The Road to a Stateless Axis of Resistance

BY NICKY REID

MAY 17, 2024

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“Modernity is one of the most delicate and vital issues confronting us, the people of non-European countries and Islamic Societies. A more important issue is the relationship between an imposed modernization and genuine civilization. We must discover if modernity as is claimed is a synonym for being civilized, or if it is an altogether different issue and social phenomenon having no relation to civilization at all. Unfortunately, modernity has been imposed on us, the non-European nations, in the guise of civilization.”

-Ali Shariati

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

-Michel Foucault

The American Empire has really fucked up and they have fucked up pretty predictably, in a way that so many empires before it have fucked up that it’s downright cliche. America, in its infinite exceptionalism, has bitten off way more than it can chew on the world stage and created a downright formidable alliance devoted to its destruction in the process. I speak now of the Axis of Resistance, a loosely affiliated, ragtag coalition of rogue states and militias who, after decades of crushing western Frankenstein monsters like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, have finally trained their sites on America’s original Middle Eastern terrorists in Israel. At first glimpse it may appear that Babylon and their Zionist proxies are winning this war, what with the mountain of dead children reaching the clouds above Gaza, but I implore you to look again.

While Israel horrifies a world with too many smartphones to ignore the Nakba anymore, Houthi rebels have launched over 60 attacks against imperial shipping in the Red Sea, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq has launched over 150 airstrikes against American bases across the Middle East, Hezbollah has made the northern region of Israel virtually uninhabitable with their own artillery barrage, and Iran has joined the melee by throwing over 300 rockets and drones into Israel’s Iron Dome, all while all of the above remain under heavy sanctions and military siege by the United States and its western partners.

The material results of this unprecedented onslaught are far less relevant than the propaganda that these deeds has delivered to a watching world and that propaganda tells us all that the power of the American Empire is worthless in the face of a few pissed off peasants with homemade drones and nothing left to lose. And while these renegades rage, those of us in the west who have stumbled over our conscience in the coverage of the slaughter in Gaza rage with them, creating the most formidable antiwar movement any empire has seen in decades.

Even if Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden manage to succeed in ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, the damage to American prestige and its malignant influence over the Islamic world may be irreversible. Israel, Babylon’s bloody jewel in the desert, could very well become Uncle Sam’s Waterloo and it won’t be China or Russia dancing over his grave either. Those overworked wannabe superpowers are far too busy policing their own increasingly rambunctious and ungovernably massive populations.

No, the true victors of this third-world third world war will be the militias, modern day reflections of the ancient tribes that once roamed these deserts freely before some WASP in beige short pants drew a bunch of lines all over them. We really should have seen this coming. Even before America gave those militias a crash course in three-dimensional warfare with the War on Terror, all the pieces of this set match were already firmly in place, but somehow Michel Foucault seemed to be the only white man who knew the chessboard.

You see, Iran is not the primary source of the Axis of Resistance’s momentum. If that were true, their own republic wouldn’t be as corrupt and toothless as any of their neighbors. While Iran has actually done very little in response to Israel’s mounting atrocities, the Shia militias who are supposedly their proxies have set a thousand raging dumpster fires across the region, often while the Mullahs begged them to tone it down. That’s because the Houthis and the Popular Mobilization Forces don’t actually answer to Iran.

They answer to the Islamic Revolution, a popular uprising against a wealthy and decadent western monarchy that succeeded with zero backing from any foreign world power thanks to an eclectic united front of young anti-imperialists galvanized against the spiritual emptiness of the colonial Enlightenment. This was the original Axis of Resistance, a weird coalition of communist college students and Shia clerics who looked not to Moscow or Beijing for influence, but inward towards their region’s own tribal traditions that strove for solidarity through diversity.

Tehran was never meant to be the final destination of this strangely old revolution. The more radical founding fathers of the Iranian Islamic Guards like the Fatah-trained Mohammad Montazeri and the Fidel Castro influenced Mostafa Chamran strove to form an “Islamic International” against capitalism, Zionism, and Wahabism, drawing on Ali Shariati and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s notion of the “solidarity of the oppressed.”

But an impoverished nation like Iran, crippled by mounting international sanctions and sabotage, never would have been able to sustain this wild dream without the help of a meddlesome American empire constantly crashing into their backyard and changing the property lines. There would be no Sadrists without Saddam Hussein’s American backed rampage against the Shia tribesmen of modern Mesopotamia. There would be no Hezbollah without the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon. There would be no Islamic Resistance in Iraq without the War on Terror.

And as this Axis of Resistance to western imperial chaos stretched and grew increasingly diverse, the Iranian government’s influence over its actions and ambitions began to wane. The Sadrists lashed out openly against the Mullahs’ influence over Bagdad, the Houthi rebels overthrew a dictatorship that Tehran still wanted to groom in Sanaa, and Hezbollah refused to bow to the Mullahs’ corrupt quislings in Beirut.

The Axis of Resistance may not be a traditionally anarchist arrangement, it has always been an uneasy alliance of rogue states like Iran and Syria and non-state actors like the Houthis and Hezbollah, but the fascinating thing about this arrangement is that the longer the American war machine overstays its welcome in the region, the more rogue these non-state actors seem to become, to the point where the supposed proxies are beginning to overpower the influence of their funders back in Tehran.

