The following appeared in the June 20, 2024, issue (Vol. 46, No. 12) of the London Review of Books (LRB), a magazine based in the United Kingdom.

The author of the article is Adam Shatz, LRB’s U.S. editor. Shatz is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is a visiting professor in the Human Rights Program of Bard College in New York.

His essay begins with a list of recently published books that discuss Israel, Palestine, and Zionism.

In reviewing those books, Shatz raises important issues that deserve further discussion in light of the gruesome October 7 attack led by Hamas that targeted civilians in Israel, the genocidal war Israel unleashed in retaliation on the entire population of Gaza, and a new wave of violence by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Zionist settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Shatz addresses the false conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism by U.S. politicians and others. He explains that argument is not new, and it has never been shared by all Jews. The books he reviews in this essay single out Jewish voices that were sharply critical of the main leaders of Zionism in the years before Israel was established, as well as after 1948.

Shatz writes, for example, “In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs.”

He cites Brit Shalom’s secretary Hans Kohn who in 1929 “denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’” Shatz himself writes of those today who are “incapable of distinguishing between violence against Jews as Jews, and violence against Jews in connection with the practices of the Jewish state.”

To those who reject any notion of Jews living in historic Palestine, we call attention to the views expressed by Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine, who explained in the recent interview Rashid Khalidi on the War in Gaza, Perspectives for Palestinian Liberation:

“As I quote at the beginning of my book, when an ancestor of mine once wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl, he said: ‘You have an ancestral connection to this country.’

“Christian and Muslim Palestinians believe in the Jewish people’s connection to this land. Does that give them a real estate deed? Do the Romans have the right to take over Libya and North Africa and Turkey because Rome controlled it once upon a time? Do the Muslims have the right to take back Spain because they controlled it once? Once upon a time, there was a Jewish minority in a part of Palestine. Does that give modern Israeli nationalists a real estate deed to the land? Of course not.”

In March, World-Outlook republished an essay by Alan Wald Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence. Wald is a member of the editorial board of Against the Current, where his essay first appeared. He took as his starting point two books by Shatz, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

In introducing Wald’s essay, World-Outlook noted we have expressed our own views on the Palestinian national liberation struggle, the history of Israel’s creation as a colonial settler state, and the character of the October 7 attack by Hamas, in several previous articles. These include The Palestinian Struggle and Lessons from South Africa, On the Character of the Oct. 7 Attack by Hamas, Why Opposition to Zionism is Not Antisemitism, and others.

World-Outlook re-publishes Shatz’s article below for the information of our readers. Its headline and text are from the original. Subheadings and photos are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we have divided the article in three parts, the last of which follows.

— World-Outlook editors

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Israel’s Descent (Part 3)

(This is the third of three parts. The previous can be found in Part I and Part II.)

By Adam Shatz

The excessive, militarised reactions to the encampments at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, along with the furious responses of the British, German and French governments to demonstrations in London, Paris and Berlin, are a measure of the movement’s growing influence.

As Régis Debray put it, ‘the revolution revolutionises the counterrevolution.’ A worrying development for anyone who cares about free speech and freedom of assembly, the clearing of the solidarity encampments by the police was a reminder that the rhetoric of ‘safe spaces’ can easily lend itself to right-wing capture.

The antisemitism bill recently passed in the House of Representatives threatens to stifle pro-Palestinian speech on American campuses, since university administrations could become liable for failing to enforce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Like the anti-BDS measures adopted by more than thirty states, the Antisemitism Awareness Act is an expression of what Susan Neiman, writing about Germany’s suppression of support for Palestinian rights, has called ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’, and will almost certainly lead to more antisemitism, since it treats Jewish students as a privileged minority whose feelings of safety require special legal protection.

It only adds to the unreal quality of the debate in the US that the threat of antisemitism is being weaponised by right-wing Evangelicals who have otherwise made common cause with white nationalists and actual antisemites, while liberal Democratic politicians acquiesce.

After a New York City police officer took down a Palestinian flag at City College and replaced it with an American flag, Mayor Eric Adams said: ‘Blame me for being proud to be an American … We’re not surrendering our way of life to anyone.’

This was, of course, a ludicrous expression of xenophobia – and it’s hard to imagine Adams, or any American politician, making such a remark about those who wave the Ukrainian flag. (The NYPD filmed the clearing of the Columbia campus for a promotional video, as if it were an anti-terrorism raid.) But it’s indicative of the casual racism, often laced with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice, that has long been directed against Palestinians. Said was called the ‘professor of terror’, Columbia’s Middle East Studies Department ‘Birzeit on the Hudson’.

Campaign against Palestinian scholars

Bari Weiss, the former New York Times columnist who sees herself as a ‘free speech warrior’, cut her teeth as an undergraduate at Columbia trying to have members of the Middle East faculty fired. The campaign against Palestinian scholars, which helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the attack on the encampments, is instructive.

Arafat was wrong when he said the Palestinians’ greatest weapon is the womb of the Palestinian woman: it is the knowledge and documentation of what Israel has done, and is doing, to the Palestinian people. Hence Israel’s looting of the Palestine Research Centre during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the attacks on professors who might shed light on a history some would prefer to suppress.

