think it should be a state of all its citizens (which won't stop it from being a "Jewish state" in the sense of the only state in the world with a large majority of Jews). Obviously (I hope!), Israel having some unjust policies doesn't mean that Israel should be destroyed or that it loses the right to defend its citizens against terrorist murderers.
People sometimes behave badly in wartime. A time of peace might be different
If Isreal were pursuing either genocide or apartheid as a policy, there wouldn't be that many Palestinians in Israel. Instead there would be ~0, just like there are almost none left in most Muslim countries.
One day a Palestinian leader will arrive on the scene urging nonviolent resistance and demanding voting rights for the all people between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. That's the end game absent a two state deal.
“One day a Palestinian leader will arrive on the scene urging nonviolent resistance…”
And Hamas, if it’s still around, will throw that leader off a roof.
This is clearly true... but Israel has just committed to annihilating Hamas.
Absent Hamas as an enemy, I don't see how the present status-quo is stable?
Well, that's going to be the real trick, isn't it?
The war will have to end first.
The Israelis wouldn't accept that.
The Palestinians would beat them to it!
>The Israelis wouldn't accept that.<
Precisely. I probably wouldn't either were I Israeli. Which is why separation—the two state solution—isn't dead. Though in 2023 it definitely appears to be on life support.
ludicrous
I don’t think this is an apt comparison For whatever reason, you care to suggest, the Palestinians have yet to accept themselves as being defeated, at least in the way that many of the Native American groups have.
That’s the simple truth but peole refuse to hear it. My impression is the denial comes from two places: 1. Jews like Matt who’d are more comfortable in denial for understandable reasons. 2. Gentiles more comfortable in denial for less understandable ones.
Some of that is the burden of high expectations of being a First World USA ally. If the Netherlands becomes a religious ethnostate with tiered citizenship you can be sure they would draw some ire. People (rightly!) expect more of Israel than of Iran.
Are you as outraged that Germany gave automatic citizenship to millions of ethnic Germans (Volga Germans) made stateless by the Soviet Bloc?
I am obviously not outraged by Germany extending citizenship to a bunch of refugees. I don't really understand the question to be honest. Israel accepting a bunch of Jewish refugees is not really the gravamen of people's objection to their conduct, but rather their treatment of the Palestinians, especially (i) expanding settlements in the West Bank (and lack of political rights of residents there) and (ii) maintaining a pretty terrible status quo in Gaza as their solution to resolving their legitimate security concerns. Part of the justification for that being "well it is important to us to that we continue to privilege a particular religion" is not sympathetic to many Western observers who are not hot on Zionism as a project in itself.
We do business with many regimes that much worse than Israel (for example, literally every other Middle Eastern country), and the plight of the Palestinians does not rank very high on my list of world injustices the USA needs to spend a lot of time and attention to address--if we want to intervene in the internal politics there are many more obvious candidates from a humanitarian perspective across Africa and Asia but "the Israeli government is no worse than modern Germany because something something 1940s something" is not a compelling view.
I don't have any bright ideas on how to materially improve the situation given the positions and preferences of Israel and, especially, Palestinians and I think a "one state solution" very likely leads to a horrifying civil war (at best) not a secular democracy, but that is separate from the simple observation of "well, that religious ethnostate objective and the oppression necessary to secure it seems pretty bad on its own terms, even if I understand the historical context for why it exists".
Israel isn't a "religious ethnostate", doesn't have a state religion, and doesn't have a religious test for any Jewish immigrants. Nor does a state having preferential naturalization for a specific ethnic group make it an "ethnostate" - and if so then Germany, Ireland, Greece, and many others, all of which have such laws are "ethnostates" too. Oddly, nobody throws that word around in a derogatory way, except when a Jewish state is involved. Just so we're clear, Hamastan Gaza is 99% Sunni Muslims, Israel is 21% Arab citizens.
I'm glad that you're sane and understand that forcing Israelis and Palestinians into a single state is untenable and asking for a civil war just like Yugoslavia had...which resulted in multiple independent states. The Israeli left's idea is to first destroy the terrorist capability of Hamas, reduce its threat to a minuscule portion of what it had on October 7th, and then negotiate on the West Bank. The global left likes to ignore that Palestinians already had all of Gaza since 2005, as the basis for a state - but they chose to turn it into an Iranian proxy artillery base instead. Most of the West Bank was offered in 2008, with sane land swap options, and again, the Palestinians rejected that. So there are things to resolve, but mainly the global left should press on Palestinians to finally agree to a deal and reject terrorism and the concept of an ethnic cleansing of Jews from all of Israel.
I think Matt is letting these people off the hook too easily - I honestly don't think many of these leftists even realize what they're arguing for is in fact Antisemitic. They may not be openly professing explicit Antisemitism but if you're advocating for the destruction of the *only* Jewish state, and no other state in the world, then what's really the difference? That they're too dumb to realize their stated goals would result in the ethnic cleansing of Jews doesn't mean they aren't Antisemitic in a more insidious way than what you'd expect from Right wing Antisemites who overtly and proudly express their bigotry towards Jews.
In Britain at least, progressive opposition to Israel is tied up with 1. post-colonial guilt and the Balfour declaration and 2. more concretely albeit historically with the pre-Good-Friday northern Irish situation (the British left looking generally more favourably on the Irish nationalist cause, and the realities of weapons smuggling in the late 20th century somewhat tying those causes together ('staggering on as a cause of the left' as Matt recently put it').
Somewhat outside of the topic, but there's also an undercurrent, more present in the right, of incredulity probably best expressed as: 'This level of violence was available to us THE WHOLE TIME!?!' - It's probably for the best that, say, the Thatcher government didn't realise that in the late 1980s. The Good Friday agreement really is a much better outcome overall.
You ignore the elephant in the room. There is a substantial Muslim population in London, with well known activity by the fundamentalist antisemitic “Muslim brotherhood” there. That’s the no 1 key to rise in both antisemitism and anti Israel activism there. All the rest is a side dish (add to that traditional Christian British antisemitism!).
I was in London for the 2012 Olympics and went to watch the Opening Ceremony in a large court yard with probably 5,000 people. The crowd cheered for every single country except for when it was Israel’s turn in which the boos from the crowd far exceeded the cheers for any other country. It was frankly a shocking experience that made me realize how wide spread Antisemitism is in London.
I think a lot of British anti-Semitism is native-born, exogenous to the Muslim population, as is the case in the rest of Europe as well.
I'm very willing to believe that, but it seems like there is an important qualitative distinction between "genteel" anti-Semitism and violent anti-Semitism, with the latter in the UK being overwhelmingly the province of British Muslims (often immigrants or first-generation UKers) in the last 20 or 30 years, although maybe that is the result of media reporting.
Exactly. It’s Muslims currently making life intolerable for Jews in Europe. Needless to say, Europe’s native Christians have done far worse in living memory, but currently aren’t the main problem.
Yes, agreed, though I gather the skinheads flared up in the 70s and 80s, particularly at punk shows and soccer games.
I just don't think that's true - and the broader British left isn't especially centred in London anyway.
What probably is true is that a vocal diaspora promotes the issue to the attention of the broader left, and that the ambiguity of the 'from the river to the sea' slogan is papering over some differences between the international left and Palestinian nationalists, although that wasn't quite your point.
That’s very interesting. To me, the obvious difference that dooms the analogy is that the Irish were not attempting to completely eradicate Britain. They had a specific territorial dispute. I think British leftists would have still been sympathetic to some aspects of the cause, but not up for their own eradication. Much like the Israeli left.
We don't perceive Israel as equivalent to Britain. We perceive Israel as equivalent to the Unionists in Northern Ireland - a group that the IRA was definitely trying to eradicate. The equivalent to Britain in this perception is, well, Britain (or the USA, but the sort of people who think like this think that Britain has far more influence in the USA than it actually does: I have literally heard people saying that the USA would cut off aid to Israel if Britain asked it to).
They don’t want to kill or expel all Protestants and their “threat” is to have Northern Ireland join the Republic of Ireland. A pleasant rich modern democracy where Protestants and other minorities have no problem to live.
P.S.
As I recall in the Good Friday agreement ira also agreed to disarm ?
I thought we were talking about pre-Good Friday?
"They don’t want to kill or expel all Protestants" - they very much did want all Unionists to go "back" to Britain. Not Protestants, no, but that is comparable to saying "we have no problem with Palestinian Jews" - and the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s or 1970s, while it was a democracy, had a formal recognition of the supremacy of the Catholic church and certainly wasn't rich and not all that modern. The transformation of the Irish economy really began with EU membership in 1973.
There are British people who seriously compare Israel to the old (pre-1972) Stormont Northern Ireland and say that "we" should restore direct rule of Israel, abolish the Knesset and push through a Good Friday-style power-sharing arrangement (by "we", they mean "the Americans doing what we, superior British people, tell them to")
These are not serious people who understand anything about Israel/Palestine, they are people who think that the State of Israel doesn't really exist and is just an American puppet and the USA could abolish it as easily as the British abolished the House of Commons of Northern Ireland, ie by just announcing that it's gone.
For the record, I don't think that Britain could straightforwardly impost home rule on Israel and Palestine.
That said, both Israel and Palestine choosing to join the same federalized nation or union of nations would solve a lot of problems.
Well, if you think the British left isn't self-destructive...
You're correct though, Israel is in a tough spot. The Good Friday agreement is a long way from perfect, but it does seem to be the only peaceful resolution of a similar conflict. Maybe there are others of which I'm unaware?