Both Hezbollah and the Sadrists have formed fully functioning parallel governments to the states that Iran props up within their nation’s borders and the populations that they serve have rallied around these stateless alternatives to central governance, forming thriving, diverse, and autonomous communities while the states they reject rot. This same strategy of crowdsourced Islamic rebellion has proven equally successful in the new war on Zionist terrorism as well. Poorly armed militias from Hodeida to Fallujah have gone rogue to cripple international maritime trade and pin down illegal American troop movements while Washington fails miserably to stop them. Just look to the Red Sea if you don’t believe men.

After bombing Houthi targets in Yemen over 148 times since January, Joe Biden has thrown up his hands and openly admitted defeat. Tim Lenderking, Biden’s special envoy to Yemen, announced in early April that the administration was open to “diplomatic solutions” including ending certain sanctions and recognizing the legitimacy of the Houthi government. The Houthis thought about it for a couple of weeks and then started shooting again, even expanding their targets to the Indian Ocean while informing condescending jackals like Biden and Lenderking that they weren’t interested in engaging their humanitarian blackmail.

Western anti-imperialists can learn a lot from this Axis of Resistance and at the risk of once again being declared a heretic by my fellow anarchists, maybe we should even consider swallowing our ideological puritan pride and fucking join them. After all, wasn’t it a broad and diverse coalition of third world states and first world stateless actors that nearly turned the movement against the Vietnam War into an international revolution? You will never defeat a massive conglomerate of oppression like the American Empire with a single ideology. Foucault, himself a proudly decadent Queer anarchist heretic, recognized this fact and was roundly ridiculed by his fellow comrades on the left for suggesting that Islam could be a viable force against imperialism that should be taken seriously. But shouldn’t it be?

What we really need now is to make the Axis of Resistance increasingly stateless by increasing the involvement of a diverse array of stateless actors across the globe, from street fighting anarchists like antifa and the black blocks to modern day militias like the Boogaloo Boys and Black Guns Matter. From third world liberation movements like the EZLN and the YPG to first world black market entrepreneurs like the Hell’s Angels and the Latin Kings.

The dream is not simply to create a stateless international coalition against empire, but to create a thousand stateless tribes that can peacefully coexist with radically divergent neighbors regardless of the empire’s existence. Once we render this superpower and all superpowers irrelevant, ending their reign of terror will be as simple as blowing them away like the dead seeds of a dandelion. And the Mullahs will evaporate into the ether right along with them.

35,000 dead Gazans is enough. It’s time for the stateless left in the west to step down from their soapboxes and look east again for inspiration. Let’s end this Nakba and the next one by smashing the state that subsists on such carnage once and for all and let’s make weird and dangerous friends doing it.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

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The Anti-Colonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel

The Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel was assassinated on this day in 1987. Amel developed a version of Marxism that was grounded in the experience of colonized societies, showing how class struggle converges with the fight for national liberation.

Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. (Archives of Assafir Newspaper)

BYHICHAM SAFIEDDINE
05.18.2024
JACOBIN

With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive short intellectual shrift. When they register on the radar of ideological debates at all, such debates summarily present their work as proof of Marxism’s universalism rather than a means of transforming Marxism itself.

This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, in 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pen name Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party’s national leadership by the time he was killed.

Amel’s legacy did experience a revival during the Arab uprisings that broke out a decade ago. His work garnered further attention after a volume of his selected writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in his philosophy of Marxism and its implications for how we understand colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.

A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of his philosophy’s assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in comparison and contrast to European Marxism as well as heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.

We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to major themes of post-WWII national liberation, including the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.

Marxism, Colonialism, and Methodology

Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of some supposedly authentic precapitalist thought. He equally rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw the historical materialist baby out with its Euro-centric bathwater. Instead, Amel labored in a dialectical fashion to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and employed for its socialist liberation, which he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.

Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first in brief and later in detail, across a series of essays and book-length treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings were engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that emerged during his age and remain relevant to ours.Mahdi Amel called for a ‘methodological revolution’ in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism.

While Amel’s texts may be dense and at times repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx’s discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx’s own historical context in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of colonized countries, he was incapable of taking full stock of colonialism and incorporating it into his theory of capitalism.

The historical reality of colonized peoples is the inverse of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was incidental to, or mediated via, colonialism. Colonization, in the words of Amel, “cut the thread of continuity” in their history and “sent through it violent tremors.”

He believed these tremors reached all the way to the strata of the relations of production, as the material basis for precapitalist production was destroyed while the material basis for industrialization was denied. To put it another way, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not merely concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.


For Amel, it follows from this point that the colonial relation, which is all-encompassing rather than purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction in colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis for the colonized country’s social structure.” Consequently, colonialism does not end with the end of military occupation or by gaining political independence, but with the total severance of this relation in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.

Amel’s inquiry along these lines yielded the concept of the colonial mode of production (CMOP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism furnished Amel with a sound theoretical basis to develop his model. In each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant commentary and identified first principles.

For instance, Amel relied on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and on Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thereby distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts like class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but tried to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.

Colonialism and Class Struggle

Amel’s theorization led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a CMOP is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.The instability of rule in colonized countries is a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

Small-scale manufacturers in this context are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity in economic activity is not due to some “excess energy” of this social class, but rather stems from the limitations upon concentrating production.

