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All articles

- Zionism: A People Reborn: 2025 Jun 27

- Egypt Cracks Down on the “Global March to Gaza”: 2025 Jun 23

- New York Holocaust Museum Removed Trump Images From Hate Speech Exhibit: 2025 Jun 18

- How Support for Palestine Became a Hate Crime: 2025 Jun 17

- History Lesson: 2025 Jun 17

- The Gavel and the Gun: 2025 Jun 17

- What's Ours: 2025 Jun 17

- The Measure of the World: 2025 Jun 17

- The Sympathy Trap: 2025 Jun 17

- Who Might We Become for Each Other?: 2025 Jun 17

- What You Deserve: 2025 Jun 17

- We Need New Jewish Institutions: 2025 Jun 17

- Laura Whitehorn: 2025 Jun 17

- Closer: 2025 Jun 13

- The Tangled Knot of Anti-Zionist Violence: 2025 Jun 11

- The Era of Unconditional Support for Israel Is Ending: 2025 Jun 6

- Trump’s Illegal Cuts to University Funding, Explained: 2025 Jun 5

- Marketing Authoritarianism: 2025 Jun 4

- The End of the Marty Peretz Era: 2025 May 30

- Staying in Motion: 2025 May 28

- Translation: 2025 May 23

- Unpacking the Rift Between Trump and Netanyahu: 2025 May 21

- The Group Forging a “Judeo-Christian” Zionism for the New MAGA Age: 2025 May 21

- How Should Activists Relate to Risk?: 2025 May 14

- The Destruction of Khalet a-Daba’: 2025 May 13

- Wrestling with Martin Buber: 2025 May 6

- A Leftist’s Guide to Tariffs: 2025 Apr 29

- Training for NYPD Officers Categorized the Keffiyeh and Watermelon as Antisemitic Symbols: 2025 Apr 24

COMIC | 27 JUN 2025, 2:08 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 27 JUN 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

Zionism: A People Reborn

Eli Valley

Eli Valley is a Jewish Currents contributing writer. His comics collection Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel, and his new book, Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque, are available from OR Books.

elivalley

Website

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REPORT | 23 JUN 2025, 3:25 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

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Egypt Cracks Down on the “Global March to Gaza”

By suppressing an effort to break the Gaza siege, activists say Egypt has once again prioritized its alignment with Israel and the US over its stated commitments to Palestinian rights.

Emad Mekay

A humanitarian convoy carrying hundreds of activists to the Gaza Strip to challenge Israel's blockade on the territory stops in Sirte, eastern Libya, after being blocked by authorities from continuing toward the eastern border with Egypt, June 15th, 2025.

Yousef Murad/AP

On June 10th, activists affiliated with the International Coalition Against the Israeli Occupation, a broad alliance of trade unions, solidarity movements, and human rights groups, tried to organize the “Global March to Gaza.” At the event, participants from more than 50 countries—including Mexico, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Tunisia, and France—would arrive in Cairo, travel 200 miles to Al-Arish on the Mediterranean, and then walk approximately 33 miles to the Rafah border crossing to deliver aid and help alleviate the widespread starvation resulting from the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Like the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which planned to bring aid to Gaza by ship before Israeli forces detained and deported its crew, the Global March was conceived as a “civilian response to global injustice,” with the goal of spotlighting Gaza’s starvation and demanding the opening of a humanitarian corridor for food, water, and medicine.

Right from the start, however, the would-be marchers were met with Egyptian repression. In the days before June 15th, the date set for marchers’ arrival at Rafah, Egyptian authorities unleashed a torrent of online and media propaganda, deploying influencers and TV personalities to smear organizers as foreign tools of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group that has been a historical adversary of Egypt’s military establishment and that the country has designated as a terrorist organization. “There were these calls from the international terrorist organization of the Muslim Brotherhood to converge on Egypt to stir instability,” Egypt’s top TV anchor, Ahmed Moussa, said on the state-run Sada El-Balad TV. “There are different, intellectual currents that were involved in this, but they were all led by the wings of an international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.” The rhetoric soon fueled police action. “Before the march, we had always been met with support and encouragement when we spoke to authorities,” Carola Rackete, a German member of the European Parliament and a participant in the march, told Jewish Currents, “but everything was different on the ground.” Rackete said that Egyptian authorities began snatching newly arrived activists “from the streets, at night from the hotel, and at restaurants” in order to forcefully deport them. “Some got their phones destroyed or their passports confiscated,” she added. “Not even one peaceful meeting of everyone was possible.” Other activists posted on social media that they had to change hotels every night during their stay in Egypt, or otherwise be secretly hosted by Egyptian contacts, in order to avoid arrests.

The crackdown continued as activists tried to make their way to Al-Arish. On June 13th, Melanie Johanna Schweizer, a German lawyer and spokesperson for the Global March to Gaza, told Jewish Currents that police and soldiers stopped the convoy she was traveling with between Cairo and Al-Arish. “We were held for five hours in the heat,” she said, adding that three activists subsequently collapsed and required hospitalization. Schweizer said that officers arrested some of the convoy’s participants and forced others to return to Cairo, seizing a number of people’s passports. Meanwhile, a separate contingent of 200 individuals reached Ismailia, a Suez Canal city 126 miles from Al-Arish. But by the time they arrived, the city had become an armed encampment, its streets and roads choked with checkpoints where military and police officers scrutinized identification papers and scrolled through social media feeds of suspected participants in the mass mobilization. As a result, all the activists who arrived in Ismailia were detained. In cases where campaigners refused to disperse, the authorities deployed plainclothes officers and individuals described by activists as “violent thugs in civilian clothes” to attack and remove them, a tactic seemingly intended to obscure the involvement of Egyptian police.

Egypt’s military rulers have framed this crackdown as a security issue, with the Foreign Ministry putting out a statement saying that Egypt was acting “to ensure the safety of visiting delegations due to the sensitive security conditions in this border area since the onset of the crisis in Gaza.” However, observers say that Cairo’s harsh suppression of pro-Palestine actions highlight a reality that its leaders have tried to obscure under public statements of sympathy: namely, that Egypt, which once mobilized armies for Palestine, is now working with Israel and the United States to mobilize police against Palestine’s sympathizers. “Egypt is a client state of the US, and by extension Israel,” said Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. “It is acting accordingly.” Indeed, Egypt’s crackdown on the Global March came after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that Israeli forces would stop the convoys themselves if Egyptian authorities failed to intercept them, a sequence that activists say clarifies Egypt’s role as an enforcer of Israeli policy in the region. So much so that when Egyptian security forces dragged activists waving Palestinian flags onto deportation flights at Cairo Airport, exiled opposition figure Mona el-Shazli offered a blistering articulation of this criticism: “This is no longer Cairo International Airport,” she said. “It’s Ben Gurion.”

Egypt did not always cooperate with Israel. Between 1948 and 1979, the two countries fought several wars, and even when there wasn’t fighting, Egypt refused full normalization with Israel and continued to be harshly critical of Israeli abuse of Palestinians. But this position, crafted under the leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, began to unravel after his successor, Anwar Sadat, signed a US sponsored settlement treaty with Israel in 1979. The agreement removed Egypt, the largest Arab military force, from the regional conflict, altering the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East in Israel’s favor over the coming decades. Many Palestinians considered the treaty a stab in the back, and local Islamists and pan-Arabists opposed it vehemently, but the country has continued to double down on its collaboration with Israel over time.

Behind Egypt’s compliance lurks a cold calculus. For a debt-burdened military dictatorship locked into strict International Monetary Fund austerity measures, the US’s $1.3 billion in annual military aid is critical. Egypt’s military also depends on American hardware to prop up its regime, with military insiders calling the bond between Egypt and the Pentagon among the region’s closest. Egypt’s ruling regime wants to keep these weapons flowing, and doing so often requires avoiding diplomatic and security disputes with Israel. “The current [Egyptian] regime is in full cooperation with Israel’s interests,” said Abdelhadi, summing up the dynamic, “and in return it receives continued military aid from the US.” These patterns have intensified since the rise of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime in the wake of the 2013 coup. “The shift began under Sadat with the Camp David Accords, but Sisi has taken normalization . . . to unprecedented levels,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, a Berlin-based Egyptian analyst. Specifically, Egypt under Sisi has significantly expanded its security cooperation with Israel, particularly in counterterrorism operations across the Sinai Peninsula. Sisi has permitted, for the first time, Israeli drone strikes in Sinai; he has also agreed to demands for military code-sharing with Washington at Tel Aviv’s behest, a measure previous Egyptian presidents reliably resisted. Economically, Egypt has emerged as a major importer of Israeli natural gas, despite longstanding public opposition to normalization with Israel: The country now gets 40% to 60% of its gas imports from Israel, which makes up 15% to 20% of consumption.

The Gaza blockade has been a major prong of this collaboration. Egypt has played such an important role in controlling aid to Palestinians through the side of the Rafah crossing it controls that Human Rights Watch has accused the country of aiding the Israeli blockade. More recent developments build on this precedent: Despite its statements calling for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, Egypt has kept the Rafah crossing closed while insisting it is Israel that is blocking the aid from the other side. Further, after Israeli urgings, Egyptian authorities say they have dismantled hundreds of smuggling tunnels linking the Sinai to Gaza, disrupting a lifeline for Hamas but also exacerbating humanitarian conditions in the blockaded enclave since many Gazans relied on food and merchandise smuggling from the Sinai. Egypt has also resisted domestic pressure to use its diplomatic clout and recall its ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza, underscoring Cairo’s prioritization of bilateral interests. “Today’s regime insists on demonstrating that the Palestinian question is not a priority and will not risk anything for it,” said Dima Al-sajdeya, a researcher at the Paris-based Collège de France.

To maintain this position, Egypt has had to suppress pro-Palestine protests at home. The ruling generals see such political expression as a danger, risking a showdown with Israel as well as their regime’s own survival in the face of mounting public dissatisfaction. In this sense, el-Hamalawy said, “Sisi’s deference to Washington and Tel Aviv reflects both strategic calculation and regime insecurity.” Egypt’s rulers have used two tactics to guard against such instability: security crackdowns, and a media barrage to temper pro-Palestine sentiment. On the former front, Egyptian forces routinely sweep up dissenters, snuffing out protests before they ignite. The repression targets any form of public sympathy with Palestinians not sanctioned by the state. For instance, in May, authorities extended the detention of Abdelgawad Al-Sahlami, a low ranking police officer who had raised a Palestinian flag in downtown Alexandria. He now faces terrorism charges, which carry a possible death penalty. While this clampdown unfolds, state TV works to deflect blame from Israel. It pummels Hamas as a regional saboteur of diplomacy and redirects criticism. In April, for example, international scholars met in Turkey and issued a religious fatwa to frame the need to help Palestinians as an Islamic duty. Cairo responded with a calculated leak of a 1970 tape featuring Nasser saying that since other Arab nations were not sharing in the burden, Egypt wouldn’t fight another war against Israel alone. The message was plain: If even the pan-Arabist icon of the ’60s balked at solo confrontations against Israel, today’s Egyptians shouldn’t agitate for a posture from that era.

Ultimately, the regime’s ongoing management of dissent—alongside its systematic crushing of pro-Palestine forces such as pan-Arabism and political Islam—means that while many Egyptians sympathize with Palestine, street protests remain rare. “The Egyptian people I met are deeply disturbed by the war crimes that are being committed by Israel in their neighbouring country,” said Rackete. “However, [because] Egypt is a military dictatorship in which protests are being suppressed, the Egyptian people are not free to make their voices heard.” El-Hamalawy concurred with this assessment, adding that “the gap between state policy and popular sentiment, especially on Palestine, widens by the day. It’s unsustainable long-term.” The recent eruption of the Gaza solidarity march may serve to demonstrate this unsustainability. The Egyptian government quickly moved to quell the march, which it viewed as a potential spark to inflame pro-Palestine sentiment in the country. But despite the suppression, images disseminated by activists—depicting people being removed from hotels, detained, or forced onto flights amidst protests—have transformed Cairo’s actions into a public spectacle, and contributed toward march organizers’ goal of “highlight[ing] Egypt’s complicity in the ongoing siege and genocide in Gaza.”

Activists have vowed to continue protest actions that highlight these contradictions. Global March to Gaza organizers, who include Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla, have said they will launch hunger strikes to continue their campaign. Meanwhile, a second, nine-bus “Solidarity Caravan,” comprising an estimated 2,000 volunteers from Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, sought to join the march by crossing into Egypt from Libya, although it was forced to return by forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, who Cairo trains and arms. A small convoy from Lebanon also announced plans to march to Gaza, but eventually turned back after the Syrian authorities refused to grant it permission. Meanwhile, Malaysian organizations have said they will plan a “Thousand Ship Flotilla” to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. While clampdowns may prevent some of these efforts, Global March participants say, they will still show that, in Rackete’s words, “hundreds of thousands . . . are ready to take to the streets and be active to stop the genocide of Palestinians.”

Emad Mekay is an independent journalist with extensive experience reporting from the Middle East and the United States. He has served as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg, and reported from the US for Inter Press Service (IPS). His recent work has appeared in outlets including Euronews and Global Insight, among others. Emad is a former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and previously worked with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley. He is fluent in both English and Arabic.

@MekaEUSA

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New York Holocaust Museum Removed Trump Images From Hate Speech Exhibit

Critics say the deletion—due to a board member’s intervention—exemplifies how museum leadership has increasingly catered to the right.

Alex Kane

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.

John Nacion/SOPA Images

Last September, New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage opened “Speaking Up! Confronting Hate Speech,” an exhibit on how hate speech leads to violence that originated at Houston’s Holocaust Museum. One video on display featured civil rights advocate Eric Ward speaking about white nationalism, interspersed with stills of Donald Trump. But only one day after the exhibition launched, the video went dark. Later that week, a new version was installed—this time, without the images of the former president.

The stills of Trump were removed after museum vice chair Regina Skyer walked through the display with Josh Mack, the museum’s vice president for marketing, soon after its opening. According to a person with direct knowledge of the incident, Skyer, an attorney for children with special education needs and a financial supporter of the museum, objected to the images’ inclusion. After the walk-through, Mack directed his team to remove the Trump stills, said two sources who requested anonymity to protect their jobs. According to these sources, Mack told staff that Skyer—whose only public political donations have gone to Democrats—intervened to avoid angering right-wing museum board members. (Jeff Simmons, a spokesperson for the museum, disputed that Mack said this.) Skyer denied that her objection was meant to appease pro-Trump board members, telling Jewish Currents that the exhibit opened just “prior to the election” and that she felt the museum “should not have any political candidates in any of our exhibits.”

Skyer said “there was no pushback” from the museum to her request, but according to sources, some museum employees were alarmed. “It feels antithetical to the museum’s mission to [remove] someone who’s famously used hate speech [from an exhibition] for fear of retaliation or fear of what funders will say,” said a third source with knowledge of the incident who also requested anonymity to protect their job. According to former museum employees, the removal of Trump from the hate speech exhibition was not the only recent instance in which museum leadership catered to or courted the right. In March, after tech entrepreneur Elon Musk gave a Nazi-like salute at Trump’s inauguration, the head of development for the museum asked a development team staffer to reach out to Musk for a donation; the former staffer said they were told the donation would be “a great way for Musk to remediate his image.” The staffer said they did not try to reach out to Musk. (Simmons called the former staffer’s account “unequivocally false” and said “there was never any internal directive to pursue a donation from Elon Musk.”) While this new amenability to the right has played out behind closed doors, it has coincided with a more visible shift: In the wake of October 7th, the museum has more publicly embraced Zionism—a stance that former employees said threatens the museum’s credibility as an educational institution.

In this political moment, “the museum is in a bind,” said Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of Jewish history at New York University and the author of the book The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex. Any meaningful analysis of antisemitism and extremism, she explained, implicates the MAGA movement, creating tension with right-wing donors. (The current board comprises both Democrats and Republicans, including board chair Bruce Ratner, a real estate developer who has mostly donated to Democrats; George Klein, who also sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition; and Ingeborg Rennert, a GOP donor.) Further, Berman said, because antisemitism and extremism “are at the heart of this moment in American politics,” it’s impossible for the museum to stay politically neutral. “The museum’s fundamental mission is undercut if it is unable to address antisemitism regardless of possible political fallout,” she said.

Other Holocaust museums have recently found themselves caught in the political crosshairs. In April, President Trump fired five Democrats appointed to the board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and replaced them with figures aligned with him. One remaining Biden appointee on the board accused the institution, which said only that it “welcomes” the new appointments, of staying “silent in the wake of acts of retribution and messages of hate emanating from an administration that has systematically torn at the fabric of our society’s protections and norms.” Holocaust museums have also drawn criticism for their handling of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which many experts say is a genocide. In January 2024, 50 Holocaust and genocide scholars called on Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, to condemn incitement by Israeli officials and media personalities to commit “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Gaza. (Dani Dayan, the museum’s chairman, said in response that Yad Vashem’s area of concern was “only the Holocaust.”) In February, Martin Oliner, a Trump-appointed board member of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote in The Jerusalem Post in favor of the president’s plan to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza, saying that Gazans are “fundamentally evil,” which prompted the Council on American-Islamic Relations to call for his removal from the board.

Jelena Subotić, a political science professor at Georgia State University who writes about Holocaust remembrance politics, said that Holocaust museums have always tried to strike a balance between using the lessons of the Holocaust to point to contemporary atrocities and containing the political pushback such gestures often generate. Before Trump’s return to office, they were more comfortable with highlighting contemporary human rights abuses. “There was a push for inclusivity at Holocaust museums as recently as five years ago,” she said, pointing to exhibitions like one at the DC museum that focused on the Assad regime’s crimes in Syria. But the spirit of inclusivity is “now gone,” she said. “These institutions are survivalists, and so they’re seeing the mood change. They’re terrified of the Trump administration, and they do not want to get on the administration’s radar.”

Former employees say that the Museum of Jewish Heritage used to be more willing to tangle with the MAGA movement. The museum condemned the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and hosted Alexander Vindman, the army colonel who alerted his superiors to Trump’s request that Ukraine investigate Joe Biden. In May 2022, the museum even declined to rent its space to the Tikvah Fund, which was hosting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other conservative leaders at a conference they were planning. Jack Kliger, the museum’s president and CEO, explained that the conference would have required too many resources from the museum, and a level of security that would have been difficult to accommodate. But the decision sparked a backlash among some museum supporters, who saw it as a move to censor DeSantis. “A lot of right-wing donors were really upset about it, and the museum lost members,” said the former marketing department employee.

According to the employee, the backlash marked a turning point, contributing to the museum’s more conciliatory stance toward the right to avoid losing more money or supporters. But former employees and other sources familiar with the museum’s dealings say that the October 7th attacks on Israel—and the protest movement that arose to condemn Israel’s destruction of Gaza—exacerbated this shift as museum leadership moved further right, and began to publicly take a much more avowedly Zionist stance.

After October 7th, the museum posted pro-Israel statements—a departure from the pre-October 7th era, in which the institution largely avoided discussing contemporary Israeli policies. They also began displaying the Israeli and American flags in the museum lobby last November “as a symbol of solidarity and heritage,” according to Simmons. At one staff meeting last fall, Kliger announced that the museum was adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish bigotry. (The definition is referenced in an FAQ for educators that the museum published last March.) This shift also modified the hate speech exhibit: Before its opening, the board directed museum staff to add in photographs of contemporary antisemitism that were not part of the original Houston exhibition. Those photos—displayed at the entrance to the exhibit—feature images of neo-Nazi rallies alongside images of pro-Palestinian demonstrators burning the Israeli flag and holding up a sign that used a swastika to depict the “s” in “Israel”—a move some former employees say risks conflating strident anti-Zionist activism with anti-Jewish bigotry. This seemed to reflect the personal views of at least one board member: In January 2024, Skyer gave an extemporaneous speech during a tour of an exhibition for members of the New York City Council, during which she referenced a pro-Palestine protest that day at City Hall. She gestured out the windows of the museum and said, “Hamas is right there,” according to two sources with direct knowledge of the incident. (Skyer did not respond to a request for comment on this anecdote.)

The museum has also hosted events that celebrated Israeli militarism or pushed for crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests. Last November, the museum rented space to the American Friends of the Israel Navy Seals, a nonprofit that raises money for an elite Israeli naval commando unit. The event included large images of Israeli soldiers walking through the ruins of Gaza, which were still on display when museum-goers visited the next morning, according to two sources. In January 2025, the museum hosted a training for the New York Police Department, during which a pro-Israel nonprofit told officers that Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh were antisemitic. Former employees say that in taking these actions, museum leadership is damaging the museum’s credibility as an educational space about the Holocaust for all New Yorkers—and particularly for the thousands of public school students who go to the museum every year. “The museum’s unquestioning support of Israel and its government—which has been perpetrating its own genocide against Palestinians—undermines and erodes the power of the institution’s mission and the community’s understanding of what the lessons of the Holocaust should be,” said the former marketing employee. Simmons rejected the suggestion that the museum had been politicized. “To suggest that the museum has aligned itself with a political agenda is not only unfounded, it’s also dismissive of the professionalism and dedication of our staff and educators,” he said.

The private grumblings among museum staffers turned into an organized show of dissent last December, when 14 museum staffers sent a collective letter, obtained by Jewish Currents, to the president and the board expressing their dismay at the continued display of the Israeli and American flags in the museum lobby. They wrote that the flags “[signify] an endorsement of Israeli politics” and that they were “concerned that flags at the entrance may alienate visitors who are interested in learning about the Holocaust and the Jewish people, but who may not agree with current Israeli or American political leaders and policies.” They ended the letter by requesting that the flags be removed. The board and the president never responded to the staffers, and the flags still remain.

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

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How Support for Palestine Became a Hate Crime

A celebrated civil rights law is being used to target those opposing crimes against humanity—and ruining lives in the process.

Mari Cohen

Adam Golfer

On December 5th, 2023, a New York University junior and pro-Israel student activist named Bella Ingber took the podium at a House Republicans news briefing on campus antisemitism to describe her experience at school in the months since October 7th. At the peak of her three-minute testimony, Ingber, whose Star of David necklace hung below a sharply pressed white collar, told the gathered politicians in an impassioned voice that she had been “physically assaulted in NYU’s library” while “wearing an American/Israeli flag,” lamenting that her “attacker still roam[ed] freely throughout the campus.”

At that point, Ingber was already a plaintiff in a lawsuit against NYU, filed with two other students, claiming that the university had turned a blind eye to rampant antisemitism on campus and citing the library incident as one such example. The altercation, which took place during a pro-Israel sit-in on November 7th of that year, had also received a fair amount of media attention: Pro-Israel outlets The Algemeiner and Israel National News reported that a male student, later identified as senior Elias Lopez, was arrested after he slammed the library exit turnstile on Ingber’s thumb and punched another sit-in participant, 31-year-old Benjamin Castro, who was filming the incident on his iPhone. A supporter of Ingber had uploaded Castro’s footage to YouTube, the title announcing that it showed Lopez “Punch[ing] Jews at Peaceful Sit In.”

Yet the 90-second video—and other footage from that day—does not appear to feature an assault. It begins with Ingber standing in the foreground, her brown hair pulled neatly into a claw clip, her shoulders draped in a flag that is half American Stars and Stripes and half Israeli Magen David. As other students study in the background, Israeli flags hanging from their tables, Ingber is engaged in a back-and-forth with a tank top–clad Lopez, who stands a few feet away. He tells her he doesn’t care what she has to say, because she’s a “new Brooklyner,” and then turns to leave the library. “Whatever, Palestine will be free from you eventually,” he says in a singsong as he departs. These comments agitate Ingber, who repeatedly demands, “What does that mean?” Conscious of the camera—during the argument, she faces the lens, asking, “You got that, right?”—she follows Lopez towards the exit, continuing to call after him. He passes through the security gates and turns around, offering one more barb: “If you’re indigenous, then go give yourself skin cancer,” he says, forcefully closing the gate’s turnstile behind him. She reacts: “Oh my god, he just slammed that on me.” Later, she would tell police officers that Lopez purposefully slammed the gate on her hand multiple times, but additional security camera footage from the library shows him firmly closing it just once. From the available footage, it’s not clear if the gate hit her body.

Ingber catches up with Lopez on the sidewalk, trailed by Castro, still filming. As she accuses Lopez of slamming the gate on her, he turns around, looking bewildered to find her behind him. “The turnstile?” he asks. He begins to tease Castro by pretending to punch the camera. Then he appears to grab the phone. A struggle ensues; the image dissolves into blur; a security guard shouts in the background. Security footage from nearby buildings shows Lopez trying to grab the phone out of Castro’s hand, but it doesn’t show him punching Castro. (Certainly, he doesn’t hold Castro in a headlock, as Castro—a photographer who had offered to support the pro-Israel students—would later claim in an interview with prosecutors.) Instead, as Lopez goes for the phone, Castro grabs him in a bear hug and slams him onto the ground. (Attorneys for Ingber did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. Castro could not be reached.)

NYU personnel appeared aware of these facts: An email NYU administrators sent to the school’s board of trustees, which later turned up in court files, said that while news reports gave “the impression of an unprovoked attack,” in reality, “Student 2 [Ingber] continued to follow and engage with Student 1 [Lopez] despite the attempts by Campus Safety to prevent a confrontation.” While Lopez had shut the gate “forcefully,” Ingber “was not ‘violently attacked.’” They also acknowledged that it wasn’t clear if Lopez had assaulted Castro, but said that Castro had “body-slammed” Lopez. Still, when police arrived, Lopez was the only one who was arrested. (NYU did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Twenty-three-year-old Lopez is still grappling with how that day changed the course of his life. “I’ve thought about it so many times—I almost didn’t go to the library that day,” he told me recently. But he did, and on his way out, he was struck by the mash-up of the Israeli and American flags and couldn’t resist asking about it. Lopez associates the American flag in part with the expulsion of his ancestors from Mexican Texas when the US annexed the territory in the 1840s. “We really have a mixed history with that flag,” he said. Lopez wasn’t involved in campus activism, but he was a political science student in tune with current events, and in the month before entering the library that November day, he had come to see the US’s support for Israel’s unfolding military campaign in Gaza—at that point already classified by some scholars as a genocide—as a continuation of an insidious history of American colonialism that affected his Mexican ancestors. He wanted to know: What did it mean to combine the American and Israeli flags? Were the protesters aware that both countries were built on the dispossession of people whose presence preceded them? Was that, in fact, what they were cheering on?

At a towering 6’3”, with cascading dark curls, Lopez has a penchant for sarcastic humor and a confident manner that belies his relative youth. He’s considering a career in law, which seems fitting: When we first met in midtown Manhattan in January, he told me the story of the library incident and its aftermath in exacting detail, often stopping to provide careful, technical explanations of various legal procedures. As he will readily acknowledge, he likes to argue, and not always delicately. “I’m a little hotheaded, I’m a little loud,” he told me. But, he insisted, when he began talking with the students in the library that day, he was seeking genuine political engagement. When the students reacted angrily to his questions, he began to lose his patience. The conversation turned tense, which is where the video starts, with his quip calling Ingber a “new Brooklyner.” (Lopez told me this comment was a nod to the fact that the state of Israel was founded by newcomers from the West, though it also echoes a common online talking point implying that all modern Israelis are Jewish American transplants.) But he was trying to disengage; that’s why he firmly closed the gate as Ingber was following him out of the library. He maintains that he never hit Castro and only grabbed his phone to stop the recording.

NYU personnel acknowledged that Castro had “body-slammed” Lopez; still, when police arrived, Lopez was the only one who was arrested.

Elias Lopez in front of NYU’s Bobst Library in New York City

Adam Golfer

After police arrested Lopez that day, he spent the night in a cold cell; he hadn’t brought his coat to campus, as it had been unusually warm for November. In the morning, at his arraignment on multiple misdemeanor charges of assault and harassment, his public defender seemed confident that the prosecutors wouldn’t bother pressing minor charges against an NYU student with a clean record. But Lopez, having watched a media firestorm erupt over anti-war protests and campus antisemitism in the past month, knew better. “It is not going to get dropped. They are going to try to push it,” he recalls telling the lawyer. He was right. In a few months’ time, despite having access to security footage that troubled Ingber’s and Castro’s account of the fight, Manhattan District Attorney (DA) Alvin Bragg’s office would charge Lopez with a hate crime—employing a statute intended to protect minorities from serious acts of racist violence as a means to escalate his case to a felony.

Lopez was arrested in the early days of an accelerating crackdown on supporters of Palestinian rights. In the weeks and months after the October 7th attacks, universities disbanded student clubs and fired nontenured faculty, media outlets severed ties with journalists, and hotels canceled planned conferences, all in the name of fighting antisemitism. From the start, this repressive response also included a criminal crackdown, in which police and prosecutors sought to stick protestors with serious felonies rather than the misdemeanor charges typical for civil disobedience. Last year, for example, 26 protestors who held up traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge were charged with a litany of offenses by the San Francisco District Attorney, including felony conspiracy. Lawyers in the Bay Area “definitely feel that folks on the side of Palestinian liberation get treated differently” by the justice system, said Jeff Wozniak, a criminal defense attorney who represents protestors as a member of the National Lawyers Guild. In places like New York City, where prosecutors’ offices are generally hesitant to bring criminal charges against protesters, local civil rights defense attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen described seeing a new “willingness on the part of prosecutors to treat garden-variety protest behavior as inherently dangerous, inherently antisemitic, inherently criminal.” Palestine Legal, which supports pro-Palestine protestors facing repression, received 188 intake requests for help defending against criminal charges between October 2023 and October 2024. Before October 7th, the criminal intake numbers had been so negligible that the organization didn’t bother to track them, a spokesperson told me.

In a small but significant portion of these criminal cases, the defendant, like Lopez, has been charged with a hate crime—representing a relatively novel use of a statute that is widely understood as a civil rights protection. To charge someone with a hate crime, prosecutors must prove that the accused not only committed a crime—whether it be vandalism, assault, or murder—but did so due to an evident bias against the victim’s identity. (The types of crimes that are eligible, as well as the characteristics that are protected—such as race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and religion—vary by state.) A “hate crime enhancement” on a charge can bump a misdemeanor to a felony, increasing the potential sentence. The use of these charges in relation to Israel/Palestine is not unprecedented: In September 2021, two men were charged with felony assault as a hate crime for allegedly attacking Jews at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles the previous May, during protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza—though criminal proceedings eventually revealed that the incident had been a two-way fight, potentially started by the pro-Israel diners. After October 7th, such charges have proliferated as protest activity has ramped up. “In the stories we’re hearing from jails, from the streets, from campuses, we can see that hate crime laws are now a favored tool of both the state and the Israel lobby,” said Liz Jackson, a lawyer at Palestine Legal.

Lopez is one of 17 individuals identified by Jewish Currents since October 7th—across federal and state courts, from the East Coast to the West—who have been charged with antisemitic or anti-Israel hate crimes on the basis of pro-Palestine activism or speech. In some of the cases, like Lopez’s, video footage or other evidence suggests that the defendant may not have committed any underlying crime, but police and prosecutors were still eager to book them on serious charges. In others, there is more substantial evidence that a crime was committed, like vandalism, but by designating it a “hate crime,” prosecutors have construed political actions against Zionism or the state of Israel as anti-Jewish. As one judge acknowledged at a preliminary hearing for a case in Contra Costa County, California—in which a Palestinian man was charged with hate crimes for stealing and burning a Zionist counterprotestor’s Israeli flag—“the statute here, the way it was drafted, wasn’t designed to make the sort of fine distinction that people involved in this issue make . . . between Zionists and Jews and Israeli citizens.” As if to underscore his point, at least three of those charged with antisemitic hate crimes in the cases identified by Jewish Currents are themselves Jewish.

Defense attorneys like Meltzer-Cohen report seeing a “willingness on the part of prosecutors to treat garden-variety protest behavior as inherently dangerous, inherently antisemitic, inherently criminal.”

Civil rights defense attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen in Brooklyn

Adam Golfer

Such decisions are influenced by a well-funded ecosystem of Israel advocacy groups that amplify alleged antisemitic incidents in the media and appeal to institutions to punish the accused. “The immediate, default media framing is to give credence to the allegation that speech critical of Israel or critical of Zionism is antisemitism,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. “This has everybody on the defensive. Nobody wants to be accused of supporting or enabling antisemitism.” DA offices have received significant pressure from local pro-Israel groups to apply hate crime charges to protest-related incidents—and police and prosecutors have expended significant resources on such cases, even when they involve relatively minor allegations.

Despite this, DAs have had trouble actually securing hate crimes convictions: Judges and grand juries have mostly tossed out charges, or juries have voted to acquit defendants. But by that point, those facing charges have already been significantly impacted. They have been identified as perpetrators of hate across multiple media sources—including, at times, in official DA or Department of Justice press releases—and have lost jobs, been suspended from school, or used significant resources to pay bail or legal fees. “Part of the lawfare repression strategy is that the legal process itself is the punishment,” said Jackson. “A criminal defendant who’s totally innocent can still be dragged through a terrifying, miserable process that can ruin their life.”

To be sure, hate crime charges since October 7th have not been reserved for pro-Palestine protesters. A Chicago man who stabbed a six-year-old Palestinian American boy the week after the Hamas-led attacks was convicted of murder as a hate crime in February. And, as in the past, defendants continue to be charged with clearly antisemitic hate crimes unrelated to Palestine, like sending Nazi-coded threats to Jewish clergy or attacking congregants outside of synagogues. But the ease with which the laws have been mobilized to menace those associated with a popular anti-war movement raises questions about the value of hate crime statutes as a tool for justice.

Indeed, progressive critics have warned for decades that such statutes were at least as likely to be used against marginalized people as to protect them. This did not deter diverse coalitions of activists from enshrining criminal penalties for hate crimes in state law across the country—a push led by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is responsible for drafting model hate crimes legislation that has been widely adopted. Though the organization originally pursued this work separately from its Israel advocacy, the statutes have now become useful in its current project of repressing anti-Zionism. As the right increasingly cloaks its racist, authoritarian aims in anti-discrimination discourse—claiming that the dismantling of the liberal university and even the deportation of immigrants is necessary for the safety of a Jewish minority—it is becoming clear that the laws are an effective tool with which to throttle the left. “There is a concerted movement to criminalize activism for Palestinian rights, and in that context hate crime charges are often a way of intensifying and escalating punishment,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University who has extensively studied hate crimes. With the Trump administration pledging in February to pursue more federal hate crime charges against pro-Palestine activists, and more states adopting a definition of antisemitism that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish animus, these recent prosecutions may mark the beginning of a chilling new legal paradigm.

In 1981, in response to a documented rise in anti-Jewish vandalism, the ADL drafted a model statute for what would come to be called hate crimes legislation. The law, designed for adoption in state legislatures, specified that perpetrators who targeted victims for “personal characteristics” like race, religion, or national origin, or who went after religious institutions or community centers, would face more serious charges and harsher penalties, in recognition of the way these crimes intimidated a broader community. While the issue of hate crimes would eventually became associated with shocking murders and brutal assaults—like the 1998 killing of Matthew Shephard, a gay man, in Laramie, Wyoming—the ADL’s initial goal was to draw attention to more modest incidents, like swastika graffiti or the desecration of Jewish tombstones, according to the scholar Clara Lewis, author of Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes. “None of the more serious crimes were in there,” David Raim, the ADL lawyer who drafted the model legislation, told Lewis. “The thought was those activities were punished enough by the law as is. This was trying to make low-level offenses, misdemeanors, into felonies.”

The ADL’s campaign against antisemitic vandalism emerged at a time when other communities were also seeking policy remedies for pervasive attacks and harassment. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, amid threats from increasingly organized white power groups, organizations like the NAACP, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium joined the hate crime legislation movement. (By the mid-’90s, the coalition added sexual orientation and gender to the list of protected characteristics they hoped to enshrine in the statutes.) But the ADL remained the driving force, organizing the coalition and setting its top-line agenda. The effort quickly saw enormous success: By 1990, 23 states added hate crime statutes; today, all but two states have adopted them. The coalition also succeeded in passing significant legislation at the federal level, like the 2009 Matthew Shephard and James Byrd, Jr., Act, which allows the federal government to step in and prosecute an offense as a hate crime in any state.

The success of hate crimes legislation was especially striking in an era defined by right-wing backlash to social movements, and reflected the laws’ contradictory character. As legal scholar Terry Maroney wrote in a 1998 article, the hate crimes strategy relied on a fusion of two traditionally opposed political tendencies: the civil rights movement, which sought to expand the legal rights of minorities, and the crime victims’ advocacy movement, a conservative effort that sought to restrict the rights of defendants in court for the sake of victims—itself a reaction against expanded due process protections from the civil rights movement. “[Hate crime laws] allowed politicians to simultaneously appear tough on crime and pro-civil rights,” said Sinnar.

“Hate crime laws allowed politicians to simultaneously appear tough on crime and pro-civil rights.”

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks with other testifiers before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the increase in religious hate crimes, May 2nd, 2017.

Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

Today, the actual impact of the hate crime campaign is unclear. Changes in rates of bias-motivated violence aren’t easy to measure, in part due to police departments’ longtime reluctance to report data on the issue. But study after study has shown that imposing longer sentences for certain crimes has a negligible effect on deterrence. Indeed, a Movement Advancement Project (MAP) report co-released with the ADL and 15 other civil rights organizations in 2021 directly acknowledged this limitation: “There is little to no evidence that harsher sentencing reduces crime—meaning there is little to no evidence supporting the central tool of these policies.” Still, the ADL has insisted on the symbolic power of its flagship legislation. “When you’re talking about murders, adding years to somebody who’s already going to be probably in jail for the rest of his life is not meaningful,” Steven Freeman, a longtime ADL civil rights lawyer, said on a New York Times podcast on hate crime laws in March 2021. “But talking about it as a hate crime, that message is an appropriate message for us to be sending.”

That message can come at a cost to those already most impacted by the criminal justice system. The 2021 MAP report found that “hate crimes reported by state law enforcement are disproportionately listed as having Black perpetrators,” even as national studies consistently show that most hate crimes are committed by white people. “It’s not like the systemic biases within the police or prosecutors’ offices go away when it comes to hate crimes,” said Sinnar. The laws can also easily be appropriated by conservatives: In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, six states have passed laws that include “police officer” as a “protected class” in their hate crime statutes. (Two pro-Palestine protesters in Louisiana were arrested last year on “hate crime against law enforcement” charges.)

American Jews can hold a contradictory position within this system, given that the majority of them—unlike some of their partners in hate crimes coalitions—do not face increased risk of police violence or biased treatment by prosecutors, or live in neighborhoods disproportionality impacted by mass incarceration. Jews may also feel more comfortable reporting bias incidents to police, which can lead to better representation in hate crime data as compared to other groups. “There’s a tremendous discrepancy between the Jewish American community’s relationship with law enforcement and their comfort in reporting, and that of the Arab American community, which has a strained relationship with law enforcement due to historic targeting and profiling,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute.

This has sometimes made hate crimes against Jews a convenient rhetorical tool for those trying to temper criminal justice reforms. In New York, after a 2020 measure limited the court’s ability to require cash bail for most lower-level offenses—making it less likely that defendants would sit in jail simply because they were poor—conservative and centrist lawmakers, as well as prosecutors and police, seized on a series of high-profile antisemitic hate crimes committed by Black perpetrators as a pretext to roll back the reform. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told The Times of Israel that “there should be no bail” at all for anyone who commits a hate crime. Ultimately, the legislature went on to add more than 30 offenses to the law that would be exceptions to the “no cash bail” rule—including certain hate crimes.

Meltzer-Cohen described today’s weaponization of hate crime statutes against pro-Palestine protesters as a predictable use of a type of law that was already inattentive to power dynamics—but still a perversion of their intention. “Hate crimes legislation rests upon the assumption that there are certain categories of people who require extra protection,” they said. But police and prosecutors are acting on the “fundamental misapprehension” that protestors opposing Israel’s war—people who have been shunned by most American institutions and faced relentless targeting and doxxing by well-funded Zionist groups—are the ones with the power, and must be punished for the protection of Jews.

Lopez spent the rest of the fall 2023 semester waiting to see whether the DA would pursue the charges against him. In the meantime, he also faced disciplinary proceedings at NYU: A week after the incident, an administrator informed him that he would be suspended for a full year, beginning the following semester. (Ingber also was called into a disciplinary meeting for following Lopez out of the library, even as security officers urged her to stop; there is no public record of her receiving a suspension.) Lopez did his best to prepare, securing a full-time job as an interpreter at a home care company for the time he would be out of school. As the semester drew to a close, his family begged him to come home to Texas for Christmas, but he felt anxious about flying with criminal charges pending. So he spent Christmas alone, still awaiting news from the DA. Some of his friends stopped talking to him, because they feared reputational damage from hanging out with someone accused of an antisemitic crime, he said. It made for a lonely time. “My whole life was up in the air,” he said.

But when Lopez received no formal notice of suspension, he quit his job and registered for spring classes. As the semester wore on, he started to hope that no news was good news: Perhaps the DA would let his charges expire, and NYU would allow him to finish out the semester and graduate. Instead, within a few days at the end of February, he received an email from an NYU administrator asking him to come to a formal disciplinary meeting, and a call from his attorneys letting him know that his misdemeanor charges would be upgraded to felony hate crimes and presented to a grand jury for indictment. “It just hit me, one after the other,” he said. On February 28th, his 22nd birthday, the panic sent his heart rate so high that he went to the emergency room. “The nurses were all freaking out,” he said. “They thought I was on drugs.”

Ingber told the Assistant District Attorneys that she wanted Lopez “to be charged to the fullest extent of the law because it’s a hate crime and anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitism.”

NYU student Bella Ingber speaks at a press conference about campus antisemitism at the US Capitol, December 5th, 2023.

Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images

The DA’s decision to bring hate crime charges followed months of lobbying by Ingber and her legal representatives. At an interview with prosecutors on December 7th, 2023, Ingber apparently told the assistant district attorneys, according to their notes, that she wanted Lopez “to be charged to the fullest extent of the law because it’s a hate crime and anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitism.” A few days later, a lawyer from the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, which was representing Ingber and other students in their antisemitism lawsuit against NYU, followed up by sending Manhattan Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Jaclyn Yoselevich a memo of the firm’s “research” on how Lopez’s comments to Ingber, calling her a “new Brooklyner” and referencing “skin cancer,” had shown antisemitic animus. (A significant portion of the memo consisted of screenshots of a Reddit forum called “ProIran,” in which users joked about Israelis of European descent being more susceptible to skin cancer than Palestinians.) The firm appeared dissatisfied with the prosecutors’ pace and attention to the case: On January 25th, Marc E. Kasowitz, the head of the firm, personally wrote to Bragg, the DA, urging the office to treat the alleged assault as a hate crime.

For Sean Fabi, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who defended Lopez, these interactions suggested that the DA’s office was allowing a private firm to feed them a legal analysis, rather than making their own determination. While such lobbying is not unheard of, and ADAs are required to communicate with a victim through their attorneys if they have legal representation, Fabi said he was struck by the way the ADAs appeared to be parroting research from the Kasowitz memo in meetings, without being able to offer their own explanation for why Lopez’s comments qualified as hateful. Since the firm had a vested financial and political interest in the case—a hate crime charge against Lopez would aid their lawsuit claiming that NYU permitted antisemitism on its campus—Fabi believes that the DA’s use of their work was “obviously unethical.” (Doug Cohen, a spokesperson for Alvin Bragg’s office, countered that the office has an “ethical obligation . . . to review all evidence” presented by “the lawyers representing victims and defendants,” but said the firm’s input “did not guide our decision making.” Because the case has now been sealed, he could not provide more specifics.)

Later that year, public pressure over alleged antisemitic incidents also appeared to influence Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office in its pursuit of a more high-profile case. On June 12th, 2024, activists vandalized the homes of four members of the Brooklyn Museum’s leadership, dousing doors and facades in red paint, writing the words “blood on your hands,” and drawing the circled A anarchism symbol and an inverted red triangle. (The latter is a symbol adopted by some Palestine solidarity activists, referencing Hamas propaganda videos from Gaza in which triangles identify invading Israeli tanks and soldiers as military targets.) At museum director Anne Pasternak’s home, activists hung a banner calling her a “white-supremacist Zionist.” The anonymous activists said in a communiqué that they were responding to the brutal arrests of protesters two weeks before, as they occupied the museum’s lobby, demanding its divestment from Israel. (The Brooklyn Museum has denied that it called the police on protestors, while activists insist that they saw a museum security guard make the call to police.) The vandalism immediately drew condemnation from local and national politicians—including a denouncement on the Senate floor from majority leader Chuck Schumer—and media accounts reinforced the claim that the targets had been selected because they were Jewish. Even after reporting in The Forward clarified that of the four officials, only Pasternak was Jewish, the three people arrested that fall—Taylor Pelton, Gabriel Schubiner, and Sam Seligson, the latter of whom says he had no involvement in the vandalism and was on the scene observing as a journalist—were charged with “criminal mischief as a hate crime.” (Both Seligson and Schubiner are Jewish.)

Gonzalez’s office and the New York Police Department proved willing to devote serious resources to the case. The prosecution presented testimony to the grand jury from 14 detectives and four other police officers detailing how they had tracked down suspects through surveillance video and home raids. Ron Kuby, a prominent civil rights lawyer who is representing Seligson, said these efforts represent “an incredible amount of investigatory time,” suggesting that Gonzalez’s office was treating this “glorified graffiti case” more like a murder case. “Most homicides don’t get a quarter of this attention,” he said. Indeed, during the grand jury proceedings, the ADA assigned to the case introduced several additional charges, including “making a terroristic threat as a hate crime,” which carries mandatory prison time and which Kuby called “a huge stretch under the laws that presently exist.” (A spokesperson for Gonzalez’s office said that the DA cannot comment on open cases.)

According to civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby, Gonzalez’s office treated the “glorified graffiti case” involving the Brooklyn Museum more like a murder case.

Sam Seligson in Brooklyn

Adam Golfer

Lawyers for the Brooklyn Museum defendants attribute the severity of the prosecution’s approach in part to the Brooklyn DA’s desire to appease a vocal pro-Israel constituency. Elsewhere, defense attorneys have reported that outsized media attention on alleged antisemitic incidents has affected their cases. In California’s Contra Costa County, in the East Bay, a man named Christopher Husary—the child of Palestinian immigrants to the US—was arrested at a January 2024 ceasefire protest and charged with robbery and arson for allegedly grabbing and burning a counterprotester’s Israeli flag. According to Husary’s lawyer, Nathan Peterson, the Contra Costa DA’s office faced a “bombardment of pressure” from local pro-Israel activists. The woman who owned the flag told The Jewish News of Northern California that it had been an “heirloom,” formerly owned by a deceased local civil rights activist, and said she hoped Husary would be charged with a hate crime. As part of the pretrial discovery process, the prosecution sent the defense a bevy of voicemails in which Jewish community members urged the DA’s office to “throw the book at this guy” because “they weren’t safe,” Peterson said. “That really did affect the tenor of the prosecution,” he told me. Husary himself insisted in police interviews that he was not motivated by any anti-Jewish animus, according to the investigating officer’s testimony at a preliminary hearing in June. In fact, he told the officer about his grandparents in Bethlehem, who supported themselves by selling knitted yarmulkes to their Jewish neighbors, with whom they were close. He also explained that he understood Zionism to be an ideology, not a religion or ethnicity, and that this ideology was responsible for mass killing in Gaza. Still, Husary was given hate crime enhancements on both of his charges.

In certain districts, defense lawyers say, the effort put into prosecuting minor crimes by pro-Palestine protesters stands in sharp contrast to the lax approach taken to acts of violence against them. In May 2024, a local rabbi and real estate developer (and, notably, a relative of the late right-wing extremist Meir Kahane) was arrested in Manhattan for assault after allegedly bumping protestors with his car outside the home of a Columbia University trustee. But six months later, Bragg’s office allowed the charges to expire under speedy trial requirements, effectively declining to pursue the case. In Brooklyn, Gonzalez quickly downgraded the charges against a banking executive accused of punching a woman wearing a keffiyeh, from a felony to a misdemeanor. In discussing this case and another from Brooklyn, in which a local attorney was not charged with a hate crime after allegedly assaulting and pepper spraying a participant in a stoop sale raising money for families in Gaza, Kuby said he sees a double standard at work. “I’m not particularly comfortable calling for hate crimes prosecutions against anybody, but I do think that people need to be treated equally,” he told me.

It’s rare for defendants to testify on their own behalf, but Lopez’s lawyers decided that it might be in his interest to give his own account, in his meticulous manner, before the grand jury tasked with deciding whether or not to indict him. NYU had officially informed him in March that he would, in fact, be retroactively suspended for the whole spring semester. (Unlike the earlier NYU communication to trustees, the disciplinary letter definitively accused him of hitting Castro.) Lopez, who relied on a near-full scholarship to attend NYU, had quit his home care job and taken out a federal loan to pay his housing costs. Now he was in debt for a semester that wouldn’t even count toward his degree. But he was too preoccupied by the criminal charges to push back on the school’s terms. His days that month consisted of preparing his testimony; he avoided socializing around NYU, fearful that he might run into Ingber or somehow get into trouble again.

Even as they worked with Lopez on his testimony, Fabi and other Legal Aid attorneys were still trying to get clarity on what had led the DA to pursue hate crime charges. What kind of hate crime was Lopez even being charged with: Anti-Jewish? Anti-Israeli, since “national origin” is a protected category under the New York statute? Anti-white, for the comment about susceptibility to skin cancer? But the prosecutors refused to talk details before the grand jury proceedings.

Lopez testified at the grand jury at the beginning of April. The case has since been sealed, so the DA’s office would not make a transcript available to me, but Lopez recalled intensive questioning from a male ADA who appeared to be trying to trap him into admitting anti-Jewish animus, asking questions like, “When you said ‘Palestine will be free from you,’ you meant free from Jews, right?” (Lopez’s answer, as he recounted it to me: “No, clearly not. Jewish people have lived in Palestine for a long time.”) At one point, the prosecutor asked Lopez, “What would a free Palestine look like to you?” which his lawyers considered an egregious attempt to make his political speech subject to criminal prosecution. Ultimately, the experience left Fabi with the impression that the prosecutors had “an enormous lack of clarity on these issues,” while having “all the power to decide how to wield the statute.”