First off, I should state that I have a deep affinity with secular Jews and secular people of all stripes. J Street Jews, Reform Jews, are generally cool as hell. Shoot, I’ve paid Matt for 4 years and read him for 14 years. I read the Source and at one point thought there was justification for Israel - the Holocaust, like, happened. We should have instead resettled those who were willing in the US, where we are more pluralistic (though we should have made the Haredim get vaccinated at the barrel of a gun, bc fuck them for bringing polio back)
But at least for me, it is the continued settlements, the apartheid, the failure to prosecute crimes against Palestinians, the espionage (Jonathan Pollard et al), the failure to let America dictate its behavior when it would have been annihilated but for US support, it’s export of surveillance tech to even worse actors, its political assassinations (I read Rise and Kill First), truly evil folks like Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu, AIPAC and ADL and the people conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and the alignment of Israel’s government with Cheeto von Tweeto, and the alignment of Israel with Christianists that want to bring about revelation and should be locked in cages or deported there. Fuck Hamas but F U C K Israel. We shouldn’t be involved. We shouldn’t give either side a dime in aid nor even the most wishy-washy statements or support. It will only harm the US, which I do care about. There are no good guys here. Boycott, divestment, and sanctions to both parties.
I don’t think anyone has the right to self-determination bc you can’t get that way without ethnic cleansing. Ideally, we’d have one world government that banned people from procreating with people of the same race or religion for 2 generations and afterward we’d all just look like hot Brazilians and could get on to killing each other over really important controversies, like dog people vs cat people, not dumb things like race and religion…not gonna happen but I’m not gonna support malicious actors in the world.
This is not exclusive to Israel. The other settler colonials who tried formal large scale oppression, the Rhodesians and the South Africans, got similar amounts of shit despite killing far fewer people. To Matt's point, there are data points regarding other Western-coded people doing similar stuff, and getting massive progressive pushback despite not being Jewish at all
You do know that the first Zionists bought their land, right. “Settler-colonialist” is a political phrase that does not relate to historical reality at any point.
Yeah… as much as settlements dominate among smart and savvy people who like to think about the topic, Gaza and its blockade has always been the focus I’ve see among younger people.
Which is so backwards! The Gaza blockade is a terrible thing, but it was a response to the takeover of the jurisdiction by genocidal maniacs. I never heard any other particularly good suggestions for what a country should do if ISIS takes control next door. The settlements, however, are just wicked land grabs without provocation.
This seems like reaching to be even-handed. The provocation is the war. The transgression is only meaningful in the context of an intended peace. There is no intended peace. Therefore there is no deal or if there was during Oslo it is off the table now, thanks to Arafat. And there is certainly no equivalency with what Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists have done and are doing. Frankly the Palestinians are lucky the settlers haven’t taken more. They are certainly in no position to stop it.
I think it’s because the blockade is easier to grok, honestly, and there are a lot of NGOs focused on Gaza.
It's because the leading visual of the conflict since the early 2000s has been of Israel bombarding Gaza, in full view of the world media and reported on in detail by the trusted international NGOs on the ground.
I think that’s correct.
The flipsides of Iron Dome++ were that (a) everything looks like Israeli violence against peaceful people and (b) Likud does not pay much price for its policies.
It’s the eternal low-intensity conflict we were all warned automated systems would create, just without the automated systems.
Scott Alexander did a post about how activists choose the more squirmy edge cases precisely because they're controversial and involve more fighting, which draws attention, which is what the activists want. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
When someone flies the confederate flag but says it is to celebrate “southern pride”, I don’t believe them. And I suspect Matt doesn’t either.
I could believe someone honestly _wanted_ to celebrate "heritage not hate". However....
That person can't be unaware of how the symbol would be viewed, by pretty much everyone, and therefore what message they're sending.
No matter what message they intend to send, it's not, and if they have any concern about the feelings of Black people they should not put it up, no matter what they wanted to say.
And then that means if they're _still_ flying it, they at best don't care about the feelings of Black people.
I think that's a little too categorical, because it definitely wasn't that way in the relatively recent past.
Like, The Dukes of Hazzard was super popular in the 1970s and 80s. And while black people were probably not top of mind as the target audience, it was still a network TV show that wanted to get ratings and sell ads. The producers presumably wouldn't have put a confederate flag on the protagonists' car if they thought it was going to gratuitously offend and alienate viewers. And having the flag appear in every episode *was* gratuitous; it's not as if people were otherwise going to miss the point that the show was set among Southern rednecks.
CBS at the time almost certainly thought of the flag as just a humorously over-the-top symbol of Southernness and "rebel" spirit and not any sort of statement about racial politics, and the show certainly depicted the characters as having that intent. In hindsight, it seems equally clear that many blacks probably were in fact offended. But it strains credulity to think that everyone at the time automatically recognized that it would have that effect.
It's easy to say "that was then, this is now." But the pace of cultural change isn't uniform across geographic, generational, or class lines. There are still a lot of people in the rural South who in flying the flag see themselves as doing the same thing the Dukes of Hazzard were portrayed as doing, and don't believe that "pretty much everyone" does or should perceive it otherwise. I don't particularly approve, but I also don't think they're all being disingenuous or willfully blind.
In re, "The Dukes of Hazzard," it's probably worth adding that the main (possibly only?) recurring black character on the show was Sheriff Little of Chickasaw County (played by Don Pedro Cooley), who was generally portrayed as non-corrupt and much more competent than Sheriff Coltrane, et al. from Hazzard County.
Or Billy Idol’s song “Rebel Yell”! It never occurred to me that was racist, and I grew up in a very progressive family!
When I was younger, Confederate flags were definitely more acceptable. They gave more of a non-PC, dickish vibe than a white supremacist one.
Revealed vs stated preferences.
Is a reference to "from the river to the sea" or any criticism of Israel at all?
The former.
In general, I remind people tha the FA is free. The cost of the FO is set by the Marketplace of Ideas. The spicier the view, the more likely a buyer is gonna set the price at an ass kicking.
From the river to the sea, Palestine was ruled by Britain, which ignored native opinion and let Jews immigrate en masse. A European political problem was imposed on Palestine, for reasons sentimental and strategic to the United Kingdom in 1922.
To want this area free is a fine aspiration. Wanting the unlikely is not unreasonable.
It’s an interesting question because that definition was imposed on them by people who are hostile to them. It’s ugly even if it comes to the right answer
Josh Barro's take last week was the right one. Leftists aren't tearing down posters of Israeli children hostages because they're antisemitic, they're doing so because of cognitive dissonance.
If your totalizing worldview separates evil oppressors and good victims, then it makes sense how you can see the Israel-Palestine conflict both without nuance and as a fault entirely of the Israeli side.
This event has sent me back to Hannah Arendt: "Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations."
This passage applies equally to ideologues of the alt-right and of progressivist extremists.
It’s because they are intellectually lazy and would rather parrot than think.
The end goal is to feel validated by opposing those “bad” people.
Yes, yes, yes: "Leftists aren't tearing down posters of Israeli children hostages because they're antisemitic, they're doing so because of cognitive dissonance."
It’s uncomfortable. Their motive might not be antisemitic but their actions are.
I've been wondering why instead of tearing down the posters, they don't put up posters with pictures of the (far more) Gaza children killed in the Israeli response.
I can't delve into their psyche but part of me thinks it's a mirror reflection of the Trumpists as Adam Serwer memorably said: the cruelty is the point.
They don't want to make an argument. They want to inflict emotional pain.
I think I actually did see some posters in LA mirroring the "Kidnapped" posters that said "Murdered" with pictures of killed Gazan civilians. My feeling about that is, yes, put up those posters! Make people aware! Just don't tear down the equally valid posters of killed and kidnapped Israeli civilians!
I don't think most of these protesters care about the Palestinian dead at all. The bodies are just props for their playacting.
I'm sure there are tons of people who are truly anguished about the cost the Gazans are paying, but I just get the feeling that many of these demonstrators are simply poseurs.
Someone who I consider reasonable said he struggled not to tear them down. I think he felt that they were manipulative. I was shocked when I saw people tearing them down, but I have to admit, I’ve been tempted to tear down Trump posters.
I think back to when South Africa ended Apartheid. I wrote some letters for Amnesty International, and the thought that I, a teenager with a 10 pm curfew, had helped topple an evil regime was thrilling.
I’ve realized most people don’t know anything about Israel’s history, and you can be sure they’re not getting a full version from their fellow protestors. They really do believe Israel is an evil white country that started in a similar manner to Haiti.
I saw some of the counter-posters in my neighborhood. I find the whole poster war to be a really baffling and farcical addendum to this whole clusterf-ck.
Instead of silly speculation and see what they say when they do it , many don’t shy from expressing Jew hatred. People don’t tear down kids posters out of “dissonance” just like they don’t gun them down out of that. It’s antisemitism: https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
It's strange to attempt to paraphrase someone else's position with such superficial terms, but then to also reach such firm conclusions based on that strawman.
Speaking of nuance.
What's the more charitable explanation for why someone would someone tear down posters of children hostages if not for cognitive dissonance?
I've been thinking about the posters thing because they are plastered around the campus next to me, and they do make me feel weird, when you see them as you are literally walking along listening to an NPR story about deteriorating conditions and the rising civilian death toll in Gaza. I was trying to think about why and whether I'm secretly anti-Semitic in my heart or something--I grew up Southern Baptist, so it's not an idea I would totally dismiss--and I was trying to think about how I would feel if the Russians put up posters like that after a Chechen attack, or the Chinese put them up after an act of Uighur or Tibetan terrorism.
Honestly, I wish we could just be equally sad about all deaths of children in the region, regardless of who killed the children in question, and I wish we could condemn actions that result in the deaths of children without needing to slice the salami so carefully and describe who has the better moral claim to the acceptability of their child-death-causing actions, but I get that doesn't actually solve anything.
Anyway, just wanted to put that in because I've been thinking about it ever since it happened the other day. I don't really have any answers about it, and I didn't tear any posters down. But I do think you can feel a kind of cognitive dissonance about the posters, or at least I hope my own feelings of discomfort reflect that, rather than revealing that I have an antisemitism that I did not recognize hiding in my own self, if that makes sense.