These constrained economic relations of production had political implications. Tied in its own class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoise is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing a liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of rule in colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of the two social factions, urban merchants tied to foreign trade and landowners who direct their agricultural production toward colonial trade. This fusion negates the existence of either a national bourgeoisie, usually associated with industrialists, or a feudal class, usually associated with a colonial alliance.

Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s toiling masses — prominently peasants — is never complete at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the CMOP.

When peasants migrate to urban centers seeking employment relief, they rarely, according to Amel, experience a radical transformation in terms of class existence and consciousness. Although embedded in a new class position that involves small-scale consumer industry, they preserve their previous class connections and retain much of their past class consciousness, transitioning between the two positions with ease.

Amel described the pattern in Lebanon:


The worker returns to his village at every opportunity, for holidays, vacations, and funerals. In this way, his village becomes his centre of gravity and exerts a pull over him stronger than that of the city. Ultimately, he longs for the land he left and demands to be buried there, home to his ancestors.

Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial setting, as nationalist forces would have it. Nor does it mean the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists would have it. Given the indirect relation of exploitation under a CMOP that is governed by the colonial relation, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:


The struggle for national liberation is the sole historical form that distinguishes class struggle in the colonial formation. Whoever misses this essential point in the movement of our modern history and attempts to substitute class struggle with “nationalist struggle” or reduces the national struggle to a purely economic struggle loses the ability to understand our historical reality and thus also to control its transformation.

Amel prevented his philosophy from lapsing into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective as he theorized class struggle.

He emphasized the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class becoming and resistance. He argued that before World War II, sectoral and economic forms of struggle by different factions of the toiling masses independent of each other precluded their very formation as a class. The period after 1945 saw these struggles converging in a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.

At that moment, the colonial relation became mutually constitutive of colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to sever this relation in order to transcend, and thereby destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region.

The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel’s intellectual labor focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, namely Islam, in politics.

In contrast with other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel’s thought did not lapse into orientalist tropes. He countered the ideology of defeat that ascribed the Arab loss in the 1967 war with Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lambasted the Arab bourgeoisie for portraying their own political failings as universal failings of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.

For Amel, turath, or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of the interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem that persisted in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind to be found in secular or communist polemics that saw Islam as being inherently reactionary.
Islam and Revolutionary Thought

By the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thought. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.

Amel developed critiques of different manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilist, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who saw the primary contradiction in Islam — or any other religion — as being that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who defer to power and those who defy it.

The traditional classification of precapitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Conventional scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified in the figure of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), while ascribing conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief over reason, exemplified in the figure of al-Ghazali. Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and rested on the assumption that reason was a monolith.The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force.

He pointed out that one could find a single scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking scientific reasoning as well as Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never fully antithetical to each other. As a result, subversive thought, as expressed in illuminationist Sufi Islam, took the form of rejecting reason in toto.

For Amel, the primary contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (juridical). Spiritual Islam, however, was not atemporal in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical becoming, was temporal and by extension political. Sufism, or certain strands of it, negates the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.

The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was Islam’s material rather than otherworldly existence that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even if, in Amel’s estimation, it had mostly served the interests of the ruling classes.

He identified notable exceptions to this rule in precapitalist Islamic societies that included the revolt against the third “Rightly Guided” Caliph, ‘Uthman Ibn Affan, in the period following the death of Muhammed, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Modern examples that Amel cited of Islam forming part of a revolutionary struggle in the age of national liberation included the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, Liberation, and the Palestinian Cause

Amel’s treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel shed light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, which included the role of noneconomic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the overwhelming majority of European settlers, whether they were artisans, farmers, bourgeois, or workers, opposed the revolution for national liberation.

The politicized working class was no exception. The working-class Algiers district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red neighbourhood” for serving as a popular base of the Algerian Communist Party. Yet it became “a haven of European racism” and “centre of fascist European terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.

The same anti-colonial logic applies to theorizing class struggle in Palestine. So-called labor Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be characterized as socialist. By contrast, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

The failure of Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow’s directive led the leadership of these parties to support the 1948 partition of Palestine. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic depiction of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jew, and a mercantile and landed bourgeoise, both Arab and Jew. It caused the communist movement to suffer a loss of popular support in Arab societies.Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalizing force that had an impact on class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who minimized the significance of successful armed resistance against Israeli occupation in the name of focusing on strengthening the central Lebanese state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.

Israel’s own attitude toward Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains determined in the last instance by the decision of those movements to adopt or reject national liberation strategies, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the significance of armed resistance to Israel and its allies derives from the objective centrality of the colonial relation in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.

Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in swaying this struggle toward a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point toward the end of sectarianism or its reproduction:

Either they go against the reactionary sectarian form of their ideological consciousness, i.e. in the direction of radically changing the sectarian political system of rule by the dominant bourgeoisie, or they align with this same reactionary sectarian consciousness — (but against the class interests of their toiling factions) — and lean towards sectarian reform of this system. In the latter case, the system would catch its breath in a movement that would renew its crisis, and subsequently the conditions for civil war.

There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that of Lebanon. But the leading armed resistance forces today in Palestine and across the region are Islamist in their ideology. Analyzing this resistance without centering the colonial relation, as Amel showed elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterizes its revolutionary role as the latest stage in the war of national liberation.

