Will Progressives confront left-wing antisemitism?

The torrent of antisemitism let loose by student protests against the war in Gaza is a national embarrassment, but it reflects especially badly on leaders of America’s elite colleges and the intersectional left.  

Two Ivy League presidents, University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, resigned from their jobs after a December congressional hearing during which they couldn’t give a straight answer when asked whether advocating genocide of Jews violates their university’s code of conduct.

Alas, this salutary rebuke to moral cowardice looks more like the exception than the rule. The Anti-Defamation League reports an upsurge in campus assaults and harassment targeting Jews. A plurality of Jewish college students say they don’t feel physically safe on campus.  

Students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard have filed legal complaints alleging that school leaders have failed to protect Jewish students, professors and centers from hostile anti-Israel protesters.    

As many college administrators wilt before this latest affront to the liberal values they should be defending, the campaign to villainize Israel is seeping down to high schools and even middle schools. 

In Oakland, for example, activist teachers have organized “teach-ins” to show solidarity with Palestinians and drawn tendentious analogies between Israeli soldiers and U.S. cops who abuse Black suspects, Franklin Foer reports in The Atlantic. 

No doubt students are genuinely moved by the appalling plight of Gaza civilians caught in the crossfire of war. But research shows they’re also being fed one-sided propaganda by a radical amalgam of Palestinian students, Muslim advocacy groups, anti-war activists and the intersectional left.  

Lest we forget, Hamas started the war with a barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians. This was a premeditated crime against Gaza civilians, whom Hamas uses as shields against Israeli military retaliation.  

Yet protestors shout down any criticisms of Palestinian “resistance” and chant slogans like “Free Palestine from the river to the sea.” Peoples Forum, a key organizer of the “Shut it Down for Palestine” protests, leaves no ambiguity as to what that slogan means:  

“We make no apologies for calling for the destruction of an apartheid and colonial state that is actively engaging in a genocide of the Palestinian people that has already killed over 25,000.”   

Other organizers include Democratic Socialists for America, Black Lives Matter, the ANSWER Coalition, and Code Pink. It’s fair to ask whether they endorse this hateful call to liquidate the Jewish state.  

The protesters are pressuring President Biden and Democrats to “stop the war” by withholding military and political support from Israel.  

Even progressive allies aren’t spared. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was leaving a Brooklyn movie theater recently in Brooklyn when she was accosted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators demanding that she call Israel out for committing “genocide” in Gaza. 

An irate Ocasio-Cortez told the group their tactics were “f’ed up,” adding, “and you are not helping these people (Gazans).” 

Given her own history of occupying offices and sanctimoniously demanding that Democrats embrace extreme ideas like defunding the police, you could see this confrontation as condign punishment — the intersectional left coming for one of its own.  

Nonetheless, Ocasio-Cortez was right. Accusing the victims of history’s worst genocide of trying to exterminate Palestinians is a new form of antisemitism likely to boomerang on the activist left. 

Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, notes that antisemitism in Europe and America historically has been most closely linked with the populist right. Two cases in point: The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and the 2018 murder of 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. 

The form antisemitism takes has mutated throughout history, says Feldman, and is now being reinvented by the intersectional left:  

“The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists and even white supremacists.”  

Egged on by radical poseurs with tenure, the activist left is inducting Palestinians into their pantheon of victims of racism, sexism and gender discrimination — and booting out the Jews.  

This poses a dilemma for the Democrats’ progressive wing. Will they forthrightly denounce left-wing antisemitism or equivocate, like the college presidents, as 
“social justice” activists once again associate the party with illiberal ideas rejected by most Americans? 

Democrats should stand instead with Biden, who has balanced criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s callous prosecution of the war with assurances that America supports Israel’s right to defend itself.  

Biden is keeping faith with America’s 76-year-old commitment to Israel’s right to exist — a bond forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when President Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state in 1948.  

Unlike Republicans, who have cheered Israel’s drift toward ultra-nationalism and religious fundamentalism, leading Democrats have spoken out against the current government’s collusion with settlers illicitly grabbing Palestinian land and its opposition to an independent Palestinian state. 

Netanyahu and his right-wing allies offer Palestinians nothing but a grim future of military occupation and political subordination. This is a betrayal of the liberal Zionist vision and a recipe for endless conflict.  

But Israel is a democracy; it can and hopefully will change governments when the war in Gaza is over. The same can’t be said for Hamas, a homicidal gang devoted with Islamist fervor to Israel’s extinction. 

It should not be hard, as writer Michael Tomasky contends, for U.S. progressives to condemn Hamas’s cynical savagery as well as Israeli extremists who trample on Palestinian rights and aspirations.  

Yet Arab-American and left-wing activists are threatening to sit out the 2024 election if Biden doesn’t throw Israel under the bus. It’s hard to imagine a bigger blow to the Palestinian cause than electing Donald Trump.

Will Marshall is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.