Liberal Jews Deluded Themselves on Palestine

Last January, members of the radical anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) filmed a video marking the end of their suspension from Rutgers University. At first look, the video strikes a dissonant chord: The visual aesthetic is a throwback to the Palestinian fedayeen and hijackers reading a communique after an operation. Yet the inflections and cadences, despite a detectable but faint accent, were jarringly American Gen Z.

Historically, the American Jewish establishment has portrayed SJP and its ilk as a foreign phenomenon, an import from the Middle East, fueled by Arab financing, radical Arab academics, and the influx of radical Arab and Muslim students—a form of jihad, but with laptops and lattes. In contrast, a December profile of the group in The New Yorker, the Time magazine of progressive Ivy League graduates, presented a snapshot of a prototypical intersectional movement. SJP students and professors, some of them Jewish, were portrayed as embattled social justice prophets persevering in the face of oppression by a corrupt establishment, and the unreasoning hysteria of pro-Israel activists. The Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt was briefly quoted as making allegations that SJP provided and received funds from terrorist organizations—accusations which The New Yorker author brushed aside as arbitrary and without merit.

The heroic-cartoonish slant of the essay aside, the author did capture a central fact about pro-Palestinian activism, including that which endorses Islamist genocidal movements, which many American Jews are still too quick to deny: Instead of being a marginal cause supported and funded by foreign elements, anti-Zionism is in fact the flagship foreign policy cause of the international left and the academic vanguard of progressive activism. A cause that was once regarded as fundamentally foreign is now mainstream across blue American cities and liberal elite institutions.

Whether wearing a hijab or a Star of David, SJP anti-Israel activists are not simply freaks who demonstrate in favor of Hamas. They are mainstream products of the monoculture of the academic left. They are similar, indeed identical, to the social justice, Black Lives Matter, climate, gender, decolonizing, and woke activists who have been wreaking havoc on the U.S. and tearing apart our institutions for years. The synthesis of causes, habits, mores, and aesthetics of the Middle East and of radical Western ideas has become part of the American elite vernacular.

This vanguard of American progressivism harmoniously merges Marxism, intersectionality, Third Worldism, liberalism, Muslim identity, grassroots activism, and other elements of leftism in a way that is reminiscent of the stock rhetoric of the vanguard left in the 1960s and ’70s. But whereas in the ’60s and ’70s, radical groups that espoused the Palestinian cause as part of a movement of international solidarity with Third World “liberation struggles” were generally outside the mainstream, and not under the umbrella of a major political party, the opposite is now the case.

Examples in The New Yorker essay included Jannatul Nila, a senior at CUNY’s Hunter College who organized a rally to protest Israel’s response to Hamas’ terrorism. The students’ chants and slogans reflect a blend of Islamic, progressive, and theistic Marxist symbols, underscoring their alignment with broader progressive and intersectional causes. After chanting “Allahu akbar” and “Free Palestine,” they also shouted, “We are the students of Frantz Fanon” and “We are the students of Edward Said,” the two icons of decolonization and the seminal intellectual figures of postcolonial studies. While it is difficult to imagine anyone outside of academic hothouse environments being moved by such slogans, they in fact illustrate the centrality of the new academic politics within the larger political discourse, in which Third World academics have become aspirational symbols.

In perhaps the most telling part of the SJP profile, a member of the group’s national steering committee, Carrie Zaremba, explained that “the idea is to appeal to people who know nothing.” After noting how these know-nothings are fed the updated version of old talking points, Zaremba points out that many join the movement because “they’re looking for a leftist organizing space.” The passage deserves to be quoted at some length:

Chapters start “small, with more tangible, visible elements of the Palestinian struggle,” and link those to prominent historical episodes elsewhere, such as apartheid in South Africa or the oppression of Native Americans in the U.S. “We go from apartheid to understanding what settler colonialism means. And then, from settler colonialism, we move to imperialism. And then, for example, what does Marxism have to do with Palestine?” After just one year of involvement with S.J.P., he said, “I really had a pretty solid grasp of what Palestinian liberation meant, and how interconnected it was to all the other struggles we see on the streets.”

The issue, then, is as much sociological as it is ideological. For contemporary college students, the Israel-Palestine issue is not a separate foreign policy issue referring to the struggles of people in a small spit of sand in the Middle East. It is a domestic issue of social justice that fits within a unitary and indivisible framework of global justice concerns and decolonization—on a par with BLM, the gender revolution, and climate justice. In fact, all of these separate slogans and causes are in a very real sense referring to the same thing, at least in the minds of the people who chant them. This is how intersectionality works.

The evolution in perception that is referred to by the term “intersectionality” signifies a more profound trend within American society and institutions. Leftist endorsement of groups like SJP as vanguards of social justice and progressive dogmas more broadly is not an exception. It is in line with support of anti-humanistic groups like BLM—which was until quite recently held to be de rigueur by much of the Jewish liberal establishment. Even among students from Muslim and Arab backgrounds, this intellectual shaping, predominately under the tutelage of the American academic community, has largely sidelined Islamist or Arabist ideologies.

