Why are Liberals bedfellows with Antisemites?
There must be a better way to get laid
I want to share a spiel for those curious why I've rebooted my tiny but lovely traditional egalitarian minyan Kol haKfar, a small DIY community of mostly liberal Jews, as a We Love Israel group in this dark hour for world Jewry. Some of this is inside baseball for Jewish liberals. I hope to evolve it into a letter for young Americans.
Many on the Left embrace an anti-Israel narrative, that by its very nature, calls for the extermination of Jews. To be “anti” a country means you want it gone. To be “non” a country that is under attack means you want it gone. To be “pro” a group of people who seek to topple a neighboring country means you want them to succeed. But this isn’t a football game or Disney movie. Countries are full of people.
What I’m talking about are the street protests, earnest social media posts and biased news coverage of the Pro-Palestine / Anti-Zionist / Non-Zionist movement. There’s nuance to these groups and it’s open to interpretation. My take: mostly non-Jewish activists are Pro-Palestine. These are the flag waving, visible folks you see in the news, on the streets and quad. It’s mostly Jews who are anti-Zionists. Yes you read that right, Jews against Israel, oy vay. Talk about decadent white privilege and liberal studies colleges gone wrong. Anyway, mostly Jewish left-wing extremists use the terms Anti- or Non-Zionist. They’re mostly talking to a Jewish audience while the wider Pro-Palestine crowd seeks a global approach. Either way, they’re eliminationist ideologies that seek to destroy a UN-member nation. None of these groups contain the words peace, Israel or co-existence. They’re absolutist.
In other words, they’re hate groups. I know, strong words. Please keep reading.
Since I’m Jewish I tend to focus more on Jewish narratives. If you are “anti” or “non” [insert country name] and that country is being attacked while you do nothing, then you are complicit in its destruction. That’s how morality works. If you’re unclear about this, ask a Rwandan.
You can call anti/non Zionism and Pro-Palestine activism liberal antisemitism, you can call it rallies for rape and mass murder, you can call it appeals to genocide. There are lots of hot button words, but by any other name, it's a sickness on the left. I want to understand and resist this. Their immorality and certainty is as shocking to me as the Proud Boys and January 6th insurrectionists, but hits much closer to home.
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How did otherwise earnest liberal Jews, dignified Palestinian nationalists and lower-stakes leftist allies in places like California pervert themselves into a platform predicated on mass murder and rape? And why are they so popular?
For the TikTok generation born with no real memory of 9/11 or the 2nd Intifada, for those who fought for and won marriage equality only to see it threatened years later, and for the older, ideologically-driven DEI cohort following Black Lives Matter, Israel, even in peacetime, has been conflated with the American oppression of Black and LGBTQ people. Oppression is bad. Bad Israel! What do we do with bad things? We fight to abolish them... even if they're populated by millions of people, which means we seek to exterminate them. Isn't this where the logic of the left leads?
If you are an absolutist in this conflict and aligned with Palestine, then ending the state of Israel is the necessary consequence of your position, assuming your keffiyeh-appropriating resistance isn't cosplay.
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It took me a long time to decode this projected American racial dynamic, but a decade ago while arguing with my 1960s era-liberal mom about Israel -- don't worry, I stopped doing that long ago, love you mom -- I realized why liberals kept focusing on Palestinians vs every other group on earth. It’s a projection of American civil rights. This association has grown until the fever pitch of today where communities across North America are now banning public menorah lightings because they don’t want to be “political.” In this left wing, progressive, college campus narrative, Israeli Jews are straight white cis-males with a South African accent. Or a Deep South accent. I can’t tell, but it’s something south and bad.
Palestinians are brown victims -- they are People of Color, POCs, or iPOCs, which sounds like an Apple product -- suffering from centuries of Islamophobia living in tents with no agency beyond extreme violence. There is no Iran in this equation. There is no "why didn't Arab states offer citizenship to Palestinians in 1948?"
The Israeli government accepted the 1947 UN partition plan. This would have created an Arab Palestine and Jewish Israel. Arabs rejected this. Arabs within Palestine and beyond then started a war in 1948 they now call Nakba. Israel won the war. Many Palestinians fled or were pushed out or were brutally killed. Many Middle Eastern Jews fled or were pushed out were brutally killed in surrounding Arab countries, where Jews have lived for millennia. Almost equally, these groups traded places. It was very painful. Look at the horror show of British partition at a similar time during the contraction of the British Empire. Tens of thousands died in Israel. Millions died in India. War is bad.
Getting back to Palestinians being iPOCs, the hot item for your Christmas ideological shopping list. If you reduce the world to literal black and white binaries, there is no "why are Gaza and the West Bank the only places on earth with multigenerational refugee camps, supported by the UN for seventy years?"
In the logic of multigenerational camps, all of New York City is a refugee camp. Name me one person from an illiberal country who immigrated here for fun, not necessity. It’s cold in the winter and expensive. Grinding it out as an Uber driver sucks. Should the UN declare Queens a no-mans land and ship in supplies?
