My fellow brown brother Arash Azizi wrote for The Atlantic on the far left’s continuing and unyielding dogmatism on the topic of Israel. The inciting incident has been the Democratic Socialists of America withdrawing their endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — by far the most successful political candidate they’ve
I don't think it's antisemitism, I think it's stupidity and conformity being leveraged by, yes, antisemites. It's obviously true that some criticisms of Israel are antisemitic and it's also obviously true that some aren't, and I wish we could escape the meta discursive hellscape and discuss specific criticisms on their merits because as an Israeli leftist Zionist Jew this is my life here, but I guess it's not how humans act. What keeps happening is someone makes over the top accusations, like say, a genocide, I say something like "then why aren't you worried about [list of genocides I memorized to score points]", or go lexical on them just for them to say "so you think killing X people is okay as long as it's not a genocide?"
...
It's not working. That's why we invented the concept of the burden of proof. I don't want to make people prove they're not antisemitic, or to prove that they are. I don't care. People should prove their claims and that's it.
Another excellent piece, Yassine. I think we (leftie Americans) focus more on Israel-Palestine because it's viewed as "rich white European colonizers incarcerate, exploit, control, and murder indigent brown people" and that feels very similar to chapters in European and American history. Of course, this viewpoint cannot survive 2 minutes of thought or analysis, but most people (especially young people who feel a lot of peer pressure to fall in line) don't expend even half of this.
The tragedy in Israel is that with a different mindset, Palestinian Arabs in Gaza could have built a paradise on the sea beginning in 2005. No one would have been more supportive than Israel in such a project, and the hundreds of thousands of children born there would have had infinitely better lives than they now have. Instead, this obsession with murdering their neighbor over some century-old grievance consumes them, giving rise to a brutal right-wing Israeli government that seems to be bent on annexation and erasure (at least in the West Bank) instead of any kind of peace deal. Super f**king sad.
Not knowing the motivations of whoever is at the top of the DSA food chain, I can't speak to their sensibilities or biases, but I suspect that the groundlings at the bottom buy into the rationalization that this isn't antisemitism but anti-Zionism, and that Gazans are the marginalized and Israel the colonial power that must be destroyed. Thus, they can believe and support all of this without losing a minute's sleep about hating Jews.
That they refuse to look into or beyond the rationalization to recognize its fallacies is another matter, but most people prefer to see only as much as enables them to remain part of their chosen tribe.
Yes, what you write checks out, and yet. I am sorry for the anecdata but what this just doesn't answer for me is why, as a visibly observant Jew, I suddenly started getting yelled at by strangers immediately after Oct. 7. Or why every time a synagogue I've been to has been set on fire or vandalised, it was when Israel popped up in the news cycle.
I have a non-Jewish cousin who is an organiser for the IWW. I remember telling him about the synagogue being defaced, and he responded skeptically, "Did they have an Israeli flag inside?"
Something is going on, it's more than just fixation on one emblematic conflict out of potentially many. I really want to be wrong and would be very very happy to be corrected or given an alternate explanation.
So I think the most reasonable explanation here is that the people yelling at you are prole antisemites (and probably tend to be black or Muslim, non college educated), whereas DSA types are radical leftist activist intellectuals. No doubt the latter group constantly makes excuses for the former just as they do for Hamas.
Were the people yelling at you college-educated white leftists?
I think my priors are that college-educated white leftists actually just think that Israel is South Africa or whatever (obviously ridiculous, Israel has Arabs who are citizens with rights, offered a two-state solution etc), as this is the world's only ethnic conflict I can think of between a first-world people and a third-world people.
Really the fact that this is the world's only conflict between a first world Western-adjacent people and a third-world Muslim people is probably very important. The far-left are fundamentally anti-American and anti-Western so they are anti-Israel. I don't think it's antisemitic per se but being anti Western civilization ("decolonize" Turtle Island, Columbia people wanting to abolish Western civilization) is really not any better and arguably is even worse than just disliking Jews.
And honestly they probably aren't too happy about lots of other cool things about Israel. Like that it has a TFR of 3, harvests sperm from fallen IDF soldiers, and the government subsidizes IVF and genetic testing.
I think that random black people on the street might yell at you, as there is a lot of actual antisemitism among working-class black people. A random black guy stabbed an Orthodox Jew the other day. But I'd be surprised with college-educated white leftists.
I don't think it's necessarily exactly antisemitism per se, but I think that arguments *against* it being antisemitic, if accepted on their own terms, are fully sufficient to overcome the claims that the right wing is antisemitic which people on the left have been arguing for decades.
