The following essay is part of a series of ad hoc responses to recent events centered, so far, at Columbia University, and whose scope extends beyond the wider social problems of which the university’s disorder is a symptom. This includes: For more information, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.
—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos Paul Piccone Institute Israel Initiative
The following text is an expanded English version of the German article “Palestine Avenue” published in Konkret 2/24, pages 38-39.
I remember it well. In the spring of 1987, I began a lecture on the German left in Osnabrück with these words: Denies the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and does not wish for its destruction! ” People looked at me like I had lost my mind.
But I said: “At the beginning of any discussion related to Israeli politics, society, or culture, such a basic statement that positions the speaker’s normative orientation is an absolute prerequisite.” Therefore, it must be affirmed in all cases.” In the intervening 40 years, nothing has changed. Every member of the United Nations’ 193 member states experiences this every day, as the world debates everything from politics and society to culture and food, language and customs. In the case of Israel, none of these items are legal. Witnessing the raging conflict over the alleged plagiarism of “inauthentic” Israeli food and “authentic” Palestinian food, we conveniently forget that all food everywhere is plagiarized and an amalgamation of different cultures. please. I would argue that the more appropriation, the better. Look at how much better German cuisine has become by appropriating Italian, Turkish and Greek cuisine.
What makes Israel’s situation so unique is that this unacceptance exists ubiquitously in all corners of the world and among its most diverse populations. What is even more egregious is that this untenable situation is perhaps more pronounced in the realm of civil society than in government.
After a violent conflict, hostile neighbors may not be able to accept each other’s post-conflict existence for some time; There is no country in the world that has a ) This is relevant in the case of Israel. Serbia may not recognize the existence of Kosovo, and Georgia may not recognize the existence of Abkhazia, but it doesn’t matter when Nigeria or Thailand discuss the two countries that neither country exists. What makes Israel’s situation so unique is that this unacceptance exists ubiquitously in all corners of the world and among its most diverse populations. What is even more pernicious is that this untenable situation is perhaps more pronounced in the realm of civil society than in government. Even in the case of South Africa, which was under apartheid rule from the 1960s to the 1990s (always associated with Israel), it was the South African apartheid regime that was abhorrent, not the very existence of the country. There was no need to start the discussion about apartheid in South Africa by stating that we did not want South Africa to be destroyed as a country.
After two decades (1947-1948-1967) when Israel was the hero of the world left, left-wing icon Pete Seeger and his Weavers proudly sang “Tsena, Tsena” and other Israeli folk songs. Around the time thousands of people flocked to the Champions Elysee to protest the Arab blockade of Israel that preceded the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel became the most powerful unifier of all the world’s leftists. became. With the exception of admiration for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, no theme has unified the most diverse factions of the global left more than affinity for the Palestinians and antipathy toward Israel. Palestinians have become a global proletariat. Just as for Marx the proletariat was the only universalizing agent of history that could and would bring about salvation for all, so too the Palestinian cause was universalizing for most progressives. It gained worldwide significance as a form of liberation.
But why not the Kurds, for example? Or Uighurs? Both, like the Palestinians, are stateless and oppressed peoples. The reason is that in both cases, and in many others, the oppressor is non-white, non-European, non-American, so they are exempt from any evil.
Rejecting Israel in any way has today become the most important tenet of what secession means, far exceeding the belief in an objective conflict between capital and labor.
To be sure, there are gradations in the left’s hatred of Israel. Although the hatred is generally weaker among social democrats than among the far left, strong antipathy is common to all of them. I go further and say that rejecting Israel in any way has become the overriding tenet of leaving Israel today, and that the objective opposition between capital and labor, the universal that brought unity I would like to argue that it goes far beyond belief in a theoretical concept. Of the various factions of the Old Left, it has been replaced and overtaken by the New Left, which addresses deeply particularist identity issues.
Of course, sadly, antipathy towards Israel can easily lead to anti-Semitism. This need not be the case conceptually, but it is becoming increasingly so empirically. Nowhere is this more evident than in the material collected in a brilliant new book, “The Judenhas Underground: Anti-Semitism in an Ethnicized Society,” edited by Nicholas Potter and Stephen Lauer. The realm of progressive politics, including Black Lives Matter, Pride marches, women’s marches, the LGBTQ+ movement, and climate justice, is devoid of any serious hostility toward Israel, and is dominated by the monstrosity of classic anti-Semitism. Myths are featured, sometimes with new packaging, but often not. . In an environment that embraces the weak and disenfranchised and sees its entire raison d’être as defending the voiceless and the brutalized, we are nothing but poison to Israel and the Jewish people. . The reason is obvious. For these groups, Jews are not weak but powerful, not victims but perpetrators. Therefore, members of these environments have to tear up posters with pictures of hostages abducted to Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted to Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted to Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted to Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted in Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages kidnapped in Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted in Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages kidnapped in Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted in Gaza, and they have to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted in Gaza, and they have to hide the fact that Israeli babies have been beheaded and Israeli women have been raped. It was unacceptable. Because this would make Israelis and Jews victims. There can never be a white male colonizer, just as there can never be, by definition. In the Manichean worldview of good and evil that has become so common to these progressive groups, Jews clearly fall into the core of evil.
