Diaspora Jews Must Confront the Toxic Ideology Behind the Violence
It is often said that “politics makes strange bedfellows.” The same could be said of ideology.
Across North America, there is now one ideology that unites an especially wide assortment of groups – including college faculties of Middle East and “Identity” Studies, overgrown DEI bureaucracies in both universities and corporations, much of the NGO sector, Black Lives Matter activists, prominent rap artists, America’s “progressive” Democrats, Canada’s New Democratic Party, the climate-change protest movement, and mobs of keffiyeh-clad militants. That singular ideology is Israel Eliminationism.
Besides their mutual loathing of Israel, advocates of Israel Eliminationism share one other characteristic: They regard themselves as avatars of Woke progressivism, upholding “the right side of history.”
That self-image rests on massive inversions of reality, including at least three blatant lies about the pertinent history. First, eliminationist ideology tags Israel as a colonialist project – when in fact, Israel is the epitome of de-colonialism, being a globally persecuted people finally returned to their indigenous homeland. And far from being an ‘alien incursion,’ those Jews who returned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries joined more than 20,000 co-religionists whose families had never left the ancestral homeland – despite several violent expulsions across the millenia by Assyrian, Roman, and Arab colonizers against that original, indigenous community.
Second, Israel Eliminationism frames Israel’s 1948 founding as a genocide of the native Palestinian Arabs – when in fact, Israel’s founders agreed from the outset to yield much of their indigenous land for a separate Palestinian state, and guaranteed full civic equality to Palestinians within Israel’s borders. It was actually the Palestinian Arab leaders who attempted a genocide of the new Israeli state – a goal which they proudly declared in 1948, and relentlessly continue to pursue today.
Third, Israel Eliminationism indicts Israel for denying Palestinian sovereignty – when in fact, Israel on at least seven occasions since 1937 has endorsed specific proposals to bring about a sovereign Palestinian state. All seven proposals were rejected or sabotaged by Palestinian leaders, and all seven were followed by the Palestinians’ resumption of their permanent terror war to eliminate Israel.
Despite these demonstrably false claims, which constitute the very basis of Israel Eliminationism, that genocidal ideology now largely dominates college campuses, the DEI industry, the NGO sector, so-called “progressive” Democrats across North America, and much of the mainstream media and the arts. This long-simmering bias helps explain the shocking response across North American colleges to Hamas’s October 2023 mass rapes, murders, and abductions of innocent Israelis. Far from showing empathy with grieving Israelis – as they do for grieving Palestinians – the campuses exploded with celebrations of Hamas’s horrors, and chilling calls to bring this savage “intifada” to the Western democracies.
Since October 2023, the consistent message and manner of those nationwide protests makes clear one especially disturbing reality, namely: Those protest mobs seek not only a second Holocaust targeting Israel, but also across North America, the elimination from civil society of all Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist – that is, over 90 percent of American and Canadian Jews.
Understanding that doubly eliminationist objective requires the further recognition that these goals are being pursued by two parallel and mutually reinforcing streams of highly organized activity.
At the “street” level, this activity involves raging protest mobs who seize and vandalize university spaces, then deny Jewish students access unless they denounce Israel’s right to exist. Off campus, similar mobs surround synagogues, Jewish centers, and old-age homes, shouting epithets and calling for the death of Jews. Especially concerning is this fact: although those mobs clearly violate multiple criminal laws on threats, harassment, and Civil Rights, arrests and prosecutions have been sporadic and inconsistent – especially across college campuses, where the mobs keep returning to block and intimidate Jewish students.
One can only imagine what elite institutions would have done if, rather than threatening Jewish students over the purported sins of Israel, those campus mobs instead wore KKK robes and denied Black students’ campus access. To be clear, both scenarios deserve equal condemnation and robust law enforcement.
Encouraging both the mobs’ rage and this laxity of law enforcement is the second and parallel stream of Israel Eliminationist activity, namely, the now deeply-embedded loathing of Israel that has captured the great opinion-shaping institutions across North America. At this more elite level, Israel Eliminationism manifests in countless ways, for example:
- Universities’ Middle East and “Identity Studies” departments rushing to join the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions campaign against Israel – while ignoring China’s Uyghur genocide, and Russia’s mass brutalities in Ukraine.
- Campus efforts to ban Jews from student government, claiming their Jewish identity renders them “biased.”
- The embrace by ever more K-12 school districts across America of the antisemitic “liberated ethnic studies curriculum,” which falsely instructs that Israel is a “colonial settler state” founded “through genocide.”
