The institution I teach in, the University of Minnesota, has joined other universities across the US in the crackdown on students protesting Israel’s killing of, as Senator Bernie Sanders noted, over 34,000 Palestinians (with another 78,000 wounded), 70% of them women and children, in Gaza. Several students have been arrested since the outbreak of protests on April 23. What has been striking throughout the process of the crackdown on protesting university students across the US is the claim by politicians and segments of mainstream media that the students are being anti-Semitic.
As a scholar who has spent over two decades studying and writing on M.K. Gandhi and non-violent movements, who follows Zionism closely because it provides a model for the Hindu supremacist ideology called Hindutva, and who has also had many conversations with the students from whose ranks the protestors come, I would argue exactly the opposite: it is critics of the students who are being racist.
True, there is an enormous resurgence of anti-Semitism across the US in the wake of October 7, as also of anti-Muslim sentiment. But in US universities at least, the protests are not, barring some rare exceptions, driven by anti-Semitism. In the classes I teach, for example, these students see their opposition to what is happening in Gaza as an extension of the anti-racist movements they have been involved in at least since the George Floyd protests. Even the organisational networks are often the same, and some of the same students are participating in both protests.
I have also been struck by how, even as they consider themselves fiercely anti-Zionist, these students come down sharply on positions that bear any whiff of anti-Semitism. The distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is quite simple. As many have pointed out for decades: while anti-Semitism is a hostility directed against Jews because of their religious or cultural identity, anti-Zionism is an opposition to Zionism as an ideology that is racist because it claims the Israeli state and the land of Israel-Palestine exclusively for the Jewish community. Zionism has not always been racist, of course: many early Zionists, such as Martin Buber initially, envisioned co-habiting in equality with the Arab community, rather than creating an exclusively Jewish state. But that Zionist tradition, always peripheral, is by now close to moribund.
Also read: Pro-Palestine Protests in US Universities Are Both an Inflexion Point and a Rite of Passage
Inevitably, Zionism as an ideology – like other analogous ideologies such as white nationalism or Hindutva – will justify racism and genocide, whether implicitly or explicitly. Many of the most thoughtful Jewish thinkers recognised this danger. This is why Hannah Arendt – herself by no means free of a Eurocentric mindset – was quite emphatic that “nation-states should never be able to found themselves through the dispossession of whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation.” Arendt’s fears about Zionism have by now come entirely true, as Israel has developed into a Jewish supremacist state organized around apartheid, and has deployed the structural, institutional and physical violence that apartheid requires to maintain itself.
And Zionism is by no means alone in having become a racism, in seeking to transform a religious community into an ethnicity with supremacist claims. The proponents of Hindutva are not only an analogous phenomenon but have in recent years stressed their affinities to Zionism and are allied closely with Israel, including supporting it during the most recent genocide. Increasingly, just as Zionists have sought to paint all criticism of the Israeli state and Zionism as anti-Semitic, Hindutva’s ideologues have sought to portray criticism of Hindutva or the Indian state under the BJP as “Hinduphobia,” or as criticisms from “self-hating Hindus.”
The students recognise this distinction, and when they demand divestment from companies connected to Israel’s war machine and a halt to US support for Israeli massacre of innocent civilians, they most often see themselves as continuing the tradition of civil disobedience – the tradition that peacefully breaks the laws of the land or the rules of an institution in the name of a higher law called justice – associated with Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It is striking that most of the student protests have been overwhelmingly non-violent: it is the university administrations that have unleashed the punitive force of administrative sanctions and police action against them.
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The distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, then, is analytically quite straightforward. The students have been emphatic in reiterating it. The question we need to ask is therefore somewhat different: what ideological blinkers seem to prevent the US House, or for that matter liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, and white liberals more broadly, from grasping it. (I say white liberals because even more rightwing African American liberals such as John McWhorter usually seem to get distinction: while he insists that the student protests are “not justice” – a claim that has been disputed – he is quite clear that the students are not anti-Semitic.) Put differently: why and how is the racism involved in Israel’s attack on Gaza, and in the US support to Israel, invisible to Republicans and Democrats, and why at the time of an actual ongoing racist genocide being carried out with money and weapons they supply, is it that they see the students as racist instead?