What really rankles me is, while you can definitely argue that anti-Israeli sentiment is rooted in anticolonialism rather than antisemitism, people who've said for years that "if nine people sit down at a table with one nazi, you have ten nazis at a table" are now marching shoulder to shoulder with people who literally call for global extermination of all Jews. It's one thing to argue "I stand against the actions of the state of Israel because I oppose colonialism, not because of antipathy for Jews," but if someone uncritically accepts and transmit propaganda from people who openly support killing all Jews worldwide, and when people point out to them, "hey, these people actually say they want to kill all Jews worldwide, look," and they respond with excuses or denial, I can only consider those people to be completely without moral credibility.
re: leftism and israel-palestine, the conflict is a proxy for the internationalist dreams and aspirations left over from the 20th history
it is basically 'the last revolutionary cause' radical leftists can cling onto for validation and legitimacy; not cuba, not vietnam, not russia, not the LATAM states, not china
jews, and the issue of anti-semitism, are more or less incidental to this obsession, like the famous line 'what is jerusalem?' from ridley scott's 'kingdom of heaven', the issue is more symbolic than it is practical
(this doesn't mean there aren't anti-semites using this chance to launder their bigotry. since the White left are natural allies of the Muslim diaspora, it's easy for straightforward anti-semites to lose themselves in the crowd. far leftists are a lot less picky about their bedfellows than the center-left, they need every body they can get)
if you recognize the fervor of religion in this obsession, it is because it is quasi-religious, this is the last bulwark of revolutionary leftism against the triumph of social democracy
as US-left mainstays like AOC and Bernie have drifted towards the social democratic center since 2016, this far-left cohort, recently resurrected as 'tankies' in online vernacular, have only increased their fervor in response to the stressors of modern politics
to use a brainrot allegory from twitter, israel-palestine is the geopolitical firebomb in 'firebomb a walmart', more or less the last firebomb in their arsenal
thank you, i used to orbit these circles so this is probably as close as you can get to the 'inside view'
what is important to note here is that supporting Palestine is a qualitative choice more than a quantitative one, the most sober far-left commentators, in their vulnerable moments, would admit all the protests/thinkpieces/boycotts/etc has likely not moved the needle on the death toll, and will not do so for the foreseeable future (i saw a few cases of this 'wavering faith' on twitter around the Rafah push)
and yet they consistently snap back to the 'party line', because there is nothing else, because they need to grasp for the moonshot, or else admit everything since OWS was a waste of time: the vibes must be preserved
I agree, but the legacy of antisemitism in the Soviet Union should not be totally discounted (it certainly didn’t help endear Israel to the internationalists).
that history is a little deeper than i would've preferred to go for this post but there is that, yes
i'm just skeptical it is a large driver of what you see on colleges, because, no lie, your median white leftist resents being asked to read anything older than 1970
i have no coherent mental model for how the anti-semitism of 1917 would've made the journey to the campus of Columbia, so instead i reduced the scope of my analysis to the last 20-ish years
It's not that unique. A lot of people have left for the same reason I did.
No one in the DSA would ever be so uncouth as to say "I hate Jews and therefore I want Israel gone." They attended (often elite) universities, they know better. But it adds up. Take a look at Bri Joy Gray- her attitude is very much the DSA party line.
To be honest, that part of my life feels like a thousand years ago now, and I don't have the energy at the moment to write a longform post on it. But long story short I grew weary of the snickering Holocaust denial jokes and the remarks that veered a millimeter away from calling Bernie Sanders "one of the good ones." My *comrades* were also very into conspiracy theories involving AIPAC, the Mossad, Jeffrey Epstein (can't overstate how important he was to these people), Alan Dershowitz, and generic "Israel shills" with a passion I've never experienced outside of Arab Muslim circles.
It is entirely unsurprising to me that a lot of the fandoms and figures formerly associated with the dirtbag/alt left have now veered into no-longer-even-pretending-to-be-ironic white supremacy and "race realism." Horseshoe theory proven once again etc.
> But when it’s everyone else, my white lefty ex-friends, someone who putatively has no bronze age dog in the fight, do I really believe that they just hate Jewish people that much?
Outside of Muslim/Arab circles, I don't think that typical white lefties are truly anti-semitic in the way that Muslims often are. But I think that many of them have drunk so much of the victimhood/oppressor Kool-Aid that in this historical moment they can't help seeing Jews/Israel as the embodiment of all that is awful, in the same way that during the racial reckoning they viewed white people as irredeemably bad, and how during #MeToo they characterized straight men as the epitome of all that is evil. Now it's Jews that are the target of their ire, not because they are Jews but because Jews/Israelis so perfectly embody everything that the woke Left despises. They are successful. They're a model minority. They're kind of white. They have stable nuclear families. They are disproportionately in positions of leadership, influence, and power. They are occupiers/colonialists. So of course anyone who has imbibed the progressive worldview where all those traits are considered evil, would hate Jews. And they hated Jews long before Oct 7 (for all those reasons), but everything that's happened since then has given them license to finally vent their hatred out loud.
