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Black Lives
Matter's Anti-Semitic Bedfellows
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Counterclockwise
from left: A February 2003 anti-war rally in San Francisco; an Occupy
Wall Street protester in New York City, October 2011; A Palestinian flag
flying at a July 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Cleveland, Ohio.
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With the Black Lives Matter movement's adoption of a formal manifesto charging Israel with
genocide, militant anti-Zionists are threatening to sabotage yet another
progressive cause.
Obsessed with spreading demonization of the Jewish state across the
Western world by any means necessary and at any cost, time and again
anti-Israel campaigners have fought tooth and nail to insert defamatory
anti-Israel language into resolutions and bylaws of unions, NGOs, political
parties and other institutions advancing unrelated progressive agendas.
Time and again, this hijacking has driven more enlightened activists out of
the host movement, contributing to its decline.
The phenomenon was first evident during the lead-up to the 1991 Gulf
War, when many Jewish American peace activists encountered a threatening
environment at antiwar rallies due to aggressive anti-Zionist campaigning.
"I didn't feel comfortable or safe outside the Jewish
contingent," said Betsy Tessler, leader of the Philadelphia chapter
of the staunchly antiwar New Jewish Agenda.
By the time the next Gulf War came around, militant anti-Zionists had
become far more organized and determined not merely to piggyback their
issue onto the antiwar agenda, but to push out those who were unwilling to
accept it. The antiwar movement was primarily led by two far-left
coalitions, International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Violence) and
United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), an uneasy partnership strained greatly
by the former's promotion of anti-Zionist activists before the war even
began. When Tikkun editor and leading UFPJ leader Michael Lerner
openly criticized the anti-Israeli bent of the demonstrations in January
2003, ANSWER banned him from speaking at its rallies. This led to a splintering in UFPJ and an overall weakening of the
antiwar movement.
What accounts for the willingness of
'progressive' anti-Israel campaigners to sabotage other progressive causes?
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Much the same thing happened to the Occupy Wall Street movement that
swept through New York and other major U.S. cities in 2011. The official
Twitter account of the main OWS leadership in New York briefly endorsed the
so-called "Freedom Waves Flotilla" that attempted to break
through the Israeli blockade of Gaza in November 2011, while Occupy Oakland
had an "Intifada tent" and the official Occupy Boston web site
promoted an "emergency march" on the city's Israeli consulate.
Mainstream OWS organizers refused to denounce protesters who carried
anti-Israeli, and often brazenly anti-Jewish, signs and banners.
Daniel Jonathan Sieradski, a liberal Jewish writer and activist who led
a well-attended Kol Nidre prayer service across the street from the protests
in Zuccotti Park on Yom Kippur, warned
that the growing infusion of anti-Israel messaging into official OWS
activities was leading "many Jewish supporters of OWS who do not
identify as anti-Zionist" to believe "that they could no longer
be associated with the movement." "Once this movement becomes
explicitly anti-Israel, you'll have effectively alienated three times more
people than you'll attract," he predicted. Within a few months, the movement was
effectively dead.
A related dynamic was evident in the unraveling of Britain's Labour
Party this spring, driven by the reluctance of Jeremy Corbyn and others to
disavow a small minority of radical anti-Zionists within the party's ranks.
Britain's Jewish community, which "once looked to Labour as its
natural home," wrote leftist Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, one of the country's leading Jewish
journalists, "is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has
become a cold house for Jews."
It's difficult to find a progressive cause that hasn't been compromised
in some way by the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
movement, from the anti-globalization
movement to the fight against sexual assault. "BDS destroys
everything it touches,"observes Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson.
Anti-Zionist 'progressives' have
thoroughly wrecked the Palestinian cause.
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Perhaps the most thoroughly wrecked, ironically, is the Palestinian
cause. Having occupied the commanding heights of Middle East Studies
departments in many major Western universities, anti-Zionist
"progressives" have tiptoed around religious extremism,
oppression of women and other social maladies in the Palestinian
territories for fear of distracting attention away from Israel.