The twentieth-century global conjuncture of national liberation may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. The colonial social reality of Palestinians, however, remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by all means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of early Arab communists, and, in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.

CONTRIBUTOR
Hicham Safieddine is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (2019) and the editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel (2021).

Statehood in the Arab Levant Faces a Miserable Fate


Opinion
Hazem Saghieh
Sunday - 12 May 2024


Let us remember what happened in Beirut in 2002 for a moment. Despite over two decades having gone by, recalling this juncture remains useful for understanding the present. Not only has the past not truly passed, it has become more present and painful with time, and its meanings have become more transparent.

That year, during an Arab Summit, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who would later become king, put forward what came to be known as the "Arab Peace Initiative.” The tragedy of 9/11 in the United States and the Second Intifada in Palestine were propelling a major shift in the "Middle East crisis" and its resolution.

The most prominent dimension of this initiative was its announcement that Arab states were prepared to recognize the State of Israel in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights it had taken from Syria.

Then Israeli Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon prevented Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from traveling to Lebanon to attend the summit in which his cause would be discussed. For his part, Arafat complied with the decision for fear that if he went to Beirut, the Israelis would prevent him from returning to Ramallah.

In turn, Emile Lahoud, then President of Lebanon, who is known for being a subordinate of Damascus and Tehran, denied Arafat’s request to deliver a speech at the summit via satellite. The pretext for removing the speech from the conference's agenda was scandalous: "fears Israel would interfere and distort the speech."

What happened was even worse: Hamas carried out a terrorist attack in Netanya during the summit, which coincided with the Jewish holiday of Passover, resulting in the deaths of 30 Israeli civilians.

Sharon and his government found in the attack an opportunity to ignore the Beirut summit and avoid engaging with the offer it presented. Sharon’s dismissal of the summit was reinforced by the fact that it refused to address (let alone condemn) the terrorist operation because of pressure from Syria and rejectionist Arabs.

Nothing attests to the collusion of Israel and Iran in undermining Palestinian statehood and the notion of peace in general - albeit from a position of enmity - more compellingly than this incident. Mind you, the war against the Oslo Accords also spoke volumes about this same collusion: the Israeli right assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, and rejectionist Palestinian factions planted explosives among civilians.

In addition, we add nothing novel in mentioning what happened after the Hamas coup and takeover of Gaza in 2007, which left the Israeli right happy and reassured. It was thus impelled to come to the aid of Hamas and to bolster its authority financially, not necessarily out of love for Hamas but out of hatred for the prospect that any kind of Palestinian national structure could take shape.

Both Israel and Iran sought to destroy Palestinian statehood and prevent it from evolving. Tel Aviv believed that perpetuating the split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip was crucial to achieving this end, while Tehran believed that nothing less than fragmenting the Arab Levant and preventing its stabilization into a system of statehood was necessary.

The birth of a Palestinian state leads to two undesirable outcomes:

On one hand, it deprives rejectionists of a useful flammable element, as well as proving that solving this obstinate problem is possible.

On the other hand, the creation of such a state would be a celebration of statehood and evidence of the state system's success in the Arab Levant. The reality, as many of our experiences have shown, is that the existence of a Palestinian state has become tied to the question of whether the state system is viable or absent and unachievable in the region.

Both sides, in any event, do not want the problem to be resolved, leaving it to remain a "cause." They prefer the project of promoting the turn towards militias that hinders the formation of states and spreads social decay.

Completing the picture, Assadist Syria saw itself as a partner in the Iranian effort to fragment the Levant and foster its militarization, provided that this fragmentation excluded Syria and allowed it to control the process. However, it soon fell into the hole it had dug for its "brothers" in Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine. Thus, there was no longer any exception to this Levantine rule, and the Iranians and Israelis were the only ones left on the field. The former tosses us in the air like a ball and the latter kicks it.

Now, with October 7 and the war on Gaza, it can be said that the push to nip Levantine nationhood in the bud has been successful, starting from and building on its success in Palestine. Anyone looking for regional stability that could foster statehood will find nothing but a war that springs from Gaza and does not end there. It will likely be multipronged and complex, albeit while taking various forms.

And anyone looking for autonomous forces in the Levant capable of benefiting from the Israeli-Iranian conflict will find only increasing fragmentation accompanied and aggravated by rival communal and centrifugal groups fighting among themselves. The continued population drain, brain drain included, attests to the impossibility of building on demographic solid grounds, while the defeat of revolutions and reform movements in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq show that dynamics needed to bring about positive change will remain pending for a period that is difficult to predict.

As for the influential global powers in our region, their footprint remains overwhelmingly linked to military and security matters that overshadow their minimal political presence and role in shaping a vision for the future. What was that? “Future”?

Weaponizing Antisemitism

Why we must maintain our focus on the agonies of Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing them and calling for an end to Israel’s assaults.

By Ellen Cantarow, Jennifer Loewenstein 

May 11, 2024
Source: Common Dreams





All of us—and we are legion across the worldmust keep our eyes on the genocide in Gaza, as well as on the vicious pogroms underway in the West Bank. A recent statement by James Elder of UNICEF reports that in Rafah, “The European hospital is crammed with severely injured and dying children. A military offensive here will be catastrophic.”