You are wrong about these people not having a history of anti-Semitism. This is the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages, this is the Inquisition, this is the restriction of Jews to live in ghettos, this is the ban on Jews practicing certain professions, bans on living in cities, forced conversion to Christianity, the Dreyfus affair, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, numerous pogroms, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi "solution to the Jewish question".... These guys have something to argue with Muslims about the purity of their anti-Semitism
I've already mentioned this on Twitter but I do think part of the intensity comes from organised campaining, a sort of entryism. I do think this has a personal element, with young Arab people joining left-wing groups and using their own backstory as oppressed people to table this agenda, while using their own identity as a shield against criticism, and their own fanaticism as a model for others. The 'anti-Imperialist' angle is there to make the ideologies compatible, but I don't think it by itself explains the intensity from the left. Given how left-wing Israel was for the first two decades of its existence, it's hardly obvious that the left would end up supporting the largely religious Arabs against the secular progressive Israelis.
It's a bit forgetten nowadays with the rise of Hamas but the Palestinian cause has a long history on the far left. Especially after the Soviet bloc soured on Israel after its successes in the Six-Day-War, there was a lot of sympathy on the far left for the Palestinian cause, which was also reciprocated. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was and still is a big chunk of the PLO, and maintains Marxist-Lenninist teachings, and was one of those notorious hijacking groups during the late 60's and early 70's. Unlike most other communist groups they never really stopped after the end of the Cold War, still organising themselves in multiple ways and always trying to attach themselves to left-wing student organisations by way of proxies. A particularly notorious example of this is Samidoun, which has already been banned in a number of European countries and has taken a vanguard role (lol) in organising some of the university protests last year in Amsterdam.
I'm always confused by other people's confusion on this topic. Leftists are very clear if you just take what they're saying at face value and don't try to sane wash it. They divide the world into the weak and the strong and side with the weak at every opportunity. The west in general and America in particular is the omni-strong and they oppose it where ever relevant. They also are fed a steady stream of the worst horrors war is capable of producing by algorithms designed by our best and brightest to extend their doom scrolling session as long as possible from a conflict where one side's only win condition is to incite international outrage.
This is all very straightforward stuff. When they say america is the greatest terrorist organization in the world they aren't being hyperbolic, they aren't exaggerating. They believe all that stuff. They genuinely believe when there is disproportionate representation, which jews deservedly enjoy, this is not even evidence but proof of systemic racism. If Israel is a rich nation next to a poor nation their entire analysis is already done, they _know_ that Israel's wealth is stolen from the Palestinians and say so plainly.
Reflexively favoring the weak over the strong has been the explanation I've adopted, but it still feels incomplete. It doesn't explain enough of the sheer intensity and unyielding dogmatism I've witnessed on this particular issue.
Seems like it's precisely the fact that the belief is absurd and liable to get a rise out of any reasonable person that explains its intensity. Radical politics without direct personal investment becomes a pure signaling/discourse game, and social media leftism seems very much within this category to me. If you're not saying something outrageous, you don't have skin in the game, you don't really care about "the cause" etc...
I don’t think this explanation works here (or, to my knowledge, anywhere). Radical politics tends to be most extremist among people with the most skin in the game.
Israel-Palestine is the only issue today where they all line up and reinforce each other. It's that simple. Almost certainly the fact that Israel is a Jewish state has been a moderating factor.
Thank you for a thoughtful article. I think the Alt media incl some really popular writers, some of which are here on Substack, have done their utmost to vilify Israel and the Jews to an extent that there is just no coming back from. And so everything gets hammered to pieces with that confirmation bias Thor hammer.
Ie I read this morning here on Substack by one of these writers that Oct 7th is not to be condemned but applauded as legitimate resistance to free Palestine (others retorted it was an inside job anyway, so take your pick). Written by someone in Australia (Australian colonial history anyone…?) likely never having set foot into the Middle East, unfamiliar with religious dogma, Islamic jihad, and subsequent mind poisoning, the paranoia that ALL things Western are evil and Israel is at the forefront of everything and thus needs to be eradicated. A perfect toxic mix of left over 20th century wanna be rebels, bias, unregulated hatred and total shadow projection. It’s sad. Thanks again for writing a thoughtful post.
I think you underestimate the role of self-reinforcing cycles of tribal signaling. The way to gain status in far-leftist spaces is to be as extreme as possible about whatever issue they feel strongly about and to put it before all other issues. Palestine gained salience over the other conflicts somehow, (perhaps completely randomly), and after that point there was no mechanism that would push them to talk about other conflicts instead.
There's also the fact that Israel is a comparatively rich, white, and western country, which makes them the natural enemy of far-leftists. The other conflicts you mentioned have a less obvious "bad guy" and "good guy" from the far-leftist worldview, and the approach that almost everyone always takes to morally inconvenient situations is to pretend that they don't exist.
It's true that they don't reject Palastine-aligned antisemitism as much as an intellectually honest movement would, but I think that's just normal coalition-building and selective blindness of the sort that every political movement engages in. "Nazis bad" is old news, they've been beating that drum for decades. "Israel bad" is the hot new thing. So they're willing to overlook a bit of antisemitism as long as the person gives off the right vibes. The far-leftists that I personally know still tend to performatively denounce antisemitism and Naziism when they get the chance, just like they always have.
