Elsewhere I have demonstrated precisely why anti-Zionism is antisemitism. In doing so I encountered the arguments of journalist Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC but now perhaps more at home with Al Jazeera. Credibility concerns aside, he is well known and influential, and his arguments for the negative answer are widely found among anti-Zionists, so it is worth taking them seriously. Responding to them, as we shall see, will lead us to a position so out of step with the dominant ideology on campuses and in the mainstream infosphere that some will hear it almost as a contradiction. The position is one of “punching down,” of daring to criticize the alleged marginalized, the oppressed, the victim, etc., of holding that they are actually capable not merely of bigotry but of perpetrating evil deeds. Nearly a century ago Bertrand Russell, in his essay “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed,” drily observed that the alleged oppressed invariably turn out to be morally no better than anybody else. In the current case, where the subject is the Palestinians, it might even turn out that they are not entirely oppressed either, all considered.
Our launch point will be the June 2024 Munk Debates debate on the resolution, “Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism,” featuring Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff for, and Gideon Levy and Mehdi Hasan against. In his opening statement, Hasan offered three arguments against the motion. Briefly, one was that Zionism is not Judaism, so hating Zionism (anti-Zionism) is not the same thing as hating Jews (antisemitism), and another was that identifying anti-Zionism as antisemitism would (in his view wrongly) entail that many Jews are antisemitic. For the purposes of this essay, the coarse expression of “hating Jews” shall be our working definition of “antisemitism.” His third argument, our focus here, is this:
If you vote for this motion, you’re throwing Palestinians as a people under the bus. You’re telling an occupied people, a dispossessed people to accept their own occupation, their own dispossession, meekly in silence. Otherwise, they’re racists.
Identifying anti-Zionism with antisemitism condemns Palestinians, with their presumably legitimate reasons for rejecting Zionism, as antisemitic bigots or racists. Since Hasan clearly assumes Palestinians are not antisemitic bigots, this becomes an argument against identifying anti-Zionism as antisemitism.
But this entire line of argument fails, rather spectacularly.
To begin:
(1) Hasan’s argument has emotional appeal, and he frames it well: a Palestinian must accept Zionism or be considered a racist. In response one might consider a “Palestine exception” here, i.e., grant Palestinians a much wider range of anti-Zionist and even anti-Jewish speech and behavior before being considered antisemitic. Perhaps that is a decent thing to do: however we apportion justice and injustice throughout the conflict—which I prefer to call the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict, or IPJAMIC, because it’s at least as complicated as that name—it’s hard to deny that Palestinians have suffered extensively, in their view as a direct result of Zionism, including during the current war. To empathize with that suffering may entail allowing Palestinians’ hostile feelings toward Israel and Jews—even “hating Jews”—without labeling them as bigots.
(2) Nevertheless, one cannot reject a definition of antisemitism just because of who receives the label from the definition. If you tailor the definition to protect your preferred people, that is dishonest. If the shoe fits, alas, then wear it.
I’m reminded of this moment: In 2009, Hina Jilani, then the UN Rapporteur on Human Rights, stated with respect primarily to Palestinian allegations about Israeli misdeeds that “I think it’d be very cruel to not give credence to their voices.” Of course her suggestion is absurd. It surely would be cruel not to listen to them, not to sincerely evaluate and investigate their claims, not to seek justice for them should the claims turn out to be true. But blanket credulity, particularly concerning a long, complicated conflict such as the IPJAMIC? Even where we grant that there has been much suffering, it doesn’t follow that their overall narrative is the true or best one, or that they have had no agency or accountability in the affair either. In fact there may well be a serious instance of what I elsewhere call “epistemic antisemitism” implicitly built into Hasan’s argument here, insofar as it simply assumes the Palestinian narrative, simply assumes that Israel and the Jews have perpetrated the dastardly deeds detractors regularly allege and that Israel/Jews are alone morally culpable for the suffering of Palestinians. With these (antisemitic) assumptions in place Palestinian hostility to Israel/Jews would be justified, not bigotry; but if neither is true, there wouldn’t be grounds for exempting Palestinians from the antisemitism label.
Or to put that differently: Even where we grant their suffering, it does not follow that they are immune to bigotry just because they have suffered. This is the difficult point to make in today’s progressive climate on campuses and in the infosphere, where the allegedly oppressed are granted a nearly sacred status, seen as entirely innocent, and where the alleged oppressor is entirely guilty; and where these ideas generalize to the point where it seems that no single member of the oppressed class can ever be guilty and no single member of the oppressor class can ever be anything other than guilty. To suggest that Palestinians are guilty of antisemitism, in this worldview, amounts almost to a contradiction, an oppressed person or class being guilty of something. Bare minimum, it amounts to an unacceptable “punching down.”
