The Anti-Zionist Protesters and the Left: An End to Denial

A week and a half ago, anti-Israel demonstrators began chanting during a Kamala Harris rally outside Detroit. Harris stared down the protesters and told them she was speaking. The crowd cheered wildly, but the scene disturbed some progressive observers.

“Ms. Harris managed to quickly dismiss them when they interrupted her rally speech in Detroit, but she will not be able to so easily dismiss the shocking reality against which they are protesting. Failing to adequately address protesters’ valid outrage could cause Democrats’ newfound party unity to quickly unravel,” wrote Farah Stockman in a New York Times op-ed. A similar view was expressed by Masha Gessen, also in the Times, who suggested the protesters “cannot stand to live in a world in which Joe Biden’s vice president, who has not voiced any disagreement with the administration’s Middle East policies, wins the presidency. It’s not that they want Trump to win; it’s that the level of political cynicism they are being asked to adopt feels unbearable.”

While both columns suggested the most sympathetic possible motives for the outburst, neither identified the protesters’ actual beliefs. But the demonstrators do have a publicly articulated worldview. The Detroit action was organized by Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the University of Michigan chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

SAFE, like other branches of SJP, takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.” The group sent masked protesters to the home of a Jewish regent in the middle of the night and vandalized his law office.

Would progressives have taken a cooler view of the demonstrators had they possessed a clearer view of their objectives? Some might. But others would not. Progressives tend to take a romantic view of left-wing protest. Protesters occupy a special category of political actor, freed of any responsibility or agency and judged only as a counterweight against the worst excesses of whatever they oppose. They represent an idealistic impulse and revulsion at the status quo, and since the status quo is unjust, their behavior, by definition, cannot be. All that matters is that their actions are directionally correct.

To the extent progressives feel any discomfort with the goals or methods of protesters, they tend to rationalize them by invoking noble protests from past eras. Gessen’s column lingers on the history of AIDS activists from several decades ago, the nobility of which she employs to justify the protests against Harris without needing to justify its specific ideology.

No, not every individual demonstrator supports every position taken by the group they are joining. But progressives generally take a much less forgiving view of protests on the political right — we usually judge them by their most extreme manifestations. If you recall the tea-party protests, liberals generally equated the most offensive or racist signs and statements at rallies with the general thrust of the cause, rather than trying to imagine a sympathetic purpose. (Conservatives, of course, did the opposite, ignoring the offensive bits to project their desired motive onto protests that turned out not to care about their professed goal of reducing the budget deficit.) And the groups organizing the protests exert significant control over their messaging, which is why you never see a sign or a chant at an encampment denouncing Hamas along with Israel or calling for a two-state solution.

This practice of lionizing and glossing over protesters’ actual beliefs insulates their ideas from correction. It is difficult to steer the protesters away from extreme rhetoric and counterproductive tactics if you are abiding a norm of treating them as beyond critique. Every complaint about the protests can simply be turned back on Israel or the U.S. — and it is certainly true that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians bears considerable responsibility for encouraging extremist opposition. (Before October 7, in fact, the Netanyahu government deliberately cultivated Hamas as a counterweight to more moderate Palestinian factions.) It is this very dynamic that has enabled the pro-Palestine movement to simultaneously gain widespread influence on the left without curbing any of its bloodthirsty impulses.

The bill for this indulgence is coming due in Chicago. The long-anticipated protests against the Democratic Party have prompted angst over the impact on the election and the chance that Donald Trump will benefit. A generally sympathetic news story in the Washington Post expresses the case against the demonstrations in practical terms: “Some Democrats have argued that Harris has distinguished herself from Biden and does not bear the same level of responsibility. They have also said scenes of large demonstrations could hurt the party’s ability to project unity and defeat Donald Trump in November.”

A critique not raised in the story, perhaps because it has been largely absent from progressive discourse, is whether the protesters are morally admirable at all.

