Cards on the table, so you understand where I'm coming from - I'm an American liberal Zionist, in favor of a two-state solution, an opponent of Netanyahu but a supporter of Israel in the Gaza War. I do not support war crimes, obviously, but I also don't think Israel's conduct in the war is primarily criminal, and I don't think genocide is occuring. I strongly oppose Trump administration efforts to silence and, especially, punish or deport critics of Israel.
Overall, this is a good essay and fairly well-argued, even if I disagree with much of it. The main weakness, though, is that it largely ignores Palestinian actions and preferences. Most notably, this comes through in your support for a single, democratic, multi-ethnic state in Israel/Palestine. There are two main problems with this. First, this is not the position favored by most Palestinians (or Israelis, for that matter). A solution that neither side wants is not really a solution. Second, it elides how such a situation would come to pass. You say that Israelis shouldn't fear this outcome, because they would still be richer and more powerful. But would they? It's hard to imagine a one-state outcome coming to pass in a way that doesn't involve conquest by one side, and it doesn't seem reasonable to me to assume that such a state would be democratic. Again, this ignores that the real-life supporters of a one-state solution (on both sides) are mostly supremacists.
Consider a hypothetical merger of the US and Canada. In theory, a progressive might support this - adding 40 million Canadians to the US, who are on average more liberal than Americans, would push American politics to the left. Either the liberal party would win every national election for decades or the conservative party would be forced to moderate. In reality, though, this wouldn't happen, because it ignores that the most likely way for Canada and the US to merge would be for the US to conquer Canada, which would likely involve a fascist takeover and diminished rights for everyone.
So when I hear a pro-Palestinian progressive say they favor a one-state solution, I consider that to be antisemitic (either naively or knowingly) because it ignores that such an outcome likely means that Hamas and similar groups have overrun Israel, and that millions of Jewish Israelis have been murdered or driven into exile. (And, to be clear, this is the same reason I oppose Israeli annexation of the West Bank, since that policy would necessarily involve Palestinians living in a perpetual state of oppression, worse than what exists currently. There is no reason to think Israel would extend democracy to the West Bank in this situation.)
I have somehow written at length and still feel like I haven't said half of what I planned, but I will stop here.
First, I didn't say that I personally support a one-state solution. I said that most progressive American anti-Zionists support one, insofar as they've thought through the conflict's solution at all. As footnote 8 alluded, my own views on what to do now are more pragmatic and less confident - maybe the subject of a future post, if Gaza survives for long enough to allow that.
I agree with much of what you've written here, I just think your last paragraph reduces antisemitism to something much less bad than its typical meaning, in ways that kind of prove my point. In the meaning intended by most speakers and understood by most listeners, antisemitism is *Jew hatred.* Prejudice, animus, hostility towards Jews on account of their race. What you're accusing pro-Palestinian progressives of is more like naivete--an idealistic ignorance of realities on ground that frustrate their ideal solution. That may or may not be true (as I said in my piece, many smart people do not agree that a one state solution "likely means the millions of Israelis have been murdered or driven into exile"). But even if it were true, it cheapens the weight of the accusation to call people antisemites just because they haven't thought through all the details yet in their bleeding-heart yearning for peace and justice for everyone. Racial hatred is not what drives them. Anger at senseless violence, waged against helpless victims, with their money and in their name, is what drives them.
Yes, on balance, you're correct that it is best to differentiate between people who hate Jews and people who (perhaps naively) support policies that would have negative effects on Jews. Since Oct 7th, though, I have had much less patience for such distinctions, especially since people in these two groups often ally together, as Alex Potts noted in a different comment. This alliance can serve to empower the true Jew-haters, even if that is not the intent.
Can you understand why people who have always been animated by reducing Palestinians' suffering feel the exact same thing in reverse?
"It is best to differentiate between Zionists who hate Palestinians for racial reasons, and Zionists who support policies which are currently butchering tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians because they've convinced themselves those policies are purely defensive. But since October 12th or so, I've had much less patience for such distinctions."
Yes, of course. If the situation were reversed and I were Palestinian, I don't know that I would be particularly interested in making fine-grained distinctions among Zionists. Which goes a long way towards explaining why this conflict has lasted ~100 years. The atrocities of each side harden hearts on the other.
That, of course, is part of why I personally don't go around shouting inflammatory slogans ("From the River to the Sea ...") or propounding tendentious opinions ("Palestinians aren't even a real people ..."). I would also note that my position (a two-state solution) involves creating a Palestinian state, whereas the one-state solution involves destroying the existing Israeli state, so the two aren't symmetrical - Israelis wouldn't be directly harmed by the creation of a Palestinian state (in fact, I think they would benefit and it would be a win-win).
Finally, though this is a little off-topic, I wanted to note that I have three children. Two of them have had antisemitic hate crimes occur at their schools this year, and given where we live, I don't think these were committed by right-wing antisemites. The third had a day of disruptive pro-Palestinian protest inside the school which was essentially condoned by the administration and local government. I don't know if the people who committed the hate crimes were actual Jew-haters or merely upset about Israeli policy and taking it out on the wrong targets, but to some extent, it doesn't matter.