That same lack of clarity characterized the proceedings against Husary, the protestor who had burned an Israeli flag in Contra Costa. The judge hearing the preliminary arguments had admitted that the statute wasn’t designed to capture the “fine distinctions” that activists on Israel/Palestine make between Zionists and Jews, but was still convinced that Husary’s actions could plausibly have targeted Israelis as a nationality; in an exchange with Peterson, he seemed skeptical that “Israeli” and “Zionist” were not equivalent terms. Ultimately, he determined that Husary’s case met the low burden of proof required to advance beyond a preliminary hearing. Husary agreed to a plea deal, requiring him to serve six months in county jail and two years of probation. Peterson continues to believe the legal basis for calling this a “hate crime” is dubious: By the same logic, he said, burning an American flag would constitute a hate crime against Americans. “We know flag burning in and of itself is protected speech, and [American flag burning] would never be prosecuted like that,” he said. A spokesperson for the Contra Costa DA’s office defended the office’s approach to the case and rejected the accusation that it was impacted by public pressure, writing in an email that Husary’s conviction showed that he had “committed a robbery that was motivated, either entirely or partially, by the victim’s ethnicity or religion.” (Just as the California case was resolved, Husary was separately charged with a hate crime in New York City for allegedly vandalizing a subway train door with a red triangle and threatening a Jewish passenger who took photos of it; his New York–based lawyer declined to comment in detail but said he planned to contest the hate crime charge in court.)

The judge admitted that the statute wasn’t designed to capture the “fine distinctions” that activists on Israel/Palestine make between Zionists and Jews.

Graffiti on Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak’s home in

Brooklyn Heights, June 12th, 2024.

Eric Adams via X

In a 2023 speech on the history of his organization’s hate crimes advocacy, ADL attorney Freeman emphasized that, “by design,” the notion that a defendant intentionally targeted someone due to a protected identity “should be hard to prove. And sometimes it can’t be proven.” Yet in several cases since October 7th, prosecutors have relied on tenuous evidence to try to prove that defendants targeted victims for their Jewishness. In the Brooklyn Museum case, prosecutors are arguing that the defendants targeted the homes of four board members because they thought they were Jewish—even after it was revealed that only Pasternak was. In grand jury proceedings, the ADA emphasized that two other victims, COO Kimberly Trueblood and board chairman Barbara Vogelstein, have Jewish husbands (with the latter having taken her husband’s last name). In a motion, the prosecutor characterized them, as well as treasurer Neil Simpkins, as people who are all “Jewish or follow Jewish religious practices (and have traditionally Jewish last names).” A defense motion pointed out that there was no evidence that the defendants knew Trueblood’s or Vogelstein’s husbands were Jewish; that no evidence had been presented to show that Simpkins is Jewish or has Jewish family; and that the graffiti had not mentioned anything related to Jewishness. But before the grand jury, the Brooklyn DA called Justin Finkelstein, a researcher at the ADL Center on Extremism, who described the red triangle pictured in the graffiti as a symbol Hamas uses “to target Israeli people and Jewish people.” “The claim being made is that an inverted red triangle is inherently a symbol of antisemitism, as opposed to what it actually is, which is a symbol of Palestinian resistance,” Meltzer-Cohen told me. They said it was fair to question whether Brooklyn Museum leaders were apt targets, but given “ample documentation” of a yearlong campaign pushing the museum to divest from weapons companies, “there is no reason to believe that this is targeted at Jews. There is no evidence whatsoever that what was animating these actions was anything other than, ‘Please stop investing in the war machine.’”

Still, the prosecutors’ arguments were enough to convince the grand jury to indict the three defendants on all charges; in February, a judge dismissed the most severe charges—those that carried mandatory prison time—but the charge of criminal mischief as a hate crime remains. Overall, Meltzer-Cohen said, the prosecution’s attempt to equate protesters’ actions with antisemitism here and in other cases suggests that the “propaganda machine has managed to convince everybody”—including police and district attorneys—“that we cannot criticize Zionism without being antisemitic.”

Even as various DAs have taken it upon themselves to prosecute anti-Zionism as hate, efforts are already underway to make sure it’s not only a matter of prosecutorial discretion. In recent years, six states have passed laws explicitly directing police, prosecutors, and judges to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism to enforce hate crime laws; five more states have given the same instructions in proclamations, resolutions, executive orders, or sentencing guidelines. The IHRA definition has been rejected by various civil rights and free speech groups because it defines certain criticisms of Israel—like “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policies to that of the Nazis”—as antisemitism. Even where such statutes have not been passed into law, the ADL, as a frequent leader in community hate crimes task forces, is “effectively working to influence the way law enforcement is being trained” to recognize such crimes, said Berry of the Arab American Institute, which has for years advocated for recognition of hate crimes against Arab Americans.

At the federal level, meanwhile, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now under the control of an administration that has made clear its intention to punish pro-Palestine protesters using means far outside legal norms. In late February, Leo Terrell, head of the DOJ’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism—a new body created by the Trump administration—pledged to Israel’s Channel 12 news that the department would soon announce federal hate crime indictments against students involved in “disorderly demonstrations, supporting Hamas, and trying to intimidate Jews.” He promised the department would “put these people in jail—not for 24 hours, but for years.” Terrell was not impressed by the effort DAs have already put into prosecuting dubious cases like Lopez’s, castigating prosecutors in liberal cities for taking insufficient initiative. But civil rights attorneys argue that liberals—from the advocates who created hate crimes laws to the urban prosecutors who deploy them—have been the administration’s most important allies. “All the work that the ADL has done over decades—the narrative work framing advocates for Palestinian lives as hateful, and the legal work creating pathways to charge activists for what should be protected speech—has teed it up for Trump to come in and use this as a tool for widespread repression,” said Jackson.

Those who have faced hate crime charges can testify to the way this kind of repression upends people’s lives. Hannah Tucker, a 29-year-old daycare worker living in Boise, was arrested last summer and charged with felony “malicious harassment”—Idaho’s version of a hate crime statute—after a verbal altercation with a Jewish man who approached her when she was shouting pro-Palestine chants in a busy downtown area. Tucker’s lawyer, Mikela French, told me she believes the police escalated a minor disagreement to a hate crime arrest in an attempt to target Tucker for her participation in a Gaza solidarity encampment at the Idaho State Capitol. (The Boise Police Department declined to comment on Tucker’s arrest.) The case was dismissed in December by a district court judge, who wrote in a succinct brief that the victim’s testimony did not provide sufficient evidence that Tucker “acted with the specific intent to intimidate or harass [him] because of his religion.” But the damage was done. Even before Tucker was released 24 hours after the arrest on $25,000 bail, a police press release went out accusing her of targeting a Jewish man. The daycare where Tucker worked as the lead teacher for the infant room fired her that same day, emailing all the daycare families, some of whom Tucker also worked for as a babysitter, to inform them that she had committed a hate crime and would no longer be working there. “That hurt me the most,” Tucker told me. “I’d raised the kids during the first year of their lives. I’d grown really attached to them and their families. All of that was ripped away.” Unable to pay rent and still in debt for her bail, she had to give up her apartment and has spent months crashing on friends’ couches.

Hannah Tucker in Boise, Idaho.

Kyle Green

Lopez, for his part, received word a week after his grand jury proceedings that, against all odds, they had decided not to indict him on any charges—a rare outcome in a system where grand jury indictments require an extremely low burden of proof. The case would be dismissed and leave nothing on his record. Lopez went on to graduate from NYU the following semester, in the fall of 2024. But he has found that the chapter isn’t so easily closed: The headlines about his arrest are still the top result when you Google his legal name and “NYU.” Struggling to find his first post-grad job and getting by with temp work, he’s “terrified” he’ll never escape the shadow of the incident in the library. “I didn’t hurt anyone, and I didn’t say any slurs,” he told me. But the result “will probably affect me and my career negatively for the rest of my life.”

Lopez still has regrets about engaging with Ingber and her cohort of demonstrators that day. “It’s not like I was prosecuted for being a hero,” he said. “I was a little shit. I was rude.” But people are frequently rude without having months of their life swallowed by a high-stakes criminal process, or having to pay thousands of dollars in loans—another cost for which Lopez will not be made whole. Meanwhile, in July 2024, Ingber and the other plaintiffs settled their lawsuit against NYU: In addition to pledging to devote more administrative resources to combat antisemitism under the IHRA definition, and even to strengthen the school’s ties with Tel Aviv University in Israel, the university agreed to pay the plaintiffs an undisclosed sum. A few months later, on a podcast run by the Jewish day school she attended, Ingber said the lawsuit had inspired her to pursue a career in civil rights litigation. “I would love to do what my lawyers did for me,” she said.

Support for this report was provided by the Puffin Foundation.

Mari Cohen is the associate editor of Jewish Currents.

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History Lesson

On Adam Kirsch and settler colonialism

Laleh Khalili

Palestinian men are harassed during the Nakba, 1948.

CPA Media/Alamy

Discussed in this essay: On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, by Adam Kirsch. W. W. Norton, 2024. 160 pages.

In August 2024, The Atlantic published a slapdash essay by the literary critic Adam Kirsch titled “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism.” Kirsch claimed that the concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s “as a way of linking social evils in [Australia, Canada, and the United States] today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement,” and that it could not possibly be applied to brave little Israel. After all, unlike the US or Australia, Israel’s settlement of a former “province of the Ottoman Empire” did not have continental reach, what with Israel being “about the size of New Jersey,” pluckily bobbing in a hostile sea of Arab states. And whereas settler colonialism is marked by “the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures,” Israel, Kirsch insisted, “did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine.”

The article’s countless errors and elisions quickly attracted widespread derision on social media: Some readers cited examples of scholarship on settler colonialism produced long before the ’90s, while others picked apart Kirsch’s historical inaccuracies about Palestine—for instance, rebutting his minimization of the Nakba by referring to books by Palestinian and Israeli scholars that provide extensive evidence of the mass ethnic cleansing that accompanied the state’s founding. (Kirsch admits in passing that Israel “did displace many” Palestinians, but declines to note the scale of the dispossession—about 750,000 people expelled from about 78% of historic Palestine, their razed towns and villages supplanted by settlements—or clarify how this is distinct from “erasing” or “replacing” them.)

Despite the thorough evisceration, Kirsch has since displayed his methodological negligence at a much larger scale: The Atlantic noted that the essay was adapted from a forthcoming book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. Much like the capsule-length version, the book, which was published in August, attempts to argue not only that the concept of settler colonialism is so much nonsense in the context of the US or Australia, but that, when applied to Israel, it becomes something far more sinister: antisemitic “ideology,” a word Kirsch seems to apply to any idea with the potential to shape political reality—especially in ways he finds unsettling.

Though its authoritative-seeming title presents the text as the work of an expert, On Settler Colonialism is, to put it mildly, not a scholarly book. If it were, it would have had to acknowledge the broad range of theoretical and empirical research in the fields of history, sociology, and settler colonial studies, instead of fulminating about cherry-picked lines from left-wing scholars—many of them Black or Indigenous—and eliding the contributions of Palestinians. Throughout, Kirsch quotes exclusively in order to excoriate. The summaries of the books and articles he condemns are so bland, vague, and under-specified that they could have been written by ChatGPT. It seems clear that Kirsch harvested some of his citations from his social media critics; for example, the book, unlike the article, quotes the radical French historian Maxime Rodinson, whose work was mentioned in a response to the Atlantic piece by Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. Kirsch also appears to have relied on his detractors to correct some of his more obvious mistakes: He moves the origin of the concept of settler colonialism back several decades, to 1976, when Australian scholar Kenneth Good used the term to describe Rhodesia. But Kirsch’s engagement with these lifted sources only underscores his general sloppiness. He misrepresents Rodinson by focusing solely on his plea for the humane treatment of settlers and fails to notice that Good was preceded by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and dozens of Palestinians.

The word “woke” doesn’t appear in Kirsch’s book, but the text is, in essence, a vitriolic, anti-woke screed. Despite its lack of substance, it is noteworthy as a prime example of the frenzy of negation being undertaken by stalwarts of Israel in legacy media, who have spent the time since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza discrediting any scholarship, concept, or idea that could challenge the legitimacy of the state. The Atlantic has put itself forward as the leading platform for such efforts, publishing, in addition to Kirsch’s essay, a jeremiad “against guilty history” by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, in which he argues that “settler colonial should be a description, not an insult,” and whines that contemporary citizens of settler states “owe honor to those who built and secured” their societies; and a piece by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a pop historian of Russia, decrying the “dangerous and false” conception of Israel as an “imperialist-colonialist” entity and disparaging student protesters as the political heirs of “the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler.” Such anti-intellectual pablum has also liberally graced the pages of other storied outlets. In The New York Times, France correspondent Roger Cohen similarly deplored the fact that “‘colonial’ is enjoying a field day . . . as an insult, or line of attack,” arguing that in the case of Israel, “the ‘colonizer’ label fails in more ways than it succeeds.” Kirsch himself, writing in The Wall Street Journal, sought to nullify even more terminology, pleading for “retiring” the term “genocide” because it has become “a political flashpoint.”

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The word “woke” doesn’t appear in Kirsch’s book, but the text is, in essence, a vitriolic, anti-woke screed.

Establishment media’s comprehensive disavowal of reams of serious scholarly work is in part a rearguard action to defend Israel and its “right” to use unconstrained violence. But there is also something else at play: Kirsch’s book can be understood as an aggrieved reaction against an undeniable, ongoing shift concerning what ideas get taken seriously, both in the halls of academe and in the public square. Even his methodological carelessness conveys a sense of entitlement to continue setting the terms of debate. By demonizing any scholarly concept that might have normative implications—and thus function as a call to action—as illegitimate “ideology,” Kirsch effectively advocates for a sterile form of knowledge production, in which thinking and writing are hermetically sealed off from affecting the real world.

On Settler Colonialism’s fundamental unseriousness is evident from its earliest pages. The first four chapters, a flimsy overview of settler colonialism in Africa and the Americas, are rife with misrepresentations, decontextualized arguments, and willful omissions. Kirsch cannot hide his obvious frustration with the demands that this field of historical scholarship exerts on the present. He accuses the late scholar Patrick Wolfe and other “Euro-American do-gooders” in settler colonial studies of coming up with a concept that functions as a “black armband,” requiring the public “to be forever in mourning for the crimes of the past.” And while he acknowledges that casting off the yoke of settler colonialism in wars of liberation led to the establishment of independent national states in places like Rhodesia and Algeria, he dismisses the idea that such struggles could remain relevant now; even if we were to accept that the US and Australia are settler states, he cautions, since Indigenous communities today make up only a small percentage of the population in these countries, a demand for decolonization “indicts the many in pursuit of justice for the few.” In this context, the anti-colonial call for “land back,” for example, “cannot be satisfied even in principle.”

Unsurprisingly, Kirsch caricatures Indigenous mobilization in the Americas and elsewhere, ignoring the breadth and specificity of such communities’ political activism around issues ranging from environmental degradation and climate change to food security to reparations for historic abuses—including, yes, the return of expropriated lands to First Nations. In the process, he takes potshots at scholars of Native American history, especially the celebrated Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. He claims that by critiquing “the American way of life” and its basis in settler institutions, Dunbar-Ortiz is in fact taking “the progressive route to the same conclusion as some nativists,” in effect accusing her of xenophobia. Kirsch is similarly hostile to scholars of the Black American experience. He dismisses historian Robin D. G. Kelley’s exhortations to “dream of liberation” as so many “evasive pieties” and scoffs that historian Gerald Horne, by describing the US as a “hydra-headed monster,” reductively attributes “all types of social injustice” to “a single source.” Aside from the fact that, contra Kirsch’s framing, neither Kelley nor Horne is a scholar of settler colonial studies, his stripped-of-context sneering at deeply researched works of history amounts to boorish anti-intellectualism styled as profundity.

Throughout, Kirsch insinuates that the concept of settler colonialism should be dismissed based on its recency—while ignoring its actual, extensive history. Academic scholarship on settler colonialism has indeed proliferated in the past three decades, but it draws on a much deeper archive: The terms “settler” and “colonist” were already in use well before the dawn of the 20th century, and the specific anglophone phrasing of “settler colonialism” and its proximate term “settler regime” can be traced to the 1960s, when anti-colonial movements’ diagnosis of what ailed them was translated into English. Kirsch himself gestures toward Albert Memmi’s and Frantz Fanon’s writings on colonialism, which addressed settler regimes as far back as 1957 and 1961. He quotes Memmi’s remark that “the leftist finds in the struggle of the colonized, which he supports a priori, neither the traditional means nor the final aims of that left wing to which he belongs,” interpreting this to affirm his own belief that the Western left can only champion decolonization by swallowing a degree of “cognitive dissonance.” Absurdly, compares Memmi’s experience as a Jew in Tunisia’s Muslim-led liberation movement to the supposed predicament of queer Americans who support a Palestinian liberation movement led by Hamas. Kirsch conveniently leaves out not only Memmi’s searing criticism of settler regimes, but two crucial elements of the passage in question: He glosses over the fact that Memmi is specifically talking about the left-wing colonizer (think regular Haaretz readers in Israel), a figure Memmi excoriates elsewhere, and ignores Memmi’s pronouncement that “the leftist does not always clearly understand the immediate social content of the struggle of nationalistic colonized peoples,” a line that positions anti-colonial contention as a necessary, even inevitable, form of global class struggle. Kirsch’s treatment of Fanon’s extraordinary polemic about Algerian decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, is even more risible. He finds it wanting when set alongside philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface, writing that “there is a great difference between Fanon’s bloody knives and Sartre’s bloody scalpel”—presumably because the former was a Black anti-colonial revolutionary, and the latter a European Zionist.

The colonized peoples applying the framework of settler colonialism to their own struggles in the mid-20th century included Palestinians, though you would not know it from reading Kirsch’s book, which does not include any Palestinian writing published before 2018. As historian of left-wing Zionism Areej Sabbagh-Khoury writes in Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, “The interpretative framework of settler colonialism for analyzing the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians consolidated among Palestinian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, years before this term took hold in international academic discussions.” She cites book after book written in Arabic and English by Palestinians from 1965 onwards. Kirsch does not include even a single reference to Edward Said—a telling absence, given that Said introduced the Palestinian critique of settler colonialism to the anglophone intellectual milieu in the ’70s.

Throughout, Kirsch insinuates that the concept of settler colonialism should be dismissed based on its recency—while ignoring its actual, extensive history.

Palestinian families flee during the Nakba, 1948.

CPA Media/Alamy

The polemical throat-clearing of the first half of the book sets the stage for Kirsch’s attack, in the final three chapters, on the application of the settler colonial framework to Israel. By this point, Kirsch has already defined the concept as relevant only where a country is “governed by a mother country” (as in Algeria) or has a “settler class ruling over a native population” (as in South Africa), and has argued that Israel does not fit the mold, since it has, according to him, neither a mother country nor a ruling class of settlers. On the first point, On Settler Colonialism does not—and cannot—adequately address the paradox that Israel has relied throughout its history on a succession of imperial sponsors, including first the United Kingdom, then France, and then, since 1967, the US, which has seen the state as a reliable gendarme in the region. On the second point, Kirsch argues that Israeli Jews were all refugees, escaping tsarist pogroms in Eastern Europe, the Shoah enacted by the Nazis, persecution in nationalist Arab states after 1948, and finally, discrimination in the former Soviet Union. Yet the contention that refugees cannot constitute a ruling class ignores the many contexts, across hundreds of years of history, in which it was precisely the people oppressed or marginalized in their home countries—religious radicals, convicts, revolutionaries, hungry working classes—who became settlers in the colonies.

Kirsch attempts to cover this analytical muddiness with a barrage of all the familiar clichés. Israel cannot be an example of settler colonialism because Jewish settlers never replaced Palestinians: The Palestinian population—horror of horrors—quintupled in the first 75 years after the establishment of Israel. Israel cannot be “decolonized” because it was never a colonizer, but rather, as a country of refugees, the paradigmatic eternal victim. There is no Palestinian state because Palestinians are rejectionists. Plus, no one in the world is really Indigenous, and if they claim to be, they’re being “irrational,” because we have all moved from one place to another. And oh, look, you’re ignoring the brutality of Mao Zedong and the Aztec and Inca Empires! Yes, seriously.

This palimpsest of misinformation serves Kirsch’s effort to convince readers that there is no possible just resolution to Israel’s colonization of Palestine. A two-state solution—the path Kirsch has called “the only morally worthy solution that I could imagine”—ultimately will not work, he is sorry to say, nor will a “de-Zionization” of Israel to establish one equal state for all its citizens, because what the conniving Arabs really want in the last analysis is simply to kill the Jews. This, for Kirsch, is what is meant by calls to decolonize Palestine “between the river and the sea.” Indeed, he claims that the “October 7 massacre was a foretaste of exactly what being ‘driven into the sea’ would mean for Israel’s Jews”—implying that it is Palestinians committing genocide against Israel, not the other way around.

Here and elsewhere, to read Kirsch’s book is to go through a mirror darkly, into a world in which the aggressors are the people who have been expelled from their homes, dispossessed, imprisoned, and murdered by the hundreds of thousands—subjected to torture, weapons experimentation, and starkly assymetrical warfare. Kirsch’s commitment to Zionism, his sense of perpetual victimhood, is so complete that it draws a veil over reality. At the outset, Kirsch promises to conclude the book with “an alternative way of thinking about historical injustice that is both more truthful and more conducive to a better future.” Reading and rereading the final chapter, I was astonished to find that the view he puts forward is, essentially, Revisionist Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” proposition—which famously argued that the security of the Zionist project depended upon a Palestinian defeat so complete that the Indigenous people would crawl on their knees to the negotiation table and willingly vacate their rights. This thesis was “regarded by mainstream Zionists at the time as brutally pessimistic,” Kirsch tells us. Yet in his own opinion, “the intractability of the conflict has vindicated Jabotinsky’s view.”

The best corrective to Kirsch’s attempt to dismiss the concept of settler colonialism as a shallow fad is a substantive discussion of the actual historical process.

The best corrective to Kirsch’s attempt to dismiss the concept of settler colonialism as a shallow fad is a substantive discussion of the actual historical process—especially the colonization of Palestine, as understood from the vantage of its victims. While some colonial systems depended on the exploitation of local labor (sometimes via local intermediaries), the term “settler colonialism” refers specifically to those colonies where, as historian George Fredrickson wrote in The Arrogance of Race, settlers “exterminated or pushed aside the indigenous peoples” and “developed an economy based on white labor.” (In practice, this meant developing settler workers’ skills and lifting their standard of living while de-developing and de-skilling the remaining Indigenous workers, whose labor the colony continued to mine.) For European powers, settler colonialism solved two problems at once, feeding the insatiable need for labor to exploit the colonies’ natural resources and ridding the metropole of undesired or troublesome populations. As Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, reportedly told journalist W.T. Stead,

In order to keep your forty millions here from eating each other for lack of other victuals, we beyond the seas must keep open as much of the surface of this planet as we can for the overflow of your population to inhabit, and to create markets where you can dispose of the produce of your factories and your mines . . . If you have not to be cannibals, you have got to be imperialists.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, a number of Spanish moriscos and conversos moved to the nation’s colonies in the Caribbean and South and Central America; in the 17th and 18th centuries, religious nonconformists and radicals were induced to leave Britain and the Netherlands for the Caribbean, North America, and South Africa; and in the 18th and 19th centuries, convicts were transported to Australia, while the increasingly assertive European working classes were directed toward Algeria, Rhodesia, and elsewhere in the antipodes.

Against the backdrop of this long history, the peculiarity of Israeli settler colonialism is its anachronism; the declaration of the founding of the state came at the very moment when European colonies in Asia and Africa were clamoring for independence. But Israel has followed the same blueprint as its predecessors. Indeed, Jewish settlement in Palestine, which began in the latter half of the 19th century, was initially modeled on European settlers’ search for El Dorado in Southern Africa, Hawaii, and the North American Pacific Coast. Edmond de Rothschild, a major supporter of white settlement in Southern Africa, also funded that first wave of Zionist colonization and sponsored French Algerian viticulture experts to advise Zionists settlers on developing vineyards in Palestine. Though those early Zionist settlements floundered—the new arrivals lacked experience farming in semi-arid ecosystems, and their efforts bore little fruit, as sociologist Gershon Shafir has shown in his classic account, Land, Labor and the Origins of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914—the Zionist movement soon improved its position by throwing in its lot with a far more experienced colonizer: the British empire, which, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promised Zionists a state in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine.

For the British, this alliance served to establish a friendly settler population in a strategic locale, “a bulwark to the British position in Egypt and an overland link with the East,”as George Antonius, a Cambridge-educated Arab civil servant in Jerusalem, argued in his magisterial 1938 account of Arab nationalism, The Arab Awakening. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, had promoted his cause in much the same way in 1896, arguing that for Europe, a Zionist state “should form a new outpost against Asiatic barbarism and a guard of honor to hold intact the sacred shrines of the Christians.” Herzl’s imagined state would thus fulfill a dual function shared by settler colonies everywhere: The British saw Kenya and Rhodesia not only as founts of coveted natural resources, but as strategic beachheads in East and Southern Africa, while the French viewed their colony in Algeria as an important base on the Mediterranean, where the Muslim throngs were held at bay beyond Fortress Europe.

To maintain themselves as outposts of “civilized” Europe, settler colonies constructed strict systems of racial control, anchored in the punishing labor hierarchies that rendered the colonies immensely profitable. South Africa’s system of apartheid supplied its all-important mining industry with a steady stream of surveilled, monitored, and coerced African labor, while the advantages enjoyed by the pied-noir European settlers in Algeria underwrote their fealty to the colonial order. Similar structures of hierarchy extended to Palestine, where the British Mandatory powers cultivated Zionist settlement through preferential treatment of Jewish capital and labor. While the British advocated for an empire of free trade elsewhere, in Palestine they encouraged tariffs to grow Jewish businesses. Zionist institutions were given monopolies over public works, including the crucial electricity sector, whose hydroelectric components also facilitated expropriation of fertile lands adjacent to river basins, as Fredrik Meiton meticulously documents in Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation. The Yishuv, the Jewish settler community in Palestine, spoke of its aims not only in terms of the “conquest of land,” but also the “conquest of labor,” which, Shafir writes, “aimed at the displacement of Arab workers by Jewish workers in all branches and skill levels.” Zionist political institutions such as the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor in the Land of Israel, guaranteed jobs for new Jewish migrants and created a racialized wage regime whereby unionized Jewish workers could earn as much as four times more than Arab workers—in other words, a system of apartheid.

British soldiers escort a convoy of Jewish settlers

to Tel Aviv during the Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine, 1936.

The Palmer Archive/Alamy

Thus, when Palestinians revolted against the expropriation of their lands from 1936 to 1939, they were also rebelling against the “dismissal of Palestinian Arab workers from firms and projects controlled by Jewish capital,” as Palestinian thinker and militant Ghassan Kanafani wrote shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in 1972. Contemporaneous sources bear this out; when the British set up a commission of inquiry into the grievances of the Indigenous population, George Mansour, who had been the Secretary of the Arab Workers Society and active in the general strike of 1936, provided an acute analysis of the conquest of labor’s practical impact on Palestinian workers: “As the [British Mandatory] Government, which controls the national funds of the Arabs, does not provide them with labour saving devices, they remain working in primitive conditions, while the Jewish immigrants who have supplanted them receive equipment and training which enables them to improve their financial and technical position.” (Mansour’s testimony, published in 1937 as a booklet titled The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, remains an important source for historians and was excerpted in a 2012 compendium on Zionist settler colonialism by Palestinian scholars Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour.)

In Palestine in the ’30s, as in colonies everywhere, the settler regime relied on coercive force to keep the Indigenous population in line. In the Mandatory period, the Jewish settlers in Palestine were integrated into the coercive systems of rule deployed by the British: The Yishuv members of the British Palestine Police received training amid the British subjugation of the ’30s revolt, and many future officers of the Israeli military, some of whom went on to become prime ministers of Israel, served in the British army during World War II. To this day, some of Israel’s most repressive counterinsurgency practices—the use of separation walls, human shields, torture in interrogation, punitive displacement and expulsions, racialized pass systems, home demolitions, collective punishment, and administrative detention, among others—are a direct inheritance from the British, who had perfected these methods in other colonial settings.

Ultimately, coercive force facilitated not only the conquest of labor but, even more significantly, that of land. On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, the Yishuv held only 7% of the Palestinian land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But through the systematic mass expulsion of the Nakba, this 7% became 77%, and Israel achieved a modicum of demographic superiority within its new borders. Plans for the “transfer” of the Indigenous population had long been a significant part of Zionist ideology, as Nur Masalha explores in Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948. In practice, this entailed death marches from cities like Lydd (Lod), rapes and massacres in towns like Deir Yassin (where this brutality was intended in part to terrorize others into leaving), and Palestinians being literally pushed into the sea at the harbor in Haifa, along with countless other atrocities. Much of this violence was captured in oral histories collected in Nafez Nazzal’s The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1948 (1978) and Rosemary Sayigh’s The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979)—both published long before Israeli “New Historians” were given access to the state archives that confirmed these accounts.

The very history of Israeli settler colonialism, in other words, fatally undercuts Kirsch’s protestations that the concept amounts to newfangled jargon, incorrectly applied. So, too, does the fact that in the first decades of the Israeli state’s existence, Palestinian thinkers were already dissecting its colonial character. Among the earliest and most astute analyses was Fayez Sayegh’s 1965 pamphlet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. In a chapter titled “The Character of the Zionist Settler-State,” Sayegh enumerates three features of the Israeli settler colonial regime: “(1) its racial complexion and racist conduct pattern; (2) its addiction to violence; and (3) its expansionist stance.” By then, the state had erected new racialized systems of law and labor, instituting martial law over the Palestinians who remained within the 1949 armistice borders in order to control their movements and access to work. Within a few years, the precise contours of Israeli settler rule had shifted, with the 1967 War leading to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and the Golan Heights. If, before then, Palestinian citizens of Israel had made up less than a quarter of the state’s population of 2.7 million, now an additional 1 million Palestinians came under its control. The measures Israel had deployed against Palestinians inside its borders were extended and intensified to deal with this new population. This period saw analyses that put Israel in comparative context alongside its settler colonial peers, such as George Jabbour’s 1970 book, Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East, which illuminates parallels in the legal codes at work in Israel, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia.

It wasn’t only Arab and Palestinian scholars who recognized these continuities between settler states. In 1961, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd declared that Zionists “took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” Verwoerd, like Jabotinsky, was not coy about might making right. Kirsch’s circumlocutions essentially land in the same place: Ultimately, Palestinian lives matter far less than Zionist claims to national self-determination.

In Gaza, the settler colonial practice of expulsion has now culminated in extermination.

Among the MANY CALUMNIES that fill Kirsch’s petty book is an attack on Patrick Wolfe’s now-famous dictum that settler-colonial “invasion is a structure, not an event”—an observation that speaks to the continuation of Israel’s settler colonial violence in Palestine and its fundamental importance to the character of the state. Kirsch dismisses this insight as “a new syllogism: if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.” Kirsch intends for readers to scoff along with him at the supposed hyperbole. But surveying the wreckage left by Israeli violence across the Middle East, it is hard to disagree.

Every day, as I write this, settlers with forged deeds are expelling Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and Hebron from the homes their families have owned for centuries. Israel is forcing its Palestinian Bedouin citizens from their villages in the Naqab (Negev) desert in order to expand its military free-fire zone there. The state is continuing to expropriate Palestinian lands in the Triangle and the Galilee, and to privatize the lands already acquired through conquest in 1948. Palestinian citizens of Israel, long subject to far more restrictive and arbitrary laws and regulations than Jewish citizens, are now enduring even more vicious repression. A system of labor apartheid that saw Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza working low-wage jobs inside Israel has been hobbled as a result of checkpoint closures, and Israeli policymakers are frantically scrambling to replace these workers with migrants from India, who suffer under kafala-like systems of control. In the West Bank, settlements are expanding every day; the area inhabited by Palestinians is divided into a discontinuous, highly surveilled archipelago, riddled with apartheid roads and permanent and “flying” checkpoints. Jenin refugee camp, regularly subjected to batterings, now lies in ruins. The Golan Heights, once a supposed buffer zone between Israel and Syria, have been annexed to Israel. Israel’s virulent settlers, encouraged by their fascist leadership’s power in the government, are establishing “facts on the ground” on Syria’s Mount Hermon and in the rich river basins of the Yarmouk River and the occupied “buffer zones” of Lebanon.

And in Gaza, the settler colonial practice of expulsion has now culminated in extermination. Israel’s genocidal violence has transformed an area populated by some two million people—already living under conditions of extreme control and subjected to bouts of colossal violence—into a vast free-fire zone, covered in mass graves and 42 million tons of rubble that is itself a mass grave of another kind. Gaza is filled with more child amputees than have been seen in any other war and with people dying from starvation and disease, in numbers that surely exceed 150,000 souls. The life expectancy of Palestinians in Gaza is now 34.9 years, about half of what it was before Israel’s genocidal assault.

You could not ask for a clearer demonstration of the truth of Wolfe’s articulation. His aphorism succinctly captures the idea that a nation founded on what he elsewhere calls settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination” will continue to operate by that same logic. And indeed, this is precisely what we see today, as the state’s genocidal underpinnings find their fullest and most terrible expression yet. Kirsch’s telling parenthetical about “everyone” being tarred as murderous, which accords with his guiding principle that the framework of settler colonialism was developed to unfairly besmirch individuals and societies, reveals that his primary concern is that those who stand with Israel will be branded genocidaires. But while there is plenty of blame to go around—from the soldiers who have gleefully enacted atrocities, to the Israelis who have cheered them on, to Zionists the world over who have called for Israel to “finish the job” and the imperial sponsor that has armed them to do so—Kirsch’s rickety reductio ad absurdum entirely misses the core of Wolfe’s claim, and of settler colonial studies as a whole. The idea, in the end, is to understand and indict the entire structure that has produced this ongoing, catastrophic violence, and to finally undo it. For Kirsch, however, it seems the point is not to change the world, but only to misinterpret it.

Laleh Khalili teaches at the University of Exeter, in Britain, and is the author or editor of seven books including Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (2007).

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June 17, 2025

The Gavel and the Gun

Palestinian history shows that armed struggle campaigns often catalyze gains in international lawmaking.

Darryl Li

Alamy & Ismael Mohamad/UPI Photo

Outside: The Main Court Room at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands

Inside: A Palestinian militant in Rafah, Gaza, 2006

Since Hamas launched “Operation al-Aqsa Flood” on October 7th, 2023, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, the highest court in the United Nations (UN) system, has devoted over a third of its hearings to Palestine—more than it has to any other issue. In January 2024, the court green-lit South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel, a striking development given how often Israel has couched its own legitimacy, and by extension its annihilatory violence, in relation to the Nazis’ genocide of Jews. In July, in perhaps the most significant legal defeat Israel has ever faced, the ICJ went further and ordered that the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip end “as rapidly as possible.” Though various UN bodies, including the ICJ, have criticized the lawlessness of Israeli occupation policies for decades, the July opinion was the first ever finding of apartheid from an international court, and the first to order Israel’s total withdrawal from the parts of Palestine it conquered in 1967 without requiring a prior negotiated settlement. In November, the rapid accumulation of Palestinian legal advances continued as the International Criminal Court (ICC), a separate body also based in the Hague, issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity—breaking its previous pattern of indicting only non-Western leaders or functionaries. The legal movement persisted into December, with the ICJ opening a separate case challenging Israel’s attempts to effectively shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees.

It’s not unreasonable to assume that such unprecedented moves in international law, as belated and inadequate as they may be, simply reflect the unprecedented horror of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip. There is some truth to this, especially when the scale, speed, and ferocity of Israel’s destruction of Gaza has blown through virtually every record in the history of modern warfare. But Palestinian history is littered with outrages unprecedented in their own time that either went unanswered or failed to generate commensurate responses. In 1982, for instance, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed just one resolution calling the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Phalangist Israeli proxies in Lebanon murdered thousands of Palestinian refugees, an act of genocide, but no international legal body ever took the matter further. Instead, in the past as now, what appears to propel international law to respond on Palestine is pressure from anti-colonial struggles. This explains why the historical high point of Palestinian legal efforts—pursued not just in the courts but also in quasi-legislative international bodies like the UNGA—took place in the 1970s, which was not necessarily a moment of record-breaking body counts. At that time, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) managed to mobilize the Palestinian and Arab masses and drew the sympathies of a decolonizing Global South majority amid a wave of successful independence movements that redrew the world map and packed the UN with new states. The PLO’s movement eventually led to a remarkable series of legal wins for the Palestinian cause, including the international recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to self determination and of the PLO as their representative, as well as the expansion of the rules of war to legitimize anti-colonial warfare.

In her book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, the legal scholar Noura Erakat offers a helpful metaphor for understanding what drives international law. Likening the law to the “sail of a boat”—a structure that guarantees only motion, while the “wind” of political mobilization “determines direction”—Erakat writes: “The law is not loyal to any outcome or player, despite its bias towards the most powerful states. The only promise it makes is to change and serve the interests of the most effective actors.” This analysis illuminates why international law evolved in response to Palestinian pressures in the ’70s, and why it has become a site of renewed energy in the Palestinian struggle after October 2023, as it has caught the rising anti-war and anti-colonial winds of global mass protests, direct actions shutting down infrastructure and disrupting arms manufacturers, encampments at colleges and universities, and endless small-scale confrontations in governmental, corporate, and nonprofit workplaces.

In examining these two moments in tandem, it is impossible to ignore that they are connected not only by the “wind” of popular mobilization but also by another factor: the centrality of armed struggle to the Palestinian politics of the day. Whether the PLO’s struggle out of Palestinian refugee camps in the ’70s or Hamas’s urban guerilla campaign in the Gaza Strip today, armed struggle—not mere violence, but rather organized force grounded in mass movements—has historically been a bloodstained lever moving the question of Palestine onto the international legal agenda. The reasons for this are straightforward enough. Compared to other oppressed peoples who may seek independence or autonomy—whether colonized populations in formal European colonies like India and Algeria, or minorities in non-Western states such as the Kurds in Turkey, and the Tibetans in China—the Palestinians are “dealing with a colonist state that had no project of incorporating them, even as oppressed subjects,” the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti told me. Faced with such an eliminationist adversary, Palestinians cannot vote, protest, or strike their way out of dispossession. They may not be able to fight their way out either, but at the very least their struggle has demonstrated the capacity to threaten regional and international stability and force states to respond, including and especially through international forums. “Had Palestinians not developed their own independent military capacity,” Takriti said, “their national liberation cause would have been erased a long time ago, and their inalienable rights would not have achieved any international recognition.”

In the ’70s, Palestinians commanded attention by launching an armed and mass movement that was internationalized by nature due to their exile across Arab states. That struggle quickly catapulted to global attention after it provoked Israeli attacks on multiple host countries, destabilizing the entire region. Diplomats around the world read the disruption as a call for legal and political action, with a representative from Spain telling a 1970 UNGA plenary meeting that “the conflict in the Middle East is, in the opinion of the Spanish delegation, the most critical of all the conflicts afflicting mankind at the present time,” a widely expressed sentiment at that gathering. Unless the UN acted to stop the unfolding chaos, the Spanish diplomat added, “the present potential war will inevitably lead to another confrontation, with the obvious risk that it could become a world conflagration.” Now, over 50 years later, Operation al-Aqsa Flood is operating similarly, unleashing not merely a global current of public pressure, but also the threat of regional war through the interlinked fronts of Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. It has shaken up the international status quo and emboldened emerging powers like South Africa to pursue more aggressive action in international forums. Even establishment courtiers like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who calls Hamas “a sick organization that has done enormous damage to the Palestinian cause,” cannot fail to take note of the pressures the group has generated, arguing in a recent op-ed that the current situation of “permanent insurgency” in Gaza—which he calls “Vietnam on the Mediterranean”—must be addressed politically, lest it “inevitably threaten the stability of Jordan and the stability of Egypt” and undo the very “pillars of America’s Middle East alliance structure.”

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While anti-colonial violence may alienate potential allies in the West, non-Western states that see themselves as heirs or allies to such struggles still hold significant sway in the UN.

A patrol from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the mountains east of the Jordan River, circa 1969

Thomas R. Koeniges

PLO leader Yasser Arafat shakes hands with H.A. Trimble, chief of the UN Security and Safety Section, at the UN Headquarters in New York, November 13th, 1974.

Michos Tzovaras/UN Photo

To suggest that the “good” of international law and the “bad” of violence cannot be readily disentangled may seem counterintuitive or even scandalous, especially when anti-colonial violence transgresses international legal prohibitions against targeting civilians and taking hostages. But such violations hardly set anti-colonial guerrillas apart from the regimes they oppose; after all, what is at stake is legitimacy on the world stage, the right to participate in what the political scientist Stephen Krasner famously called the “organized hypocrisy” of the international legal order. And while anti-colonial violence may alienate potential allies and supporters in the West, non-Western states that see themselves as heirs or allies to such struggles still hold significant sway in the UN and other international institutions (what Zionists deride as the “automatic majority” that routinely votes in condemnation of Israel). This support is so significant that, along with the threat of Russian and Chinese vetoes at the Security Council, it has contributed to repeated blockage of Western efforts to add Hamas and other Palestinian factions to UN terrorism lists; as a result, armed operations carried out by such groups retain some international legitimacy to this day.

Of course, then as now, advances for Palestine in international fora could not stop Israeli aggression. The genocide continues, and no one expects to see Israeli war criminals in the dock any time soon. Indeed, for decades, efforts at international lawmaking on Palestine have been listlessly caught in a space between never enough and better than nothing, part of what the anthropologist Lori Allen has called a “history of false hope.” As a South African justice lamented last year, when the ICJ belatedly ordered a ceasefire in Rafah that Israel promptly ignored, “the Court is only a court!” At its worst, the law has been a weapon against the weak, as we saw when the ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders alongside Netanyahu and Gallant, on arguably more serious charges. In the face of Israel’s utterly asymmetric death-dealing in Gaza, the prosecutor’s attempt at “balance” works to delegitimize Palestinian armed struggle in legal terms, even as Israel attempts to stamp it out in practice by simply killing Hamas leaders before they can ever be arrested.

And yet, despite their inability to stem colonial violence, international legal wins can present movements with new opportunities to exert pressure. In the ’70s, the PLO’s legal strategy powered its larger fight, turning global solidarity with Palestine into material benefits—like the ability of PLO leaders to travel (including on diplomatic passports), raise funds, and obtain weapons more easily. Today, as the threat of regional war, the activism of some Global South governments, and the popular pressure in the streets of the Global North spur international lawmaking on Palestine, we are again seeing legal gains become useful as openings for further struggle. Already, 14 states—including Spain, Ireland, and Belgium—have signaled their intention to formally intervene in support of South Africa’s petition alleging genocide in Gaza, and others may follow. The circle of confrontation has also broadened to encompass Israel’s close allies, with Germany facing its own genocide case from Nicaragua over its arms transfers to Israel and its attempts to defund UNRWA. Germany even quietly slowed arms transfers to Israel for a short time, and has now publicly said it will reassess the shipments due to legal concerns. In the best cases, activity in the courts has fed back into movements: South Africa’s largest federation of trade unions, for instance, has used the ICJ case as an opportunity to denounce coal shipments to Israel, asking why the government maintains diplomatic and trade relations with a genocidal state. Certainly, there are important differences from the ’70s conjuncture; the decolonial momentum of that era is long gone, and the divisions in Palestinian politics leave the national movement without a clear representative. For all their limitations, however, recent developments clarify that the path ahead lies not in closing the gap between law’s promise and its enforcement, but in turning that gap into a means of regenerating and channeling popular energies. The history of anti-colonial lawmaking suggests that the law’s true utility lies not in its ability to directly constrain the colonizer, but in the tools it offers the colonized to remake the terrain of political struggle.

At first, Palestinians experienced international law primarily as a tool of dispossession. A League of Nations mandate enshrined the Balfour Declaration’s support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine in international law, and a 1947 UNGA resolution called for the partitioning of the country, which set the stage for the mass expulsions of the Nakba, when Zionist forces exiled more than 700,000 Palestinians beyond the boundaries of what became Israel. Most Nakba refugees ended up in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, an exile that was not only geographical but also legal. In an emergent order of newly independent nation-states, Palestinians no longer had a country to return to nor any claims to citizenship anywhere, an outsider status that the Palestinian lawyer Ardi Imseis has called “international legal subalternity.” With Palestinians largely lacking any representation in the international system, by 1952 the question of Palestine had disappeared from the agenda of the United Nations, a situation that worsened after the completion of the Zionist conquest of historic Palestine in 1967—when the UN Security Council produced a framework that treated the Palestinian question as a humanitarian “refugee problem” rather than a political one.

If the international legal order was inherently enemy territory, the anti-colonial movements of the mid-20th century nevertheless significantly reshaped its contours. In the decades after the Nakba, national liberation struggles had won independence from colonial rule in most of Africa and Asia. Western governments were a minority in the UNGA, which made it a key venue for Third World states to create a counterbalance to the Security Council, and engage in what the political theorist Adom Getachew has called “anti-colonial worldmaking.” Suddenly, the conservatism of formal international law principles like equality and non-interference between state sovereigns seemed like a useful way to protect the gains of successful anti-colonial movements, and to power the struggles of ongoing ones.

By triggering violence across borders, the Palestinian struggle created outsized pressure at the international level, becoming impossible for the international system to ignore.

An aircraft blown up by the PFLP at Dawson’s Field in Zarqa, Jordan, September 12th, 1970

Alamy

Entering this favorable context, Palestinians transformed their refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria into bases of an armed liberation struggle, one often referred to as “the Palestinian revolution.” The Palestinian guerrilla operations that followed kept the region in a permanent state of low-level war, as Israel’s attempts to eliminate Palestinian resistance invariably entailed attacks on Arab host states. US-backed regimes, such as the one in Jordan, soon came to see Palestinian militancy as a threat to their stability. Indeed, confrontations between Israel and the PLO helped catalyze civil war in Jordan during the “Black September” of 1970, when Jordan used a multi-plane hijacking by Palestinian guerrillas as a pretext to forcibly evict the PLO from the country. Conflict also broke out in Lebanon beginning in 1975, which included fighting between Israeli-backed proxies and the PLO and their allies. The most destabilizing moment came in 1973, during what is known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War—when Egyptian and Syrian militaries launched a surprise attack on Israel that was only contained thanks to an emergency US airlift of weapons. The PLO was involved in the conflict, with its guerillas and leaders participating in the war’s planning and execution. By triggering violence across borders, the Palestinian struggle created outsized pressure at the international level, becoming impossible for the international system to ignore. And the more the US had to intervene to prop up Zionism, the more it risked antagonizing regional players—as seen most dramatically when US support for Israel in 1973 provoked the Saudis into declaring an oil embargo that drove up fuel prices and catalyzed an inflationary spiral for US consumers. This ability to upend regional and global politics proved crucial not only for the PLO’s leverage, but also its legitimacy: A month after the October 1973 war, for instance, the Arab League recognized the body as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. After decades of being spoken for by Arab states, the PLO’s commitment to armed resistance had solidified its status as the leader of the national movement, a representative that governments and international bodies had to deal with.

In the early ’70s, PLO leader Yasser Arafat launched a diplomatic offensive in this newly receptive moment. The campaign that followed secured a rapid succession of legal wins in a matter of a few years. First came the widespread recognition of the Palestinian people as a nation with the right to self-determination, culminating in a 1970 resolution at the UNGA. Soon afterward, the PLO achieved recognition as the representative of the Palestinian people, and on that basis became the first national liberation movement to be granted observer status at the UN; this gave the Palestinians, unusually among stateless peoples, an institutionalized voice that could speak in their name on the world stage. In 1974, Arafat was invited to address the UNGA. In a moment that represented a major diplomatic triumph, the PLO leader—whose speech was interrupted multiple times by applause from the assembled dignitaries—famously announced that he came “bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” making explicit the understanding that he would not be addressing the UNGA if not for armed struggle.

Arafat addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York, November 13th, 1974

Marty Lederhandler/AP Photo

In the years that followed, the PLO continued to make significant gains on the international legal front. In 1975, the UNGA passed a historic resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. Until that point, the UN had generally affirmed Palestinians’ rights without naming their oppressors; the Zionism resolution concretized in law an explicitly anti-colonial analysis of the struggle against Israel and helped pave the way for future statements describing the Palestinians as a people facing colonialism. Later UNGA resolutions explicitly “reaffirm[ed] the legitimacy” of anti-colonial movements, including that of the Palestinians, to proceed “by all available means, including armed struggle.” All of this was critical in preventing Israel from fully normalizing its conquests in international fora. It also enabled the growth of a robust Palestinian diplomatic apparatus with offices around the world and facilitated the flow of aid from sympathetic states, from Chinese guns to Yugoslav medical aid to Soviet university scholarships.

Perhaps the most striking development of this era came from multilateral negotiations in Geneva to update the rules of warfare. The PLO and other anti-colonial movements were allowed to participate in the gathering, which resulted in the 1977 First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions; this codified many of the rules of warfare now considered axiomatic, including the prohibitions on targeting civilians and on indiscriminate attacks. What interested the PLO and other national liberation movements was not so much the rules themselves (which they, like most states, had no trouble disregarding when convenient) but the extension of the privileges ordinarily reserved for state armies to movements “fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.” Soundly outvoted, Israel and the US refused to support the protocol, which gained near-universal acceptance nonetheless. (The US came crawling back a decade later by bizarrely opting in à la carte, issuing a list of articles in the protocol that it believed were binding.)

Gradually, however, the PLO’s diplomatic and legal strategy displaced mass politics, including armed struggle, and took the wind out of the movement’s sails for decades to come. Even as it won novel acknowledgment of the legitimacy of anti-colonial violence, the PLO leadership increasingly judged that further legal and diplomatic gains would require moving away from a military strategy. The organization’s leadership had already begun moving in this direction as early as 1974. That year, Arafat watched Egypt enter into US-brokered negotiations with Israel. Sensing the creation of a pathway to Arab–Israeli normalization—which would remove the most powerful Arab state from the confrontation with Zionism—he responded with a diplomatic overture in the form of a “ten-point program,” which maintained the PLO’s stated goal of replacing Israel with a democratic secular state, but proposed doing so in a phased approach. The proposal sparked an uproar across the PLO, and especially from the organization’s second-largest faction, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which saw the phased approach as a tacit acceptance of accommodation with Zionism through partition and a signal that Arafat would abandon armed struggle without achieving liberation. After Arafat’s UN speech, a PFLP newsletter reminded readers that “armed struggle was the chief reason for this diplomatic success. Hence we postulate that it is this same vehicle which must not be abandoned in order to advance and develop the Palestinian resistance movement.” The PFLP’s warning proved prescient. Within a decade, normalization of ties with Egypt allowed Israel to invade Lebanon with far less fear of triggering a broader Arab–Israeli war, ultimately removing the PLO’s main source of military pressure on Israel and derailing the revolution of the refugee camps.