This is an entirely different question from whether one believes the Palestinians deserve sympathy or that American policy toward Israel needs revision. On both points, I believe the answer is “yes.” I also believe that Israel’s government and its American supporters bear a significant amount of blame for the radicalization of the Palestinian movement. Even aside from the devastation in Gaza, Israel has abandoned the two-state solution and is permitting Jewish terrorists to brutalize Palestinians in the West Bank. American supporters of Israel have habitually smeared critics of Israel, even the mildest and friendliest ones, as antisemitic. It is a cliché that watering down charges of bigotry through overuse makes it easier for actual bigotry to spread, but I believe this is precisely what has happened.

It is possible to imagine a world where pro-Palestinian protesters were aiming for a just future where Israel and Palestine could coexist. But that is not the world we inhabit. And it does no good to pretend it is.

The Chicago protests are being led by Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. On October 7, Abudayyeh made an official statement for USPCN celebrating the slaughter of Israeli civilians: “Palestinians have an internationally-recognized right to resist illegal military occupation, and today’s attacks from the Palestinian Resistance should be understood as a legitimate response to unending violence from Israel’s extreme right-wing, racist, white supremacist, zionist government and settler movement … now we have no choice but to defend ourselves, because the Israeli military and racist settlers have been attacking and killing with impunity, and must and will be stopped! We will win our liberation and Return!”

And while this rhetoric may be shocking, every major anti-Israel activist group has adopted a similar position. Students for Justice in Palestine called the October 7 attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” against “the façade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The Palestinian Youth Movement saluted “the active decolonization of Palestinian land” and stated “We have a right to resist on our own land.” Within Our Lifetime declared, “Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people,” and therefore, “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.” Jewish Voices for Peace declined to condemn the attack, instead blaming it on Israel: “The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to U.S. complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation.”

The common thread running through these statements, other than unbounded eagerness to shed Israeli blood, is a worldview suggested by the recurring terms settler and colonist. All these groups adhere to a left-wing western doctrine that is the subject of an excellent new book, On Settler Colonialism, by Adam Kirsch.

Settler colonialism is a theory of societies established by western settlers. The fact that certain countries (the U.S., Canada, and Australia) were established by settlers who displaced or killed off the native population is not novel. Settler colonialism is a way of centering this fact as an ongoing genocide that “continues to define every aspect of its life, even after centuries,” as Kirsch puts it. “Settler, in this view, is not the descriptions of the actions of an individual but a heritable identity.”

Settler-colonialist theory has grown explosively in the West, where it has inspired hundreds of books, thousands of papers, and numerous college courses. As applied to the Anglosphere, it poses a critique that is radical but entirely confined to theory. Settler colonialism delegitimizes its targets without offering a workable program for replacing them — there is no pathway to restoring the western hemisphere to the political arrangements that stood before Columbus’s arrival. And so the programmatic aspect of settler-colonialist theory is confined to “land acknowledgments” and other quasi-religious rhetoric.

The inclusion of Israel as a settler-colonialist state is the move that transforms the theory into something more threatening. It is a curious connection, as Kirsch notes. While Israel’s founding did displace many Palestinians, it did not precipitate their virtual eradication. (The Palestinian population, despite undeniable oppression, has grown dramatically since 1947.) More importantly, the Jewish population in Israel has a long-standing connection to the land it inhabits and no other place to “return.”

The only humane solution to the predicament is a negotiated agreement between Jews and Palestinians. Settler colonialism, instead, denies Jewish Israelis any right to live in the region, rendering any act of the Israeli state illegitimate and any action to dismantle it permissible.

Settler-colonialism theorists believe certain people have an authentic, permanent relationship to the land. Their rhetoric, as Kirsch points out, echoes the romantic nationalism of the old German right. “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinians ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land,” writes Jamal Nabulsi of University of Queensland. Palestinians have “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land,” in the words of the scholar Steven Salaita.

Compare this with the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologists such as Richard Walther Darre — “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it” — and you will have difficulty detecting any difference. Indeed, if you switched Palestinian with German, it would be hard to tell one theorist from the other.