This is a nitpick about footnote 7 that I think is worth making to contribute to the otherwise well-researched argument there. The 2600 figure is off by about 700 years, depending on where you draw the lines. I presume you are aware of this, but some readers may take the figure literally. My version of the history:
After Biblical Israel was destroyed, enough Jews returned that they could at least claim Jerusalem as their place of residence and built a Second Temple, of which the Western Wall stands to this day as one of the most holy places for Jewish prayer. It is also recorded (for example in the book of Ezra) that there were ideological conflicts between the returners (from Cyrus' Persia) and the Jews that already lived there. It seems that the returners' interpretation of their religion won out. The Second Temple period would have started, depending where you count from, around 600-400 BC (the usual date given for the Temple construction is just before 500 BC).
They may have been formally under the Persians or Seleucids or Romans among others, but there was definitely a Jewish presence with some latidude to run their own affairs as long as they played their part as good subjects. When they didn't and were lucky, you get Hanukkah to celebrate the rededication of the Temple.
The story of Jesus could only happen and make sense in the context of a Jewish presence in Jerusalem (and Nazareth) that was officially ruled by the Romans but given a certain leeway to run their own affairs as long as they paid taxes and didn't cause trouble. This is how we get the client-king Herod, whom Jesus and his chroniclers were, to put it lightly, not very fond of.
The destruction of the Second Temple is usually dated to 70 CE, after a series of revolts and uprisings. The famous Titus' Arch in Rome shows an image of soldiers carring off the Menorah.
So we can establish a Jewish presence in Jerusalem from around 500 BC to 70 AD, occasionally as an independent state, mostly as client kingdoms of various powers with varying degrees of autonomy.
That makes in a question of 75 years vs just under 2000 years in my mind. Sure, one number is still massively larger than the other. But I feel that we can't ignore something the size of the Second Temple in our chronology.
Sure, and when I said Jews were "dispersed" in my hasty recap of this history, I did not mean to imply that none of them ever lived there again. I meant that from then on, they were never again the majority in the land until modern times. Given that clarification, it seems everything you've written above is compatible with this sentence from my footnote, no?
"Over the next 2600 years, Historic Palestine changed hands between many empires. A minority of the region remained Jewish, but the majority of its inhabitants became Muslim soon after the creation of Islam and remained so for over 1,000 years."
I think that's right - one can make a stronger case for Jerusalem being majority Jewish for longer, the rest of the region is a mess to describe depending on where the empire of the day drew its province boundaries.
If one wanted to, post-1000 one could mention the Umayads and Seljuks and Ottomans and everyone else I'd have to look up, but religiously they were definitely Muslim.
I think a more reasonable criticism of western progressives might be that they are too eager to ally with antizionists in the Arab world, who are much closer to that first set of ideas than the second. In practice. I think a lot of them delude themselves into thinking they are brothers-in-arms, whereas in fact they disagree on pretty much everything except the Israeli question.
> But there are also perfectly defensible reasons to oppose the idea that any race—even a race as historically persecuted as Jews—has a right to wield as much violence as Israel does to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel. Some of these reasons may be that race is made up and so are borders; that people with power should value all lives equally; that 2,600 years is too many to reclaim your ancestors’ land, whereas 75 years may not be;6 that Western superpowers arming white settlers to illegally seize land from Arabs bears some resemblance to colonialism and apartheid; or belief that a one-state solution with minority protections in a secular democracy could be the fastest path to peace and justice for all the region’s inhabitants, and if that means the state cannot be expressly Jewish by charter, so be it.
The reason why anti-zionism is labeled as antisemitism is not that any of the above points are unreasonable or prima facie antisemitic, but rather that being a commited anti zionist de facto necessitates wildly different treatment of Israel. Let's break it down point-by-point:
>race is made up and so are borders
Where are the anti-Gaullists and anti-Garibaldines arguing that we need a mass global movement to abolish France and Italy as independent countries because "race is made up and so are borders?" Israel is the only country that is the target of an active movement to make it stop existing on these grounds even though these arguments could apply to literally any nation on earth.
>that people with power should value all lives equally
I'm a moral cosmopolitan, but no other nation on earth is expected to not have a preference for the welfare of its own citizens, and plenty of nations maintain ius sanguinis citizenship without controversy. Yet only Israel faces this reproach.
> that 2,600 years is too many to reclaim your ancestors’ land, whereas 75 years may not be
Palestinians are the only people on earth who get taken seriously when they demand the reversal of an already-accomplished population transfer. If Turks, Greeks, or Germans made similar demands about Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and Prussia that Palestinians make about the Right of Return, they'd be laughed out of the room. If a German nationalist student association held a memorial service for the exiles from Prussia (i.e. their own Nakba) we'd all know exactly what was going on.
> that Western superpowers arming white settlers to illegally seize land from Arabs bears some resemblance to colonialism and apartheid
Mizrahi Jews outnumber Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. Israel is not a "white" country. This point makes no sense, especially considering that these very Mizrahi Jews were expelled from their home countries - a clear genocide which none of the Principled Anti-Zionists Who Are Definitely Not Antisemitic ever seem to take issue with or consider important context.
> belief that a one-state solution with minority protections in a secular democracy could be the fastest path to peace and justice for all the region’s inhabitants, and if that means the state cannot be expressly Jewish by charter, so be it
This is an absolutely insane thing to believe given that Jews have been genocided from all other Arab countries.