Even as it won acknowledgment of the legitimacy of anti-colonial violence, the PLO leadership judged that further legal and diplomatic gains would require moving away from a military strategy.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (left) and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (right) shake hands in front of US President Bill Clinton to mark the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, Washington, DC, September 13th 1993.

Ron Edmonds/AP Photo

As the national movement fractured through the ’80s, the PLO embarked upon a legal strategy that, even when it coincided with popular mobilization, was not able to build on their momentum. In 1987, the First Intifada broke out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, featuring protracted mass mobilizations and strikes, and marking a shift in the center of gravity of Palestinian politics from the refugee camps in Arab states to the parts of Palestine conquered in 1967. At first, this was remarkably successful in pressuring the Israeli polity due to Israel’s dependence on Palestinian workers and consumers. The PLO leadership in exile used the leverage of the Intifada to lean further into its bid for international legal recognition, declaring the establishment of a “State of Palestine” with unspecified borders in 1988. (The declaration’s favorable mention of the 1947 UN partition resolution signaled the PLO’s potential willingness to compromise with Israel.) Yet Israel managed to adapt to the pressures of the First Intifada, gradually reducing its dependence on Palestinian labor. Meanwhile, having lost its leverage on the battlefield, the PLO’s desperation to get Israel to the negotiating table generated only concessions. In December 1991, the PLO acceded to repealing the UN resolution designating Zionism as a form of racism as a quid pro quo for Israeli participation in diplomatic talks in Madrid. But the sit-downs proved unsuccessful for Palestinians, while Israel reaped rewards from its tepid engagement, which allowed it to finally establish full diplomatic relations with both China and India, the two largest countries in the world that were also longtime allies of the PLO.

The Oslo Accords that capped these years of negotiations only solidified the PLO’s shift away from anti-colonial resistance. The agreement established an interim body, the Palestinian National Authority (more commonly known merely as the Palestinian Authority, or PA, mirroring Israel’s dismissal of its aspirations to statehood), which accepted a role as Israel’s security subcontractor in the 1967 territories. This made Palestinian leaders responsible for suppressing revolutionary activity in the future, all but guaranteeing that they would be delegitimized in the eyes of the people they purported to represent. As a result, by the time the Second Intifada rolled around—favoring violence where the First had favored mass mobilization—the PA’s capitulations at Oslo ensured that the movement would remain confined to individualized militant actions (especially martyrdom operations, or “suicide bombings”) rather than an organized strategy of armed resistance led by a representative body, as in the ’70s.

After the First Intifada, and amid the PA’s detachment from any effective legal strategy, a new generation of Palestinian civil society organizations emerged as significant players in Palestinian international lawyering. Groups such as al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (where I worked in the early 2000s), al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and Addameer sought to activate the growing post–Cold War landscape of human rights and humanitarian law mechanisms to hold Israel to account for its treatment of the Palestinians living under its rule. They supplied testimony to various UN bodies about Israeli violations of international law, lobbied governments (especially European ones) to pressure Israel, and helped bring legal cases in national courts against Israeli war criminals. The high point of this era of international law work came in 2004, when the PLO’s UN alliances and the NGOs’ legal savvy came together to produce a resounding legal victory at the ICJ, in the form of an advisory opinion declaring the separation barrier that Israel was building in the West Bank to be illegal, and forcing Israel to make modest adjustments to the barrier’s route. The opinion authoritatively confirmed positions widely held in the international community, namely that Israel’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was indeed governed by the law of occupation (a position Israel had long resisted, even as it relied on occupation law itself when convenient), and that the Jewish settlements in those territories contravened international law. In the end, however, the ruling constituted a narrow, technical win, rather than a political one: In objecting only to the path of the wall rather than its existence, the ICJ reified the idea that the barrier might be “necessary” for Israel’s presumably legitimate “security objectives.” And while the opinion did help spur activism in the form of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which began as a call for its enforcement, the largely external-facing solidarity movement did not feed back into mobilization among Palestinians. Ultimately, the legal strategy of Palestinian civil society groups could not overcome the absence of a national struggle.

The unveiling ceremony of a large symbolic United Nations seat in Ramallah, West Bank, September 20th, 2011.

Debbie Hill/UPI

In the decade since, the Palestinian leadership has failed to provide a suitable vehicle for national liberation, instead doubling down on a strategy of diplomatic gimmickry. In 2011, the PA launched a desperate campaign for full membership in the UN. It even set up a giant, UN-blue chair in the center of Ramallah to communicate the urgency of filling a Palestinian seat in the international body—a move that became a widely derided symbol of the leadership’s broader approach. Needless to say, such empty publicity stunts did not go far: Facing the threat of a US veto, the PA instead accepted an upgrade from observer to “non-member observer state”; the addition of the word “state” allowed Palestine to join treaties and some UN agencies, including the ICC, but it remained unable to vote. After October 7th, the limits of this strategy have become clearer than ever. In April 2024, the PA lost another bid for full Palestinian membership in the UN after an entirely predictable US veto, suggesting that even sustained global mobilization over the genocide in the Gaza Strip could not elicit new ideas from the Palestinian old guard, or arrest the decline of its relevance.

Today, the entity most explicitly filling the resulting void is Hamas. Since its emergence during the First Intifada, the group has slowly gone from a spoiler to a vanguard in Palestinian politics. In 2011, Hamas secured the release of over 1,000 captives in exchange for one Israeli soldier it had captured. Most significantly, those freed hailed from multiple Palestinian factions, thus demonstrating Hamas’s ability to bring leverage from the battlefield to the negotiating table on behalf of all Palestinians. During the Great March of Return—a sustained set of mass protests at the fence encircling the Gaza Strip in 2018 and 2019—Hamas showed a willingness to support mass mobilizations led by other formations. In 2021, the group responded to settler dispossession of Palestinians in Jerusalem by firing rockets from Gaza; these actions and the resulting Israeli onslaught on Gaza sparked a “Unity Intifada” that included a general strike involving Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.

Even if international law currently seems to offer a weapon to the Palestinian cause, the ability of a clearly defined Palestinian subject to wield that weapon has never been more uncertain.

Through it all, Hamas did not necessarily develop a political vision that appealed to a majority of Palestinians or address grievances about the shortcomings of its own repressive governance in the Gaza Strip. Instead, the group managed to solidify its position in Palestinian politics by underscoring its commitment to an ideal that transcends party and faction altogether: resistance. Opinion polls of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from late 2023 show significantly higher levels of support for Operation al-Aqsa Flood than for Hamas itself, recognizing the former’s importance in putting the question of Palestine back on the world agenda. More tellingly, polls from May show that even many Palestinians who believe the October 7th attack was a strategic error given the severity of the Israeli response remain resolutely opposed to any unilateral disarmament by Hamas—with 85% of respondents in the West Bank and 64% in Gaza answering “no” when asked whether they would support such disarmament in order to stop the war on Gaza. This confirms what for some observers is an uncomfortable truth: that Hamas has become the central actor in the Palestinian struggle.

Theoretically, Hamas’s militancy could generate legal and diplomatic momentum for the Palestinian cause. The group’s recent statements—invoking international law when decrying Israel’s actions, welcoming international court decisions, and thanking those engaged in legal efforts in support of the Palestinian cause around the world—reflect its aspirations to wield this dual strategy. And Hamas has long had an active diplomatic presence, including ties with various Arab states, Russia, China, and, most recently, direct negotiations with the United States. At the same time, there are seemingly insurmountable obstacles to the reemergence of a renewed national liberation movement with Hamas at the helm. The group currently faces a dilemma wherein its actions have helped cement the PLO’s irrelevance, even as international fora still recognize the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people—a hard-won asset that Hamas itself recognizes as crucial. Nor can Hamas simply join the PLO; Fatah, the faction that has long dominated the body, has insisted on keeping Hamas out for fear of giving up its own power. Fatah maintains that Hamas can only join if it accepts the Oslo agreements—a thin pretext, given that the PLO’s second-largest faction, the PFLP, has always rejected Oslo, and that Hamas has said repeatedly that it would voluntarily disarm in exchange for a Palestinian state along ’67 borders. This marks a stark contrast from the ’70s moment: Whereas then Palestinians broadly understood the PLO as their representative on the world stage (even as various factions squabbled and competed under its umbrella), today’s Palestinian national struggle is more fractured. Hamas carries the mantle of armed struggle, while an increasingly reviled PA has largely ceded international lawyering to states like South Africa and to the NGOs. None of these actors possesses the broad legitimacy to lead a national liberation movement that could bring together the Palestinian people and their global supporters.

In other words, even if international law currently seems to offer a weapon to the Palestinian cause, the ability of a clearly defined Palestinian subject to wield that weapon has never been more uncertain. But what is clear is this: The question of whether legal achievements become part of the arsenal of struggle or an alibi for inaction will ultimately be answered not in the courtroom, but on the terrain of mass politics—on the streets and, especially, the battlefield.

Darryl Li is an anthropologist and lawyer teaching at the University of Chicago.

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What’s Ours

Myriam Boulos’s photographs probe the porous boundaries between everyday life and revolutionary rupture.

Introduced by Aria Aber

Myriam Boulos: A cactus in broken glass after the explosion

Beirut, August 6th, 2020

On October 13th, 2019, the photographer Myriam Boulos looked out from her balcony and sensed that something was afoot. There was, she knew, a general air of instability—throughout Lebanon, people struggled to access basic services like water, electricity, and sanitation—but later she would come to realize that she was also intuiting a newly unfolding catastrophe: At that very moment, wildfires were erupting across the nation’s forests. Four days later, as government neglect stalled containment and recovery efforts, the Lebanese cabinet announced new financial measures, among them legislation that further insulated the wealthy. Protests broke out, inaugurating a series of uprisings against the state’s fatal austerity and corruption. “It felt as if we were coming out of an abusive relationship to finally say: No, this is not normal,” Boulos writes of the events that would eventually be known as the October 17 Revolution. “Since then, everything has been emotionally and physically draining and confusing but also beautiful, sad and awakening.”

For Boulos, the revolutionary moment instigated a way of seeing, dilating the vivid contradictions that animate social worlds in the midst of radical transformation. What’s Ours—a series of photographs taken between 2013 and 2023 and collected into a book of the same name (Aperture, 2023)—realizes the possibilities of this form of perception. In sensuous and caustic images, Boulos documents the multifariousness of contemporary life in Lebanon. The project’s titular insistence on populist solidarity, however, should not be mistaken for didactic certainty: “Lebanon is so fragmented . . . that I personally have trouble grasping what us refers to,” Boulos explained in an interview. Indeed, What’s Ours juxtaposes such markedly discrepant scenes as a stripper suspended upside-down on a pole at a nightclub, a group of soldiers gazing at something just outside the image’s frame, masked women walking away from a burning building, and the hands of the artist and her grandmother lovingly entwined.

Across the series, Boulos develops a visual vocabulary through which meaning is thrown up for grabs. In one image, hundreds of men stretch their hands toward the night sky, confetti filling the air. They appear to be taking part in a celebration—but because Boulos shows us this photograph alongside depictions of militarized repression and popular uprising, the otherwise carefree scene assumes a layer of gravitas: The gold glitter falling from the sky rhyme with the debris from explosions; the coordinated gestures of the revelers recall other cohorts engaged in forms of choreographed sociality, like soldiers or protesters. In another image, a cloud of hookah smoke obscuring the face of a man lounging on a lawn chair recalls the haze of tear gas. Like the uprisings themselves, these images probe the porous boundaries between everyday life and ruptural transformation.

But while harsher references persist across the series, a tenacious tenderness emerges as the dominant note. Consider the astonishing portrait of a young woman posing in front of a blown-out window. She is wearing a mask—perhaps to protect herself from Covid-19, or from toxic chemicals emanating from the ruined city visible in the background. What strikes me is not the debris of Beirut, but the sybaritic quality produced by the rich interplay of textural and chromatic elements: the folds of the woman’s soft, pink trousers; the smoothness of her white tank top against her tan shoulders; the delicate tattoos decorating her bare arms; the jagged, beige rubble of the city. Like so many of Boulos’s images, this portrait registers the thick experience of revolutionary time.

The photographs in What’s Ours cannot be reduced to a unified meaning. Here there is no singular subject, no figure on high to prescribe the coming future. Instead, these pictures harness the throbbing urgency of riots and raves, immersing the viewer in a rapturous present tense, where all manner of transgressions—queer intimacy, state repression, imperial violence—jostle in recombinant relation. Where Boulos refuses the illusory comfort of a salvific authority, she offers in its place an affirmation of what we make together, consecrating, again and again, the promise of human connection. Every revolution, after all, begins and ends with the body.

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Nour couldn’t listen to music for weeks after the explosion.

Beirut, August 6th, 2020

Beirut, December 31st, 2019

My grandmother is at the hospital.

February 15th, 2020

Beirut, July 6th, 2018

Beirut, September 5th, 2019

Ghazwa during a protest for women’s rights

Sour, March 23rd, 2021

Jasmine and Laura-Joy kissing in the grand theater

Beirut, October 20th, 2019

When I gave her this tiny flower, my grandmother told me “Dis aux arbres de sourire,” which means tell the trees to smile.

Dahr El Souwwan, February 21st, 2021

Fire and glass spoke to me more than well-articulated slogans.

Beirut, October 18th, 2019

Beirut, 2020

Beirut, October 18th, 2019

That night we thought there was a heart beating under the rubble.

Beirut, September 4th, 2020

Aria Aber is a contributing editor at The Yale Review, the poetry editor of Kismet, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Vermont. She is a recipient of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and a Whiting Award, and her debut novel Good Girl (Hogarth, 2025) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.

AriaAber

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June 17, 2025

The Measure of the World

By attending to the vibrant specificity of Black life, poet Dionne Brand contests the cruel mathematics of empire.

Claire Schwartz

At the opening of Dionne Brand’s 2001 book A Map to the Door of No Return, the poet is 13 years old and in pursuit of a name. What were they called, she wondered, the people she’d come from? Who had they been before they’d arrived in Guayaguayare, the fishing village in southeastern Trinidad where Brand was born in 1953—and where the sea, it seemed, “had brought the whole of [the village] there from unknown places, unknown origins”? A name promised to illuminate a map; by proffering some fixed key, a name would clarify her coordinates. Again and again, the teenager pestered her grandfather, who’d said that if he heard their people’s name, he would know it. “Yoruba? Ibo?” she offered. “Ashanti? Mandingo?” For weeks, she asked. Each time, he said no. He would not make of language a palliative substitute for absence—would not concoct for the child a myth of origin, by which the bounds of kin can be scripted, territory claimed. Eventually Brand stopped asking. The disappointment soon “gathered into a kind of estrangement.” The rift was not merely personal. It was, she writes, “a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being”; it “revealed a tear in the world.”

The tear disclosed by the missing name was the door of no return, the door captured Africans passed through as they were loaded onto slave ships bound for plantations across the Atlantic. The door is real in a material sense: You can visit it, for example, as hundreds of thousands of people do every year, in Ghana or Gorée Island, where a tour guide will usher you through barely ventilated dungeons toward the eponymous threshold. But the transatlantic slave trade did not only radically reorganize material conditions; it also, Brand writes, inaugurated a “cognitive schema,” a way of understanding the order of things. In the world plantation slavery composed, life in the Black Diaspora is “lodged in a metaphor”—constrained to serve as a resource for white heroism, white protagonism, white meaning.

By writing about this indelible transformation at the door, Brand aimed not to court some salvific “before,” but, as she notes in the foreword to a new edition of the book issued in the United States last fall, to “credit the knowledges deposited there.” Facing the “virtuosity and despair” of those who have made lives in excess of empire’s rigid prescriptions, Brand refutes what the literary scholar Ian Baucom calls the “alinguistic grammar of commensurability” honed through the slave trade—the schema in which each Black life can be reduced to the numerical: described in terms of a monetary equivalent, represented as statistical evidence of deviance in anthropology textbooks or as inconsequential collateral in progress’s forward march. Instead, she elaborates “a grammar in which Black existence might be the thought and not the unthought,” as she puts it in her 2017 poem “An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk.” A Map to the Door of No Return therefore constellates traces from the wider world that repudiate the door’s restrictive orders: the five thousand mile migration route of the rufous hummingbird, charted before the activities of “all known map-makers”; the expression that comes over the face of a child in Saint Lucia when a woman calls her name, “a look like being needed somewhere not for anything except to fill a familiar space on a lap”; the languid humor of the Ethiopian attendant at the Toronto car park, disrupting Brand’s brusk clip en route to a gala. In this way, the book, Brand explains in the foreword, is an effort “to put the accumulated, daily, lived experiences back together, to detail the minor acts, in any day, under fracture, under force, under pressure.”

Since its publication, this careful act of suture has vitally informed a generation of Black study. “In Brand’s work, the political cannot be separated from the aesthetic,” the scholar Saidiya Hartman, a friend of Brand’s, explained to me. Refusing to accept convention—whether genre or any other social formation—as an unchangeable given, Brand probes our habits of arrangement, and rejects the customary conflation between dominance and rightness. In the space of that cleavage, a cohort of writers found what Canisia Lubrin, a friend and former student of Brand’s, characterized to me as “permission”; once she read Brand’s work, Lubrin, who came from Saint Lucia to Canada, where her proclivities diverged from those of her classmates, found that a “lack of trust in myself was cured.” As Brand’s work has traveled widely, both within and beyond the academy, her writing has been recognized with numerous major honors—among them the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. From 2009–2012, she served as the poet laureate of Toronto, the city she’s called home for 55 years.

The recent reissue of A Map to the Door of No Return coincided with the release, in both the US and Canada, of a new book of nonfiction, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. The work tells of “a life animated but also destroyed by books”—of schooling in the colonial literature of the British canon, and of an extracurricular education in art from Black traditions that offered instruction in “how to imagine and make real something like freedom”; that is, Brand’s life. But the book’s autobiographical element is, the writer cautions, “not an invitation to witness transparency.” Rather, what appears of her life has been “pored over, turned over, analyzed, refashioned as art, and made theoretical through those processes.” Her work is autobiographical only in the sense—she quotes literary scholar William Boelhower’s reading of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci—that autobiography describes “the smallest unit of analysis capable of understanding subject and object caught in the processes of biological and historical change.”

Last summer, in anticipation of these two signal publications, I went to Toronto to visit Brand. I wanted to learn more about this orientation toward the minor; I was starting to glimpse the way that an attention to “the smallest unit”—an individual life, a specific gesture, a single line—suffuses the writer’s 24 books, which include nonfiction, novels, and the 12 collections of poetry at the core of her practice. As Brand and I walked down Ossington Avenue, in the poet’s West End neighborhood, she swept her hand in front of her to indicate our bustling surroundings. “Only in something like the dominant form of the novel is all of this arranged linearly,” she reflected. I watched a gaggle of teenagers talking and laughing, then a woman bending to tend to a child, as Brand continued, speaking as she writes—with the exacting clarity of someone practiced at turning over each word, shaking off the sediment: “What if you were to give each element its discrete thought, its discrete style, its particular imaginings? That’s what you tap into to compose lines of poetry, the separate and tiny concerns arrayed in the everyday which somehow come together in the big life of the world.”

From early on, Brand understood herself to be part of this big life. Born into what she described to me as a “highly politicized” family, she came of age in a world animated by revolutionary swell. Meaning was contested, open; no single story of the past ordained the future. But “each decade brought its own shifts,” as she put it in a lecture published in 2008 as A Kind of Perfect Speech—and by the time the poet was 30, the sense of expansive possibility had dissipated. Liberation struggles had been quashed through repression or dispelled through incorporation into the new global common sense of the neoliberal order. “To sustain poetry in the absence of its radical muse—left collective political action—to sustain poetry when there is no inspiration, that was my work,” Brand said. As history barreled ahead, mapping death’s routes, Brand found in poems a way to keep alive the materials of revolutionary desire—the longing, as she writes in A Map to the Door of No Return, “to feel as if history was not destiny.” Over nearly five decades of published writing, the poet has tended to the variegated particulars of Blackness disavowed by imperial regimes; in so doing, she rebukes the order in which meaning always narrowly precedes Black life. Where the colonial world asserts its hold, Brand has refused its pretense of total domination, looking instead after the “small space [that] opened in me” when her grandfather did not know their ancestral name—an aperture through which to glimpse a different order, the makings of a still-open future.

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“To sustain poetry in the absence of its radical muse—left collective political action—to sustain poetry when there is no inspiration, that was my work.”

As Brand recalls in Salvage, she spent her early years immersed in the British literature of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. This canon summoned her to attend eagerly to the romps of Robinson Crusoe—in which “very good success,” the reader understands, euphemizes wealth accrued by selling people as slaves—and solicited her admiration for Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair, whose “silence, inaction and vapidity” against a backdrop of colonial exploitation signified “good character.” These texts made clear just whose lives had worth. Crusoe was the protagonist, his life endowed with meaning; he would, Brand knew from the outset, survive. On the other hand, Vanity Fair’s Miss Swartz, “the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s,” was, even to her child’s sensibility, immediately apprehensible as “without future in the narrative.” Such figures, Brand writes, “enrich the text in crucial ways, but they do not live.” Their value having been set, their meanings fixed, the Black characters are drafted in service of a social order in which their inclusion is contingent on performing the attributes they’ve been assigned.

Even novels that putatively sought to critique the world’s anti-Black arrangements actually reinscribed them. Brand writes about Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688), which tells of a prince from the region now called Ghana, who is kidnapped and sold onto a plantation in Surinam, where he organizes a revolt among his fellows. In the century and a half that followed, white anti-slavery advocates hailed Behn’s text as the first abolitionist novel. However, Oroonoko rebels, Brand notes, not because he detests the institution of slavery, but because he realizes that the Cornish slaver who captured him does not intend to make good on his promise to release him; “a personal demand for freedom, a special demand, is reneged on.” For this insurgence, he is killed. What is at stake in Behn’s text, Brand clarifies, is not liberation, but the “proximate, incomplete freedom” of emancipation, “which attributed a half-human-until-educated status to the enslaved.” In this sense, 145 years before the abolition of slavery in the British empire, Oroonoko laid the imaginative groundwork for the subsequent regimes of Black subjection.

As the British novel proselytized a world where, as Brand puts it in Salvage, “only white bourgeois experience [is reproduced] as ‘meaning,’” its status as literature obfuscated the cruelty of its constitutive arrangements. Like a museum vitrine ensures that stolen objects remain eternal spoils by “refus[ing] to allow another meaning to inhabit the artifacts,” so, too, does the “distance called ‘art’ . . . [seal] the form against indictments of its very narration of that time.” Break the glass, and you will be swiftly ushered out, while those well-mannered visitors milling about—admiring the bright colors of this bowl or conjuring an image of the woman who had once worn that necklace or abhorring the entire enterprise in silence—are enrolled as custodians of stolen life.

Last July, nestled into a couch in the home Brand shares with her partner Christina Sharpe, a scholar of Black Studies, I wanted to know more about this polite and noxious audience, which is, of course, a readership. What does it mean that canonical texts depend on us, their readers, to fortify their vaunted status with our adoration, to legitimize them with our engaged critique? “What about the reader’s complicity?” I asked the poet. “Not complicity,” Brand corrected me, “innocence.” The next day, I asked Brand to elaborate. Innocence, she told me, is “the gift of dominance, or of one’s favorable adjacency to it—the proposition that it is possible to not see, which capital can buy depending on your relationship to it.” It is this innocence—which condemns the Black reader to, as she writes in Salvage, “absence [or] eternal subjugate presence”—that structures the imperial we of the British canon. “To read,” Brand explains, “is to encounter this ‘we’ at every juncture.” This we marks those to whom the benefit of meaning redounds, whose experiences are recognized as admissible evidence in the court of the real, who profit from what is hoarded, traded, thrown overboard. In the world set out by this we, Brand told me, “I am always guilty.”

When Brand moved to Canada in 1970, at the age of 17, to study English and philosophy at the University of Toronto, she was met with others who were likewise sentenced—members of the recent wave of West Indian migration, Indigenous people, Black Canadians whose ancestors had fled slavery in the British and French colonies. A cresting wave of decolonial movements in Africa energized the time. (In the previous decade alone, more than 30 countries had won independence.) In 1969, after Sir George Williams University in Montreal obstinately refused to intervene in a professor’s anti-Black grading practices, hundreds of students barricaded themselves inside the computer lab for almost two weeks—until a fire of still-contested origin forced them out into the path of police. Ninety-seven students were arrested, several of whom were subsequently deported to their home countries in the Caribbean. Canada’s spectacular assertion of the fragile contingencies of Black inclusion provoked an international response, sparking protests from Quebec to Port of Spain. By the time Brand arrived, “Martin Luther King’s passivity had been repudiated; joining the system, assimilation, was out; armed struggle was a much debated possibility,” she writes in her 1994 essay collection Bread Out of Stone. Black Power was in full swing.

By the time Brand arrived in Toronto, “Martin Luther King’s passivity had been repudiated; joining the system, assimilation, was out; armed struggle was a much debated possibility,” she writes. Black Power was in full swing.

Student protesters at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, with punch cards thrown from the windows of the ninth-floor computer center littering the ground.

Concordia University

Brand spent her early years in Toronto “getting the hang of the city, drudging it out at several dead-end jobs and raising my consciousness in arguments, at study groups, in a Black students’ organisation, at community events and partying, which ended up being the same as studying.” She attended African Liberation Day meetings in the UNIA Hall on College Street, where “the Sino-Soviet split drew a line down the middle.” (Though, she remembers, “I had as much of a good feeling for Mao as for Lenin”; and besides, communism had come to the poet much earlier—a way to reimagine the fates of people she’d grown up with people who labored in coconut, cane, and oil fields, and who never saw the profit they created.) She read literature of Black traditions that functioned, she writes in Salvage, “as a salve, as a balm, as a map, as a trace, as an analysis, as a hypothesis, about the coming of freedom from within what is circumscribing and possibly fatal.” She danced and organized and wrote poems, and found herself alongside people who knew culture to be a critical part of anti-imperial movements. Among her new comrades was the journalist Harold Head, who had been banned from apartheid South Africa, and whose press, Khoisan Artists, would publish Brand’s first book, ‘Fore Day Morning, in 1978. (“Juvenilia,” she called it, exempting the volume from her collected poems.) On Bathurst Street, in the heart of Toronto’s Black community, she found a kind of home—reveling in the dashikis and Panther blue shirts and big gold hoops while awaiting a friend, or asserting a brief architecture in the air as she called out ebulliently to a comrade, or distributing pamphlets to passersby that insisted police violence must end or Angela Davis should be free. The subways rumbling below were “portals through which we all passed, passing from Negroes into Blacks, from passive into revolutionary,” she writes in Bread Out of Stone. “Bathurst was the site of new definitions.”

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in 1975, Brand began working at the Black Education Project in Toronto, supporting students facing the endemic racism of the public school system. It was there that she met Marlene Green, who became a close friend and comrade—and whom, in 1983, Brand followed to the island nation of Grenada, where a revolutionary socialist experiment was underway. (“In all that living [in Toronto], there was a sense of internationalism,” Brand told me. So when the revolution happened in Grenada, going there was “the simplest of moves.”) In 1979, the vanguard of the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement had overthrown Grenada’s authoritarian Prime Minister Eric Gairy. With Maurice Bishop, a widely beloved young lawyer, at the helm, the swiftly formed People’s Revolutionary Government implemented a spate of transformative social programs from literacy initiatives to free healthcare. Thousands of people packed into town squares and conference halls from St. George’s to New York City to hear Bishop affirm Grenada’s sovereignty and connect its struggle to Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and to every place where people sought to cast off imperial domination. Over radio airways, Bishop’s message rang out: “We are not in anybody’s backyard, and we are definitely not for sale.” As the anthropologist David Scott writes in Omens of Adversity, this small country of 110,000 people constituted “an unprecedented symbol of the possibility of breaking with the colonial and neocolonial Caribbean past.” For 10 months, Brand worked as an information officer for the Agency of Rural Transformation, writing a newsletter about the island’s revolutionary activities, which was distributed to leftist groups across the Caribbean.

On October 19th, 1983, a great clamor woke the poet from a feverish sleep. Internal disagreements had fractured the revolution’s leadership, and three days earlier, a dissenting faction had placed Bishop under house arrest. Now a throng of supporters had freed the prime minister. Brand made her way to Market Square, where a dense crowd had gathered, then up the steep hill toward Fort Rupert, the headquarters of the People’s Revolutionary Army. She saw them there: Maurice Bishop, his silhouette conspicuous in the shadowy doorway; Jacqueline Creft, the Minister of Education and Bishop’s partner, clad in yellow, waving her cigarette spiritedly as she talked. People were laughing, celebrating. “The atmosphere,” she writes in A Map to the Door of No Return, “was ripe with possibilities.”

A crowd gathers in Market Square in Grenada in support of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, October 1983.

Alleyne/AP Photo

Brand returned to Green’s house in search of her friend. In the minutes since Brand had left Market Square, a battle had erupted as Bishop’s detractors attempted to regain control of the site. Gunshots cracked the air, fast and staccato. From Green’s balcony, Brand watched as people leapt from the cliff, their bodies knocking limply against its side. Green rushed into the house. The women stood together, looking out toward the fort; just then, though they could not see it, members of the army were dragging Bishop and seven of his associates into the courtyard, where they were shot to death. (The exact circumstances remain unclear.) In her poem “October 19th, 1983,” from her 1984 collection Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, Brand remembers that day: “Maurice is dead, Jackie is dead /

[. . .] / dream is dead / lesser and greater / dream is dead / in these Antilles.” Six days later, US planes landed on the island. “This part of the story is history,” Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return. “The coup took place, the Americans invaded. That was the end of the socialist path in Grenada and the English-speaking Caribbean.”

As Grenada’s inhabitants moved stiffly through days truncated by curfew and defeat, Brand felt a familiar schema bear down. She had come to the revolution, she later wrote, in search of “some relief from the enclosure of the Door of No Return. That’s all. But no.” As in the previous century, new legal orders curbed the possibility of liberation. After the abolition of plantation slavery in the US, Reconstruction and Jim Crow had reorganized white domination to ensure its endurance; now, Scott explains, as part of a broader program of late-Cold War Western imperial consolidation, the US and its allies, who figure themselves as liberal democracies, collapsed diverse social formations—from apartheid to socialism, from military dictatorships to communism—into the single category “illiberal.” In so doing, they solidified a lexicon for their own “special, universal political claim—namely, the idiom of ‘human rights’” that entitled, even compelled, Western powers to refashion the world to suit their self-interest. It was a terrible echo: “Each push by the formerly enslaved is an eruption of a potential Black freedom,” the scholar Rinaldo Walcott writes in The Long Emancipation, “but each push is also contained by the juridical and legislative elasticity of the logic of emancipation as partial, as incremental, as apprenticed.”

US troops during the invasion of Grenada, October 1983.

Alamy

This logic was everywhere, if you attuned yourself to it: The invasion, Brand told me, heralded an era “when, from a certain vantage, it seemed that centers of imperialism were affording what they called ‘rights’ to people; but, if you really looked, you could see that in most places, US empire was tightening its grasp.” By then, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, and Margaret Thatcher were in office—the conservative triumvirate in the US, West Germany, and England at work securing the “triumph of corporate capitalist consumer culture . . . and the disappearance/eradication of collective action,” as Brand describes the time in A Kind of Perfect Speech. “I saw how agile capital was—that it could absorb something and spit it out again as something else, that it could swallow up and redistribute its antagonisms,” she told me. In Grenada, people had briefly forged another we, shattering the fastener that fixed the future according to a singular story of the past. The revolution had torn open the world; the invasion had sutured it shut. Brand explained, “Poetry thickened in me after that.”

The revolution had torn open the world; the invasion had sutured it shut.

In the wake of defeats of leftist uprising across the globe, Brand was tasked with “working out, in language, what has survived the death of her politics,” Sharpe writes in the introduction to Brand’s Nomenclature: New and Selected Poems. Indeed, the late 1980s saw what Sharpe calls “the enlargement of the flaccid (il)liberal democracies,” and by the early 1990s, Brand and her comrades found themselves “battered by multicultural bureaucracy, co-opted by mainstream party politics, immersed in everyday boring racism,” as the poet laments in Bread Out of Stone. From her living room in Toronto, Brand, who had begun teaching in the English department at the University of Guelph, watched the news as the US led a 42-country coalition against Iraq. As American bombs obliterated the ordinary for Iraqis, she felt a horrible resonance: The onslaught sounded on a frequency with the ways that “the small daily life of Black people is constantly being overpowered by the regime of racism,” she recalls in a conversation with the writer David Naimon on his podcast Between the Covers.

Poems offered a place where the daily could live. In Inventory, a book-length poem published in 2006, Brand reckons with this time when “the science-fiction tales of democracy” were, yet again, fortifying a feedback loop between the past and the future—decimating life for those under imperial force via numbers “so shapeless, apart from their shape, their seduction of infinity.” This cruel accounting, Brand explained to me, “is what we’ve been captured by entirely. How, then, to tell the story in the interstices of those numbers?” In Inventory, a woman “losing the idea / of mathematics” stays awake night after night “to keep watch at the window / of the television” where statistics ferry Iraqis across the ocean, bound to their deaths—“twenty-seven in Hillah, three in fighting in / Amariya, two by roadside bombing, Adhaim.” As the woman searches for “another life . . . behind the flat screen and the news anchor,” the statistic’s sleek encasement cracks, revealing textured particulars

she’s heard clearly now, twenty-three,

by restaurant bomb near green zone, Ibn Zanbour,

and so clear, syntonic, one, threading a needle

three beating dust from slippers, anyone looking

for a newspaper, an idea in their head like figs will soon

be in season, four playing dominoes, drinking Turkish coffee

seven by shop window, with small girl, in wading pool,

twelve half naked by river, nine shot dead in

Missouri shopping mall, possible yes, in restaurant

in Madison, three nephews, one aunt in Nashville fire bomb

By way of the details, militarized borders concede to a wider geography: Missouri, Madison, Nashville, everywhere pocked with passing concerns (“where’s the hair oil, / the butter’s gone rancid, remember that cat we used to have”). As this restoration of the quotidian slackens the hold of assigned meaning, it rejects the foregone “over there”—the brutal abstraction that reduces a city of millions of people to “a big spot [on a map] where some terrible idea [was] being wiped out,” as Brand described the mainstream media’s depictions of Baghdad on Naimon’s show—and dispels the absolution contrived by innocence’s proposition that, for some, it is possible not to see. Probing the legend of empire’s delusional map, where brutality is dubbed common sense, Inventory reminds us that careful attunement to entanglement might offer an antidote to indifferent destruction.

On that walk last summer, Brand and I stopped at the corner of Bloor and Dufferin, where a poem she wrote is published on a pair of benches. A seated man concealed the text, his face etched with the familiar weariness of someone who has no place to set things down for long. As we continued on, Brand remarked, “This is not a beautiful city”; over the past decades, the cruel alchemy of financialization has transformed housing from basic need into coveted asset. Briefly, though, the poet had glimpsed the possibility of reconfigured relation—the rudiments of another way. During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, she reflected, “for a moment, the powers that be were disturbed. Suddenly they had to deal out a certain kind of care.” The virus, she writes in Salvage, fleetingly occasioned “the uncomfortable recognition of the ‘we’—of its geological whole. We suddenly felt the earth as if our feet were on the same shaky surface.” That is, “until the stock markets corrected themselves; until commentators reclaimed the racist narratives of difference,” and we resumed “our ongoing right-sliding toward a killing, stratifying, death-dealing normal.” Normal: an eagerly evangelized dream of a return—a word that, like “goodness” and “success,” “beautiful” and “gentlemen” in the British texts Brand read as a child, stashes a world of violence, recasting “the global state of emergency of antiblackness,” as Brand called it in the Toronto Star in 2020, as coveted virtue.

In writing poems, Brand explained, one must ask: “What is the jangle you’re trying to make of all the things people already know? What is the new arrangement?”

At the beginning of the pandemic, Brand wrote a long poem, “Nomenclature for the Time Being.” The poem diagnoses and disperses this extractive we—the we that binds those of us who “have the means” to those who “are the means by which others extract and consume,” as she writes in Salvage—by proceeding from a different kind of self. The poem’s speaker, Brand clarified in a 2020 lecture, is “a Black aesthetic,” which, as in the transformative exertions of ’70s Bathurst, is “open to multiplicity, to variation, to movement, to opacity, and to calibration.” This speaker is neither exempted from nor defined by imperial terms:

we read their books, as I said earlier, took

in their alphabets like popsicles and lesion paste

it is a good thing that they don’t know who we are

Language, Brand reminds us, is a social practice, a kind of we. And as with all wes, it is manifold in its gathering. When I say cat or green or bread, what each of those words calls up for me is likely different than what it summons for you. No matter, though, that cat immediately brings to my mind my pet’s speckled face, for you, perhaps, a tabby emerging from the rubble of a bombed building or the cartoon rendering of a disembodied head floating under the letter C on the wall of your kindergarten classroom. We meet there, our various histories jostling inside the name. As Blackness, Hartman noted in a conversation with the poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley, “doesn’t presume any unanimity of culture, or reference,” so too might the multifarious we of language, if loosed from the grammar of domination, refute the cruel mathematics of the ledger, where the meanings of difference are prescribed and managed, where value is determined, definition secured. Puncturing the enclosure of certain meaning, of what Hartman called in our conversation “the incredible parochialism of a certain kind of imperial metropolitan subject who would imagine that their narrowness is the world,” Brand instead reaches for “the whole immaculate language of the ravaged world,” as she writes in Inventory. In writing poems, she explained on our walk, one must ask: “What is the jangle you’re trying to make of all the things people already know? What is the new arrangement?”

“For me, the line is the most crucial unit of a poem,” she told me. “It hovers. It is full in its proposition”—like revolution, the we suspended, total in its possibility. In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand recalls those final hours in Market Square, dense with potential: For a brief time, “everything, every minute was a surprise. I was sure of nothing, though I was hopeful throughout . . . And I gave up all thoughts, all of my movements, to this hope. . . . I was less determined than the crowds of people.” This throng cancels the ledger, nullifies accounting. In revolution, as in a line of poetry, meaning is flung open: “You are,” Brand writes in Bread Out of Stone, “making yourself for the future, and you do not even know the extent of it when you begin.” The terms of subject and object, of sovereign and Other, are undone. The grammars that secure hierarchies and constrain possibilities are loosened—the structures of relation thrown up for grabs.

Dionne Brand is looking toward the site of a sound I can’t hear. We are standing outside her brick house. I follow the poet’s gaze up to the roof of her house. Once I see the robin, I, too, hear its sharp alarm. Lines from “Nomenclature for the Time Being” unspool in me: “In many trees along particular roads, we heard // some sound we did not recognize since / there was no noise to cover it.” What I couldn’t hear now resounds indelibly. The world has terribly reconstituted itself. There is always a tear in the world.

Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service (Graywolf Press, 2022) and the culture editor of Jewish Currents.

23cschwartz

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-measure-of-the-world at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

REVIEW | 17 JUN 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 17 JUN 2025, 12:22 AM UTC

The Sympathy Trap

On Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims

Jackie Wang

A Palestinian boy throws a rock at Israeli troops on the border of the Gaza Strip, August 31st, 2018.

Hassan Jedi/Alamy Live News

Discussed in this essay: Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal, by Mohammed El-Kurd. Haymarket Books, 2025. 256 pages.

On January 29th, 2025, I was at work on this review, and Hind Rajab had been dead for exactly one year. How many of us had wept, listening to the recording of the five-year-old’s last phone call? “I’m so scared, please come. Come take me,” Hind entreated a responder from the Palestine Red Crescent Society. “Please, will you come?” For people across the world, the wavering of Hind’s small voice made the depth of Israel’s brutality intimately present. We could feel the child’s utter desperation as she pleaded from inside the car, where she was surrounded by the bodies of her aunt, uncle, and four cousins, who had just been murdered by Israeli soldiers as the family attempted to flee the war zone Israel had made of their home in Gaza. By the time we heard the recording, we already knew that, not four hours later, Hind would be dead, as would the paramedics sent to rescue her. An investigation by Forensic Architecture later found that an Israeli tank fired 335 rounds of bullets at the Palestinian family’s car.

Many people committed to a free Palestine, myself included, circulated the story of Hind’s murder by Israeli forces. We posted pictures of the little girl with a floral headband and a radiant smile. We shared the audio recording of her tender, terrified voice. We asked others to look, to listen, to not turn away. It’s no surprise that Hind’s heartbreaking and rage-inducing story traveled widely. She was so clearly innocent—and thus, though we did not say it, so clearly not a “terrorist.” In the year and a half since Israel began its indiscriminate war against the people of Gaza, this kind of story has become horribly familiar: newborn twins slain while their father was at a local government office registering their birth; a grandfather beloved by children and kittens killed in a bombing; a software engineering student burned alive in a medical tent with an IV still hooked up to his arm, days shy of his 20th birthday. See, we said, these people so clearly posed no threat to anyone—did they not deserve to live?

What so many of us were doing was curating a selection of “perfect victims” that would make the Palestinian cause more sympathetic, more palatable to a liberal audience, in the hopes that those who professed to care about universal human rights might use whatever power they had to help end this horrendous assault. In his new book, Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal, writer and activist Mohammed El-Kurd critically interrogates this approach. By emphasizing victimhood as the condition for sympathy, he argues, this strategy grants the moral authority of those in power—those who preside over the world structured by colonial brutality—and requires Palestinians to maintain a posture of pitiable powerlessness. Indeed, the perfect Palestinian victim cannot express rage—not toward their Israeli occupiers, nor the soldiers killing their people en masse, nor the Western powers that send funds and arms to their murderers. Even in the context of occupation and genocide, they must exhibit only passive suffering and a desire for reconciliation; any other affect or expression threatens to eject them from the narrow role of sympathetic object. Banishing Palestinian resistance from the frame, this recourse to appeal ultimately strengthens the Zionist project it often purports to contest.

Of course, as El-Kurd readily acknowledges, this terrible bind—in which victims of structural violence are coerced into an impossibly constrained position or even blamed for their own oppression—is neither new nor particular to Palestinians. I wrote about this phenomenon in the context of American anti-Blackness more than a decade ago, in an essay called “Against Innocence.” In that piece, I argued that “a liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of blackness with guilt (criminality).” In other words, according to the dominant anti-Black order of things, Black people are afforded empathy only when they sufficiently distance themselves from Blackness; appeals to worthiness in the eyes of the law will only ever exempt the individual, not overturn the structure that condemned them in the first place. Keenly attuned to this reality, El-Kurd invokes the parallels between Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and Black Americans murdered by police. “We hamper them with innocence,” he writes of the latter group. “‘They were artists’ or ‘They were mentally ill’ or ‘They were unarmed.’ (It is as if condemning the state for sanctioning the death of a Black person is permissible only if the slain person is a sterile model of American citizenry.)” A similar logic, he notes, operates for victims of sexual assault.

Though I know well the dangers of sorting victims into categories of deserving and undeserving, since Israel began its genocidal assault in Gaza, I have been surprised by the degree to which I’ve found myself limiting my own speech to stay within the accepted bounds of liberal discourse, both to convince others and to protect myself. For instance, I noticed myself not only focusing on spreading stories like Hind’s and emphasizing the proportion of civilians killed by Israel, but also gravitating toward promoting the viewpoints of pro-Palestinian Jews or joining Jewish-led actions as a way to preempt charges of antisemitism. My speech felt further constrained by my awareness that one of my colleagues was under investigation for posts on X calling out Israeli war crimes. Indeed, no matter how much we contorted ourselves in our expressions of Palestine solidarity, no matter how agreeable and commonsensical our positions, the accusations were always the same—and they bore material consequences. In the US, you could lose your job for a social media post calling attention to the historical context in which the October 7th attacks took place. You might be deported for writing an op-ed criticizing your university’s complicity with genocide. Even for many of us who have long had no illusions about the brutality of this nation, the repression was much fiercer than expected. After all, the US—with its deep-seated infatuation with the mythos of free speech—habitually neutralizes leftist movements by substituting representation for structural transformation. Articulations of dissent become profitable, movements become yard signs—and too many of those who had been oriented to collective change take the money, the jobs, the accolades, as the people they claimed to serve are left to languish. But in the case of Palestine, it seems, no such cleavage between righteous speech and material vulnerability is possible. And here, El-Kurd’s book offers a vital clarification: Tame platitudes and semantic acrobatics will not protect us; they will only serve to further hem in those already suffering in militarized enclosures.

Although only 27 years old, El-Kurd already has a long history of navigating the vexed question of what it means to speak under conditions of extraordinary repression. El-Kurd grew up in half of his family’s home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah; the other half had been stolen by settlers from Long Island. As a child he became, as he writes in Perfect Victims, “a docent of dispossession,” translating the strange contours of his circumstances for “the foreign diplomats and journalists who would sit in our ‘solidarity tent,’ drinking our tea and ‘witnessing’ our catastrophe.” He felt “special” when, at age 11, he was selected as the protagonist of a documentary about the neighborhood. A decade later, El-Kurd came to understand the terms of this platform differently. In 2021, he was thrust into the international spotlight once again when an anti-expulsion campaign mounted by Sheikh Jarrah residents ignited an uprising across Palestine. El-Kurd soon found himself fielding requests from American politicians, who wished to speak to Palestinians about what they called “the situation.” They did not, however, want to talk with just any Palestinians, but with Palestinian children—those “whose fangs are not yet sharpened,” El-Kurd writes. Not only was the bizarre request emblematic of how innocence functions as the primary modality through which Palestinian dispossession is made legible to Western audiences; it also exemplified “a morbid correlation”: “The more martyrs there are, the more podiums.”

In this context, where the death of one’s kin forges the route toward opportunities for public address (albeit extraordinarily constrained), El-Kurd refuses the mantle. “I do not want to audition before the reader; I want to address the reader as if they are a guest in my living room,” he writes. In one’s own living room, one need not, while a genocide rages, condemn Hamas or respond to hypothetical future harm that might one day befall Jewish Israelis in order to be heard. In one’s own living room, one is free to address “the topics of discussion in accordance with their moral or political weight.”

The barrier to this approach is, of course, the politics of appeal—which follows an oppressive logic that, El-Kurd explains, proceeds in two parts: “dehumanization” and “humanization.” The former refers not only to those spectacularly vulgar “moments of televised fury when politicians slip up and call us ‘human animals’”—as Israel’s then Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant did on October 9th, 2023, when he demanded a “complete siege on Gaza”—but also to the more ordinary agents of obfuscation: journalists who conceal Israeli violence by writing about genocide in the passive voice, missionaries who enrich their sense of self through Palestinian immiseration, bureaucrats who couch their Zionist collaboration in muddled proceedings, and all the rest of those in the West who “refus[e] to look us in the eye.” Whereas dehumanization forms the basis of a Western common sense that indicts Palestinians for “what is logically understood to be man’s natural reaction to subjugation” (for example, rage in the face of generations of land theft and ethnic cleansing), humanization recuperates Palestinians by “depicting us in ‘respectable’ and ‘relatable’ terms,” emphasizing woundedness and grief and often focusing on the particular story of an individual, rather than the collective claims of the group. “If they are bereaved,” El-Kurd writes, “they can only be the wailing widows whose grief is too inexplicable to contextualize.” In short, dehumanization casts Palestinians as terrorists (guilty), while humanization portrays Palestinians as victims (innocent). The politics of appeal comprises the narrow route by which one might pass from the former to the latter.

In Perfect Victims, El-Kurd emphatically discards this vigorously enforced script. Recognizing the relationship between comportment and capitulation, he decisively rejects the polite discourse of reasoned neutrality and irreverently refuses to confine himself to a singular mode. He moves freely between sharp analysis, rhapsodic lyricism, journalistic matter-of-factness, and the no-holds-barred boldness of a revolutionary who is clearly fed up with the civility humpers who insist on a posture of respectability. After all, the rehearsal of the constrained forms agreeable to those in power functions as a ritual of submission through which acquiescent attitudes are established. Irreverence therefore interrupts the process of habituation to oppression, dilating the space of possibility; it is “a dignifying act of refusal, for those confined by siege or incarceration can be emancipated in the mind.” Like the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who famously theorized the linkage between psychological and material schemas of oppression, arguing that “decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder,” El-Kurd underscores that meaningful change is possible only when the colonized themselves and those in solidarity with them undergo radical transformation. Only by completely disregarding the oppressor’s rhetorical and narrative strictures, by orienting oneself toward the truth that “the Palestinian struggle for liberation is heroic—no qualifiers needed,” can the vital activation come about, ultimately enabling the colonized to bring about an end to their occupation.

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Irreverence interrupts the process of habituation to oppression; it is “a dignifying act of refusal, for those confined by siege or incarceration can be emancipated in the mind.”

Still, it would be difficult to argue that, over the past year and a half of genocide in Gaza, the politics of appeal has made no inroad for the Palestine solidarity movement. We have signed petitions, called our representatives, circulated heart-wrenching images of Palestinian victimization—and indeed, the Overton window has shifted. Polls have found that Democratic voters increasingly sympathize with Palestinians, and this past spring, 15 senators supported a pair of bills to cancel the sale of offensive arms to Israel, a tally that would have been unthinkable just years ago. Outside the US, the sense that Israel is an oppressive regime is even stronger. In a way, we are winning. The ferocity of the current repression is a testament to the force of the sea change: Those with power can no longer manufacture consent, so they attempt to keep people in line by threatening to fire them from jobs, suspend them from school, or even deport them for holding the “wrong” position.

Yet this shift in public opinion has not corresponded with material change. It doesn’t seem to matter to the ruling class that they have lost broad consent for Israel’s war against the Palestinians. Despite 83% of Democrats being in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza, Democratic representatives overwhelmingly do not support cutting off the money and weapons that underwrite the genocide. We have clearly seen that it is not the beliefs of the people but the interests of the powerful that ultimately determine policy. What good, then, is a politics that hinges on calling on the consciences of those who profit from the status quo?

