After listening to a 90-minute comprehensive webinar on campus protests and antisemitism, led by a prominent Hillel rabbi at an elite university, I was shocked that there was no mention of Israel’s war on Gaza that has so far killed tens of thousands of civilians and injured almost 100,000 people. This was not unintentional. Many Jews have been searching for a way to deflect difficult conversations, either by avoiding the issue entirely, as the Hillel podcast did, or else by finding ways to delegitimize the loudest critical voices.
Almost since the moment they began, there’s been a vigorous effort in the Jewish conversation to essentialize campus protests against the war as examples of Left antisemitism. A long standing project on the Right, the effort to stoke fear of Left antisemitism has gained allies like the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt who are clearly worried by the increase in those who are heartbroken and horrified by Israel’s actions.
Left antisemitism is a particularly compelling and convenient narrative for those who tacitly or openly believe in “eternal antisemitism,” Hannah Arendt’s term for the position that Jew-hatred is unrelated to context and circumstances—that it’s a permanent and perpetual reality. Such a position, which Arendt argues is historically unfounded and morally dangerous, is tacitly used to wed anti-Zionism, or Palestinian solidarity, with antisemitism. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg put it so succinctly in a May interview, some problematic positions are “motivated by an underlying dislike of Jews.” Elsewhere I have referred to this phenomenon as Judeopessimism.
Even many who don’t sign on to the eternal antisemitism argument still refuse to view the protests as acts of resistance against a war that, while it has so far resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, largely women and children, and laid waste to almost the entirety of Gazan society, hasn’t, and likely won’t, eradicate Hamas. Rejecting the concept of “eternal antisemitism,” this group tends to embrace the “alternative motive” thesis, which, in the end, also serves to deflect complicity in and responsibility for mass killing.
In a recent essay, “Western Self-Hated and the Offering of Israel,” for example, Israeli scholar and writer Tomer Persico offered a (re)assessment of what he calls “the West’s” critical response to Israel’s devastating war on Gaza that followed Hamas’ October 7 massacre. The question he asks has been asked before: why does the “progressive” Left/West—or, as he prefers, the “anti-West”—seem to consistently find fault with Israel? Rejecting the oft-rehearsed response that this is simply an extension of antisemitism—Israel embodying what human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler called “the collective Jew”—Persico asks us to dig a bit deeper.
The so-called ‘West’
But before we address his main question it’s important to note that “the West,” a category Persico consistently uses, is somewhat out of date. The “East-West” dichotomy is itself a product of colonialism (do people in Asia see themselves as living in “the East”?). The notion of the Left being “anti-West,” therefore, only feeds a colonial model that in some ways points to the problem. It’s the West’s conversational hegemony that labels anything opposing it “anti-” (as if to imply “anti-civilization”). The categories are no longer useful.
Persico’s “anti-West” example is Michel Foucault’s defense of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The West has always critiqued itself, a quality that certainly didn’t begin with Foucault, and the “West”—often a surrogate for the Enlightenment—has given the world many things, including nationalism, democracy, communism, fascism, and universalism. As Robert Fine and Philip Spencer argue in Antisemitism and the Left, it may be the “West” itself (and not the anti-West) that’s given us modern antisemitism.
In any case, Foucault is a fair example, but let’s not forget that, while he did defend the Iranian Revolution, he also decried as shameful the 1976 UN resolution that “Zionism is racism.” Using him to make a point as an “anti-Western” voice against Israel may be complicated. As Persico notes, Foucault recognized his error when Khomeini failed to implement his revolutionary program as Foucault intended. However, it did, as promised, strike at the heart of the West’s attempt to dominate and subjugate the so-called non-Western “other”—the disease at the very heart of colonialism.
So yes, the Iranian revolution was anti-Western, if we understand the “West” (Europe and the US) as the arbiters of domination—be it colonialism, imperialism, or the control of populations and resources. And it may be true that the Palestinian Solidarity Movement is an iteration of what Persico calls “anti-Westernism” (what I would call an internal critique of imperialist violence and coloniality). But if that’s true it’s for good reason. At this moment, Israel, given the context, history, and complexity of its coming into being, is acting like the worst projections of the so-called West. Whether Zionism is or isn’t colonialism it’s surely acting as such today.
I’m not only referring to the fringe Right in Israel, but also to ministers in the present government, and government policy itself. So if the Left is committed to anti-coloniality and human liberation (which it is), then whether or not Israel formally constitutes colonialism, its policies and actions in practice will attract the Left’s ire as anti-colonialist—but also, in a sense, as anti-Western.
