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AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Zionism Has Lost Young America
Nobody really believes there’s a threat to Jewish students on campuses or that pro-Palestinian students are subjecting their Jewish classmates to abuse or harassment.
A speaker at a major protest in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 1, 2020, against threatened Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News
A specter is haunting U.S. college campuses, and it is the specter not of anti-Semitism but of opposition to anti-Semitism.
No one would object to fighting hate, particularly the ancient form of hate against Jewish people, if the movement against anti-Semitism were truly about combating anti-Semitism.
But the battle on college campuses is instead unmistakably a political battle directed against Palestinian activism and nationalism. This has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Instead Zionists hurl charges of anti-Semitism around to police speech and ban expressions of pro-Palestinian nationalism.
When the the Anti-Defamation League counts rallies protesting Israeli genocide as examples of anti-Semitism, you know that it is not about anti-Semitism anymore. It’s about an attempt by a pro-Israel group to shield Israeli aggression and occupation from criticism.
The Change on Campus
The shape of student activism on college campuses has changed; the struggle for Palestine is no longer confined to Arab and Muslim students. To be sure, the movement historically did attract progressive Jewish students, but the movement was composed largely of Arabs and Muslims.
In recent years, American youth have been moving away from Democratic Party politics, instead embracing Third-World-style progressiveness. Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter movement has adopted Palestine as one of its causes and that supplied the Palestinian movement with a current of local domestic radicalism.
Black Lives Matter demonstration in Berlin, June 24, 2017. (Montecruz Foto, Creative Commons: Attribution Share Alike)
BLM was able to identify the racist impulse in Zionism — years after failed attempts by Palestinians and their Arab supporters to make that case. Zionist founders were never shy about their contempt for the natives and their belief in the superiority of Israelis vs. Arabs.
Books and articles were produced in Israel or in the West by Israelis to show the genetic inferiority of Arabs. The notorious book, The Arab Mind, has never been out of print and is still used in the West and Israel as a manual on Arab political and social behavior.
The intersectionality of Palestine with American radical movements propelled Palestine, for the first time in its history, into American progressive causes.
Yet, Democratic liberals and mainstream feminists — like the National Organization of Women and Feminist Majority — remain solidly behind Israeli mass violence. To date, NOW has released only one statement about Palestine; and it was to condemn Hamas.
Zionism’s Colonialist Context
Delegates at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Zionism would not have been launched without the context of Western colonial thought and practices. The first document of the Zionist Congress in 1897 did not shy away from using the word colonialism. And you need a thrust of racism to be able to justify the establishment of a Jewish state on a land with a majority of non-Jews.
Just like South Africa, the Zionist project was predicated on the belief in the inferiority of the subject race. It is this element in Zionism which allowed progressive minorities in the U.S., and some whites, to identify with Palestinian outrage at Israeli racism and subjugation.
The debate that has taken place in Congress and on op-ed pages of U.S. newspapers is misleading.
Nobody really believes there’s a threat to Jewish students on campuses or that pro-Palestinian students are subjecting their Jewish classmates to abuse or harassment.
And surely nobody really believes a Palestinian lobby has taken over Congress, the U.S. media and university administrations.
[See Academic Freedom Under Fire as Gaza Burns; Zionist Suppression in Congress and PATRICK LAWRENCE: Gaza & Confronting Power]
The contrived debate revolves around the realization by Zionist organizations that they’ve lost young people in the U.S. Public opinion surveys show this demographic is quite clearly on the side of Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation.
Thus losing American youth has led to a counterattack by supporters of Israel.
Students in New York protesting in support of Gaza outside the Israeli consulate on April 29, 2015. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
[WATCH: Anti-Genocide Protesters Arrested at US Capitol]
Israel supporters aren’t debating the facts of the conflict and aren’t even providing justifications for the genocide in Gaza. Instead, they are branding all manifestation of pro-Palestinian activism as anti-Semitism.
This is a backlash that is likely to continue and is also destined to fail. Israel’s massacres speak for themselves, despite the propaganda attempts to whitewash them.
“Supporters of Israel are not debating the facts of the conflict and are not even providing justifications for the genocide in Gaza. Instead, they are branding all manifestation of pro-Palestinian activism as anti-Semitism.”
No examples of anti-Semitic rhetoric by pro-Palestinian students have been produced as evidence, because there are none.