To adopt that worldview, on the other hand, is to subject Palestinians to a condescending “humanitarian racism”: to treat them as children, having no agency whatever, never responsible for their decisions or actions, thus holding them to far lower moral standards than others, to the point, even, that when they torture, rape, and murder unarmed civilians and children (as during the October 7 massacre) it’s somehow “okay.” It may sound odd, and it’s surely against the tenor of the times, but it’s actually more respectful toward them to subject their decisions and actions to the same universal moral standards we apply to all other people than simply to give them a pass—not least because doing the latter amounts to finding excuses for mass murder.
(3) There are many Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians, including those who have “suffered,” who are “okay” with Israel. Many reasons make this possible, ranging from genuine support for the Zionist project to simply being fed up with a century of violence and wanting to move forward, to make accommodation with Jewish sovereignty in the region. What matters here is just that this position is possible and occupied by some Palestinians. That means that anti-Zionism is a choice one makes, among other possible choices. Hasan frames his argument in an artificially forced way: it would be unjust to label Palestinians as antisemites because (he assumes) there is no other legitimate position available to them given their experience but anti-Zionism. But that is not true. One way to avoid being an antisemite is to recognize that, despite your own suffering, the Jews, too, have suffered, and also have some rights, a recognition that could temper or remove one’s anti-Zionism. Once we grant Palestinian Arabs agency and moral accountability, we could even go back to the beginning of the modern IPJAMIC and recognize that some anti-Zionist choices they made “back then” were partly motivated by antisemitism—thus contributing to the suffering they suffered as a result of their encounter with Zionism.
(4) In fact, the Palestinian Arabs have a long history of antisemitism.
First, one cannot ignore the long history of Islamic antisemitism, preceding the modern Zionist movement by a good twelve centuries. Nor can one overestimate its general impact on the psyche of Muslim Arabs, including those in Palestine as the Zionist movement got underway.
Thus mixed in with whatever legitimate concerns they may have had about Jewish immigration and sovereignty were xenophobic, racist sentiments against Jews, both as illegitimate outsiders and inferior “dhimmis” who should know their place. Today if someone were to proclaim (for example) that Mexicans should not be permitted to immigrate into the U.S., that land sales to Mexicans should be forbidden, perhaps call them “filthy” or “animals,” and were to undertake violence against them, we would instantly label that person a xenophobic racist. Those who today are vehemently opposed to Muslim immigration to the U.S. are widely considered xenophobic and racist. But the notorious Palestinian leader, the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, originally resisted testifying before the 1937 Peel Commission because the British, he claimed, were “Judaizing” what properly was a “purely Arab country,” then relented and testified both that there was no room for a Jewish state among an “Arab ocean” and that Jews should be excluded from their holy places, such as the Western Wall, because that was a “purely Muslim place.” To be fair, the concept of “racial purity” was common in that era; but to be fairer, we also have no trouble today identifying such sentiments as racist. (Just insert “white” for Arab and Muslim and “black” for Jew and see how it reads.) Palestinian Arabs had no problem with mass immigration from all over the Muslim and Arab worlds, of a diverse mix of ethnicities, cultures, and languages, but only had a problem with the immigration of Jews. This opposition to the Jews can’t be blamed on the alleged dastardly deeds of the Jews because it preceded the immigration of many and the establishment of the state, the alleged ethnic cleansing, the alleged occupation, the alleged apartheid, etc.
Today we call such “problems with Jews” antisemitism.
And of course, the Mufti himself. Responsible for so much violence against Jews, utterly unwilling to recognize any Jewish rights or legitimacy in their ancestral homeland, utterly unwilling to compromise, the Mufti directly collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis’ Final Solution, created a Muslim army division for the Nazis, and spread propaganda throughout the Muslim world to activate the antisemitism always present there, hoping to bring Hitler’s Final Solution to the Middle East. If there were ever a moment when anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from antisemitism, it is the anti-Zionism that collaborates with and propagates the Nazis’ Final Solution.