That's the construct of the left: they project American racial trauma onto the Middle East. It’s not smart. But it’s simple, relatable and very contagious.
Wait, there's more.
American Jewry, which is 85% Ashkenazi, has assimilated to whiteness over time. My grandfather, a refugee from anti-Jewish violence of the Russian Empire in Ukraine, faced de facto anti-Jewish segregation here in New York in business and academic worlds. I don’t have that struggle, at least not until Affirmative Action succeeded in reducing Jewish matriculation rates back to the quota systems from the early 20th century that kept my grandfather out of medical school.
I'm white now. (Not to complicate things, but I’m of mixed ancestry, my dad is an Anglo for lack of a better term. If you’re casting doubt based on my last name, consider my cousins, who are 100% Ashkenazi.) Outside of a few elite academies and virtue-signalling political appointments, being white has been massively beneficial to my cousins. Access to banking, deferential treatment by police, intergenerational wealth. It's great stuff, and in our society, it’s parcelled out as privilege.
Of course many Asian, African, Indian, Middle Eastern and Latino immigrants claim this same privilege, but that’s too complicated for the DEI crowd. (Most of the heads of the largest tech companies in America are Indian. Barack Obama was a two-term president. Latinos have high home ownership rates. And on and on.)
But where white privilege backfires for Jews is when this emerging whiteness, and the sectarian reaction to against whiteness by the DEI left, applies to Israel. This creates a cauldron of rage.
Whites are bad, certainly when they’re being racist. Israel is white. Since Palestinians are brown and don’t have a country despite 90 years of being offered a country, and since many are treated horribly by Israel in their irredentist (two people claiming the same land) struggle, they are victims. More to the point, they are brown victims. The fact that many Palestinians treat Israelis horribly, well before October 7th, doesn’t really count. Brown people can’t do wrong in this formulation. Or if they do, it’s an aberration.
This point is that Israel is bad. Not the government. Not some Israelis. All of it.
If something is bad, and I’m a liberal who believes in human rights for all (for some?), I must be for its antithesis. That makes me Pro-Palestine or Anti- or Non-Zionist.
Zionism is a dated term not used anymore in Israel. It’s the motivation to create a Jewish nation state in the mid 19th century, when ethnic and geographic groups formed modern nations from faltering empires.
Germany, Italy and so on became nations in the 1860s, instead of feudal empires, at the same time Zionist thought emerged. German or Italian or Israeli statehood is another way of saying nationalism instead of Hapsburg or Ottoman Empire. It makes voting citizens out of unfree subjects.
Nationalism gives moral credence for Italians to no longer be subjugated by Austrian aristocrats. Italians speak a common language, live in the land of Italy and do Italian things as an ethnic group. They deserve their own autonomous state. Same for Jews with their language, culture and geography. Judaism, Hebrew and Jewish rituals are all based on the land of Israel, where Jews have had larger or smaller populations of more or less autonomy since early antiquity. Garibaldi and Ben Gurion might have missed each other by decades, but they would have had a hell of a dinner party.
Back to Bad Israel. This equation, where Israel is white and has a complicated and violent history with it’s illiberal neighbors (Italy did too until the end of WWII, except it was the illiberal one), then Israeli white warfare is necessarily racist.
You get it, right? Looking at the region with racial sunglasses reduces conflicts to simple racial binaries that have 0% to do with the actual struggles. The actual struggle is between Arab Nationalism (they also had their 19th century movements, starting in Egypt) and Jewish Nationalism. Arab Nationalism has expressed itself as illiberal monarchies or military dictatorships. There are no more empires, much to Iran’s chagrin. Ethnic minorities in Arab countries are tolerated in small quantities as long as they make no bid for power, like Berbers in Morocco, or why Kurds can’t have their own state in Iraq. There’s always been an existential fight between Arab nationalism, which has been authoritarian, and Jewish nationalism, which has been democratic, and contained in a tiny parcel with no natural resources.
Let’s talk about this for a second. Jewish Nationalism is infinitesimal. There are 7 million Israeli Jews in a region of 475 million Arabs. That’s 1.47 percent of the region. No Arab countries tolerated Israel’s existence until 1978, when a single country, Egypt, sued for peace after having lost four wars they started in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Things have changed dramatically since then.
I’m kidding.
Since Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, now two Arab countries have peace with Israel. Two out of 22 Arab nations. Jordan also lost multiple wars they started, and in that losing, the entity of the West Bank went to Israel which has occupied it since 1967. More recently, four Arab nations signed trade and diplomatic deals, but they’re not peace treaties. But let’s be generous and say now 6 states accept the existence of Israel. Only 16 to go!
This leads to hate speech by elite students at Harvard and contorted statements at the UN women’s agency, when it takes months for it to call out Hamas rapist-murders. It’s not clear why denouncing rape is difficult, but the UN’s struggles are shared by many ostensibly apolitical groups.
