Mick Hartley

Further to yesterday's news about the cancellation of a New York State Writers Institute panel discussion at the University at Albany because two of the participants refused to discuss their books with "a Zionist"….the Zionist in question, Elisa Albert, now has her say at Tablet:

Use of the word “Zionist” as a permissible pejorative is a tool of brainwashed propagandists to dehumanize the people of Israel, wherever we reside, and to blame “us” for the horrific ongoing violence in an achingly, tragically, nightmarishly endless regional conflict, the latest conflagrations of which have inflamed many a conspiracist imagination and inspired many a nihilistic trauma tourist.

This, it is apparently not needless to say, helps zero Palestinian civilians or Muslims or Christian Arabs or Bedouins or Druze or assimilated diaspora quasi-Jews or Western gentiles looking for cheap thrills in anarchist drag. It brings zero relief to anyone directly impacted by this intractable, gruesome conflict. Not in Gaza, not in the Galilee, not in the Negev, not in Judea or Samaria, not in East Jerusalem. Not in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iran.

It simply further entrenches a stale, appalling, hopeless status quo.

It does, however, allow a couple of writers who live in New York and Connecticut to play at a form of primal social-political-personal pseudo-identitarian catharsis (which I guess isn’t nothing!).

Oh, the short, half-life payoffs of misplaced nationalism: It’s like a drug, in how precious little it asks of you.

In the past year, our tribe (I wonder if it helps to categorize “us” thusly … in that no reasonable person could feel politically/culturally/personally entitled to spew bigotry toward, say, Native Americans) has witnessed a tsunami of historical erasure, misinformation, and confusion about Judaism in general and Israel in particular.

Most shocking has been the specter of “allies” in so many progressive movements—anti-racism, queer liberation, art, feminism, education, pronoun-preferences, equality, sex-positivity, diversity, size-inclusive slow fashion, witty tote bags—eagerly, carelessly parroting some of the laziest, most twisted antisemitic ideas and incitement known to human history.

Phew. She's not taking it lying down….