And here I’m not only talking about the war. The occupation/annexation, which really amounts to a culture of domination, has pervaded Israeli political culture for decades, whether we’re talking about Likud or Labor governments. The brutal massacre of October 7th and the ensuing war, which the UN’s International Court of Justice calls a plausible genocide, pushed this issue to the surface, but the underlying conditions have been gestating for many years.
Still, if you buy the “eternal antisemitism” argument, nothing Israel does really matters. Antisemitism has unfortunately become a foreign policy tool that makes Israel exceptional and undermines the whole argument for Zionism/Israel, which was to normalize the Jews and enable them to become “like all the other nations” (arguably its raison d’etre). If criticism of that state constitutes antisemitism, then that is not a normal state.
Why just Israel?
An Israeli friend, a Leftist, recently told me that the Left almost always focuses on one issue/conflict at a time. It isn’t strictly true, of course, but in the 1950s the primary focus was Civil Rights; in the early 1960s it was the protest against the French-Algerian War; in late 1960s and early 1970s, Vietnam; in the 1980s, Apartheid; in the 1990s, solidarity with Afghanistan in the Afghan-Soviet war (we all wore Afghani Freedom Fighter hats in grad school); in the 2000s it was massive protests against the invasion of Iraq; economic redistribution after the crash of 2008 and Occupy in 2011; Black Lives Matter in the late twenty teens; and now it’s Palestinian solidarity. And one day it will be something else.
In each of these cases, there were other conflicts and atrocities that didn’t become a central focus of the Left. So why these and not others? That’s a good question, and one frequently asked by supporters of Israel who suspect antisemitism. But antisemitism isn’t a compelling explanation when it comes to the focus on Gaza. In addition to a singular focus clearly being the Left’s preferred approach, let me offer two brief examples to illustrate why.
This summer, an Israeli friend and I inadvertently happened upon a Palestinian solidarity rally in New York’s Washington Square Park. Listening to the speakers I was somewhat surprised. Yes, there were chants to end the war in Gaza, along with “Stop the Genocide” and “From the River to the Sea.” But when the war was discussed the focus was largely on Biden’s continued support for supplying Israel with ammunition to bomb Gaza. And speakers also talked about Sudan, Ukraine, climate change, and the US military-industrial complex. In other words it became a protest of the Left. Gaza was the rallying cry, but the protest fanned out far beyond that conflict, which is becoming more common.
Then there’s a recent piece in The Boston Globe, “Socialism’s at the Core of the Pro-Palestinian Movements’ Next Phase on College Campuses.” The report traces a series of student groups in conversation over the next stage of the protest movement, which they say is largely about “a wider global malaise, the manifestation of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy they see embedded in Western society.” Is this all “anti-Western”? In a way—but not the way Persico thinks. And it’s focused on Israel, though certainly not predominately so.
There are obvious reasons to focus on Israel
This isn’t to say that antisemitism plays no role today in the campus protest movement. It certainly does. The question is: what role? Antisemitism often latches onto different elements of the Left’s anti-Westernism—in this case the war on Gaza. This isn’t especially new. And while the Left has traditionally opposed antisemitism (one reason so many Jews in Eastern Europe and America were attracted to socialism in the early 20th century), it certainly also rears its head in Leftist circles. Everyone from Max Horkheimer to Hannah Arendt to Jurgen Habermas claim in different ways that it was the Enlightenment that gave us modern antisemitism.
In this case, however, the “eternal antisemitism” argument, and the argument that anti-Israelism is anti-Westernism, are self-serving and to my mind unsustainable. Let’s not forget, women and children are dying, innocent people are starving, and children are drinking from puddles because (in “self-defense”?) the IDF bombed water purification plants. Gaza has been obliterated, the devastation arguably one of the worst since World War II. Those are incontestable facts, reported by reputable news and relief agencies. What’s happening in Gaza may or may not in the end be understood as genocide (I do not think it is), but it’s clearly sociocide, the intentional destruction of a society including infrastructure (schools, hospitals, universities), resources (water, electricity), and services (garbage collection etc.). To claim that protests against decimation like this are primarily about “anti-Westernism” and not starving children is as I see it no better than blaming eternal antisemitism.
But here’s the rub for Persico and those looking to identify impure motives in the campus protest movement. In the case of civil rights, Vietnam and South Africa, the Left’s “anti-Westernism” was correct. Of course the Left wasn’t really protesting the West, but rather imperialism, injustice, and coloniality. And activism in the US and Europe helped end these tragic situations, even though in these cases there may have been incidents of protest violence.