Let’s think about the Harvard, Penn, Stanford, and Ivy+ situation for a moment. The racial lense of the Middle East isn’t only anti-intellectual, it’s also dangerous. At our most elite universities, where the pinnacle of American high school students are molded into tomorrow's ruling class, there were marches on October 8th valorizing an Islamic terrorist massacre — while conveniently antagonizing Jewish students. That should make anyone fearful for the future of our country, let alone the deep moral challenges of the left when it tries to win elections. How will these elite students conduct business negotiations when they become top bankers, lawyers, software engineers and politicians? Will they have a zero-sum approach to acquiring companies and getting mortgages? Will they attack their boardroom opponents?
Projecting whiteness and DEI pathologies onto Israel, and even sexual identity politics, can't understand Middle Eastern history, gender, ideology and geography, but it's driving millions of Americans towards a direction: into intellectual oblivion.
Why would liberal people be sympathetic to an authoritarian dictatorship soaked in blood... like the Palestine Liberation Organization, now known as the Palestinian Authority, to say nothing of Hamas? Why isn't there an overwhelming protests on the Brooklyn Bridge or Grand Central Station against the Syrian mass murder of over 500,000 people? Or against Shia Houthis in Yemen with 400,000 dead? Or against relentless cartel violence in Mexico?
What's the motivation for this anti-intellectual, racially warped leftist projection onto Israel? If it all it takes is a substack post to demonstrate the fatuousness of their analysis, then what’s happening here?
It's hard for me to tease out any other rationale other than a hatred of Jews -- which includes a minority of self-loathing liberal Jews. The willingly self-marginalized, as I like to think of them. Remember, being marginalized fast tracks you to ennoblement. Being white means the "I" in DEI can’t apply to you, nor does the “D.” I’m not sure what the “E” is doing there when it comes to being accepted by an elite school or business - does that mean everyone gets in? But my point is that DEI is broken and smart people must know this, so the only motivation I can think of is a deep and ancient hatred of Jews, who are the worst colonizers in history, since they only control 1.47 percent of the Middle East. Talk about underachievers.
And this is where I think liberals have made bedfellow with antisemites. This is the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally of 2017, but now it’s the Pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist protests at menorah lightings in 2023.
Two last thoughts. Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe the DEI left makes astute observations about white Israelis and POC Palestinians.
If this lense is correct, then aren’t 50% of Israelis iPOCs because they come from the Middle East? Millions of Israelis come from Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran and more. There are Persian Jews, Yemenite Jews, Kurdish Jews. Are they not People of Color being dominated by, um, you?
Here’s a good one. What about the 164,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel? They’re not just POC, they’re legit BIPOC. They get the full acronym treatment. They are Black. Why don’t they count? Is it because, they’re, you know, the j-word?
If you're truly anticolonial, leave America. If you're truly in favor of fighting the irrefutable systemic racism that continues to deny intergenerational wealth to Black people, then, if you're not Black, give your wealth to a Black neighbor. No one is stopping you.
Ultimately that is too hard. It’s way faster to post on social media about apartheid. Maybe that makes them feel better. And maybe it answers my question as to the origins and futility of their politics.
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There are many legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy -- note I don't say Israel, to criticize its existence isn't legitimate unless you're a fan of World War II. These criticisms are especially valid, as a liberal, when they're aimed at far right settler violence in parts of the West Bank and racist, homophobic politicians who have been undercutting Israeli democracy while keeping the current prime minister in power.
Criticizing them, even if you don't vote in Israel or serve in the army, is good. I do the same during French elections Marine Le Pen almost wins, or when Jeremy Corbyn helmed the Labour Party as an anti-Jewish bigot. But if you pull back the lense to a wider angle, the global focus on Israel isn't discussing, or even knowledgeable of, Knesset coalitions, judicial policy or what settlements are final agreement status and which are violent land grabs. Their critique of Israel is existential. Theirs is an illegitimate, DEI-based eliminationism. It’s black and white.
This is why lefties wake up to Instagram feeds full or From The River to the Sea posts, ruin Thanksgiving meals when being fed by parents from an earlier liberal generation, and align themselves with Islamic totalitarians that, ironically, seek to destroy them. It’s one thing to protest in Times Square. I invite you to bring your Queers for Palestine banner to Ramallah.
I don’t know how the left backtracks from racial binaries and grapples with a more complex world that isn’t reducible to the Marvel Comic Universe, but I’m going to do like Chuck D and fight the power. I’ve reformed my little Jewish community, Kol haKfar / the Voice of the Village, to make a strong statement to the non- and anti-Zionist Jews in New York that what they’re doing isn’t helping peace, ironically, they’re hindering it.
I’ve marched in DC to show our politicians, my fellow citizens and the world, that Jewish lives matter as much as anyone’s else. I’ve also clarified my own thinking about Palestine, which I don’t think will be ever be as liberal or free as Switzerland, but I pray has a dignified future that perhaps looks like Costa Rica, a demilitarized state that’s a green gem in an otherwise illiberal Central America. It’ll take a global effort to make that happen, it will be a stretch.
Either way, there are over 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and over 7 million Jews in Israel. They’re not going anywhere. They deserve better than a slogan.