- Cancellations of Jewish authors by publishers and writers groups, based solely on their presumed guilt-by-association with “genocidal” Israel.
- The loathing and bullying of Jewish writers at major media outlets, as graphically exemplified in Bari Weiss’s resignation letter from the New York Times.
- Awarding a 2025 Pulitzer Prize to an antisemitic Palestinian writer, whose columns falsely deny Hamas’s savage murder of the kidnapped Bibas babies, and Hamas’s abduction and starvation of two recently-released female Israeli hostages.
While not as broadly violent (yet), these phenomena echo a notorious past phase of American history, namely, the enforcement of Jim Crow laws against Black Americans. A two-tiered apparatus similarly enforced those oppressive laws. On the “street” level, the KKK targeted, threatened, and lynched Black citizens suspected of violating any of the brutal Jim Crow strictures. But overseeing, protecting, and ideologically supporting the KKK’s violence was a higher level of “White Citizens Councils,” composed of elite leaders in each town and state.
To be clear: Black life under Jim Crow was vastly worse than anything experienced by minority groups in contemporary North America, Jewish or otherwise. But what that example makes clear is, the assaults, threats, and attempts at ostracism and segregation now targeting Jews are not the work of the mobs alone. They are incited, enabled, and protected by Woke ideological overseers of high status and power, especially among elite academic and media institutions. Both sets of those highly influential institutions constantly recycle the false Israel Eliminationist allegations catalogued and refuted above.
In sum, the so-called “progressive”/Woke sectors of American and Canadian society have begun to cultivate a form of Jim Crow ostracism targeting their Jewish citizens. As many observers have warned, unless the false underlying ideology and its entrenched promoters are confronted, delegitimated, and disempowered, the tentacles of this Woke “Jew Crow” will continue to extend their reach.
And this is no longer just a warning: it has transformed into violent reality. Across North America, the relentlessly promoted lies of Israel Eliminationist ideology and its call to “globalize the intifada” have metastasized into lethal violence against anyone who publicly supports Israel’s right to exist.
Since the outbreak of the Hamas-Israel war, a Jewish school in Toronto has been repeatedly targeted with gunfire by armed assailants.
In late May of this year, an armed anti-Israel activist flew to Washington DC, staked out a Jewish Museum event, and executed in cold blood two young Israeli embassy staffers. His online manifesto reads like a Substack post from a tenured Middle East Studies professor. It regurgitates the universities’ one-sided Middle East discourse, denouncing “atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine,” defaming Israel as a “genocidal apartheid state,” and closing with the obligatory shout-out to “Free Palestine”.
Within days, a faction of the Democratic Socialists of America chillingly praised the assassin and lamented his status as a “political prisoner.”
In April, an arsonist of similar ideological leanings targeted and firebombed the official residence of Pennsylvania’s Jewish Governor Josh Shapiro. The assailant expressed fury over what he had been brainwashed to believe Shapiro “wants to do to the Palestinian people.”
And again just last week, an Egyptian-born terrorist hunted down and attacked with a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, a crowd of mostly elderly Jewish citizens in Boulder Colorado. They were peacefully calling on Hamas to release the abducted, tortured, and starved Israelis still held hostage. After literally setting his victims on fire – including an elderly Holocaust survivor – the terrorist triumphantly shouted, “End Zionists” and “Palestine free and for us.”
Arresting and prosecuting those terrorists, while necessary and laudable, is far from sufficient to prevent this murderous violence from recurring. As in the days of Jim Crow, the brutal violence will continue – in fact, is almost certain to increase – as long as powerful opinion leaders in prestigious positions of influence keep recycling the perniciously false and hate-drenched ideology of Israel Eliminationism. Having now captured large swaths of our universities, legacy media, and NGO sector, this dangerous ideology is what justifies, incites, and celebrates such violent attacks.
This metastasizing danger helps clarify the path forward for North America’s Jewish communities. Namely, in order to put an end to the antisemitic violence, and to defeat the movement to ostracize Jews from civic life, both this toxic eliminationist ideology and those who promote it must be relentlessly confronted, decisively refuted, and utterly delegitimated.
Unfortunately, for far too long, the Jewish leadership across North America have largely focused on ideological threats from the right, while often neglecting this vastly more influential ideological tempest coming from the left. The time for such neglect is long past, as events in Toronto, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and Colorado make all too brutally clear.
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Note: A shorter version of this column was previously published in Jewish News Syndicate.