“…I wish we could condemn actions that result in the deaths of children without needing to slice the salami so carefully and describe who has the better moral claim to the acceptability of their child-death-causing actions…”
It’s not that complicated: The October 7th deaths, the fate of the hostages, and the deaths of children in Gaza are all the responsibility of Hamas.
As I have said many times on this forum, I'm a global health guy--taught it for a decade before going back to nursing school--and I just don't agree. Everyone can always say that pretty much any action is someone else's fault. And that's not a theoretical claim I'm making; I brought up the Chinese and the Russians specifically because both of those governments made precisely this claim about their actions in Xinjian, Tibet, and Chechnya: we had to do this as a response to terrorism.
If there is one principle I ascribe to in the human rights / global health space, it's that governments are and must be responsible for the things they do. That's not the same as saying that I don't think they have reasons for doing what they do. That's not the same as saying that I don't understand the strategic logic of choices they make.
But no: Hamas is responsible for the actions of Hamas, and the facts of Israeli government actions over the last two decades do not in any way, ever, under any circumstances give Hamas some kind of free pass on behavior. And the same is true of the Israeli government. Everyone's motives are pure in their own minds--no one gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and is like, "I'm going to do evil for no reason today because I'm an evil person." And in a world where everyone's motives are pure in their own minds, all you have left for making moral judgements is to look at their actual actions / behavior. At least, that's how I see it. It really is possible in a given situation to not be excited about the behavior of any of the players (I would offer, as an example, both the Iran-Iraq war and the conflict between ISIS and the Assad government.)
“…it's that governments are and must be responsible for the things they do”
I agree: In this case Hamas is responsible for Israel’s legitimate response to their attack.
One thing this conversation does make me think is that the non-Jewish citizens of Israel are an under-discussed part of this question. They have very circumscribed political power, but they have political power, and it's pretty clear that they have not been wielding it effectively to move Israeli government policy in a more productive direction. I assume that is a big hill to climb, but that doesn't make it not worth making the attempt.
+1 If chinese students put up posters after a terrorist attack by tibet, a nation they are occupying, I would have a hard time sympathizing. If you saw china and israels land occupations as simular.
You would have a hard time sympathizing with killed or kidnapped 4-year-olds because of the policies of their government?
https://tenor.com/view/idk-chief-i-dont-know-about-that-one-chief-chief-gif-12469724
If the posters were put up in the USA then yes, because it is propaganda.
Yeah: I think that is right. As I said, I'm not a tear-down-posters guy. I just kind of found them personally unsettling, in a this-feels-like-propaganda kind of way. But I also don't like that feeling, because the plight of the hostages is genuinely awful, as was the terrorism that preceded it.
That was why I put that comment up; I was trying to flag that I think the cognitive dissonance angle has some explanatory power, because I feel like that articulates a feeling I was trying to understand in my own self.
Hanlon's razor really has to do a whole ton of work to give a pass on people chanting, "from the river to the sea", but overestimating the stupidity of average political thought hasn't failed me yet.
Protests are often full of idiots who will chant anything that rhymes. There is a plausible positive interpretation of the slogan, provided that you know nothing about the issues (which most protesters do not).
The most generous reading of these people is as legitimately dangerous idiots.
"Twenty (miles per hour) is plenty" is becoming a common rallying cry in urban infrastructure and public policy. Is there anything unique about 21mph or 19mph? Lol hell no! It rhymes so we love it.
Yeah but you do need to draw a limit somewhere, and in practice virtually everywhere does speed limits that are divisible by five (regardless of if it’s MPH or KPH) for easy memorability.
When deciding what blood alcohol content counts as drunk driving, with any given number, you could always says, “Why not a smidgen higher or a smidgen lower?” and the answer is “Because we need to draw a line somewhere and this is that line.”
A car traveling at 20 mph is very unlikely to kill a pedestrian that they hit, meanwhile a car traveling at 40 mph is very likely to kill a person that they hit. (You can look up various studies with slightly different probabilities found.) At some point you have to draw a line—and yes, it will be partially arbitrary. But this isn’t about having a cute rhyme.
Twenty is plenty but fifty is nifty!
120 is plenty!
Seventy is heavenly
I'm trying to imagine "54 39 or fight!"
At this point they do. They persist. They’re antisemites.
It rhymes and it’s evocative. Just miles ahead of your average protest line. As a Youth who has personally had conversations where I asked friends to say something else, I’d wager ~50% don’t know what it means at all, ~40% have heard, but are negatively polarized and/or propagandized into simply not believing that it has antisemitic connotations, and ~10% are fully on board with saying it more broadly (even though I’d wager that of those 10%, 10% or fewer are genuinely antisemitic, while the remainder are some combination of edgy revolution-larping assholes and people who feel a social obligation to side with the most extreme elements of whichever political group they’re in). I think Casey’s comment was also spot on.
It’s even more scary in its own way that antisemitic speech can spread so far beyond antisemitic sentiment. It reminds me of the revolutions in Russia and China, where surely most people did not actually like the mass slaughter of “political enemies”, the constant fear of receiving their own accusation... and yet the social dynamics were such that it happened regardless. This is the sort of thing that strong protection of free speech prevents!
To be clear, I can’t see a revolution, good or bad, antisemitic or not, happening in the states. But there is a history of horrific ideas riding popular sentiments to dizzying heights, and I think conservatives might be more willing to entertain the idea that most of these campus radicals are not antisemitic if they felt that to do so wasn’t also conceding that they aren’t dangerous.
This get's into a whole uncomfortable thing, where people want to posit that, like, all bad things proceed from bad ideas, when the truth is people don't usually do terrible things because they're racist or whatever. There are plenty of benign racists out there, and plenty of people who commit atrocious racist violence who, if they didn't happen to believe stupid things about race, would find other excuses to motivate their terrible acts. A lot of people seem to have convinced themselves of bad, utopian sort of assumptions, that simply correcting people's obviously dumb ideas is all that's necessary, and it's really, really not. History has shown that the real danger on the political scale is not so much the truly individual evil actor as much as it is the social and cultural dynamics that cause vast numbers of scared, ignorant, tribal people who otherwise know better to play along with the nakedly amoral leadership.
So I agree, that most of those people don't mean the phrase in the mustache twirlingly evil, openly genocidal way it was conceived, but I'm not sure how much less deplorable that actually makes them than if they did.
They know. They enjoy it. It’s evil and vile and excuses shouldn’t be made against all evidence.your percentages are wishful thinking divorced from reality. They need to be condemned and ostracized like all racists.
I think some know and a lot don’t. I agree with you that many people (including Matt) are disregarding clear malicious anti-Semitism, but I think you’re too quick to assume malice from *everyone* in the movement when ignorance (granted it’s somewhat willful ignorance) is more plausible. It really doesn’t take much to get people to turn a blind eye to badness in their ideological allies!
I like the larping reference.
Rashida Tlaib probably legitimately thinks it's a peaceful phrase as she is rivaled in congress perhaps only by MTG and Lauren Boebert on an intellectual level.
Nah, she's legitimately pro-Hamas.
No she doesn’t. She is an American citizen and a member of Congress and the Struggle means more to her than her own country.
When I ask people, they will say that they think that Jewish Palestinians (by which they mean Israeli citizens) should be free too.
This is an excellent post, and I think it touches on the larger problem of what I've come to think of as politics by mind reading. Which isn't to say there's no such thing as anti-semitism (or any other form of ism) out there. Just that the assumption without evidencd is lazy intellectually and has the convenient effect of relieving the person making the assertion from grappling with complicated facts, interests, and issues. I think it's exactly where the Kendian stuff was (which I very much hope has crested and that we are on the down slope) and I agree it's where pro-Israeli rhetoric has gone.
I can grant that Israelis have a right to be very upset about the attack October 7. I grant it is understandable for the Jewish diaspora to have a lot of deep feelings about Israel, including deeply sympathetic feelings. What I can't and don't think anyone can grant is that Israel and its supporters can wash their hands of a bunch of stateless people under the de facto control of the Israeli state, as if it's totally irrelevant to the violence.
Are you aware of the wave of antisemitism occurring in the us and Europe? Do you even know what we’re discussing here ?
I'd ask you the same question.
By no means is the accusation of anti-Semitism from reasonable people based on “you must wash your hands of the Palestinians or else you’re anti-Semitic.”
I'm pretty sure the accusation of anti-semitism is being leveled at any and all people who fail to get on board with maximalist Israeli aims and actions, not just the crazy activists.
Yes, some people are leveling the charge too broadly. Some people also level the charge of anti-black racism too broadly, but I’m not sympathetic to those who respond by treating all charges of anti-black racism as spurious.
I think that's kind of the point of Matt's article though. An accusation is just an accusation. I am sure that you can uncover what fair minded people would have to conclude is anti-semitism in pro Palestinian activist groups. But there's also a point where if one doesn't want to have all accusations treated as spurious you have to stop crying wolf all the time on issues of legitimate disagreement.
But who is "you"? If the post is directed at neocons, then I agree that those are people who cry wolf and treat legitimate disagreement as anti-Semitic. However, I don't know why Matt would aim a post at ideologues who as far as I can tell don't listen to him on anything and aren't to be found among his commenters (and hence, probably not among his readership). I took him as talking to other centrist/left-of-center people who see an anti-Semitism problem; Jonathan Chait, say. Is that someone who cries wolf all the time?
Maybe Matt will jump into the comments and tell us who the message is intended for, but failing that, I interpret it as being for (i) Israel sympathizing center left people who are struggling with the response if the larger left to events since October 7, and (ii) the heteodox group of writers and readers of substacks and similar publications with whom SB is in regular dialogue.
Everyone wants to be a victim. All those Trump voters who shrug at the threat to democracy because coastal elitists look at them with contempt, in their mind.