At the same time, throughout the West Bank, mobs of fascist settlers torch homes, steal possessions including livestock, kill Palestinians and drive them off their land. All of this has been enabled by President Joseph Biden, who has sent fulsome amounts of aid to Israel to carry out its genocidal and ethnic cleansing assaults on the Palestinian people. A holocaust, underwritten by the greatest military power in the world, is underway in both occupied territories.

Promoting the savageries Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, said, “Whoever perpetrates against the Jewish people like these evil ones have perpetrated on us, will be destroyed, they will be annihilated, and it will echo for decades and decades onwards.” In another statement he declared: “Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, total and utter destruction that will erase the memory of the Amalek from under the skies.”

This is the fulfillment of Israel’s dream of inhabiting all of what was once historic Palestine, making it a land unencumbered by its indigenous Arab population. Israel’s ongoing efforts since 1948 to kill or expel all Palestinians from what was historic Palestine have triggered student sit-ins and demonstrations on some 120 American college campuses.

Israel has become a country with powerful fascistic tendencies, headed by fanatics and demagogues catering to a population so filled with hatred of Arabs that it welcomes the genocide. In a recent article, “Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide,” Ellen recalls visiting the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980s and seeing graffiti on walls that proclaimed, “Arabs to the Gas Chambers.” At that time renowned Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that Israel was turning its soldiers into Judeonazis. Recent YouTube videos of soldiers mocking their victims bear out his prophecy. This hatred is pervasive in Israel. There are courageous exceptions like journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy who write for the newspaper Haaretz and the group Combatants for Peace. But all too many Israelis have supported their country’s assault on Gaza, or even wanted something worse.

The student protests that for weeks have been under public scrutiny have been peaceful mass gatherings of citizens outraged at Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza. Yet early on, riot police were summoned to Columbia’s campus as well as that of the City College of New York, the University of Texas-Austin, UCLA, and others, to dismantle the encampments, arrest, and sometimes beat up students and supporting faculty. Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC last week showed images of a mob hurling fireworks at the UCLA protesters, spraying them with pepper spray, and beating them with sticks and other weapons.

In tandem with the police actions, cries of “antisemitism” have arisen about the protests. When interviewed in print or on television, the Jewish student activists have said unanimously that these protests are neither antisemitic nor hate-filled. Moreover, the antisemitism claims are irreconcilable with the fact that thousands of Jewish students nationwide are participating. Two leading protest organizations, Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now, are Jewish, proclaiming that never again may genocide take place against any people, not just Jews.

Both of us writers of this article have experienced real antisemitism. Ellen remembers, in her early childhood, around 1945, her mother saying that the local grocer, a Mr. McGonigle, was glad Hitler was “mopping up all the kikes.” She remembers the child in her third-grade class who called her “a kike.” Jennifer remembers being pelted with spitballs by classmates shouting “Jew!” at her for making a Star of David design in her art class. Meanwhile, her father recalled being chased around the block by a neighborhood bully holding a knife saying, “You killed Christ!”

These experiences mirror what until now has been the guiding definition of antisemitism, that of The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA): “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Yet the campaign against alleged “antisemitism” has gone forward, adding criticism of Israel to the definition of the term. In Congress, the House of Representatives on May 1 passed a bill entitled “The Antisemitism Awareness Act.” It makes speech seemingly threatening the existence of Israel newly “antisemitic,” citing, for example, the cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and of the Jews in it. It makes no difference that Jewish students and people like the writers of this article have chanted that slogan, intending its meaning to be that Palestinians should be free within a redefined state.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a longtime supporter of Israel and a Zionist, has criticized the bill: “While there is much in the bill that I agree with,” he said, “its core provision would put a thumb on the scale in favor of one particular definition of antisemitism to the exclusion of all others to be used when the Department of Education assesses claims of antisemitism on campus.” He continued that the new definition includes “contemporary examples of antisemitism,” adding: “The problem is that these examples may include protected speech, in some contexts, particularly with respect to criticism of the State of Israel.”

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide, is the author of an article entitled, “Weaponizing Language: Misuses of Holocaust Memory and the Never Again Syndrome.” In a recent dialogue with the Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, the two discussed antisemitism and “the perils of antisemitism and its current weaponization.”

In an April 30 interview on Democracy Now!, Bartov noted the peaceful nature of the University of Pennsylvania demonstration as well as the one at Brown University. Of antisemitism he said that it “is a vile sentiment, it’s an old sentiment, it has been used for bloodshed, for violence, and for genocide. But it has also become a tool to silence speech about Israel. And that, too, has quite a history, and numerous governments under Benjamin Netanyahu have been pushing this agenda of arguing that any criticism of Israeli policy, not least, of Israeli occupation policies, is antisemitic.” He added that there are Jewish students who feel threatened, for instance by the term “Intifada,” which literally means “shaking off,” as in the shaking off of the 57-year-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “But there’s nothing threatening about opposing occupation and oppression.”

The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which indeed weaponizes antisemitism against those protesting Israel’s savagery in Gaza and the cruelty of its overall occupation policies, is soon to be voted upon by the Senate. Its enactment would mark a giant step towards degrading the U.S. Constitution, in particular its protection of freedom of speech, assembly, and a free press. It also threatens the status of academia as a realm in which the free exchange of ideas can flourish.