In the context of the Palestine solidarity movement, El-Kurd is far from alone in taking up a decidedly anti-appeal approach. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, for instance, focuses not on changing the hearts and minds of Western actors, but on the structural antagonism and asymmetry of power between Israelis and Palestinians. For two decades, the movement has demanded, among other things, a boycott of “events, projects, publications, films, or exhibitions” that normalize occupation by bringing Israelis and Palestinians together “so they can present their respective narratives or perspectives, or to work toward reconciliation, ‘overcoming barriers,’ etc., without addressing the root causes of injustice and the requirements of justice.” Youth-led movements, such as the student intifada that generated the proliferation of encampments and other pro-Palestine activity on college campuses last year and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)—a transnational, grassroots movement of young Palestinians—refuse the compulsion to construct perfect victims by focusing on materially ending support for the Israeli war machine. (PYM has, for example, led a campaign against the Danish shipping company Maersk, which transports arms to Israel, while the student intifada demanded that universities divest from entities materially supporting the genocide.) These groups have been able to remain clear-eyed about who the enemy is and continue to unapologetically use the language of resistance—honoring the martyrs, praising the intifada, and calling for a horizon of Palestinian liberation “from the river to the sea,” while others decry this lexicon as objectionable or nonstrategic.

The orientation of those who refuse the politics of appeal underlines the contested role of speech in political change. El-Kurd, for his part, remains ambivalent about what can be done with language, even as he has chosen a life of words: “Sometimes . . . I’m tempted to say that it’s all smoke and mirrors, that after all the poems and essays and speeches, there is not a dent in the status quo,” he writes. And yet, he remembers the Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, who wrote “God Is a Refugee” in protest of the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law and the 1960 Israel Lands Administration Law, which facilitated Israeli land theft: “His poem not only documented Zionist land theft but helped catalyze the farmers and landowners toward launching a general strike.”

El-Kurd does not tidily resolve his inner conflict, so we are left with the question: What are the conditions that enable expressive acts to catalyze radical transformation? Hussein’s poem opened a space of possibility, but it was ultimately the action of the workers that made the poem an effective political tool. Only a synthesis between action and imagination can instantiate a new reality. As Black Liberation Army revolutionary Assata Shakur succinctly put it: “Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.” Repeated enunciation can contribute to making alternative realities thinkable, but power never yields voluntarily; we must identify our points of leverage so they can become the fulcrum we use to raise up a new, liberatory future for Palestine.

Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, and multimedia artist. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023).

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CONVERSATION | 17 JUN 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 17 JUN 2025, 12:43 AM UTC

Who Might We Become for Each Other?

A conversation about Black–Palestinian interconnectedness and the legacy of June Jordan

Marina Magloire in conversation with George Abraham, Zaina Alsous, Aurielle Marie, and aja monet

June Jordan, circa 1976

Louise Bernikow

Last fall, as the 2024 United States presidential election drew near and both major parties courted the votes of Black Americans, we were confronted with a torrent of social media posts, memes, and talking heads attempting to deny the interconnectedness of Black and Palestinian communities. Black people have already done enough for collective liberation, they said; a focus on the genocide in Palestine came at the expense of Black people suffering elsewhere. “Why do Black people have to care about everyone while expecting everyone to not care about anyone but themselves?” the journalist Michael Harriot wrote in an op-ed in TheGrio, tracing the fault lines of the argument that Palestine solidarity was acting as a spoiler for Kamala Harris’s campaign. Our struggles are connected, we countered again and again, like a spell meant to vanquish those who insisted we abandon each other. Sometimes we meant that our killers work in tandem, as when members of the Atlanta Police Department—whose predecessors served slaveholders, and whose colleagues murdered Kathryn Johnston and Rayshard Brooks—share tactics with the Israeli police responsible for enforcing a regime of domination that includes systematic dispossession and the incarceration of more than 9,000 Palestinians. Sometimes we issued the pronouncement to affirm that we owe each other everything, even when we die different deaths, decreed by the passports we do or do not have, or by the color of our skin. Sometimes we said it to refute the actions of our own people who enlist in regimes fatal to the other, like last year, when at a convening of the UN Security Council, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield voted to abstain from demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, her Black hand rising on America’s behalf.

In search of a model for cutting through these corrosive obfuscations, my comrade Zaina Alsous and I turned to the long and rich history of solidarity between Black and Palestinian people. We found ourselves pulled back to the words of Black feminist poet, educator, and activist June Jordan, who wrote with unyielding clarity about an anti-imperialist horizon with Palestine at the center. “The issue of the Palestinian people is the issue of the value of human life,” she proclaimed in 1982, and she remained firm in her conviction—even when censured by the media, the American and Israeli literary establishments, and at times, her own friends. As a Palestinian woman and a Black woman, Zaina and I had long appreciated the bridges Jordan built between our peoples. As American citizens conscripted into underwriting a genocide with our tax dollars, we have also found inspiration in Jordan’s unflinching confrontation with her own complicity. Despite her position as a queer Black woman in a country that hated her, Jordan never used her own oppression to abdicate responsibility for the imperialist violence happening in her name. In the introduction to her posthumously published essay collection Some of Us Did Not Die, Jordan writes of facing her “own absolute dirty hands”: “I am discovering my own shameful functions as part of the problem, at least. I no longer think ‘They’ are this or that, but rather, ‘We’ or ‘I’ am not doing enough, for instance, or ‘I’ have not done my homework, and so on.”

What Jordan teaches us is at once very simple and very difficult: If our claim that our struggles are connected is to be more than just cliché or consolation, we must embody it, even when privileges of class, color, and citizenship threaten to lull us into self-satisfied complacency. Jordan pushes those of us, both Black and Palestinian, living in the United States not to accept comfort instead of liberation, rest instead of resistance, or words instead of actions. It bears underscoring that while Jordan was primarily known as a poet, language was one among many things that she did with her body. She went to protests and hid in stairwells with her friends when the cops rammed through the crowd, she organized fundraisers for children in Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion, she found housing for students when they were abused by partners, among countless other acts of quotidian courage. Our expressions of pain can so easily be warped into alibis for inaction, distorted into a form of redress for past or present harms—but, Jordan reminds us, when we fortify our language with action, we move closer to the justice we have been seeking.

In the spirit of Jordan’s imperative to rigorously consider the limits and possibilities of writing and organizing from within the heart of empire, Zaina and I convened a group of Black and Palestinian American poets to think alongside Jordan’s work as we discuss the roles of identity, memory, and poetry in building Black–Palestinian solidarity. In addition to Zaina—a poet and labor organizer in South Florida—the conversation below includes Aja Monet, a surrealist blues poet, musician, and cultural worker currently living in Los Angeles; George Abraham, a Palestinian poet and an editor at Mizna; and Aurielle Marie, a poet, essayist, and cultural worker living in Atlanta. There are no simple answers to the paradox of living in a country that harms us, even as we owe many of our material comforts to the violence it exacts against our own peoples across the world. Instead of offering easy certitude, this conversation offers what Jordan calls “dreams: detailed explorations of the alternatives to whatever stultifies and debases our lives.”

—Marina Magloire

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Marina Magloire: In thinking about the question of solidarity through the lens of Jordan’s work, I found myself returning to her essay “Report from the Bahamas,” in which she writes about traveling to the Bahamas as a Black American woman. She draws on the experience to caution against understanding Blackness or womanhood as ready-made foundations of solidarity, recalling shopping for souvenirs from the Black Bahamian women whose livelihoods depend on selling hats and bags to the parade of tourists and reflecting that, in the context of this exchange, “we are not particularly women anymore; we are parties to a transaction designed to set us against each other.” Solidarity has to be chosen and enacted. “It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection,” she writes. We are so often presented with a marketable notion of identity—as static, extractable, something that can be bought and sold. How do we refuse this commodification and orient ourselves instead toward well-being in our relationships?

George Abraham: I teach at a college, so I often find myself taking part in conversations that are preoccupied with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Even as the right is trying to implode these initiatives to implement a more overtly fascist regime, we have to be clear that diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamentally inadequate categories for thinking about Palestine. They may help us change what power looks like, but as Jordan warns, they traffic in the idea that identity is a fixed property of the individual—something that you have, not something whose meaning depends on what we make happen between us—and so will not fundamentally challenge regimes of domination. What we need are concepts that can help us reckon with the structures that have brought our world into being: racism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism. And moreover, our thought has to have a material tether.

Aja Monet: I’m currently very disappointed by the ways people have neglected to work together. Clearly, our movements have not been sufficient. We’ve learned to romanticize the language of struggle, and we’ve turned that language into a series of slogans. We print them on T-shirts and posters, and we buy them to help us feel like a part of something. We mistake this image of community—which is really our shared consumption—for the possibility of actual community, which capitalism has corroded. Identity, in this framework, is just a product; its value is fixed, it occupies an unchanging position in a hierarchy. There are a couple of problems with this. First, it means the banner of an identity category can be used to conflate very different experiences. As Jordan put it in a 1987 interview, “If I, a black woman poet and writer, a professor of English at State University, if I am oppressed then we need another word to describe a woman in a refugee camp in Palestine or the mother of six in a rural village in Nicaragua or any counterpart inside South Africa.” Moreover, this rigid idea about what identity means also feeds destructive ideas about scarcity. For example, I am ashamed that as the Movement for Black Lives was trying to push our people toward a more internationalist framework, we were met with the idea that there is always some baseline anti-Black oppression that transcends context—as if taking the genocide in Palestine seriously is taking something away from Black people. It’s important to be clear that people are facing real identity-based attacks, but our solution shouldn’t be to respond on those terms. I think this is what Jordan is speaking to—the way that finding the love between us actually has the potential to move us out from identitarian groupings and toward true solidarity, which is rooted in the values that describe how we should live together. Part of what that means is addressing the grave degree of anti-Blackness that exists within our movements across the globe.

The recent uprisings in the movement for Palestinian liberation have been so transformative (in part) because we were organizing not on the basis of identity but on the basis of our shared belief that genocide should not happen. As someone who’s been a part of the Movement for Black Lives for many years, it was inspiring to see that the Palestine solidarity movement has been able to mobilize people across the world in a way that organizing from the position of Black identity politics did not allow us to do. Really, I’m just saying that I don’t know if we should be so concerned with whether or not identity is being commodified, so much as we should be concerned with whether or not we are meeting people’s material needs. If we do our work right, identity will be a way to feel connected around shared affinities and experiences, rather than a series of channels for allocating resources.

“People are facing real identity-based attacks, but our solution shouldn’t be to respond on those terms.”

Zaina Alsous: I like the entry points Aja mentioned: shame and disappointment. Without shame and disappointment, we would be immersed in self-congratulatory delusion, pretending not to see what’s happening all around us, and it is far worse to live in a state of delusion than to accept the suffering that comes with acknowledgement. That suffering is actually required to cultivate the resilience we desperately need to work with other people day-to-day—including people we don’t agree with, people who have let us down, who might be vile toward us sometimes, and blame us for the despair they’re feeling. We need to do this, as Jordan emphasizes, to ensure that our kids will have enough to eat, that people will have healthcare—basic, fundamental things.

Jordan’s work encourages us to hold onto an idea of identity that is not so individual. For me, that means that it’s not enough to think about how I am proud to be Palestinian; while it’s certainly true that I am, if I thought only about my sense of self, I wouldn’t have it in me to get up day after day amid so much unjustifiable death and grief. It’s when I remember that my people are counting on me that I have to show up.

The culture industries in the United States and Europe are exceptionally skilled at creating spokespeople on behalf of oppressed peoples, which is ultimately a way of extracting people from our communities. So when it comes to refusing the commodification of identity, presence and repetition are essential, showing up for our people day in and day out. And I think we unfortunately have the additional responsibility of being clear that visibility is not liberation—nor will we ever settle for it. Writing, or any other practice, that is devoid of a material day-to-day accountability to the community within which you live is, to me, useless.

Aurielle Marie: Certainly, some “organizers” are using identity politics to cash a check, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that the kind of weaponization of identity that we’re talking about emerged from a wound of scarcity. It is heartbreaking and overwhelming to face the state with rocks and slingshots when they’ve got guns and prisons. And in organizing spaces, too, we find ourselves hemmed in. For example, Black people often, and for good reason, fear anti-Blackness from non-Black people of color. Sometimes, this has meant preemptively turning our backs on them, afraid they would “threaten” our success when we were already up against so much. To be vulnerable: I failed as an organizer because I wanted to “get it right” with my own people so badly that I betrayed the part of me that understood that Black folks and non-Black folks could be on the same side. I was scared of the pain of losing whatever Blackness gave me. I was trying to protect myself from losing more. This kind of rigidity was flawed and deeply human—and it is something we need to strategize around.

Marina Magloire: In her essay “Black Folks and Foreign Policy,” Jordan uses metaphors of the plantation to argue that Black Americans are house slaves who have a responsibility to use their proximity to the master to help the field slaves in Nicaragua, Vietnam, southern Africa, and Palestine. She writes: “Inside the Big House our mothers and our grandmothers worked down on their knees so that we could stand up. They kept their eyes on a house ahead of them, a house full of family come to freedom. Now we sleep inside that Big House. Will we let ourselves and our family in the field just grovel down and die, domesticated by de Massa? Or will we join our cousins in the field—and clean it up?” Jordan doesn’t usually write much about the past—in fact, she wrote to Alice Walker in 1981 that “we differ because I am emphatically oriented towards the present and the future reality and I am interested in the past only as it may be helpful now, or tomorrow.” However, in this essay, she links her solidarity to the memory of her ancestors’ struggle, calling up the history of refusing to accept the table scraps of US imperialism. How do you understand the role of memory in our movements?

Zaina Alsous: Memory is a pedagogy. It can be instrumentalized to reify systems of extraordinary violence. It is also a tool that can tether our people to one another. So memory is essential, and it comes with a great deal of responsibility: What memories do we invoke, and how do we invoke them toward that end of, as Aja said, finding the love between us?

To succeed, we need to be in coalition not just in our organizing but also in our habits of communication and memory. As a Palestinian born in the US South, instead of being fixated on the historic levels of atrocity waged against my own people in a way that turns me away from where I am, I have to get clear that those atrocities cannot be fully understood without holding onto the memory of the land I’m on, which includes the memory of the generations descended from enslaved people—because all of those things lead to the brutality of the present. As Jordan reminds us, it is not productive to be self-obsessed. The reality is that Palestine will not be free without mobilizing millions of people across the world toward a common purpose, and this requires creating resilient forms of connection across disparate contexts. In 2020, the Palestinian artist Taqi Spateen painted a mural of George Floyd on part of the separation wall in the occupied West Bank. In an interview, Spateen explained that he did not sign his name because “it’s not about me”—and he further clarified his intention in depicting a man who had been murdered by a police officer: “I want the people in America who see this mural to know that we in Palestine are standing with them, because we know what it’s like to be strangled every day.” These are the kinds of memory practices that I am committed to: ones that create forms of recognition among oppressed peoples, that establish a lexicon of common cause.

Throughout her life, Jordan sought ways to see ourselves in one another, studying liberation movements across the globe. I love her 1984 essay “Nicaragua: Why I Had to Go There.” She writes: “Here in the United States you do get weary, after a while; you could spend your best energies forever writing letters to the New York Times. But you know, in your gut, that writing back is not the same as fighting back.” She continues: “[The Sandinistas] have given to me and to all of us an amazing example of self-love. With their bodies and their blood they have shown us the bravery that self-love requires.” Is it possible, then, that in this moment of deep despair we could call upon an overwhelming self-love for our people to instruct us in study and strategies of communication that never focus only on our own people?

I find such a powerful example of this in Jordan’s 1996 essay “Eyewitness in Lebanon,” which she wrote in the context of the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon that began in the early 1980s. Of course, this resonates now because of the recent Israeli bombing campaign; my family’s home was bombed. My parents were born as Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and as a child I didn’t encounter much public discussion about this period of occupation. Jordan writes, “But I went there, to Lebanon. And I’m back. And I’m real. And Lebanon is real. And this poisonous pretense to the contrary seems to me insolent and ominous, at best.” And later: “My life requires perpetual revolt against a double standard that puts me on the Easily Invisible side of the ledger, the Don’t Matter and No Count side of things, the Be Good/Keep Quiet/Say ‘Thank you’ side of the equation. And Lebanon is on the wrong side, just like me. Lebanon is not white.” Jordan is not saying that identity doesn’t matter. She’s employing a strategy. She’s asking: How do I communicate about this atrocity that is so far away from my own people in a way that makes them feel a sense of connection?

“Memory is essential, and it comes with a great deal of responsibility: What memories do we invoke, and how do we invoke them toward the end of finding the love between us?”

A mural depicting George Floyd on the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

Maya Alleruzzo/AP

Marina Magloire: In the introduction to Poetry for the People, a pedagogical primer born from her poetry workshops at University of California, Berkeley, in the 1990s, Jordan writes: “Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.” How do you understand the role of poetry in addressing the ongoing violence against our peoples?

George Abraham: I recently taught a Palestinian Resistance Literature class at a liberal arts college. At the end of the semester, the students, most of whom were people of color, designed an exhibit made up of texts and personal reflections articulating material connections between their own lives and the struggle for Palestinian liberation. We know how this story goes: The administration prohibited the display. During this disheartening ordeal, a comrade returned me to Jordan’s essay “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” in which she recounts designing a class on Black English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Jordan explains that the class came about as a kind of corrective to the corrosive institutional distortions Black people face in the US: “As children, most of the thirty-five million Afro-Americans living here depend on this language for our discovery of the world . . . [But] we begin to grow up in a house . . . meant to shelter a family that is alien and hostile to us. As we learn our way around this environment, either we hide our original word habits, or we completely surrender our own voice.” In her course, Jordan built a different kind of home, one where her students were free to study and imagine in a grammar that affirmed “the presence of life”—the lives of the students and their communities, the lives denied by the dominant formula that “White English, in America, is Standard English.” When Reggie Jordan, the brother of one of the students, was murdered by the Brooklyn police, the class got to work. They composed notes of condolence to the family, as well as statements to both the police, who routinely murdered Black folks, and the press, who had neglected to cover the event. The group knew their language of study would be unlikely to “communicate with those who, evidently, did not give a damn about us/Reggie/police violence,” and still they chose to do all of their writing in Black English. After all: “If we sought to express ourselves by abandoning our language wouldn’t that mean our suicide on top of Reggie’s murder?” Jordan’s essay reoriented me toward the critical questions: What is the language that our truth demands? Who might we become for each other as we learn to tell it?

Jordan said, “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth”—so these are poetic questions. After all, poetry is where we intimately and carefully attend to language. And they are questions that I find particularly urgent here in the US, where many of the best-resourced poets cannot bring themselves to call a genocide a genocide—let alone to meaningfully confront the truth of our complicity or offer material support in solidarity with Palestinians. They are questions that rhyme with the tradition of Palestinian poetry that is rooted in the insurgent collective—a tradition that, as Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani put it, is grounded in a “dialectical relationship [between] artistic work and the movement . . . at work in society.”

Aurielle Marie: Part of my grief and fear is that I did, at one point, feel like we had arrived at the place Jordan names: the edge of rhetoric and the beginning of action. In 2014 and 2015, I thought we were going somewhere together—Black and brown and Indigenous folks who were organizing in opposition to state violence. There was a palpable momentum. There were folks who were willing to die. I was one of them. Then, it just stopped. And the idea that you could arrive at the place of revolutionary action, and then just revert . . . I don’t think I’ve recovered from it. That’s when I turned to writing as my way through.

Aja Monet: In the Movement for Black Lives, infiltration, commodification, and individualism became detrimental. We lost sight of the fact that organizing is fundamentally rooted in relationships, not in quotas or donor expectations. The movement began to fail when the poetry of organizing—the day-to-day, door-to-door blues of it—fell away.

When we were organizing in South Florida, we facilitated poetry workshops for organizers to help us deal with the interpersonal discord among us and to direct critical discussions about our purpose and our future. Some people didn’t want to face the reflections that the workshops revealed. Others didn’t want to participate at all because they felt it was not radical enough. If we look to Indigenous knowledge, then we know that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are integral to our liberation movements; they inform how we come to know who we are, who we want to be, and what we’re capable of.

Capitalism is vicious, and it captures what is normal. It is normal for people to want the material conditions of their lives to shift. I think our role as poets and as organizers is to facilitate the creation of language for that desire that also helps people understand where that desire comes from, and how it is exploited. Poems instruct us to go inward to help the individual find language for what they’re experiencing as part of the collective. Poems have helped me transform freedom from an abstract idea into a fully fleshed sensory experience that I can share with others.

“Slowness is not comfortable. It’s a way of insulating our work by refusing the state the ability to dictate what our center should be.”

Marina Magloire: Without the kinds of deep work that you’re talking about, people don’t trust each other. I saw this in the Palestine solidarity encampments here in Atlanta: People were trying to organize direct actions, but couldn’t even agree on methods. Many of us were not actually in community with each other outside of these crisis situations, so we hadn’t built the trust necessary to make collective decisions in incredibly stressful situations. In her essay “Notes Toward a Model of Resistance,” Jordan highlights community as the mechanism that gives us the courage to face the threat of individual harm. With compassion, she describes attending a protest with a woman who retreats in tears when the police arrive: “Not blessed by a visible, known, tested, and building community on which she could rely, she felt, and therefore, she was isolated. She could not do herself, or anyone else, any good.” In light of escalating violence, what does moving toward community look like for you at this moment?

Aurielle Marie: My initial impulse is to home in on the idea of escalation: Here it comes—more of it. And then I begin to wonder, What do we mean by escalation? The state is driven by extraction and expansion. It has one single, horrible project, with endless variations. Attuning ourselves to the proliferation of forms of brutality can wear us down, decimating our capacity.

I was talking with [the poet and musician] Saul Williams for Scalawag magazine, and he invoked something awful: The State of Israel has deployed bombs so powerful that they are vaporizing Palestinians. When Saul said that, his tone was incredulous. And I assumed that disbelief: How can they just disappear people that way? I was stuck, the question running on a loop in my mind. Then, the next week, I heard myself think it—How could they disappear people that way?—and I felt convicted by that way, as if it was the specificity of the method and not the fact of disappearing people at all that horrified me. At once, I felt shame: How dare I fall for this sleight of hand? This somatic impact of a new tactic had pushed from my mind the thousands and thousands of people who have been disappeared by the state in other ways. I had forgotten the women who stepped through the Door of No Return, the people detained in Guantanamo, the children ripped apart when the police bombed row houses in Philadelphia seeking to kill MOVE activists, the mother and son in Gaza burned in a tent; I had forgotten even my own experience as an activist kidnapped by the police. A new technology had made me forget that this is what they do. If they package their violence in a better PR kit, should I be less alarmed? To be disappeared is to be disappeared is to be disappeared.

In light of the incapacitation that the framework of escalation encourages, my personal assignment is to refuse that imposed acceleration. Urgency is deeply important, but we have to be attuned to multiple modalities. When we would respond to the state essentially every time they killed another unarmed Black person, it meant that we were locked into such a relentless pace of reaction that we could not build protracted movements. It burnt us out and left us vulnerable to infiltration. Slowness is not comfortable. It’s a way of insulating our work by refusing the state the ability to dictate what our center should be. It’s like the song we’ve sung time and time again, marching in the streets: “We shall not be moved.” The state can outpace us—and if they tire us, they will outlast us. Now, I invite folks who are doing their work in the streets over into my home, and they know when they cross that threshold that they are here to eat, drink water, write poems, decompress. I see how folks are preserved by that slowness; it’s allowing for a continuity that I hadn’t witnessed before. Here in Atlanta, there is distrust in the marrow of our relationships—the state did that. We need a space where we can alchemize that into something different, or we’ll stay trapped in the same cycles.

Marina Magloire is an Atlanta-based scholar and the author of We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism.

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their book Birthright won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian poetry anthology for Haymarket Books, and are a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University.

IntifadaBatata

Website

Zaina Alsous works in the labor movement in South Florida and is the author of the poetry collection A Theory of Birds.

Aurielle Marie is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and storyteller. They’re the author of Gumbo Ya Ya, which won the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Aurielle was the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year in poetry and a 2023 Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Marie lives in Atlanta, Georgia, on unceded Muskogee land.

aja monet is a Surrealist Blues Poet and cultural worker, who follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. She is the author of the poetry collections my mother was a freedom fighter and florida water, both from Haymarket Books; the creator of the Grammy-nominated poetry album, when the poems do what they do; and the Artistic Creative Director for V-Day.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/who-might-we-become-for-each-other at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

FICTION | 17 JUN 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 16 JUN 2025, 6:40 PM UTC

What You Deserve

Be careful what you wish for, is the moral of the story, except when the moral is something more like: unless, what if, if only.

Lyta Gold

Illustrations: Anya Levy

“What if I rolled a golem out of mud,” she murmured, as if I wasn’t there. I could’ve been made of mud myself, for all the attention she was paying me. At first I thought maybe I’d misheard. I was sitting in her studio—the corrugated shack she calls a studio—in her only chair, sipping a post-work beer. Jess was squatting on the floor, clearing the gears of her pottery wheel, which were always jamming. There was a profound ugliness to her at that moment that I loved, and if I’d still been an artist I would have grabbed a fistful of modeling clay and sculpted her right then and there, like a skinny-legged, soft-bellied toad, or a ruined goddess, crouching in the ancient dirty clay bits on her floor.

Instead I kept playing the patient, supportive friend, offering advice—safe, normal advice, upbeat and Instagrammable. Jess didn’t respond, just rose and started spinning up a new pot from a lump of earthenware. The gallery had asked her to fill out her show with four more pieces by the end of the month. I blathered on and on from her chair, and drank her dark beer, as Jess sat on a splintered box and shaped the new pot into a solid, pleasurable shape, with cute little feet. Boring, spiritually beige stuff by her standards; I could tell she wasn’t thinking about her work from her own eyes but from others’, now that there would be others—and one person’s in particular.

“What Bertram did back then doesn’t have to stick to you today,” I told her. “You don’t have to let it stick. It’s your first real show, even if it’s on the small side. Don’t let him ruin it!”

She sped up the wheel, wired off a section, and let it whirl out of her hands. The loop of clay flew like a limp UFO for three whole feet before it hit the wall and slid into the dust. “I’m thirty-four,” she said. “I’m old for firsts.”

“She’s maaad,” Rahim likes to sing, “she’s maaaaad at the moooon.” I don’t know if this is a real song or one of the ones he made up, in which case I guess it’s real enough. Anyway he’ll sing it about Jess, he’ll sing it about me. He’s right: We are mad. Not like him, even-keeled and eternally unbothered, putting his annoyingly practical computer science degree to annoyingly practical use. He still finds time to make up his little songs and tend to the plants in our apartment with nearly artistic intuition, their leaves so rich and thick and green that each individual layer of membrane could maintain a tiny terraced city. Rahim never worries about any of the stupid shit that preoccupies me and Jess: juried shows and coveted grants, prestigious fellowships and tenure-track jobs, who gets to be a professional artist and who doesn’t, and shouldn’t. He doesn’t care about this kind of thing anywhere, for anyone—who gets a promotion at work, who gets invited to present at conferences. He doesn’t even have a LinkedIn.

Jess has never earned a fellowship; she’s never been awarded one of those magical grants. The art world showed little interest in her Medusa teacups, her tentacle medallions. These days she peddles her wacky pots at craft fairs and her standard ones on Etsy; she teaches ceramics at the Wolster community center, and every other weekend she drives to a prison fifty miles away to teach an art therapy course, even though the governor cut the budget and she has to invoice a local church for gas. That last part is why I love her, even as I hate her, because she’s never viewed herself as making it, as being a real artist; when I’ve never been close, when I’ve only ever worked in an office; and she isn’t even grateful to have made it now, officially into a gallery at last.

“Bertram might be impressed,” I said. “You never know.”

“If he even recognizes me.” Jess picked up the long rope of fallen clay, encrusted with all kinds of broken bits. Maybe there were dust people on her floor, too tiny to see, and this was their Roswell, their sacred encounter. Some of the moted dust people were trying to ascend with the returning UFO and were falling like angels, spiraling to the floor, slowed in the holy terror of the air. I watched Jess knead the wrecked clay to shapelessness. At one point she cut herself on a fired chip that had gotten mixed up in the larger mass, leaving a streak of blood in the clay. She just kneaded that in too. She squeezed it into a man, a careless little guy, forming his fluid imperfect limbs like it was nothing. It almost looked like the thing was breathing, or straining for completion. But she stopped there, at the attempt, the sketch, and stood the little clay man on the table, a bit more blood from her thumb smeared across his forehead. “I bet,” she said—not to me but to the little man—“he won’t remember me at all.”

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Rahim wasn’t worried about the little man, not at first. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him. “Jess keeps working on that thing,” I coughed out a week or so later, as I lay curled up with Rahim on the couch, smoking.

“So?” Rahim blew a perfect ring and took another drag on his pen. He preferred vapes; they let him feel like Gandalf. “She’s got to work on her things, right?”

“No, no. She’s only working on the guy. The little guy. The golem. The show asked for four additional pots, not a single sculpture.”

“Whatever.” He waved away my misty exhalation and my concerns. “Golems are cool. The gallery will understand.”

Of course he thought golems were cool. He’s always been considerably more interested in Judaism than I am; he’s the one who insisted on having a mezuzah on the door, a chuppah at our politely interfaith wedding. And he’s always been irritatingly certain that everyone will be as chill about everything as he is. I’ve never been chill about anything, and neither has Jess. That was how she and I connected back in Hebrew school, over 80s goth rock and Gregorian chants. Our nails were always painted black with silver sparkles; we regarded ourselves with the tremendous moral seriousness acceptable for preteens and artists and no one else. Later we applied for the same prestigious art program at Wolster College, outside of Boston, and got in together.

And then I dropped out. And because I dropped out, what happened to Jess, what happened to the others, never happened to me. I’m not numbered among the professor’s victims: not the bronze sculptor with the Guggenheim fellowship, or the mixed-media installationist, or even Jane Does 1–12. The famous Bertram North didn’t care about me at all. He looked past my blobby sculptures, my mushy doubt, my lank and uninteresting body, and chose Jess’s sure and ferocious intensity instead.

Rahim and I smoked a little more, then a lot more. He watered the plants; I took the dog for a walk. We drifted along our neighborhood route, making the usual stops. Kirby sniffed for treats outside the Dead Poets bar, where popular professors would go out for drinks with their students—only the special ones, the ones who could take the attention.

Of course Bertram wanted to fuck her. Jess wasn’t stupid. In fact she thought she’d been smart enough to lead him along forever, parlay every drinks some other weekend? and I’d be happy to model for you later into a grant-funded graduate position, or at least a solid recommendation. She could play the game, she thought, of delicate denial. Wasn’t that eroticism: the impossible pursuit, the never-meeting of need? All the theory texts said it was, at least. In real life, though, I think he just got bored. And his reputation was catching up to him: The Guggenheim sculptress had spoken up, and the rumblings had started, the creaky machinery of academic bureaucracy, the old complaints shut away in a querulous drawer. Meanwhile, a position was opening up at a Parisian institute, an honor worthy of his esteem. So Bertram North was quietly packed off to Europe, the college more than happy to float the costs of his convenient exile. A student would join him later on a fellowship: not Jess, but that blonde from Phoenix who made the misshapen finger bowls. I heard he married her, eventually.

So Jess wasn’t one of the famous professor’s victims, not really. The facts would say that she’d been the one to try, and had been rebuffed, and any negative reaction on her part must arise from baffled ambition, unsatisfied desire. She had wanted that fellowship. She knew it was stupid. She kept telling me that. But just because it was stupid didn’t mean it was a bad idea: If it wasn’t him it would be someone else. That was the world, he was the world, or at least how she had to enter into it. I know, I know, but I promise it all made a brilliant and hard-edged sense when we were twenty-two. Jess knocked on the door of his office as he was hurriedly packing—dressed as cute as she could, black curls tied back and a dress cling-filming her short, stocky form. Then Bertram said what he said, abruptly, and with his back turned. The fellowship wasn’t right for her. She wasn’t the right fit for France. She was a born crafter, not an artist. She’d sell best at local fairs and farmers’ markets, and it was better for her to know her inadequacy now, and not later. Someday, she would be grateful.

When Kirby and I returned home, Rahim was already in bed, watching videos; I joined him. Someone, an invisible person, was patiently rolling glass jars down a staircase, jars full of every imaginable thing: olive oil and paint and ball bearings, fireworks and Disney princess figurines. We watched them break and crash and explode, over and over. My phone started buzzing—texts from Jess arriving in bursts, fast and furious.

I silenced the notifications and tried to focus on the videos, Rahim swiping to the next and giggling before they started. But I couldn’t help imagining her, ten miles away, sitting in that former guest cabin behind a rundown farmhouse. Soon after graduation, her parents had divorced—which gave her an excuse to start over, remaking loopy, cursive Jessica Soloway into hard, plain Jess Chen—and she bought the cabin with guilt money from her dad. Now she stewed out there in her hut with her crafty little pots and a vengeance she couldn’t take, her self-contempt and her stifled, extravagant rage. She wasn’t an artist and she wasn’t a victim and she wasn’t a destroyed little girl; she was a woman, and she resented. And resentment can kill you.

Somewhere between the video of the jar with the melting action figures and the one with the antique crystal egg cups, Rahim fell asleep. I snuck the phone out of his hand and put it on the nightstand; I took mine to the bathroom. On the toilet I finally looked at Jess’s messages. They were incomprehensible. More nonsense about golems: a link to a PDF I couldn’t download, and which didn’t look safe. A supposedly in-progress photo that was too blurred to make out—Jess had cracked the lens on her phone ages ago and couldn’t afford the new models. What do you think? she demanded. I have to know if it’s right.

With a week to go before her pots were due, Jess still hadn’t started. I kept dropping by after work because she said it helped, having me there; and I wanted to help, turn her around, turn her show around, make it happen. But on every visit I found her huddled in a loose grey wrap that was almost like a tallit, researching golems, poring over weird shit she found online and musty kabbalistic books she ordered with expedited shipping that I knew she couldn’t afford. And her little man sculpture was turning from a temporary joke into a three-foot-tall totem, scratched here and there with Hebrew letters. She’d picked up an ancient Hebrew dictionary, too, even though she probably remembered as few words from Hebrew school as I did. But now she was scribbling the characters down on slips of paper scattered all over the shack, practicing before carving them into the statue’s flesh.

If you know me, you might be thinking: Sylvie, you’ve had your own occult obsessions, is it really fair to judge? Sure, there was the high school dabbling with Wicca and angelology, and yes, during the worst of the pandemic I fell far into the depths of horoscopes and tarot. That kind of thing can help: the shuffle of objects and words and the use of resonant nouns that feel like strength, that make you feel like yourself—and like something cosmic is on your side. Words are real, they have their own gravity. Under the right conditions, they can even be a shield, or a weapon.

An email had arrived last month from Debbie Bliss, owner of the gallery, breathlessly announcing to all members of her mailing list that the great Bertram North, her magnificent friend, had finally returned from abroad. Debbie didn’t mention the reason for Bertram’s long sabbatical. She just praised his responsibility for so many shining careers, so many well-regarded contemporary American artists, all his little stars. Not to mention—Debbie didn’t mention it; perhaps she was unaware—Bertram’s littlest star of all, thirty-four-year-old Jess Chen, in her first juried show, alongside three other lucky winners.

If something the great professor had said to her once, a couple of words, had derailed her career for a decade, then he must have been right all along and she really wasn’t very good. Debbie Bliss would think this; everyone would think this. We didn’t need to say it out loud, while I slugged too many of her beers, and she pounded away on that stupid sculpture, the one she wasn’t supposed to make. We both knew, just like everybody knows, that talent, real talent, glares like a star, like a theater light. Whatever you create is the true sign of yourself. Whatever happens to you is only what you deserve.

On Friday evening—a week before the opening of the show—I thundered down the choppy Wolster roads in a foul mood. I’d been burning my mind all week through spreadsheets and trackers and checklists, and while I was trying to be patient with the golem thing, I’d hit compassion zero. But for once Jess wasn’t working on her little man. She had three pots glazed and ready to be fired, and the fourth in progress. They were nice—strong and shapely, too odd for craft fairs or any practical use but flowing with the biological intricacy of Jess’s style, that a judge might look at and say it reminded them of the natural world, of actual life. That was the nicest comment the jury had made, the nicest comment people usually made about Jess’s art: that it reminded them of being alive.

I was glad to see the almost-finished pots, but less glad to see that someone was sitting in her chair, which was my chair. A big, broad-shouldered guy with a waxy, somewhat sick complexion and damp dark hair to his shoulders, wearing one of Jess’s more ridiculous muumuu smocks, the one spattered with abstract daisies and daffodils. He didn’t seem to mind the flowers. He wore it the way an escaped mental patient might wear their hospital gown: with shy dignity, and bridled violence. He might have had tattoos, or lines of ink like letters, already fading into his skin.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

You might think: Okay, Sylvie, here you must have struggled, you must have doubted, you must have hysterically waved your arms and threatened to call some kind of exorcist. I don’t know. At this point in my life—late pandemic, I guess you could say—I was smoking a lot of weed. And on weekends Jess and Rahim and I would go do shrooms together in the woods, where stars would fall from the violet sky like snow, and leave bright laughter on my cheeks.

But the man sitting in Jess’s shack was no hallucination. He was solid, real as dirt, real as a mountain, real as the rock you stub your toe on. Bits of mud flecked his face, as if turned up by tire treads. Maybe he really was an escaped mental patient.

“I’m Sylvie,” I said.

He looked at Jess, the question clear despite his silence.

“We didn’t work that out,” she said. “Maybe—Greg?”

“Greg,” he agreed. Greg had a normal voice, low and a bit rumbly, but like a human, not like clay or mountains.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t do anything. I offered him a beer.

He took the beer. He drank, like a person.

I texted Rahim to pick up some clothes—men’s size XL, I guessed. Rahim arrived soon after with oversized sweatpants and crew-cut jerseys in his own sleek style.

“Like dressing the Terminator,” he said in awe. But he quickly recovered from the novelty and offered the golem his vape. I helped Jess load the finished pots in the kiln as the men leaned against the shack and smoked. Greg laughed quietly at something Rahim had said. Sparks from the kiln flew up into the sky like stars, like bright new stars.

A golem is for vengeance. A golem is a wish, that you could do something when you can’t. And then you regret it after, that your justice was so hard: both hard to get, and hard to give. I picked this up from Jess, from the PDF that I eventually opened despite my certainty it would give my laptop a virus. The PDF was a scan of an old book about Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, who once summoned a golem to stop a blood-crazed mob of antisemites. But the golem went too far and attacked the innocent, and if it continued it might have actually killed children and proved the false blood libel true after all. So Rabbi Loew put the golem to death, he killed it silently in the attic of the synagogue. Be careful what you wish for, is the moral of the story, except when the moral is something more like: unless, what if, if only. Nobody has ever found the body of the golem in the attic, but there’s an urban legend that a Nazi officer traipsed up there in the 1940s, hunting for the disincarnate golem only to die a strange and bloody death himself. That’s just a legend too; it’s nice to imagine, but probably isn’t true. Unless, what if, if only.

Jess’s revenge was a small and stupid one, in comparison. Even she knew that. Golems weren’t supposed to be personal, avenging your own weak and damaged pride: They were supposed to protect the people, the community, the city as a whole. Jess might pretend she was protecting Miss Guggenheim, and the installationist, and Janes 1–12, and any future victims to come. But she hadn’t asked their permission; they hadn’t consented to having her act as their avenging angel. They might just want to forget him. And anyway, they weren’t around.

Neither was Bertram North—at least not yet. I was fully drunk on the gallery’s watery, tasteless red wine, and making my fifth or sixth round of the art. The space’s first post-pandemic show—fittingly and stupidly titled post(?) pandemic(?)—had attracted quite the crowd. There were four open wings, one for each artist, and in the middle of everything a table held the wine, a small untouched box of surgical masks, and a display of ceramicist tools sticking out of a pile of fretted clay. Loop tools had been set up in a line like Odysseus’s axe heads; elephant ear sponges flared out of a ceramic elephant’s head. A huge harp tool was displayed like an actual harp, a sculpted figurine poised as if to play the single cutting wire. To the side, a basket held colorful modeling clay for kids. I tore off a piece and rolled it about in my fingers, and my fingers remembered it.

I remembered his voice too, immediately, like a clip from a famous movie, or the chords of a ’60s rock song. He boomed and chorused; he made no effort to hide himself. “Debbie!” Bertram cried, and threw his arms around her. Debbie cast a swift glance around after the cheek-kissing, as if to say I’m a woman, and I forgive him, and frankly I never believed it anyway. Bertram North looked much the same, but thinner, and taller if possible. His hair was a grey waxwork, and he wore a black jacket open over an artistically spattered shirt, like a sort of gaunt, rainbow Gérard Depardieu. He loomed over everyone in the gallery, loudly and laughingly shaking hands, as though he had just recovered from a long and dreadful illness, a happy warrior who had bested death.

Jess said nothing. Neither did Greg, but then he didn’t talk much in general. He stood by her side in all his solid realness as Bertram stooped, staring at her. The old professor’s eyes widened. A studied gesture of surprise. He took her hands. “Jessica Soloway!” he cried. “Although the name I’ve been hearing all night is Jess Chen.” He chuckled. “So where’s Mister Chen?”

He looked at Greg and Rahim, frowning at their failure to meet the expected appearance of Mr. Chen. Then he clapped an arm over Jess’s shoulders and began steering her around the gallery. “My student!” he boomed to no one in particular. He was changed. Lots of people were different right after the pandemic, had developed a kind of awkwardness, a shouty loneliness, their speech rhythms and word choices all wrong. But in him the shift was particularly extreme. There was something sad and louche and desperate about him now, as if he’d lost his own shape and was trying to stuff himself into a mold of borrowed Europeanness. I couldn’t imagine he’d acted like this in Paris, and if he had, he couldn’t have been very popular. He wasn’t wearing a ring, and sculptors often didn’t, but I still wondered what had become of the blonde from Arizona, and if her finger bowls had ever improved. Maybe she’d left him. Maybe he’d been sick after all.

I managed to tack around them without knocking over anybody’s work, which was impressive given how drunk I was. That let me approach from the front, giving Jess the chance to introduce me, which I hoped might grant her an opening to slip away. But Bertram held on. He glanced about the room, sunny and unfocused. “Sylvie Katz?” Jess tried again. “From Wolster?”

“Ah!” Bertram grinned and shook my hand vigorously. The bones of his fingers were thin and prominent. He still didn’t release her. “You have to introduce me to everyone you know,” he said to Jess, poking her in the bare shoulder. She wore a sleeveless yellow sack dress, billowy and flattering. He was already drawing her away from me, and from Rahim and Greg, who had followed; we were clearly no one she knew or ought to know. Is it more horrible to be known or unknown—recognized and used, or forgotten and ignored? A toss-up, really. The one envies the other, like the living and the dead.

A golem isn’t alive or dead. A golem doesn’t have any manners to have forgotten in the days of anxiety and shuttered human interaction. Greg went after them, fast; he met Jess and Bertram in front of the centerpiece with the tools and the clay and the wine. Jess said something, trying to pull away from the professor, I think. He draped his left arm around her with seeming lightness, and laughed.

And then—well, there are a lot of interpretations. I didn’t see anything. Greg blocked the view; he was broad as a linebacker, and nearly as tall as Bertram. The professor was wailing, a thin sad scream. Greg held the professor’s right hand, gently: He was slapping clay over Bertram’s knuckles. Jess stood to one side in her spattered, billowing dress. The fingers lay on the floor, in a tidy pool of blood and wine. The middle and ring fingers were crooked up, the first and pinky knocked flat, in a kind of devil horns. If they’d been arranged there on purpose they might have made a sculpture. I thought of the time I’d been at the MoMA and someone had dropped a glove on the floor: Dozens of patrons had circled around the object for hours, worried it was art.

“Get me a cup of ice,” Greg said to me, calm and patient as a mountain.

When the police arrived, Bertram had fainted and Debbie was screaming that a huge psychopath had torn off the professor’s fingers. But other guests who had been closer said that Bertram had swept his right hand in a big dramatic gesture and lost four fingers to the harp wire. A ceramicist’s tools can be terrifyingly sharp; the legendary art professor should have known better, which means he must have been drunk. Everyone was now sure that he had, in fact, been drunk. Bertram was back in America, where bad things only ever happen to people who deserve them, who already made stupid mistakes in the first place. I handed the cup of ice and fingers to the police. There were four officers and each seemed more baffled than the last. “Who put his fingers on ice? Who put clay on his injuries?”

For that, everyone was in agreement: They had seen Greg act quickly. “He used to be an EMT,” I said, and felt it was true, and maybe it could have been true. I don’t know, I was still very drunk myself. I had been standing there for ten minutes holding a cup of fingers. “He used to be an EMT,” I said again. “He said we should use ice to preserve the fingers. And clay to stop the bleeding.”

“That was quick thinking,” said one cop with admiration.

Another glared at Greg. “We should take him in,” the other officer said. “He’s covered in blood.”

But of course, so was Jess. So was everyone and everything within a four-foot radius of the centerpiece: the table, the clay, the tools. The harp wire was bloody, and dripping. Bertram North might have really cut himself on it, I don’t know. The cops were eyeing Greg. They needed somebody to get what they deserved. Rahim took a long drag on his vape and said, in his flawless stoner’s voice: “You think he just ripped this dude’s fingers off, man?”

That seemed to embarrass the cops sufficiently, and they let us go. The ambulance sang into the driveway as Rahim and I made our way to the roof of the gallery. There was pizza, newly arrived pizza, not blessed or cursed by wine or blood. Rahim had some whiskey in a flask. Jess and Greg joined us, having washed their faces and hands, their nice outfits still spattered in a red that was glazed to black by the shining dark.

“Oops,” said Jess. She worried at her lip, as the ambulance pulled away, shrieking, Bertram’s waking squeals finally drowned out. “Do you think they’ll be able to reattach his fingers? He was a great artist, once.”

Greg shrugged, the way a hill might, a big sighing and release of shoulders.

“I do feel bad,” she said. “Should I feel bad?”

“He won’t die,” Greg said with quiet confidence. Jess settled against him.

Rahim was passing around the vape. I needed it, if I was going to attempt the pizza. Later that night, when I was sobering up, I would vomit several times—I held a cup of human fingers in my hands, for ten fucking minutes—but at the moment, I was mostly sleepy, and hungry. What would my mother have said? She’d have wanted to know how the show went, though she was going to hear enough from Jess’s mom at their coffee date next Thursday. They would both agree, without needing to hear from us, that Jess had been brilliant: Everyone had loved her work, she was their shining star. It would be a small news item, no more, that an elderly professor had lost his fingers at the opening, and that they had been reattached: a miracle of modern surgical techniques, a real work of art.

Mom would also want to know when it was going to be my turn, my work, my show: When would I start making art again? It wouldn’t be enough, it would never be enough, for me to simply exist—to have my job and my dog and my husband. And I wouldn’t know how to tell her how dangerous it could be, going after these hard real things, that you could maybe have them but they were bloody. Living like this could only lead to a kind of art and a kind of being that wasn’t any good for mothers like ours, wasn’t anything they could show off; because beyond all the fellowships and awards and the scratching and biting for money and fame, there lurked something true, something awful, something not quite alive and not quite dead. A sacred fatality.

Rahim passed the vape to Greg, squinting at his forehead. “Your ink’s really faded,” he said. “Maybe that’s a problem, I dunno. That’s how golems die. You have to erase the aleph.” Rahim grinned at me, as he did when he knew something Jewish-related, and I didn’t. “Emet to met. From truth to death. I saw it on The X-Files.”

“The truth lives forever,” Jess said. She turned in Greg’s arms, and kissed him.

Lyta Gold is an essayist and fiction writer living in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Baffler, Protean, New York Review of Architecture, and Current Affairs. Her book Dangerous Fictions came out in 2024.

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RESPONSA | 17 JUN 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 16 JUN 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

June 17, 2025

We Need New Jewish Institutions

Sustaining the struggle will require spaces for reimagining our tradition.

Arielle Angel

Illustrations by Aaron Goldstein

The Gaza genocide has made plain what many leftist Jews have long feared: that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot. Over the past 20 months, there is no sacred Jewish ritual that has not been performed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, in the ruins of someone’s home or school, right before or after a slaughter. In the US, Jewish day schools bus children to war rallies, and concerned parents identify campus activists for deportation. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) primes Donald Trump’s attorneys general to regard pro-Palestine activists as akin to ISIS, while other mainstream Jewish institutions dither about the arrival of authoritarianism so as not to disturb their donor base. Amid a torrent of images of children under rubble and desperate families gunned down while waiting for flour, Jewish leaders insist that we are the primary victims. They respond to recent attacks on Zionist gatherings with incoherence, affirming the fusion of Zionism and Judaism while repudiating the violent result of such a conflation. And it is not just the religious and institutional trappings of Jewish life that are implicated, but even those cultural calling cards that once seemed nonaligned. A shop in Boca Raton sells blue and white bagels to support war relief efforts in Israel; the Seinfeld sitcom fortune bankrolls a Jumbotron at UCLA broadcasting scenes of Jewish death from October 7th to students just trying to get to class.

Might this catastrophic failure of Zionist Judaism mark an opening for anti-Zionist Jews, a moment for us to step into greater influence, make our case for something new? Our ranks swell in response to the endless carnage: In May 2024, roughly 30% of American Jews—and nearly 40% of those under 44—said they would apply the word “genocide” to Israel’s actions, a term whose usage roughly corresponds with non- and anti-Zionist identity. And yet even some erstwhile sympathizers express doubt that we have anything to offer besides refusal. Quoted in a New Republic article about the breakdown of the Zionist consensus last year, the author Joshua Cohen—whose 2021 novel The Netanyahus seemed to exhibit discomfort with the moral compromises of Jewish nationalism—delivered a cranky dismissal of our ilk:

Most anti-Zionists are not going to be Jews in a generation. The vast majority of these Jews don’t speak any of the Jewish languages. They don’t know the Jewish texts or live in Israel. And if they’re going to have children, there’s nearly a 50% chance they’re not going to have them with Jews or raise them as Jews. For these Jews to oppose Zionism, for these Jews to have reserved for themselves as the final expression of their Jewishness the condemnation of Israel—I have to salute them, I might even bow down to them. That’s ultimate chutzpah.

It would be convenient to simply brush off Cohen’s chauvinistic rant, not least for its identification of anti-Zionism as uniquely empty, when it is contemporary Judaism itself that has been hollowed out in favor of a blunt nationalism. Any provision of blame must account for the fact that it is the Zionists who have been the primary actors over much of the last century of Jewish history, who have strangled our diasporic languages and disinvested from our cultural and spiritual life, who have made ignorance of Judaism the norm for Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. Even if, as Cohen suggests, this Zionism-as-Judaism reliably correlates with continuity, it would be fair to ask, amid unchecked slaughter and starvation in Gaza: Continuity of what?

