Progressives, You’re Marching Against Your Own Allies
A Letter to Progressive Anti-Zionists: Look Who You’re Marching Against
You think you are standing with the oppressed. Look around. Look at who is being targeted at your rallies, and ask whether you chose that on purpose or just never checked.
There is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to a homeland. That is all it is, and nearly every Jew holds it. Pew found that caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish for 45% of U.S. Jewish adults, and important for another 37%. That is more than eight in ten. Yes, there are Jewish anti-Zionists, in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. They are a tiny minority, and you quote them constantly precisely because they are so rare. When you announce that you are against Zionism, you are announcing that you are against the self-understanding of almost every Jew you will ever meet. You would never accept that excuse for opposing Irish nationalism, Black self-determination or Indigenous sovereignty. You cannot demand the Jews’ exit from their own national identity and then act shocked when they call it what it is.
Israel is not the world’s only illegitimate border. You call it a colonial accident. Then explain Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ireland, the Baltic states, Singapore and Malaysia. Every one of them was carved out of a collapsing empire, by mandate commissions and partition plans that bundled peoples together and drew lines in a hurry. Iraq stitched Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites into one state. The partition of India displaced millions. Nobody marches to dissolve Pakistan or abolish Jordan. Only the Jewish state is told that its origins disqualify it, and it happens to be the one that returned a people to a homeland they had held for three thousand years. In 1947 the UN offered two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews said yes. The Arab side said no and went to war. Reserving this standard for Israel alone is a double standard, and you know what usually explains those.
You are attacking your own coalition. Roughly 70 percent of American Jews vote Democratic. Jews built your movement. They organized the unions. They marched with Dr. King and helped found and fund the NAACP. They fought for immigration, women’s suffrage, gay rights, abortion rights, equality under the law, and the separation of church and state that protects every minority in this country. And your answer is to make them prove they are the right kind of Jew, demand they disown the most basic part of their identity, and leave them to face the vandals and the violence. A movement that treats its most loyal allies as enemies will not stay a movement for long. You are teaching the Jews what you think of them, and they are listening.
You are marching for the wrong side of the Palestinians’ tragedy. Their suffering is real, and it deserves pity. So ask who has spent 80 years making sure it never ends. The Arab regimes that vowed to protect the refugees refused to absorb them. Jordan is the exception. In Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, refugees and their grandchildren were kept stateless in camps, denied citizenship and the right to own property, and displayed as a standing argument against Israel. The leadership rejected partition in 1947, and the pattern held. In 2000, at Camp David and in the Clinton Parameters that followed, Ehud Barak accepted a framework that offered a Palestinian state in Gaza and roughly 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank, with land swaps and a capital in East Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat walked away and made no counteroffer. The second intifada followed. In 2008, Ehud Olmert went further: a state on territory equal to nearly all of the pre-1967 West Bank through swaps, Jerusalem’s Holy Basin under international oversight, and a limited return of refugees. Mahmoud Abbas never accepted, and the talks died. Two Israeli prime ministers put a state on the table. Both times, the Palestinian leadership did not negotiate toward yes. They kept alive the fantasy of undoing 1948, and sold it to generations of refugees as a promise. Meanwhile Hamas fights from inside civilian neighborhoods, and aid money meant for ordinary Palestinians has been diverted into weapons, tunnels and the fortunes of those at the top. The ones who profit from Palestinian misery are not the Jews of Brooklyn or Berkeley. They are the men who need the grievance more than they need a solution.
Choose. Aim your fury at the leaders who have treated an entire people as a bargaining chip for eight decades. Or keep marching, and explain to your Jewish friends, colleagues and allies why the movement that claims to stand for justice has turned them into the target. If your cause requires Jews to give up their homeland, it is no longer about justice. It is about making Jews disappear as a people.