Has some of the rhetoric on US campuses slid into antisemitism? Have some Jewish supporters of Israel been bullied, physically or verbally? Yes, though the extent of anti-Jewish harassment remains unknown and contested.

There is also the question, as Shaul Magid writes in The Necessity of Exile, of whether ‘the single umbrella of antisemitism’ best describes all these incidents. ‘What is antisemitism if it is no longer accompanied by oppression?’ Magid asks. ‘What constitutes antisemitism when Jews are in fact the oppressors?’

Amid all the attention on heightened Jewish vulnerability, there has been little discussion of the vulnerability of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, much less an academic commission or political bill to address it. Unlike Jews, they have to prove their right simply to be on campus.

Palestinians – particularly if they take part in protests – risk being seen as ‘trespassers’, infiltrators from a foreign land. Last November, three Palestinian students visiting relatives in Vermont were shot by a racist fanatic; one of them will be paralysed for life. Biden did not respond to this or other attacks on Muslims by saying that ‘silence is complicity,’ as he did about antisemitism.

It was, in fact, the refusal of silence, the refusal of complicity, that led students of every background into the streets in protest, at far greater risk to their futures than during the 2020 protests against police killings.

Opposition to anti-black racism is embraced by elite liberals; opposition to Israel’s wars against Palestine is not. They braved doxxing, the contempt of their university administrations, police violence and in some cases expulsion. Prominent law firms have announced that they will not hire students who took part in the encampments.

The political establishment and the mainstream press were largely disdainful. Liberal commentators belittled the students as ‘privileged’, although many of them, particularly at state colleges, came from poor and working-class backgrounds; the protests, some claimed, were ultimately about America, not about the Middle East. (They were about both.)

The protesters were also accused of making Jews feel unsafe with their ritualised denunciations of Zionism, of grandstanding, of engaging in a fantasy of 1968-style rebellion, of ignoring Hamas’s cruelties or even justifying them, of romanticising armed struggle in their calls to ‘globalise the intifada,’ of being possessed by a Manichean fervour that blinded them to the complexities of a war that involved multiple parties, not just Israel and Gaza.

There is, of course, a grain of truth to these criticisms. Like ‘defund the police,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ is appealing in its absolutism, but also dangerously ambiguous, fuel for right-wing adversaries looking for evidence of calls for ‘genocide’ against Jews.

And there was, as there always is, a theatrical dimension to the protests, with some students imagining themselves to be part of the same drama unfolding in Gaza, confusing the rough clearing of an encampment (‘liberated zones’) with the violent destruction of a refugee camp.

But the attacks on the demonstrators – whether for ‘privilege’, supposed hostility to Jews or fanaticism – weren’t a fair portrayal of a broad-based movement that includes Palestinians and Jews, African Americans and Latinos, Christians and atheists.

Pro-Palestinian student mobilizations

For all their missteps, the students drew attention to matters that seemed to elude their detractors: the obscenity of Israel’s war on Gaza; the complicity of their government in arming Israel and facilitating the slaughter; the hypocrisy of America’s claim to defend human rights and a rules-based international order while giving Israel carte blanche; and the urgent need for a ceasefire.

Nor were they cowed by Netanyahu’s grotesque comparison of the protests to anti-Jewish mobilisations in German universities in the 1930s (where no one was holding seders). If Trump wins they will be blamed, along with Arab and Muslim voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for a president who armed Bibi, but they deserve credit for mobilising support for a ceasefire and for helping to shift the narrative on Palestine.

The destruction of Gaza will be as formative for them as the struggles against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and the Iraq War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives.

When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the same feeling of solidarity that led students in 1968 to chant ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands’ after the German-Jewish student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France. These are emotions of which no group of victims can forever remain the privileged beneficiary, not even the descendants of the European Jews who perished in the death camps.

As the historian​ Enzo Traverso has argued, a particular version of Holocaust remembrance, centred on Jewish suffering and the ‘miraculous’ founding of Israel, has been a ‘civil religion’ in the West since the 1970s. People in the Global South have never been parishioners of this church, not least because it has been linked to a reflexive defence of the state of Israel, described in Germany as a Staatsräson.

For many Jews, steeped in Zionism’s narrative of Jewish persecution and Israeli redemption, and encouraged to think that 1939 might be just around the corner, the fact that Palestinians, not Israelis, are seen by most people as Jews themselves once were – as victims of oppression and persecution, as stateless refugees – no doubt comes as a shock.

Their reaction, naturally, is to steer the conversation back to the Holocaust, or to the events of 7 October. These anxieties shouldn’t be dismissed. But, as James Baldwin wrote in the late 1960s, ‘one does not wish … to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.’

The question is how, if at all, these movements can help to end the war in Gaza, to end the occupation and the repressive matrix of control that affects all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up a fifth of the population. While the justice of the Palestinian cause has never enjoyed wider or more universal recognition, and the BDS movement (vilified as ‘antisemitic’ and ‘terrorist’ by Israel’s defenders) has never attracted comparable support, the Palestinian national movement itself is in almost complete disarray.