Yeah, coupled with lots of insinuations in this thread and elsewhere that amount to “The Eternal Mussulman is conspiring to overthrow your society from within!”
Palestinians are the responsibility of the UN. You can’t ask somebody to be take responsibility for enemies.
Yeah, you can also think of it as the politics of bullying. Like longstanding attempts to "cancel" various forms of activism around the IP conflict on campus, some partisans on the pro-Israel side really do try to equate criticism of Israel to antisemitism as a way to make people shut up. Personally I think it's pretty foolish in the long term in a "boy who cried wolf sense" where if you're constantly calling your opponents bigots they tend to close ranks and ignore the real bigotry when it does appear on their side (as it certainly can with some pro-Palestinian activist groups as we've seen recently). It's like turning the conversation into people having to line up "Defund the police!" or "Back the blue!" and nothing else in between, it leads to a very dysfunctional and unhealthy discourse.
I appreciate the distinctions you draw in this article, Matt, but I think there are a few important points you don't consider.
1. It's worth re-emphasizing the stakes here, as you and I both see them: "The implementation of the progressive left’s favored one-state solution would, I believe, lead to civil war and bloodshed." To me, that's more than just an oopsies. That's a group that would, cavalierly and with little thought, endanger the lives of my friends and family in Israel. I don't think it requires me to go full Kendi to believe that it shades into anti-Semitism to be so massively wrong about a basic fact that so obviously and extremely puts Jews at risk of massive violence. (Please tell me if there's a different widely-held position in US politics today with comparable consequences.)
2. You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine. I agree that Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe (due to its Hamas-run government and military posture). But since 2008, we've seen 500,000 civilian deaths in Syria, and hundreds of thousands in Yemen. Ethnic Armenians are being cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh essentially as I type this. Two million people were internally displaced in Ethiopia last year. Genocide in Sudan may be making a comeback. All of these are catastrophes on a similar or much vaster scale than what we've seen in Gaza, but there's no international coalition coming to their rescue. People will say that it's because the US gives Israel aid, but the US continues to allow Saudi Arabia (a repressive monarchy!) to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of military equipment, which it then uses to fund e.g. slaughter of civilians in Yemen. Once the left gets mobilized about all these tragedies, I'll be more sympathetic to the idea that they're not anti-Semitic, no matter how many of them do or do not check a box on a survey that says "I hate Jews."
I'd just like to add here that the Israel-Palestine situation is extremely difficult to understand for most Americans and a vanishingly small percentage of them have anything approaching a real grasp on it. I'd say that I barely understood it until Matt wrote a primer a few weeks back myself, and I'm more plugged-in than most.
With that said, the "one-state" solution doesn't seem prima facie like a bad idea (or antisemitic) if it just falls broadly in line with your own progressive ideas of everyone living in harmony. It comes down to what Matt has said about "everyone having different opinions from the ones they actually hold" - the one state solution is, in fact, bad, but if you don't really know all the important factors (a high bar for most people!) it doesn't sound all that different from South Africa or Ireland or anywhere else different people have joined to live together in harmony in the same state.
The one-state solution is not going to cause massive slaughter. The "one-state solution" is, of course defined as "every single person between the river and the sea wants to live in a single multinational state with open borders and in harmony with each other; this then leads them to create such a state".
Obviously the problem with this is that you need to wave a magic want to achieve the first clause.
OK, then by that definition it's just a made up fantasy world and we can talk about it the same way we talk about just moving all the Palestinians to Atlantis.
Yeah, it's not a serious proposal.
When I ask people about it, they will literally tell me that Hamas doesn't actually want to kill the Jews and would happily live side by side with them as citizens of a Palestine from the river to the sea and the only problem is Israelis who don't want that.
It's gibberish, it's childish nonsense, it's complete denial of the reality of the world. It's on the level of thought of the song from Coca-Cola advert ("I'd like to teach the world to sing") or John Lennon's "Imagine".
You don’t seem to know the facts of reality on campuses and elsewhere. We’re talking plain and simple antisemitism , being excused or ignored. Jews, especially the young and visibly Jewish, are under attack at levels not seen for many decades. That’s the discussion. You’re missing the point.
No, *you're* missing the point. The article isn't about the rise of antisemitism. It's about the source of antisemitism (which is on the right, based on available data) and the motivation of anti-Zionists (which may be based on antisemitism, but not necessarily, and is less likely on the left, again based on available data).
No, Matt is ignoring (and probably not fully aware) of what’s going on. But there is tons of civil rights litigation against universities right now for creating a hostile environment for Jews (aka institutional antisemitism) and letting their student antisemites run amock. Hopefully some of the results of all that will make Matt, yourself and others belatedly go “oh, now I get it” in a few years time. It’s unfortunate that Jews have to suffer while you very very slowly digest the facts.
If such antisemitism exists in force on the left, the data will show it.
“The data” doesn’t speak for itself. It needs interpreting (and methodology in producing it). Matt ignores the data he doesn’t like and interprets that which he likes tendentiously. Any educated person knows you can’t form an opinion on a topic based on reading one essay by one person. If you do it shows you don’t particularly care about the topic. You don’t seem to care about this one. Fine (sad, but that’s life), however at least realize your ignorance here.
Generally incidents on campuses that the administrators choose not to classify as a civil-rights matter don't show up in civil-rights data. It's self-reported. So we have to actually wait to see how the lawsuits turn out and then see what the potentially corrected data says.
Whatever one chooses to call the thing currently going on campuses and in other left-leaning spaces that involves hostility and even occasional violence toward Jewish persons, that its "source" is not "on the right" is so manifestly obvious that any suggestion otherwise strikes me as frivolous.
I don't particularly care if one wants to use the same word to describe left-wing anti-Jewish sentiment and right-wing anti-Jewish sentiment, though they seem to me different enough in substance to justify having distinct labels. But the likelihood at least that expressions of such sentiment on the right and the left will differ from each other verbally and attitudinally makes me highly skeptical of trying to use polling data to compare them.
After the Charleston church shooting*, there were a lot of posts on social media about an increase in churches burning down. Lots of news reports pointed out these incidents of fire. Analysis later concluded that these fires were not statistically significant - some number of fires happen, some happen in churches, and we were all paying more attention to this kind of thing at the time so it seemed manifestly obvious that arsonists were afoot.
Nothing is manifestly obvious. Everything must be borne out by data. If one wants to make a point, for instance, that antisemitism is up on campuses and in other left-leaning spaces, this must be shown by actual facts comparing "now" to "before" and controlling for other factors. I'm no more skeptical of this idea than any other - maybe you're right! Maybe you're EXTREMELY correct and Jews in these spaces are more in danger than I'd ever considered! But the fact remains that anecdotes (or a few news stories) are not data.
*I think this was the inciting event at the time; I don't remember. This is all from memory and memory is faulty. But the point stands
I completely agree with you that people's intuitive impressions about things being "on the rise" often turn out to be overblown or even directionally wrong when one examines the empirical data.
In this case I have a pretty strong prior that there were more pro-Palestine/anti-Israel demonstrations on American college campuses in October 2023 than there were in October 2022, and that such events were more likely to be associated with acts of overt hostility toward Jewish students. That's not to say my assumption isn't rebuttable by strong evidence to the contrary. But I also don't have to walk around in a state of complete agnosticism about an apparent social trend just because I haven't seen it precisely quantified.
At any rate, I don't think you're really responding to what I wrote. I didn't make any claim about whether the thing "currently going on" was going on more in the past, less in the past, or to exactly the same extent in the past. What I said was "manifestly obvious" wasn't anything about antisemitism being up or down. It was simply that whatever may or may not be happening on the right, it's plainly not the "source" of Israel-related attitudes animated by leftist political commitments, which are what everyone is discussing here.
"You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine. I agree that Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe (due to its Hamas-run government and military posture). But since 2008, we've seen 500,000 civilian deaths in Syria, and hundreds of thousands in Yemen."
I'm very much on the pro-Israel side of things, but I've always found this particular argument a bit unpersuasive. People are always somewhat parochial and care about some things and not others in ways that don't really stand up to logical inspection. There are any number of plausible non-antisemitic reasons why many Americans might fixate on Israel while ignoring other places that are by the same standards objectively worse.
Israel is a major US ally, in a region that's been a strategic focus of US foreign policy as far back as most people alive today can remember. The roots of its current dilemmas have some parallels to America's own history of settlement and Native dispossession. A major US ethnic group has a close relationship to Israel that's unusual in its being not so much a place American Jews *came from* -- which tends to recede in significance for later generations -- as a place to which they *might go.* It has a broadly Western culture and standard of living, which makes it superficially easy to think it can be evaluated by familiar norms, whereas most Americans would probably feel a lot less confident making judgments about Ethiopia.
And I'd add that Israel is in many ways just an intrinsically atypical and therefore interesting kind of country that would probably attract a certain amount of attention and debate even if none of the above were true. That's not to say that the degree of criticism leveled at Israel is necessarily unrelated to antisemitism. But I'm not persuaded the selectivity of focus in and of itself is evidence of a connection.
"It has a broadly Western culture and standard of living, which makes it superficially easy to think it can be evaluated by familiar norms"
Plus Israeli political leaders for decades have explicitly emphasized Israel's liberalism/progressiveness in making their case for Western support. Almost none of the factions in Syria or Yemen even make serious efforts to claim that they would try to implement a liberal democracy if they succeeded in establishing a government. ("Rojava" in Syria is the only one I can think of to make that claim with any force and they are undermined by pretty clearly being a Kurdish separatist stalking horse with good PR.)
Why does the nation pay so much more attention to Israel/Palestine than these other horrific conflicts?
For the same reason that there are 340 comments on today's post and counting, and if Matt wrote a post on the what's going on in Sudan and Ethiopia there'd be fewer than half that, with many digressing to other subjects like, oh, Israel/Palestine.