Fascism threatens American democracy embodied in a Republican Party that has long ceased to be a political party and is rather, according to Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of The American Enterprise Institute, “an insurrection.” The reelection of Donald Trump would import an Israeli-style fascism embodied by Netanyahu and Smotrich, while the reelection of Joe Biden will allow these smoldering tendencies to ignite the flames of that ideology within the U.S. If the Antisemitism Awareness Act is passed by the Senate, the erosion of civil liberties long anchored in the Constitution seems all but certain.

Like all forms of prejudice and ethnocentrism, antisemitism has no place in an enlightened society. But what about genocide? Is that an acceptable manifestation of a modern society? Are those denouncing protests against Israel’s genocidal and ethnic cleansing actions OK knowing that over 100,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed, wounded, and maimed in indiscriminate bombing raids across the Strip since Oct. 7th?

Meanwhile, all the focus on alleged antisemitism has diverted national attention from the genocide in Gaza and the barbaric settler actions in the West Bank. The official number of Gaza’s dead is close to 35,000 with another 8-10,000 people unaccounted for under the rubble. If 6,000 of these people were Hamas fighters, that still leaves a total of nearly 40,000 civilians dead.

News of atrocities within this holocaust continues. Recently, UN Special Rapporteur of the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese stated, “I am extremely alarmed by information that Dr. Adnan Albursh, a well-known surgeon at #alshifa_hospital, has died while detained by Israeli forces in the Ofer military prison. While I acquire more information, I urge the diplomatic community to intervene with CONCRETE MEASURES to protect Palestinians. No Palestinian is safe under Israel’s occupation today.”

Israel is neither a democratic nor a peace-loving society. It is an arm of US regional hegemony and a US client state that receives $3.8 billion annually in military aid and that has received over $30 billion additional military aid since October 7th. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has received $158 billion in military support, making it the greatest recipient of US military aid in history. Israel has nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons the only such power in the Middle East to have this kind of arsenal. [We] suggest the next time someone complains that “little Israel” is “surrounded by enemies” (a false statement to begin with), people consider these facts. We need look no further than Tel Aviv to determine which nation is the real destabilizing force in the region.

If the Antisemitism Awareness Act passes the Senate, what will befall student protests? Will they all become acts of civil disobedience? What about the alternative press, whose independent organs have become invaluable given the corporate media’s pussyfooting or downright ignoring of the Gaza holocaust and West Bank atrocities? Will it be shuttered by the federal government on the grounds of banned “hate speech”? Will what we write be rejected by publications that fear for their survival?

“As a Jewish person who stands hand-in-hand with my Palestinian brothers and sisters and works daily against anti-Arab hate, I find this weaponization of my identity particularly disgusting,” states Arab-American Antidiscrimination Committee staff attorney Chris Godshall-Bennet. “Criticism of Zionism and of the Israeli government is not antisemitic, and conflating the two only serves to provide cover for Israel’s numerous, ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law, as well as its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Declares Palestinian poet Mohammad Al Kurd, “I am asked to have patience for these kinds of debates that tell me that words are genocidal. The Israeli regime is engaging in a war of attrition against the Palestinian people and yet we are asked to talk about chants and slogans… But this is about our moral obligation as human beings to reject genocide, the real genocide that is happening in real time.”

All people of conscience must keep this in mind. And we must maintain our focus on the agonies of Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing them and calling for an end to Israel’s assaults, to settler violence, and ultimately to the occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza.

We must honor the student demonstrators and all who champion them as the heroes they are, cease the opportunistic abuse of the term ‘antisemitism,’ and urge them to continue their protests.

Under the Pretext of “Antisemitism”, the Suppression of the Palestinian People is Accompanied by an Attempt to Suppress the Defense of their Cause

By Gilbert Achcar

May 10, 2024

Source: Daraj



The intensity of reactions from pro-Israel circles against that movement is only a confirmation of the importance of this development, which it would not be exaggerated to describe as historic.


The global movement denouncing the Zionist war of genocide going on in the Gaza Strip (and in the West Bank, at a lower intensity) – and in the context of that movement, most particularly, the youth movement that has developed in U.S. universities and is spreading from there to other countries – is the only glimmer of hope in the bleak and horrific scene of the destruction of Gaza. The intensity of reactions from pro-Israel circles against that movement is only a confirmation of the importance of this development, which it would not be exaggerated to describe as historic.

Indeed, the emergence of a mass movement sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in Western countries, especially in the home of the superpower without which the Zionist state would not be able to fight the current genocidal war, constitutes a very disturbing development in the eyes of the pro-Israel lobby. It threatens to establish among the new generation a rejection of Zionist barbarism that rivals the rejection of U.S. imperial barbarism more than half a century ago, which was one of the major factors leading Washington to stop its aggression against the Vietnamese people and withdraw its forces from their country in 1973.

This historical precedent is strongly present in the minds of Israel’s supporters in all Western countries, as the anti-Vietnam War movement included them all and even played a prominent role in the wave of leftist political radicalization among the student movement on a global scale at the end of the sixties. The alarm bell has hence rung in Zionist circles and their supporters, prompting them to launch a violent campaign against the movement standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine, seeking to silence it in various repressive ways, from ideological violence to police violence accompanied by legal violence.