There is then a straight line from the Mufti to today. The Mufti represented the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, the same Muslim Brotherhood whose branch is today known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, whose foundational charter both openly quotes the same antisemitic forgery admired by and motivating the Nazis (Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and quotes Islamic scripture endorsing the Islamic Final Solution of Jewish genocide, and who have spent decades directly attempting to perpetrate their genocide against the Jews, culminating in the barbaric atrocities against the Jews on October 7—widely celebrated among the entire Palestinian population.
That line also includes PLO leader Yasser Arafat, with important contributions from the virulent antisemitism of the Soviet Union. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking Communist official to defect, explained how the PLO was “dreamed up” by the Soviet KGB. They hand-picked Arafat to lead the new narrative of the “indigenous Palestinians expelled by the imperialist Jews,” actively contributed to numerous PLO terrorist attacks on Jews and related targets, and worked to “instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world.” In support of this the KGB “showered the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Subsequent PLO leader, current Palestinian Authority (P.A.) President Mahmoud Abbas, after earning his degree in Moscow for a Holocaust-denying thesis, worked as a KGB spy promoting the same Soviet agenda. Soviet antisemitism, in short, built and guided the PLO and its propagation of the anti-Zionist “Palestinian narrative.”
If nothing else convinces, then consider the following. Audio was released shortly after October 7 of one of the Hamas men calling his parents on October 7 itself, in the home of a Jewish family he had just murdered, using the phone of the Jewish woman he had just murdered, to brag about his achievements. The conversation went like this:
TERRORIST: Hello dad. Open your WhatsApp right now, and see all the killed. Look at how many I killed with my own hands, your son killed Jews!
FATHER: Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar. May God protect you.
TERRORIST: I am talking to you from the phone of a Jew, I killed her and her husband, I killed ten with my own hands.
FATHER: Allahu Akhbar.
TERRORIST: I killed ten. Ten! Ten with my own bare hands. Their blood is on my hands! Let me talk to Mom.
MOTHER: Oh, my son, may God protect you.
TERRORIST: I killed ten all by myself, mother! Mother, your son is a hero. (Talking to terrorists on the scene: Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill them!)
This young man was so, so proud of himself, sought (and received!) his parents’ praise—for killing Jews, with his own hands, ten of them, look and see! That is what Hamas is about: the glory and glee in mass murdering Jews, all the more delicious when you can do it “with your own hands.” This is bloodlust, pure and simple, a thirst for the blood of Jews. Jew-hatred never ran so deep.
One doesn’t have to deny Palestinian suffering, one can acknowledge that that suffering has contributed significantly to their feelings, and still understand that this thirst for Jewish blood, exulting in the deaths of unarmed women, men, and children, is indistinguishable from the bloodlusty antisemitism of the Nazis’ Final Solution. It doesn’t matter what reasons or “justifications” you invoke. The lust for the blood of Jews, the ecstatic joy in the spilling of that blood, of children, the boasting of it: if that isn’t antisemitism then nothing is. (I argue elsewhere that literally nothing Israel allegedly does or has done, none of the alleged grievances, come close to justifying the massacre of October 7.)
(5) Again, one doesn’t have to deny their suffering to attribute some portion of it to their own decisions and actions over the decades of the IPJAMIC.
From the beginning, generally speaking, they denied Jews any rights or considerations in Palestine. Recall the famous 1899 correspondence between Theodor Herzl and Yousef al-Khalidi, where the latter acknowledged that “Who can contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God! Historically, it is your country!”—but then concluded, given the foreseeable violent local opposition, “In the name of God, leave Palestine alone!” The local people would not accept the Jews, and that is just the point. It was the Jews’ country, but not only historically: Jews had maintained a continuous presence there, had always immigrated there in numbers small and large, already had a majority in some parts of the country. To deny them the ability to immigrate, particularly given the persecution and violence they were facing across Europe and the Islamic countries, is to deny them any rights or considerations.
The Palestinian Arabs made decisions and could have made other decisions; there were possibilities of compromise available along the way, where they chose to fight instead. Perhaps those compromises felt unjust, but compromise is what follows once you recognize the legitimacy of competing claims. Zionists generally were willing to compromise, not least because they, generally, recognized that Palestinian Arabs had legitimate claims as well. The most important such moment, of course, was the 1947 United Nations partition proposal. Had the Arabs accepted, there could have been two states living side by side celebrating their 77th birthdays this year. Perhaps partition felt unjust: they wanted the whole country and were losing something. But if you recognize the other side’s legitimacy, that the Jews too deserved some of the country, then you can compromise. The Jews also thought the partition was unjust to them, but they accepted it. The Arabs chose war.