Anti vax and climate change denial both strike me as examples of obviously wrong positions that stand to kill lots of people which require no special malice to explain. Just a bad mistake! Lots of foreign policy views are like that too, one state solution among them.
Good examples, thanks! Perversely, though, in both of those examples it's more or less the entire world that's harmed. Whereas in a "one-state solution," it's specifically Jews (and Palestinians) who suffer.
There aren't pro-Saudi Arabian organizations in Congress who will primary you if you point out Saudi Arabia is a bad country who does bad things, as many Congresspeople and normal people do.
"You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine. "
A disproportionate focus on this conflict does not only exist on the pro-Palestinian side by any means. On the contrary, Israel itself has campaigned extensively for almost it's entire existence to put their "plight" at the center of U.S. policy and to engage in all sorts of soft power campaigns and lobbying efforts to turn Israel into the "51st state" in the eyes of many. This status quo of Israel as an elevated issue in America has been the case since before almost any of these campus leftists were born, and Israel does not get to lobby endlessly for U.S. support when it suits them and then suddenly say "why do you care so much about us" when this attention doesn't suit them.
I think this is a fair criticism. I will add though that protests have been widespread throughout pretty much all of the West, including in countries with little to do with Israel. I realize that the OP was about "Antisemitism in America," but to the extent that these protests are continuous with protests elsewhere, I think my point stands.
Rightly or wrongly, the left clearly believes that a one-state solution is manageable with minimal bloodshed. I tend to think Matt's wrong and they're correct - and when you really get under the hood of the Good Friday agreement, you can start to see how that could be managed. But - and jumping back to the formation of the Republic of Ireland - you can see that on the Israeli side the IDF can probably behave professionally and suppress settler violence with minimal bloodshed... and that the Palestinians are likely going to have to remove Hamas, who'll likely resist violently, and that is going to be ugly (see also 1922 Irish Civil War).
Do you believe in full right of return, including Palestinians who fled to neighboring countries? Because that would immediately turn the area to 75/25% Muslim/Jewish. This is obviously a non-starter for Israel. The country would become an Islamic caliphate within minutes.
I mean, you're basically asking me to pop the bonnet on the Good Friday agreement and get deep into nuts and bolts of whether that engine could be used in the Israel-Palestine conflict car.
In short, strong constitutional protections both on an individual and community level, mandatory cross-community voting, and a power-sharing executive would prevent the 'a single election results in a government that never holds another and imposes Islamic rule' outcome.
Note that the one-state solution does away with the right/claim of return. All citizens within the new state would be citizens of the new state (NS). Likely, those living abroad as refugees without another citizenship would also become citizens of the NS (since it is illegal to make someone stateless).
I'm assuming Jewish Israeli's would wish to keep the 'law of return' so the NS would remain a 'place to run to' without restriction for all Jews, which would presumably have to be extended to all Palestinians as well. But that doesn't have anything to do with the right of return as Palestinians currently claim it, and it would in fact extend enough beyond the right of return claim that it would subsume it.
That's one of the attractions of a single-state solution, it's not necessary to unpick all the details around the right of return issue.
And... it's worth noting that the scenario where you really could end up with a Caliphate is where the Palestinians take their right of return claim to some international court or body which then requires Israel to readmit them without restriction (i.e. without the buttressing structure of something like the Good Friday agreement).
"Please tell me if there's a different widely-held position in US politics today with comparable consequences."
Police abolitionism seems like an obvious candidate.
"You ignore the crucial question of *why* progressives choose to focus on Israel/Palestine."
The anti-war left did do a lot of protests against the war in Yemen. A number of Pro-Palestinian groups even added their signatures to petitions against the war.
What was different about Yemen and Syria was that those conflicts cut across sectarian lines that also divide Western Arab and Muslim communities, so those communities weren't as united as they are when it's a non-Muslim Western country/Western ally bombing Muslim Arabs, as was the case in Iraq and Israel/Palestine (Afghanistan was complicated by the US having been unquestionably attacked first). Basic diaspora tribalism, the same thing that, as Matt Y discusses in this article, leads many American Jews to be reflexively defensive about Israel, or leads Armenian and Azerbaijani-Americans to get into a brawl on a Los Angeles street over events on the other side of the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgX3XHjkIJs).
But this discussion is specifically about the Western *left*, not Western Arabs and Muslims, many of whom are cross-pressured conservatives.
I was thinking about police abolitionism as well, actually. But that's a case where I think if anything even remotely like it were implemented, the problems would manifest so quickly that you'd get the National Guard are something called in to restore order and things would quickly revert more or less to the status quo. Unfortunately, in interstate/interethnic conflict, there's no single military to appeal to.
I agree that other conflicts in the Arab world cut against sectarian lines, so there isn't a massive religious constituency to draw attention to it. But also, that's kind of the point. Most of the time, people's reaction is "there's violence somewhere in the world, seems bad and complicated, probably not worth my time." But then a conflict breaks out involving the Jews, and many people on the left (perhaps following their Arab/Muslim "allies") jump to "well clearly the Jews are committing genocide." I'm gonna go ahead and venture that there wasn't as much interest in those Yemen protests you mention.
> "Afghanistan was complicated by the US having been unquestionably attacked first." This is one of the things that upsets me most about the current display of support for Hamas. We just witnessed the most deadly terrorist attack on a Western-aligned country since 9/11, and people's reaction is "immediate ceasefire." Which to me implies a fundamental denial of Israel's presumptive right to self-defense, which is to say, very existence.
Iraq 2003-2011 saw protests of a similar scale if not even larger. The relevant factor here isn't "Jews", it's "non-Muslim and non-Arab people occupying and/or bombing Arab Muslims outside of either intervening in a sectarian civil war or in service of a cause that a majority of Muslim Arabs actually agree with". (And even in IE Gulf War 1 there were complaints about the way in which America conducted that war, bombing civilian infrastructure and so on.)
I've heard that the Kashmir issue gets a significant amount of attention in the UK, where a lot of local Muslims are South Asian, and local left-wingers can claim historical responsibility and so on. For example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JV7g4Jqfjg0
> This is one of the things that upsets me most about the current display of support for Hamas. We just witnessed the most deadly terrorist attack on a Western-aligned country since 9/11, and people's reaction is "immediate ceasefire." Which to me implies a fundamental denial of Israel's presumptive right to self-defense, which is to say, very existence.
Israel and Palestine were already at war, and had been for a very long time. Even looking at Gaza in isolation, maintaining a naval and air blockade for 16 years is generally considered an act of war. Then there was the occupation of the West Bank, with regular land confiscations, home demolitions, etc. Try to argue over who started it, and you end up bringing up things that happened many decades ago.
Bin Laden's stated primary causus beli was US military bases in Saudi Arabia. A much harder sell outside of his own esoteric belief system.
And even with all of the above taken into account, it seems worth noting that total civilian deaths of the war in Afghanistan over 20 years in a country with a population of 20-40 million were around 46,000 (https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022), whereas Israel has killed at least several thousand civilians in Gaza, with a population of 2.3 million people, in a little over a month. The March 2003 invasion of Iraq had a similar civilian death rate (7000-8000 in 3 weeks), in a full scale invasion of a country of 29 million people, and again that war did draw widespread condemnation and protest. The per-capita level of death and destruction in this particular war is, in fact, unusually high.
The Iraq war was prosecuted by the US, which is a much better reason for protests in the US.
Israel and Palestine were already at war in some sense, but a ceasefire was in effect on 10/6. The idea that you would go back to that status quo is quite frankly offensive after the events of 10/7.
It is no doubt true and incredibly sad that the civilian death toll is quite high in Gaza (just how high is impossible to know at this point given that we're relying on Hamas statistics that can't be confirmed by outside observers). But it's also a consequence of Hamas intentionally embedding itself within civilian areas and actively preventing evacuation of said civilians despite repeated warnings and weeks of notice. I realize that's little comfort to civilians whose family members are killed in the crossfire. But as outside observers we should remember which group has tried to increase civilian deaths, and which has tried to minimize them
Leaving aside obvious questions about aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean, there were numerous large protests against the Iraq War outside of the US and other countries that participated in it, including the Guiness Book of World Records' largest anti-war protest in history in Rome in February 2003, with an estimated 3 million attendees, as well as numerous large protests in many Muslim-majority countries. This Wikipedia article includes a non-comprehensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
It seems obvious to me that it’s much harder for the public to get interested when the people fighting each other are the same color. Yugoslavia, Armenia, Syria, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Yemen. Not many people realize Israelis and Palestinians are the same color.
Maybe that’s the solution — we widely share this information, and everyone gets confused and bored.
Also, this:
"Ethnic Armenians are being cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh essentially as I type this."
Is kind of a strange example to use given Israel's extensive arm sales to Azerbaijan. Quoting CNN:
"Azerbaijan and Israel are close military partners. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), more than 60% of Azerbaijani weapons imports came from Israel between 2017 and 2020, making up 13% of Israeli exports during the same period. SIPRI research reveals that Azerbaijan purchased a wide variety of drones, missiles, and mortars from Israel between 2010 and 2020.
However, according to SIPRI senior researcher Pieter Wezeman, certain specifics are unknown about the extent of the ongoing Azerbaijani-Israeli weapons trade.
“We had quite some information before 2020 and then it stops,” Wezeman said. “And that doesn’t really make sense because in 2020 Azerbaijan used a significant amount of its equipment… Most likely they have continued their relationship with Israel, but that’s about as far as we know.”
The trade is believed to be particularly active in periods just before Azerbaijan has gone to war. A March 2023 investigative report by Haaretz found that flights by an Azerbaijani airline between Baku and Ovda air base, the only airport in Israel through which explosives can be flown, spiked in the months just before Azerbaijan attacked separatist positions in Karabakh in September 2020.