I addressed a lot of this later in the piece, under "Selective Application Arguments." On each of these points you pretend Israel's Jewishness is the reason it receives unique criticism, when actually it's a) some other reason, and/or b) not a unique criticism.
On race being made up - "Many racial groups are denied states for practical reasons, and this is usually not blamed on bigotry. These include the Kurds, Catalans, Kashmiris, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Tamils, and Québécois."
Race being made up is not the most direct reason people think Israel shouldn't exist. People think that because maintaining Israel's existence requires a high degree of violence on other people with equally valid claims to the land. That's not the case for France. Race being made up is merely a rebuttal to the idea that this violence is justified because it's the only way to have a Jewish ethnostate. There is no contradiction in the idea that ethnostates work fine when an area has been dominated by only one race for centuries, but not fine when multiple races have valid claims to the same area.
On valuing all lives equally - every nation is criticized when it treats foreign life too cheaply, certainly including the US. I have called on my own country to treat all lives equally for decades. In 2014, I wrote a thesis on the U.S. drone program that estimated that U.S. drone strikes at the time were killing about one civilian per six or seven enemy combatants—and I argued that this was far more collateral damage than killing the combatants was worth. Early in the war, Israel was accepting a ratio of 20 dead civilians for every one, low-level enemy combatant: over 100x worse than the U.S. drone strike ratio. By Israel’s admission, at least two-thirds of the Palestinians killed have been civilians, which likely counts all adult males as combatants; other estimates exceed 90%. The idea that Israel’s critics are holding it to a higher standard than other nations in this regard is absurd.
On reclaiming land, you completely sidestepped the point about thousands of years v. 75 years. Individual Palestinians alive today were dispossessed of land belonging to them - not the case for Ancient Smyrna. As importantly, it is not an already-accomplished population transfer; it is an in-progress population transfer, as West Bank settlements and efforts to make Gaza uninhabitale make clear.
On "arming white settlers" - the state of Israel was founded in large part by white settlers from Europe, armed and aided by Britain and then the United States. The racial breakdown today is irrelevant, as is the whiteness of Israelis today. Those are things only ethnonationalists care about, and as my post made clear, I'm not one of them. My post also made clear that many on the left should acknowledge genocides against Jews as important context instead of dismissing or trivializing that - we agree there.
In a one-state solution Jews would be roughly half of the population and start out controlling almost all businesses, wealth, courts, and levers of political power. Intense, generational racial hatreds have been overcome to enable relatively peaceful coexistence in the same nation before, such as in South Africa. The idea that this could *one day* be possible may or may not be realistic or naive, but it's not "insane" - it's believed in good faith by millions of smart and well-meaning people, some of which are just as informed as you.
>Race being made up is not the most direct reason people think Israel shouldn't exist. People think that because maintaining Israel's existence requires a high degree of violence on other people with equally valid claims to the land.
This is unfair to 2-state side because much of the "necessary" violence is downstream of ridiculous maximalist demands; e.g. Israeli settlement building & Palestinian refusal of Israeli peace offers. Specifically, the Palestinians refused the UN partition plan while the Jewish agency accepted it (some people said that they only accepted part of it, but I don't think this is true - the Jewish agency was prepared to accept the partition, at least on a temporary basis.) The alleged unfairness of the partition plan doesn't excuse the Palestinians, because their motivation for going to war was not to negotiate for a better deal, but commit genocide against their Jewish neighbors. You can see how it's unfair to Israel to say that it's not allowed to exist because it depends on violence to exist... because it has to resist the violent attacks of people with genocidal intentions towards Jews. Like, imagine if people decided that France wasn't allowed to exist because Occitans suddenly decided they didn't like sharing a country with Bretons and started attacking them.
>On valuing all lives equally - every nation is criticized when it treats foreign life too cheaply, certainly including the US.
I agree that Israel's current willingness to inflict collateral damage is far too high, and the ratio of civilians:combatants is heavily skewed and unacceptable. However, this does not support the much stronger claim that Israel should be expected to regard all people *equally*. States are expected to limit harm to enemy civilians to the minimum militarily necessary - that's very different from treating them as well as their own civilians!
>On reclaiming land, you completely sidestepped the point about thousands of years v. 75 years.
I did not sidestep this point; in fact, I very directly addressed by intentionally picking modern examples. There are still-living Greeks who were born in Smyrna, which the Greek military occupied as recently as the 1920s - this isn't ancient history! There are still-living Germans who were born in Prussia, but as I said, if German nationalist student associations showed up on American college campuses and 1) held memorial services for the German exile from Prussia and 2) started demanding the Polish government recognize German right of return to Prussia, and possible even a 1 state solution to the problem, it'd take everyone in the world about 5 seconds to figure out that these people were Nazis.
> As importantly, it is not an already-accomplished population transfer; it is an in-progress population transfer, as West Bank settlements and efforts to make Gaza uninhabitale make clear.
The Palestinian demand to end settlement expansions and for Netanyahu to negotiate to end the war in good faith are not unreasonable. The Palestinian demand for the right of return to places that are internationally recognized to be Israeli territory is unreasonable because it does in fact constitute a reversal of an already-accomplished population transfer; specifically the Nakba. It should become an ironclad principle of international affairs that people don't get demand to undo past population transfers - that'd quickly escalate to calls for reparatory ethnic cleansing.
