Mick Hartley

Samuel J Hyde, a couple of months back:

The young people who chant for intifada and denounce Zionism with quasi-religious conviction do not believe themselves ignorant. They think themselves enlightened. The slogans that saturate social platforms – settler colonialism, decolonization, and the genocide libel – did not originate in the fevered minds of the naïve but in the quiet, tenured rooms of the university. They have become the moral grammar of our time and are now wielded to sanctify the murder of Israeli Jews on October 7.

Quoted by Cary Nelson in his Times of Israel blog – A Taxonomy of Antizionism.

Meanwhile, antizionism is itself being aggressively promoted by faculty members, campus groups, and NGOs that advocate for a cluster of historical and contemporary myths and falsehoods.

The first of these antizionist myths, one invoked for decades but not the main emphasis of contemporary antizionism, is the insistence that Palestinians are the only true indigenous residents of the area from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and beyond. It is based on the lie that the Jews have not had a substantial presence in the region either in the ancient world nor in the post-Roman era. This falsehood has been repeated for decades despite the substantial body of historical testimony and archeological evidence to the contrary. It remains a comforting story antizionists can tell themselves and use in persuading gullible new recruits to the movement that the antizionist cause has decisive historical validation. Given its historical claim, it can be considered antizionism’s foundation story.…

The second example is the myth that there is a direct line between several antizionisms that flourished in the early twentieth century and those that operate today. The study of antizionism should insist instead that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 created a complete break with the antizionism that existed beforehand. Contemporary antizionism, like that Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine advocate, gains credibility and authenticity if people can believe it inherits the mantle of those who opposed the establishment of a Jewish state seventy-five or a hundred years ago. Efforts to eliminate an actual state with 7 million Jewish citizens bear no relationship,  post-Holocaust, with earlier arguments that assimilation into European societies represents a solution preferable to Jewish statehood. Antizionism was once a plausible political argument when the outcome of history was still being debated. No longer….

The third falsehood to be overcome is the insistence that contemporary antizionism is entirely distinct from and unrelated to antisemitism. Even relentlessly, often viciously antizionist groups like Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine persist on claiming they are not antisemitic. They routinely perform outrage at the suggestion that their practices actually erase the difference between antizionism and antisemitism. Among those seriously researching antizionism,  a consensus has evolved, in the wake of 10/7, that antisemitism and antizionism have fused. With the antisemitic murders on 10/7 itself, followed most recently by the carefully planned slaughter of 15 Jews on Australia’s Bondi Beach, along with the belated recognition that chanted antizionist slogans have antisemitic consequences, that conclusion has become fundamental. It alerts us to the ways rationalized antizionism can either sublimate or animate antisemitism, including antisemitic murder.

Nelson goes on to list twenty of the “flashpoints that highlight contemporary debate” on antizionism. For instance…

No. 2.  CORRUPTING THE ACADEMY. Antizionism now centers and defines the international left. It has entirely taken over the movement that purports to advocate for Palestinian rights. It is increasingly corrupting humanities and social science disciplines, making it nearly impossible to hire or grant tenure to faculty with research projects sympathetic to Zionism. It is increasingly dominating both Israel Studies and Jewish Studies, We need to be both frank and explicit in detailing these developments.