And yet, perhaps surprisingly, Cohen’s critique of the Jewish left resonates with one that surfaces regularly and with a particular passion among a segment of our readership. These critics object not to the excoriation of Israel, but rather to our single-minded focus on it, to the neglect of other facets of Jewish life. Some of them were readers of the previous iteration of Jewish Currents, which regularly published Yiddish translations and sent out a daily email featuring important moments in left Jewish history. How reductive, they tsk, to pull from the great tapestry of our cultural-historical-political life, a single, sad thread. In this form, we are nothing but a mirror of the Zionist mainstream: Israel is still at the center of our Jewishness, only in photonegative, defined by renunciation rather than embrace.

I cannot deny the charge that our Judaism has been primarily one of rebellion. Indeed, even among those who insist on the principled separation of Jewishness and Zionism, I’ve noticed a tendency to cede ever more territory, to declare more and more of Jewish life contaminated or at least suspicious, with suspicion reason enough for withdrawal. I’ve seen some friends and comrades become increasingly skittish about Jewish left politics, out of discomfort with the way that even adamantly anti-Zionist formations remain responsive to a seemingly compromised Jewish subjectivity. But we do not have the luxury of withdrawal. If there was a sunny half-century where we could dissolve into Americanness—settle into disavowal, or not, with little imposition of meaning—it is definitively over. Our self-appointed leaders collude with the state to define our identities in service of fascism and genocide; in this context, abdication becomes indistinguishable from acquiescence.

But to effectively claim Jewishness toward the aim of liberation, we must develop an understanding of what exactly we’re claiming. This question is not, as irritated comrades sometimes allege, merely an expression of an idle, narcissistic identity crisis, but a material organizing problem, faced anew in the crafting of every collective statement or action. To know how to adequately respond, say, to the attack in Boulder on Jews at a march for Israeli hostages, to do so in ways that advance a new self-awareness in Jewish life and direct it toward just ends, we need clear answers to complex questions about who we are, who we are speaking to, and in what language. At present, we often find ourselves cobbling together responses from the desiccated Judaism we’ve fled and the broader anti-colonial movement we’ve joined, both of them useful, but insufficient in articulating a distinctively Jewish, left politic. The ability to synthesize these streams and others into something that feels rooted and right will derive from an investment in the content of radical Jewish life. In a reality where Zionists hoard the claim on authenticity, it is an uphill battle for recognition. Which means that to credibly wield political power as Jews, we will need the confidence to assert that what we are doing now is, in fact, Judaism.

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The development of new spaces for the exploration of anti-fascist Jewish life will make us stronger political partners, from the vantage of both strategy and sustainability.

All of this speaks to the need for new spaces, new containers for the exploration of anti-fascist Jewish life. The development of such spaces will make us stronger political partners, from the vantage of both strategy and sustainability: As Black activist, singer, and historian Bernice Johnson Reagon discusses in a 1981 lecture on coalition politics, in order to endure the dangerous, taxing work of coalition, it’s important to have a home, “a nurturing space where you sift out what people are saying about you and decide who you really are,” where “you take the time to try to construct within yourself and within your community who you would be if you were running society.” Johnson Reagon acknowledges the risk of ethnic nationalism in all home spaces—precisely the worry that puts many Jews off this work today—and warns that it requires vigilance to dispel. But, she insists, the risk doesn’t negate the necessity.

To be full participants in coalition work, it seems, we need—and deserve—a communal and spiritual life: to find our forebears in Jewish history, given and chosen, and forge connections with one another in the present—not at the exclusion of other comrades and friends, but as one form of relation among many. While we remain accountable to partners in this work—and to Palestinians in particular—we cannot outsource our approach to it to a broader movement that has neither a unified view of its use, nor an insider’s insight into its contours. If we mean to fight the weaponization of our identities, we will have to create a version of them we can fully inhabit. If we hope to weaken Zionism within Jewish communities, we will need to develop a substantial vision for contemporary Judaism; we will need to meet those who want an exit from the rot with something beautiful and real. We cannot ask them to jump and decline to catch them.

Where to start? Even for those who actively desire communities of practice, there is no clear answer. Last spring, Jewish Currents put out a survey asking people about their experiences leaving or being ejected from Jewish institutions over Zionism. A portrait emerges from the hundreds of responses collected in a matter of days: an anguished exodus from synagogues, summer camps, campus Hillels, and day schools; a brain drain of Jewish professionals—rabbis, educators, and administrators—afflicting every stream of Judaism from Chabad to Reconstructionism. The respondents speak reliably of loneliness, heartbreak, and a pervasive sense of dislocation. I feel ostracized and rejected by a community I’ve depended on for most of my life. Having a Jewish community grounded me; I feel adrift. I miss the singing; I practice alone now or occasionally with a few friends. It meant so much to me to sit in the synagogue where my grandmother sat. There is a spiritual void in my life. The alienation is felt most acutely by the already-marginalized: Jews in rural areas, Jews by choice, LGBT Jews, and Jews of color. It’s painful to not have a community to celebrate holidays with, to raise our children with, to study with. I miss it every day.

Where will they go now? In a November 2023 article in The Forward, Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the nominally pluralist Shalom Hartman Institute, could hardly contain his glee at the establishment’s opportunity to “unburden” themselves from the need to engage with the Jewish left, whose opposition to Israel’s brutal, collective punishment in Gaza put them definitively outside the tent. As Kurtzer wrote, they “will have no seats at any tables besides the ones they set for themselves.”

He’s right. We need new Jewish institutions. We need them to carry our politics, and also the other facets of our lives. We need them to discover who we are, and to put this discovery to use in the world. We need them not to exit Jewish community, but to join it in earnest, on our own terms. To transition from pockets of rebellion to poles of power.

No doubt, the imperative to create rival institutions is a tall order. As the historian Lila Corwin Berman details in her 2020 book, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, our current institutional landscape is the product of a vast consolidation of wealth after World War II and co-constitutive with the runaway capitalism of the neoliberal era. This has insulated Jewish institutions from the crisis of legitimacy wrought by intracommunal turbulence; they are rich enough to continue on without us—without anyone, save a few powerful donors—for a very long time. Fledgling left institutions, on the other hand, are coming up in a moment of economic decline, often led by younger Jews who lack their parents’ earning potential. They will not be able to build from the spoils of oligarchy—nor should they want to, given the anti-democratic implications of such a strategy.

But despite these limitations, a newer crop of institutions is emerging out of necessity. These formations are building on the power of the Jewish left’s one institutional asset, our essential political action organizations—both national, Palestine-focused ones, like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow, and local base-building groups, like New York City’s Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the Twin Cities’ Jewish Community Action—while starting to relieve them of the burden they’ve carried for too long, to be all things spiritual, cultural, and political to the wandering leftist Jew. Diaspora Alliance, a several-year-old organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism and its weaponization, may in time provide the intellectual basis for a replacement to the fascist-friendly ADL. Jewish Liberation Fund, now in its eighth year, is providing a new philanthropic model for the donor class, educating and reorienting funders to give Jewish social justice organizations the support they need. Meanwhile, last year saw the release of various flag-planting mission statements, from the revival of the international Jewish Labor Bund (“We believe the future belongs to a 21st-century socialism, not a 19th-century nationalism”) to a blueprint for a “diasporist community day school” called Achvat Olam, “rooted in love, diasporism, and the Torah of justice.”

These new formations are building on the power of the Jewish left’s essential direct action organizations, while relieving the burden they’ve carried for too long, to be all things spiritual, cultural, and political to the wandering leftist Jew.

Rabbis of the Jewish left have turned toward the pressing question of spiritual life. At almost 400 members, Rabbis for Ceasefire—created after October 7th to protest the genocide in Gaza—moonlights as an ad-hoc network connecting people to like-minded rabbis for pastoral support. (The nondenominational organization presently boasts more rabbis than the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.) After limping along for the last several decades, American Council for Judaism, the 80-year-old anti-Zionist organ formed in reaction to the Reform movement’s drift toward Zionism, has been taken over by a new generation of leaders, many of them the children of Zionist Reform leadership. A recent course offered guidance in building your own Jewish community, to support the explosion of these efforts across the country. The 10-year-old Tzedek Chicago—one of only two explicitly anti-Zionist congregations in the country, along with Makom in North Carolina—doubled in size after October 7th, and has had to innovate to meet demand. Since they began moving services online during Covid, they’ve drawn members from all over the world; affiliated communities now meet locally in New Zealand and the UK while continuing to maintain their relationship with the Chicago congregation.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, dozens of anti-Zionist rabbis and other Jewish leaders have begun meeting under the loose auspices of a “Jewish Diaspora Movement,” aiming to support existing and emerging alternative communities. The questions to answer are formidable, as nearly every aspect of Jewish life requires rethinking: What forms of liturgy, practice, and theology do we inherit from the hollow husks of the various denominations in which many of us were raised? What is our relationship to Jewish languages—particularly Hebrew, but also the diasporic languages displaced by its modern development? How do we orient around myriad, vexed conceptions of peoplehood and the biblical relationship to the land of Israel?

The uncertainty extends even to the terms we’re uniting under. As I’ve learned in conversations with affiliated rabbis, there seems to be some consensus that “anti-Zionist,” while sufficient as a political identification, is wanting as a communal one, in that it describes us only in the negative without articulating what we are for. But there are also concerns about self-defining as “diasporist,” which some see as inadvertently reaffirming a “center” in the land of Israel. When I spoke recently to Providence-based rabbi Lex Rofeberg, he advocated for eschewing any such markers and claiming Jewish authority without qualification. “Instead of becoming the University Anti-Zionist Coalition or the Diaspora Collective or Jews for Doikayt, just call yourselves the Jewish Student Union,” he quipped. “Grab the reins.”

The urgency of such questions dramatizes the lack of resources or real estate with which to begin a reply. Perhaps we might eventually pay dues to a left Jewish “federation”—run through membership, not coercive patronage—which could redistribute funds to a network of communal projects according to need and demand. But for now, we will have to be open to working in imperfect scenarios, with what already exists. Though it seems clear that large legacy institutions like the existing local federations or Jewish Community Relations Councils cannot be infiltrated or reformed, it does not mean there are no communal resources ripe for the taking. Not surprisingly, younger anti-Zionist Jews have found the greatest success moving into aligned but diminished organizations ready for a generational handover, like the aforementioned American Council for Judaism or the current iteration of Jewish Currents. But we might also look to Zionist-coded spaces, synagogues chief among them, that are struggling to pass what they have to the next generation precisely because their version of Judaism has hit a wall. Can an inventory be made of such vulnerable institutions, and can we support aligned individuals and families—open to the discomfort and frustration of working across difference, and in it for the long haul—who would be willing to join up and make their way into leadership? Meanwhile, even new ventures may not require “new” resources. When we spoke, Lila Corwin Berman stressed cooperation with other communities as a potential answer to our present predicament. If we cannot buy a building, we can rent or borrow space in churches or rec centers. Berman also expressed hope that getting some of these ventures off the ground in a provisional way will spur a virtuous cycle: Once there’s proof of concept of this afterschool program or that minyan, some of the people currently patronizing existing institutions for lack of options will move their money.

Whether we’re speaking of reviving something old or creating something new, we’re inevitably talking about the provision of services, spiritual and otherwise. People need help educating children, navigating ritual, and burying their dead. Our small minyanim and chavurot cannot provide this lifecycle support, which means people will exit them at the moment they need them most, constraining their potential for growth without solving our original problem. But again, there are some available models. I’ve been imagining what it would look like to draw on the example of the International Workers Order (IWO), a federation of Jewish Communists that flourished from the 1930s until its demise by McCarthyism in 1954. The IWO offered mutual aid in the form of health insurance and medical clinics and created cultural mainstays like newspapers, singing groups, and social clubs—and, crucially, was open not only to Jews but to everyone. In fact, despite the Jewish character of the IWO, visible in its investment in the Yiddish press and Jewish schools and summer camps, at the federation’s peak in the postwar period, only a quarter of its nearly 200,000 members were Jewish. This mix of communal grounding and porousness was part and parcel of the Communist Party’s broader aim to harness the organizational capacity of identity-based communities—the trust and togetherness and affiliative structures—to serve a broader universalist politics. It is a powerful reminder that diasporic organizing untethered to a nationalist project need not be scattered or decentralized; indeed, in its most ambitious form, it won’t be.

The IWO provides a powerful reminder that diasporic organizing untethered to a nationalist project need not be scattered or decentralized; indeed, in its most ambitious form, it won’t be.

Needless to say, any attempt to replicate this model, to offer services on a broad scale both within and beyond the Jewish community, would require an enormous amount of coordinated effort and expertise. Perhaps one present-day analogue—in terms of organization, if not aims—might be Chabad, whose emissaries around the world are taught to chart their course to indispensability, and thus self-sufficiency, in direct relation to a given constituency’s needs: A young community may need a preschool; an old one, a burial society. This analogy may also suggest, in a different way, the difficulty of bringing these models to bear on the work of the present-day Jewish left. The success of Chabadniks and 20th-century Communists alike appear inseparable from their full-time, sometimes messianic integration of life and purpose and organization; their steadfast fealty to “party discipline.” But the IWO, of course, had an actual party, and Chabad has its own messiah. There is nothing that provides this sort of anchor for the contemporary Jewish left, nothing that even aspires to. But if we commit to the incremental work of building institutions in our own image—to gathering our people and focusing them on communal tasks—we might become more anchored than we expect.

That commitment will require confronting a resistance to formal organization long pervasive on the US left. For instance, at JVP’s national members’ meeting in early May, I heard prominent guest speakers on various panels argued passionately and convincingly for a decentralized horizontalism. They spoke about how institutional hierarchies pervert social relations; how the need for capital makes organizations accountable to funders rather than communities; how nonprofits drain energy from movements and co-opt radical action while working mostly to maintain themselves. However astute these critiques of the “non-profit industrial complex,” I fear that this orientation is warding people off of the prospect of building infrastructure we can’t do without. Indeed, I only heard these speakers in the first place because a formal, hierarchical organization had the firepower to manage the logistical, programmatic, and security feat of a 2,000-person gathering in a moment of left retreat and escalating repression.

In his 2020 book A Time to Build, conservative political analyst Yuval Levin offers a useful defense of institutions, which he defines as the “durable forms of our common life . . . the frameworks and structures of what we do together.” I like this definition for how it clears away negative connotations and gets right to what is important about an institution: that it is structured, built to last, and aimed at some material, collective task. This last point is key: The problem with being a perpetual “outsider”—which Levin argues is the favored position in today’s political landscape—is that it delivers the moral high ground at the cost of any communal structure. People with political commitments are thereby isolated from the means of advancing these commitments into material aims, creating “an unusual and unhelpful distance between theory and practice in American life.” The void is often filled by the “anti-institution” of social media, which exacerbates the problem by incentivizing performative, individualistic modes over formative, communal ones. We outsiders remain pure, but powerless. We favor short-term thinking over slower and more deliberate strategies, since that is the only timescale our atomized or provisional formations can hold; this leaves us constantly reinventing the wheel and perpetually vulnerable to collapse, most often through interpersonal conflict and burnout.

While Levin’s case isn’t entirely assimilable to leftist ends—it’s clear that for him, institutions’ role as a moderating force is a virtue, not a flaw—I hear his prescription echoed on the other side of the political spectrum by abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, hardly an advocate for the status quo. In a 2022 interview with Teen Vogue, Gilmore lamented that in the absence of “large-scale institutions” (with the noted exception of unions and the Democratic Socialists of America) “it’s hard for people to figure out, ‘Well, what can I do?’” Her advice: “Go into something that already exists, and do that work towards . . . helping to tip it away from reinforcing the system towards weakening the system. That’s infiltrating. Or innovate. If something doesn’t exist, make it.” In her recent introduction to Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism and the National Question, she elaborates on the kinds of institutions we might look to as models, pointing to organizations like Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, a land reform group that boasts 1.5 million members across the country, or National Nurses United, an American union of 225,000 that routinely steps beyond its supposed remit to connect the dots between workplace exploitation on the one hand and deportations, police budgets, and the colonization of Palestine on the other.

The problem with being a perpetual political outsider is that people with political commitments are isolated from the means of advancing these commitments into material aims, creating “an unusual and unhelpful distance between theory and practice in American life.”

Like the new Jewish institutions I am envisioning, these examples are not political parties, but Gilmore seems to think of them as “proto-parties,” just as essential to the practice of world-making. They are the tributaries that feed the party form (think of Black churches’ relationship to the Democratic machine). And they are themselves venues for the practice of politics at its most grounded: the tedious maintenance of systems and relationships, the repeated collapse and coming to agreement—or else not, picking up the pieces and moving ahead. By entreating us to study these resolute, but flexible models, characterized by “constant political education and debate,” Gilmore offers us a way of seeing institutions not as timid, rigid bureaucracies nor as constraints on political possibility. On the contrary, the aim of such organizations is to “make big things,” to reorder the world on the level of land and resources and social relations. In this context, our shrinking from organizational ambition is a self-defeating form of erasure. “History’s protagonists,” she writes, are the ones who “revise social reality. Therefore, part of the struggle is defining—becoming—history’s protagonists, repeatedly.”

In our quest to become such protagonists, the left has relied disproportionately on its street movements. But such efforts—noble but scattered—have failed to translate into real power. In If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, journalist Vincent Bevins spoke with veterans of protest movements around the world, from Egypt to Ukraine to Brazil to Korea. He reports that organizers across locations and contexts came out of their various revolutionary attempts—defined by “horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest”—convinced of the need for greater hierarchy, structure, and formal representation. Without this orientation, even when popular uprisings of the last decades were able to create a power vacuum, it largely benefitted “the groups that had already formed coherent, disciplined organizations before the uprising began.” Toward the end of his book, Bevins quotes an unnamed Egyptian revolutionary who lamented the consequence of importing the Western left’s disdain for structure in protest movements around the globe. “In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn’t work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward,” he said. “Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.”

Perhaps the American left was insulated; it’s not anymore. The intentions of the Trump administration are plain. At the time of writing, Andry Hernández Romero and Neri José Alvarado Borges are in a concentration camp in El Salvador. Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia remain in concentration camps stateside. American mayors and judges and congressional aides have been apprehended by federal officers. The National Guard is on the streets of LA. In many of the most meaningful ways, we are already too late to stop what’s coming, the building being slow. Never mind, let’s begin.

In 2014, Rabbi Benay Lappe gave a lecture that outlined the basis for the queer yeshiva Svara, which she leads. She argues that every communal system—be it a nation, a religion, or a culture—relies on a master story, and that, under the slow pressure of time and history, every master story “will ultimately and inevitably crash.” Lappe uses the waning days of Temple Judaism to examine the potential responses to such a collapse. Option one is to “deny the crash,” like the priests of the Temple did, “build a wall” around your narrative “and make sure that no threatening information gets in.” Option two is to reject your story entirely—what she calls “the baby with the bathwater option”—exemplified by a full 90% of Jews at the time, who “left Judaism completely and melted into the Roman empire.” These two paths are two sides of the same coin, she says, driven by the erroneous assumption that stories are by nature fixed.

Meanwhile, the remaining 10%—a group of “fringe-y, radical, outsider hippie guys”—chose a third option. They began meeting in little “retreat centers” they called synagogues, instead of at the Temple, to explore what new forms their practice could take. These defectors “accepted the crash, embraced the crash, went back to the tradition, took with them what still worked, mixed the old with the new and created a radically new tradition . . . that would have been unrecognizable to a Temple Jew.” This process had begun even before the Temple’s destruction; its story “had long since crashed for them,” as they struggled under Roman oppression and grew disillusioned with the priestly class. These rabbis stressed that the qualifications for Jewish leadership would now rest not on formal titles or ordination, but rather on the principles of learnedness and moral intuition. Such moral intuition, or “svara,” was itself Torah, the rabbis said, as long as it was substantiated by a rootedness in Jewish text and tradition. Rabbinic Judaism was born—or, as we all know it today, Judaism.

When I spoke to Minneapolis-based rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who is involved in the burgeoning Jewish Diaspora Movement, she emphasized that this story of the leap to rabbinic Judaism is often told with a dramatic jump cut: the fall of the Temple to the full yeshivas of the rabbis, omitting the “messy process” of the intervening half millenia or more. “We tell the story as if it was inevitable,” she said. “In fact, there was nothing inevitable about it.” Those hundreds of years, she told me, probably resembled our current moment in meaningful ways: small groups of people traveling around, trying things, attempting to shore up one hypothesis or another through practice—the minyans and study groups in “living rooms and backyards, the Shabbat service in a church or a Zen Center.” People doing what they feel “called to do in the places where they are, and that eventually overwhelming the centralized system of authority to become the normative thing.” But we don’t have 500 years. According to Rosenberg, the question now is how to “network and resource the living room,” maintaining the beauty of what is happening there while building toward a greater level of organization and power.

In 2021, in the wake of another Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I wrote that, “Jewishness must mean justice for the Palestinian people or nothing at all. If it is to be drained of meaning, then I will be, too, for a time, and will have to rebuild myself on sand.” Israel’s genocide is a quicksand; it takes with it not just a failed Jewishness but a failed world order. In some ways, though, the extent of the problem is clarifying. If all is implicated, then we have no choice but to rebuild—Judaism no less than anything else we deem necessary to thrive—so that in time we may find ourselves back on solid ground, in a world made unrecognizable by our efforts.

Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/we-need-new-jewish-institutions at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

OFFICE HOURS | 17 JUN 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 16 JUN 2025, 11:38 PM UTC

Laura Whitehorn

“We must have courage and not run for the hills.”

Interviewed by Nick Barber

Nadyia Duff

I first met Laura Whitehorn on a dreary January morning in Albany, New York. Hundreds of us—primarily formerly incarcerated people and loved ones of those currently on the inside—had traveled from across the state to advocate for parole reforms. In small groups, we met with legislative staff members, and by luck, I was assigned to Laura’s group. We had come that day to drum up support for two particular bills, but we were part of a broader movement—one that seeks to end the brutal system of punishment that is prison; it was this deeper clarity of purpose that steeled Laura. I watched her look straight into the eyes of each person we met with a courage of conviction that stiffened spines, brushing away readily offered excuses and demanding unequivocal commitments from our reluctant interlocutors.

For more than six decades, Laura has struggled against racism, misogyny, and other forms of structural oppression. In 1971, she helped organize a ten-day occupation of a Harvard University building that led to the creation of the area’s first women’s center. In 1974, after courts ordered the desegregation of Boston Public Schools and white mobs routinely retaliated with violence, Laura spent two years committed to “house defense,” guarding the homes of terrorized Black families with a baseball bat. She was a member of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), a militant anti-racist organization of white student activists, and in 1983, she—together with other members of the May 19th Communist Organization, a splinter group of the WUO—took part in bombing the United States Senate in protest of the military intervention in Grenada and Lebanon. The group targeted several other government buildings over the course of the following two years, taking great care to ensure that no one was harmed. Their actions—alongside those of the Black Liberation Army—became a synecdoche of US leftist militancy in the popular imagination.

In 1985, Laura was arrested, and over the 14 years she spent incarcerated, she continued to organize, agitating for better conditions inside prisons and directing an urgently needed AIDS education program. “To risk changing your life, as anyone who’s a political prisoner has done, you have to have a vision of what you’re fighting for; and that vision, whether you think you’re going to win it in your own lifetime or not, has to be as real and as strong in your heart as the comforts you’re giving up,” she explains in the documentary Out: The Making of a Revolutionary. Since her release in 1999, Laura has remained unwavering in her commitment to a world liberated from imperial powers, active in movements from Palestine solidarity to prison abolition. In 2013, she co-founded Release Aging People in Prisons (RAPP)—a grassroots campaign that advocates to free incarcerated elders and others serving long sentences, and the group that brought us together on that winter day in Albany—with formerly incarcerated activist and Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin, activist and former jailhouse lawyer Mujahid Farid, and civil rights attorney Soffiyah Elijah.

I spoke with Laura about the process of coming into her political sensibility, how she understands the relationship between nonviolent protest and armed struggle, and how her own experience in prison informs her commitment to a free Palestine. Her life in the struggle for liberation, she told me, has made her “the luckiest person alive.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Nick Barber: In your introduction to the collected works of Black liberation activist Safiya Bukhari, you explain that Safiya includes personal details in her writing only insofar as they explicate “the necessity to fight for justice.” I know you, too, are loath to share biographical details without a clear sense of utility, but within the parameters you outlined, what can you tell us about how you were radicalized?

Laura Whitehorn: Growing up in a liberal Jewish household, my father explained that what was happening to Black people in the United States was not that different from what had happened to marginalized groups under the Nazis. So starting in my youth, I supported the civil rights movement, and in college I became involved with groups like the Northern Friends of SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], raising money for the people at the forefront of that struggle.

In 1968, I moved to Chicago to pursue a PhD in English literature. One day I was sitting by the window in my apartment, pretending to read Paradise Lost, when I saw a young Black man assaulted by police. He was walking down the street, minding his own business, when a couple of cops jumped out of a car, threw him up against the vehicle, and started terrorizing him. Little liberal that I was, I ran out and started yelling at them: “What are you arresting him for?” Of course, they just threw me out of the way. I was totally ineffective. That experience changed something in me. Up to that point, I had believed what I had been told as a kid—that we just had to teach white people until someday, they stopped being racist. But now, I saw: We were engaged in a struggle for power, and the answer to racism was not white education, but Black power.

“We were engaged in a struggle for power, and the answer to racism was not white education, but Black power.”

After that, I worked with the People’s Law Office, which my husband at the time helped start, supporting the legal team of Fred Hampton [deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party] when he was accused of assaulting the driver of an ice cream truck and stealing $71 worth of Good Humor bars, which he intended to distribute to kids in the community. Fred said that if these white lawyers were going to do this work, they should have a real political education—so he started a study group for the lawyers and their partners, which I participated in. Later, I began to put my body on the line: Police raids were escalating across the country, and I was part of a group of white people tasked with helping defend the Panther office in Chicago. I remember standing behind barricaded doors with a shotgun. I had never held a gun before—my hands were shaking! It was one of the scariest nights of my life. Luckily, the police didn’t come that evening.

NB: As you moved away from the liberal vision of the world you had grown up with, how did you conceive of the relationship between revolutionary armed struggle and mass movement work?

LW: To enact transformative change, people must rise up in whatever forms are necessary to overturn oppressive regimes—so this question has different answers in different contexts. The anti-war movement of the 1960s, for example, was made up of various parts. The student movement aimed to end the war in order to end the draft; some of its members, most of whom were white, didn’t want to fight for an imperial cause, and many just didn’t want to fight, period. But these students were typically eligible to defer the draft to continue their educations. Many of the people who couldn’t avoid getting drafted were people of color. So some of these folks led the other, fundamentally more powerful but often-forgotten strand of the movement: During the war, many Black and Puerto Rican GIs led resistance efforts; fragging [killing or sabotaging military superiors, often by throwing a fragmentation grenade] also became increasingly common. And there were many other militant actions at the time, including thousands of small bombings of buildings across the US. This swell of action communicated to the general populace that violence wasn’t something injected into the situation by a small group of activists; it was an organic response to what people were seeing abroad: The United States was carpet bombing Vietnam. A lot of young people like me were beginning to apprehend the full scale of brutality that underlies the whole system. And we were responding in kind.

NB: I want to talk a bit about the moment after the end of the Vietnam era, when the mass anti-war movement waned even as imperial wars continued. How did activists at the time navigate this landscape?

LW: After the war in Vietnam ended, many people who had taken part in the white anti-war movement retreated into local organizing because they were no longer threatened with the draft. But Che Guevara had urged people around the world to “create two, three, many Vietnams”—to proliferate the fight against US imperialism—and my comrades and I took this very seriously. Anti-imperialist organizing was at the heart of our fight against white supremacy. We had a slogan: The power of the people is greater than the man’s technology. That is what we had seen in Vietnam: The power of the people had defeated the most powerful army in the world. That was what I wanted to be part of.

We targeted sites that were significant to the imperial wars in which the US was involved [for example, in 1984, bombing the offices of Israel Aircraft Industries in New York and the officer’s club at the Washington Navy Yard]. Our understanding—and I still believe this to be true—was that when the US government was most militarized on a global scale, they also made themselves vulnerable to attack. And so, we tried to exploit that vulnerability in order to turn public attention to the horrors of US imperialism.

NB: After you were arrested in 1985, you continued to organize from inside prison. It would be great to hear about that work, undertaken as you found yourself incarcerated alongside a cohort of other activists and revolutionaries.

LW: Being inside together comes with amazing possibilities, even under the most difficult circumstances. For example, my comrades and I taught classes in our facilities, correcting for what is not taught in public schools—helping people with reading and writing, but also sharing the history of radical movements, especially the Black liberation movement. Learning about the Black Panther Party in prison, where you are directly under the thumb of the power that you’re studying, is very different than, say, chatting about that history at a potluck at a friend’s home. Inside, you intimately feel not only the structures of oppression, but also the need for resistance—so by bringing that education into enemy territory, the prison system, we were building our collective power. For example, because we understood the history of reggae music in contesting colonial control, we sang Bob Marley songs and refused to go in for count in Lexington [Kentucky’s Federal Medical Center Prison].

“Learning about the Black Panther Party in prison is very different than, say, chatting about that history at a potluck.”

And we were far from alone in feeling like this education was transformative. I often think of Jose Saldaña [director of RAPP] and Stanley [“Jamel”] Bellamy [RAPP community organizer], who were in prison together. Each served almost 40 years. They were part of the Resurrection Study Group that Eddie Ellis, who was a Black Panther, started—and they talked about how Eddie challenged their thinking. He helped them to understand themselves as part of a struggle, as part of a people. When you learn in this way, it really clicks into place: You are here because you’re part of that people. Society wants you to stay here and die, but you want to get out and live for the good of your people.

NB: Your experience as a political prisoner connects you to a global geography of anti-imperialism—and I’d love to talk specifically about Palestine. I was at an event that RAPP co-hosted with Samidoun [an international network of organizers working in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners], where participants made connections between political prisoners here and political prisoners there. Can you say a bit about why these connections among people facing repression in different contexts are important?

LW: The anti-imperialist organizations I was part of in the ’70s were all committed to Palestinian liberation, and I have long been, too; but my commitment was really fortified in 2016, when I traveled from the US to Palestine with a group of former political prisoners and activists. The resonances were very powerful. There were a number of Black organizers on our trip—including Hank Jones, who had been part of the San Francisco 8 [a group of former Black Panthers against whom the state had attempted to reopen a 36-year-old case]—and they all felt the similarities between our own context and what we were seeing in Palestine. One night, people told us about the experiences of Palestinian children in the West Bank; we met with the family of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who shared with us about how he had been kidnapped by settlers, forced to drink gasoline, and then set on fire. As he listened, Hank, who grew up in the South, was brought immediately back to his own youth. He recounted how the Klan burned crosses on the front yards of his family and neighbors. As a child, he had been told: “Don’t walk down that street at night, because another young Black man was lynched there the week before.”

As far as political prisoners, I had always understood that they existed in Palestine—there are political prisoners in every revolutionary movement—but what amazed me on the trip was that every single person we met had a family member in prison, or had themselves been in prison, and we met a lot of people. And because incarceration was such a pervasive part of Palestinian experience, nobody wondered why we were there. There are a lot of places where, if I tell people I was a political prisoner, they will ask in surprise: “The United States has political prisoners?” No one said that in Palestine.

We visited a military tribunal. As we waited to go into the court, we could see the families of the defendants waiting, too. It looked like a concentration camp—barbed wire and fences, hot sun, people sitting on the ground. The court proceedings were held in Hebrew, so most of the defendants couldn’t understand the discussions that would change the course of their lives. We went there with representatives from the Palestinian human rights organization Addameer, and they told us that these courts have a conviction rate of over 99%. It was a stark example of the depths of repression and the use of the law as a tool of ethnic cleansing.

All over the buildings in Palestine we saw pictures of political prisoners. One man explained that political prisoners keep liberation alive in our minds. By this, I think he meant not so much that these people undertook discrete actions that will liberate us, but rather that their ongoing resistance in contexts of utter confinement is a beacon that helps us continue our own resistance. It certainly redoubled my commitment to amplifying the struggles of political prisoners here in the United States.

NB: Given this long history of anti-imperial struggle and imperial repression, how are you thinking about the current movement to end the genocide in Palestine?

LW: We need to remember that the world is seeing the truth of Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing not because a group of students embarked on an education campaign, but because Palestinians materially confronted Israeli power. I’m not saying that to advocate any particular form of resistance—the shape resistance takes comes from the moment, the community, and what people are willing to sacrifice to change social relations. But it is important to note that every single movement that begins to be militant in the United States is faced with attempts to derail it. When people express support for broad anti-colonial resistance in Palestine, for example, they are often faced with obsessive questions that try to discredit Hamas as a legitimate representative of Palestinian struggle. That is a strategy to keep certain kinds of resistance off the table, and it is something we must push back against.

At the same time, effective resistance needs multiple modes, and armed struggle will ultimately not be effective if it is undertaken by a tiny group of people without connection to a mass movement. It can occasionally still be a symbolic victory. For example, I saw pictures of people lined up to get into a court hearing for Luigi Mangione [indicted in the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare]. People were so furious that billionaires continue to control our welfare that they were willing to support Mangione, even though he had acted purely as an individual. But how do we get the people who were angry enough to come down to the courthouse for one day to actually organize—to be in the streets day and night, in freezing cold and sweltering heat? A lot of them probably wouldn’t; they would feel that people like Luigi can do the heavy lifting.

What is required now is militancy. Militancy is not a tactic; it’s a political stance that you believe in what you believe in, and you don’t throw it out because that commitment becomes riskier. We must have courage and not run for the hills.

Nick Barber is a New York-based writer and organizer, with a focus on incarceration, criminalization, and punishment.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/laura-whitehorn at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

POETRY | 13 JUN 2025, 2:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 13 JUN 2025, 7:35 PM UTC

Closer

Farid Matuk

Aflo Co., Ltd. / Alamy

The lyric poem has long been understood as a site of a certain idealism. For Hegel, it was the most challenging of genres because, he wrote in Aesthetics, it required the poet to become “the centre which holds the whole lyric work of art together.” Such a transformation, if carried out, yielded “a self-bounded subjective entity,” a form of perfect expression that constitutes historical progress.

Farid Matuk’s “Closer” probes the implications of this aspiration. Bringing together abstract ideals and images of the outdoors, the poem initially seems to conform to lyric conventions, but a catalog of US war planes swiftly interrupts, summoning a different genre: the epic—which mediates the relationship between the self and the collective. As the poem shifts scales, refuting both the lyric’s idealized individuality and the epic’s narrative impulse, the reader is suspended in the disjuncture where ready-made settings fail, blurring the world like the lens of a camera before locking into a distance. Where, in the modern lyric, ignorance of an audience constitutes evidence of the truth of its expression, in “Closer” that solipsistic exceptionalism is rendered as a question, given as a charge to the reader, who, in each encounter, completes the poem’s meaning anew. The pretense of solitude in a world underwritten by imperial militarism is, after all, also a relational stance, a technology of destruction.

— Claire Schwartz

Listen to Farid Matuk read "Closer."

Closer

If it’s freedom or Sunday morning Through which the iterations— UH-60 Black Hawk A-10 Warthog C-130E Hercules MH-60S Knighthawk HC-130J Combat King II E-3 Sentry E-6B Mercury EC-130H Compass Call F-4 Phantom F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor B-25 Mitchell —fly closer, a clear sky, A perfect day Can be a backdrop so calm, Admitting no wind So, who’ll take that feeling With me Into the critique of feeling?

“Closer” appeared in Moon Mirrored Indivisible by Farid Matuk, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Farid Matuk’s work has been recognized by the 2023 Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Holloway Lectureship at UC Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship. His latest poetry collection, Moon Mirrored Indivisible, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/closer at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 11 JUN 2025, 6:38 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 11 JUN 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

The Tangled Knot of Anti-Zionist Violence

Doubling down on the conflation of Zionism and Judaism won’t stop violent attacks.

Daniel May

A makeshift memorial for the victims of the attack on demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado.

David Zalubowski/AP Photo

The day after the June 1st Molotov cocktail attack on demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, I received an email from my synagogue. Citing the assault, which injured 15 at a walk for Israeli hostages in Gaza, along with the killing of two Israeli embassy workers outside an American Jewish Committee (AJC) event in Washington, DC, a week prior, the note from congregation leadership affirmed that “Attacking Jewish people as a response to a war in Israel and Gaza is unquestionably antisemitic.” The letter reminded readers that “the purpose of antisemitic terror is to make us afraid to live public Jewish lives.”

This interpretation of the violence is ubiquitous among both Jewish communal leadership and American politicians on both sides of the aisle. “Make no mistake,” declared the chief executive of the liberal advocacy group Jewish Council for Public Affairs, “if and when Jews are targeted to protest Israel’s actions, it should clearly and unequivocally be understood and condemned as antisemitism.” Progressive US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed, writing on X that “Antisemitism is on the rise here at home, and we have a moral responsibility to confront and stop it everywhere it exists.” Speaker Mike Johnson went farther: “It isn’t about Palestine, it isn’t about Gaza, it isn’t about any particular conflict. It’s because these people want a complete and total extermination of the Jewish people.”

The response is both predictable and puzzling. As troubling as these attacks are, neither the shooter in DC nor the assailant in Colorado yelled any obviously antisemitic slogans when they attacked; both chanted “Free Palestine.” Nor is there any evidence that they held classical antisemitic views, like blaming a Jewish cabal for government policies or seeing Jews as especially greedy or mendacious. The DC shooter’s manifesto doesn’t contain the word Jew or Jewish or even Zionist. We know less about the attacker in Boulder, who apparently told police that he wanted “all Zionists to die.” Yet those that have called the violence antisemitic generally insist that the victims were attacked not because they were Zionists but because—and only because—they are Jews. In a representative New York Times editorial, Sheila Katz, chief executive of the National Council of Jewish Women, declared that the victims were targeted because they were at “Jewish events.” Yet Katz’s pronouncement ignores the fact that the AJC is well known as a staunch supporter of the Jewish state, that those killed in the DC attack worked at the Israeli embassy, and that American marches for the release of hostages are recognized by most observers as political demonstrations in support of Israel. It would seem that the victims were targeted not because they were Jews, but because of their support for Israel.

I understand why some find the distinction irrelevant. Jews are being killed and attacked for their views; this is undeniably upsetting. “The very conversation—is this antisemitic or not—trivializes the issue,” Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, said on a recent podcast. “We Jews who support Israel are now being targeted by acts of violence. Does it matter whether somebody calls it antisemitism or not?” In a sense, Kurtzer is correct. The severity of the violence should, on its own, offer sufficient grounds for condemnation. Yet for American Jewish leaders and politicians, it clearly matters a great deal whether or not this violence is called “antisemitism.” There are obvious political reasons why. For many in the Jewish world, antisemitism is an “eternal” hatred; it persists throughout time, a virus always on the verge of outbreak. If that is the cause of the violence—if indeed there is no cause except irrational prejudice—then there is little we can do to stop it. But if one’s interest is the safety of Jews, then it’s imperative to examine the motivation of the violence as stated by those that committed it. Doing so makes plain the uncomfortable but increasingly obvious fact that when associated with Jews as a whole, Israel’s annihilatory campaign of indiscriminate bombing and starvation in Gaza puts Jews around the world in danger. Those committed to preventing such attacks should be working to stop that destruction and to refute that association.

Instead, Jewish leaders are doing the opposite. Katz writes passionately that “our position on this war, or on Israel, does not affect how extremists perceive us. To them, we are all Jews, and that alone makes us targets for hate and violence.” In other words, the violence has everything to do with the victims being Jewish and nothing to do with their support for Israel or their identification with Zionism. Simultaneously, Katz makes clear that to her there is no relevant distinction between the two. “We [Jews] have been asked, unreasonably, to fully disavow our relationship to Israel . . . just to be accepted by supposed allies.” She laments that the word “Zionist” has become a “slur,” when it means nothing more than “the basic belief in Jewish self-determination.” By this logic, anyone opposed to Zionism is an opponent of Jewish freedom; that is, antisemitic. Yet if support for Israel is simply part of what it means to be Jewish, and anti-Zionism is tantamount to antisemitism, then why should anyone—whether a student activist, congressional lobbyist, or murderous loner—be expected to make a distinction between Zionism and Judaism that the leaders of the Jewish community refuse to make themselves?

This knot—in which Zionism and Judaism merge so completely that opposition to Zionism becomes indistinct from opposition to Judaism—was tied at the birth of Zionism as a political program in the late 19th century. The early political Zionists were not only interested in creating a Jewish refuge, but in transforming what it meant to be Jewish. Leon Pinsker, whose 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation is often considered the first text of political Zionism, argued that legal equality in Europe was inherently unable to end discrimination against Jews because it couldn’t make others see Jews as equal. In their prolonged exile, the Jews of Europe were a “ghostlike apparition of a living corpse.” “The proper and only remedy,” he concluded, was “the creation of a Jewish nationality,” achieved “by the acquisition of a home of their own.” The key point for Pinsker, which was also advanced by other early Zionists like Thodeor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Micah Berdyczewski, was that the creation of a Jewish homeland was a means toward the end of establishing a new Jewish identity. Jews were not coreligionists but members of a nation, and only when they recognized themselves as such would they regain a place of pride and honor lost through generations of living in nations that belonged to others. As Berdyczewski wrote at the turn of the century, “we must cease to be Jews by virtue of an abstract Judaism and become Jews in our own right, as a living and developing nationality.” According to this framework, those Jews that rejected their national identity were choosing self-denial over self-respect.

It isn’t hard to see how this position would eventually lead so many to insist that Zionism is not a political ideology, but an integral aspect of Jewish identity—and some to declare that Jews that oppose Zionism are, in fact, not really Jews. When so many synagogues in America feature Israeli flags in their sanctuaries, when campus Hillels are unabashed centers of pro-Israel advocacy, when Jewish communal institutions declare that those calling for divestment from Israel are blatantly antisemitic, it shouldn’t surprise anyone when opponents of Zionism conclude that their political antagonists are, in fact, the Jews. Many Palestinian activists and intellectuals have long recognized that such a conflation would tarnish their cause, and worked to clarify that their enemy was not Jewish people but the state that had stolen Palestinian land. Fayez Sayegh, founder of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, was among the most persistent and nuanced in making this point. It was Zionism and not opposition to it, he argued, that built directly on antisemitism. Both Zionists and antisemites, he noted, agreed on the basic premise that Jews are a single nation that cannot coexist with others. “The difference between them,” he argued in his 1965 Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, is that antisemitism “disdains those alleged ‘national characteristics’” while “Zionism idealizes” them. In a refrain familiar to any pro-Palestine activist, he insisted: “I am anti-Israel. I am anti-Zionist also. But I am not anti-Jewish.” Astute Jewish commentators recognized how difficult it was to hold the distinction. In 1968, the Israeli writer and historian Nissim Rejwan noted in a letter to a colleague that supporters of Israel wanted it both ways: They demanded that Arabs make a distinction between Jews and Zionists while insisting that “you cannot draw the line between Zionism and Judaism as the former is the ‘national liberation movement’ of the Jews.” Who are we, he would later ask the American critic Irving Howe, “to accuse the Arabs of antisemitism when all they have done is fallen right into the ideological trap which the Zionists have set for them?”

It turns out that this wasn’t just a trap laid for Palestinians struggling against Zionist dispossession. It has also become a trap for Jews. Given that Israel’s founding involved the dispossession of 750,000 people, then decades of military rule over subjects denied basic rights, and now a campaign of bombing and siege that leading human rights organizations have declared a genocide, there are clear reasons for hostility to Zionism. And if support for Israel is essential to being Jewish, then hostility to Israel necessarily entails hostility to Jews. The dynamic feeds on itself like an ouroboros: The hostility proves to Jews that antisemitism is a malignant and eternal force, which reinforces the idea that a militarized ethnostate is essential for Jewish safety, which increases support for that state’s security, which leads to justifications for Israel’s ongoing campaigns of dispossession, which increases the hostility. Rinse, repeat. This is why those that warn of an increasing threat to Jews are right to do so, even if they misattribute the reasons. Studies have long shown that as Israeli violence increases, so too does violence against Jews.

For many Jews, discussing the troubling consequences that follow from the conflation of Judaism with Zionism is too risky or uncomfortable—akin to victim blaming. But describing how the conditions for violence are produced does not exonerate the person directly responsible for that violence; regardless of motivation, we can and should be clear that civilians should not be killed or maimed because of their political positions. More specifically, the idea that these marchers in Boulder might be an apt target for violence from those angry with Israeli policies reflects a warped perspective in which distinctions between identity, complicity, responsibility, and power have dissolved. Even if the boundaries between these categories aren’t always clear, delineating them remains important. Their collapse isn’t, unfortunately, unique to any one assault; it is all too familiar in a political culture in which questions of power are often reduced to matters of identity. We’re not immune to this on the left, where degrees of responsibility are frequently flattened into a catchall “Zionist” identification. But it shouldn’t take a rugged materialist to point out that those manufacturing the bombs killing whole families in Gaza bear more responsibility for that killing than those walking in circles in Boulder. Whether the CEO of Lockheed Martin is or isn’t Jewish is of course irrelevant. It’s also irrelevant whether he is a Zionist. This is not to proffer a list of preferred targets for violence. It is to insist that a politics preoccupied with labels of identity more than with structures of power will not be effective, and can metastasize in dangerous and damaging ways.

Yet those seeking to hold specific individuals and institutions accountable for their support for the ongoing destruction in Gaza will get no help from the Jewish world, whose representatives continually insist that there is no difference between a synagogue service, a march for hostages, or an AJC event for diplomats—or that a municipal ceasefire resolution, a college protest encampment, and a firebombing at a peaceful march are all, equally, signs of pernicious anti-Jewish hatred. The terrible irony is while such declarations are made in the name of Jewish security, they do nothing to make Jews safer. By reinforcing the view that Jews are at risk no matter where they live and no matter what they do or say, such calls distract from addressing the conditions that produce such violence. Rather than demanding generic support for “the fight against antisemitism,” those looking to actually protect Jews will eventually need to turn their eyes from the violence of recent attacks towards the bombing and starvation of millions in Gaza. Doing so will require recognizing recent attacks not as evidence of an eternal hatred but as destructive responses to an unconscionable war.

Daniel May is the publisher at Jewish Currents.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-tangled-knot-of-anti-zionist-violence at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 6 JUN 2025, 2:26 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 6 JUN 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

The Era of Unconditional Support for Israel Is Ending

Trump’s redefinition of America’s imperial role is emboldening US officials to distinguish American interests from Israeli ones—and freeing European governments to challenge the Jewish state.

Peter Beinart

President Donald Trump at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 14th, 2025.

Alex Brandon/AP Photo

For more than three decades, American presidents have insisted that what is good for Israel is good for the United States. In Democratic and Republican party platforms since the end of the Cold War, you find the same language again and again: The US and Israel hold “common strategic interests” and maintain “a strategic alliance that benefits both nations.” But in recent months, Trump officials have repeatedly signaled that those interests diverge. On May 9th, the Trump administration cut a deal to ensure that the Houthis would stop attacking US ships—even as the Yemeni militant group continued its strikes against Israel. Asked to justify the agreement, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee made it clear that keeping Americans safe from Houthi attacks is a US priority; keeping Israelis safe is not. The US, he declared, “isn’t required to get permission from Israel to make some type of arrangement that would get the Houthis from firing on our ships.” Two months earlier, when asked about the Trump administration’s direct negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of an American hostage in Gaza, even as Israeli captives languished, US envoy Adam Boehler asserted that, “We’re the United States. We’re not an agent of Israel.” To prove it, Trump has ignored Israeli opposition as he negotiates with Iran on a new nuclear deal.

This willingness to sharply differentiate American interests from those of its longtime partners isn’t restricted to Israel. The Biden administration prided itself on forging a common front with America’s European allies. President Donald Trump prefers going solo. He’s parted ways with Europe’s leaders on Ukraine, climate, and trade—and now he’s allowing EurÏope to go its own way on Israel, too. “Trump isn’t cracking everyone else into line,” observed Daniel Levy, the British-based president of the US/Middle East Project. “The US is not trying to create a common policy.” Without meaningful opposition from the US, European leaders have grown increasingly critical of Israel’s assault on Gaza over the last month. French President Emmanuel Macron has called Israel’s actions there “a disgrace.” Britain’s foreign minister termed Israel’s denial of humanitarian aid to the Strip “abominable.” Slovenia’s president accused Israel of genocide. A joint statement by Britain, France, and Canada labeled the language of some Israeli leaders “abhorrent” and, in a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s embrace of Trump’s plan for the mass relocation of Gaza’s people, the three governments warned that “permanent forced displacement is a breach of international humanitarian law.” Never before in the post-Cold War era have European leaders so seriously discussed punishing the Jewish state.

Trump’s redefinition of America’s imperial role is emboldening US officials to distinguish American interests from Israeli ones—hearkening back to an older era of US–Israel relations—and freeing European governments to challenge the Jewish state without fearing American retribution. The age of virtually unconditional Western government support for Israel is coming to an end.

Peruse foreign policy commentary since Donald Trump’s return to office, and you’ll encounter a persistent lament: He’s abandoned America’s leadership of the “free world”—the group of nations, mostly located in Europe and East Asia, with whom the US partnered to oppose the Soviet Union after World War II. But Trump isn’t interested in this mantle. He doesn’t believe the US shares interests with longtime allies; he suspects they’re ripping America off. And he doesn’t claim that America’s democratic partners are superior to its longtime foes. Trump often prefers autocrats, especially when they pay him.

This inclination is shaping Trump’s policies toward Israel. In the Middle East, he courts super-rich Gulf monarchies, like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, which can deposit more money into his family’s bank accounts than Israel can. Before Trump visited the Persian Gulf—and bypassed Jerusalem—on his first foreign trip, his administration reportedly stopped conditioning US support for Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program on its willingness to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. At the urging of Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, he also lifted US sanctions on Syria, over Israel’s objections.

While Trump’s epic corruption is new, his willingness to challenge Israel in pursuit of what he considers American interests is not. It’s a throwback to the Cold War. Between the 1950s and the 1980s—when the Christian right and AIPAC enjoyed less influence in Washington and successive administrations worried that a conflict in the Middle East could spark a war between superpowers—American presidents were less deferential to Israel. President Dwight Eisenhower threatened to end all aid to Israel unless it withdrew its troops from Egypt in 1956. In 1975, when the Jewish state refused a partial withdrawal from the Sinai, Gerald Ford vowed a “reassessment” of “our relations with Israel,” and halted all new assistance. After Saudi Arabia begged Ronald Reagan to force Israel to halt its bombardment of Beirut in 1982, Reagan wrote in his diary that he had told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel’s assault “had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered.”

