The Gaza Encampments are History in the Making

Students at American colleges and universities are again making history. ‘Gaza encampments’ have been erected at dozens of colleges and universities around the country, making this one of the most important student movements since the 1960s. We are now hearing of new encampments every day, including now in Australia, Great Britain and Germany.

And, unlike in the 1960s, many faculty members are participating in and supporting these encampments, especially after their students face repressive actions initiated by panicked university presidents.

As a student protester myself in the 1960s, I could not be more excited or prouder of what I am seeing on college campuses today.

There are real parallels between the anti-Israeli war movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Just as students in the 1960s mobilized against an unjust war, students today are moved to action by the deeply disturbing role the U.S. is playing in enabling Israel to engage in an aggressive war against Palestine in open defiance of international law and public opinion.

And just like in the 1960s, the anti-Israeli war protests are already forcing a shift in the war itself, as the United States and Israel find themselves increasingly isolated and condemned for human rights violations. Biden is certainly feeling the pressure. He has already defied Netanyahu by building a dock for humanitarian aid to unload in Gaza and by forcing Israel to drastically scale back a planned attack on Iran and by putting economic sanctions on some right-wing extremist ‘settlers.’ It seems likely that as the protests build (especially if and when Israel invades Rafah), the U.S. will start withholding military supplies for some Gaza operations.

Of course, Republicans are sticking to their defense of Israel’s war, and are using all their power to try to force universities to repress the student protesters. Columbia University has emerged as ground zero because of the large Zionist presence on the campus and in New York City as a whole. There, more than anywhere else, university officials are under intense pressure to crack down on the Gaza encampment and have already called hundreds of NYPD officers to the campus to make mass arrests of students, who were then all summarily suspended from school without any academic due process. Despite her efforts to placate Republican lawmakers, Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik is under growing pressure to resign, with House Speaker Mike Johnson demanding her removal for failing to safeguard Jewish students from “violent, antisemitic” protesters. (He also called for the mobilization of the National Guard—perhaps thinking about what happened at Kent State in 1970?).

And who are these “violent, antisemitic protesters?” They are, like the protesters of the 1960s, those with the deepest commitment to social justice. They are the people who cannot go on with their studies when their country is aiding and abetting the mass murder of Palestinian civilians. They are the people who understand that the Israeli government is now the cutting edge of the worldwide right-wing movement, and that stopping this war is directly connected to stopping Trumpism in the United States. They are people revulsed by the racism of Israel’s callous disregard of Palestinian lives. And yes, a significant number of them are Jewish, a fact demonstrated by the beautiful celebration of Passover’s feast of liberation for all people at many of these encampments last Monday.

And who are the people referring to the protesters as “violent antisemites”? Well, most of the vocal Republican members of Congress consider themselves white Evangelical Christians, who until very recently referred to Jews as Christ killers, and many have a history of virulent racism in their political closets. All support unchecked police violence against Black people and Latinos, and all support the right of every American to carry guns.

If the parallels between the 1960s and the current movement are accurate, we can anticipate two major trends. First, there will be increasing repression of the protests. And second, in response to the repression, more and more people will join the movement. It is useful to remember that as late as 1967 only a small minority of students were even opposed to the Vietnam War, let alone actively protesting it. Yet by 1968, the anti-war movement had become capable of mounting nation-wide mobilizations, broad and powerful enough to force President Johnson to not run for a second term. Planning for national demonstrations against the Israeli war has already begun. Indeed, in the April 24 NY Times, David Brooks worried that the Democratic Convention (to be held in Chicago in August — as it was in 1968) might well be again the site of enormous protests that might doom the Biden Presidency.

Make no mistake about it: the students who are building the Gaza encampments are aware of the risks they are taking. They know (just as students in the 1960s knew) that what they are doing can lead to their arrest and/or expulsion from school. I would guess, from our experience in the 1960s, that the use of repressive force will grow in the coming weeks and months. But I would also guess that this movement is poised for a mass expansion which will surely happen when the IDF enters Rafah in the coming weeks.

