The role of a particular aspect of contemporary woke left-wing ideology is playing an outsized role in fueling antisemitism and attacks on Israel in academia and elsewhere in American society. According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, the myth that Jews are aliens in their ancient homeland has gained traction in recent decades but the willingness of the left to single out Israel has more to do with ideology.
Tobin is joined by literary critic, poet and author Adam Kirsch, author of the new book, On Settler Colonialism, Ideology, Violence and Justice, who explains that the focus on Israel is more a matter of what is possible for ideologues to imagine happening than the details of their theories.
Kirsch points out that “settler/colonialism” is a term invented to describe countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, in which overwhelming numbers of Europeans conquered, evicted and/or supplanted much smaller indigenous populations. But as much as left-wing advocates for woke theories claim that this means the United States is an illegitimate country that ought to be dismantled, no serious person thinks that will happen or the 98% of the population that is not Native American will be forced to leave. So, its advocates content themselves with pointless and hypocritical “land acknowledgments.”
But, as Kirsch notes, when applied to Israel, a small country of less than 10 million people, whose Jewish majority is connected to the oldest of hatreds, such a fate is imaginable. That is a big part of the explanation for why the left, academia and the students who are indoctrinated in these toxic theories, are so obsessed with supporting its destruction.
The “settler/colonial” label has also been applied to places where a minority of European colonists ruled over a native majority such as the French in Algeria or the British in Rhodesia. But the fact that the Jews are the indigenous people of Israel is ignored because of woke concepts that falsely brand them as “white oppressors” and the Palestinians as victims, no matter what they do, including atrocities like the Oct. 7 massacres. And unlike genuine colonizers, the Jews have no “mother country” to return to if they lose their home.
Liberal Jews seem to find it difficult to resist such arguments because they have come to believe they must always identify with the underdog who has less power. But Kirsch asserts that such a philosophy fails to comprehend that, “if the goal is for Jews to stop being persecuted and oppressed, they must have political power and they must have a state of their own. And that is Zionism. That is the idea of Zionism. I think that if our goal as Jews is to ensure the future of the Jewish people, that Zionism is a sort of a necessity and that the state of Israel is a necessity.”
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