>The racial breakdown today is irrelevant, as is the whiteness of Israelis today.
It is relevant for understanding the conflict. There are two theories of bad, evil Israeli maximalism: the "colony" theory of Israel and the "refugee camp" theory of Israel; they are not strictly mutually exclusive but the former, favored by the left, sees Israel as a white settler colony that will by necessity harbors genocidal intent and therefore needs to be abolished. The latter says that Israel's worst impulses come from the fact that many Israeli Jews were expelled from Arab countries and therefore are violently defending themselves against their historical oppressors.
By referring to Israel as "white," pro-Palestinian people are trying to use pattern-matching (white = oppressor, brown = oppressed) to make people think that the "colony" theory is correct. However, the empirical evidence is clearly on the side of "refugee camp" theory - most right-wing Israeli voters are Mizrahi Jews (i.e. those expelled from their homes and historically oppressed by Arabs) whereas Ashkenazi Jews (i.e. the original "white settlers") are actually very conciliatory towards the Palestinians.
People who claim that Israel needs to be abolished because its an inherently colonial state are unable or unwilling to understand that Israeli extremism comes from Mizrahis; i.e. it is a learned response to the oppression and genocide they suffered at the hands of their Arab neighbors. That doesn't change the fact that Netanyahu is an evil bastard, but it should change one's appraisal of the situation.
>My post also made clear that many on the left should acknowledge genocides against Jews as important context instead of dismissing or trivializing that - we agree there.
Then you should understand why I seriously take issue with leftists trying to frame this as a white vs brown race thing, when it is clearly about a historically persecuted groups - Jews - defending themselves against their historical oppressors who, with 100% consistency, ethnically cleansed them wherever they had the power to do so.
>In a one-state solution Jews would be roughly half of the population
I'm not sure this is true. Palestinians, unlike everyone else in the world, inherit their refugee status. If the diaspore all returned to the unified state, they would massively outnumber Jews. One might suspect this is why Palestinians get unique treatment when it comes to (a) their maximalist demand to annex the other side, (b) their maximalist demand to the right of return, and (c) their maximalist demand to inherit refugee status for an arbitrarily long period of time. One might think that a certain kind of person wants Jews to be a minority, and at the mercy of people who have always carried out an ethnic cleansing against them whenever they had the power to do so! It's almost as though personal antipathy towards a historically disfavored group is motivating some people's reasoning here!
>Intense, generational racial hatreds have been overcome to enable relatively peaceful coexistence in the same nation before, such as in South Africa.
Given that Jews in the Middle East have been victims of ethnic cleansing in literally 100% of cases where they've been at the mercy of an Arab majority, I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Israelis take this risk. It might be more reasonable to establish ties between two separate states and explore possible integration later when tensions have dissipated. This would probably have a lower chance of success, but it also has a lower chance of ending with Jews being the victims of another genocide.
Opposing Israel on grounds of opposing nation states in general is great, but in the current state of the world, Israel will necessarily be replaced by a worse, more violent, less democratic, less diverse, nation state. This is a non-starter. And the situation of the stateless people you mentioned is an argument in favor of nation states.
These arguments always boil down to something like "if everyone were as peaceable and moral as me, the Jews would be fine." What is the amazing situation that would emerge for which it is worth it to dismantle a successful democracy of 10 million people? What is it?
Anti-Zionists are usually not opposed to states in general. They're often opposed to *ethno*-states, which define the nation based on race, and thus link rights and citizenship with race.
To say that the Zionist state would necessarily have to be replaced with a worse state is just to beg the question that Anti-Zionists contest. They conceive of alternative states they think could be better, on varying timelines, not all of which would require that Israel's democracy be dismantled. For example, some proposals involve that democracy merely being extended, to millions of additional people who are not Jewish.
If everyone were as peaceable and moral as me, most of those in Gaza would be fine too. But they're not - they're about as far from fine as it's possible to be, in ways that cause morally decent people to question how "successful" Israel's current democracy is at bringing peace and justice to half the region's inhabitants.
Great. I'm talking about the current situation. In the current situation, the nation state of Israel could be replaced only with the nation state of Palestine, which would be less democratic, less just, and less diverse.
I would love to replace Israel with a Jewish-Arab democracy where all could flourish, and where persecuted Jews and Arabs would find refuge, but I can't. I also don't know how to bring about a situation like that. Israel **at present** could be replaced only with another ethnostate, a less democratic one.
So anti Zionism in the world's current configuration on grounds of opposing ethnostates in general is just a non-starter.
"Israel **at present** could be replaced only with another ethnostate, a less democratic one."
I'm not convinced this is true. More importantly, to the theme of my post: not everyone who doubts or disagrees with this hates Jews. And you don't get to put an artificial timeline on how long a one state solution is allowed to take. From the AZ perspective, the status quo is actually non-starter, and anti-Zionism is the only just destination - whether or not it's something we can snap our fingers and create immediately with no transitional phase.
Okay, you don't hate Jews. I don't think you do and I don't care. My argument is that if you're opposed to nation states, then a Jewish one and a Palestinian one are equivalent, and these are the options, and what you need to propose to be taken seriously and for your objections to matter is a way to change both societies into societies that can coexist.