They have even been willing to ride roughshod over Palestinian artistic
freedom in their zeal to defame Israel. The most unnerving aspect of
Columbia University's controversial 2003 Palestinian film festival wasn't the anti-Israeli tone of many of
the films (any legitimate selection of Palestinian art is going to be
unflattering to Israel), but the fact that films depicting Palestinian
suffering at the hands of Arab governments were conspicuously nixed. In
light of the fact that many prominent Palestinian filmmakers grew up in
Arab refugee camps, and have depicted this experience often in their work,
this was a glaring omission (somewhat akin to a Woody Allen tribute
excluding films set in New York).
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Staunch
Jewish anti-Zionists such as Norman Finkelstein (left) and Noam Chomsky
(right) have disavowed the BDS movement.
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Such militant Jewish anti-Zionists as Noam Chomsky and Norman
Finkelstein have come to disavow the BDS movement less because it defames
Israel than because the defamation has no real aim. Holocaust inversion
(e.g., "Bibi and Hitler are the same; the only difference is the
name!"), boycotts, and other BDS tactics, glaringly reminiscent of
Western anti-Semitism in the past, are the last thing that will cause
Israelis to see the "error" of their ways—utterly
counterproductive as a persuasive tool.
From its inception three years ago, Black Lives Matter—and the movement
to end police brutality against African Americans in general—received
unwavering support from progressive Jewish organizations, such as T'ruah and the Jewish
Community Relations Council of Greater Boston (JCRC), which in turn
facilitated more mainstream acceptance of Black Lives Matter and its aims.
Although plenty of individual BLM leaders fell in with the BDS movement in
the face of sustained pressure, plenty of others worked to keep bridges
with sympathetic Americans as open as possible.
All that seems to be going up in smoke since the adoption of the new
platform. "We cannot and will not align ourselves with organizations
that falsely and maliciously assert that Israel is committing
'genocide,'" the JCRC said in a statement. "We reject participation in any
coalition that seeks to isolate and demonize Israel singularly amongst the
nations of the world."
"[We] are extremely dismayed at the decision to refer to the
Israeli occupation as genocide," replied T'ruah. Harvard law professor Alan M.
Dershowitz, a longtime campaigner against police abuses, warned
that the "obnoxious and divisionary platform plank may destroy [BLM's]
credibility with regard to police abuse in America."
There was backlash even within the African American community. The
Ecumenical Leadership Council of Missouri, which represents hundreds of
predominantly African American churches throughout the state, issued a statement saying it "rejects without hesitation
any notion or assertion that Israel operates as an apartheid country"
and reminding the public that Jewish Americans have "worked with
African-Americans during the civil rights era when others refused us service
at the counter — and worse."
What accounts for this extraordinary nihilism on the part of supposedly
progressive BDS activists? Holding an extreme position on Israel is one
thing—that can be the result of ideology, religious beliefs, ignorance or
something else. Being willing to sacrifice all other causes and concerns
ordinarily convergent with one's worldview for the sake of hurting the
Jewish state is something altogether different.
The BDS movement's unusual grade of
nihilistic anti-Israel antipathy is a hallmark of classical
anti-Semitism.
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This unusual grade of obsessive, self-destructive antipathy is a
hallmark of classical eliminationist anti-Semitism. Unlike ordinary
intergroup prejudice "found in the suspicion and resentment which are
often directed against neighbors of another tribe, another race, another
faith, or from another place," explains historian Bernard Lewis, anti-Semitism is a
"special and peculiar hatred" that attributes to Jews "secret
and diabolical power."
Against such a perceived enemy, no sacrifice is too great. Nazi
Germany's diversion of much-needed resources in the final months of World
War II from fighting the Red Army (and providing for the escape of German
refugees) to exterminating more Jews makes sense only to someone who sees
the latter as a cosmic evil.
Although anti-Semites often go to great pains to avoid expressing their
hatred as anti-Jewish (indeed, they coined the term
"anti-Semitism" itself as a politically correct euphemism for Judenhass),
this unique cognitive signature is easy enough to spot—just take a
measurement of what the subjects are prepared to sacrifice to harm Jews.
To date, however, mainstream liberals in America have been reluctant to
call out the anti-Semites wreaking havoc within the ranks of the Left. If
black lives—or socioeconomic justice, peace, women's rights, etc.—really
matter to them, why have they allowed the cancer to metastasize this long?
Gary C. Gambill is a research
fellow at the Middle East Forum
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