In many cases, of course, as for example with university administrations, the Israeli state, organisations such as the AIPAC, or powerful donors sympathetic to the Zionist cause, arguably all that is going on is a cynical weaponisation of the charge of anti-Semitism, which provides a quick way to shut down opposition.
But there are also deeper ideological affinities.
As far as Republicans and neo-conservative media outlets such as Fox News are concerned, there is a direct ideological convergence. Zionism could well be described as an enhanced analogue of white nationalist fantasies for Europe and the US; this after all is why so many—including Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu—have described Israel’s polity as an apartheid regime. So, when Republicans endorse Zionism, and push to have any criticism of Israel declared as anti-Semitic, they also (wittingly or not) extend a space for white nationalism.
A far more complex ideological affinity is at work in the mainstream Democrats, as well as liberal media outlets such as the New York Times: they exemplify what could be described as a subconscious anti-Semitism that misrecognises itself as an anti-racism.
Till two decades back, the Democratic Party and the Times were, while opposed to the explicit racism of the Republican Party, quite complicit in dog whistle racism, and quite incapable of comprehending structural racism. But both the Democratic Party and liberal media have become more self-consciously anti-racist over the last decade – witness, for example, the brilliant 1619 project at the Times, or the wide-ranging Democratic support to the George Floyd protests.
Also read: I Was One of 19 NYU Faculty Members Arrested For Protecting Student Protesters. Here’s What I Think
And yet, even as Democratic and liberal traditions have become less tolerant of explicit racism in general (while continuing to be complicit in systemic racism – this is why it has been described as a racism without racists), they have continued to aggressively support the explicit racism involved in the Zionist project. A recent analysis by the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] project provided detailed evidence that liberal outlets show systematic bias towards the Israeli state. An internal Times memo, for example, specifically asked reporters to avoid certain words, including ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘“Palestine” (“except in very rare cases”), “occupied territories” (say “Gaza, the West Bank, etc.”) and “refugee camps” (“refer to them as neighborhoods, or areas”)’. The memo claimed that this was to ‘provide clear, accurate information,’ and avoid ‘heated language’ but as the FAIR analysis noted, ‘highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around.
Ironically, in their support for Israel and their hostility to the student protests, Democrats and the liberal media are themselves practising an anti-Semitism thinking itself to be the converse. Like Gandhi with Hinduism or King with Christianity, many protesting Jewish students are drawing on Judaic traditions to oppose the killings in Gaza (and the occupied West Bank) by the Israeli state; they are insisting that to reduce Judaism and Jewish identity to Zionism involves a most profound violence to Judaism and the Jewish identity. Indeed, just as Gandhi tried to rescue Hinduism from becoming a racism directed against Muslims and the dominated castes (and was killed by a Hindutva ideologue for that), the Jewish students especially, but also many of others, are trying to rescue Judaism from being complicit in the racism that Zionism has become. They are saying that to be Jewish is to be anti-racist.
When Democrats and liberal media fail to recognise this, they operate, paradoxically, with a subconscious understanding of Judaism as a tradition incapable of the moral compass necessary for self-reflection, for critiquing Zionism. It is that moral compass that figures like Arendt drew on in criticising Zionism, and that so many young Jewish students on American campuses draw on in criticising the genocide occurring in Gaza now. What could be more anti-Semitic than denying these students the embrace of a Judaism that is sensitive to the other, and instead conflating Zionism with Judaism and, thus, Judaism to the genocide being conducted in its name!
Could it be the subconscious Democratic and mainstream white liberal fear that they are themselves being profoundly anti-Semitic that drives the hysteria and vehemence with which they declare that there is no genocide occurring in Gaza, that it is the protesting students who are being anti-Semitic? Could this also be a return of the repressed: could it be that white liberals affirm in the Zionists the explicit racism that they must repress and disavow in their relation with African Americans and other people of colour here in the US?
Ajay Skaria teaches history at the University of Minnesota. The essay is part of an irregular series reflecting on contemporary forms of violence and resistance to these forms, with a focus especially on psychic and epistemic violence.