That choice of war has and had consequences. As of the 1947 partition proposal there were zero Arab refugees. Repeat: zero Arab refugees. It was not Zionism, but the subsequent war the Arabs started, that produced the refugees. When you choose war, you are gambling what you have in order to gain more. When you lose the war that you started you may lose what you originally had, per the nature of gambling. You don’t get to call “do over,” or “sorry, now give us back what we started with.” That is not how war works, nor does anyone ever suggest as much regarding the hundreds of other military conflicts in the world except, by double standards, for this one. The war was their “Nakba,” or catastrophe, both in its original sense (their failure to exterminate the Jews) and in the later sense (their defeat and “exile” into refugeehood). But those catastrophic consequences were the results of a choice they made, when they could have chosen otherwise—a choice made on the basis of denying Jews any legitimacy, rights, considerations.
Those who see the Palestinians never as agents responsible for their choices, never as aggressors but always victims, not only infantilize them but unfairly treat the Jews only as agents, only as aggressors. That is the antisemitism. To treat the Jews as ordinary human beings with the same needs and desires of most other human beings, but also with the same rights and considerations, is to appreciate the complexity of the IPJAMIC, to realize that Jewish actions were sometimes not aggressions but responses to Arab aggression, that Jews are not purely evil doers of dastardly deeds but simply trying to satisfy their own needs and interests as all parties do, and sometimes forced to defend themselves when attacked in what Arabs invariably promise will be “a war of extermination.” Winning a war of extermination directed against you is not evil. Nor is it an aggression, when the other side started it. Defending oneself is a normal human response. Winning is sometimes what happens when one must defend oneself. Nor does losing a war that you started mean that you are a victim.
Those who see the IPJAMIC as a long narrative in which the Jews are only evil agents while the Palestinian Arabs are only innocent victims are selling the Palestinians short and behaving antisemitically toward the Jews. That that description characterizes the narrative adopted by so many, including the Palestinians themselves, is evidence of the antisemitism throughout the anti-Zionist movement. None of this means the Jews are perfect angels, or that Zionism is not guilty of dastardly deeds along the way. But those incapable of apportioning any responsibility to the Palestinians and only responsibility to the Jews are, simply, antisemites—Palestinian or not.
(6) But now even if we were to grant the “Palestine exception,” this would not do the work Hasan thinks it does in negating the proposition, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”—for it will do nothing to exempt the anti-Zionism of the many non-Palestinians who support the cause, including the perhaps millions of Arabs, Muslims, and western progressives around the globe, including on so many campuses. They have not themselves “suffered from Zionism,” so the question is what motivates them to adopt the cause, to adopt Palestinianism.
These numbers would include right-wing antisemites—such as Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, and Tucker Carlson–who hate Israel because they hate Jews, seeing Israel as the primary mechanism through which those evil Jews perpetrate their dastardly world-dominating schemes.
But that extreme, and therefore clear case does suggest similar motives among the other constituents of the anti-Zionist movement. One is reminded of the “horseshoe” idea, that the extreme left and the extreme right converge in their hatred of Israel and the Jews. We’ll return specifically to the progressives in a moment.
But first, it may seem natural for other Arabs and Muslims to take the Palestinian side, via empathy or identification or even the “honor-shame” mentality some argue is dominant among that demographic. Though this requires more detailed discussion, let me suggest here that that conclusion should be resisted. The Arab and Muslim worlds are not monoliths but deeply fractured, with many, often violent conflicts within them, the Sunni-Shiite one the most well-known and overall bloody (that may indeed be heating up again with recent events in Syria). There’s also an important division between Islamists and non-Islamists (though perhaps a matter of degree). Many Arab governments oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah, even banning them and repressing or persecuting their adherents. Several Arab countries have peace or normalization treaties with Israel. Reports indicate that many Arab and Muslim countries are rather tired of the Palestinians’ century-long war against the Jews. It is more than conceivable that many Arabs and Muslims oppose the Hamas and Hezbollah war on Israel, either openly or behind the scenes, on the basis of their own national or political interests. It is more than conceivable—it is actual—that some Arabs and Muslims might not side with the Palestinians, on the basis of their own national or political interests or even their moral beliefs. Again, anti-Zionism is not inevitable but a choice, where other choices are available. So, when they do side with the Palestinians, one may ask why. Many Arab countries do not seem to really care about the Palestinians, as evidenced by the universal refusal to accept any Palestinian refugees during the current war and the fact that many actively persecute the Palestinians in their own midst. So, might it be that they are motivated, after all, not by being “pro-Palestinian” but by being “anti-Jew,” by their hatred of Jews—i.e. antisemitism?