In the Manichean worldview of good and evil that has become so common to these progressive groups, Jews clearly fall into the core of evil.
It is for this very reason that even the Holocaust became a site of conflict. By not seeing this as a sacrifice of the Jews, but rather by remaining silent about it, or, even better, by seeing this as one of many incidents in a long process of colonialism, any sympathy for the Jews can be avoided. It becomes unnecessary and creates hostility towards the Jewish state. It may go out of control. And remember, in the everyday colloquialism of people talking about Israel, they easily slip from “Israelis” to “Jews.” This is often not due to conscious anti-Semitism, but may be more of a habit and a casual act, but this may indicate that the two are inseparable, if not outright anti-Semitism. , showing how hostility toward Israel can easily flow into Judeophobia.
Not surprisingly, this structure completely conquered the American representatives of this milieu, which are abundant in the country’s major academic institutions, especially in the faculties of humanities and social sciences. It is precisely in this environment that the Democratic Party has established an incredible monopoly power (the professors at the University of Michigan, where I belong, have a ratio of 25 Democrats to 1 Republican, which is very typical in this world). After 25 years as a faculty member at this university, I still aspire to meet the Democratic Party’s deep hostility to Israel over the past 10 or 20 years. It’s not surprising that we’ve seen people break in. Political life in the United States is more deeply divided than ever before (with the obvious exception of the Civil War), and with these two hostile opposing factions weighing almost every item of war against each other, Israel is in the service of It’s not surprising that it does. A welcome bullet for both. About the disastrous Israeli policy of openly supporting the Republican Party and becoming a de facto ally, making Israel the de facto “Republican Party” even though 75 percent of American Jews continue to vote Republican. I cannot cover it in this short essay. Democratic Party. However, just by aligning the Republican Party with Israel in this way, the Democratic Party has by default distanced itself from Israel.
And the situation is dire! A new poll doesn’t just reveal the deep divide between Republicans and Democrats over Israel. So, for example, the latest New York Times/Siena College poll from late December 2023 found that 77 percent of Republicans support Israel, while only 31 percent of Democrats support Israel. It is shown that it is supported. Despite the current war between Hamas and Israel (4 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of Democrats support the Palestinians), there is an even more troubling age divide within the Democratic Party. 46% of all 18-29 year olds support Palestinians over Israelis, compared to 75% of Democratic 18-29 year olds who support Palestinians over Israelis. From the age of 30 until he is 44, the respective figures are 24% and 36%. Among those aged 45 to 64, it was 13 percent and 57 percent. Among those 65 and older, the numbers range from 11 percent to 63 percent, making it clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perceived very differently by different generations in the United States.
These numbers are certainly deeply concerning to Democrats and the Biden campaign. Statements by young people such as “After Biden’s support of Israel’s criminal war against Gaza, I will not vote for that man again under any circumstances” are highly problematic for the president’s reelection. Because Biden would not have been able to defeat Donald Trump in 2020 without massive support. He needs the youth vote or he will not be able to vote again in 2024. Add to that the fact that the majority of the 300,000-plus Arab American community in my state of Michigan is even more clearly turning away from Biden, and there’s a problem. It gets even more serious. Michigan has the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the Union, and Biden won by a narrow margin in 2020, making it once again one of the nation’s top five battleground states, with the president likely to lose it. I can’t afford it. If that happens, it could easily be seen as a consequence of the severity of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict for American politics. After all, the all-Muslim City Council of Hamtramck, a suburb of Detroit that was once a Polish-American bastion, has decided to name a section of Holbrook Street that runs through the city’s center Palestine Street. has just been decided by a vote. For me, the horror of the October 7, 2023 pogrom is brought to a further climax by its impact on the US presidential election, one of which he professes to dismantle its very foundations. will be reached. Continuing the uninterrupted American republic that had lasted approximately 250 years, he established a dictatorship. I’m still hoping for that and think it’s unlikely, but I’m concerned it might not be impossible.
Andrei S. Markowitz is currently the Karl W. Deutsch University Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies and the Arthur F. Turnau Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has published many books, academic articles, conference papers, book reviews, and newspaper contributions in English and many foreign languages on a variety of topics, including German and Austrian politics, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, and social movements. He is the author and editor of . The European Right and the European Left. He has also conducted extensive research on comparative sports cultures in Europe and North America. His latest book is a memoir, Passport as Homeland: Rootless Comforts, published by Central European University Press in Budapest, Vienna, and New York.
This post is part of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Israel initiative. For more information about this initiative, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.
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