Like Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan, the Trump administration’s willingness to defy Israel has little to do with Palestinians. It’s about America’s relationships with Middle Eastern regimes. During the Cold War, the existence of a rival superpower gave Arab leaders leverage over the United States. Now that America has superpower rivals again, some of that leverage is back. Trump isn’t only pro-Saudi because its leaders give his family lucrative business deals. His advisors also fear that Riyadh could draw closer to Beijing.

Another reason Trump is more willing to break with Israel is because Republican foreign policy opinion has dramatically changed over the last decade. In his first presidential run, Trump overthrew the GOP establishment in part by harnessing a populist backlash against the Iraq War. In December 2015, in one of the defining moments of the Republican primary, he broke with his hawkish opponents—most notably GOP frontrunner Jeb Bush—by declaring that the war had left the Middle East “totally destabilized, a total and complete mess” and arguing that the US should have instead spent its money “right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!” Trump campaigned this past fall on a renewed promise to avoid military conflict, especially in the Middle East. “If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars,” he told a Michigan crowd days before last November’s election. “I am the candidate of peace.”

Trump’s critique has been taken up by younger conservatives like Vice President J.D. Vance and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who want the GOP to fully repudiate the interventionist Bush legacy. For younger people on the right, the CATO Institute’s Justin Logan told me, the “global war on terror was a colossal psychological event”—a catastrophe that has left them deeply skeptical of military adventures, especially in the Middle East. Over the last 18 months, Israel’s assault on Gaza has made many of these conservatives associate the Jewish state even more strongly with wars that threaten to draw in the US. This has contributed to an enormous gap between the way younger and older conservatives view Israel. According to the Pew Research Center, 50% of Republican adults ages 18–49 now hold an unfavorable view of the Jewish state, compared to only 23% ages 50 and above. By comparison, the generation gap among Democrats is only five points. A 2024 Northeastern University poll found that Republicans 18–24 feel more negatively toward Israel than Democrats over the age of 65. These young conservatives are led by a spate of far-right influencers—from Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens to Nick Fuentes—who offer harsh criticism of Israel, much of it suffused with conspiracy theories about Jews.

Though these shifts make the Trump administration more willing to defy Israel in its policies toward Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, and perhaps even Iran, they have not yet made the White House more sympathetic to Palestinians. As a stateless people, the Palestinians have little to offer Trump; they can neither bribe him nor scare him by threatening to ally with China. This means that even as Trump breaks with Netanyahu’s warlike attitudes toward other Middle Eastern regimes, he is providing him weapons and diplomatic support that enable Israel to continue its assault on Gaza. Trump has even proposed expelling the Strip’s entire population.

But Trump’s belligerence on Gaza, coupled with his disinterest in coordinating with allies, has prompted Europe to contemplate its own, very different, break with the Jewish state. As in the US, public support for Israel has been declining in recent years in Germany, France, Britain, and Spain. But until earlier this year, European public discontent had little effect on government policy. That changed this spring, when—with Trump’s blessing—Netanyahu scuttled a ceasefire deal that would have released all the hostages in return for an end to the war, renewing a starvation and bombardment campaign aimed at depopulating Gaza. Israel’s renewed offensive undercut European rationalizations for supporting the war. “For many European governments,” notes Hugh Lovatt, a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, “Israel’s decision to end the ceasefire removed any Israeli justification for necessary self-defense because there was a realistic [diplomatic] path to releasing all hostages.” According to Martin Konecny, director of European Middle East Project, Israel’s “more obvious and explicit talk of ethnic cleansing cut through the layer of denial in much of Europe.”

Despite the harsher condemnation of Israel from American allies like France and the UK, Europe hasn’t matched its talk with action. But that could change. On May 20th, European Union foreign ministers voted to review whether Israel was complying with the human rights requirements of the EU–Israel Association Agreement, which affords Israel preferential trading access to the continent, along with various forms of scientific and technological cooperation. Revoking the entire agreement is virtually impossible, since it would require unanimity among the EU’s 27 nations, which include Hungary, a staunch Israeli ally. But according to Lovatt, just revoking the trade portion “could cost Israel hundreds of millions of Euros in tariff savings,” since, according to the Financial Times, “Israel sources nearly half of its goods imports from Europe and sends more than a third of its exports to the continent.” Canceling scientific cooperation would also constitute a serious blow to Israeli research institutions.

A partial revocation requires a qualified majority: 15 countries representing 65% of the EU’s population. A key holdout is Germany, which, given its history, has been extremely reluctant to challenge the Jewish state. But even there, attitudes are shifting. A poll last month found that 80% of Germans oppose Israel’s assault on Gaza. Some leaders of the center-left opposition party SPD have publicly called for ending German arms sales to Israel, and Germany’s chancellor recently called Israel’s actions “no longer comprehensible.” Last week, well-known German talk show host, Markus Lanz, lambasted the “hypocrisy” of German politicians who defend IDF conduct in front of the cameras but acknowledge that Israel is committing war crimes behind the scenes. Konecny recalled a conversation with a German-born official who compared the public debate on Gaza to the public debate in East Germany shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when even senior officials said one thing in public and another once the mics were turned off. Given Germany’s economic and political heft, a shift there could change Europe’s relationship with Israel in fundamental ways.

Whether Europe does ultimately act, the growing outrage among its leaders—combined with Trump’s willingness to assert US national interests over Israeli objections—highlights the timidity of Democratic politicians in the US. Congressional Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have endorsed a ceasefire, but don’t support US pressure to bring one about. Potential 2028 presidential candidates like Josh Shapiro and J.B. Pritzker have condemned Trump’s expulsion plan, but mustered none of the indignation now being heard in London, Paris, and even Berlin.

Democratic elites aren’t just failing morally. They’re failing politically. US public opinion is turning swiftly against Israel. In a survey this March, Gallup recorded Israel’s lowest level of support since the pollster began measuring it in 2001; the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found this May that Israel’s favorability rating was the lowest it has been since the Council began its surveys in 1978. Among Democrats, the numbers are particularly lopsided. In 2013, according to Gallup, Democrats favored Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 36 points. Now they favor the Palestinians by 38 points.

This chasm between ordinary voters and Democratic leaders, many of whom remain in the Biden mold, offers an opportunity to a Democratic presidential candidate in 2028. Like Howard Dean in 2004, who rose from obscurity because he was the only major Democratic contender who opposed the Iraq War, a Democrat who forthrightly opposed arms sales to Israel could expose establishment opponents as out of touch with the party base. National Democrats could learn from New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who cites a conversation with “a 75-year-old woman whose elevator is not working in her building” in which she laments that “the federal government can’t send her a single dollar for public housing” but “somehow has billions of dollars to kill children.” When it comes to Israel and Palestine, Democrats need not choose between the language of justice and the language of national interest.

Obviously, any Democratic presidential candidate who spoke that way would be pilloried by pro-Israel groups and parts of the media. And even if a Democrat did take the White House, they would likely find it harder to defy Israel than Trump has. When the Trump administration negotiated directly with Hamas, congressional Republicans largely stayed silent, as they do when Trump violates all kinds of norms. Had Barack Obama done the same, they would have demanded his impeachment.

Still, among the lessons of Donald Trump’s presidency is that the rules governing what is and isn’t politically possible are often more fragile than they appear. That’s true of unconditional Western support for Israel—a policy consensus that only emerged a few decades ago and is now hemorrhaging public support. Trump’s presidency and Israel’s murderous attack on Gaza are remaking the geopolitical map and creating an opening for Democrats to speak differently about Palestine and Israel. They just have to seize it.

Peter Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents.

PeterBeinart

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-era-of-unconditional-support-for-israel-is-ending at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

EXPLAINER | 5 JUN 2025, 4:59 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 5 JUN 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

Trump’s Illegal Cuts to University Funding, Explained

The administration is using Title VI to justify the suspension of federal grants, while completely leapfrogging the legal process.

Alex Kane

Harvard University’s campus

John Walton / Press Association via AP Images

Since March, the Trump administration has cut billions of dollars in federal funding to universities, halting $3.3 billion in grants and contracts to Harvard, $1 billion to Cornell, $790 million to Northwestern, $400 million to Columbia, and $210 million to Princeton. The main justification for this unprecedented funding freeze has been pro-Palestinian activism on these campuses, which President Donald Trump has labeled antisemitic. The cuts, which have already impacted the schools’ medical, scientific, and technological research, could expand further: On March 10th, the Department of Education (DOE) sent letters to 56 other universities warning them of “potential enforcement actions” if they do not “protect Jewish students on campus.”

In halting federal funding, Trump administration officials have repeatedly claimed that they are following Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits institutions receiving federal support from creating or permitting a “hostile environment” for students on the basis of race, national origin, or other protected identity classes. But experts have said that the Trump administration is leapfrogging the legal process outlined by the Civil Rights Act, even as it points to Title VI as justification for their funding cuts. In the process, legal experts say, the administration is not only misusing Title VI—turning a statute intended to combat discrimination into a potent weapon with which to assault pro-Palestinian activism—it is also illegally undermining universities. This explainer delves into how the Trump administration is using Title VI law; the precedents Trump is building on in turning Title VI against critics of Israel; and how such weaponization of civil rights law relates to the administration’s attempts to undermine the rule of law.

What does Title VI say about funding cuts?

In 1964, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, legislators deliberately wrote provisions that made it difficult to terminate federal money over a violation of Title VI. “Cutoff of assistance is not the objective of Title VI,” Rhode Island Democratic Senator John Pastore said during debate on the bill in April 1964. “Fund cutoff is a last resort, to be used only if all else fails to achieve the real objective—the elimination of discrimination in the use and receipt of federal funds.” In order to reach the point of cutting funding under Title VI, a federal agency must first investigate an institution, make findings, and offer the entity the ability to voluntarily comply. If the institution does not comply, the dispute goes to an administrative court and to Congress, or the federal government can refer the matter to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The laborious nature of Title VI proceedings, and the emphasis on voluntary compliance, means that the suspension of funding is a power that has rarely been used (the most prominent instances occurred in the context of racial discrimination in the 1960s). “The whole point is for this to be a curative process, not a punitive one, given what’s at stake for institutions and for students, who, if the doors are shut on them, may be left out in the cold,” said Katy Joseph, a former chief of staff in the Biden administration DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the principal agency that enforces Title VI in educational settings. Title VI also mandates that any funding cuts be narrowly tailored to impact programs where non-compliance is found—a policy that sharply diverges from the Trump administration’s wholesale cuts to scientific and medical programs with no evidence that the particular programs are connected to alleged antisemitic discrimination.

How has the Trump administration used Title VI?

The administration has not wholly ignored the Congressionally-mandated process, and in some cases, it has launched Title VI investigations into schools, as the statute stipulates. After such an investigation into Columbia, the OCR offices of the DOE and the Health and Human Services’ Department declared on May 22nd that the university had violated Jewish students’ civil rights because of pro-Palestinian activism on campus, which the OCR said created a hostile environment for Jews.

On its face, the inquiry and the immediate release of findings in a public letter, along with the administration’s request that the university voluntarily comply with its Title VI obligations, appear in line with the normal process. But the administration had already unveiled a set of funding cuts before it undertook the inquiry process, canceling $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia on March 7th. The same thing unfolded at Harvard, where the administration sent an April 11th letter announcing that the Department of Justice would be investigating the school’s compliance with Title VI, and would work with the university to “secure compliance by informal voluntary means,” only to summarily cut billions in grants to the university three days later.

Experts say that the cuts have effectively made an end run around the Title VI process. “Funding cutoffs are by law a last step,” said Michael Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School and an expert on Title VI. But “in its dealings with Columbia, Harvard, and other universities, the Trump administration has circumvented the requirements by cutting funds before without going through any of the mandated steps.” Joseph noted that in this context, the administration’s unusual decision to make its findings letter public was telling. “OCR doesn’t typically publish letters finding a violation, absent a signed agreement [because] the intent is to try and get the university to come to the table,” she said. “This is more of a ‘name and shame’ approach—another example of the offices taking liberty with the process in pursuit of a political end.”

In addition to raising process concerns, lawyers have also questioned the legal basis of the funding cuts. Radhika Sainath, a senior managing attorney at the civil rights group Palestine Legal, told Jewish Currents that the federal government is using Title VI without proving that there is in fact antisemitic discrimination taking place, pointing to a March 13th letter to Columbia in which the administration mentioned student encampments and the occupation of Hamilton Hall—actions that Sainath says are protected political speech and activism. “It’s really clear that what the Trump administration is framing as antisemitism is really speech critical of Israel’s genocide,” said Sainath. “That is not a violation under Title VI because speech critical of a country’s practices is not targeted harassment based on a protected class.” In pursuing this interpretation of antisemitism, Joseph said that the administration is using a different legal standard than in the past: While previous DOE investigations included a “subjective and objective” standard when evaluating civil rights complaints (meaning that the investigation would look at whether the conduct would be considered harassment by both the complainant and a reasonable outsider), the Trump DOE letter to Columbia makes no reference to such a standard, making it easier to find a university out of compliance with the law for alleged antisemitism.

What precedents is Trump building on in weaponizing Title VI?

Israel advocacy organizations have long used Title VI to target pro-Palestinian speech, and past presidential administrations from both parties have launched Title VI civil rights investigations into pro-Palestinian activism on campus that were alleged to create a hostile environment for Jews. The Obama DOE opened up investigations into alleged anti-Jewish bigotry at the behest of pro-Israel groups, for instance investigating multiple University of California schools for allegedly creating a hostile environment for Jews. As pro-Palestinian campus activism surged after the October 7th attacks and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza—which many experts have labeled a genocide—the Biden DOE, likewise responding to complaints filed by Israel advocacy groups, made particularly aggressive use of its investigatory powers, launching an unprecedented number of civil rights investigations into schools due to complaints of antisemitism. Civil liberties lawyers are critical of the investigations for pressing universities to scrutinize legally sanctioned speech and activism. “By not definitively shutting down the misuse of Title VI to suppress speech critical of Israel, the Biden administration really set the stage for everything the current administration is doing,” Sainath said.

While prior Title VI cases targeting pro-Palestine activism may have laid the groundwork for the present moment, no previous president has taken such cases as far as Trump. Indeed, Obama’s DOE repeatedly dismissed pro-Israel actors’ allegations, finding that examples cited by such groups were either protected forms of expression, or harassment based on political speech, which is not covered under Title VI. Unlike the Obama DOE, the Biden administration did not dismiss cases on the basis of protected expression. At the same time, it still continued to rely on the legally mandated voluntary agreements with universities it investigated, something Republicans often criticized as weak. “The toothless agreements shield schools from real accountability,” Rep. Tim Walberg, the Republican chair of the House’s Education and Workforce Committee said in reaction to the Biden administration’s January decision to settle with a number of institutions after antisemitism investigations. “The Trump administration should closely examine these agreements and explore options to impose real consequences on schools.”

Now, experts say Trump is doing just that by effectively pursuing an end run around Title VI. “We’re seeing the executive branch take unprecedented liberties, because they can flip the switch and turn the money off,” said Joseph. “The process is being abused in really coercive ways.” Dorf echoed the sentiment, saying bluntly that the Trump administration is “breaking the law.”

How does the misuse of Title VI fit into the administration’s broader agenda?

Legal experts say that the administration’s weaponization of Title VI is part of its attempt to not only crush pro-Palestinian speech but undermine universities altogether. Republicans see these institutions as powerful centers of organizing and scholarship that oppose their agenda; by threatening funding, Trump may be enlisting university administrators themselves into his project of silencing dissent. “[Threats to funding] give universities a huge incentive to suppress speech because they’re so afraid of having whatever remains of their federal funding terminated,” said Miriam Nunberg, a former staff attorney at OCR. “That’s a huge violation of the entire purpose of a university.” This pattern played out at Columbia when, after halting money to the school in mid-March, federal officials made funding restoration talks conditional on the school instituting a mask ban, hiring more law enforcement, and placing the Middle East studies department under the control of the government. In response, Columbia largely complied with the demands. And despite Columbia’s acquiescence, the Trump administration has not restored funding to the school; in fact, as recently as Wednesday, the administration declared that Columbia remains out of compliance with its Title VI obligations as part of an attempt to threaten the school’s accreditation.

In addition to weakening universities, advocates say that Trump’s Title VI moves should be understood as part of a wider attack on the rule of law writ large. This assault has included the continued detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in a Salvadoran prison, despite the Supreme Court ruling that the administration should “facilitate” his return back to the US, and the likely illegal targeting of students for deportation for voicing pro-Palestinian views. “The Trump administration is acting completely outside the bounds of the law. They are just doing what they want to target people whose views they don’t like or that they don’t believe should be in the country, and completely ignoring the First Amendment and other due process protections,” said Sainath. “The targeting of universities is part and parcel of that.”

What groups are pushing back against Trump’s Title VI strategy and how likely are they to succeed?

On March 25th, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit charging that the DOJ targeting of Columbia is illegal, based in part on its misuse of Title VI. In April, Harvard University also began litigation against the administration, arguing that the Trump administration’s application of Title VI to cut off money to the Ivy League school is illegal. (Both lawsuits also allege other legal violations, such as contravention of the First Amendment.)

These lawsuits have a high chance of succeeding if a court rules on their merits, said Dorf. But even if those lawsuits are successful, the administration’s abuse of Title VI could nonetheless continue to damage universities. The Trump administration could quietly deny future grants to universities on the same grounds without explicitly saying so, “making it difficult to prove that the denial of any particular grant” was done illegally, Dorf said. Further, there’s no guarantee that the administration would follow a court ruling demanding that the federal government restore the grants. Even with a favorable ruling on Title VI, then, Dorf said, “there’s a real risk that this administration won’t comply.”

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/trump-cuts-university-funding-harvard-antisemitism-explainer at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 4 JUN 2025, 2:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 4 JUN 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

Marketing Authoritarianism

Mimicking his Salvadoran ally Nayib Bukele, Trump is using spectacles of disappearance to project a total power he does not yet possess.

Dennis M. Hogan and Matthew Ellis

The Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT, March 5th, 2023.

Salvador Melendez/AP Photo

Three commercial airliners are parked on a tarmac. A mass of men wearing riot gear begin unloading their cargo: human beings in orange jumpsuits, their hands and ankles tied. The guards drag these prisoners, doubled over and shuffling, towards a fleet of armored police vehicles and white school buses. Electronic music pulses as the motorcade makes its way to a hulking prison facility, emerging out of the darkness against a surrounding countryside. Within its enormous concrete walls, there are rows of buildings that resemble warehouses. Inside, under fluorescent lights that appear almost medical, the prisoners have their heads shaved one by one before the guards lock them inside an enormous communal cage containing long rows of bunk beds. As the gates slam shut and the prisoners gaze out at the camera, presumably never to be seen again, the dehumanization is complete. They are nonpersons forgotten inside a nonplace. The screen goes black and encourages the viewer to press “replay.”

This video, posted to X by the account of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in mid-March, and swiftly shared by US President Donald Trump and other senior government officials, depicts the transfer of 238 men deported from the United States to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in Spanish, or CECOT for short), a recently-constructed maximum-security facility in rural El Salvador designed to incarcerate thousands of prisoners indefinitely. CECOT is where Bukele says he detains the most dangerous members of El Salvador’s street gangs; now, despite most of the men deported from the US having no criminal records, Trump has attempted to portray them as dangerous gang members as well.

Much of Trump’s cruelty here is familiar—the US national security state has long used extensive, extraordinary, and questionably legal methods of apprehension and punishment—but what is remarkable is the crafting of a short film celebrating the process. The human rights violations of the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations, while serious, were not typically so openly advertised; the very name “black site,” as the secret CIA torture and detention facilities were called during the Global War on Terror, suggests as much. In those years, a certain discretion, if not secrecy, used to characterize most US deportation proceedings. In contrast, Trump and Bukele have gleefully turned deportation and incarceration into theater, circulating images of their power to detain, deport, and incarcerate unfettered by law or custom. Understood this way, Bukele’s video, featuring deportations to a Salvadoran prison from which no person has ever been released, functions as a digital advertisement for efficient disappearance—testifying to authoritarian leaders’ total power to take people, and our powerlessness to bring them back.

In turning to disappearance as a tactic of political control, the US is building on precedents from across the hemisphere, particularly Latin America. Throughout the Cold War, the region’s military dictatorships tortured and murdered political prisoners in remote rural areas or secret detention centers. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the right-wing governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay all collaborated on Operation Condor, a transnational kidnapping and torture program targeting political dissidents. Right-wing governments and combatants in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and, indeed, El Salvador, also employed disappearance as a political technique, principally during the Central American civil conflicts of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. These operations were at least notionally conducted in secret, but people knew their loved ones were being disappeared, even as they didn’t know what happened to them next—a mystery that was, in many ways, the point.

Now, Bukele is leading contemporary Latin American fascists in reimagining the tactic of disappearance for the social media age, producing slick videos that are beamed to digital screens around the world as symbols of his power. One June 2024 Bukele video features a masses of undressed prisoners being corralled by heavily armored and helmeted agents, with captions celebrating the captives being “incomunicados con el exterior, sin posibilidad de salir” (“incommunicado with the outside world without the possibility of leaving”). For Bukele, these spectacles of enforcement and punishment are important as evidence of the “order” that he claims to have brought to El Salvador through the authoritarian powers he’s granted himself over the past three years, during which he has created a “state of exception” that has entailed the indefinite suspension of civil rights. Bukele has used these capabilities to manage El Salvador’s gang violence crisis, but absent a way to jumpstart the economy, he has not been able to effect the total transformation of the country he once vowed. In this context, his videos have served as a major tool for building legitimacy, offering him an opportunity to project his narrative to the Salvadoran people even as his promises remain unfulfilled.

Much like his southern ally, Trump, too, is turning to mediated spectacles of force and coercion to create the impression of progress on his unfulfillable political promises. Immigration has been a signature issue of both of his presidential campaigns, and his victory in 2024 came with a pledge to begin mass deportations in his second term. Yet even as ICE has accelerated its operations under the new administration, Trump’s promised “millions and millions” of deportations have not materialized, and it’s reasonable to think that they never will. There are an estimated 11 million immigrants without legal status in this country, many working in essential sectors like agriculture, construction, foodservice, and the caregiving professions; deporting them all lies beyond the institutional capacity of the American state. But Trump’s team knows they don’t actually need to enact deportations at a mass scale so long as they can create a sense that immigration enforcement is swift, omnipresent, impossible to challenge, and—to their supporters at least—carried out in the name of justice, with or without the consent of the actual justice system. So we get the spectacle of arbitrary enforcement, theatrics that do not always require government-produced videos to sow terror. Bystander footage of random and violent arrests has been enough to do the job, including a video of an anti-war graduate student being snatched off the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Somerville, Massachusetts; another of a family in New Bedford having their car broken into by a sledgehammer-wielding ICE agent; and a third still depicting the aftermath of ICE stopping a bus carrying migrant workers in upstate New York, where the agency plucked off a small, handpicked group of worker leaders. Ultimately, such images end up serving the same function that the stories of the disappeared have long done across the Western hemisphere: advertising the capaciousness of state power, suggesting that no one is safe from its grasp, and projecting an omnipotence it does not yet possess.

The present conjuncture, where US policymakers are looking to Latin America for inspiration, inverts the history of Latin American governments importing repressive tactics from the US. The historian Greg Grandin has characterized the region as the “workshop” of empire, a place where techniques of soft and hard power—from dollar diplomacy to death squads—are tested and refined by US elites and their local clients before being exported worldwide. Institutions like the US military’s School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), for example, have trained many of the region’s most brutal military and political leaders who have, in turn, gone on to spread torture and indiscriminate violence across the hemisphere. In Central America in particular, the US has backed dictatorial, kleptocratic, and even genocidal right-wing governments in devastating civil wars against left-wing popular insurgencies—aiding Guatemala’s military in committing a genocide against the country’s indigenous Maya; funding and arming a guerilla counterrevolution against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and supporting the far right politician and American-trained military commander Roberto D’Aubuisson (a School of the Americas alumnus) in El Salvador. D’Aubuisson went on to assassinate political opponents, torture suspected enemies with blowtorches, and command death squads like those that killed thousands of Salvadorans, including nuns, priests, students, union leaders, and the rural poor. Notably, each of these conflicts involved thousands of disappearances: Some 8,000 to 9,000 people were disappeared in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992, while in other contexts—like the Guatemalan civil war—estimates suggest the number may exceed 45,000.

US intervention has continued to destabilize Central America for decades beyond the official conclusion of military conflicts. After the end of El Salvador’s civil war in 1992, for instance, gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 grew in power and influence across the country. But such groups, now synonymous with Salvadoran street violence, were a distinctly North American export, with roots in Los Angeles’s longstanding youth gang culture. Many Salvadorans fled north to places like LA to escape the violence of the war, and some ended up in US prisons. Starting in 1989, the United States began deporting Salvadorans who had served time back to El Salvador, and the returning gang members brought their associations with them. As a result, even after the peace settlement, US-style gangs quickly made El Salvador among the most dangerous places in the world, devastating the government’s ability to achieve stability and laying the groundwork for a return to all-out repression. And indeed, by 2019, the gang problem provided a political opening that helped sweep Bukele into power.

Bukele became president with a mandate to finally address El Salvador’s most intractable problems, including gang violence. Initially, he disavowed repressive policies and looked to combat the issue in part by negotiating a secret truce with the gangs to reduce homicide rates. After that deal broke down in 2022, however, Bukele had the legislative assembly declare a 30-day “state of exception” that suspended many civil rights, making it easier for government authorities to arrest and imprison suspected gang members. Since 2022, Bukele has detained nearly 80,000 Salvadorans, almost all of them young men, in conditions that independent human rights organizations have said amount to torture. (Since El Salvador has a population of just 6.5 million, that’s the proportional equivalent of locking up 4.1 million Americans.) In many cases, suspected gang members have been taken in on flimsy evidence, or no evidence at all: Stories abound of young men arrested because they’d been turned in by a neighbor, faced accusations on social media, had a previous encounter with police, or had tattoos. Sources both within and outside El Salvador suggest that many non-gang affiliates have been swept up in the dragnet, with one report estimating that as many as a third of the Salvadoran prisoners incarcerated in CECOT are ordinary civilians, thousands of them children. Like the disappeared during Cold War civil conflicts, these people were snatched off the streets, imprisoned, and, in some cases, never heard from again. Eventually, Bukele’s government has been forced to release 7,000 prisoners due to lack of evidence. The vast majority, however, remain in custody, and nearly 400 are confirmed to have died. So while Salvadorans got their cities and streets back from the gangs—guaranteeing that Bukele remains extraordinarily popular at home, with around 85% of the public supporting his government—they also ended up with a country where the state of exception has been renewed over 30 times and remains in effect today, and where the incarceration rate is now the highest in the world.

Despite the crackdown, however, a total transformation of El Salvador still evades Bukele. The president came into office at the head of the political party “Nuevas Ideas” (New Ideas); these turned out to be a combination of several old approaches, including personalism, techno-utopian mystification, pro-market ideology, and old-fashioned mano dura (iron fisted) security policies. Such ideas could contain gangs, but they could not deliver a strong economy, without which Bukele’s promised golden age is incomplete. And while Bukele has said that the improvement in the security situation means that prosperity waits just around the corner, analysts suggest that his restrictive political program has actually hampered economic growth. In response to this inability to remake El Salvador, Bukele has doubled down on showmanship. He has long held international attention as one of the first millennial heads of state, commanding millions of followers on social media, where he regularly broadcasts his own accomplishments (real or exaggerated). Using these platforms, as well as the free publicity his allies in the tech industry have provided him, Bukele has defended his security policies, dramatized his support for (and from) the armed forces, trolled his enemies by gleefully accepting the role of the “dictator,” advertised his government’s extensive use of prison labor, and most notably, created a regular feed of CECOT promotional videos that remind the public of his expansive power to disappear.

By aiding Bukele in projecting total control, this media strategy has helped curtail dissent and weaken democracy in El Salvador. As sociologist Jocelyn Viterno has described, Salvadorans are increasingly reluctant to publicly share their political opinions, a fact which casts Bukele’s high approval ratings in a somewhat more dubious light. Further, in light of Bukele’s escalating persecution of journalists, some of El Salvador’s best-known investigative reporters have chosen to flee the country; labor and environmental leaders have also been caught up in his sweeps. As a result, government transparency is almost nonexistent, means for recourse against corruption scarce, and checks on presidential power impossible to exert. In the gap left by this democratic decline, Bukele has cemented his personal power through procedural manipulations and outright bastardizations of the political process. He got pieces of his first crime package passed in 2020, for example, by having the military occupy the legislative assembly, where his party did not yet hold a majority. Bukele has also attacked judicial independence, illegally replacing the magistrates of the country’s Constitutional Court; the new appointees later allowed him to seek a second consecutive presidential term despite a clear constitutional prohibition on re-election.

If this story of fascist consolidation sounds familiar—save, mercifully, for the sky-high approval ratings—it’s because Trump, seeking to install his own “state of exception,” appears to have turned to Bukele’s El Salvador not only for a place to warehouse the people he deports, but as a model for the entire program. (Trump is one of many leaders across the hemisphere who admire Bukele, from the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, to the rising star mayor of Panama City, Mayer Mizrachi, to failed presidential hopefuls in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru.) To be sure, nothing that Trump has attempted yet goes nearly as far as the extreme measures Bukele has taken: Trump has not called the armed forces into the halls of Congress, illegally removed judges from their positions, or conducted sweeps of the size and scale of Bukele’s. But this is cold comfort. Even a drastically reduced version of Bukele’s current powers of arrest and detention would come close to ending civil liberties for noncitizens in this country, and this is the direction in which Trump is moving. Recently, Trump’s supporters have not only claimed that due process requirements do not apply to certain immigrants—building on the immigration system’s already weak protections for noncitizens—but also floated the idea that longstanding constitutional protections like habeas corpus should be suspended if they interfere with ICE’s ability to effect arrests and deportations. This is the Bukele formula, adapted to local conditions. Because the gang situation was so dire for everyday Salvadorans, Bukele has been able to rule principally by consent, using force—and the spectacle of force—as a way to shore up his control around the edges. But, contra right-wing pundits’ complaints about supposedly immigrant-driven crime, the US, in reality, has no analogue to El Salvador’s gang problem that would deliver Trump a mandate for Bukele-style levels of repression. So Trump has inverted the approach, with the threat of escalating violent repression serving to advance the authoritarian goals that popular consent won’t yet countenance.

In pursuing his increasingly extreme interpretations of executive authority, Trump has found the dissemination of images of repression to be a useful tool in offering adherents online spectacles of cruelty in place of any positive vision for the government’s role in public life. As a result, we see the arrest, deportation, and confinement of human beings on the same screens we use to order socks on Amazon or share an ETA with an awaiting friend, a fact that underscores digital media’s centrality to contemporary US fascism. Indeed, tech platforms’ fascist utility goes hand in hand with the newly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the second Trump administration: Tesla, SpaceX, and X CEO Elon Musk; Palantir’s Peter Thiel; the artificial intelligence mogul Sam Altman; and the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen are all in Trump’s circle, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sergey Brin remain glad to donate to and dine with the president. Trump thus naturally turns to Silicon Valley products to promote his disappearances, and his functionaries have even suggested that they may count on the industry’s mastery of logistics and supply chains as a model for more efficient deportations: ICE director Tom Homan was recently quoted saying that he wants to operate deportations in the mode of an Amazon supply chain: “like Prime, but with human beings.”

These techno-fascist visions of a deportation machine may appear terrifying, but that is precisely the point. Ultimately, the spectacles of violence are intended to compensate for core deficiencies. Bukele markets himself as a dynamic, innovative, and pathbreaking young leader abroad to conceal the ways in which his governance of El Salvador amounts to a rerun of the same old right-wing repression. And Trump celebrates each new innovation in state cruelty to conceal the fact that he cannot fulfill his promises—not on immigration, not on cost of living, and certainly not on “making America great again.”

Dennis M. Hogan is a writer, organizer, and academic.

Matthew Ellis teaches film and media studies at Portland State University, and co-hosts the weekly cinema series The Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast. His writing has appeared in publications such as Jump Cut, Parapraxis, and MUBI’s Notebook, and he publishes a newsletter on Substack titled “Histories of the Present.”

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The End of the Marty Peretz Era

At a controversial event at the Center for Jewish History, Trump donor Bill Ackman held his own against an exhausted brand of liberalism.

David Klion

Leon Wieseltier, Deborah Lipstadt, and Bill Ackman at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan on May 18th, 2025.

John Halpern

In 1974, a 35-year-old Harvard lecturer named Marty Peretz purchased The New Republic (TNR) with $380,000 of his wife’s inherited sewing machine fortune and commenced remaking the magazine in his image. Though he came up on the activist New Left in the 1960s, Peretz had since fallen out with many of his erstwhile comrades over Israel, particularly its rejection by Black radicals. He soon fired the incumbent editor, overhauled the masthead, and made it TNR’s mission to challenge liberal pieties and, as he later wrote in his memoir, “argue for why Zionism mattered.”

For nearly 40 years, TNR—often referred to as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One” during the Clinton presidency, in recognition of its influence in Washington—reflected Peretz’s priorities. Though it always positioned itself as left of center, the magazine often staked out controversial stances on both foreign and domestic policy that aligned it more with neoconservatism. It championed the Nicaraguan contras during the Reagan era, helped kill the Clinton administration’s universal health care plan, published Charles Murray’s inquiry into racial disparities in IQ, and led the liberal drumbeat to invade Iraq in 2003—all while consistently defending Israel’s actions, from its bloody intervention in the Lebanese civil war to its repression of Palestinians during the First and Second Intifadas. Countless notables built their early careers there—among them policymakers like Samantha Power and Antony Blinken and pundits like Jonathan Chait, Andrew Sullivan, and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart. But the magazine’s credibility began declining in the early 2000s, as Peretz’s hawkish centrist liberalism fell out of favor in the wake of the Iraq disaster. His own reputation plummeted in parallel; for instance, he was made persona non grata at Harvard after activists protested his numerous racist remarks about Black people and Arabs. Financial troubles at TNR eventually forced Peretz to sell to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, whose editorial mismanagement triggered an exodus of the remaining Peretz-era staff before he sold to current owner Win McCormack; under both Hughes and McCormack, the magazine has repudiated much of Peretz’s editorial line and generally tacked left. “I am a dissatisfied man,” Peretz reflected in 2023, as he contemplated not only his personal failures but the collapse of his ideological project.

Peretz has mostly kept a low profile in recent years, but earlier this month, he resurfaced as the organizer of a conference at the Center for Jewish History (CJH) in Manhattan titled “The End of an Era? Jews and Elite Universities.” The program immediately drew fire over one of its keynote panelists, Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire and longtime benefactor of both Peretz’s TNR and CJH, who has recently gained notoriety as a ferocious critic of campus pro-Palestine activism. As of this writing, 86 scholars have signed an open letter to CJH condemning the institution for the event’s “overall lack of academic expertise on Jews and higher education” and contending that “the lineup of speakers . . . endangers the Center’s reputation for academic excellence and integrity.” The letter singles out Ackman for supporting the Trump administration’s assault on higher education, which has “threatened academic freedom, the secure employment of academic workers, and scholars’ right to free speech.”

Despite these objections, the day-long conference proceeded without disruption on Sunday, May 18th, before a disproportionately elderly audience. Of the 17 speakers, 12 of whom were men and all of whom were Jewish, over half were former contributors to Peretz-era TNR. These included the magazine’s longtime literary editor, Leon Wieseltier—who has rebounded from his 2017 sexual harassment scandal, and has run the journal Liberties for the past five years—along with academics like Paul Berman, Steven Pinker, and Nicholas Lemann, and journalists like Jamie Kirchick and Eli Lake. The lineup suggested a reunion, or perhaps a resuscitation, of an intellectual community that hasn’t properly existed in more than a decade.

Peretz himself kicked off the event with an address that highlighted, above any substantive point about the day’s subject, his own frailty. “I’m 102, and next year I’ll be 101,” the 86-year-old quipped, before admitting that he had no prepared notes and had forgotten what he wanted to say. After several painful minutes spent slowly recalling the Columbia University uprising of 1968 and forgetting which participants he intended to thank, Peretz acknowledged his own embarrassment—“but hey, I am, as I said, 103”—and passed the podium to Rabbi David Wolpe, who opened his more cogent remarks by praising Peretz for his “ageless accomplishment” at TNR. It was the first of many such tributes: University of Maryland historian Jeffrey Herf said that without Peretz’s TNR, “there’s a hole in our political culture that still needs to be filled”; Kirchick thanked Peretz and Wieseltier for giving him “the graduate education I did not ever have”; and Ackman, who had been Peretz’s student at Harvard in the 1980s, simply said, “I’m here because of Marty Peretz.”

Marty Peretz and Bill Ackman at the Center for Jewish History.

David Klion

A valedictory tone permeated the day. It wasn’t just that Peretz’s disciples wanted to honor him in the face of his acknowledged decline; many of the panelists seemed to feel that the “golden age” of American Jewish life, as TNR alum Franklin Foer wrote last year, might also be slipping into the past. Multiple participants recounted the familiar story of how Jews overcame antisemitic quotas at the Ivies to ascend into the upper echelons of American society, and there was much anxious discussion of recent Jewish demographic decline at elite universities (between 1967 and 2023, the Jewish share of undergraduates shrank by around half at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard, though Jews remain significantly overrepresented at all three relative to their share of the US population). These fears of dwindling Jewish representation in the corridors of power are concurrent with fears about the long-term health of liberalism—at least as many American Jews have long defined it, with an assumed degree of liberal sympathy for Israel regardless of its political behavior. Squeezed between allegedly antisemitic protests and Donald Trump’s draconian crackdown in response, the academic and intellectual era that had shaped so many of these panelists appeared, indeed, to be ending.

Against the backdrop of Israel’s daily bombardment of Palestinian civilians, the panelists were overwhelmingly concerned with the Jewish student experience closer to home. Though there was some light dissent—NYU journalism professor Susie Linfield described the response to incidents of campus antisemitism as a “moral panic,” while the Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker dismissed assertions of widespread antisemitism as “Harvard derangement syndrome”—the general consensus from the stage was that elite university campuses are increasingly hostile spaces for Jews. Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust historian and Joe Biden’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, said she’s “met too many students” considering college options who are asking “where will I be comfortable as a Jew?” As for currently enrolled undergraduates, she said she’s “met students who haven’t been harassed but they’re moving their mezuzahs from outside their dorm rooms to inside, for safety’s sake” and is aware of others “who are wearing baseball caps instead of yarmulkes”—a phenomenon she described as “Jews going back into the closet.” Journalism professor and New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann said he had lost friends over his role as co-chair of Columbia’s post-October 7th joint task force on combating antisemitism, and recounted arguing with campus activists who refuse to understand how central Zionism is to many Jews’ identity. He choked up briefly, saying that the lack of “empathy” shown by such activists “provides a platform for the utter dismissal of the kind of Jews my kids are,” drawing sympathetic applause.

If Lemann was at least theoretically interested in trying to engage critics of Zionism, other panelists seemed to hold such critics in visceral contempt. Most egregiously, both Ackman and Lipstadt seemed to float the conspiracy theory that student protesters coordinated with Hamas and had advance knowledge of the October 7th attacks. “This wasn’t an organic protest,” said Lipstadt. “There was a lot of preparation before 10/7.” “There’s a lot of evidence that our foreign adversaries are funding many of the protests,” Ackman said, before insisting that activist groups should be required to disclose their funding sources.

Few panelists acknowledged more than glancingly the underlying context for campus protests: Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Both Linfield and Pinker alluded to the suffering of Palestinians, but cast it as a kind of abstract moral fixation by idealistic demonstrators rather than a matter of sincere concern. Wieseltier was the only panelist who seemed to appreciate why the actual events in Gaza have been galvanizing for so many students. “Anybody who does not understand why a Palestinian or a sympathizer would get unhinged by what happened in Gaza is not paying attention,” he said, to scattered applause. “You may believe the Israeli war is just, as I do, but the magnitude of the carnage in Gaza is such that there is a certain moral integrity to protesting it.” He cited his own experience as a teenage member of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League in 1960s Brooklyn to put student activism in context. “When I was a bright young Jewish fascist, I said things I cannot bear to remember,” he said. “These are kids and they say virulent things, and they’re not going to hurt anybody.”

But despite these differences, all of the panelists—with the notable exception of Ackman—seemed in broad agreement that Trump’s campus crackdown has gone too far. Lipstadt, who acknowledged that she has “been skewered for saying that some of the initial actions taken by the Trump administration were things Jewish students had been asking for,” expressed concern that Jews will now be blamed for the president’s overreach. Rachel Gordan, a scholar-in-residence at CJH, noted that the University of Florida, where she teaches, has already experienced something like Trump’s campus crackdown for the past several years, thanks to the “repression and fear on campus that many have compared to the McCarthy era” under Gov. Ron DeSantis. “I don’t think Jews are having a bad experience at UF as Jews,” said Gordan. “The real crisis is a changing relationship between government and universities.”

While most panelists affirmed their support for First Amendment protections even of speech they disagree with, there was some exploration of precisely what counts as speech, as opposed to actions that might warrant deportation of foreign students. Eli Lake, the neoconservative journalist who is currently a columnist for Bari Weiss’s Free Press, said that while he questioned why the imprisoned grad student activist Mahmoud Khalil was admitted to Columbia and “despised” his rhetoric, “you can’t just assert that you can deport him without telling us the actual crime he’s accused of when he’s a permanent resident and he has a green card.” Linfield, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” agreed, but said “we are in dangerous territory when we don’t draw a distinction between protected speech and illegal actions like defacing or taking over administration buildings.” Kirchick articulated most clearly how he thought these issues should be arbitrated: “Foreign citizens have the right to protest here; what they don’t have the right to do is break the law. If they’re just out there demonstrating peacefully, holding up signs, and chanting slogans, it doesn’t matter if I like them or not, that’s legally protected speech. If they are involved in taking over campus buildings, defacing property, or harassing individual students or professors, then not only should they be expelled, they should be deported.”

Lake and Kirchick both reflected on the relationship between free speech and what they regard as the suffocating culture of wokeness in higher ed, as embodied by diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies that have been targeted by Trump and that right-wing critics see as fostering a climate in which expression is effectively stifled. Lake noted that offensive speech against groups other than Jews is routinely disciplined on elite campuses. “If the rules are rigged against Jews, that itself is a problem,” he said. “The way to resolve this is to get rid of DEI and fire all the DEI instructors,” said Kirchick. “It’s good to call out the hypocrisy, but we shouldn’t want to add the Jews to this group of protected people.” In a preview of Ackman’s remarks, which blamed campus antisemitism on the “ideology of intersectionality,” Kirchick suggested a link between “radical transgender movements” and anti-Israel attitudes, warning that a society that will believe “that men can become women and women can become men . . . will believe anything.” “The crazier those people are, the more anti-Israel they are,” said Kirchick, who is openly gay, regarding queer, trans, and nonbinary people. “The more letters you add to your identity, the higher a building they’ll throw you off in Gaza City,” he added, to audience laughter. “I don’t know if that’s antisemitism—antisemitism has to be a part of it, but it’s something much deeper and more disturbing and sicker.”

Such comments went unchallenged; for most of the day, debate was kept to a minimum. The most contentious panel was the keynote, for which attendees paid a premium, featuring Ackman, Lipstadt, and Wieseltier. It fell to Ackman, an outlier at the event, to unequivocally defend the Trump administration’s strategy of withholding federal research dollars as a means of responding to the alleged threat of campus antisemitism. The billionaire made the case that Trump’s blackmail is in fact a legitimate negotiating tactic aimed at “making Harvard more of a meritocracy,” and that elite private universities are not entitled to taxpayer money unless they conform to Ackman’s particular definition of academic freedom, which precludes any support for DEI or for teaching Palestinian perspectives. Citing Harvard’s motto, “Veritas,” Ackman argued that his alma mater has replaced truth with “social transformation” and now aims to teach the next generation of leaders that “there’s a bicameral world of oppressors and oppressed,” a framework “that is very similar to Marxism.” “This has been going on for 30 years,” scoffed Wieseltier, a seasoned veteran of campus culture wars. “You may have come late to this ideology.” Ackman and Wieseltier went back and forth for the rest of the event, both drawing cheers from sections of the audience, while Lipstadt sat between them, both physically and ideologically. While the two men staked out clear disagreements on the proper relationship between universities and government, Wieseltier rounded out the discussion on a conciliatory note. “I want to thank my friends Deborah and Bill,” he said. “Against certain enemies, we will all march together.”

In the reception area at the event, where attendees noshed between panels on kosher salmon reubens and cookies frosted in the blue and white of the Israeli flag, Marty Peretz’s 2023 memoir, The Controversialist, was on sale alongside other panelist-authored books. In one chapter, Peretz describes how New York City, where he grew up in an intellectually vibrant, Yiddish-speaking milieu during and after World War II, had by the 1970s and ’80s become a city for financiers. “I didn’t come to New York for intellectuals anymore,” he writes of visiting his hometown from Cambridge. “My new friends were in finance, and I met them through my work for Israel and for Jewish cultural institutions.” It’s in this context that Peretz became close with figures like Michael Steinhardt, who helped pioneer a shift in the Jewish donor ecosystem from investment banks to hedge funds such as Pershing Square Holdings, founded by Bill Ackman in 2004. It was Ackman who formed a consortium with several other wealthy donors to keep Peretz’s TNR afloat until it could be sold, and Ackman who was a major donor to the Martin Peretz Undergraduate Research Fund that was supposed to be established at Harvard in 2010, before Peretz became a lightning rod for his racist blog posts.

“The America we came up in was one of neighborhoods and ethnicities and creeds and unions; the America we helped grow, the one we have now, is one of PhDs and interstate systems and investment portfolios,” Peretz writes—a wistful reflection near the end of his long and consequential life. Perhaps PhDs are becoming relics of an older America too, but investment portfolios do rule America now, including America’s Jewish cultural institutions. And though Ackman faced criticism over his defense of Trump’s war on higher ed, no one was impolite enough to state outright the likeliest reason why Ackman was appearing onstage in the first place: In addition to the significant financial support he has provided CJH, including raising more than $30 million to retire the center’s construction debts in the 2010s and co-chairing the center’s board for several years, his subject matter expertise amounts to his influence with the Trump administration and among Harvard and Columbia trustees, bought by his $9.3 billion fortune.

It was all too appropriate that Ackman dominated Peretz’s event, because Ackman is Peretz’s most relevant legacy today. As an undergraduate, Ackman’s sensibility was shaped by attending Peretz’s Harvard lectures and reading TNR, from which he absorbed not a commitment to abstract liberal values, but a compulsion to defend the Jews against all perceived communal threats. What Peretz’s TNR represented at its height to many of the other panelists—a robust, confident establishment that saw no tension or contradiction between its liberal and Zionist ideals—has become as exhausted as Peretz himself appeared to be. A March Gallup poll of Americans showed that sympathy for Israel vis-a-vis Palestinians has fallen below 50% since the October 7th attacks, with a particularly stark drop among Democrats. For many people, it is becoming untenable to reconcile core liberal commitments with the reality of Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza, not to mention the Trump administration’s lawless arrests of campus dissidents who speak out against it. Meanwhile, the unapologetic authoritarianism Ackman supports—which, it turns out, is not so far removed from the unapologetic Zionism Peretz’s TNR represented for decades—is thriving.

When it comes to addressing this crisis, most of the prominent social critics whose careers Peretz helped foster are at a loss, especially because their work has little appeal to the current occupants of the White House. Ackman may have been the least intellectually distinguished person onstage at the CJH event, but he has by far the most access to actual power in America in 2025. “Foreign students were a relatively small percentage of the [Harvard] class when I attended. Now they’re a much larger percentage,” Ackman complained at one point, “so the number of Americans being served to become leaders of our society is a tiny fraction.” As if on cue, just four days after the event, the Trump administration announced a total ban on foreign students at Harvard.

David Klion is a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, a columnist at The Nation, and a writer for various publications. He is working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism.

DavidKlion

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-end-of-the-marty-peretz-era at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

DISPATCH | 28 MAY 2025, 3:23 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 28 MAY 2025, 8:11 PM UTC

Staying in Motion

The JVP national members meeting was a show of force at a moment of alarming vulnerability to repression.

Arielle Angel

A scene from the JVP National Members Meeting in Baltimore, May 3rd, 2025.

C.S.

On the first Sunday afternoon in May, the final day of the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) National Members Meeting in Baltimore, executive director Stefanie Fox took the stage to fortify the crowd for the work ahead. She laid out a lengthy list of threats to the movement for Palestine, many of them already on the tracks—from the potential revocation of nonprofit status and freezing of bank accounts to the criminal prosecution of activists—before switching into a personal register. Her voice softened as she spoke of a recent walk with her young son through an old growth forest near their home in Seattle. When they came upon a fallen tree, her kid began to tell her about “nurse logs,” relating how these felled giants became incubators for new growth, releasing nutrients and holding moisture in the soil so life could take root. “Look around,” Fox entreated the attendees, some of whom, after four days of nonstop workshops, lectures, performances, and organizing meetings, were spread out on the floor at the periphery of the audience, where they stretched, tended to children, or lay with heads resting on friends’ bellies. “This movement is an old growth forest. You can’t stop a forest from growing.” “What can we do,” she asked, “to ensure that no matter what they take from us, we are nurturing this movement forward?”

This ominous image, implicitly likening the organization to a fallen tree, was a striking note on which to close—a reminder of JVP’s alarming vulnerability to repression even at a moment of unprecedented influence. It cut a sharp contrast to the mood of the rest of the convening, which was by all accounts a show of force. The meeting drew over 2,000 attendees from 45 states, and featured distinguished speakers including politicians like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush and activist intellectuals like Naomi Klein, Angela Davis, and Noura Erakat. After decades spent countering a charge of marginality from the Jewish establishment (and sometimes, subtly, from other corners of the Jewish left), JVP now appears to be the beating heart of an anti-Zionist Jewish movement that polling suggests claims anywhere from a fifth to a third of American Jews. Since October 7th, those disgusted by the Israeli genocide in Gaza have flocked to the organization, which has doubled in size over the past 19 months, claiming 32,000 dues-paying members from over 100 chapters across the country. High-profile arrestable actions from an October 2023 takeover of Grand Central Station to a March 2025 sit-in at Trump Tower have made their black or red t-shirts, with the block-letter slogans “Not In Our Name” and “Stop Arming Israel,” a potent symbol of American Jewish refusal.