The Palestinian Authority is an authority only in name, a virtual gendarme of Israel, reviled and mocked by those who live under it. It has been unable to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from the wave of settler attacks and military violence that has killed five hundred Palestinians in the last eight months and resulted in the theft of more than 37,000 acres of land, a creeping Gaza-fication.

Palestinians inside Israel are under intense surveillance, ever at risk of being accused of treason, and left to the mercy of the criminal gangs that increasingly tyrannise Arab towns.

Future of Gaza

The future of Gaza looks still more bleak, even in the event of a long-term truce or ceasefire. ‘Gaza 2035’, a proposal circulated by Netanyahu’s office, envisages it as a Gulf-style free-trade zone. Jared Kushner has his eye on beachfront developments and the Israeli right is determined to re-establish settlements.

As for the survivors of Israel’s assault, the political scientist Nathan Brown predicts that they will be living in a ‘supercamp’, where, as he writes in Deluge, a collection of essays on the current war, ‘law and order … will likely be handled – if they are handled at all – by camp committees and self-appointed gangs.’ He adds: ‘This seems less like the day after a conflict than a long twilight of disintegration and despair.’

Disintegration and despair are, of course, the conditions that encourage the ‘terrorism’ that Israel claims to be fighting. And it would be easy for Gaza’s survivors to succumb to this temptation, particularly since they have been given no hope for a better life, much less a state, only lectures on the reason they ought to turn the Strip into the next Dubai rather than build tunnels.

Over the last eight months, Palestine has become to the American and UK student left what Ukraine is to liberals: the symbol of a pure struggle against aggression. But just as Zelensky’s admirers ignore the illiberal elements in the national movement, so Palestine’s supporters tend to overlook the brutality of Hamas, not only against Israeli Jews but against its Palestinian critics. As Isaac Deutscher wrote, while ‘the nationalism of the exploited and oppressed’ cannot be ‘put on the same moral-political level as the nationalism of conquerors and oppressors’, it ‘should not be viewed uncritically’.

In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), Rashid Khalidi writes that when the Pakistani activist Eqbal Ahmad visited the PLO’s bases in southern Lebanon, ‘he returned with a critique that disconcerted those who had asked his advice. While in principle a supporter of armed struggle against colonial regimes such as that in Algeria … he questioned whether armed struggle was the right course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel.’

As Ahmad saw it, ‘the use of force only strengthened a pre-existing and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism and bolstered the support of external actors.’ Ahmad did not deny the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance, but he believed it should be practised intelligently – to create divisions among the Israeli Jews with whom a settlement, a liberating new dispensation based on coexistence, mutual recognition and justice, would ultimately have to be reached.

First Intifada

Today it is difficult to imagine an alliance between Palestinians and progressive Israeli Jews of the kind that flickered during the First Intifada.

Groups pursuing joint action between Palestinians and Israelis still exist, but they are fewer than ever and deeply embattled: advocates for the binationalism sketched out by figures as various as Judah Magnes and Edward Said, Tony Judt and Azmi Bishara, have all but vanished.

Nonetheless, one wonders what Ahmad would have made of Hamas’s spectacular raid on 7 October, a daring assault on Israeli bases that devolved into hideous massacres at a rave and in kibbutzes. Its short-term impact is undeniable: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and the myth of Israel’s invincibility.

But its architects, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza’s own people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they recently appeared on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list, they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence but possessing little strategic vision. ‘Tomorrow will be different,’ Deif promised in his 7 October communiqué. He was correct. But that difference – after the initial exuberance brought about by the prison breakout – can now be seen in the ruins of Gaza.

Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever more committed to its colonisation project and contemptuous of international criticism, ruling over a people who have been transformed into strangers in their own land or helpless survivors, awaiting the next delivery of rations.

The self-styled ‘start-up’ nation has leveraged its surveillance weapons into lucrative deals with Arab dictatorships and offers counterinsurgency training to visiting police squads, but its instinctive militarism leaves no room for new initiatives. Israel cannot imagine a future with its neighbours or its own Palestinian citizens in which it would no longer rely on force.

The ‘Iron Wall’ is not simply a defence strategy: it is Israel’s comfort zone. Netanyahu’s brinkmanship with Iran and Hizbullah is more than a bid to remain in power; it is a classical extension of Moshe Dayan’s policy of ‘active defence’.

The violence will not cease unless the US cuts off the delivery of arms and forces Israel’s hand. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon: Netanyahu is due to address Congress on 24 July, after receiving an unctuous, bipartisan invitation to share his ‘vision for defending democracy, combating terror and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region’.

Biden’s call for a ceasefire has been met with another humiliating rejection by Netanyahu, who knows that the administration isn’t about to suspend military aid or observe any of its own ‘red lines’. But the encampment movement, and the growing dissent among progressive Democratic leaders from Rashida Tlaib to Bernie Sanders, foreshadows a future in which Washington will no longer provide weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes.

Whether Palestinians will be able to hold onto their lands until that day, in the face of the settler zealots and ethnic cleansers who have captured the Israeli state, remains to be seen.

(This was the third of three parts. The previous can be found in Part I and Part II.)

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