The slogans being chanted across the country refer to Palestinian national aspirations of freedom. “Free, free Palestine” is the most oft-chanted phrase in demonstrations. But Zionist organizations have suddenly decided the word “intifada” (Arabic for uprising) implies genocide against Jews.
Intifada — Against Arab & Muslim Governments
The word has been applied repeatedly by Arabs since the 20th century to refer to political movements and revolts against Arab and Muslim governments. The usage long preceded that of the Palestinian intifada of 1987.
Iraqi contemporary history is replete with intifadas against the British and later against the ruling governments. Nobody ever charged Arab rebels with genocidal intent when they revolted against Arab governments.
Similarly, Egyptians referred to their January 1977 revolt against the cruel economic policies of President Anwar Sadat (the West’s favorite despot, despite his anti-Semitism) as the “January Intifada” while Sadat later dubbed it “the Intifada of thieves.”
The other slogan under fire is “from the river to the sea,” which simply denotes the geographical area from which all Palestinians originally hail.
Would Israel and the U.S. prefer Palestinians to say: “From Area A to Area B, under Oslo,” or limit the historical imagination to fit the narrow parameters of a Palestinian entity within less than 20 percent of historic Palestine?
That’s impossible. Palestinians can’t deform their own history to allay the fears of Israelis; they also can’t tailor their slogans to satisfy the concerns of Zionist groups in the U.S..
It is not true that this slogan about historic Palestine entails the expulsion or murder of Jews. No such demand has ever been voiced by any Palestinian political group since 1948.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s charter was very clear in demanding a state in all of Palestine, but it never proposed to murder Jews; similarly the Hamas charter of 2017 makes no such reference and even talks about confining its enmity toward Zionism and not toward Jews as Jews. (Hizbullah made a similar clarification in its political document from 2009).
“Israel and U.S. would like the Palestinians to say: ‘from Area A to Area B, under Oslo,’ or to limit the historical imagination to fit into the narrow parameters of a Palestinian entity within less than 20 percent of historic Palestine.”
It’s understandable that Zionist groups in the U.S. are desperate; they are quickly losing support among young people in general, and college campuses in particular.
The Israeli cause that was once “cool” among Western youths, has become the most “uncool” of causes, while Palestine has captured the imagination of young people worldwide.
Social media has become the driving force transforming world public opinion. Before it, Israel committed its crimes quietly away from the cameras.
In 1987, the late U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger advised the Israeli government to expel media from the West Bank before using use force to quell the uprising there.
The ability of Zionist groups to control the narrative in the leading media has been undermined by virtue of the proliferation of social and independent media. It can’t be muzzled.
Pressure can no longer impose the narrative Israel has insisted upon since 1948. Young people today share graphic proof of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In a futile attempt to return to the pre-social media era, Israel has come up with the idea that anti-Semitism needs to be redefined to include all expressions of protest for Palestine and any manifestation of opposition to Israel and its crimes.
Western governments are going along with Israel’s new definition. But they failing to impose it on society, especially when Jewish groups (like Jewish Voices for Peace) and Jewish individuals (such as U.S social scientist Norman Finkelstein, journalist Max Blumenthal, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, among many others) are in the forefront of pro-Palestinian campaigns.
Young Palestinian Women’s Fierce Leadership
Protester outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 20, 2016. (Susan Melkisethian, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Activism for Palestine in the U.S. has changed markedly from my days as a student in the 1980s. Arab groups back then were very cautious and their male leaders were easily intimidated by Zionist groups. Many would get flustered when asked if they recognized the state of Israel.
Today, the leadership of the movement is spearheaded by young Palestinian-American women who can’t be intimidated. They are fierce in their rejection of Zionist pressure tactics. Israel has a major problem with these brave women and doxing and other methods of defamation and vilification are being wielded to stigmatize and marginalize them.
But Israel’s problem is much bigger than a PR matter. It’s problem is that it is a colonial, racist state resorting to tactics of 19th century colonial powers in an age of 21st century new media.
Israel has become an anachronistic entity which does not fit within the modern norm of expected decency, humanity and international law: and all those ideals are blatantly violated and trampled upon by Western powers who continue to support Israel.
Ultimately Israel can’t win militarily against the Palestinians and it has already lost the media war. This has been made clear by a U.S. president, who never fails to remind us that he is an unabashed Zionist (which makes sense given his checkered history when it comes to race).
The notion that pro-Israel groups can bully and muzzle American students, led by young Palestinian women, reveals a deep ignorance of how far they have gone to lose the youth of America.
As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil
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