If the widely circulated photos of masses in JVP t-shirts show the organization’s power as a unified anti-war voice, the conference also showcased its particularities, embodying a robust cross-section of Jewish life. There were nightly meet-ups for Jews of color, workshops on Arab Jewish political storytelling and “disability justice and direct action” that quickly filled to capacity, and panels on navigating intergenerational organizing—the latter a particular necessity in a crowd that evenly spanned generations, from college students to those older than the State of Israel. Every morning, there was a well-attended traditional-egalitarian service, complete with a Torah scroll; a pomegranate symbol in the program indicated if a workshop was compatible with Sabbath observance. At a time when so many anti-Zionist Jews don’t have home communities or congregations, it was a rare glimpse of abundance in left Jewish life.

It would be easy to take this degree of diversity for granted, but none of it was inevitable. In the past decade, JVP has weathered a number of broad, internal conflicts about their ability to provide a political home for many of these groups. Last year’s book by former JVP executive directors Rebecca Vilkommerson and Alissa Wise, Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love, identifies a 2015 racial justice reckoning in particular as “undoubtedly the biggest test of our leadership.” When a caucus of Jews of Color, Sephardi, and Mizrahi members challenged JVP to better align its white- and Ashkenazi-dominated culture with its stated commitment to anti-racism, the organization eventually undertook a process that encompassed “almost every aspect of our work, from our internal communications to work with chapters and member leaders, campaign selection, HR policies and beyond.”

JVP has also long navigated challenges in its relationship to other movement organizations—a terrain that has only become more delicate since October 7th, as affective and strategic divides have sometimes opened up between Jewish and Palestinian-led formations that are otherwise aligned. And still, there were enough Palestinian organizers at the conference from a variety of groups—including the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Palestinian Youth Movement, and Adalah Justice Project—that they were able to hold their own internal meeting there. In particular, representatives from Palestinian groups helped to shift the focus of the conference when it seemed like the emphasis on building for the long haul drew attention from the stakes of the present: the continued Israeli starvation and bombardment of Gaza. “Many of them have families in Gaza who, at that very moment of the convening, could not survive another day without food and medical treatment,” Elena Stein, JVP’s director of organizing strategy, told me shortly after the conference. “They brought us that dire urgency.” In response, Stein said, JVP called in chapter leaders to stay longer after the convening for an emergency strategy meeting, planning campaigns aimed at pressuring Israel to let aid trucks into Gaza. “Whatever actions emerge in this next period will come out of that moment and the direct calls from our partners,” she said.

In some ways, that circumstance reflected the difficulty of assessing strategy at a time when nothing has worked. JVP has balanced boycott and divestment campaigns, direct action and narrative work, and—through their advocacy arm JVP Action—congressional lobbying. But nothing has stopped the slaughter in Gaza. Fox told me that while they were confident that they had the ingredients for the “next right step to keep emerging,” she admitted that “the short-term is really hard. We don’t know how to end the genocide.” In this environment, almost everything about JVP’s strategy can be called into question: Is it enough for civil disobedience to keep Gaza in the headlines, or should the group’s direct actions aim for greater material disruption? What good does it do to lobby Congress when they’re clearly not listening? As JVP Action political director Beth Miller put it, “the US Congress is one of the most anti-Palestinian institutions in the world,” which means that, for example, 19 senators voting to block certain weapons sales to Israel is both profoundly insufficient and an unprecedented win. But Miller stressed the importance of staying the course: “Our opposition is already in those spaces. If we are not, we are ceding that terrain entirely.” She predicted that Congress would be “the last to move,” but insisted that this is why JVP must keep fighting on multiple fronts: “They will move only once our movement has changed the cultural narrative in this country, and has shifted the political calculus for members of Congress.”

To speed the sea change it seeks, a mature JVP appears to be priming its base to stretch into a Jewish mass movement, with all the discomfort that entails. Over the course of the long weekend, I heard from all corners a militant commitment to Palestinian liberation complemented by a softer approach to relationships, oriented toward bringing people along. In her welcome speech, Fox asked attendees to commit to building “the biggest we,” to reach for connection over condemnation. She reminded members that, in engaging with comrades over the course of the weekend, “the point you’re making is not as important as the person you’re talking to.” In the workshops I attended, vital conversations that have been largely taboo amid the intensity of the past 19 months were tackled head on. (“If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable,” organizer and performer Morgan Bassichis told me, paraphrasing Mister Rogers.) A session on bridging divides between anti-Zionist Israelis and American Jews—in my experience, a frequent third rail in movement spaces—provided a space for Israelis to reflect frankly on the experience of feeling unwelcome in American activist spaces over the past year and a half, and to offer their analysis of how such ostracism functions as a bid to innocence by Americans displacing a reckoning with their own settler identities. Elsewhere, I heard students active in campus chapters brainstorming how they might begin to connect with—and thus, demobilize—liberal Zionists on campus repelled by Israel’s campaign of starvation. Other workshops aimed to use grief as a vehicle for “turning toward each other rather than on each other,” or to strengthen skills for dealing with interpersonal conflict against a backdrop of repression and despair. In the latter workshop, the writer and activist Dean Spade challenged the audience to reflect on their own behavior in movement spaces, providing exercises for staying focused on what we can control in relationships with others, and for identifying and managing the aggrieved states where we do the most damage. I could feel myself beginning to release the defensive crouch of these past months, as individual difficulties were reframed in collective terms. “It’s very hard to stay soft when you’re embattled. That’s how repression functions. It hardens you,” Fox told me. “The organizing space is a place where we can take the risk of staying soft with each other even when we feel attacked.”

But the attacks are coming: In a broad effort to criminalize pro-Palestine activism as “material support for terrorism,” there is no doubt that JVP is high on the list of targets. The group is mentioned prominently as a “Hamas Support Organization” alongside groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a plan created last fall to quickly dismantle the Palestine movement in the first year or two of a favorable administration. Since Donald Trump has come into office, several of the plan’s planks have been put into action, including the investigation and attempted deportation of student activists and the revocation of grants to universities on the grounds of antisemitism. Meanwhile, more than two dozen nonprofits or funders have been threatened with congressional investigations into their tax and legal statuses. JVP has come up by name again and again in calls for such investigations, with congressional players referring to them as a “Pro-Hamas,” “anti-American,” “dark money” group.

Even more immediately, the group is facing a volley of attacks by a network of Trump-affiliated lawfare firms. At Columbia, for instance, a lawsuit brought by 15 Israeli and American plaintiffs, some of whom are family members of people killed or taken hostage in the October 7th attacks, accuses individuals in groups like JVP, SJP, and Within Our Lifetime of “aiding and abetting Hamas’ continuing acts of international terrorism,” even absurdly suggesting that students in campus groups had foreknowledge of the Hamas attacks. Other lawsuits, brought by the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, are suing JVP, among other parties, for damages on behalf of people who missed flights or work while being “falsely imprisoned” in their cars during highway blockade actions in Chicago or Washington, DC. “They’re just shopping for plaintiffs, throwing spaghetti at the wall,” Fox told me. Even if many of these cases are dismissed, they will have served their purpose, draining the organization of time and money. Already, the group has settled a suit with the Department of Justice brought by David Abrams of the Zionist Advocacy Center—a registered foreign agent with ties to the Israeli government—alleging fraud around JVP’s application for Covid relief funds. In a statement on their website, JVP announced their decision not to fight the “politically motivated” legal battle, saying the $700,000 settlement would cost less than a protracted lawsuit, which would constitute a distraction from their mobilization against the genocide in Gaza. (They also cited concerns that litigating the suit would require the federal government to access discovery documents “far beyond the remit of the investigation”—a serious concern for a group already facing surveillance.)

The knowledge of these threats hung in the background of the conference, somewhat tucked away until the closing plenary on the very last day. The effect was like being in a strange, protective bubble, as attendees focused squarely on the nitty gritty of continuing the work: attending workshops on running a good meeting, the art of the one-on-one, and documenting actions. (A skybridge from a hotel across the street to the convention center even insulated attendees from the single, small Zionist protest, penned within barricades outside the entrance to the convention center.)

I spoke with Fox about this dissonance a few days after the convening, while she waited to board a flight back to the West Coast, fresh off a day of congressional lobbying in Washington with students active in campus organizing. She told me about a series of leadership meetings in early 2025, as the litigation piled up and an emboldened right announced their ambitious intentions. The organization’s lawyers had already delivered a sobering assessment of its viability during an aggressive Trump regime, and leaders had to ask themselves: Do we stay the course or do we disassemble the organization, reconstituting ourselves differently while we still have agency? In one such meeting, Dorothy Zellner, an 87-year-old movement elder who lived through government repression of her Communist milieu during McCarthyism, shared her experience: “People talked about going underground to continue the fight. A lot of people went underground. Not everyone kept fighting.” The group debated the implications of this warning: As a Jewish organization with a membership largely composed of US citizens, it still maintains a measure of privilege even amid its targeting by Project Esther, members of Congress, and lawfare organizations. Now, it was being called to serve not just as a defense organization, but a kind of test case in its own right. “If we stop, then we’re showing that it can’t be done, that we can’t fight,” Fox said. That meeting was the precise moment when they decided to move ahead with planning the conference. “The only way to prepare is to be in motion.”

Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents.

ArielleLAngel

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/staying-in-motion at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

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Translation

Hayan Charara

Jannis Werner / Alamy Stock Photo

The Palestinian American writer Sarah Aziza opens her memoir The Hollow Half with a “Translator’s Note.” But rather than a reflection on the process of bringing someone else’s text into another language, this preface is a meditation on the distance between the English word translate and the Arabic ترجم. The English term, Aziza writes, figures text as a kind of “cargo,” something acquired and brought wholesale from one place to another, while the Arabic—whose “meaning emanates from interpret, touches expound, explain”—is more sensitive to what is “lost in uprooting”: “An open window wafting aromas of the bread you will not taste[,] ترجم can haunt us with all that it withholds.”

Hayan Charara’s poem “Translation” is similarly engaged with the question of what happens in the movement from one place to another. It opens with an act of translation, the speaker explaining their father’s words: “Get the get out of here my father / said to men and women he wanted / gone from his world.” Yet even as the poem explicates the father’s wishes, it alloys this clarity with doubt as the line breaks undermine the sense of the sentence. Taken as a whole, this opening tells the story of a parent antagonizing those who’ve intruded on “his world”—but the fractures change the meaning: The first line hovers as a threat to expel the father, while the second lingers on a desire the following line denies. As the poem proceeds, the speaker tries to clarify the father’s intention while vacillating between “I mean” and “he means,” each attempt at explanation rattling with what it cannot hold, generating the impulse for further explanation. “Translation” tumbles on like this, gradually turning over the terms entirely (“By here he means your world / not his”) until we reach what is at once plainly stated and ineffable—the violence that produced the encounter in the opening lines—and lands, finally, on a fragile “we” that bears the poem’s full weight, the irreducible whole constituted both by what the words reach and by a longing for what they can never touch.

– Claire Schwartz

Translation

Get the get out of here my father said to men and women he wanted gone from his world By his world I mean the beer and wine he built and ran in Detroit And by beer and wine I mean the convenience store he wanted to call Father & Son but went with Beer & Wine which is also the prison he made for himself Get the get out of here he told the kids with not enough money and the men buying quarts and forties before and after their shifts at the factory and the women who came to complain to him about their men Get the get out of here he said to them and by that he meant Get the fuck out of here By here he meant the store but also his face his life and maybe his world When he says it now he says I want to get the get out of here By here he means your world not his When he says my world he means my home He means where he was born When he says I want to get the get out of here he wants to go home and by that he means where he wants to die He wants to die at home Let me be clear My father doesn’t want to die in the house he lives in now surrounded by his children his walls his bottles his eyeglasses He wants to die in his home in his homeland and I don’t know if he means the house or the city he was born in but he should know though I have not told him yet that the house and the city he was born in have both been turned to dust and by turned to dust I mean obliterated and by obliterated I mean bombed to oblivion and of course by oblivion I mean where he is going and obviously by he I also mean we

Hayan Charara is the author of four poetry books, most recently These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. He teaches at the Honors College at the University of Houston.

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Unpacking the Rift Between Trump and Netanyahu

The president has sought to separate US interests from Israeli interests abroad, even as he represses Israel critics at home.

Alex Kane

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during an April 7th White House meeting

Associated Press

In early May, in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s first trip to the Middle East in his second term, the US embarked on a set of foreign policy shifts that explicitly went against the wishes of Trump’s erstwhile friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. First, Trump ended the US bombing campaign in Yemen, despite the Houthi rebels vowing to continue their missile attacks against Israel. Next, the administration circumvented Israel and engaged in direct negotiations with Hamas in order to secure the release of Edan Alexander—an Israeli American soldier captured by the militant group on October 7th, 2023. Trump continued this series of policy shifts while in Saudi Arabia last week, on a regional tour that notably excluded Israel. In a speech on May 13th, the president announced the end of sanctions on Syria, in direct contravention of Netanyahu’s recent request that the US continue economic action against the country in order to dissuade cross-border attacks into Israel. In the same speech, Trump also offered Iran, an American and Israeli arch-enemy, “a far better and more hopeful future” if it reaches a nuclear deal with the US. The speech reiterated Trump’s apparent openness to a compromise with the country, a position that Netanyahu has firmly opposed.

Experts say that Trump’s distance from Netanyahu has been visible since before the Middle East tour—in particular since March, when Israel ended the ceasefire with Hamas that Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff had helped broker. According to Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington, DC, Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza dashed Trump’s hopes of using the ceasefire to build on the Abraham Accords—the normalization deals between Israel and Arab states that he facilitated during his first term—and especially his aspiration to bring Saudi Arabia into the agreements. “It became clear the Israelis were not going to help Trump advance the objectives that he wanted within the region, and that Netanyahu was putting his own domestic political interests ahead of his relationship with Trump,” said Munayyer.

Since then, even as the administration has continued the flow of military aid to Israel (and has taken a pro-Israel line in the domestic realm by repressing Palestine activists), Trump officials have publicly asserted US interests as distinct from Israeli interests in a manner unusual for US presidents. One illustrative example, according to Suzanne Schneider, a historian and expert on right-wing thought, was a March CNN interview with Trump hostage envoy Adam Boehler. Boehler had been conducting unprecedented direct negotiations with Hamas in an attempt to release Israeli American hostages and renew the ceasefire, a move that displeased Israeli officials. “I understand the consternation and the concern,” Boehler said in response to the criticism, but “at the same time, we’re the United States. We’re not an agent of Israel.” Other members of the Trump camp have spoken in a similar vein, with Trump’s ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee explicitly telling an Israeli television station that “the United States isn’t required to get permission from Israel to make some type of arrangement that would get the Houthis from firing on our ships.” Together with the recent policy shifts, Schneider said, these gestures “seem to signal to Israel that they’re going to have to play the game on our terms, rather than the other way around.”

More broadly, observers say, the Trump administration’s assertive position with Israel is part of a new “America First” brand of foreign policy that focuses on making deals with one-time enemies to reduce tensions and advance US economic interests in the Middle East, all while focusing attention on other rivals such as China, which Trump and his allies believe more acutely threaten American hegemony. Multiple conservative commentators told Jewish Currents that the administration’s embrace of this position is responsive to a newly robust conservative “restraint” movement, which sees the War on Terror era of US intervention in the Middle East as an utter failure and instead demands a massive pullback of military assets from the Middle East. “There are dozens of people I would identify as restrainers in this administration,” said Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. At times, Trump himself has adopted the language of restraint: In his Saudi Arabia speech, he inveighed against “neocons” and accused Middle East “interventionalists” of “intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.“ Curt Mills, the executive director of the anti-interventionist conservative magazine The American Conservative, said that the newfound strength of the “restraint” strain has meant that the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu—has become more vulnerable to previously muted criticism from the right. “There’s always been this looming question within populist conservative foreign policy: Is it America First, with the exception of Israel?” he said. “This month would seem to indicate the answer to that is no.”

Trump’s recent changes are a turnabout from his first administration, when the president gave Netanyahu nearly everything he wanted. In those years, the US officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; legitimized Israeli annexation of the occupied Golan Heights; and engaged in a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran that involved the US pulling out of the nuclear deal with Iran, initiating punishing economic sanctions, and assassinating a top Iranian military official.

Analysts offer varying theories for Trump’s colder relationship with the Israeli prime minister this time around. John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisers who is now a Trump critic, said the enmity between Netanyahu and Trump goes back to the 2020 election. “Trump has never forgiven Bibi for the speed at which he said he recognized that Biden had won the 2020 election. That’s heresy in the worst form in Trump’s view,” Bolton said. Munayyer, meanwhile, pointed out that Trump is much more comfortable with acting against pro-Israel donors and voters now that he is unburdened from the need to run another election campaign. “He doesn’t need to please this set of interests, and he can pursue his agenda as he sees fit to advance whatever he thinks it advances, whether it’s the American interest, his own personal legacy, his own bank account, or all of the above,” he said. In any case, according to Matt Duss—the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and the former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders—Trump may recognize that shifts on Israel are unlikely to harm his popularity, given that he has historically managed to persuade his base to back him even when he acts against their long-standing beliefs: “If evangelicals are going to be okay with voting for a philandering, corrupt brute like Donald Trump, they’re going to be okay with him not being super pro-Israel,” he said.

Trump’s Israel policy shifts also respond to the recent prominence of a “restraint” orientation in the conservative voting base. This movement in the base is stark when it comes to Israel policy: A May 5th poll found that 39% of Republican voters believe the US is too one-sided in favor of Israel—a bump of six points from last year’s poll on this question—and nearly half of Republican voters want the US to pressure Israel to end its military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. “There has also been a huge shift in where the grassroots are, as reflected in someone like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading MAGA voice, inveighing against war with Iran,” Logan of the Cato Institute told Jewish Currents. This shift has also been reflected in the composition of Trump’s advisors: For example, in January, Trump appointed Michael Dimino—a fellow at the restraint-minded think tank Defense Priorities who advocated against US bombing in Yemen, and who has said that the Middle East is minimally important for US interests—as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. “Between the number of people that he has brought into his administration that are sympathetic to realism and restraint, and the actual moves he’s making, we’ve seen more hopeful signs than we have seen in years,” said Kelley Vlahos, a senior advisor for the Quincy Institute—a think tank promoting anti-interventionist US foreign policy that includes restrainers on the left and the right—and a former executive editor for The American Conservative. In turn, these moves have worried the pro-war voices who traditionally made up a significant part of the Republican Party coalition. “Be careful of Obama 2.0 [Iran] nuclear deal with a Trump sticker,” Mark Dubowitz, the head of the neoconservative group Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), wrote on X in April amid ongoing US–Iran talks.

Still, for all of the “restraint” camp’s progress, many of the material conditions of US support for Israel haven’t changed; as the historian Schneider put it, “weapons, money, and diplomatic cover are still flowing” to Israel under Trump. In fact, two of Trump’s first acts on Israel policy included the lifting of President Biden’s hold on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, and the reversal of a Biden executive order that imposed sanctions on violent Israeli settlers. In February, Trump levied sanctions on the International Criminal Court in part over the body’s issue of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. And even as Witkoff has reportedly complained about Israel’s intransigence in negotiations to reach another ceasefire—telling Israeli hostage families that “Israel is prolonging the war, even though we do not see where further progress can be made”—he has also apparently said that Washington won’t force Israel to end the war in Gaza. According to Duss, these facts clarify that “Trump isn’t driven by humanitarian concerns but by dealmaking. Ending the war is a politically existential issue for Netanyahu, and Trump currently doesn’t see Gaza as enough of a priority, or enough of a hindrance to dealmaking, to apply the necessary pressure.”

Furthermore, while there appears to be at least some daylight between the US and Israel when it comes to foreign policy, in the domestic sphere Trump has forcefully pursued a pro-Israel agenda. Acceding to the demands of various pro-Israel forces like the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that helped put together the “Project Esther” strategy to crush the Palestine solidarity movement, the president has launched a fierce crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech—arresting and attempting to deport student activists as well as cutting off government grants to universities where students held pro-Palestinian protests. These attacks on Israel’s critics might appear to be in tension with Trump’s America First foreign policy, but Vlahos suggested that the dual approach may be a strategic move on Trump’s part. “He is indulging one part of his constituency—the [pro-Israel] organizations that create dossiers on college students—because without their support, he loses some energy on his domestic issues,” she said. “But it also holds them at bay while he is doing his thing in the Middle East as he works around Netanyahu.” Munayyer said he, too, doesn’t see a contradiction between the two approaches, and that in both Trump’s domestic and foreign policies, “it’s about him advancing the priorities that he sees fit and using whatever tools and conditions are available to him at the moment to get them done.” In the case of his domestic approach to Israel support, Munayyer said, Trump’s true priorities may include “using Palestine as the low-hanging fruit with which to achieve a couple of different things, including the weaponization of immigration policy and the neutering of the academy.”

However, some portions of Trump’s base—even if otherwise dedicated to mass deportations—have turned against support for pro-Israel positions in the domestic realm. Last month, Charlie Kirk, the head of the campus-focused conservative group Turning Point USA and a close ally of Trump, warned that “jailing, impoverishing, or silencing people based on ‘racism’” might echo the very politics of wokeness that MAGA movement has decried. Kirk’s sentiment was repeated by top MAGA voices in Congress as Republicans debated whether to vote on two bills—the Antisemitism Awareness Act and the Israel Anti-Boycott Act—that would give the federal government new tools to target critics of Israel. As a result of the right-wing backlash, the bills died before coming up for a full vote, with Taylor Greene, a leading voice of Trumpian conservatism in Congress, underscoring her opposition to the anti-boycott bill as a defense of Americans’ “rights to buy or boycott whomever they choose.” “What I don’t understand is why we are voting on a bill on behalf of other countries,” she added. Speaking to the fate of these bills, Mills of the American Conservative said that “AIPAC has cause for concern if they want their maximal goals achieved.” He insisted that there is no “major mainstream desire to expel AIPAC or the neocons from the Republican Party—a lot of people think it should be a big tent. But maximal demands create this decision point where you have to either say yes or no, and I think we’re saying no.”

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

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The Group Forging a “Judeo-Christian” Zionism for the New MAGA Age

Israel365’s decades of outreach to Christian Zionists has made it a power player from the World Zionist Congress to the White House.

Ben Lorber

Steve Bannon with Israel365’s Pesach Wolicki at the National Religious Broadcaster’s conference in Dallas in early March.

Still via Israel365’s YouTube channel

After record turnout, votes are now being tallied in this year’s World Zionist Congress (WZC) election to determine which factions will emerge victorious. Established by Theodore Herzl in 1897 as the founding legislative body of the Zionist movement, the WZC helps direct the policy and funding of legacy Zionist organizations like the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF)—which have been key actors in the process of Palestinian dispossession since the pre-state era. Historically, the American branch of the WZC has been dominated by the Reform movement, but the 2020 election saw Reform’s historic dominance shaken by a surge in support for a newly formed ultra-Orthodox slate, granting the Jewish far right an unprecedented, and slim, majority of seats within the so-called “parliament of the Jewish people.” Against the opposition of a reinvigorated liberal camp, this new leadership has moved to increase funding for settlements, support the Israeli right’s judicial overhaul, and block educational programming promoting religious and cultural pluralism within WZC member institutions.

If the 2020 WZC election marked the ascent of Jewish right leadership within the WZC, this year’s election portends the rise of yet another, aligned current: Christian Zionism. This tendency was represented at the 2025 election in a slate assembled by Israel365, a group that specializes in building Jewish Zionist partnerships with the US Christian right. Since its founding in 2012 by the American-born Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Tuly Weisz, Israel365 has dedicated itself to advancing the Israeli far-right’s cause with the American evangelical public. The group has achieved this using a digital media wing that produces a steady stream of what Weisz has called “Biblical journalism”; a publishing arm that produces an Israel-themed Bible, along with an array of religious books; a charity wing that raises funds for ventures ranging from farms in West Bank settlements to winter gear for Israeli soldiers; and a marketing wing that connects Israeli companies with Christian consumers. Thanks to this outreach, Israel365 has become an established face of biblical hasbara for US Christians. More significant still has been the group’s advocacy wing, which seeks to strengthen the partnership between Jewish and Christian Zionist faith leaders, politicians, and influencers by organizing a bevy of campaigns, speaking tours, conferences and summits, webinars and prayer calls, sign-on letters, and tours to Israel.

This steady drumbeat of faith-based diplomacy has built crucial connective tissue between Israeli settler leaders on the one hand and MAGA movers and shakers like Steve Bannon, the Heritage Foundation, and evangelical leaders like Paula White-Cain (director of Trump’s White House Faith Office) on the other. For the hardline religious nationalists on both sides of this biblical romance, this partnership offers a way to achieve shared political goals. Building on the victories of the first Trump administration—the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, launch of the Abraham Accords, and more—such groups are now seeking the full Israeli annexation of the West Bank, an escalation of the exterminationist war on Gaza, and Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount. The ambitiousness of these goals reflects both movements’ optimism in the new MAGA age: As Pastor Mario Bramnick, globe-trotting Christian Zionist operative in the upper echelons of the first Trump administration, effused in March, it is as if “God is giving Israel a blank check to begin to write upon, to dream again.”

For many Christian Zionists, these goals feed into End Times fantasies, where the steady advance of Israeli expansion and domination paves the way for a final apocalyptic battle centered in Jerusalem, prophesied to culminate with the return of Jesus and global triumph of the Christian faithful. Previously, most Jewish Zionists balked at these fantasies even as they partnered with their Christian counterparts on shared goals. “Until I see Jesus coming over the hill, I’m in favor of all the friends Israel can get,” Lenny Davis, former chief of research at AIPAC once said; in the same breath, however, he admitted that “these guys give me the heebie-jeebies.” But Israel365 does not hold such reservations. Instead, the group shares the messianic motivations of its allies, and sees its work organizing Christian support for Israel as a way to speed the hour on God’s prophetic clock, with Weisz telling a 2021 Christian livestream that “it’s so important that we get this right in order to bring about the ultimate redemption—the Messiah, the Moshiach that we’re all waiting for.”

With the support of evangelical allies, Israel365 is now bringing this End Times-inspired project to the institutions of the Jewish Zionist diaspora. “I see Israel365 as the MAGA movement inside the Jewish people and for Israel,” far-right leader Steve Bannon told the group at a virtual rally held in March. Bannon then charged Israel365 to take a “commanding role” in the WZC “so that you have a platform to fight this fight for Western civilization.” “We’re going to shake up the Jewish establishment, the failed status quo,” explained delegate Josh Hammer, a popular MAGA pundit, at the same rally, promising to direct WZC-controlled funding “for strengthening . . . biblically-undergirded national populism all throughout the Western world.” In practice, this may mean a stronger political partnership between Jewish and Christian Zionists across Israel and the US. While much of the US membership and ostensible base of institutions like the JNF and Hadassah (an affiliate of the WZO) remains anti-MAGA, an ascendant Israel365 may try to steer these institutions to work more closely with Christian Zionists on educational, hasbara, and Israel advocacy campaigns, and even to back Christian right campaigns around prayer in public schools, funding for religious schooling, and more—leading to the further consolidation of an American Jewish flank of the Christian nationalist coalition. Considering the Democratic leanings of most American Jews, the prospect of Zionism’s central organ for diaspora participation retooling itself into an organ for Christian outreach and wading into MAGA culture wars might appear counterintuitive. But it may well reflect the true nature of the oft-vaunted “Judeo-Christian” partnership at the heart of today’s US–Israel relationship, and of 21st century Zionism as a whole, which relies far more on evangelical support than on American Jewish backing.

The alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionists is not new. Since the 1970s, Israeli and American Jewish operatives have cultivated close, if often complicated, political relationships with pro-Israel Christian right leaders like Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, and Pastor John Hagee, head of Christians United for Israel (CUFI). These policy partnerships contributed to the establishment of the US–Israel “special relationship” since the 1980s, helping translate evangelical Zionist fervor into effective political advocacy.

Despite their success, such alliances remained controversial for many Jewish Zionists, who remained theologically opposed to partnership with Christians, suspicious of missionary intent, and averse to Christian apocalypticism. But in the past few decades, certain Jewish Religious Zionists (adherents of the movement synthesizing halachic observance with nationalist fervor that has grown to dominate Israeli politics since the 1967 War) have warmed to the theological potency of Jewish–Christian partnerships, and some have even come to embrace the End Times orientation of their Christian allies. Specifically, the Center for Jewish–Christian Understanding and Cooperation (CJCUC)—the first Orthodox institution dedicated to Jewish–Christian partnership, which was established by the American-born Rabbi Shlomo Riskin in the West Bank settlement of Efrat in 2008—quickly gained notoriety in the Orthodox Jewish world for accommodating Christian messianism by drawing on a parallel set of eschatological beliefs in Judaism. In addition to carving out a greater role for Christians to play in the Jewish version of the End Times saga, the CJCUC also pioneered joint Jewish–Christian religious ritual, undertook shared theological dialogue and Bible study, and publicly flanked antisemitic Christian Zionist leaders like Pastor John Hagee.

In the face of criticism from other Orthodox and settler leaders, Riskin justified this work as politically necessary. “We are in a third world war,” he told a journalist at CUFI’s 2017 annual conference. “Jews have to be strong . . . Jews need alliances.” Indeed, the Jewish–Christian alliance was so central to CJCUC’s worldview that it understood the partnership as “not really an interfaith relationship in the traditional understanding of the term,” per Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, who used to lead CJCUC and now heads Israel365’s lobbying arm. Instead, Wolicki said, the connection he was cultivating was “more of an intra-faith relationship,” one that “seeks and expands upon common points of faith.” Israel365 builds on this foundation, advancing an eschatology where the growth of Christian Zionism around the world, much like the creation of Israel, is itself a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and where a Jewish–Christian Zionist partnership is thus a key to moving the End Times process along. “Jews and Christians must begin to work together . . . because it’s part of the biblical plan,” Weisz explained in a 2023 interview. “The active participation of Bible-believing gentiles in the Zionist project is not only politically expedient,” Wolicki added in a March 2025 op-ed, “it is part and parcel of the way the redemption of Israel is meant to play out.”

Fueled by Israel365’s relentless efforts, this bid to ally with the “Bible-believing gentiles in the Zionist project” has lately been reaping material dividends, especially in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023, as the group’s advocacy has reached the heights of the MAGA coalition. This became apparent on a clear afternoon in March 2024, when Weisz and Wolicki gathered on a West Bank hilltop with Christian partners and a pair of silver trumpets. They were there to renew an ancient Israelite wartime ritual that marked, according to Wolicki, a holy war not only in Gaza but also against the Biden administration (which had renewed calls for a two-state solution in contravention of God’s supposed will). The ritual was attended by two A-list Christian Zionist power brokers who were on a solidarity delegation to visit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of October 7th: Tony Perkins and Pastor Mario Bramnick. Perkins is president of the flagship Christian nationalist group Family Research Council, which has advanced decades of Capitol Hill lobbying against LGBTQ and reproductive rights, church-state separation, and other culture war crusades. Meanwhile, Bramnick is head of the evangelical advocacy group Latino Coalition for Israel and a key figure behind the Heritage Foundation task force which produced Project Esther, a plan to destroy American left movements, starting with the movement for Palestine.

The relationship did not end with a shared ritual. The following month, Weisz and Wolicki paid Bramnick and Perkins a visit, this time meeting up at the Washington, DC, offices of the Heritage Foundation to launch “Keep God’s Land,” a faith coalition uniting over 150 American Jewish, Christian, and conservative leaders and organizations in opposition to the two-state solution. The launch event featured recorded remarks from Netanyahu as well as in-person guests including Member of Knesset (MK) Ohad Tal and GOP leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson and New York Rep. Claudia Tenney. The gathering, like so much else unfolding in Heritage’s offices at the time, was close to the nerve center of a conservative movement positioning itself to storm the White House. As such, it spoke to Israel365’s niche among key power brokers on both sides of the US–Israel alliance, and the group’s strategic role as a faith-based bridge-builder between these camps.

The re-election of Trump supercharged these partnerships, and further elevated Israel365’s position. As Israeli Finance Minister and Religious Zionist leader Bezalel Smotrich proclaimed that “2025 will be the year of sovereignty for Judea and Samaria” and Christian nationalists put the demand for West Bank annexation front and center, Israel365 found itself back in Washington in January. This time, Weisz and Wolicki joined Bramnick and Perkins for the launch of Rep. Tenney’s Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus, which Israel365 claimed to have helped organize. Since then, caucus members and fellow-travelers like Senator Tom Cotton have all called on Trump to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and for official United States documents to refer to the territory as “Judea and Samaria.” Many of Israel365’s partners have also organized energetically for this agenda within MAGA institutions, developing infrastructure to coordinate pro-Israel lobbying across the institutional Christian landscape. In February, the momentum continued with Weisz and MK Tal meeting with White-Cain in Washington, as she began her new role as director of Trump’s White House Faith Office. Israel365 had invested in a prior relationship with White-Cain, one of Trump’s earliest evangelical advisers: On a trip to Israel she took in summer 2023, the group accompanied her and her husband Jonathan Cain (one-time rhythm guitarist for the rock band Journey) to ascend the Temple Mount, meet Religious Zionist leaders, and learn Torah in West Bank yeshivot. This relational work now paid off: After the White House meeting, Weisz gushed about their deep alignment. “She understands Judea and Samaria . . . we talked about building the Third Temple,” he relayed in a video uploaded to Israel365 Action’s Facebook account. “We had a very spiritual conversation, and a very practical conversation.”

These political-theological partnerships are continuing well into the first year of the new Trump term. In March, the leaders of Israel365 visited Dallas, Texas, for the annual conference of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), a global consortium of leading Christian media organizations claiming a combined audience of over 100 million viewers. There, Israel365 leaders not only mobilized further Christian support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, but also took the opportunity to hold a celebratory dinner to honor Steve Bannon with a “Warrior for Israel” award. Bannon took the stage before a crowd of far-right Christians and Jews to accept the award and, living up to his reputation as a coalition builder, used his speech to outline the battle lines taking shape across what he called the “kinetic phase of the third world war” then underway. “The Judeo-Christian West is united,” he said, while the “red-green alliance” of DEI supporters, “neo-Marxists” and “radical Jihad” represented the “enemy” who “hate us, and there’s no middle ground, there’s no negotiation.” Recommending a brutal crackdown on campuses starting with the deportation of foreign students—which would begin one week later with the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil—Bannon also extended his militant posture to the Israeli front, calling for even more military aggression in Gaza and the West Bank, railing against regional powers like Iran and Turkey as civilizational enemies, and seeming to endorse West Bank annexation.

The event was not without its tensions. When Wolicki joined Bannon on stage after his speech and raised concerns about anti-Israel voices in the America First movement, Bannon interjected that “many of these are very close friends of mine [and] you have to understand where they’re coming from.” Citing widespread opposition to an interventionist Middle East policy, foreign aid, and the US’s role as global “hegemon,” Bannon estimated that support for Israel among MAGA supporters under 30 had dipped to the single digits. Signaling his own non-interventionist sympathies, he floated the idea of pausing a $3 billion arms sale to Israel then under consideration and offered that while Iran is the “ancient enemy of the West,” the US should likely avoid military entanglement against the country (an issue Bannon and Wolicki had debated fiercely on Bannon’s War Room show weeks before the conference). At times, Israel365’s leaders have professed common ground with skeptics of Middle East intervention—particularly on the question of gradually phasing out military aid to Israel, a position that has been voiced in some corners of the pro-Israel right, and has been echoed in recent weeks by the Heritage Foundation and even Netanyahu himself. Still, the energy in the room seemed to cool after Bannon’s provocations, and when Weisz acknowledged in his speech after the exchange that some in the audience may be “surprised to hear messages like that at a Jewish event,” it underscored the rift brewing in the MAGA ranks.

Nonetheless, Israel365 has a track record of tolerating substantial tensions within the “Judeo-Christian” Zionist alliance it is building. For instance, it claims to eschew partnership with Christians who hold a missionary agenda, but has continued partnering with Bramnick and Perkins who, like many Christian Zionist leaders, have seemed to support the conversion of Jews when speaking to Christian audiences. Similarly, nine days before being honored by Israel365, Bannon drew fire for making a Nazi salute at a conservative conference, but Israel365 was unfazed. Even when a local Orthodox day school where it had initially planned to hold the Bannon gala canceled the event in protest, the group proceeded by holding the event at the NRB convention instead. Indeed, Israel365 appeared in its natural element at the convention, leading workshops over Shabbat on topics like “Jews and Christians in the Age of Redemption” and “Filling the Void: Why Both Jews and Christians Need the Third Temple.” This suggests that while foreign policy debates continue in the MAGA camp, an energetic core remains focused on common goals and common enemies. “There’s a comfort level” to the relationship, Wolicki enthused during a conversation with two Christians on the conference floor. “The whole [project] of Jews and Christians coming together,” said his interlocutor, pointing upward, “comes from above.”

Ben Lorber works as senior research analyst at the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, researching antisemitism and white nationalism. He is the co-author of Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.

BenLorber8

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-group-forging-a-judeo-christian-zionism-for-the-new-maga-age at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

CHEVRUTA | 14 MAY 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 14 MAY 2025, 3:40 PM UTC

How Should Activists Relate to Risk?

An investigation through Jewish text, in the wake of escalating violence in the West Bank against Palestinians and their allies

Aryeh Bernstein in conversation with Maya Rosen

A solidarity activist films a confrontation between the Israeli military and a Palestinian resident in the West Bank.

Emily Glick

Chevruta is a column that aims to address the ethical and spiritual problems confronting the left. For each installment of the column—named for the traditional method of Jewish study, in which a pair of students analyzes a religious text together—Jewish Currents will match leftist thinkers and organizers with a rabbi or Torah scholar. The activists will bring an urgent question that arises in their own work; the Torah scholar will lead them in exploring their question through Jewish text. By routing contemporary political questions through traditional religious sources, we hope to discover new and unexpected avenues for inquiry into today’s most pressing problems. You can find an audio version of this conversation here, and a stand-alone source sheet for group study here.

In September 2024, an Israeli sniper shot and killed Turkish American human rights activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi outside of Nablus in the northern West Bank. Her murder was a devastating example of a sharp uptick in military and settler violence against both Palestinian residents and the international and Israeli activists who work with them. For years, solidarity activists such as Eygi have responded to the violent reality in the West Bank by physically accompanying Palestininans in the hopes that their “protective presence” will serve as a buffer to prevent attacks. This strategy has been employed by groups like All That’s Left, Jordan Valley Activists, Center for Jewish Nonviolence, International Solidarity Movement, and others, and has received heightened attention thanks to the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which features Palestinians resisting colonialism in the villages of Masafer Yatta, and Israelis engaging in protective presence with them.

For those engaged in solidarity work in the West Bank, this moment of increased violence has amplified ever-present moral questions: What is my responsibility to intervene when someone else is in danger? How much risk must I take upon myself to try and protect my Palestinian comrades? And to what extent must I recruit others to join me in taking that risk? In this chevruta, I explore these quandaries with Jewish Currents assistant editor Maya Rosen. As a long-time protective presence activist, Maya is regularly weighing the danger that she and the activists she recruits will take on in the course of their work: How can she adequately prepare people without scaring them off? And how can she communicate the rewards of the work alongside the risks?

We consider this dilemma through the lens of three texts, the first of which is a short Talmudic passage that establishes the commandment to intervene to save other people’s lives even at personal risk. Next, we discuss a 1941 legal responsum from the Kovno Ghetto exploring whether a person is obligated to risk one’s life by interceding with Nazi collaborators to negotiate the return of kidnapped Jews. Finally, we work through another short Talmudic passage about conversion to Judaism, which proves a surprising source for considering the ethics of recruiting other people to a dangerous but worthy mission. I hope that our discussion will help others who are wrestling with the attempt to share the burden of risk, and that, by offering a way to understand and respect limitations, it will help readers find pathways to greater collective courage.

— Aryeh Bernstein

Aryeh Bernstein: Maya, could you tell us about what brings you to this conversation and the questions you’ve been brooding over?

Maya Rosen: I’ve lived in Jerusalem for the past eight years, and in that time, I’ve gotten involved in organizing with Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Often we do what’s called “protective presence,” in which solidarity activists will go to communities that are requesting our presence if there’s a concern about settler violence or attacks. That might mean going with residents while they shepherd their sheep or harvest their olives. It might mean walking children to school who have to pass by a violent outpost. The hope is that our being there reduces violence, or, at a minimum, allows us to collect documentation, which can then be used in future legal proceedings and in getting the word out to people abroad.

Aryeh: I remember at the end of October 2023, word spread on social media as well as through some news outlets that settlers were threatening an all-out pogrom in the Masafer Yatta communities in the South Hebron Hills, and I remember texting with you and a couple of other comrades of ours, knowing that you would probably be thinking about going out for protective presence and not feeling confident that you could be safe. At the time, I felt I had to write to you just tell you that I love you and that I believe in you. I’m glad that the worst we expected that night didn’t happen, but I’ve thought about that night a lot: What can we do, and what risks do we need to take on?

Maya: I’d love to discuss this with you. I know that if we do our job right, it means that we escalate, and if we escalate, it’s going to get more violent here, and people will get hurt. And that’s a really hard thing to recognize. Yes, I want our movement to grow, and yes, I want us to be effective, and no, I don’t want anyone to get hurt. But in moments, it feels like that’s an inevitable consequence. So I struggle with how much risk I should take on and the limits and boundaries of that. And the longer I’ve been in this work, the more I’m in a role where I’m facilitating new people coming into the work—where I’m organizing a protest or overnight shifts in a village where there might be a demolition. And in those cases, I wrestle with what my responsibility is to those recruits in terms of making sure that they’re safe, and sharing all the information that I can.

Aryeh: I remember a little over two years ago, the first time we had a version of this conversation, you told me that when you began doing this work, you recruited people to do protective presence trips—often American or European nationals, Jews who were in Israel—and you would say, your EU passport, your American passport, protects you. Even then you were having doubts about whether you could say that to anybody anymore.

Maya: I think that’s part of why Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi’s death really rattled me. Obviously, there’s the brutality and the horror of it, but also, she was an American, and it fully punctures that myth that there’s some sort of protection offered by that positionality. I sometimes take a bit of—I guess false—pride in knowing how to assess risk in the field and knowing how to act as safely as possible in very tense, violent situations, how to position myself and how to be able to extricate myself when things get more tense. Trusting my instincts in the field is a skill I feel I’ve developed over the years. And part of what was really scary about Eygi’s death is that she was standing off to the side, on a hilltop overlooking a protest. She wasn’t in the thick of it.

Aryeh: Different from Rachel Corrie.

Maya: Very different from Rachel Corrie, whose death—while she was heroically blocking a bulldozer with her body—was also obviously horrendous. But Eygi was an onlooker and was killed by a sniper. And if it’s true that just by standing in the West Bank, you can be shot by a sniper who you can’t even see, that really shatters everything that I know about what it means to “stay safe” in these circumstances.

Whenever I’m on a bus of people coming down for a protest, I give a standard PSA where I say: “The West Bank is unpredictable. And even though today we think the risk level is going to be X or Y, it could always change at any moment. And we can’t guarantee anything.” So it’s not like I feel I’m taking people blind into the field. But even if I tell them that it could be dangerous, my experience means I have a greater ability to assess risk. So there’s a limit to how effective my warning is. Is there a point at which my verbal warning is insufficient and I actually should stop bringing people? Or is the need of the hour so intense that it’s actually important despite that?

I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from learning about the struggle for civil rights in the United States and the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. And I’m especially aware that more allies died in those struggles than in the struggle against the occupation here. This only heightens my feeling that if this escalates, if we’re going to win, it’s going to get more violent, and the number of those murdered or seriously injured will increase. It’s a really scary thought. How do you bring people into the movement while also making sure that they’re aware of that? How do you make sure they still want to join the movement, since we need to grow?

Aryeh: Right. What is informed consent in such a context? Do new people have the capacity to understand what that means? Let’s explore these questions.

The first text is a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, page 73a, which explores the basic question of whether one has to take on danger in order to reduce danger to others.

Maya reads.

From where do we derive that one who sees another drowning in a river or being dragged away by an animal or being attacked by bandits is obligated to save them? Scripture states, “You shall not stand idly over the blood of your fellow.”

Aryeh: What’s your reaction to the text? What does it bring up for you?

Maya: It seems to start from a core assumption that you do need to attempt to save people who are in danger, and that the rabbis are attempting to find a biblical text that’s going to ground that conclusion. You could have imagined the reverse: The rabbis could have taken a biblical verse and then said, “Okay, what are we required to do given that text?” But it seems that the text is being driven by a core moral assumption that’s outside of the text, rather than a prescriptive “do what the text tells you.”

It does seem that these are all risky situations in their own way: that the animal could turn on you and attack you, too. Same with the bandits. That the raging river is carrying someone away. For me, I’m not a strong enough swimmer that that wouldn’t entail some risk.

Aryeh: Do you think you have an obligation to jump into the river if you don’t know how to swim?

Maya: My assumption would be no, because then you’re not going to help the person. You’re just going to have two people who have drowned instead of one.

Aryeh: We also have responsibilities to preserve life—“u’shmartem et nafshoteichem,” you should protect your lives, your health.[1] So there already might be limitations on this obligation, when it could be helpful to others but too risky for yourself.

Maya: Right. And I’m wondering whether there are gradations of that: If there’s a 10% chance you could save them, but a 90% chance you both drown, then is it worth it? And how far do those numbers have to shift for it to be the right thing, or even the obligatory thing, to do? It still leaves us with all these questions: It’s clear that if somebody is bleeding in front of you, you need to help them in some way. But what about if you hear that this is happening in a different town? If it’s not in front of your face? Do you have to go seek it out?

Emily Glick

Aryeh: Maybe it’s impossible to reach a clear calculus. I found a very chilling legal responsum from 1941 by Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, who was the rabbi of the Kovno Ghetto, one of the last rabbinic greats in that era to survive the Holocaust. He wrote rabbinic responsa in the Kovno Ghetto and throughout the Holocaust period and buried them in scraps, and found them after the war. They’re published in a very chilling collection of responsa called She’elot U’Teshuvot Mima’amakim (Responsa from the Depths).

He’s asked a question in that volume: The Nazis had appointed some Lithuanian hooligans to do some of their dirty work—harassing, rounding up, and killing Jews—and some of these hooligans kidnapped some yeshiva students. Somebody approached Rav Oshry to talk to another rabbi who happened to know these hooligans. The moral question being: Should this second rav go and intercede on their behalf to save the yeshiva students? Must he do that? May he do it? Are you allowed to put yourself in such danger, when you’re also obligated to protect your own safety?

Rav Oshry comes to the conclusion that the rabbi wasn’t obligated to, but it was a kind of “midat hasidut,” an act of piety, to do so. This rabbi was not prohibited from doing so, and he wasn’t necessarily obligated to do so, but it was an righteous act. (Incidentally, he did so and was successful, but was later killed in one of the concentration camps.)

Maya: There’s something about the ruling he gives—that it’s neither mandatory nor prohibited—that, on the one hand, feels intuitively right. But it also feels less helpful. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do!

Aryeh: I know! I think it might be simultaneously very empowering to feel that these rabbinic sources aren’t so narrow and don’t have the hubris of always having the answers. And also sometimes, especially in situations of life and death, we need guidance.

I did want to pivot to one other passage that I think sheds light on another aspect of your question. When you were talking about the burden you feel, it sounded like you had even more concern for the well-being of people whom you’ve recruited to do this work. There’s a passage that, on its face, is not about our topic, but I think might resonate with it. This is a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yevamot 47a-b, and it’s about what we—the rabbinic class—should say if somebody comes forward to convert to Judaism. The core of this source is from 2nd-century Palestine, under Roman occupation. It was not a great time for the Jews, especially for the rabbis. If you think about the Yom Kippur liturgy—the martyrology, and the stories of the ten holy rabbis and the trials and tribulations they went through under Roman occupation[2]—that’s all present in the background. So let’s jump in and see what this surprising text might teach us.

Maya reads.

Our rabbis taught: A convert who comes to convert at the present time, they say to him, “What did you see, such that you came to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and suffering comes upon them?” If they say, “I know and I’m unworthy,” they are accepted immediately.

Aryeh: How do you relate to that? Somebody says, “I really want to be Jewish.” In the day and age of the text, the first thing you tell them isn’t, “That’s great, welcome.” The first thing you tell them is, “Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? It’s bad for us.”

Maya: Maybe that’s just a sanity check: Why would you want to join a group that’s going to make your life worse by any normal metric? If you convert, you’re going to be subject to attacks. This is not a winning team at the moment.

Aryeh: How does this script sound different to you than the one you give on buses before leaving for a protective presence trip?

Maya: My first inclination is it actually feels somewhat similar: It does mention the danger, but there’s also a limit. You could imagine a speech given to converts that is actually like, “Okay, well, let me tell you about the pogroms we faced. There was this incident where this gentile bandit came and attacked us. And there was this time when the…”—whatever it may be. There’s no detail or texture given, no accounting for what it actually looks like or feels like to be despised and attacked, how it affects you and your children and your livelihood. So in that sense, it does feel somewhat similar to my bus speech. I say, “This is really dangerous and things are unpredictable,” but I don’t say, “And you know, last night there was an attack in this village, and the week before, this person got beat up.” That feels like it would actually constitute fear mongering in a way that’s unproductive. I don’t want to exaggerate the risk. Because while it’s true that the danger is very serious, the vast majority of the time that I’m in the West Bank, I’m fine. And even more than that—often it’s a really lovely day, which is something that doesn’t fit the narrative. I visit really good friends who live in these villages, and we sit and drink tea and play with the kids; not every moment is an emergency moment, even though the broader situation is dire. And so I also don’t want to prime people to only be able to view these places through the lens of catastrophe.

Aryeh: I think that’s a great segue into the continuation of the passage, about the laws that are mentioned specifically to the would-be convert. To give a bit of context, what we’re about to see is a list of the Torah’s social welfare laws—specifically agricultural laws that stipulate that when you’re harvesting, if you drop certain plants, you can’t go back and pick them up. They’re for poor people to come and harvest for themselves. Same with the forgotten sheaves in the corner of one’s field.

Maya reads.