They also are unaware that Israel is actually not predominantly white. They have never actually done any boots on the ground concrete research or stepped foot in Israel so the truth is they really dont cares about Israel and the Jewish people at all to understand just how hypocritical, false, damaging, stupid,
And hateful what they are saying actually is and even when bombarded with the truth based on facts and evidence it doesn’t matter enough to
Them to correct themselves because anti semitism is blaming the Jews for everything no matter what. Too white/ not white enough,
Too rich/too poor, they don’t assimilate/they have too much power, too religious/they aren’t religious enough (the right religion).
And when we talk about the money the US gives to Israel is important to note we don’t write them a check we give them credits for that they have to us on American made weapons and the likes-it also states in that aide that Israel can not buy over a certain percentage from other countries or sell their military technologies or weapons to other countries and so the US technically is never without the “aide” tee give Israel and gets at least 5 times more from Israel. In purchases and technology from us.
Whereas since we left Afghanistan in 2021 we have been sending about 40 million dollars a week to the Taliban-the same Taliban we spent 20 years in a war with trying to replace only to replace them with the same Taliban and are finding them with straight cash. And this Taliban is basically now the blanket of most terrorists organizations worldwide.
Don’t believe me-go to Tablet magazines website and read the Israel/US relationship articles from 6 different experts within both countries political sphere.
And in regards to the Taliban-Go to the Shawn Ryan show and listen to the shows with CiA targeted Sarah Adams episode #81 (2parts) and episode #116 then listen to episode #107 with “Legend”.
One thing I think is also worth pointing out is that anti-Israel activity on the left isn't, by and large, an objection to the Israeli government, politics, or Netanyahu. Leftists are very comfortable with generalizing and demonizing Israelis *as people* in a way that would never fly for any other group.
If you listen to leftist podcasts you'll hear a lot of discussion about how horrible Israelis are, mocking the Israeli accent, their perceived personalities, their cuisine (it was stolen from Arabs, of course). One host on a recent episode of Chapo Trap House bizarrely talked about how a character in a recent videogame reminded him of an Israeli, and that it made killing said character much more pleasurable. Everyone laughed.
American has a lot of problems, and ‘progressive’ useful idiocy on behalf of Islamist terrorism is a main one. The resurgence of anti-Jewish racism and violence is funded by Islamist petrodollars, admires Islamist terrorism, is carried out by Islamists and their socialist allies. Having some token Jews in JC doesn’t Jew-wash this bigotry, hate speech and violence. It leaves progressives morally bankrupt to be taken seriously on anything really.
I think it's just anti-apartheid logic being straightforwardly applied to a weirdly religious ethno-state that is joined at the hip with the officially secular US - and with much more domestic purchase - in a way other states are not. From a non-interventionist, no-dog-in-the-fight pov too support for Israel is thought to be an unnecessary burden (though this minimal, Robby Soave-style anti-Israel support is nowhere near satisfying enough for DSA folks).
I was just watching Katie Halper and Michael Tracey - two Jews - on this yesterday, but turning your question on its head: What explains the US support for Israel when everyone else is so skeptical (save for Germany)? A slick AIPAC, ADL and a strange Christian subculture of extreme support for the Holy Land on Judeo-Christian terms, more or less.
It seems Jews are at the forefront of condemnation of the Jewish state. You can add Max Blumenthal to the list, who decries our relationship with Saudi Arabia as well, incidentally ,though not as much. In their case it may be a sense of feeling more responsible for the Palestinian plight than Yemenis or Kurds. One can understand that.
I read somewhere that (I think it was Biden) once observed that Israel is so useful to the American cause, if it didn't exist the US would have to invent it. Maybe it really is just as simple as the US supporting Israel because it's a strategic asset, and Mossad is an effective body for keeping the US's middle Eastern foes (e.g. Iran) on a leash.
Is it really a strategic asset? For decades Israel was more concerned with resisting pan Arab nationalism than it was with radical Islam, which literally blew up in our face in 2001. They likewise remain more hawkish on normalizing relations with Iran. They're determined to refuse Iran nuclear power in a way that is not obviously in *our* interest, though I can see why it's in theirs.
I don't think it's antisemitism, I think it's stupidity and conformity being leveraged by, yes, antisemites. It's obviously true that some criticisms of Israel are antisemitic and it's also obviously true that some aren't, and I wish we could escape the meta discursive hellscape and discuss specific criticisms on their merits because as an Israeli leftist Zionist Jew this is my life here, but I guess it's not how humans act. What keeps happening is someone makes over the top accusations, like say, a genocide, I say something like "then why aren't you worried about [list of genocides I memorized to score points]", or go lexical on them just for them to say "so you think killing X people is okay as long as it's not a genocide?"
...
It's not working. That's why we invented the concept of the burden of proof. I don't want to make people prove they're not antisemitic, or to prove that they are. I don't care. People should prove their claims and that's it.
