Clueless on Gaza

 

On Sunday Malcolm Nance wrote about the growing protests, especially on campuses (the picture above was taken at New York University), supposedly supporting the Palestinian people but often not even veiled expressions of antisemitism.  Threats to shoot Jewish students at Cornell led to a man's arrest this morning.  Jewish students there and at Harvard are considering lawsuits against the universities for not doing enough to protect them.  A student at Cooper Union looked up from the library to see a mob shouting threats.  This is the northeast.  It's not hard to guess what's going on elsewhere.  (No need to guess -- a student at Tulane was punched in the face and his nose broken.)

The title of Nance's article -- "Ask yourself, are you really for Palestine or do you just hate Jews?" is deliberately provocative and well asked.  As Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League put it, "There's nothing wrong with advocating for a two-state solution.  There's something profoundly wrong with advocating for a final solution."  It's as if 10/7, as Nance calls it, unleashed something that was always latent in this society.  Ninety years ago the right railed against "Franklin Rosenfeld" and his "Jew Deal," backed up by the Klan and Charles Coughlin.*  Now right and left alike have seized on the war to advance their never-very-subtle agenda.  After all, far more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed and Americans instinctively root for the underdog, like Ukraine.  Decent Americans.  

It is possible to grieve for the circumstances of the Palestinians without supporting Hamas, Hezbollah or any other terrorist group.  It is also possible to disparage the overreaction of the Netanyahu government without falling into antisemitism.  Israel just took responsibility for bombing the Jabalya refugee camp; how is this ever defensible?  "The Jews" didn't do it -- the IDF did.  Distinctions matter.

Except, the distinctions are harder to find than chalk marks on a wet pavement.  For years the American Israel Public Defense Committee (AIPAC) and other lobbying groups, with help from the mainstream media, have worked to conflate opposition to Israeli government policy and actions with antisemitism.  Anyone who does not support Israel straight down the line is practically a Nazi or that singular monster the "self-hating Jew" (e.g. Noam Chomsky).  Rather than raise their heads over the parapet, most politicians have assented to this, though no such thinking would survive for a minute when applied to any other country.  If I point out that Brexit was the mother of all dumb ideas, do I advocate driving the British into the sea?  Can I suggest that Hungary needs a better government without wanting all Hungarians to die?  We laugh at Trump's assertion that American Jews who don't support him and therefore Israel are "disloyal" because it's Trump and he's demented, but is it really different from the AIPAC position?  

Sadly, the level of education even on elite campuses is not high, especially when it comes to history.  Excitable young Americans are allying themselves with entities they scarcely understand.  The solution is not more Islamophobia, for Islam is equally not the same as terrorism.  The solution is not cheap politicians like Ron DeSantis trying to ban Palestinian organizations (and everything else they hate) from campuses.  We all need to learn and remember the deep history of antisemitism and where it always leads.  We have to carve out space for ourselves where it does not exist in the inflamed present.  Before you chant "From the river to the sea," know what it means.

*Ken Burns's three-part The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022) is a good place to start.