That said, consider now the progressive western campus communities. The first question is why, exactly, they take such disproportionate interest in this conflict at all, when the IPJAMIC at worst is just one of uncountably many mass injustices of the twentieth century, and in fact is by all objective measures smaller and less violent than many other recent and ongoing conflicts (Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria)? Further, why do they favor that side, advocating for this people, while utterly ignoring the many other stateless, repressed, occupied peoples in the world: Kurds (bombed relentlessly and ethnically cleansed by the Turks, including during the past year, including through December 2024), Tibetans (occupied and persecuted for decades by China), Rohingya, Yazidis, etc.? Why not devote even some of their energies to the Christians badly persecuted and regularly slaughtered throughout the Muslim world? Or to the oppressed women of Afghanistan and Iran? Or why not care when Palestinians face a real apartheid in Lebanon, and literally underwent ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter in Syria?
Those last two examples, along with numerous others, suggest that progressive anti-Zionists are not really “pro-Palestinian” as they claim, as demonstrated primarily by what they do not say or do: they express minimal or no interest in Palestinian welfare except when doing so can harm Israel. This suggests that their motivation is less to “help the Palestinians” than it is to harm the Jews, i.e. antisemitism.
They will sometimes offer painfully inadequate defenses of their selective interest in the IPJAMIC. “The United States gives Israel money”: yes but the U.S. gives money to many entities and groups, including Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon whose human rights violations are extensive and serious, the P.A. (which oppresses its own people and funds “pay-to-slay” incentivizing the murder of Israelis), and until recently UNRWA (infiltrated and directly supporting Hamas), and sells weapons to Turkey who uses them to bomb the Kurds, yet these activists have not a word to say against those entities. Most progressives supported the “Iran deal” that flooded Iran with the cash that funded its “Ring of Fire” around Israel and directly led to the October 7 massacre—Iran, whose serious human rights violations include killing women for not covering their hair and publicly hanging gays from cranes. Even worse, progressives ignore the fact that money “given” to Israel is actually an investment in an ally that directly pays American dividends, both in that most of it must be spent on U.S. companies (thus being an investment in America) and in the benefits of military and intelligence sharing, among others. To ask what concrete benefits America gets from pumping money into Egypt, Jordan, the P.A., UNRWA, Turkey, and Iran is to expose the hypocrisy of the progressive position here.
Most importantly, progressives claim they are motivated by human rights and social justice concerns, so shouldn’t they invest most of their time, energy, and resources in places where those are most badly threatened and violated—namely the long list of other conflicts and situations around the globe listed above, including the enemies of Israel, and more? Instead, what we get on campuses and elsewhere, on most other matters beside Israel: silence.
Needless to say, even if all of the dastardly allegations they levy against Israel were true (which they are not), the single-minded focus these groups direct to alleged Israeli misdeeds surely suggests something sinister. They only really care when Jews are the alleged perpetrators; as the title of Tuvia Tenenboim’s recent book put it, they thirst to “Catch the Jew!” Imagine a group of twenty-three men, one black, the others all white. Then imagine a website called “Black Crimes,” obsessively documenting bad deeds done by the black man while not only ignoring his many good deeds but ignoring the far greater number of, and worse, bad deeds done by the twenty-two white men; and, to boot, imagine the website also advocated for isolating, harming, or even killing the black man on the basis of those bad deeds, while ignoring or even advocating for the benefit of the white men. Even if all its information were true—the black man did those bad deeds—the website’s racist motives would be clear to all, given what it does not say about the good deeds and all other offenses. Throw in that most or all of the allegations are in fact lies and misrepresentations, and the racist conclusion seems inescapable. Now substitute “Jew” or “Israel” for “black” and “Arab” for “white” and it seems equally inescapable: these progressive parties are motivated by their antisemitism to focus on the Jewish state, i.e. the Jews.