Cards on the table, so you understand where I'm coming from - I'm an American liberal Zionist, in favor of a two-state solution, an opponent of Netanyahu but a supporter of Israel in the Gaza War. I do not support war crimes, obviously, but I also don't think Israel's conduct in the war is primarily criminal, and I don't think genocide is occuring. I strongly oppose Trump administration efforts to silence and, especially, punish or deport critics of Israel.
Overall, this is a good essay and fairly well-argued, even if I disagree with much of it. The main weakness, though, is that it largely ignores Palestinian actions and preferences. Most notably, this comes through in your support for a single, democratic, multi-ethnic state in Israel/Palestine. There are two main problems with this. First, this is not the position favored by most Palestinians (or Israelis, for that matter). A solution that neither side wants is not really a solution. Second, it elides how such a situation would come to pass. You say that Israelis shouldn't fear this outcome, because they would still be richer and more powerful. But would they? It's hard to imagine a one-state outcome coming to pass in a way that doesn't involve conquest by one side, and it doesn't seem reasonable to me to assume that such a state would be democratic. Again, this ignores that the real-life supporters of a one-state solution (on both sides) are mostly supremacists.
Consider a hypothetical merger of the US and Canada. In theory, a progressive might support this - adding 40 million Canadians to the US, who are on average more liberal than Americans, would push American politics to the left. Either the liberal party would win every national election for decades or the conservative party would be forced to moderate. In reality, though, this wouldn't happen, because it ignores that the most likely way for Canada and the US to merge would be for the US to conquer Canada, which would likely involve a fascist takeover and diminished rights for everyone.
So when I hear a pro-Palestinian progressive say they favor a one-state solution, I consider that to be antisemitic (either naively or knowingly) because it ignores that such an outcome likely means that Hamas and similar groups have overrun Israel, and that millions of Jewish Israelis have been murdered or driven into exile. (And, to be clear, this is the same reason I oppose Israeli annexation of the West Bank, since that policy would necessarily involve Palestinians living in a perpetual state of oppression, worse than what exists currently. There is no reason to think Israel would extend democracy to the West Bank in this situation.)
I have somehow written at length and still feel like I haven't said half of what I planned, but I will stop here.
First, I didn't say that I personally support a one-state solution. I said that most progressive American anti-Zionists support one, insofar as they've thought through the conflict's solution at all. As footnote 8 alluded, my own views on what to do now are more pragmatic and less confident - maybe the subject of a future post, if Gaza survives for long enough to allow that.
I agree with much of what you've written here, I just think your last paragraph reduces antisemitism to something much less bad than its typical meaning, in ways that kind of prove my point. In the meaning intended by most speakers and understood by most listeners, antisemitism is *Jew hatred.* Prejudice, animus, hostility towards Jews on account of their race. What you're accusing pro-Palestinian progressives of is more like naivete--an idealistic ignorance of realities on ground that frustrate their ideal solution. That may or may not be true (as I said in my piece, many smart people do not agree that a one state solution "likely means the millions of Israelis have been murdered or driven into exile"). But even if it were true, it cheapens the weight of the accusation to call people antisemites just because they haven't thought through all the details yet in their bleeding-heart yearning for peace and justice for everyone. Racial hatred is not what drives them. Anger at senseless violence, waged against helpless victims, with their money and in their name, is what drives them.
(To put my cards on the table, here is what I think about what Israel is doing in Gaza: https://exasperatedalien.substack.com/p/the-killing-you-pay-for-war-in-gaza)
Yes, on balance, you're correct that it is best to differentiate between people who hate Jews and people who (perhaps naively) support policies that would have negative effects on Jews. Since Oct 7th, though, I have had much less patience for such distinctions, especially since people in these two groups often ally together, as Alex Potts noted in a different comment. This alliance can serve to empower the true Jew-haters, even if that is not the intent.
Can you understand why people who have always been animated by reducing Palestinians' suffering feel the exact same thing in reverse?
"It is best to differentiate between Zionists who hate Palestinians for racial reasons, and Zionists who support policies which are currently butchering tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians because they've convinced themselves those policies are purely defensive. But since October 12th or so, I've had much less patience for such distinctions."
Yes, of course. If the situation were reversed and I were Palestinian, I don't know that I would be particularly interested in making fine-grained distinctions among Zionists. Which goes a long way towards explaining why this conflict has lasted ~100 years. The atrocities of each side harden hearts on the other.
That, of course, is part of why I personally don't go around shouting inflammatory slogans ("From the River to the Sea ...") or propounding tendentious opinions ("Palestinians aren't even a real people ..."). I would also note that my position (a two-state solution) involves creating a Palestinian state, whereas the one-state solution involves destroying the existing Israeli state, so the two aren't symmetrical - Israelis wouldn't be directly harmed by the creation of a Palestinian state (in fact, I think they would benefit and it would be a win-win).
Finally, though this is a little off-topic, I wanted to note that I have three children. Two of them have had antisemitic hate crimes occur at their schools this year, and given where we live, I don't think these were committed by right-wing antisemites. The third had a day of disruptive pro-Palestinian protest inside the school which was essentially condoned by the administration and local government. I don't know if the people who committed the hate crimes were actual Jew-haters or merely upset about Israeli policy and taking it out on the wrong targets, but to some extent, it doesn't matter.