The student movement will soon have to make a number of choices, just as we had to in the anti-Vietnam War movement. While I have all the confidence in the world in the current movement leaders, I just want to highlight some of the issues the anti-Vietnam War movement had to address as it matured. First, the early anti-Vietnam War movement expressed its solidarity with the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. But the movement could only grow by reframing itself as an anti-war movement to appeal to the broadest number of Americans. Secondly, the anti-Vietnam War movement had to address the fact that it was primarily a movement of white elite student, but that opposition to the war was actually greatest among people of color. Martin Luther King’s decision to oppose the war (and Muhammed Ali’s draft resistance) went a long way to creating powerful links between the anti-war movement and the civil rights/Black Power movements. Finally, the anti-Vietnam War movement become a movement for democracy against militarism. By doing all these things, the movement grew enormously. I am confident the anti-Israeli War movement will be able to navigate these issues with far greater insight than we did over half a century ago.

One side note: I am especially excited to see Jewish students boldly claim their Jewishness while condemning Zionism. As I have written in previous posts, there is no reason why Jews should be beholden to Israel’s current form of Zionism, and a million Jewish reasons to oppose it. The Passover Seders at the encampments were of great importance for the future of American Judaism.

Lastly, I want to point out that the students who are now becoming anti-war activists are being changed in ways they cannot now know, but in ways that most will carry with them for the rest of their lives. A study of people who participated in the civil rights movement in Florida in the 1960s and 1970s found that almost all of them made different life choices than their peers who did not participate. They chose different careers, different spouses, different friends, and lived in different places.

The students who today are daring to call on us to have a conscience are the best and the brightest among us. They understand the real purpose of an education and are now getting schooled in the most important lessons of their lives. I am so proud of them. We all should offer them our support and be prepared to join them in the national mobilizations soon to come.

Distinguishing Anisemitism from Anti-Zionism Part II

In my two previous posts I argued that the failure of the pro-Palestinian left to denounce Hamas’ attack on Israel as antisemitic would come back to haunt them. And, indeed, right wing opportunists, Trump most notably, have positioned themselves as ‘the true defenders of Israel’ and are calling critics of Israel antisemitic.

Make no mistake about it: using this weapon, the rightwing is succeeding at intimidating universities to retract fifty years of racial justice efforts, and there is a real danger that many Jews, who have always been a bedrock of the Democratic Party coalition, will realign and vote for Trump. Left-wing legislators, most notably Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman, are facing well-funded challengers because of their opposition to Israel’s war.

We need a clear understanding on what is and what is not antisemitism in order to defend ourselves from this rightwing attack

There are three positions on the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The first, held by the right wing of both the U.S. and Israel, is that any criticism of Israel, especially in the wake of October 7, is antisemitic. This position is simple: Israel is the home of the Jews, and any criticism of Israel is therefore an attack on Jews, i.e. it is antisemitic.

The second position, held by many on the left (including, of course, some Jews in the U.S. and in Israel), is that Israel is an illegitimate settler state that was founded by dispossessing Palestinians of their land, and denying their national self-determination. To many who believe this, all attacks on Israel, including Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, are justified, and are not antisemitic. (To be fair, many who believe Israel is an illegitimate state react defensively to this criticism and say they ‘mourn the deaths of innocent lives on all sides of the conflict.’ But this is not sufficient: the concrete question is whether they directly condemn Hamas.)

The third position (which is barely being heard now) is that criticism of Israel and/or Zionism is not by itself antisemitic, but that there can be antisemitic critiques of Israel and Jews in general. This position has been well articulated by the Nexus Task Force Statement on Antisemitism (LINK). Most importantly, this position maintains that it is antisemitic to lump all Jews together as collectively responsible for the state of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Or the flip side of the same coin: it is antisemitic to hold (as Trump did on March24) that any Jew that does not support Israel’s war is anti-Jewish.) Distinguishing a critique of Israel from a critique of Jewish people is important because Hamas failed to do so. It targeted Jewish civilians (including women, children and elders) on the grounds that all Israelis are culpable for Israel’s aggression against Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. (Those of us who have bothered to pay attention to the biographies of those killed and captured by Hamas learned that several of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas consisted of Jews who were among the strongest opponents of Netanyahu’s fanatic rightwing vision of Greater Israel.)