Likewise, Haaretz reported in mid-September that the same company flew between Baku and Ovda less than a week before Azerbaijan began its latest assault in Nagorno-Karabakh. CNN reached out to the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense and the airline in question, but did not receive a response. The Israeli Ministry of Defense, which oversees Ovda Airport, had no comment.
“We don’t know what was on board, but very likely it is something related to the military equipment that Israel already has supplied to Azerbaijan before,” Wezeman said."
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/04/middleeast/azerbaijan-israel-weapons-mime-intl/index.html
The relative lack of attention that this issue got is, IMHO, evidence that it is not, in fact, the involvement of Israel or Jews that is the most important explanatory factor.
(1) was mostly directed at people who already accept the premise that it would lead to bloodshed on an unacceptable scale. I'm reluctant to go down the rabbit hole here actually arguing that point, but here's the one thing I'll say about it. South African apartheid did not have a strong religious dimension to it. Yes, you had decades of violence, but you also had a leader in Nelson Mandela who could credibly disavow violence and enjoyed widespread support. Hamas, on the other hand, is a jihadist movement. Here's an excerpt from its charter, quoting a hadith:
"The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"
While Hamas appears to be unpopular in Gaza due to corruption (not its stance toward Israel), polls suggest that it would almost certainly win if free elections were held in the West Bank. Its whole reason for existence is the expulsion and/or genocide of the Jews in Israel. This is not an unpopular opinion in the Palestinian territories.
(2) There are many reasons. Evangelicals have their own weird eschatological reasons that I don't really understand. The national security apparatus realizes that the Middle East is a dangerous place with imperial ambitions that actually believes what it says and wants to end the Western, liberal international order, and Israel is a critical ally in that fight. And I'm invested because I'm Jewish, and I'm also a secular, liberal Zionist.
Incidentally, that last point underlies my response to (1). Because even if it were true that a peaceful one-state solution were possible (which, I repeat, it is emphatically not), it would mean abandoning the dream of self-determination for the Jewish people, which could only be secured in a democratic, majority-Jewish state. In the same way, I desire self determination for Palestinian Arabs within their own future state, and for the 22 existing Arab states (many of which sadly deprive their citizens of that right with brutal oppression), and for the 50-some Muslim majority nations (ditto).
I am old enough to remember the days when advanced thinking in the Arab world was not about self-determination but about unification of all the Arabs. Nasser was big on that. What is self-determination among people whose primary identity is as Muslims and Arabs and whose national existence was created to make war on the Jews?
That's a good question. I genuinely don't know. Obviously there are many Israelis who say there are plenty of Arab states, Palestine is essentially coextensive with (Trans)Jordan, etc. etc. But clearly there is no turning back the clock on the Palestinian national movement, so all we can hope now is that it is sublimated into something less violent and more conducive to peaceful long-term coexistence.
No, there is another possibility, which is that the Palestinians will finally fuck up so bad that some other country will beat it out of them to end the war quickly. After which the survivors will understand what a disaster this war has been. They will become peaceful people like the Japanese and they will make a future for their grandchildren. Numerous things will finally become possible. It is very harsh but options have narrowed so much that this may be the only path left for peace. Hamas have put the world on a knifes edge now. If a big shooting war with a draft breaks out, literally anything could happen. The Palestinians are in the crosshairs of history and they don’t seem to know it.
I’d say that October 7 renounces the renunciation
1. My understanding is that their more recent update never actually renounces the 1988 charter explicitly. Also, take a look at some of the 10/7 footage to see how they feel about murdering Jews (answer: positively ecstatic).
2. Clearly the inequality is a huge driver behind people's intuitions. I just think it's more complicated than that. "The party with less power deserves are sympathies" is a reasonable heuristic to start with, but it's far from the end-all be-all.
There have been a lot of killings of white farmers in South Africa, so I am not sure this is as good of an example as you think it is.
I wonder if part of the increasing hostility of the the secular left against the state of Israel reflects that conservatives and white evangelicals have become such partisan and one eyed supporters of it. Perhaps that's a task for historians but I think it all too probable that it has strengthened the hostility.
There's the weird twist of the antisemites who are pro-Israel. By which I mean many in the Christian fundamentalist community, who look forward to the death of the vast majority of Jews and the forced conversion of the remaining 144,000 during the tribulation.
I’m sure it has, but it doesn’t mean antisemitic sentiment hasn’t come with it!
I think there are other frameworks to understand this too. Like the disharmony between stated and revealed preference.
Some people might not express animus and bigotry in surveys, but then reveal it when they show a lack of concern for truth (like the total disregard for physical security concerns of Jews) and magical thinking that runs counter to evidence. The choice to show selective outrage at one tragedy while disregarding larger and more horrendous crimes that are both geographically and temporally proximate suggests there is something underlying that makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict salient.
I hate Bibi. I loathe Likud’s “mowing the grass” strategy and West Bank settlements. I am not chanting “from river to sea.” I don’t say Israel is an illegitimate state. I don’t debase the word “genocide.” People who choose to speak these words and choose to hold theses ideas are making a choice. We can interpret those choices.
Precisely. Also there are just tons of explicit antisemitism happening all over which this article ignores!
We cannot know motive unless someone states it truthfully. We can observe choices and what ideas they find salient and what ideas they discard or ignore.
The problem is that we cannot determine whether animus, intellectual laziness, or in-group signaling are driving this. We cannot determine if motivations are antisemitic, but we can determine if actions are antisemitic.
People often conflate actions with intent, like some folks assert that failing to support “defund the police” means the moral character of someone is inherently racist. This type of reasoning is what MattY is critiquing.
Someone who yells "gas the Jews!" is antisemitic regardless of their intent or motive.
You can identify antisemitism as well as any kind of racism and should apply the same criteria. If you do you’ll see the campus left is steeped in it. If you refuse to do so only for antisemitism while accepting it for all other racism question is why?
Something something Foucault?
There's a common tactic in leftish spaces of implying your opponent is racist to win fights. People will usually back off or switch to trying to prove they're not racist, or switch to trying to trying to show that the other side is racist, all of which get away from clarity and truth. I appreciate this article because I feel like something similar is happening with the concept of antisemitism, and we need to push back against this way of doing things in all its forms.
But, I don't have to believe that large numbers of people in higher education are racist against Asians to believe that their ideology is leading to injustice towards Asians. I try not to be influenced by anecdotes, but the stories I see about things pro-Palestinian protestors are getting away with on campus makes me wonder if the administrators, whether or not they personally are antisemitic, are running their institutions in a way that is unfair to Jewish students.
If an ideology leads to its proponents behaving unjustly, I think that's worth pointing out.
I think Asians are something of a threat to a lot of Left ideologies about race and victimhood. Here's this group that faced enormous prejudice in America-- internment camps and the Alien Land Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act may not be on the level of slavery, but they represent enormous amounts of historic state-imposed bigotry-- and yet they do incredibly well and in fact have surpassed whites in any number of "objective" measures such as test scores and wealth building.
Which raises the question, why are they doing better than other groups? Now, there are answers to this that are compatible with Left-wing thought, such as differential access to capital, but it's also kind of obvious that even if we leave aside possible genetic explanations (as I would strongly advocate we should), there are some pretty obvious cultural explanations that aren't the sorts of things that Lefties like to talk about.
As a result of this, Lefty theorists end up saying some really embarrassing things about Asians-- really, they're "white adjacent"?-- ignoring mass Asian opinion in favor of the few elite Lefty Asians who are already in the door and don't mind a ton of gatekeeping, focusing on the few acts of anti-Asian racism of whites and ignoring the many acts of non-whites, or just writing them out of the story entirely (how many discussions of affirmative action have you seen that focus solely on stuff like the history of the Freedmen's Bureau and don't even mention Asians?).
None of it, I would say, is exactly racism. But it's all kind of ugly.
Internment for Japanese-Americans is a particularly critical detail because not only was it obviously massively discriminatory, but it effectively dialed most Japanese-American households' accumulated wealth down to zero. (I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if average and median household wealth for Japanese-Americans in 1946 was below that of black Americans.) Japanese-Americans, however, completely recovered from that in less than 20 years -- i.e., there was no "intergenerational wealth" issue, people literally built back their lives within their lifetimes by and large -- and I believe surpassed median white American household wealth within 20 or so years after that.
The Japanese internment was a panic move with which the courts refused to interfere because it was wartime. We were later sorry about that, and apologized and paid reparations but in the context that the Japanese Americans were 100 percent loyal to their country. Their young men volunteered to fight in the US Army starting within a few weeks of Pearl Harbor and of the thousands of Hawaiian Japanese handling top secret signals traffic there was not a single instance of disloyalty.
I read a really fascinating book on the Great Migration of blacks from the Jim Crow South (The Warmth of Other Suns). It outlined the incredible racism black people faced, not just in the South but the North and West as well.
But. When explaining how other white immigrants were able to grab a piece of the American Dream, it said that other immigrants could change their names and pass, completely ignoring that Asians can’t do that.
But do they celebrate massacres of Asians? Do most of them come from cultures with long anti Asian tradition and institutions infamous for national Asian discrimination ? Do they go on to accuse Asian students of the actions of Asian countries? Demand special loyalty oaths from them to allow them to progressive spaces etc? There is something to the analogy but only so much. The campus left goes far beyond that with regards to Jews.
This is naive.
1) antizionists rarely criticize Israeli policy. They criticize Israeli legitimacy. That's why the West Bank settlements seem irrelevant. When they chant against Israelis as settlers, they're talking about *all* Israelis.
2) much of the criticism of Israel is also rooted in an idea that there is no particular need for a guarantee against Jew hatred worldwide. Given two thousand years of history, that seems wildly moronic. So people who are indifferent to the need for special protections against Jew hatred are either (a) ignorant of that history (rarely true), (b) morons, or (c) engaging in motivated thinking. That motivated thinking may take many different flavors, but they can all reasonably be called antisemitic.