You might enjoy this talk I had with Yakov Hirsch about the conflation of Israel-criticism with antisemitism. He goes deep on the roots of this: https://behavior-podcast.com/why-is-criticism-of-israel-sometimes-called-antisemitic-with-yakov-hirsch/
There is even ethnic religious groups within Israel that don’t have their own states such as the Druze and the Samaritans
This is a nitpick about footnote 7 that I think is worth making to contribute to the otherwise well-researched argument there. The 2600 figure is off by about 700 years, depending on where you draw the lines. I presume you are aware of this, but some readers may take the figure literally. My version of the history:
After Biblical Israel was destroyed, enough Jews returned that they could at least claim Jerusalem as their place of residence and built a Second Temple, of which the Western Wall stands to this day as one of the most holy places for Jewish prayer. It is also recorded (for example in the book of Ezra) that there were ideological conflicts between the returners (from Cyrus' Persia) and the Jews that already lived there. It seems that the returners' interpretation of their religion won out. The Second Temple period would have started, depending where you count from, around 600-400 BC (the usual date given for the Temple construction is just before 500 BC).
They may have been formally under the Persians or Seleucids or Romans among others, but there was definitely a Jewish presence with some latidude to run their own affairs as long as they played their part as good subjects. When they didn't and were lucky, you get Hanukkah to celebrate the rededication of the Temple.
The story of Jesus could only happen and make sense in the context of a Jewish presence in Jerusalem (and Nazareth) that was officially ruled by the Romans but given a certain leeway to run their own affairs as long as they paid taxes and didn't cause trouble. This is how we get the client-king Herod, whom Jesus and his chroniclers were, to put it lightly, not very fond of.
The destruction of the Second Temple is usually dated to 70 CE, after a series of revolts and uprisings. The famous Titus' Arch in Rome shows an image of soldiers carring off the Menorah.
So we can establish a Jewish presence in Jerusalem from around 500 BC to 70 AD, occasionally as an independent state, mostly as client kingdoms of various powers with varying degrees of autonomy.
That makes in a question of 75 years vs just under 2000 years in my mind. Sure, one number is still massively larger than the other. But I feel that we can't ignore something the size of the Second Temple in our chronology.
Sure, and when I said Jews were "dispersed" in my hasty recap of this history, I did not mean to imply that none of them ever lived there again. I meant that from then on, they were never again the majority in the land until modern times. Given that clarification, it seems everything you've written above is compatible with this sentence from my footnote, no?
"Over the next 2600 years, Historic Palestine changed hands between many empires. A minority of the region remained Jewish, but the majority of its inhabitants became Muslim soon after the creation of Islam and remained so for over 1,000 years."
I think that's right - one can make a stronger case for Jerusalem being majority Jewish for longer, the rest of the region is a mess to describe depending on where the empire of the day drew its province boundaries.
If one wanted to, post-1000 one could mention the Umayads and Seljuks and Ottomans and everyone else I'd have to look up, but religiously they were definitely Muslim.
I think a more reasonable criticism of western progressives might be that they are too eager to ally with antizionists in the Arab world, who are much closer to that first set of ideas than the second. In practice. I think a lot of them delude themselves into thinking they are brothers-in-arms, whereas in fact they disagree on pretty much everything except the Israeli question.
> But there are also perfectly defensible reasons to oppose the idea that any race—even a race as historically persecuted as Jews—has a right to wield as much violence as Israel does to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel. Some of these reasons may be that race is made up and so are borders; that people with power should value all lives equally; that 2,600 years is too many to reclaim your ancestors’ land, whereas 75 years may not be;6 that Western superpowers arming white settlers to illegally seize land from Arabs bears some resemblance to colonialism and apartheid; or belief that a one-state solution with minority protections in a secular democracy could be the fastest path to peace and justice for all the region’s inhabitants, and if that means the state cannot be expressly Jewish by charter, so be it.
The reason why anti-zionism is labeled as antisemitism is not that any of the above points are unreasonable or prima facie antisemitic, but rather that being a commited anti zionist de facto necessitates wildly different treatment of Israel. Let's break it down point-by-point:
>race is made up and so are borders
Where are the anti-Gaullists and anti-Garibaldines arguing that we need a mass global movement to abolish France and Italy as independent countries because "race is made up and so are borders?" Israel is the only country that is the target of an active movement to make it stop existing on these grounds even though these arguments could apply to literally any nation on earth.
>that people with power should value all lives equally
I'm a moral cosmopolitan, but no other nation on earth is expected to not have a preference for the welfare of its own citizens, and plenty of nations maintain ius sanguinis citizenship without controversy. Yet only Israel faces this reproach.
> that 2,600 years is too many to reclaim your ancestors’ land, whereas 75 years may not be
Palestinians are the only people on earth who get taken seriously when they demand the reversal of an already-accomplished population transfer. If Turks, Greeks, or Germans made similar demands about Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and Prussia that Palestinians make about the Right of Return, they'd be laughed out of the room. If a German nationalist student association held a memorial service for the exiles from Prussia (i.e. their own Nakba) we'd all know exactly what was going on.
> that Western superpowers arming white settlers to illegally seize land from Arabs bears some resemblance to colonialism and apartheid
Mizrahi Jews outnumber Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. Israel is not a "white" country. This point makes no sense, especially considering that these very Mizrahi Jews were expelled from their home countries - a clear genocide which none of the Principled Anti-Zionists Who Are Definitely Not Antisemitic ever seem to take issue with or consider important context.