This isn’t to say that the tactics of the Vietcong—or the ANC, or the FLN, or now, Hamas—are justifiable. But the Left’s critique was, and is, correct, in principle. Israel’s culture of domination is a bloated form of chauvinism and, in some circles, supremacy, that has and will continue to evoke serious, and sometimes tragic, resistance. Many Israelis, and Diaspora Jews, agree with that. As Thomas Jefferson once said, slavery will end one day because “subjugated people will eventually rebel.” And, as Michael Kaplow recently suggested, there isn’t a “cycle of violence” in Israel/Palestine, but rather a “system of violence”—a system of violence perpetuated by the occupation. Only now the occupation has largely become the government itself, supported by a majority of the electorate.
Precisely what Zionism was meant to do
Not surprisingly, Palestine solidarity was at the very center of this spring’s graduation ceremony at Harvard Divinity School (where I teach). There were calls for Harvard to divest from military arms, mixed with calls for a “free Palestine” (though I heard no chants of “from the river to the sea” and there was no mention of Hamas). Keffiyehs were ubiquitous. And yet a student who’s suing the university for antisemitism and an outspoken critic of the campus protests was duly applauded by his classmates as he rose to receive his diploma.
So what was really happening at the graduation? I submit, this wasn’t only about Israel/Palestine, or the war—though it was certainly also about that. This was about what one graduate called a referendum to end “carceral states.” Claiming Gaza is a “carceral state” may not be quite right, but it’s also not unreasonable. The term usually refers to the expanded and unequal criminal system in the US functioning through the dehumanization of people of color. To many, the people of Gaza and the West Bank have come to represent “carceral states” globally. And if Israel weren’t the ruling power embodying that “carceral state” I think many of the same Jews who today deplore the protesters would be with them. Think of significant Jewish opposition to China’s treatment of the Uyghurs or Jewish support for civil rights and the boycott of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
So, yes, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement is the latest symbol of the Left’s ongoing critique of the West, in the tradition of its support for abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, an end to the fighting in Vietnam, the dismantling of Apartheid, and BLM. It’s not a movement principally in support of Hamas or of October 7.*
It’s a sad irony that the State of Israel was founded as a state of the oppressed and has now become a state of the oppressor. As a Jew, and an Israeli citizen, that is painful to me as it is to many of us. But that doesn’t make it untrue. History is nothing if not a deep pool of irony where the unexpected often becomes the law. It’s not antisemitic to oppose those who dominate others, or to resist those who claim that they are the real victims of those they dominate.
There were 1,200 murdered victims of October 7 and hundreds of hostages—some still alive, many tragically not. This is unconscionable, but Israel is not the victim in the larger conflict. Israel is the hegemon. Whatever one thinks of it, that was precisely what Zionism was supposed to accomplish—the end of Jewish victimhood. If Israel sees itself as a victim, then Zionism has failed.
The protest against domination will not go away, should they?
The claim that the protest movement is “just another case of anti-Westernism”—i.e., “the Left is just Lefting”—threatens to erase complicity. The West has given humanity many great things, and many horrible things. And the critique of the West from within won’t go away because, as Adorno and Horkheimer argued toward the end of WWII, the Enlightenment, with its fixation on Reason, carries within it, its own demise. As we know, democracies have produced horrific forms of inequality.
The Left will always wage a critique of coloniality and oppression. And yes, sometimes it will perpetuate oppression. Just as democracy can both offer freedom and also curtail it. But I’m afraid that dismissing opposition to the near complete destruction of Gaza as “anti-Western” isn’t a whole lot better than dismissing it as just another manifestation of “eternal antisemitism.” And neither provides ample nuance to understand the Left’s anger at what’s transpiring in Gaza.
It’s not unreasonable to see that Gaza today has become the embodiment of people living under a crushing war in an utterly dysfunctional situation with nowhere to go. Whether this is a legitimate response to October 7 is a question the collective Jewish conscience must reckon with, not wave away with lazy accusations of eternal antisemitism or arguments about the Left’s inveterate “anti-Westernism.” Zionism, which was given both increased relevance and justification by the Nazi genocide, is so much more expansive than Israel’s actions or its apologists’ rhetoric suggest.
But sadly, Israel continues its 56-year brutal occupation of Palestinians and, in many cases, argues that such action is necessary and thus justifiable. I would argue that, even if you disagree with the description, protesting that is legitimate. Each piece of this messy story has a context, a history, and myriad rationalizations and justifications. But the protest against domination will not go away. And it shouldn’t. Just imagine what the world would be like if “the West” proceeded unchecked? Sadly, Jews know that better than anyone.
*Support for Hamas, a terrorist organization, and October 7, a massacre, is an entirely different story. If there are indeed factions and individuals who support Hamas and its actions that day, the Left needs to own that, confront it honestly, and acknowledge that non-condemnation is wrong, immoral, and inexcusable, even as protesting this war, is legitimate.
