Mick Hartley

An important article from Izabella Tabarovsky in Tablet on The Cult of ‘Antizionism. 

A group of anti-Israel academics and BDS activists have taken a new step toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of “scientific antizionism” on American campuses. The “founding collective” of 10 has established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which aims “to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.” The new institute defines Zionism as a “political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.” This October, ICSZ will hold its inaugural conference titled “Battling the ‘IHRA Definition’: Theory and Activism.”…

American progressives have scored numerous successes in recent years by using the power of tenured academic positions, in-class bullying, and threats of physical intimidation to enforce anti-Zionist culture at American universities and within the elite cultural spaces that employ American liberal arts graduates. Now, they have taken opposition to Zionism a step further, by transforming their hatred of “Zionists” and rejection of the historical dynamics of Jewish self-identification and national self-determination into its own free-standing ideology, which is politically aligned with, but not dependent on, the wider progressive movement.

Anti-Zionists, as part of the broader far left, are eerily reproducing elements of the cultural deformations that once defined the lives of the citizens of the communist bloc: They have introduced Americans to the practices of collective demonization, blacklists, and denouncing friends and colleagues. They have injected political reeducation and oversight committees into workplaces and academic institutions as part of a new cultural revolution that overtly targets “Zionists” as present-day villains and boogeymen, on a par with “white supremacists” and “fascists.” And they have forced colleagues and coworkers who don’t agree with them to either hide their true opinions, or, more often, to stop having opinions at all, in order to keep their jobs….

With some familiar names:

ICSZ’s advisory board, which has grown from 16 to 29 members as of this writing in less than two weeks, now includes the UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler, an academic superstar of the American BDS movement who famously described Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive social movements that are “on the Left” and are “part of a global Left,” and New York University’s Lisa Duggan, who defended Rasmea Odeh, a PFLP operative who helped organize two deadly bombings inside Israel.

Worth reading in full.