Another excellent piece, Yassine. I think we (leftie Americans) focus more on Israel-Palestine because it's viewed as "rich white European colonizers incarcerate, exploit, control, and murder indigent brown people" and that feels very similar to chapters in European and American history. Of course, this viewpoint cannot survive 2 minutes of thought or analysis, but most people (especially young people who feel a lot of peer pressure to fall in line) don't expend even half of this.
The tragedy in Israel is that with a different mindset, Palestinian Arabs in Gaza could have built a paradise on the sea beginning in 2005. No one would have been more supportive than Israel in such a project, and the hundreds of thousands of children born there would have had infinitely better lives than they now have. Instead, this obsession with murdering their neighbor over some century-old grievance consumes them, giving rise to a brutal right-wing Israeli government that seems to be bent on annexation and erasure (at least in the West Bank) instead of any kind of peace deal. Super f**king sad.
exactly. why could Gaza not be some shimmering enclave city- state much like Doha or Dubai or Singapore, for that matter. Cultural suicide?
Not knowing the motivations of whoever is at the top of the DSA food chain, I can't speak to their sensibilities or biases, but I suspect that the groundlings at the bottom buy into the rationalization that this isn't antisemitism but anti-Zionism, and that Gazans are the marginalized and Israel the colonial power that must be destroyed. Thus, they can believe and support all of this without losing a minute's sleep about hating Jews.
That they refuse to look into or beyond the rationalization to recognize its fallacies is another matter, but most people prefer to see only as much as enables them to remain part of their chosen tribe.
Yes, what you write checks out, and yet. I am sorry for the anecdata but what this just doesn't answer for me is why, as a visibly observant Jew, I suddenly started getting yelled at by strangers immediately after Oct. 7. Or why every time a synagogue I've been to has been set on fire or vandalised, it was when Israel popped up in the news cycle.
I have a non-Jewish cousin who is an organiser for the IWW. I remember telling him about the synagogue being defaced, and he responded skeptically, "Did they have an Israeli flag inside?"
Something is going on, it's more than just fixation on one emblematic conflict out of potentially many. I really want to be wrong and would be very very happy to be corrected or given an alternate explanation.
So I think the most reasonable explanation here is that the people yelling at you are prole antisemites (and probably tend to be black or Muslim, non college educated), whereas DSA types are radical leftist activist intellectuals. No doubt the latter group constantly makes excuses for the former just as they do for Hamas.
Were the people yelling at you college-educated white leftists?
I think my priors are that college-educated white leftists actually just think that Israel is South Africa or whatever (obviously ridiculous, Israel has Arabs who are citizens with rights, offered a two-state solution etc), as this is the world's only ethnic conflict I can think of between a first-world people and a third-world people.
Really the fact that this is the world's only conflict between a first world Western-adjacent people and a third-world Muslim people is probably very important. The far-left are fundamentally anti-American and anti-Western so they are anti-Israel. I don't think it's antisemitic per se but being anti Western civilization ("decolonize" Turtle Island, Columbia people wanting to abolish Western civilization) is really not any better and arguably is even worse than just disliking Jews.
And honestly they probably aren't too happy about lots of other cool things about Israel. Like that it has a TFR of 3, harvests sperm from fallen IDF soldiers, and the government subsidizes IVF and genetic testing.
I think that random black people on the street might yell at you, as there is a lot of actual antisemitism among working-class black people. A random black guy stabbed an Orthodox Jew the other day. But I'd be surprised with college-educated white leftists.
I don't think it's necessarily exactly antisemitism per se, but I think that arguments *against* it being antisemitic, if accepted on their own terms, are fully sufficient to overcome the claims that the right wing is antisemitic which people on the left have been arguing for decades.
What really rankles me is, while you can definitely argue that anti-Israeli sentiment is rooted in anticolonialism rather than antisemitism, people who've said for years that "if nine people sit down at a table with one nazi, you have ten nazis at a table" are now marching shoulder to shoulder with people who literally call for global extermination of all Jews. It's one thing to argue "I stand against the actions of the state of Israel because I oppose colonialism, not because of antipathy for Jews," but if someone uncritically accepts and transmit propaganda from people who openly support killing all Jews worldwide, and when people point out to them, "hey, these people actually say they want to kill all Jews worldwide, look," and they respond with excuses or denial, I can only consider those people to be completely without moral credibility.