An important corollary of settler-colonialist thought is that, because they lack a naturalistic connection to any soil, the Jews must be rendered a permanently rootless subaltern class. This has an echo of the Nazi conception of the Jew as alien, and at times its rhetoric has the same overtones. Salaita, again, on the Zionists: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … There is no real notion of the commons in Zionism. Public space is deeply personal, demarcated and apportioned based on a crude obsession with genetics … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic.” This is blood-and-soil nationalism for the left.

Inevitably, the activism and pedagogy inspired by settler-colonialist theory has frequently slipped over into outright antisemitism. A Stanford lecturer told Jewish students to identify themselves, then ordered them to stand in a corner of the classroom, because “this is what Israel does to Palestinians.” At Columbia, one professor allegedly asked a student with a Jewish name before an exam to explain their views on Israeli’s actions in Gaza, while another complained that the mainstream media “is owned by Jews.” At CUNY, the activist group Not in Our Name instructed its members and followers to undermine a Hillel survey on campus antisemitism, including by answering a question about encountering prejudice against Jews in the negative even if they had experienced it. Numerous other cases like this could be added.

These sorts of incidents may not represent the typical experience of Jewish students, but they are a predictable result of the climate of opinion fostered by the leading pro-Palestinian activist groups. Their rejection of coexistence between Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East has extended to their vision of domestic politics in the U.S. The protesters’ central goal has been to turn Zionism — which they define, de minimus, as the belief that Israel has a right to exist in any form — into an unacceptable opinion. Their demand that universities boycott Israel is designed to advance this strategy by lending official support to their view that Israel is a unique source of evil in the world.

For years, Jews in progressive spaces have long agonized over demands they face to denounce Israel or Zionism as the entry price for their participation. Divestment is a lever intended to spread that cultural norm more broadly through universities and other cultural institutions. The protest method of seizing campus common space and declaring it off limits to “Zionists” is a model for their strategic goal. That persistent demand, more than the sporadic outbursts of overt antisemitic harassment, is the chilling threat that makes Jews fear for their future in the U.S.

And it is on this point that the anti-Israel protesters are unwilling to give ground. They will not stop creating fear and discomfort for Zionists because they simply don’t believe in liberal ground rules that would permit people with different beliefs about the Middle East to go about their lives in peace. Even if they lack the power to murder Zionists, they retain the power to make them deeply uncomfortable. It is why they consistently surround their targets with taunts and vandalize their homes.

That is why encampments have so consistently seized common spaces and barred Zionists from entering them — it is their vision of the campus they wish to create. The same dynamic played out in June, when WOL protested an art exhibit dedicated to the victims of October 7. Protesters unfurled a “Long Live October 7th” banner and filmed a scene in the subway afterward where they crowded into a car and instructed “Zionists” identify themselves and get out.

Equally revealing was their response to condemnation, which came even from pro-Palestinian Democrats including Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Students for Justice in Palestine denounced the “smears” of their allies. “Attempts to divide or undermine any sector of our movement, especially from the ‘left,” are unacceptable …,” the group announced, and “we will not tolerate attacks on our movement’s political and moral character.”

Any complaint about violence or antisemitism by a member of the movement inherently divides it and raises questions about its political and moral character. To reject out of hand any such possibility is to repudiate the very idea it must abide any standards of behavior in the tactics it uses against its targets.

The movement could not be any more clear on this point. Its members will not stop harassing and intimidating Jewish people. Nor will they adopt any standard of behavior. When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.

What Democrats and progressives need to decide is whether to treat these groups as noble idealists broadly on the right side of history or as the fanatic adherents of an illiberal and unjust program. In the Middle East, that program calls for endless war until the Jews have been expurgated from a soil on which they unnaturally reside. In the West, it means imposing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome.

To advance justice for Palestinians and Jews does not require placating, forming alliances with, or ceding “leverage” to followers of this hateful program. The morally just response is to meet this ideology the way liberals meet other forms of hate: by calling it what it is.