And they inform them of some of the light mitzvot and some of the weighty mitzvot. And they inform them of the sins of gleanings, forgotten sheaves in the corner of one’s field, and the poor person’s tithe. And they inform them of the punishment for the mitzvot. They say to them, “Be aware that before you came to this status, had you eaten forbidden fat, you would not be punished by karet.”

Aryeh: Certain very weighty prohibitions in the Torah have the punishment of “karet,” which we assume to mean that you are cosmically cut off from the Jewish people in the World to Come, or something like that.

Maya reads.

“Had you profaned Shabbat, you would not be punished by stoning. But now, once you become Jewish, if you have eaten forbidden fat, you are punished by karet. If you have profaned Shabbat, you are punished by stoning.” And just as they inform them of the punishment for mitzvot, so do they inform them of the reward granted for them. They say to them, “Be aware that the World to Come is made only for the righteous, and be aware that the Jewish people at the present time are able to receive neither an abundance of good nor an abundance of calamities.” And they do not proliferate upon them, nor are they exacting with them.

Aryeh: This last part seems to be a theological reflection about whether reward and punishment can come in this world.

Maya: Because our true reward and punishment is going to come in the World to Come?

Aryeh: Yeah, exactly. I think with “proliferate,” it means, “Don’t overwhelm them with too much detail about the mitzvot and their consequences, and don’t be too exclusionary.” Don’t say things like, “I don’t know if you’re good enough, if you know enough.” But still, you have to make sure they know this context.

I’m hearing within this text some of what you were saying. You start with making sure that they understand that it’s a hard road, and you have to know the responsibility involved. And also you want to share the positive things too. Maya, you were talking about worldly rewards, the relationships, the sense of purpose. You have to make that a significant part of the story.

But why do you think it starts with the grim part: “Don’t you know the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and suffering comes upon them”?

Maya: I guess that’s the responsibility piece. You know, I don’t want to be the one convincing people to do something beyond what they’re comfortable with. But I’m conflicted as I say that; I also want to fight against this liberal cult of safety—like, as soon as you say the word “safety,” it’s automatically a reason not to do something. I feel torn between a sincere desire for caution and a desire to reject that paradigm, wanting people to be in a mentality where they feel, “of course, we have to take on risk.”

Aryeh: Because the residents of Masafer Yatta are experiencing so much risk, or the residents of indigenous communities who are being bulldozed by pipelines, or whoever it may be.

Maya: Right, they don’t have a choice in the matter.

Aryeh: And their survival depends on people who don’t live with as much risk taking on some of it. And the more of us that do it, the less risk there is for any one person or group. But still, the text starts with: “But you have to make sure people understand the risk.” What makes the speech on the bus different is it’s not just saying, “You should know the Jewish people in the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, harassed, and suffering comes upon them.” You’re simultaneously trying to get more people to take seriously “lo taamod al dam re’echa,” don’t stand idly by the blood of your fellows, and that it’s actually a great merit to fulfill that mitzvah.

Emily Glick

Maya: There is a piece of that that really resonates with me: that despite all the difficulties of this work, I feel so grateful to be able to do it. It gives my life shape and purpose. And beyond that, it has brought me into relationship and community with some of the people who are dearest to me in the world. In so many versions of this world and my life and the reality we live in, I wouldn’t have met these communities, and I’m so grateful that I have.

I want to create a movement culture where there is the ability to make an active choice about risk. But I don’t think it’s a healthy movement culture that glorifies the idea that the way to be the most successful activist is to always take the maximum possible risk. In order to sustain ourselves in the work and to sustain our movements, we have to be able to say, “Today, I’m going to visit these communities, but I’m actually kind of under the weather, or I have a really big test tomorrow, and I’m not in a position where I can get arrested.”

Aryeh: And so then there are other roles. Can you do a jail support shift? Can you stay back at home, but make a pot of soup for people to come back to so they can be nourished when they return?

Maya: Yes, and I think that our movements need to have a lot of roles. This kind of work on the ground is not right for everyone, and it’s not right for anyone all the time.

Aryeh: I want to run a reading of this passage by you that translates it to our context. A striking thing about the conversation with the convert is it’s a one-on-one. It raises the question: Do you want people getting on that bus if they haven’t had a one-on-one with an organizer yet, where somebody with a little more experience can get a sense of what’s motivating them and where they’re coming from? So when somebody comes to sign up for risky, protective presence work, the first thing to do is have a one-on-one and ask what their story is. After you hear from them, make sure that they understand the negative consequences—the danger—and that they’re not being unrealistic. Then, once they’re in, you give them a training—a nonviolent direct action training, a community organizing training—inform them of some of the light mitzvot, some of the weighty mitzvot, not every nook and cranny; they’re not going to be experts, but make sure that they have the basics. Make sure that they know that integral to our movement is the commitment to sharing resources, making sure that we keep us safe. Nobody’s left behind—“the sins of gleanings, forgotten sheaves, corners of one’s fields, poor person’s tithe.” We make sure they know how they can access help when they need it, and they understand their responsibility to help others. We make sure they have a sense of what it means to be part of this, what the consequences could be, and also the reward and the rich sense of purpose and relationships that come with it. You don’t go over the top, and you don’t try to keep people out. You try to welcome people in, but you make sure that people have that context.

Maya: That resonates a lot. I really like the way you translated “the sins of gleanings, forgotten sheaves, the corners of one’s field, and the poor person’s tithe”—the recognition that part of bringing people into this work also means investing in the structures that will provide them with care while doing it.

Aryeh: And imparting their role in sustaining those structures of care for others, too.

Maya: Totally. I sometimes think of these aspects as separate: the work and the support structures. But it’s crucial to integrate them in some way, so that when people join, we really do have support to offer, and they are recruited into a role in sustaining it. You can’t just join a protective presence shift and go back to your own life; you’re actually embedded now in a network of people who are actively looking out for each other.

It feels tied to the rabbinic idea of “simcha shel mitzvah,” literally “the joy of mitzvot,” that commandedness and obligation requires something of us, and that, in and of itself, is also what can bring joy.

Aryeh: That’s a profound confluence between the wisdom of movement organizers and rabbinic scholars: that commandedness and responsibility is a whole terrain of joy.

Maya: Amen.

Footnotes

1

Devarim 4:15

2

According to rabbinic tradition, ten prominent rabbis were martyred by the Romans in the period following the destruction of the Second Temple, including Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel. They are memorialized in the poem “Eleh Ezkarah” (“These I Will Remember”), which is recited on Yom Kippur and describes the executions in harrowing detail.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein directs the Chicago Avodah Justice Fellowship and is a senior editor of Jewschool.com, a member of the Tzedek Lab, and the author of “The Torah Case for Reparations.” Aryeh was ordained by Yashrut Institute.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/risk-chevruta at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

PHOTO ESSAY | 13 MAY 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 14 MAY 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

The Destruction of Khalet a-Daba’

The largest demolition in the history of Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank portends an escalation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in the region.

Introduced by Emily Glick

Ruins in the West Bank village of Khalet a-Daba’ on May 5th, 2025.

Eid Suleiman

In the early morning hours of May 5th, two large excavators and two bulldozers rolled over the hills of Masafer Yatta and into the village of Khalet a-Daba’. In under two hours, Israeli military forces demolished nine houses, six residential caves, 11 bathrooms, ten water tanks, seven water cisterns, four animal shelters, an electricity room, the majority of the village’s solar panels, and the community center. By the time the army left, only four structures remained; 90% of the village was in ruins. As the head of the settler South Hebron Hills Regional Council, Eliram Azulay, wrote on Facebook the following day, the “historic demolitions” are part of an attempt to achieve Israeli “sovereignty in the South Hebron Hills”—an intentional strategy to consolidate Israeli control over the West Bank by removing Palestinians from the rural regions known as Area C and annexing the territory to Israel.

“This is the first time I’ve seen a demolition where families really have no place to go afterwards,” said Basel Adra, a Palestinian journalist and filmmaker from Masafer Yatta, who was present at the demolition. “Caves are now blocked by piles of rubble; homes are gone. There is no shelter at all, and the summer heat is coming.” The small village, home to some 120 people, is known for its cultivation of almond, grape, and olive trees—a pocket of lush greenery nestled in the arid hills of Masafer Yatta. The village was also distinguished by large murals on many of its structures—a project launched with international solidarity activists to draw attention to the community’s struggle for survival. In bold white lettering, the murals proclaimed: “Free Khalet a-Daba’” and “We Deserve Life.”

Like other neighboring villages, the community has consistently weathered violent home demolitions and settler attacks. Since October 2023, settlers have attacked the village several times, injuring residents, destroying cars, and, in one case, burning down a home. The location of Khalet a-Daba’ makes the village particularly vulnerable: The community is one of 12 villages in Masafer Yatta located within the borders of “Firing Zone 918,” a swath of land that Israel designated a military training zone. Following a decades-long legal battle, the Israeli Supreme Court approved the forcible transfer of more than 1,000 residents from these villages on May 4th, 2022, almost exactly three years ago. Tellingly, Khalet a-Daba’ is surrounded by four Israeli outposts, all located within the same firing zone. Despite their illegal status under both international and Israeli law, these outposts have continued to expand with state support since the 2022 ruling.

After the Supreme Court decision, residents of Firing Zone 918 feared Israel would immediately expel them from their land. Instead, the state implemented a slow and calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting the region as a whole and these 12 communities in particular, attempting to make life untenable for residents through road closures, home demolitions, and coordinated efforts with local settlers to block Palestinians from accessing their land. The demolition of Khalet a-Daba’—the largest ever carried out in Masafer Yatta—marks the state’s first clear attempt to actualize the Supreme Court’s ruling by trying to expel one of the 12 villages in its entirety. Residents fear that this step foreshadows an escalation in Israel’s campaign of expulsions and forced transfer across the region—the intensification they have nervously anticipated for the last three years.

This photo essay—comprised of photos by Basel Adra, Eid Suleiman, Omri Eran Vardi, Oren Ziv, and myself—offers a glimpse at life in Khalet a-Daba’ before, during, and after its recent destruction. In one image from November 2023, Jaber Dababseh walks in front of his home, which displays a mural saying, “If this sign falls, it will be the sixth time this house has been demolished.” That home now lies in rubble. As this photo essay was going to press, a masked settler entered what remains of Khalet a-Daba’ and attacked Dababseh’s brother, inflicting a severe head injury. When an ambulance arrived, the Israeli army blocked it from providing care and then proceeded to arrest Dababseh and his cousin.

In an interview with +972 Magazine in the hours after the demolition last week, Dababseh’s mother, 80-year-old Amna Dababseh, said, “I will never leave this village—not until my last day.” One wonders how much more they will have to endure, how many cycles of destruction they can withstand, to stay on their land.

— Emily Glick

Khalet a-Daba’ at sunset, October 11th, 2022.

Emily Glick

After the demolition, May 5th, 2025.

Oren Ziv

Residents of Khalet a-Daba’ watch the demolition of their homes from a distance after Israeli soldiers forcibly remove them from the village, May 5th, 2025.

Basel Adra

Israeli soldiers stand in front of Khalet a-Daba’ while bulldozers begin demolishing the village, May 5th, 2025.

Eid Suleiman

Badawi Dababseh, a resident and community leader of Khalet a-Daba’, September 29th, 2022.

Emily Glick

In the aftermath of the demolitions, men from the community try to piece concrete blocks back together in order to shelter the community’s elders from the harsh winds, May 5th, 2025.

Oren Ziv

Residents of Khalet a-Daba’ seek shade from an olive tree, surrounded by the ruins of their homes, May 5th, 2025.

Oren Ziv

A resident of Khalet a-Daba’ holds a baby goat after the Israeli army demolished the village’s animal pens, May 5th, 2025.

Oren Ziv

Jaber Dababseh in front of his home, the wall of which reads, “If this sign falls, it will be the sixth time this house has been demolished,” November 2023.

Omri Eran Vardi

Jaber Dababseh stands at the entrance of his cave after settlers ransacked the village, November 2023.

Omri Eran Vardi

After the demolition, May 5th, 2025.

Oren Ziv

Emily Glick is photojournalist and visual storyteller based in Boston.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-destruction-of-khalet-a-daba at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

ESSAY | 6 MAY 2025, 2:35 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 6 MAY 2025, 11:22 PM UTC

Wrestling with Martin Buber

The Zionist philosopher couldn’t escape a colonial mindset, but his binationalist vision offers a way forward in Israel/Palestine.

Raef Zreik

Martin Buber in Israel, 1962.

Boris Carmi/Meitar Collection of the National Library of Israel via Wikimedia

Reprinted with permission from A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs by Martin Buber, edited with commentary and a preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr, with new forewords by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Raef Zreik, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Martin Buber poses a greater challenge to Palestinian intellectuals than any other Zionist leader and thinker. The challenge posed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, and David Ben-Gurion was not primarily of an intellectual nature. Their central claim—that conflict with the Indigenous Arab populations was inevitable and unavoidable—left Palestinians with few options other than to brace themselves for violent confrontations with Zionist colonizers. The challenge they posed could only be met on the battlefield. Most Palestinians were thus in closer agreement with Jabotinsky than with Buber, who insisted that Jewish and Palestinian national interests are compatible and thus amenable to mutual accommodation. Buber obliges you to engage in a dialogue with him; Jabotinsky forces you to fight.

Thus, in voicing a vision of a rapprochement between Zionism and the Indigenous Arab population of Palestine, Buber called into question whether the Zionist project, which seeks to secure the interests of the Jewish people, is or could be compatible with the interests and the aspiration of Palestinian people. Moreover, Buber’s unique position within the Zionist discourse raised a paradoxical and incomprehensible position for Palestinians: As a Zionist, he was part of the colonial project while opposing it. In many respects, Buber’s stance was akin to the description of the self-critical colonizer portrayed by Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized. While socially, culturally, and economically he belonged to the settler society, he was nonetheless alert to the injurious effects of colonialism on the native society. Buber thus objected to some basic social and political structures that made his own existence possible. He was walking south in a train heading north. Indeed, he found himself in a seemingly untenable situation. In seeking to distance himself from the West in general and British imperialism in particular, Buber seemed to overlook the heavy debt that Zionism owed the British and Western colonial powers endorsed through the League of Nations, the Balfour Declaration, and the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine.

Memmi was very much aware of this paradoxical situation in which a colonizer who resists colonization can find himself inextricably entangled in that very system. Memmi thus draws our attention to the sociological reality of “colonial life,” which one cannot simply transcend with ideas. The world in general cannot merely be split between people according to their ideology: progressives and conservatives, liberals and fundamentalists, socialists and capitalists, left and right, and so on. People are also distinguished according to their social location, their situatedness, and their objective location rather than by their ideas alone. There is a distinction between natives and settlers, and no matter how much a settler wants to renounce his privileges, he nonetheless continues to enjoy them. His connections, his web of relationships, his frame of reference—the entire context that ascribes meaning to his actions remains the settler’s society. There is a limit to how far the colonizer can identify with the colonized or embrace his position. For Memmi, if such a colonizer “cannot rise above this intolerable moralism which prevents him from living, if he believes in it so fervently, then let him begin by going away,” and cut his ties to the colonial project and settler culture. This is what Hans Kohn, Buber’s close friend and disciple, did. After the Arab-Jewish riots in 1929, Kohn declared that “Zionism is not Judaism,” surrendered his senior position in the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, left Palestine, and eventually emigrated to the United States.

But Buber did not endorse Kohn’s decision. He remained a Zionist and did not acknowledge himself to be a privileged colonizer. He wanted to be part of the Jewish people and part of the Zionist project and to struggle from within the movement to direct it on a radically different course than it had taken. He opposed the creation of a state that would subjugate the Arabs to minority status; he did not want Zionism to be part of the imperial order; he wanted a Zionism that upholds the equality of Jews and Arabs and looked forward to establishing a binational state in Palestine. But did he have any reasonable chance of realizing this vision?

Was Buber merely a daydreamer? An apologist? Did he not understand the fundamental difference between politics and ethics? Was he simply “constructing myths,” as Memmi would have argued? Conversely, do we really want to subscribe to the view that first and foremost politics is about power, and as long as you lack power, no one will take you seriously? Are we sure that we want to divorce morality from politics?

As a Palestinian, I don’t know that I have adequate answers to these questions. Yet together with Buber I am wary of those approaches that tend to exaggerate the presumed tragic dialectic of history and politics. In his 1945 article “Politics and Morality,” Buber acknowledges that “life, in that it is life, necessarily entails injustice. There can be no life without the destruction of life.” Buber was not naïve. But he was neither ready nor willing, under the guise of this truism, to countenance cruelty and injustice as inherent in human affairs. For that reason he added the caveat, “we cannot refrain from doing injustice altogether, but we are given the grace of not having to do more injustice than absolutely necessary.” “The main point,” he duly emphasized, “is recognizing limits.” And thus he warned his fellow Zionists that “if one has the intention of driving people who are bound to the soil out of their homeland, then one has exceeded those limits. Here we confront an inalienable right, the right of one who cultivates the earth to remain upon it.” The concept of “limiting” injustice to the absolutely necessary creates the space for imagining another social and political reality in Palestine and offers some intellectual tools to argue against Jabotinsky’s logic of the ineluctability of the conflict with Palestine and the logic of us versus them that continues to prevail in the Zionist political imagination.

The logic informing Jabotinsky’s politics—and that of his disciple Benjamin Netanyahu—derives its justification from the past, when the Jews of Europe were subject to insidious, unrelenting antisemitism. Thus their exigent need for a safe shelter that they could not find in Europe, a shelter Jabotinsky averred could only be secured in Palestine in the form of a sovereign Jewish nation-state—a self-justifying objective to be attained by whatever means were deemed necessary. His single conception of justice for the forlorn Jews of Europe blinded him to the political and demographic reality of Arab Palestine. Hence, that conception is flawed from the beginning. This is different from a situation in which the conception of justice is reasonable, but its implementation would lead to undesirable consequences. Indeed, Jabotinsky’s exclusive focus on justice for the Jewish people deliberately ignores its consequences with regard to the Palestinians—their dispossession and the deprivation of political rights. His political logic is unbending and ruthlessly overrides ethical considerations. Buber challenges Zionist policy guided by this single political logic. In pursuing one’s fundamental interests, one must accept the moral responsibility of limiting the harm one’s actions may cause others. As Hannah Arendt put it, no one inhabits the world alone. We are destined to share the world and ultimately have no choice but to find a way to live on it together.

In honoring this existential and ethical imperative, Buber promoted the vision of a binational state. Neither the Zionists nor the Palestinians found it worthy of consideration. Let’s not forget that during the 1920s the Jews made up no more than 10–15 percent of the population of Palestine. It is true that the numbers increased in the next two decades, reaching 35 percent around the time of partition in 1947. Although the envisioned binational idea guaranteed Jews and Arabs equal share in the government and administration of the future state, Palestinians rejected it for several reasons. For one, the idea of parity irrespective of demographic proportionality implied that the Palestinians would surrender their majority status and homeland. The mere idea of a minority of immigrants (the Jews) offering equality—individual and collective—to the native Palestinian majority was understandably deemed unreasonable if not downright absurd. Why should the Palestinians give up half of their homeland? To be sure, Zionists would also have to surrender the dream of, as their national anthem has it, “a hope of two thousand years old / To be a free [politically sovereign] nation in our land / The Land of Zion, Jerusalem.” Still, there is some difference between giving up a dream and giving up your reality: your land.

The major issue that made the acceptance of binationalism most difficult was the mere fact that reality was not binational at the time. To accept binationalism, the Arabs would have had to accept Jewish immigration to Palestine under the tutelage of the British Mandate. Furthermore, Buber did not speak to the Arabs. He debated with his fellow Zionists. Nor did the Zionist leadership speak to the Arabs, assuming that only with the help of the British Empire could they succeed in establishing a national homeland in Palestine. In short, Buber’s attempt to situate Zionism as a subaltern nationalism, a nationalism of decolonization, was at odds with the facts on the ground. He was trying hard to situate Zionism beside and complementary to—not in opposition to—Arab nationalism, as anti-colonial nationalism, but that did not square with the fact that it was the British who laid the ground for the Jewish settlement of Palestine.

Buber’s arguments pose interesting questions to the Palestinian national movement, mainly due to his minimalism and his attempt to find a way to reconcile the interests of both movements without the domination of Zionism over the Arabs. Was Buber’s version of Zionism a plausible one that the Arabs should have accepted? In part this is a historical question. But the question is still relevant given the fact that we are still struggling to find a way to secure a peaceful, decent, and dignified existence for both peoples. Some of Buber’s arguments for the rights of the Jews in Palestine are explained in his 1929 talk “The National Home and National Policy in Palestine.” This text reveals clear traces of colonial thought and imagination, such as when he bases the right on “a proven fact: after thousands of years in which the country was a wasteland, we have transformed it into a settled country, where it was open to us to do so, by years of labor. The right deriving from creation and fertilization is in fact the right of settlers.” Even when Buber sought to extend equality to the Indigenous Arabs, he did it from the perspective of a colonial mindset, stating that “the situation of our settlement includes the lives of the Arab inhabitants of the country, whom we do not intend to expel.” To any Palestinian with a sensitive ear this sounds as if the Jewish immigrants are doing the Arabs a favor by not expelling them, a benevolent gesture that deserves to be rewarded!

Buber’s colonial mindset is again on view in his 1939 letter to Mahatma Gandhi, in which he seeks to explain why the persecuted Jews of Germany seek refuge in Palestine: “Jews are being persecuted, robbed, maltreated, tortured, murdered.” Why not a land other than Palestine? Because Jews have a historical religious and spiritual connection to the land, and it is theirs (“we need our own soil”). To those acquainted with the language of rights I might say that the argument refers to both a general right based on need and a special right that ties the Jewish people specifically to this land. Arguments of need are general. If I am starving, I have a right to be fed, but this right is general and is imposed on everyone who is able to assist; as a result it can impose an imperfect duty of solidarity. But my duty of solidarity with others, to help those who are in need, is different from my special duty to pay the one that I borrowed money from or the one whose property I damaged. Those are special duties and heavier than the general duty of assistance. The Palestinians had the duty of assistance, the duty of solidarity, as a general duty. This was the same general duty owed by the French, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Americans. How can a people wake up to find themselves owing a special duty to assist another people by giving up half their homeland, however dire the need? Arguments of need can hardly establish such a duty. Most Zionist leaders did not even contemplate offering arguments for or answers to this question. Buber gets close to an answer, but he does so in his epistolary debate with Gandhi, not with an Arab-Palestinian leader. Still, I think there is a difference between a duty of solidarity that guarantees the right of Jews fleeing persecution to immigrate and a duty to accept another people’s demand for a separate nation-state or even an equal partner in a binational state. That is not taken for granted and need not be so.

While Buber’s ideas were in his time consigned to the margins of history, it might be helpful to revisit them now in order to contemplate the future. As I mentioned above, one of the problems with Buber’s ideas is that he proposed a binational solution in a reality that was not binational. This was not only because the number of Jews was relatively insignificant but also because of the colonial nature of the settler project. While the colonial settler aspect still exists 100 years later, the demographic landscape is different—the Jews in Palestine today are the third or fourth generation on the land and know no other home. This makes Buber’s ideas relevant again, but clearly they must be updated to meet new challenges. Those challenges include the recognition of the Palestinian Nakba and the need to end the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians. As a first step, Jewish Israelis would need to acknowledge and redress the historical injustices of dispassion, discrimination, and occupation suffered by Palestinians. Accordingly, binationalism can make sense only as a project of decolonization that brings to an end the legacy of subjugation and domination. Binationalism without decolonization is but a continuation of domination bedecked with different finery.

For many Arab intellectuals, binationalism is intrinsically untenable, for it implies recognizing the historical rights of the Jews in Palestine and acknowledging that the Palestinian resistance has failed and was perhaps simply misguided. Furthermore, many argue that the best solution for the Jewish question in Palestine would be a secular, multiethnic, liberal state based on equal rights for all its citizens without regard to race, religion, gender, or cultural affiliation.

A binational state that supports cultural and religious autonomy does not in my judgment necessarily require accepting the Zionist narrative regarding the historical rights of the Jews in Palestine. To recognize Jewish collective rights in Palestine need not be construed as acknowledging their historical right to the land. Many rights that we have are not historical, nor are they based on historical affiliation. My right to have a lawyer represent me in a criminal trial and my right to freedom of expression are purely legal rights. These rights are based on certain perceptions of the fragility of human existence and its basic needs. I don’t see any reason to believe that accepting a collective right of Jewish self-determination in Palestine within the framework of binationalism amounts to accepting any version of Zionism. We should be able to imagine a Jewish nationalism in Palestine that is not colonialist.

As to the suggestion of a secular liberal state that does not recognize any religious, cultural, or national affiliation in the public sphere, I tend to think that is not attractive at this time. The liberal dream of a neutral public sphere that brackets identities and limits them to the private sphere is not convincing. There is no need here to reiterate the whole literature in the last half century that stresses the importance of cultural identification, from Will Kymlicka to Charles Taylor, Bhaikhu Parekh, and others. I do tend to think that the collective identity for both groups is important to them, and they have a vested interest in keeping and developing their distinctive cultural and religious life.

Yet another reservation advanced by Arab intellectuals precluding any rapprochement with the Jewish state pertains to the Zionist alignment with Western imperialism and willingness to safeguard its interests at the expense of the East in general and the Arab world in particular. Buber shared some of these concerns and consistently denounced the Zionist leadership for seeking the support of the imperialist powers. He offered another kind of Zionism that was in a sense non-colonial (he tried to differentiate between expansive colonialism and concentrated limited colonialism, a distinction that can hardly hold in practice), despite the colonial rhetoric with which he celebrated the idealism of the pioneers of Zionist agricultural settlements (see his 1939 essay “Concerning Our Politics”). He envisioned Zionism as facilitating Jewry’s return to its origins in the Orient and thus serving as a bridge of reconciliation between the East and West (see his 1956 essay “Instead of Polemics” and his 1965 essay “The Time to Try”). But Israel, since its establishment 77 years ago, has chosen a path alongside the United States and other Western hegemonic imperialist powers of perpetrating an ongoing attack on the region, its people, and their interests and thus positioning itself as the enemy of the region (the wars of 1956, 1967, 1982, and 1996 are only a few examples). Furthermore, the more Israel launches wars against the region, the more dependent it becomes on Western powers, as the recent war in Gaza plainly demonstrates. This is just to say that the future of Palestine cannot be conceived without reshaping the image of the whole region and the nature of the relations of East and West, bringing colonial and imperial policies to an end. Buber hoped that the people of Israel would serve as a bridge of reconciliation between East and West. Since Buber’s passing six decades ago, the image of that bridge continues to recede into an ever-distant horizon. Israel is now fully entrenched in the service of the great Western imperial powers against the peoples of the Near East. The war of 2023 on the Gaza Strip against the Palestinians renders Israel increasingly akin to a crusader’s castle in the Holy Land, desperately fending off the armies of Saladin in the 13th century. Buber had anticipated that, and unfortunately, he was right.

Raef Zreik is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, senior lecturer of jurisprudence at Ono Academic College, senior lecturer of political philosophy at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, and senior researcher at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/wrestling-with-martin-buber at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

EXPLAINER | 29 APR 2025, 7:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 30 APR 2025, 12:07 AM UTC

A Leftist’s Guide to Tariffs

Despite purporting to “bring back jobs,” Trump’s trade war continues the capitalist offensive of the free trade regime.

Sheetal Chhabria

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick holds a tariff chart at the White House, Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo

It’s been a dizzying few months for US economic policy. Again and again, President Donald Trump has announced and backtracked on tariffs. On March 4th, he proclaimed an immediate 25% tariff on imports from Mexico and Canada, only to say the next day that US automakers would be exempt for a month to give them time to adjust. In the subsequent weeks, Trump continued this flip-flopping, announcing or backtracking tariffs on goods ranging from soybeans to aluminum and steel. Then, on April 2nd, Trump unveiled a series of “reciprocal” tariffs on every country in the world. Set to take effect in three days, the tariffs would begin at a common baseline of 10%, but would rise to up to 50% on April 9th for countries that were net exporters to the US.

Trump’s announcement caused widespread alarm: On April 8th, Reuters reported that the S&P 500 had just witnessed “its steepest four days of losses since the index was created in the 1950s.” In light of the panicked markets—as well as the retaliatory tariffs that multiple countries quickly promised to impose on the US—Trump declared a “90-day pause” on the higher tariffs just a few hours after they began on April 9th, essentially reverting to the 10% baseline. But there was one exception: China. That country would now face a 124% tariff, which was bumped up to 145% the next day. China responded in kind, confirming that Trump has instigated a full-blown trade war that risks at least a recession and at most, a decline of the primacy of the dollar in global trade. But through it all, Trump has retained his commitment to tariffs, insisting such a policy is necessary to return manufacturing jobs to the US.

For the left, which has long been critical of how the current global economic order has failed workers by promoting low wages and the offshoring of jobs, these developments present a fork in the road. Some US labor leaders have commended Trump’s tariffs, with United Auto Workers’ Shawn Fain calling them a “long-overdue shift away from a harmful economic framework that has devastated the working class and driven a race to the bottom across borders,” and Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien telling reporters that tariffs could bring back “good-paying, middle-class jobs.” But others on the left, while sharing Fain and O’Brien’s concerns for the plight of American workers, have denounced Trump’s tariffs, joining foreign labor leaders in calling for labor coordination across borders rather than a trade war that pits workers against each other. To help parse these left debates, this explainer offers an overview of tariffs, delving into what they are, how they have historically helped and harmed workers, how Trump is using them, and whether his version is indeed a solution to the ills wrought by free trade economic policy over the past few decades.

What are tariffs, and how have they historically been used?

A tariff is a tax collected on imports. The company bringing in the imported goods pays the tax, which becomes an added cost of doing business in the country. This serves to disincentivize imports, and can be a way for governments to promote domestic production.

In the US, tariffs have historically been supported by industrialists looking to evade foreign competition and promote their own newly established enterprises. Between the early 1800s and 1930s, for instance, industrialists demanded tariffs on incoming goods to compete with Britain, early America’s main industrial competitor. As a result of their lobbying, throughout the 20th century the US had some of the highest tariffs in the world. Such protectionism helped new industries like American iron and steel transform into powerful global players by the end of the 20th century.

While it is most often industrialists who benefit from tariffs, sometimes politicians and even workers join pro-tariff coalitions. This is because of what the late anthropologist David Graeber referred to as the ideology of corporatism: the idea that workers and bosses have common interests. Corporatists, per Graeber, sell the idea that “there is no class contradiction” and “we’re all in it together.” In the case of tariffs, this worldview manifests in the belief that by bolstering domestic industries, tariffs automatically empower domestic workers—providing them with jobs, increasing their wages, and improving their standard of living. In reality, however, the distributional effects of tariffs depend on class power. While 20th-century US tariffs helped industrial barons like Andrew Carnegie, they rarely helped their workers, who continued to labor in dangerous conditions for dismal wages. It was only when labor collectives and unions pushed for wage fairness and for health and safety regulations that steelworkers benefitted.

Globally, too, tariffs have had an uneven impact. Specifically, tariffs imposed by the West have long served as tools of imperial control over colonized countries and have occasioned what anti-colonial Marxists have called the “development of underdevelopment.” The British empire, for instance, used tariffs to prevent colonized countries’ manufacturers from selling goods to England, even as cheap raw materials extracted from those colonies were used in most “domestic” British products. In the mid-20th century, ex-colonies tried to recover from the immiseration they had suffered under this colonial system through “import substitution”—essentially coupling high tariffs on Western goods with subsidies and incentives for their own domestic production. But Western countries could not abide these restrictions, and by the 1970s, US-led institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund coerced ex-colonies to “liberalize” their economies, opening them up to a “free” (West-led) trade system that would send their industries into a downward spiral. The economist Ha-Joon Chang has termed this late-20th-century practice “kicking away the ladder of development,” with Western countries prescribing a “free trade” economic formula for others that they did not use when developing their own industries.

How do Trump’s tariffs compare to historical uses of the tool?

Tariffs are often selectively applied to individual countries, sectors, or even specific products, reflecting a studied approach to propping up a domestic industry. In contrast, Trump has approached tariffs as a blunt weapon, beginning with a universal tariff “on all imports.” Practically, this means that instead of promoting a US car maker like Ford by taxing its foreign competitors like Honda or Hyundai, Trump has also taxed all the inputs Ford itself needs to make its own cars—effectively raising the costs of production for everyone rather than promoting American manufacturing.

The blanket approach to tariffs, as well as the frequent waffling on implementation, has prompted chaos, but has also clarified Trump’s actual goals. For example, by the end of March, Apple—which maintains the vast majority of its supply chain outside the US—sought to circumvent imminent tariffs by airlifting some $2 billion worth of iPhones into the US, chartering additional cargo flights, and even lobbying airport officials to clear customs faster. Soon after inaugurating this panic, the administration issued a set of tariff “exceptions” for smartphones, laptops, and other select technological goods from China. Apple’s shares, having fallen originally, temporarily rallied, and Trump was quick to take credit, boasting: “I speak to Tim Cook. I helped Tim Cook, recently, and that whole business.”

This series of events laid bare Trump’s strategy: impose aggressive tariffs, push companies and countries to the brink of ruin, then offer individualized negotiations where business and state leaders can curry favor. “It’s like [Trump’s] a medieval priest selling indulgences,” the leftist economic analyst Doug Henwood told Jewish Currents, referring to Trump’s quest to call the shots on a case-by-case basis rather than produce a clear procedure others can plan around. Indeed, within a few days of announcing the “reciprocal” tariffs, Trump’s press secretary boasted that 70 countries had reached out looking to negotiate individual deals for exceptions on specific products or a country-wide carve out.

Trump’s tariff “transactionalism” has not worked out. So far, no bilateral trade deals have materialized. (News of a tentative deal on auto imports broke on April 29th, but few details had been reported by press time.) Dismayed by Trump’s “break first, negotiate later” approach, many countries have started actively planning an economic world order without the US. Treasury yields have been rising—a metric that indicates a loss of confidence in the dollar as there are fewer buyers for American debt. Trump has responded by floating the idea of lowering tariffs on China soon, but it may be too late to backpedal. Whether the tariffs stay or go, trading partners’ loss of confidence in the US is now a serious problem. In practical terms, it indicates that Americans are likely to pay more for goods, thanks not just to the tariffs but also the declining value of the dollar.

What has been Trump’s stated justification for these tariffs?

Trump claims his tariffs will solve two problems: the US trade deficit, and the loss of domestic manufacturing jobs. Both these phenomena emerged together in the 1970s. At that time, US capitalists were facing limits on their profits due to very high income taxes (92% on the upper bracket through the 1960s), rising union power, and newly competitive Asian firms. In response, they became interested in bolstering profits by becoming “more competitive,” i.e. gaining access to cheaper labor abroad in addition to cheapening labor in the US. As a result, successive US administrations began negotiating trade agreements like Ronald Reagan’s 1988 agreement with Canada and later, Bill Clinton’s 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), applauded by the Heritage Foundation as “Reagan’s vision realized.” Signed with bipartisan support, NAFTA enabled companies to escape the US regulatory environment and its minimum wage, union rights, and environmental regulations. Now, companies could set up plants across North America with reduced import duties and fines. The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 furthered this momentum by creating similar free trade conditions amongst 166 member countries.

The rise of these trade agreements has globalized most supply chains, with the manufacturing of both parts and final consumer products now taking place internationally. Thanks to this shift, the US has been buying more from abroad than it sells—a trade deficit. Since the 1970s, the size of that deficit ballooned, going from about 1% of the GDP in 1980 to 3% of the GDP ($620 billion) in 2019 and 3.9% ($1.2 trillion) in 2024. Trump has been decrying this since the 1980s, saying other countries “rip us off by dumping their goods into our country,” and are “laughing at us.” It’s not clear, however, how this deficit itself in itself is a “ripoff” for everyday Americans, who are in fact receiving the goods they purchase from abroad.

The real problem has not been the need to buy goods from abroad, but the decline of livelihoods due to the deregulatory economic environment. In the past few decades, the bipartisan free trade regime has led to the offshoring of over 700,000 jobs from the US as capital sought to drive down its costs of production. Domestic wages for the jobs that remained have also stagnated amid an assault on pro-labor regulations and the social safety net in the US itself—while unions have lost leverage because of companies gaining the option to move jobs abroad rather than having to stay and negotiate. Through these measures, US capitalists have significantly restored their profitability.

How does Trump’s apparent opposition to the free trade consensus compare to longtime leftist critiques of the neoliberal economy? Will his tariffs serve leftists’ goals?

Large parts of the left have opposed the deregulatory spiral of the past five decades. During the onset of Clinton’s NAFTA in the 1990s, Bernie Sanders visited Mexico and met the Mexican workers who had replaced American workers, many working for subhuman wages and living in precarious housing surrounded by environmental toxins. At the time, Sanders warned that agreements like NAFTA were antithetical to the wellbeing of all workers, whether in the US or Mexico, and said that only a regime of “fair trade, not free trade” could solve this—a system that would entail having strong worker protections that accompanied trade across North America. Such insights were often repeated in the coming years, from anti-NAFTA protests in Mexico to the streets of Seattle in 1999. But regulations that constrain bosses and benefit workers, whether domestic or foreign, have rarely been on offer from either political party in the US. As Henwood told Jewish Currents, “we never developed a progressive internationalism based on fairer trade, and now we are paying the price” in the form of Trump cynically exploiting the issue to his own ends.

Indeed, for all his concern for onshoring jobs, Trump has done nothing to address the core reason the jobs disappeared in the first place: capitalists’ unwillingness to pay US wages and adhere to US law. Instead of curbing capital’s power to flee regulation, Trump has only bolstered it by assaulting the National Labor Relations Board, deregulating environmental laws, removing caps on financial accumulation, and more. In this permissive deregulatory context, tariffs alone cannot compel businesses to bring “good” US jobs back. Instead, research by economists like Isabella Weber finds that companies will try to adjust to “cost shocks” like tariffs by charging consumers more, by squeezing more out of their workers, and by automating. This pattern appears to be holding. Already, the auto company Stellantis has used the tariffs as a reason to pay shareholders more and cut jobs. Meanwhile, Subaru has recently announced a plan to shut a US plant, and other Asian car makers have suggested they plan on doing the same. The net result may be more job losses than gains.

What should a left vision for restoring the US economy look like, if not support for tariffs?

Given the likely effects of Trump’s tariffs, distinguishing pro-worker rhetoric from pro-worker policy is a good first step in making sense of the president’s policy. A second but no less important step is to recognize the historical continuities between Democrats and Republicans, and between free trade and tariff regimes. For instance, the political scientist Thea Riofrancos told Jewish Currents that successive US administrations have seen the mineral lithium, used to make both consumer electronics as well as missile defense systems, as essential to US national security, but have approached the task of securing lithium differently. In his first term, Riofrancos said, Trump used executive orders to “expedite the regulatory processes for mining critical minerals in the US.” Then, Biden “picked up where Trump left off,” adding provisions to boost US-led lithium mining to his landmark Inflation Reduction Act, and framing it as a move to support green energy production despite the fact that lithium mining pollutes water supplies. Now, Trump has returned to the issue with his tariffs, targeting China—which controls 80% of the lithium supply chain—in a bid to bully it into allowing the US access to its lithium supply chain.

This example illustrates how US leaders across parties have, whether using free trade or tariffs, ultimately adopted a (corporate) America-first paradigm that puts military and mining priorities far ahead of workers’ concerns. Henwood pointed out that the main difference between the two parties has been the method, with Trump “returning to a 19th-century model” where, in addition to seeking control through trade negotiations, brute force is also on the table. Riofrancos agreed, noting that while Biden was pressuring Greenland, a major lithium producer, to sell its mining assets to US companies rather than Chinese ones, Trump has directly threatened Greenland’s sovereignty itself. The approaches differ, but neither is about offering dignified livelihoods—just as neither the free trade paradigm, nor the tariffs that supposedly correct for it, are automatically linked to good jobs.

For the left, the insight here is that securing “good jobs” will require much more than tariffs. In the lithium example, it ought to involve opposing green capitalism and the defense industry’s calls for lithium in the first place, instead advocating for jobs that do not require militarism or extractivism. (Public healthcare and education, two sectors that create far more domestic jobs and equitable growth than corporatist bosses have permitted us to realize, are good candidates for such agitation.) More broadly, good jobs in the US will require curbing corporations’ ability to offshore production as a way to avoid domestic labor law. And on a global scale, ensuring good jobs will entail supporting the emergence of an internationalist progressivism through policies like a global minimum wage and universal workers rights. As the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has pointed out, “such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above.” Instead, as Hickel says, they will require a political struggle “similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century.”

Sheetal Chhabria is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College and the author of Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/a-leftists-guide-to-trump-tariffs at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

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UPDATED 24 APR 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

Training for NYPD Officers Categorized the Keffiyeh and Watermelon as Antisemitic Symbols

Experts say the training reinforced a police culture that treats Palestinians and their supporters with suspicion and brutality.

Alex Kane

A protester is arrested by the NYPD during a march demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil from ICE custody in New York, New York on March 10th, 2025.

Gabriele Holtermann/Sipa USA via AP Images

On January 8th, senior New York Police Department (NYPD) staff joined over 150 law enforcement officers, city officials, and religious leaders at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan for a training on combating antisemitism. In a press release about the event, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM)—which led the training alongside George Washington University’s Program on Extremism (POE)—said the presentation aimed to teach the police “how to recognize and address antisemitism in its many contemporary forms” and offered “tools to counter it.” But the presentation itself, exclusively obtained by Jewish Currents, was in large part concerned with pro-Palestine activism, casting the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety despite consistent documentation that antisemitism in the United States is most prevalent among far-right white nationalists. The training, which focused heavily on student protesters, repeatedly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism. It categorized campus demonstrators as extremists tied to Hamas, and branded as antisemitic Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as “settler colonialism” and “all eyes on Rafah.”

Experts on antisemitism and civil liberties say the training reinforces a police culture that treats Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims more broadly) with suspicion, while doing little to curb antisemitism. “They are actively conflating any care for Palestinian humanity or rights—and in some cases, Palestinian existence itself—with antisemitism,” said Dove Kent, the US senior director for Diaspora Alliance, a group that fights antisemitism and its weaponization. “None of this does anything to increase Jewish safety.” Instead, the trainings serve to worsen a situation where “law enforcement is on the front lines of violent anti-Palestinian repression—beating student protesters, surveilling them, and raiding them both on and off campus,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal (and a contributing editor for Jewish Currents). “With this training, police are being fed a description of pro-Palestinian students that, merely on the basis of their political expression, categorizes them as a security threat.” (The NYPD, the New York City mayor’s office, CAM, and POE did not return requests for comment.)

The two groups that led the NYPD training occupy different roles in the pro-Israel landscape. CAM was founded in 2019 by Adam Beren, a Trump-supporting oil tycoon. One of the organization’s main goals is lobbying elected officials around the country to adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—which classifies some anti-Zionist speech as antisemitic—into state law. CAM’s advisers include individuals with close ties to government officials around the country, such as Joel Eisdorfer, a former senior adviser to New York City Mayor Eric Adams who helped coordinate the seminar for the NYPD, and Gabe Groisman, a top ally of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, POE, created in 2015 and housed at George Washington University, describes itself as a “research center on all forms of extremism,” with a particular focus on “global jihadism, Islamism, domestic extremism and antisemitism.” The organization is led by Lorenzo Vidino, who “promotes conspiracy theories about the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the United States,” according to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, which researches Islamophobia. POE also employs numerous former national security officials—including a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who helped investigate the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim group prosecuted by the Bush administration for giving humanitarian aid to allegedly pro-Hamas Palestinian charities. (Legal experts have harshly criticized the prosecution and conviction of the Holy Land Foundation due to the government’s reliance on the testimony of anonymous Israeli intelligence agents, and the fact that the Palestinian charities funded by the foundation were also funded by the US government.)

Now, CAM and POE have capitalized on law enforcement’s interest in anti-Zionist activity, which has peaked in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023 amid an upsurge of campus protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Prior to the NYPD seminar this January, CAM and POE had teamed up in late 2024 to give trainings to law enforcement agencies in Virginia in sessions co-organized by Governor Glenn Youngkin. The presentations attempted to outline Hamas’s alleged “ongoing efforts to infiltrate the American education system,” and tried to link prominent Muslim American groups like American Muslims for Palestine and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to Hamas. Subsequently, Virginia lawmakers wrote a resolution commending the CAM and POE training for “resulting in real-world results,” with “investigators identifying and thwarting potential threats to public safety thanks to improved recognition of evidence associated with extremism during probes of unrelated criminal activities.” And Virginia is not alone in having CAM and POE present to its police. This January, then-Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (who is now a Florida senator) announced that Florida’s federal, state, and local law enforcement officers would attend an April 30th seminar given by CAM and POE on “the presence of Hamas in America and campus protests,” building on post-October 7th efforts by government officials and Israel advocacy groups to allege without evidence that student protesters are violating “material support” laws against assisting Hamas.

The CAM and POE training session for the NYPD drew top officials from the department: Commissioner Jessica Tisch offered opening remarks and NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force Commander Gary Marcus also spoke. The presentation itself was led by Lisa Katz, CAM’s chief government affairs officer, and David Zimmerman, a senior research fellow at POE. In one of the slides shown during POE’s presentation, Zimmerman labeled Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—whose supporters he characterized as “young, bored, and looking for purpose”—as campus extremists. The slide tied the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” to Hamas, and defined it as advocating the “complete annihilation of Israel.” (“From the river to the sea” is a phrase used widely across the Palestinian political spectrum, not only by Hamas, and is historically rooted in a call for a secular, democratic state in Israel/Palestine.) The slide went on to link SJP to an alleged 300% increase in antisemitic activity on college campuses, citing the Anti-Defamation League—a group whose audits of antisemitism conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

CAM’s portion of the session, delivered by Katz, centered on campus activism and pro-Palestine street protests. In one slide purporting to show “antisemitic symbols,” CAM listed the keffiyeh, a black and white scarf emblematic of Palestinian identity, and the watermelon, which shares the colors of the Palestinian flag, as examples of images that “incite hatred, violence, or discrimination against Jewish individuals or communities.” Another image deemed antisemitic was one from a Columbus, Ohio, city council meeting, where some attendees had their hands painted red. The local paper—CAM’s source for the image—explained that protesters used the paint “to simulate the blood of Palestinian civilians being killed in Gaza,” but CAM likened it instead to a famous photo taken in 2000 of Palestinian militants raising blood-stained hands after killing two Israeli reservists in Ramallah. CAM also identified the phrase “settler colonialism” and slogans such as “all eyes on Rafah”—a reference to a viral social media campaign urging people to speak up against Israel’s destruction of the Gazan city—as examples of antisemitic speech. The group ended the presentation by recommending that law enforcement train officers on the “symbols of antisemitism,” utilize the IHRA definition of anti-Jewish bigotry, and “prosecute consistently.”

“The presentation urges policing action and prosecutions based on the deeply problematic IHRA definition, which falsely equates criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism,” said Ramzi Kassem, a professor of law at the City University of New York and the co-director of the legal nonprofit CLEAR. “NYPD and city actions based on the IHRA definition probably would be unconstitutional, and would amount to nothing less than the criminalization of speech and dissent.” Civil liberties advocates worry that such advice could also fortify troubling NYPD policing practices. “The NYPD reportedly attended a training by an outside group that, under the banner of fighting antisemitism, fosters anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and misinformation and risks chilling constitutionally-protected speech,” said Veronica Salama, a staff attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “This reinforces our concern about the NYPD’s brutal treatment of pro-Palestine protesters based on their views.” (The NYPD has repeatedly responded to recent pro-Palestinian protests with violence, drawing weapons on demonstrators and dousing them with pepper spray.)

The CAM and POE trainings build on the NYPD’s longstanding willingness to partner with right-wing groups pushing anti-Muslim or anti-Arab ideas. In 2012, documents obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice revealed that the department had repeatedly screened an anti-Muslim film positing that American Muslim leaders want to “infiltrate and dominate” the US. The film was produced by the Clarion Fund, a group which portrays Islam as inherently violent, and was shown to over 1,200 officers. (In 2014, CAM founder Beren gave $50,000 to the Clarion Fund through his family foundation.) The revelation of the screenings came as the NYPD faced criticism over its invasive surveillance program targeting Muslim Americans that began after the September 11th attacks. Now, experts worry that this pattern is set to continue. “The NYPD’s enlistment in the war on terror set the stage for many generations of police to be trained to see Muslim and Arab people as a national threat,” said Kent. Palestinians and their supporters are now being easily assimilated into this framework, she said. “It is part and parcel of a worldview that casts Arab and Muslim people as the central international enemy.”

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

alexbkane

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/training-nypd-keffiyeh-watermelon-antisemitism-israel-palestine at 29 June 2025, 7:21 AM UTC.

Table of Contents

Jewish Currents: 2025 Jun 27

All articles

Zionism: A People Reborn: 2025 Jun 27

Egypt Cracks Down on the “Global March to Gaza”: 2025 Jun 23

New York Holocaust Museum Removed Trump Images From Hate Speech Exhibit: 2025 Jun 18

How Support for Palestine Became a Hate Crime: 2025 Jun 17

History Lesson: 2025 Jun 17

The Gavel and the Gun: 2025 Jun 17

What's Ours: 2025 Jun 17

The Measure of the World: 2025 Jun 17

The Sympathy Trap: 2025 Jun 17

Who Might We Become for Each Other?: 2025 Jun 17

What You Deserve: 2025 Jun 17

We Need New Jewish Institutions: 2025 Jun 17

Laura Whitehorn: 2025 Jun 17

Closer: 2025 Jun 13

The Tangled Knot of Anti-Zionist Violence: 2025 Jun 11

The Era of Unconditional Support for Israel Is Ending: 2025 Jun 6

Trump’s Illegal Cuts to University Funding, Explained: 2025 Jun 5

Marketing Authoritarianism: 2025 Jun 4

The End of the Marty Peretz Era: 2025 May 30

Staying in Motion: 2025 May 28

Translation: 2025 May 23

Unpacking the Rift Between Trump and Netanyahu: 2025 May 21

The Group Forging a “Judeo-Christian” Zionism for the New MAGA Age: 2025 May 21

How Should Activists Relate to Risk?: 2025 May 14

The Destruction of Khalet a-Daba’: 2025 May 13

Wrestling with Martin Buber: 2025 May 6

A Leftist’s Guide to Tariffs: 2025 Apr 29

Training for NYPD Officers Categorized the Keffiyeh and Watermelon as Antisemitic Symbols: 2025 Apr 24