The problem of equating all Jews with the current rightwing version of Zionism is a grave error because it renders invisible those Jews both in Israel and in the diaspora who oppose Zionism as it exists today. Please remember that in 2023 Israel was literally torn to pieces by mostly Jewish protests against Netanyahu’s efforts to nullify important parts of the Israeli constitution. Indeed, it seems obvious to many observers that Netanyahu is waging the current Israeli war precisely to shore up support for his rightwing Zionist regime that was on the verge of collapse before October 7.

The problem with equating all Jews with modern Zionism is that it also cannot appreciate the significance of Senator Schumer’s speech denouncing Netanyahu and calling for regime change. Chuck Schumer built his entire political career on support for Zionism, but that Zionism is now gone. The left must learn how to make a popular front against rightwing Zionism that includes the Schumers of the world who are mourning the loss of their version of Zionism. Whatever one thinks of Israeli policies before 2018 (the year the Nation-State Law declared Israel to be a Jewish nation), the Zionism of the far right that now runs Israel is a far cry from that of the Zionists actively seeking a two-state solution, or the early Zionists willing to live in a secular, non-religious country on equal footing with Palestinians and other Muslims and Christians.

It is essential to understand that Netanyahu is trying to not only destroy Palestine but also to destroy earlier concepts of Israel/Zionism. Indeed, I would argue that the rightwing coup that produced Netanyahu and Israel’s genocidal war is pursuing a path that may well lead to the destruction not only of previous ideas of Zionism, but of Israel itself. But this is a topic for another day….

The critique of Zionism as it now exists is not antisemitic. The new extremist rightwing Zionism seeks to destroy Palestine and make claim to Gaza and the West Bank as part of Greater Israel (with future claims on Lebanon and Jordan certainly in the works). It is incumbent on the entire world to isolate and destroy this extremist regime. And, as the March 25 UN Security Council vote for an immediate cease fire (without a U.S. veto) shows, Israel is well on the way to becoming an international pariah.

The only claim to legitimacy that is propping up this regime is its claim that it is standing up to antisemitism. The clearer we become about what is and is not antisemitism, the more effective we will become on defending democracy against the rightwing of both Israel and the United States.

The Weaponization of Antisemitism

There is a ton of confusion about what is and what is not antisemitism, and right-wingers are making the most out of it.

MAGA Republicans, in the name of rooting out antisemitism, are launching McCarthy-like witch hunts aimed at dismantling DEI (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives at some of America’s most prestigious and influential universities. How is it possible that the new allies of the Jews are right-wing Christians—including open fascists– with their own history of virulent antisemitism?

Let’s start with the basics: antisemitism is a real thing. Ever since the Spanish Inquisition (1490s), nation-state builders in Europe targeted Jews as dangerous ‘outsiders’ in order to convince Christians that they shared a common identity as citizens of newly emerging nations. This antisemitism reached its peak during the late 19^th and early 20^th Century as European nation-states locked horns in imperialist conflicts. Rulers unleashed pogroms across Eastern Europe in order to whip up patriotic support for their wars. Eventually the most powerful nation-state, Germany, undertook the systematic eradication of all Jews under its control. In the U.S., Jews were red-baited by anti-immigrant rightwing politicians throughout the first half of the 20^th Century.

This dynamic abated, partly because of world revulsion at the Holocaust, partly because of the mass exodus of Jews out of Eastern Europe to Israel and the United States, and partly because of a re-configuration of nation-states themselves as economic globalization began to take hold after World War II. In the U.S. and Western Europe, many Jews assimilated into a white middle class social order, often by changing their names, dropping Yiddish, and becoming religiously non-observant or embracing Reform Judaism.

But now the Western liberal social order is in a crisis. (See other posts on this site). As the middle class falls apart, a new generation of white Christian nationalists has begun a project to re-shape Western nation-states. And a new generation of ultra-nationalist Zionists have seized power in Israel.