This is my issue with the article as well. I think Matt’s larger point is a good one: that Israel’s actions do affect its reputation and that criticizing Israel or having a bad view of it is not by definition anti-semitism.
That said, if ONLY Israel’s actions affect your opinion of the I/P conflict and not the Palestinians’, if you constantly spread lies or dangerous hyperbole exclusively at Israel’s expense, if you hold Israel to a standard that you hold no other country to, and if Israel is the only country in the world that you completely delegitimize and believe should be dismantled (or even believe that it doesn’t count as a country), than I think it’s hard to argue that anti-semitism doesn’t play a role in your views. Sure you could chalk all that up to bad takes or general stupidity, but if the Jewish state is the only one that you’re selectively stupid about, than I think it’s somewhat naive to think that this is all just a misguided response to the Netanyahu administration (which I agree has been awful).
The left isnt chanting to end the settlements. It’s chanting to end Israel.
Precisely.
I think your first point is too categorical about opposition to Israel. Or, maybe it's true of ideological antizionists, but it supposes that critics of Israel are broadly "antizionists" in this sense. I am one guy who criticizes the West Bank settlements but believes in Israel's legitimacy; there are lots of other people with that stance, including in this comment section and in Israel. That said, I agree with you that denying Israeli legitimacy is anti-Semitic since it relies on a standard for legitimacy that almost no one applies consistently.
Young white liberals are not exactly anti-Semitic. But many of their Muslim and Arab peers are absolutely anti-Semitic, in the wildest and most extreme way that would not have shamed Germans in the 1930s. And the young liberals are their collaborators, enabling them.
This exactly. If you support bad people you are bad.
Exact same argument as all cops are bad. If you vote for and pay money to the thuggish police union then you support their racist illegal policies. People can't wash their hands.
There is another option for determining if anti-Israel rhetoric and arguments is rooted in antisemitism besides 1) it's bad for the Jews so it's antisemitic or 2) there is other evidence of antisemitic intent. That is, do you deny only Jews the right to have a state of thier own (i.e., Zionism). If you do, there is strong evidence that antisemitism is involved. After all, we Jews have a particularly strong case for a state of our own, having been (as Hakim Jeffries pointed out at the March for Israel yesterday) expelled from so many countries (and otherwise very badly mistreated) over so many centuries, and having such a long history of connection to the land of Israel.
Honestly this comes across that you’ve just found a way to convince yourself it’s illegitimate to oppose Israel. There are separatists in tons of places and in basically every case the international community supports fair treatment of minorities but not state creation because it risks a ton of violence. As has proven the case in Israel.
I'm not sure "basically every" is right here, there are plenty of recent examples of separatists getting their own state (East Timor, Western Sahara, whatever). Now, why the international community decided that East Timor should get its own state but West Papua or Aceh shouldn't? IDK, I'm not an Indonesia scholar but someone probably has some ideas (the massive global influence of Portugal maybe?).
How long does the state need to be there, in your eyes,before it no longer counts as state formation?
And of course, there is the fact that we are talking about an existing state. Is this the only homeland you are seeking to eliminate? Even stronger evidence of antisemitism than if we were talking about whether a group of people should be able to form their own state.
I don't think a group of people who are a minority everywhere (as Jews were and Roma are) are entitled to make themselves a majority somewhere and form a state.
But, having done so, I think they are entitled to continue having a state. Ethnic cleansing is wrong, but having done it, you can't "reverse it", you can't "not kick someone off their land", you can only revert the land to the heir of the previous owner and kick off the current owner. And that's not reversing ethnic cleansing, that's repeating it.
Nice how that “ethnic cleansing” thing just flowed right out of your sentence. The Palestinians were certainly displaced by the war of 1948 that took place right at their homes, but ethnic cleansing? By Jews? Hard to really make this case on facts and especially since those Arabs who did not flee are still there and are Israeli citizens. Now Arabs, that’s another thing. It’s what they tried and failed to do in that war. A disturbingly high proportion are still in favor.
"ethnic cleansing? By Jews?"
To quote from the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the Nakba - not an ideal source, but one with sources that you can check:
"the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 villages by Zionist militias and, later, the Israeli army"
Just because not all Palestinians were driven out doesn't mean that none were - and it's a lot more than that; when about 90% of the population flees, that just doesn't happen without a lot of violence.
But even regardless, if Palestinians were only, as you admit "displaced by the war of 1948 that took place right at their homes" and then not allowed back, when Jews who were so displaced were allowed back (thanks to the Law of Return, which Palestinians do not have access to), then how is that other than ethnic cleansing? If you drive people out of their homes and then selectively let them back based on ethnicity, what other reasonable name is there for that?
Come now. Surely you must know that controversial topics attract a lot of back and forth editing on Wikipedia with no checking. They have flame wars a mile long in the editing record. What it says today, it could say the opposite tomorrow. All it shows is that Palestinians and their supporters are good at propaganda which we already know.
There are various legends and self-interested claims about the Nakba. Some say they were encouraged (ordered) to leave by their leadership, with the promise that they could come back when the Arab armies had killed all the Jews. Radio broadcasts, pronouncements and other things to this effect have been documented. Some also say that Jewish militias did it. That (on a small scale) has also been documented. And, there are contemporary accounts (and photographs) of Arab peasants just picking up and hitting the roads to get away from the fighting. These things are not mutually exclusive. I think that all three of those happened to varying degrees. It would have to be, to add up to that many people.
There is a big conceptual difference between "driven off the land in a war between the Jews and the Arabs" and "driven off the land by the Jews." That is a pretty breathtaking rhetorical move, especially given that the Arabs started that war (openly and proudly - also well documented). You need to have a prejudice going in to make that move.
In any case, "responsibility" is a meaningless concept here. It was the first phase of a long, long war, in which the Arabs failed to achieve their objectives. Who knows if the Israelis might have let the Palestinian Arabs back, if the war had actually ended then and the Arabs made peace? But in fact, the Arabs didn't make peace. The Arab leadership instead founded the PFLP and kept fighting. They are fighting still. The war continues to this very day and hour. So the matter of what happens after the peace is as yet untested.
We do know that many Arabs did not flee, and their descendants are 20% of the Israeli population today. It seems to me that if the Israeli Jews were bent on ethnic cleansing, they would not have failed to drive those people out, too. The distinction is, the Israel Arabs kept the peace and the others did not.
Who lets a mortal enemy into their own house, because their neighbors tell them they should? This is what is meant by "applying standards to Israel that aren't applied to other people." "Ethnic cleansing", like "genocide" is a swear word that the Palestinians use to get attention for their cause (which intends that very thing), from largely ignorant people worldwide. For the rest of the world to take sides and go along with this blood libel - well, that is more than shameful.
^excellent. I wish more people in this thread would read this.
I agree with you on the facts, but I do think ethnic cleansing is incorrect, or unnecessarily inflammatory. We generally used “expelled” in these types of situations. I’ve mentioned before one of my close friends is Indian, and he was expelled from Uganda on the basis of his race.
We could argue whether Israel should have been created but the fact is it exists and a surprising amount of people have no problem ethnically cleansing Jews from a state that has existed for several generations based on the justification that the current inhabitants live there because of ethnic cleansing.
Agreed. The history of how Israel came to be has no bearing on its right to exist.
I think that's fine practically speaking. I disagree with you about the history–I think Zionism was probably far and above the most justified and admirable "ism" of the 20th century–but that doesn't really matter for determining contemporary policy.
I have a hell of a lot of time for Jewish people who wanted to go to the land of Canaan and live somewhere where they would have the protection of the state and to establish a safe place where every Jew could go regardless, and all the more so after the Shoah.
I don't think they had the right to drive Palestinians out of their homes (as distinct from buying them out which they absolutely had the right to do), and they should have the right to a state that will welcome and protect Jews. But the determination that that should be a Jewish state that means that non-Jews are, by the nature of saying that it's a Jewish state, some sort of second-class citizen at best has always rubbed me the wrong way.
But I can absolutely understand why Jewish people don't feel safe in a state ruled by non-Jews regardless of the constitutional and other guarantees, and incorporating the entire West Bank and Gaza into Israel and accepting all the residents there as citizens (ie the one-state solution where the one state is Israel) would result in 40% of the Knesset being the Arab parties, and it would take an awful lot of reconciliation before most Israelis would feel safe under those conditions.
I can see where you got the number, but only about 7.5 of Israel's 9.2 million population are actually Jewish, the balance are Israeli Palestinians who didn't flee during the Nakba and a grab-bag of minority groups (like Christians), so a one-state solution would be about 45% Jewish, 50% Palestinian, and 5% other. But see the Good Friday agreement for how this could be managed/has been managed on the island of Ireland.
There's also no need to give up on Israel as the Jewish homeland in a one state solution. It just also needs to be the homeland of the Palestinian people. And both peoples, wherever they live, could have an unrestricted right of immigration based on descent (my understanding is the concept of Israel as a 'place to run to' is an important concept for the Israel as a state.
Please remember Right if Return applies to a MASSIVE number of Palestinians in neighboring nations.
Jewish turnout is higher than Arab turnout in Israel.
>> But the determination that that should be a Jewish state that means that non-Jews are, by the nature of saying that it's a Jewish state, some sort of second-class citizen at best has always rubbed me the wrong way.
I don’t think it’s meant to make anyone second class. In fact I think Israel’s Declaration of Independence goes out of its way state full equality as a core principle of the state. The record has admittedly been mixed but that need not be a permanent state of affairs and some things in fact improved (eg education gaps between Israeli Jews and Arabs, Arabs in positions of power and prestige) even as others have worsened (tolerance for racist political discourse).
exactly
It's exactly the same claim to self-determination as white people in the USA or Canada or Australia or New Zealand, or Unionists in Northern Ireland, or Turks in Turkey.