re: leftism and israel-palestine, the conflict is a proxy for the internationalist dreams and aspirations left over from the 20th history
it is basically 'the last revolutionary cause' radical leftists can cling onto for validation and legitimacy; not cuba, not vietnam, not russia, not the LATAM states, not china
jews, and the issue of anti-semitism, are more or less incidental to this obsession, like the famous line 'what is jerusalem?' from ridley scott's 'kingdom of heaven', the issue is more symbolic than it is practical
(this doesn't mean there aren't anti-semites using this chance to launder their bigotry. since the White left are natural allies of the Muslim diaspora, it's easy for straightforward anti-semites to lose themselves in the crowd. far leftists are a lot less picky about their bedfellows than the center-left, they need every body they can get)
if you recognize the fervor of religion in this obsession, it is because it is quasi-religious, this is the last bulwark of revolutionary leftism against the triumph of social democracy
as US-left mainstays like AOC and Bernie have drifted towards the social democratic center since 2016, this far-left cohort, recently resurrected as 'tankies' in online vernacular, have only increased their fervor in response to the stressors of modern politics
to use a brainrot allegory from twitter, israel-palestine is the geopolitical firebomb in 'firebomb a walmart', more or less the last firebomb in their arsenal
This is the explanation I find the most plausible by far
thank you, i used to orbit these circles so this is probably as close as you can get to the 'inside view'
what is important to note here is that supporting Palestine is a qualitative choice more than a quantitative one, the most sober far-left commentators, in their vulnerable moments, would admit all the protests/thinkpieces/boycotts/etc has likely not moved the needle on the death toll, and will not do so for the foreseeable future (i saw a few cases of this 'wavering faith' on twitter around the Rafah push)
and yet they consistently snap back to the 'party line', because there is nothing else, because they need to grasp for the moonshot, or else admit everything since OWS was a waste of time: the vibes must be preserved
I agree, but the legacy of antisemitism in the Soviet Union should not be totally discounted (it certainly didn’t help endear Israel to the internationalists).
that history is a little deeper than i would've preferred to go for this post but there is that, yes
i'm just skeptical it is a large driver of what you see on colleges, because, no lie, your median white leftist resents being asked to read anything older than 1970
i have no coherent mental model for how the anti-semitism of 1917 would've made the journey to the campus of Columbia, so instead i reduced the scope of my analysis to the last 20-ish years
I was a mid-level member of the DSA from the rise of Bernie in 2016 to 2021 or so.
It's antisemitism.
That's a unique perspective. What about your experience makes you draw that conclusion?
It's not that unique. A lot of people have left for the same reason I did.
No one in the DSA would ever be so uncouth as to say "I hate Jews and therefore I want Israel gone." They attended (often elite) universities, they know better. But it adds up. Take a look at Bri Joy Gray- her attitude is very much the DSA party line.
She’s a pig
Can you share what you found and learned?
To be honest, that part of my life feels like a thousand years ago now, and I don't have the energy at the moment to write a longform post on it. But long story short I grew weary of the snickering Holocaust denial jokes and the remarks that veered a millimeter away from calling Bernie Sanders "one of the good ones." My *comrades* were also very into conspiracy theories involving AIPAC, the Mossad, Jeffrey Epstein (can't overstate how important he was to these people), Alan Dershowitz, and generic "Israel shills" with a passion I've never experienced outside of Arab Muslim circles.
It is entirely unsurprising to me that a lot of the fandoms and figures formerly associated with the dirtbag/alt left have now veered into no-longer-even-pretending-to-be-ironic white supremacy and "race realism." Horseshoe theory proven once again etc.
From what you wrote it really just seems like classic antisemitism.
I think you are confusing cause and effect.
You're totally welcome to do so.
> But when it’s everyone else, my white lefty ex-friends, someone who putatively has no bronze age dog in the fight, do I really believe that they just hate Jewish people that much?
Outside of Muslim/Arab circles, I don't think that typical white lefties are truly anti-semitic in the way that Muslims often are. But I think that many of them have drunk so much of the victimhood/oppressor Kool-Aid that in this historical moment they can't help seeing Jews/Israel as the embodiment of all that is awful, in the same way that during the racial reckoning they viewed white people as irredeemably bad, and how during #MeToo they characterized straight men as the epitome of all that is evil. Now it's Jews that are the target of their ire, not because they are Jews but because Jews/Israelis so perfectly embody everything that the woke Left despises. They are successful. They're a model minority. They're kind of white. They have stable nuclear families. They are disproportionately in positions of leadership, influence, and power. They are occupiers/colonialists. So of course anyone who has imbibed the progressive worldview where all those traits are considered evil, would hate Jews. And they hated Jews long before Oct 7 (for all those reasons), but everything that's happened since then has given them license to finally vent their hatred out loud.
You are wrong about these people not having a history of anti-Semitism. This is the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages, this is the Inquisition, this is the restriction of Jews to live in ghettos, this is the ban on Jews practicing certain professions, bans on living in cities, forced conversion to Christianity, the Dreyfus affair, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, numerous pogroms, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi "solution to the Jewish question".... These guys have something to argue with Muslims about the purity of their anti-Semitism
I've already mentioned this on Twitter but I do think part of the intensity comes from organised campaining, a sort of entryism. I do think this has a personal element, with young Arab people joining left-wing groups and using their own backstory as oppressed people to table this agenda, while using their own identity as a shield against criticism, and their own fanaticism as a model for others. The 'anti-Imperialist' angle is there to make the ideologies compatible, but I don't think it by itself explains the intensity from the left. Given how left-wing Israel was for the first two decades of its existence, it's hardly obvious that the left would end up supporting the largely religious Arabs against the secular progressive Israelis.