> belief that a one-state solution with minority protections in a secular democracy could be the fastest path to peace and justice for all the region’s inhabitants, and if that means the state cannot be expressly Jewish by charter, so be it
This is an absolutely insane thing to believe given that Jews have been genocided from all other Arab countries.
I addressed a lot of this later in the piece, under "Selective Application Arguments." On each of these points you pretend Israel's Jewishness is the reason it receives unique criticism, when actually it's a) some other reason, and/or b) not a unique criticism.
On race being made up - "Many racial groups are denied states for practical reasons, and this is usually not blamed on bigotry. These include the Kurds, Catalans, Kashmiris, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Tamils, and Québécois."
Race being made up is not the most direct reason people think Israel shouldn't exist. People think that because maintaining Israel's existence requires a high degree of violence on other people with equally valid claims to the land. That's not the case for France. Race being made up is merely a rebuttal to the idea that this violence is justified because it's the only way to have a Jewish ethnostate. There is no contradiction in the idea that ethnostates work fine when an area has been dominated by only one race for centuries, but not fine when multiple races have valid claims to the same area.
On valuing all lives equally - every nation is criticized when it treats foreign life too cheaply, certainly including the US. I have called on my own country to treat all lives equally for decades. In 2014, I wrote a thesis on the U.S. drone program that estimated that U.S. drone strikes at the time were killing about one civilian per six or seven enemy combatants—and I argued that this was far more collateral damage than killing the combatants was worth. Early in the war, Israel was accepting a ratio of 20 dead civilians for every one, low-level enemy combatant: over 100x worse than the U.S. drone strike ratio. By Israel’s admission, at least two-thirds of the Palestinians killed have been civilians, which likely counts all adult males as combatants; other estimates exceed 90%. The idea that Israel’s critics are holding it to a higher standard than other nations in this regard is absurd.
On reclaiming land, you completely sidestepped the point about thousands of years v. 75 years. Individual Palestinians alive today were dispossessed of land belonging to them - not the case for Ancient Smyrna. As importantly, it is not an already-accomplished population transfer; it is an in-progress population transfer, as West Bank settlements and efforts to make Gaza uninhabitale make clear.
On "arming white settlers" - the state of Israel was founded in large part by white settlers from Europe, armed and aided by Britain and then the United States. The racial breakdown today is irrelevant, as is the whiteness of Israelis today. Those are things only ethnonationalists care about, and as my post made clear, I'm not one of them. My post also made clear that many on the left should acknowledge genocides against Jews as important context instead of dismissing or trivializing that - we agree there.
In a one-state solution Jews would be roughly half of the population and start out controlling almost all businesses, wealth, courts, and levers of political power. Intense, generational racial hatreds have been overcome to enable relatively peaceful coexistence in the same nation before, such as in South Africa. The idea that this could *one day* be possible may or may not be realistic or naive, but it's not "insane" - it's believed in good faith by millions of smart and well-meaning people, some of which are just as informed as you.
>Race being made up is not the most direct reason people think Israel shouldn't exist. People think that because maintaining Israel's existence requires a high degree of violence on other people with equally valid claims to the land.
This is unfair to 2-state side because much of the "necessary" violence is downstream of ridiculous maximalist demands; e.g. Israeli settlement building & Palestinian refusal of Israeli peace offers. Specifically, the Palestinians refused the UN partition plan while the Jewish agency accepted it (some people said that they only accepted part of it, but I don't think this is true - the Jewish agency was prepared to accept the partition, at least on a temporary basis.) The alleged unfairness of the partition plan doesn't excuse the Palestinians, because their motivation for going to war was not to negotiate for a better deal, but commit genocide against their Jewish neighbors. You can see how it's unfair to Israel to say that it's not allowed to exist because it depends on violence to exist... because it has to resist the violent attacks of people with genocidal intentions towards Jews. Like, imagine if people decided that France wasn't allowed to exist because Occitans suddenly decided they didn't like sharing a country with Bretons and started attacking them.
>On valuing all lives equally - every nation is criticized when it treats foreign life too cheaply, certainly including the US.
I agree that Israel's current willingness to inflict collateral damage is far too high, and the ratio of civilians:combatants is heavily skewed and unacceptable. However, this does not support the much stronger claim that Israel should be expected to regard all people *equally*. States are expected to limit harm to enemy civilians to the minimum militarily necessary - that's very different from treating them as well as their own civilians!
>On reclaiming land, you completely sidestepped the point about thousands of years v. 75 years.
I did not sidestep this point; in fact, I very directly addressed by intentionally picking modern examples. There are still-living Greeks who were born in Smyrna, which the Greek military occupied as recently as the 1920s - this isn't ancient history! There are still-living Germans who were born in Prussia, but as I said, if German nationalist student associations showed up on American college campuses and 1) held memorial services for the German exile from Prussia and 2) started demanding the Polish government recognize German right of return to Prussia, and possible even a 1 state solution to the problem, it'd take everyone in the world about 5 seconds to figure out that these people were Nazis.
> As importantly, it is not an already-accomplished population transfer; it is an in-progress population transfer, as West Bank settlements and efforts to make Gaza uninhabitale make clear.