Granted that that happened in the early 90s, but I bet if you polled anti-zionists you’d find a substantial number would say that South Africa abolishing Apartheid was a good thing. Didn’t that have the effect of denying white Afrikaners a then-extant homeland to at least the same extent that making Israel a binational state of everyone living in historical Mandate Palestine would for Jews?
Couple important differences .
First, white Afrikaners didn’t have a two thousand year history of persecution. They were differently situated than the Jews (or Kurds or Armenians, for that matter) in terms of the imperative of a state for self protection.
Second, the Afrikaners didn’t have any black equal citizens; the entire premise was racist exclusion, not self-determination. Israel grants equal rights to all citizens.
Third, the Afrikaners hadn’t made multiple offers of statehood that were met by violence.
Everything is different from everything else, but none of these is an argument that Afrikaners didn’t have a state in South Africa that they lost when Apartheid was abolished.
And your first argument is just a species of Micah’s (1): Jews need a state, anti-Zionism would deny them one, therefore anti-Zionism is objectively antisemitic. (And I bet that an Afrikaner could tell you a whole history of his people’s sufferings, from the Huguenot persecution in Europe that led them to move to Africa in the first place to being rounded up in concentration camps—so called—during the Boer Wars. Maybe you don’t think that makes them as deserving as Jews, but maybe he’d think they rate with the Armenians or Kurds?)
The Boers are not remotely similar to the Kurds or Armenians. The Boers were Dutch farmers who were taken to the cape by the Dutch East India Company to live in a Dutch colony. Afrikaans is a Dutch dialect. Boer is Dutch for farmer. Boers derived entirely from Dutch colonialism. Certainly they developed their own culture and suffered atrocities in their wars with the British. But they are not a historically oppressed group in any way comparable to what the Armenians and Kurds suffered.
Two things: One, many, if not most of the black people in South Africa are descended from people who migrated there from other parts of Africa, in large part *after* the Afrikaners came there. Two, in my view, the "historical oppression" argument is always, and everywhere, something that angry and morally deficient people say to whitewash and excuse their own desire to oppress people they don't like in the here and now. This is certainly true of the South African government, which is a basket case that that has systematically excluded white South Africans from a large part of the economy. The only reason they haven't confiscated their land already is that they rely on them to keep the whole country from starving. A lot of Afrikaners are desperate to emigrate, but doors are prejudicially closed to them. Maybe the Americans bring all these "colonialists" here, where they would make fine, productive, loyal citizens. That would be good for them, but very bad for South Africa.
I actually think it would have been fine if SA had simply been a little white state with a 20% black population that was treated equally. Saying the population *must* be majority white would obviously be problematic, but Afrikaners have much less of a persecution claim, and they never went in with the intention to build an equal state. The problem was the Apartheid. Israel and Palestine can have two states.
Third isn't true, that's what the Bantustans were.
And with respect to the second, you could argue that the intermediate status of Indians and “coloureds” under apartheid was at least broadly analogous to the citizenship granted to Palestinian citizens of Israel—inferior to that given Jewish citizens, but clearly superior to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza.
Except this literally is not true. Citizens of Israel have equal rights. Arab Israelis vote, serve in parliament and the judiciary, and have every other civil right. Certainly there’s discrimination, just like minorities face in literally every other democracy.
"Didn’t that have the effect of denying white Afrikaners a then-extant homeland?"
No, because black South Africans wanted to be South African. It changed the nature of what being "South African" meant, but it didn't eliminate South Africa as a homeland for the Afrikaans.
But polling and policy decisions repeatedly show that most Palestinians do not want to be Israeli, even if that meant a magical binational state.
Do you believe in a national homeland for white Southerners? I don’t have a national homeland!! I’m forced to vote in elections where people with other identities have way too much influence. Why can’t I live in a national homeland for white Southerners, and maybe have a wee little guest worker program so someone can mow my lawn and clean my house? Why do you hate white Southerners so much?
I do believe in a state for Kurds, to take another example. But you ignored the reasons why it is particularly appropriate for Jews to have a homeland in Israel.
“Do you believe in a national homeland for white Southerners? I don’t have a national homeland”
That’s because white southerners were badly behaved, started a war, and lost.
didn’t rome defeat the jews a while back at masada?
Great point. Israel should demand reparations from every country in the former Roman Empire.
Yes, and Sherman was tame in comparison.
Your opinion
Are there facts I may be unaware of?
I don’t what your level of factual knowledge is or isn’t. I’m only pointing out that your opinion is in fact only an opinion. You don’t need to impress anybody - I’m confident nobody here is in favor of slavery or secession or wishes the South had won.
Jeeze. Lighten up, Francis.
How is that relevant to the argument? Also, you do understand the irony here, right?
Do tell.
Are you asking me to explain the irony? Because no, I'm not going to do that.
Because you do not understand.
I mean, if the South had won the war, the North would have had to deal with it. 🤷🏻♀️ You’d probably end up with something like East/West Germany because all the black people (and poor whites) would constantly try to escape.
my celtic ancestors were plundered by vikings and came to our shores to escape forced tithing to the church of england. why do you ignore my plight?
You are making David's point for him.
Only a damn Yankee would say that. You clearly didn’t have a good Southern upbringing. (But I’m old enough to remember when it was a real thing and that was 100 years after the event)
There isn’t much of an argument against Jews having a state in principle but it can’t be implemented in practice without dispossessing or even oppressing other people. The 1947 partition and most peace plans aim to keep that to a minimum, but it’s unavoidable.
"do you deny only Jews the right to have a state of thier own"
What are some other examples of comparable stateless people that they should deny a homeland to in order to prove their bona fides on this? I'm not sure there are that many leftists hypocritically hyping up Kurdish independence or a Hmong home state.
Well, "Free Tibet" was a cause celebre on the Left for a while. I think the activism about East Timor came from the Left as well? But you're right that the Left is not advocating for a policy of ethnic self-determination in every case (e.g. there was a lot of left-wing skepticism about our intervention on behalf of the Kosovars).
"I think the activism about East Timor came from the Left as well?"
Calling upon my vast knowledge from having written a paper on East Timor in a high school class 30+ years ago (which to be fair, probably actually is enough to put me in at least the 75th+ percentile of Americans for knowledge about East Timor), I absolutely agree that activism about East Timor was pretty much exclusively left/progressive driven, but I think a huge part of that was because being pro-Timorese independence was the "anti-American" position since the Ford administration had blessed the Indonesian invasion in 1975 for anti-communist reasons.
Knowing the words “East Timor” puts you in the 90th percentilr, at least!
Yes, I think that's a good point, just as "Free Tibet" was partly due to the Left wanting to throw wrenches into the neoliberal rapprochement with China developing in the 90's (seems like the Left was correct on this one!).
"Free Tibet" strikes me as having largely come from a much different side of leftism, namely the types of "leftists" who are into woo-woo spirituality, and it mostly seems to have been driven by the uniquely effective activism of the Dalai Lama more than anything. Also that shit's ancient, I don't think any of the new generation of campus activists even know anything about it.
The woo is part of it; I also think that the Left wasn't inclined to view China favorably, or as "enemy of my enemy," since (as I mentioned in a comment above) at the time we were trying to build better trade relations with them, so making a big deal about China in Tibet was a way of being anti-neoliberal. The point is that the Left, like most factions, uses independence, self-determination, and sovereignty in an ad hoc way rather than as consistent principles.
Ethnic groups demand and receive their own states all the time. We take it for granted now that Yugoslavia could never work, and that’s entirely based on ethnic nationalist claims. Many of the problems in Africa snd the Middle East arise from arbitrarily established borders that don’t correspond to ethnic/linguistic lines.
IDK, they made Yugoslavia work for almost 75 years, that's almost as long as Israel has existed. One can easily imagine it having worked longer with some better leadership and some other left turns in history. There are plenty of other examples of multi-ethnic/multi-linguistic populations like Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, even India to some extent.
Yugoslavia survived as a dictatorship. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of the pluralistic secular democratic state, and bravo to countries that pull it off. I just don’t think one can plausibly argue that nation states based on *nations* are somehow deviant. Especially if they’re democracies that give full rights to minorities.
Useful thing about comments is it can help to clarify arguments. Important point I initially forgot to mention was that we are talking about an existing state.
Useful thing about comments is it can help to clarify arguments. Important point I initially forgot to mention was that we are talking about an existing state.
Very important point. Ultimately the historic arguments matter much less to me than the fact that two peoples are there, they aren’t going anywhere, and they both have strong nationalisms and want sovereignty.
In your tweet yesterday (https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1724403191071002689) you said, “tomorrow I will reveal which criticisms of Israel are the antisemitic ones.” But this piece doesn’t do that, and even if you were joking I think it would be stronger if it did. You seem to be suggesting we can *only* tell that attacks on Israel are anti-Semitic if we can show the attacker has other, anti-Semitic views independent of Israel. I think we can be more analytical than that.
Here’s an example: there’s a secular Jewish organization here in LA called The Workmen’s Circle. 10 or 15 years ago, someone tagged a mural on their wall with “Free Palestine.” “Free Palestine” is not, in itself, an anti-Semitic thing to say, even though it can be construed as an attack on Israel. But why did the graffitist choose this mural to tag with it? Obviously, because it’s on the wall of an organization that identifies as Jewish, and the tagger thought that made it fair game for that critique. To me that is obvious, collective-guilt anti-Semitism. I’m curious to know if any of the other attacks on Israel strike Matt in similar ways.
I also think the Medicaid expansion comparison is not apropos because Matt is comparing disparate effects of a policy with disparate *discourse* about a nation and a people, and discourse is a much more reliable guide to one’s attitudes and motivations. When Reagan inveighed against urban “welfare queens,” or when a Reagan spokesperson responded to a question about AIDS with “I don’t have it, do you?”, it becomes much easier to say the administration’s stinginess on social and public health spending was specifically due to its problems with groups of people, not with something about the policies themselves.