This point is only reinforced by the otherwise inexplicable alliances these parties make with the Islamists. Many of the continuous campus rallies after October 7 have displayed open support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, waving their flags, celebrating their achievements, mourning their “martyrs,” calling on them to continue their “resistance,” holding signs saying “Long Live Al-Aqsa Flood,” and so on. Does one really need to point out that the progressive movement could not have less in common with the Islamists—who are homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, reject diversity, reject pluralism, reject tolerance, reject human rights, reject freedoms of speech, assembly, conscience etc. indeed, reject “progressivism” in every detail? The only thing they share is “hatred of Israel,” but even that makes no sense for the progressives, since Israel is by far the party that better aligns with what progressives say they value. Anti-Zionists coined the phrase “Progressive Except for Palestine” to indicate their disappointment with the minority of progressives who support Israel, on the assumption that progressives should be anti-Zionist. But that is exactly backwards: that phrase should refer to the exceptions to their values that most progressives make in support of Palestine. There is literally nothing progressive about “Palestine” or the Islamist groups leading the violence for “Palestine,” and there is much that is comparatively progressive about Israel—yet they work toward dismantling the Jewish state while establishing an anti-progressive Palestinian state.
It’s hard to imagine what could explain this other than a deep-seated hatred of the Jews that, while theoretically forbidden in their circles to express explicitly, can express itself as anti-Zionism. It’s not the “Jews” they hate but “Israel”—even though their hating Israel makes no sense, given their values, except insofar as it expresses a hatred for Jews.
Nor can you explain this by saying that progressive groups combat “Islamophobia,” and care about human rights for Muslims. These Islamist groups don’t believe in “human rights” for anyone including Muslims and have murdered far more Muslims in their quest for jihadi supremacy than have remotely been killed by Israel over the decades. And, again, there are many Muslims opposed to these Islamist groups. Progressives could—indeed should—side with those Muslims, rather than the Islamists.
The most they can say about their “progressive” support for anti-Zionism is this. (i) They are against white supremacy, (ii) They support the indigenous against settler-colonialists, and (iii) They support the oppressed against their oppressors. But their application of these positions to the IPJAMIC is truly ludicrous. Point (i) depends on complete ignorance of the “racial” reality, where both Israeli Jews and Palestinians span the spectrum of skin colors from light to dark; and anyway, no group has been a larger victim of white supremacy than the Jews. Point (ii) depends on complete ignorance of the history of the region, in which Jews are indigenous to the Land and the establishment of Israel was a major decolonization process. Point (iii) depends on an absurdly narrow and historically ignorant framing of the IPJAMIC, where in fact the Jews were for a long time and still are the “oppressed” aggressively contested by most of the Arab and Muslim world (which outnumbers them in population and land mass by orders of magnitude) and are currently defending themselves in a seven-front existential war launched against them. And all of the above depends on (a) the humanitarian racism of completely denying Palestinians any agency (i.e. that they can be and have been aggressors), (b) the antisemitic denial that Israelis (i.e. specifically Jews) are ever justified in defending themselves (in fact “resisting” Palestinian, Arab, and Iranian aggression), and (c) failure to appreciate that the IPJAMIC is a national and religious conflict (not “racial”), where one side is actually driven by Islamist jihadist genocidal aspirations entirely inconsistent with “progressivism.”
In light of all this, only one conclusion is possible: progressive anti-Zionism is driven primarily and deeply by antisemitism. In the best case this would be of the epistemic variety, the kind that isn’t particularly conscious; though one cannot but suspect, in light of the bloodthirsty enthusiasm so many displayed for the October 7 massacre, along with their open alliance with the Islamists waving the flags of the jihadist terror groups, that it is also of the more explicit variety.
The true “progressive,” in short, should be on the Zionist side of the conflict; the fact that so many aren’t can only be explained as the product of antisemitism.
The antisemitic label then applies to all the major constituents of the Palestinian movement, the supporters of Palestinianism, whether on the left or right and regardless of nationality or religion; and including the Jewish progressives who operate either by prioritizing their progressivism over Judaism and/or contorting their Judaism into an expression of progressivism. And most of all, it applies to the Palestinians themselves.
Mehdi’s arguments, then, fail, and fail spectacularly.
Andrew Pessin is a philosophy professor at Connecticut College and Campus Bureau Editor for the Algemeiner. Over the past decade the hostility to Israel across college campuses has led him to focus on Jewish and Israel Studies. His recent books include Anti-Zionism on Campus, documenting and analyzing the phenomenon, and Poisoning the Wells: Antisemitism in Contemporary America which, unfortunately, is compellingly timely. He has also published four novels, including Nevergreen, a satirical account of campus cancel culture and its deleterious impact on the Jews, which alas has proven prophetic post-October 7. His most recent novel is Bright College Years (about how college used to be before they all went crazy). He once portrayed “The Genius” on the David Letterman show.