It's a bit forgetten nowadays with the rise of Hamas but the Palestinian cause has a long history on the far left. Especially after the Soviet bloc soured on Israel after its successes in the Six-Day-War, there was a lot of sympathy on the far left for the Palestinian cause, which was also reciprocated. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was and still is a big chunk of the PLO, and maintains Marxist-Lenninist teachings, and was one of those notorious hijacking groups during the late 60's and early 70's. Unlike most other communist groups they never really stopped after the end of the Cold War, still organising themselves in multiple ways and always trying to attach themselves to left-wing student organisations by way of proxies. A particularly notorious example of this is Samidoun, which has already been banned in a number of European countries and has taken a vanguard role (lol) in organising some of the university protests last year in Amsterdam.
I'm always confused by other people's confusion on this topic. Leftists are very clear if you just take what they're saying at face value and don't try to sane wash it. They divide the world into the weak and the strong and side with the weak at every opportunity. The west in general and America in particular is the omni-strong and they oppose it where ever relevant. They also are fed a steady stream of the worst horrors war is capable of producing by algorithms designed by our best and brightest to extend their doom scrolling session as long as possible from a conflict where one side's only win condition is to incite international outrage.
This is all very straightforward stuff. When they say america is the greatest terrorist organization in the world they aren't being hyperbolic, they aren't exaggerating. They believe all that stuff. They genuinely believe when there is disproportionate representation, which jews deservedly enjoy, this is not even evidence but proof of systemic racism. If Israel is a rich nation next to a poor nation their entire analysis is already done, they _know_ that Israel's wealth is stolen from the Palestinians and say so plainly.
Reflexively favoring the weak over the strong has been the explanation I've adopted, but it still feels incomplete. It doesn't explain enough of the sheer intensity and unyielding dogmatism I've witnessed on this particular issue.
Seems like it's precisely the fact that the belief is absurd and liable to get a rise out of any reasonable person that explains its intensity. Radical politics without direct personal investment becomes a pure signaling/discourse game, and social media leftism seems very much within this category to me. If you're not saying something outrageous, you don't have skin in the game, you don't really care about "the cause" etc...
I find this plausible
I don’t think this explanation works here (or, to my knowledge, anywhere). Radical politics tends to be most extremist among people with the most skin in the game.
There are three moral axes:
1) weak vs. strong
2) brown vs white
3) anti vs pro America.
Israel-Palestine is the only issue today where they all line up and reinforce each other. It's that simple. Almost certainly the fact that Israel is a Jewish state has been a moderating factor.
The controversy is the point. Why would they go yell about Saudi Arabia? Everyone is going to say “yeah, fuck those guys.” No revolutionary frisson.
Thank you for a thoughtful article. I think the Alt media incl some really popular writers, some of which are here on Substack, have done their utmost to vilify Israel and the Jews to an extent that there is just no coming back from. And so everything gets hammered to pieces with that confirmation bias Thor hammer.
Ie I read this morning here on Substack by one of these writers that Oct 7th is not to be condemned but applauded as legitimate resistance to free Palestine (others retorted it was an inside job anyway, so take your pick). Written by someone in Australia (Australian colonial history anyone…?) likely never having set foot into the Middle East, unfamiliar with religious dogma, Islamic jihad, and subsequent mind poisoning, the paranoia that ALL things Western are evil and Israel is at the forefront of everything and thus needs to be eradicated. A perfect toxic mix of left over 20th century wanna be rebels, bias, unregulated hatred and total shadow projection. It’s sad. Thanks again for writing a thoughtful post.
Thank you for this thoughtful article!
I think you underestimate the role of self-reinforcing cycles of tribal signaling. The way to gain status in far-leftist spaces is to be as extreme as possible about whatever issue they feel strongly about and to put it before all other issues. Palestine gained salience over the other conflicts somehow, (perhaps completely randomly), and after that point there was no mechanism that would push them to talk about other conflicts instead.
There's also the fact that Israel is a comparatively rich, white, and western country, which makes them the natural enemy of far-leftists. The other conflicts you mentioned have a less obvious "bad guy" and "good guy" from the far-leftist worldview, and the approach that almost everyone always takes to morally inconvenient situations is to pretend that they don't exist.
It's true that they don't reject Palastine-aligned antisemitism as much as an intellectually honest movement would, but I think that's just normal coalition-building and selective blindness of the sort that every political movement engages in. "Nazis bad" is old news, they've been beating that drum for decades. "Israel bad" is the hot new thing. So they're willing to overlook a bit of antisemitism as long as the person gives off the right vibes. The far-leftists that I personally know still tend to performatively denounce antisemitism and Naziism when they get the chance, just like they always have.
