Mick Hartley

A topical debate, especially in light of that Margate exhibition which was deemed by Kent Police not to be a problem since it was pitched as anti-Zionist, despite all the familiar tropes about Jews – sorry, Zionists – eating babies.

From Adam Louis-Klein at the Free Press (via Jerry Coyne) – yes, “anti-Zionism is just another category of anti-Jewish hate”.

After years in which Jewish and Israeli students at University of California, Berkeley were told that their exclusion was merely the product of political disagreement, a Title VI case brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has reached a settlement. It requires the university to end student group practices that excluded “Zionists,” and finally affirms that what Jewish students experienced was, in fact, discrimination.

The settlement forces the university to confront what it had long denied: that Jewish students’ experiences of discrimination and harassment were real. Though the problem accelerated after Hamas’s genocidal massacre on October 7, Kenneth L. Marcus—founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center, which brought the suit—accused Berkeley law students in 2022 of having“institutionalized an ancient ideology of hate, incorporating it into the legal DNA of their major identity groups.” He listed clubs as diverse as women’s groups, Asian and Pacific Islander, African American, LGBTQ, and Middle Eastern student organizations, all of which had altered their bylaws to exclude “Zionist” members and speakers.

In Marcus’s words: “Daniel Pearl, a Zionist victim of beheading, would have been constitutionally banned during his lifetime from speaking to any of these groups. His anti-Zionist murderers would not have been.”

Berkeley’s own law dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, wrote that he had never in his life been subject to anti-Jewish prejudice like that of the weeks following October 7. He recalled a student saying the school would feel safer if it could “get rid of the Zionists” and described being accused of participating in a “Zionist conspiracy.” Many Jewish and non-Jewish academics have been forced into silence in the wake of the anti-Zionist riots on campuses.…

Anti-Zionism transforms the very meaning of Zionism, reconstructing “Zionism” as a form of racial supremacy rooted in Jewish chosenness. This draws on a longer anti-Judaic tradition, running from Hasan Sa’b’s propaganda text Zionism and Racism—a key entry in the Palestine Essays series edited by Fayez Sayegh, the PLO propagandist who coined the term settler colonialism, and which recast Jewish peoplehood as inherently oppressive—to the Soviet-backed “Zionism is Racism” resolution of 1975 that continues to infuse the toxic discourse around “Zionism,” despite its formal repeal in 1991.

We need a paradigm shift: the ability to see anti-Zionism as a structured form of anti-Jewish hate, with its own tropes, its own history, and its own logic—a symbolic cosmology reshaping the very terms of the present.

Meanwhile the Greens’ motion on “Zionism is racism” has been postponed – “disrupted by technical failures, misgendering rows, and no-confidence votes”. Oh dear.