For years, opponents of movements like SJP or the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whether from Zionist circles or the world of anti-Islamist activism, have emphasized these groups’ reliance on Middle Eastern and Islamic ideologies, finances, and personnel. These critics argue that the adoption of Western progressive terminology by these groups is a strategic ploy designed to manipulate the well-intentioned but naive beliefs of misguided “useful idiots.” The anti-Israel zealotry of so many such progressives in turn is regarded not as proof of their culpability but of the innocence of their souls and the purity of their hearts, which are being manipulated by foreign villains. This viewpoint, a descendant of the post-9/11 jihad demonology, has become so ingrained that it could be considered a quasi-official stance among liberal Jews and Zionists to explain the current climate of antisemitism on college campuses.

None of this is to deny SJP’s links to Palestinian terrorist organizations like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Rather, the point is that by trapping themselves in outdated categories, and by wishing to imagine themselves as normative American liberals, many American Jews are blinding themselves to seismic changes in American society and politics. Of those changes, the shift in the Democratic Party, the traditional political home of American Jews, is arguably the most consequential.

The Democratic Party of the 21st century is, by most traditional measures, far to the right of its 20th-century predecessors, having abandoned familiar social democratic struggles for higher minimum wages, housing subsidies, higher tariffs to benefit workers, and other economic measures. Instead, it has embraced comparatively low tax rates and global techno-capitalism—while at the same time embracing a compensatory Third Worldist ethos. This ideological shift reached a pivotal point with the election of Barack Obama, whose own formative years were split between Cold War America and Sukarno’s Indonesia. His presidency initiated a profound transformation within the structure of American institutions that reshaped the Democratic Party as the head of a political alliance of urban liberal technocrats, technology corporations, institutions of higher education, and activist grievance groups.

This reconfiguration of power dynamics within the Democratic Party in turn made it a natural ally for various groups sympathetic to and obsessed by the Palestinian cause, most of which saw and still see Jews and Israel as enemies. This domestic realignment mirrored Obama’s foreign policy priorities and its approach to Middle Eastern affairs, namely the policy of realigning U.S. interests in the region with Iran.

As Obama’s Democratic Party transformed itself into a big tribal sectarian tent, traditionally Democratic American Jews found themselves under the same roof with elements that were antisemitic and anti-Zionist, but whose grievances had now been granted higher status. There were now exigencies that demanded flexibility—intersection, if you prefer. Everyone would now pretend that anti-liberal progressive dogmas being incubated on campuses were the natural evolution of the liberal causes that many American Jews had long supported by way of achieving greater equality and liberation from prejudice.

Groups like the ADL and other American liberal Jewish institutions were often at the forefront of endorsing the same progressive ideas and intersectional jargon that are central to the current self-conception of the anti-Israel movement. Ironically, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who was quoted in The New Yorker as a token Jewish establishment hysteric, was perhaps the key author and implementor of this strategy of intersectional “allyship,” as Obama’s yes man within the Jewish establishment.

If Jewish liberals were to maintain their position on the American left, further adaptability was required on their part: American Jewish identity needed to be defined by a commitment to social action and progressive theology. If Zionism is to have any legitimacy at all, it would be contingent on its interpretation as a movement aligned with progressive social justice and national liberation ideals—namely, as the handmaiden to establishing a Palestinian state. This ideology, including the false consciousness it fosters, is what still prevents many American Jews from comprehending the growing wave of antisemitic activism as a social justice cause—one being pushed and protected by the political party most American Jews still regard as their home.

When reality is too frightening to contemplate, often the response is either to deny it or to assert that what’s staring at you in the face is merely a facade. Hence, it’s common to see progressive and seemingly liberal movements that endorse anti-Zionism dismissed as fringe or fleeting phenomena. The result is the further obfuscation of an increasingly obvious political reality: The Democratic Party is openly courting the most antisemitic forces in America and the world.

This mystification also helps affirm Zionism’s own authentically liberal, even progressive identity: On one side are the prestigious and glamorous Western forces of liberalism, equality, and progress, of which the liberal Jewish establishment is part; and on the other, the forces of religious fascism, exotic fanaticism, and foreign barbarism on which the anti-Israel activists live.

Young American Jews have often shied away from facing the prospect that other liberal Americans of their generation—increasingly indoctrinated into left-wing ideologies and seeking a “leftist organizing space” for the struggle against racism, colonialism, and imperialism—are much more likely to align with pro-Palestinian activism than with Jews. One of the reasons is that many young Jews go to the same schools, where they are indoctrinated into the same ideologies, and are often unlikely to critically question whether there is something inherently distorted and dangerous in them.

Cries of “intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are not bugs in the new politics; they are features. There is no “version” of “social justice” politics without them. And as long as American Jews persist in ignoring that reality, they will continue to feel shocked and alone. The American Jewish establishment’s hope that it could overlook this reality and instead impress its erstwhile friends with “allyship” and stories of its contributions to the civil rights movement, feminism, and other progressive causes was a profoundly mistaken strategy that squandered whatever communal power they might have retained within the Democratic Party. The result is that the American Jewish establishment is increasingly disposable, both to Jews and to those who hate them.