These oppressive efforts are not new, of course, but are part of an ideological war that started from the beginning of the Zionist project and intensified as it moved into implementation in Palestine under the auspices of British colonialism. The battle reached its peak in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the United Nations, which was newly established at the time under the hegemony of countries of the Global North, considered the issue of partitioning Palestine and granting the Zionist movement the right to establish its state there. At that stage, the Zionist effort in the “war of narratives” focused on portraying the Palestinians’ refusal of the establishment of a Zionist state on most of their homeland’s territory as if it were inspired by “antisemitism” of a sort akin to the Nazis’ hatred for the Jews and constituting a continuation of it. They portrayed the Zionist seizure of most of the land of Palestine in 1948, coupled with the uprooting of most of its indigenous people, as the last battle against Nazism, thus distorting and disguising the reality of that usurpation, which was in fact the last episode of settler colonialism (*).

Over time, Zionist propaganda became more fervent in its resort to labelling anyone hostile to the Zionist project as a Jew hater and a contin6uator of the Nazis. Two examples, among others, are Gamal Abdel Nasser, and after him Yasser Arafat, both depicted by that propaganda as counterparts of Adolf Hitler. This equation reached the height of absurdity and grotesque in the response of Menachem Begin, leader of the Likud Party whose fascist roots are well known, and Israeli Prime Minister when the Zionist army invaded Lebanon in 1982, to Ronald Reagan, then President of the United States who, in a letter to Begin, had expressed his concern about the fate of the civilian population in besieged Beirut. In his response, Begin wrote: “I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’, where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface.”

The zeal of Zionist propaganda increased in its resort to accusations of anti-Semitism and comparisons to Nazism, as the image of the Zionist state became more degraded in international public opinion, and Western public opinion in particular. The fact is that this image has steadily deteriorated as the State of Israel has moved from the myth of a state redeeming the Nazi extermination of the Jews and run by pioneers of a socialist dream led by a “workers’ party”, to the reality of an expansionist militaristic state, led by the far right. This image transformation accelerated with the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territories (1982-2000) and the suppression of the first intifada in the occupied territories in 1967, which reached its peak in 1988, and later with the repeated bloody and destructive attacks on the Gaza Strip, starting with the “Gaza massacre” in 2009.

As the image of the Zionist state declined, its supporters’ propaganda focused on rejecting any radical criticism of it by accusing it of antisemitism. In 2005, some pro-Israel circles formulated a definition of antisemitism that included “examples” such as “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” (meaning that the comparison by the Zionists between several of their Arab enemies and Nazism is acceptable, just as the comparison between any state and Nazism is, except for the Zionist state, whose comparison with Nazism constitutes a form of antisemitism simply because it is “Jewish”) and “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” (in other words, describing any project that aims to create a state on the basis of racial or religious discrimination as racist is acceptable, except for the “Jewish State” project, for which that label is taboo).

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted that definition, prior to a campaign it launched in various Western countries, calling on them to officially adopt it to stifle criticism of Zionism. The campaign succeeded in getting the parliaments of countries such as Germany and France to adopt the definition. It culminated in an attempt to get the UN General Assembly to adopt the same definition. This attempt failed, however, especially after the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism advised in October 2022 against adopting the IHRA definition. Of course, the fervour among the supporters of the Zionist state has returned and reached frenzied forms in the face of the current escalation of global condemnation of the genocidal war that the Zionist state has been waging in Gaza for seven months.

Since the United States itself is a major theatre for this condemnation, especially among the student youth as emphasised at the beginning of this article, the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress adopted on the 1st of May a bill, submitted by a Republican representative in October of last year, calling for the adoption of the IHRA definition as a basis for “the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes”. 320 representatives voted in favour of this bill, compared to 91 who voted against it. 133 Democratic Party representatives joined the Republicans in voting in favour of the bill, while 70 Democratic Representatives and 21 Republican Representatives voted against it (with 18 abstaining from voting). While it was normal for representatives of the Democratic Left to vote against the pro-Israel bill, it was very odd to see representatives of the Republican far right reject it too, including the frenetic reactionary Representative Marjory Taylor Greene, the most extreme of Donald Trump’s supporters – so much so that the latter almost appears moderate in comparison to her.

Do not, dear reader, think that the rabid Republican rightists objected to the effort aimed at suppressing the movement denouncing Israeli barbarism because of attachment to the freedom of speech. They are the most enthusiastic devotees of the Zionist state, especially since the latter’s government has been including people who, like them, belong to the far right. They are also in favour of suppressing freedom of speech whenever it concerns opinions that they hate, and they frantically call for an escalation of repression against the students who oppose Israel’s genocidal war. The reason for their opposition to the bill lies simply in their loyalty to traditional antisemitism, which has long inspired a major section of Zionism’s supporters. These antisemites agree with Zionism in the view that the State of Israel is the Jews’ sole homeland, while hating the presence of Jews in their countries (just as they hate the presence of Muslims).

Whereas one of the traditional antisemitic arguments for hostility towards the Jews was to hold them collectively responsible for “the killing of Christ” on the pretext that the Gospels blamed a Jewish crowd for sentencing Christ to death, and since the examples of antisemitism given by the IHRA definition included “claims of Jews killing Jesus”, the Republicans who voted against the bill justified their position not by the fact that it would prevent criticism of Zionism and its state, which they of course welcome, but by their fear that it would prohibit traditional antisemitic positions, if turned into law. That is why the most enthusiastic supporters of the “Jewish” state objected to restricting the freedom of true Jew haters. Should one laugh or cry?

Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon. He is a Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. His books include The New Cold War: Chronicle of a Confrontation Foretold. Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising; The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising; The Clash of Barbarisms; Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy; and The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. He is a member of Anti-Capitalist Resistance.

The “Antisemitism” Smear Weaponized

The ATC editors

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor encampment May 1, 2024

WHILE THE HORROR of the Israeli-United States genocidal war on Gaza continues with no letup or resolution in sight, there has been only one really hopeful development: the outpouring of pro-Palestinian activism in many U.S. communities, most especially the magnificent movement on college campuses organized in encampments demanding an immediate permanent ceasefire, and divestment from corporations tied to Israel’s machinery of massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Because of this movement’s moral authority and power in the face of a monstrous slaughter funded by U.S. tax dollars, it’s not surprising that it has come under attack from multiple directions including reprisals by campus administration and violent police action against students and sympathetic faculty members.

We want to focus here on a specific smear against the movement: that it is “antisemitic” or advocates “genocide of the Jewish people.” This lie is endlessly cycled through much of the media, in the spectacle of Congressional hearings and now legislation mandating “antisemitism watch” offices at universities, and of course through the “pro-Israel” lobby groups spearheaded by AIPAC (America Israel Political Affairs Committee) and the Anti-Defamation League.

Much of the hysteria in Congress and media is propelled by far-right MAGA elements who, of course, had little to say about the torch-carrying “Jews will not replace us” white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. It’s actually part of a broader Republican campaign to discredit and ultimately crush any progressive expressions in college education, especially liberal arts.

The “antisemitism” smear against Palestine solidarity makes a convenient opportunist addition to existing targets such as Diversity-Equity-Inclusion programs, Critical Race Theory, gender studies, anything “woke” and other perceived threats to what the right wing regards as western civilization. Not coincidentally, it’s also a pretext to slash huge holes in protections of free speech and to purge academic institutions.

This includes a drive to literally criminalize slogans of “Free, free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (No one proposes to outlaw the statement from Israel’s ruling Likud party and prime minister Netanyahu, “from the river to the sea, total Israeli sovereignty.”) Whatever these phrases might mean to different people in different places, there can be no excuse for banning them as so-called hate speech or “genocide of the Jewish people.”

In this climate it’s necessary both to defend Palestine solidarity activism and to state clearly what antisemitism is – and isn’t. Antisemitism is an ideology of hatred and contempt for Jews, as a people and as individuals. While it has centuries-old roots in religious bigotry, for the past 150 or so years, beginning in Europe, antisemitism has taken the form of pseudo-scientific racial theory. Like all forms of racism it is irrational, and in the specific case of antisemitism it ascribes to Jews various schemes to control finance, politics, media etc.

In its most extreme forms, of course, antisemitic ideology and myth fueled the Nazi extermination machinery that almost wiped out Jewish life in much of Europe. At less visible levels it persists and tends to arise at moments when racism in general raises its ugly head – as for example in the United States in the anti-Black backlash following the election of president Obama and the ascendancy of Donald Trump.

Antisemitism as a set of racial anti-Jewish stereotypes is not to be confused with critical analysis of the Israeli state. Israel’s “crimes of apartheid and persecution” (as called by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) against the Palestinian people are no more immune from scrutiny than those of the United States in Vietnam and Iraq, Russia in Ukraine or China against the Uyghur people, the Indian government’s Hindutva campaign against Muslims, etc. Israel’s ideological claim to act as the “nation-state of the Jewish people” falsely – and dangerously — seeks to make all Jews responsible for its criminal acts.

Under these conditions, and with live-streamed genocidal atrocities in Gaza growing by the day, it may be surprising and encouraging that so few actual antisemitic incidents have actually occurred. More of these have occurred off campus than on, such as the Proud Boys gathering near Columbia or one hate-speech ranter outside the gate. (One campus protest organizer musing about “killing Zionists” was immediately repudiated.)

In the notorious case of Northeastern University in Boston, administration called police onto campus after “Kill the Jews” chanting was reported – which video footage showed coming from an apparent counterdemonstrator carrying an Israeli flag.

There have been many more physical attacks and threats against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim than against Jewish students. All of them, of course, are vicious and absolutely unacceptable on campus or anywhere else. Attacks on Jewish students are both morally repugnant and damaging to the Palestine solidarity movement.

It’s important however to emphasize a point made by Columbia and Barnard professor Nadia Abu el-Haj, who herself has been a target of Zionist smear campaigns during her academic career. Everyone on campus, she states, has an absolute right to be safe. That does not give anyone a right to shut down speech or protest just because they don’t feel safe.

In fact, part of the purpose of the right-wing attack – joined deplorably by much of the center-liberal establishment – on the pro-Palestine campus struggle is aimed to make Jews feel unsafe. Weaponizing Jewish insecurity in this way, as a tool against an anti-genocide struggle, can be seen itself as a manipulation of antisemitism.

Is real antisemitism increasing in the United States today? Probably so (although unfortunately the once-useful statistics compiled by the ADL are now entirely unreliable since it acts as a propaganda and intelligence outpost of the Israeli state). It needs to be resolutely fought, along with all other expressions of racism. It is not to be confused with denunciation of what must be understood, again, as the joint Israeli-U.S. genocide in Palestine.