I think this is plausible, but the "Palestine gained salience somehow" part needs to be shored up. Why this one and not other topics?
They also are unaware that Israel is actually not predominantly white. They have never actually done any boots on the ground concrete research or stepped foot in Israel so the truth is they really dont cares about Israel and the Jewish people at all to understand just how hypocritical, false, damaging, stupid,
And hateful what they are saying actually is and even when bombarded with the truth based on facts and evidence it doesn’t matter enough to
Them to correct themselves because anti semitism is blaming the Jews for everything no matter what. Too white/ not white enough,
Too rich/too poor, they don’t assimilate/they have too much power, too religious/they aren’t religious enough (the right religion).
And when we talk about the money the US gives to Israel is important to note we don’t write them a check we give them credits for that they have to us on American made weapons and the likes-it also states in that aide that Israel can not buy over a certain percentage from other countries or sell their military technologies or weapons to other countries and so the US technically is never without the “aide” tee give Israel and gets at least 5 times more from Israel. In purchases and technology from us.
Whereas since we left Afghanistan in 2021 we have been sending about 40 million dollars a week to the Taliban-the same Taliban we spent 20 years in a war with trying to replace only to replace them with the same Taliban and are finding them with straight cash. And this Taliban is basically now the blanket of most terrorists organizations worldwide.
Don’t believe me-go to Tablet magazines website and read the Israel/US relationship articles from 6 different experts within both countries political sphere.
And in regards to the Taliban-Go to the Shawn Ryan show and listen to the shows with CiA targeted Sarah Adams episode #81 (2parts) and episode #116 then listen to episode #107 with “Legend”.
I second this explanation.
Of course it’s antisemitism. Or plainly Jew hatred.
One thing I think is also worth pointing out is that anti-Israel activity on the left isn't, by and large, an objection to the Israeli government, politics, or Netanyahu. Leftists are very comfortable with generalizing and demonizing Israelis *as people* in a way that would never fly for any other group.
If you listen to leftist podcasts you'll hear a lot of discussion about how horrible Israelis are, mocking the Israeli accent, their perceived personalities, their cuisine (it was stolen from Arabs, of course). One host on a recent episode of Chapo Trap House bizarrely talked about how a character in a recent videogame reminded him of an Israeli, and that it made killing said character much more pleasurable. Everyone laughed.
"Leftists are very comfortable with generalizing and demonizing Israelis *as people* in a way that would never fly for any other group."
*White people have entered the chat*.
Exactly. See Lana they do it with all white people, not just Jews.
American has a lot of problems, and ‘progressive’ useful idiocy on behalf of Islamist terrorism is a main one. The resurgence of anti-Jewish racism and violence is funded by Islamist petrodollars, admires Islamist terrorism, is carried out by Islamists and their socialist allies. Having some token Jews in JC doesn’t Jew-wash this bigotry, hate speech and violence. It leaves progressives morally bankrupt to be taken seriously on anything really.
I think it's just anti-apartheid logic being straightforwardly applied to a weirdly religious ethno-state that is joined at the hip with the officially secular US - and with much more domestic purchase - in a way other states are not. From a non-interventionist, no-dog-in-the-fight pov too support for Israel is thought to be an unnecessary burden (though this minimal, Robby Soave-style anti-Israel support is nowhere near satisfying enough for DSA folks).
I was just watching Katie Halper and Michael Tracey - two Jews - on this yesterday, but turning your question on its head: What explains the US support for Israel when everyone else is so skeptical (save for Germany)? A slick AIPAC, ADL and a strange Christian subculture of extreme support for the Holy Land on Judeo-Christian terms, more or less.
It seems Jews are at the forefront of condemnation of the Jewish state. You can add Max Blumenthal to the list, who decries our relationship with Saudi Arabia as well, incidentally ,though not as much. In their case it may be a sense of feeling more responsible for the Palestinian plight than Yemenis or Kurds. One can understand that.
Update: Mike Johnson claims support for Israel is a "founding principle" of the US: https://news.antiwar.com/2024/07/21/speaker-johnson-supporting-israel-is-one-of-americas-founding-principles/
Who are the weird Israel obsessives? I guess it all depends on where you look...
I read somewhere that (I think it was Biden) once observed that Israel is so useful to the American cause, if it didn't exist the US would have to invent it. Maybe it really is just as simple as the US supporting Israel because it's a strategic asset, and Mossad is an effective body for keeping the US's middle Eastern foes (e.g. Iran) on a leash.
Is it really a strategic asset? For decades Israel was more concerned with resisting pan Arab nationalism than it was with radical Islam, which literally blew up in our face in 2001. They likewise remain more hawkish on normalizing relations with Iran. They're determined to refuse Iran nuclear power in a way that is not obviously in *our* interest, though I can see why it's in theirs.
Michael Tracey is not Jewish. I think this might actually be an anti-semitic stereotype, lol.
Ah. My bad. I overlooked Irish, big face palm.