The banshees of anti-Israel/anti-Zionism propaganda portray Israel as a project of colonization that must engage in ethnic cleansing by apartheid and genocide. Israel is an outpost of “European White Supremacy” that, since the 1890s, has performed “settler imperialism.” This is their gospel.
The roots of this outlook lie in the thinking of Karl Marx. Marx viewed industrial capitalism as the new danger to the working class and democracy, and saw it as expanding globally. In the political pamphlet the “Communist Manifesto,” it was postulated that cheap commodities and the development of communications would break down walls; as a result, nations would be engaged in introducing “civilization” to the supposedly uncivilized. The “nations of peasants” are thus made dependent on “nations of bourgeois,” or “the East on the West.” As capitalism advances and improves, so do the capitalist nations naturally exert domination over those less so.
This ideology, however, takes on a mutated growth pattern of its own, exponentially so. An upcoming issue of the Journal for Architectural Education is themed “Palestine.” Its Call for Papers includes this language:
“that Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state is an established fact … [the] volume will … continue to learn from and with practices of resistance to the Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid … . Contributors might map, represent, theorize, and historicize genocide, ecocide, spaciocide, terracide, and urbicide as practices of colonial erasure.”
In essence, the editors leave no option for any academic in the field to disagree or express an opposing view. To do so would have him risk a charge of blasphemy with the result of cancelation and boycott, with all possible advancement stalled. Adhere, or be expunged.
Not only is today’s anti-Zionism predicated on a Marxist approach that sees capitalism as going global, which must result in colonization, but it has also adopted Marx’s anti-Semitic overview of Jews and Judaism.
In his 1844 “On the Jewish Question,” Marx targets Jewish economic life as one of “hucksterism,” which is the “empirical essence of Judaism.” Once the “subjective basis of Judaism,” Marx posits, “has been humanized,” society can then become emancipated from Judaism. He insists there is a connection between the religion of the Jews and Jewish involvement in society’s bourgeoisie character as a natural part of it.
For Marx, “practical Judaism” equals “huckstering and money,” and if Christians engage in such practices, they “become Jews.” Judaism seeks to achieve “universal dominance.” It alienates men. Jews become the ultimate enemy, and humankind needs to emancipate itself from this Judaism.
Whether or not one accepts Marx’s analysis, what is relevant for today’s crusade of anti-Zionism is that a Jewish state is a pariah. Israel becomes the arch-agent of colonialism—the replacement evil of capitalism—or the true root generator of capitalism. Marx was Jewish and white, yet his theorizing concepts have been adapted, remixed and weaponized to destroy the movement of Jewish nationality—Zionism—and its fulfillment: the State of Israel.
There is, however, one more ingredient in this neo-Marxist framework that drives the assault on Israel and Zionism and it is racism. Marx was class-focused, and therefore, the social and economic oppressions of today, based on gender and race, were left untreated. I am unsure what Marx would think about professed transgender theory or the harassing of Nancy Mace at her congressional offices, and yet, thanks to the tool of intersectionality and the atmosphere of wokeism, his structure has been enthusiastically welcomed by pro-Arab propagandists.
Mehdi Hasan, for example, published an op-ed in The Guardian titled, “Israel is a rogue nation,” demanding that it should be removed from the United Nations. Hasan, a Shi’ite Muslim educated at Christ Church, Oxford, knows very well the difference between a state and a nation. He sought to undermine not only Israel’s membership in the United Nations but to cast doubt on its Jewish nationality.
In the piece he wrote, “Israel only exists today because of a U.N. general assembly resolution.”
Israel, of course, exists because it has succeeded in defending itself. And if, to any degree, that 1947 resolution possesses relevance, since the so-called Palestine Arabs rejected it they shouldn’t exist at all. Logic, though, is never a propagandist’s strong point. Mixing and melding elements of Marxism and wokeism with an underlying layer of anti-Semitism has resulted in a campaign to negate Jewish identity and the right of Jews to maintain a state. In lecture halls, the streets, television studios, theaters and social-media platforms, the cauldron is stirred to produce a counter-message in a fog of filthy air in which fair is foul, and foul is fair.