The white Christian nationalist alliance with Zionism is of recent origin. Up until at least the 1980s, white evangelical Christians spouted virulent McCarthyist antisemitism, and earlier, had supported Hitler. Why are they rushing to defend Israel now? It’s quite simple, really: Israel is now the white nationalist project of the Mideast. We could argue about whether it has always been so. (In Israel’s early days, left wing Zionists envisioned a socialist Israel in which Jews and non-Jews were equal citizens even while the Israeli state engaged in the systematic displacement of Palestinians from their land and homes). But certainly, since the 1980s, the self-defined ‘settler’ movement has sought to aggressively expand Jewish claims to land and to remove all Palestinians. The definition of Israel as a nation of Jews alone was not fully enshrined into law until the enactment of the Nation-State Law in 2018. Since then, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have experienced a qualitatively greater level of unrelenting aggression, and the Netanyahu government has systematically attacked democratic rights of Israeli Jews as well. The U.S. white Christian nationalist movement is supporting Israel because Israel is now the vanguard of the world’s rightwing revolution.

For these reasons, anti-Zionism is not antisemitic but is anti-fascist. Furthermore, Zionism does not represent the aspiration of Jews everywhere. As Shaul Magid argues LINK, the region now called Israel does indeed have special significance to many Jews. The problem, he points out, is not that Jews want to live in Judea/Zion/Palestine/Israel. The problem is that the state of Israel claims that Jews and Jews alone own that land, trampling on other people’s legitimate attachment to that area who are Muslim, Christian, Ba’hai, and secular people. To call Israel “the home of the Jews” is also problematic because most of the world’s Jewish population has no desire to live in Israel.

Hamas’ October 7 attack posed a real challenge: was it a legitimate defense against Zionist aggression? There can be no doubt that the Palestinian people have been experiencing a new level of Zionist aggression and expansion of Israel’s claims to land since the passage of the 2018 Nation-State Law. It is also true that many Arab states were in the process of abandoning their commitment to Palestinian self-determination, leaving Palestinians’ feeling isolated and vulnerable. A military action aimed at stopping Israeli expansionism and galvanizing Arab solidarity for these reasons might have been warranted. But I would argue that Hamas’ attack was not anti-Zionist; it was antisemitic. It was not aimed at Israeli military or government targets: it was aimed at terrorizing Jewish civilians and included mass murders and sexual assaults on elderly people, women and children who were targeted because they were Jews. This equation of all Jews as responsible for Israeli aggression against Palestinians played right into the hands of the rightwing Zionist project (Israel = the Jewish people). But this equation is empirically wrong. 27% of Israel is not Jewish. And Israelis’ politics is not monolithic. In 2023, millions of Israelis marched in the streets to stop Netanyahu’s attack on democratic rights. And today there are a sizable number of Israeli Jews as well as non-Jews protesting the Israeli war. Many Jews around the world oppose Zionism and support Palestinian self-determination. To equate all Jews as the enemy of all Palestinians is not anti-Zionism; it is antisemitism.

This confusion about what is and is not antisemitism came to a head in the U.S. when some progressives defended Hamas’ October 7 attack. I was personally offended by online posts made by former comrades of mine who stated that the 1200 murdered Jews were legitimate targets because they were illegal occupiers of Palestinian land. At the time, I wrote a post warning progressives of the consequence of not calling out Hamas’ antisemitism. Sure enough, the rightwing quickly saw the opportunity to use this mistake and used it to whip up Jewish (and Christian nationalist) support for Zionist aggression as well as to attack progressive initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion on college campuses.

The lesson to me is simple enough: we can ill-afford to excuse antisemitism on the grounds that Jews are white and privileged, and in the case of Israelis, occupiers. Jews are people and even people living in a nation based on an illegitimate claim (Zionism) can suffer egregious discrimination as Jews. And when people are attacked because they are Jews, they must be defended. But we cannot let the rightwing get away with their argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Let us be clear what antisemitism is and is not. If we are not, the progressives’ gains of the last fifty years are in jeopardy.