Macroaggression

The precincts from which we learn that America and Israel are racist dystopias are disgorging people who, with beatific pleasure, trumpet the mass murder of Jews.

When I began writing about Antisemitism 20 years ago, I set out to focus on “utopian and totalitarian ideas, mostly as they find expression in Antisemitic reaction to Israel and modernity.” That formulation was the embryo of what will likely be a lifelong inquiry. My original idea was freighted and abstract, but it felt precisely homed to a dark phenomenon cued by the Second Intifada: thought on the contemporary Left was algorithmically hostile to Israel out of all proportion to the policies and actions of the Jewish state.

Nevertheless, the way this thought was expressed at the time was generally respectable. It wasn’t hard to sense what was fermenting under the surface, but by and large, on campus and in politics, anti-Israel rhetoric attempted to marshal facts and arguments, however false or contextually bereft, and to avoid overt use of Antisemitism. There were steady exceptions of course, which kept writers like me lucubrating late at night, but the yeoman’s work of manufacturing hatred of Israel was done in polemics that would rely on sophisticated methods, like shell games of sympathy played through “root cause” analyses or foolish consistencies which ignored the nature of Palestinian rejectionism.

I remember, for example, the useful idiots who brayed that Israel and the West needed to honor the democratic will of the people of Gaza, who had voted for Hamas in 2006. After all, didn’t the United States, the occupiers of Iraq, talk a big game about promoting democracy in the Middle East and vaunt Israel as an open society? It was this sort of sophistry, rather than hateful sloganeering, that predominated among partisans of the Palestinians, as well as critics of American foreign policy.

Last week, Hamas burst into southern Israel and murdered some 1300 civilians, mowing down young peace ravers as in a video game, raping women, burning people alive, kidnapping toddlers and the elderly, parading children they had orphaned, and slaughtering babies, some of whom they decapitated in a triumphant quotation of ISIS. This was by far the worst single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The next day, 34 Harvard University student organizations released a joint statement declaring:

We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.

And the gates were opened.

I’m old enough to remember the controversy ignited (belatedly, when it came to light in 2005) by University of Colorado Boulder ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, who the day after the 9/11 attacks gushed that Bin Laden’s mass-murderers couldn’t have found “a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting… the little Eichmanns” who died by the thousands in the World Trade Center. His logic was what teenagers on TikTok today call “decolonial”: Al Qaeda’s terrorist attack was righteous resistance against decades of imperial depredations by the United States.

The Harvard letter was accompanied by an explosion of little Churchills on social media, university professors and academics who put aside even specious facts and argument to simply endorse what Hamas had done. This is not interpretive license on my part. Look for yourself.

Walaa Alqaisiya, teaching fellow at Columbia and research associate at London School of Economics

Ameil J. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Social Work at McMaster University

Mahvish Ahmad, Assistant Profesor of Human Rights and Politics at London School of Economics

Amy Fallas, PhD candidate in History, University of California, Santa Barbara

They were joined by journalists who upped the ante with snark or outright celebration.

Najma Sharif, freelance writer, whose tweet was “liked” by Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah

Derecka Purnell, columnist and author of Becoming Abolitionists

Edward Ongweso, Jr., Finance Editor of Logic Magazine

In roughly twenty years, we’ve evolved from the odd Tom Paulin peering over the rampart of elite disdain for the Jewish state, only to have his head blown off by institutional opinion and paraded on the spike of an excoriating news cycle, to open joy—now demonstrated by thousands of people in cities across the world—at the mass murder of Jews, depicted in the way that Antisemitism has always defined it: as a liberation of the oppressed.

Protestors occupy the steps of the Sydney Opera House to shout Antisemitic slogans two days after Hamas’ mass-murder of 1300 Jews

And while Jewish schools in metropolises like New York City and London have asked Jews to stay home or lay low, university administrators aren’t sure what to do. The activist groupuscule Students for Justice in Palestine, which has chapters nationwide, tried to stoke similar unrest on campus with a Day of Resistance. Substantial numbers answered the call.

A report came from Stanford University where a core curriculum lecturer commanded his Jewish and Israeli students to stand in the corner, because “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.”

The instructor then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” the lecturer said, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.” 

It’s crucial to note that the precincts which are generating this activity are also those which strive to cleanse the campus of even the mildest negative stimuli, lest they threaten the “safety” of students. Administrators, like Claudine Gay of Harvard, are now walking a gossamer line to preserve their vision of “safe spaces” while upholding freedom of expression for those who celebrate—in front of their Jewish peers—the mass murder of Jews.

Video of Harvard President Claudine Gay’s statement about Hamas and free expression

They are also the home of people who promote the idea that words can be violence. Ryna Workman, the president of NYU Law School’s Student Bar Association, reminded us of this when she paused, in her note to the community of “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians” in their “necessary” resistance, to “condemn the violence in labeling oppressed people ‘animals.’”

People who believe that racist rhetoric is a form of violence—people who think that microaggresions do medically measurable harm to marginalized peoples—are racing to broadcast their approval of “resistance” in the form of an anti-Jewish pogrom.

Think about what that means. They must be seeking, either consciously or unconsciously, to do violence to their Jewish peers.

This is what people like to call an “inflection point.” Decent people generally, and Jews specifically, can no longer pretend there is a clear and present danger of Antisemitism on the political Right while anti-Jewish incitement is sporadic and insignificant on the Left. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America organized one of the first street protests in support of Hamas! Even AOC had to blush.

Pro-Hamas demonstrator brandishes a swastika at an NYC DSA protest in Times Square

And we can no longer rely on the rhetorical fictions we indulged in the past, when people used more respectable polemic. The decolonists will continue to tell us they’re inciting against “Zionists” or “Israelis” rather than Jews, but the distinction now is diaphanous.

We must confront an ascendant Left that is not universalist, believing in liberation for all peoples, but which is particularist, favoring redemption through violence by those it terms peoples of light against peoples of darkness, among whom it clearly situates or even centers the Jews.