The Palestinian demand to end settlement expansions and for Netanyahu to negotiate to end the war in good faith are not unreasonable. The Palestinian demand for the right of return to places that are internationally recognized to be Israeli territory is unreasonable because it does in fact constitute a reversal of an already-accomplished population transfer; specifically the Nakba. It should become an ironclad principle of international affairs that people don't get demand to undo past population transfers - that'd quickly escalate to calls for reparatory ethnic cleansing.
>The racial breakdown today is irrelevant, as is the whiteness of Israelis today.
It is relevant for understanding the conflict. There are two theories of bad, evil Israeli maximalism: the "colony" theory of Israel and the "refugee camp" theory of Israel; they are not strictly mutually exclusive but the former, favored by the left, sees Israel as a white settler colony that will by necessity harbors genocidal intent and therefore needs to be abolished. The latter says that Israel's worst impulses come from the fact that many Israeli Jews were expelled from Arab countries and therefore are violently defending themselves against their historical oppressors.
By referring to Israel as "white," pro-Palestinian people are trying to use pattern-matching (white = oppressor, brown = oppressed) to make people think that the "colony" theory is correct. However, the empirical evidence is clearly on the side of "refugee camp" theory - most right-wing Israeli voters are Mizrahi Jews (i.e. those expelled from their homes and historically oppressed by Arabs) whereas Ashkenazi Jews (i.e. the original "white settlers") are actually very conciliatory towards the Palestinians.
People who claim that Israel needs to be abolished because its an inherently colonial state are unable or unwilling to understand that Israeli extremism comes from Mizrahis; i.e. it is a learned response to the oppression and genocide they suffered at the hands of their Arab neighbors. That doesn't change the fact that Netanyahu is an evil bastard, but it should change one's appraisal of the situation.
>My post also made clear that many on the left should acknowledge genocides against Jews as important context instead of dismissing or trivializing that - we agree there.
Then you should understand why I seriously take issue with leftists trying to frame this as a white vs brown race thing, when it is clearly about a historically persecuted groups - Jews - defending themselves against their historical oppressors who, with 100% consistency, ethnically cleansed them wherever they had the power to do so.
>In a one-state solution Jews would be roughly half of the population
I'm not sure this is true. Palestinians, unlike everyone else in the world, inherit their refugee status. If the diaspore all returned to the unified state, they would massively outnumber Jews. One might suspect this is why Palestinians get unique treatment when it comes to (a) their maximalist demand to annex the other side, (b) their maximalist demand to the right of return, and (c) their maximalist demand to inherit refugee status for an arbitrarily long period of time. One might think that a certain kind of person wants Jews to be a minority, and at the mercy of people who have always carried out an ethnic cleansing against them whenever they had the power to do so! It's almost as though personal antipathy towards a historically disfavored group is motivating some people's reasoning here!
>Intense, generational racial hatreds have been overcome to enable relatively peaceful coexistence in the same nation before, such as in South Africa.
Given that Jews in the Middle East have been victims of ethnic cleansing in literally 100% of cases where they've been at the mercy of an Arab majority, I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Israelis take this risk. It might be more reasonable to establish ties between two separate states and explore possible integration later when tensions have dissipated. This would probably have a lower chance of success, but it also has a lower chance of ending with Jews being the victims of another genocide.
Opposing Israel on grounds of opposing nation states in general is great, but in the current state of the world, Israel will necessarily be replaced by a worse, more violent, less democratic, less diverse, nation state. This is a non-starter. And the situation of the stateless people you mentioned is an argument in favor of nation states.
These arguments always boil down to something like "if everyone were as peaceable and moral as me, the Jews would be fine." What is the amazing situation that would emerge for which it is worth it to dismantle a successful democracy of 10 million people? What is it?
Anti-Zionists are usually not opposed to states in general. They're often opposed to *ethno*-states, which define the nation based on race, and thus link rights and citizenship with race.
To say that the Zionist state would necessarily have to be replaced with a worse state is just to beg the question that Anti-Zionists contest. They conceive of alternative states they think could be better, on varying timelines, not all of which would require that Israel's democracy be dismantled. For example, some proposals involve that democracy merely being extended, to millions of additional people who are not Jewish.
If everyone were as peaceable and moral as me, most of those in Gaza would be fine too. But they're not - they're about as far from fine as it's possible to be, in ways that cause morally decent people to question how "successful" Israel's current democracy is at bringing peace and justice to half the region's inhabitants.
Great. I'm talking about the current situation. In the current situation, the nation state of Israel could be replaced only with the nation state of Palestine, which would be less democratic, less just, and less diverse.
I would love to replace Israel with a Jewish-Arab democracy where all could flourish, and where persecuted Jews and Arabs would find refuge, but I can't. I also don't know how to bring about a situation like that. Israel **at present** could be replaced only with another ethnostate, a less democratic one.
So anti Zionism in the world's current configuration on grounds of opposing ethnostates in general is just a non-starter.
"Israel **at present** could be replaced only with another ethnostate, a less democratic one."
I'm not convinced this is true. More importantly, to the theme of my post: not everyone who doubts or disagrees with this hates Jews. And you don't get to put an artificial timeline on how long a one state solution is allowed to take. From the AZ perspective, the status quo is actually non-starter, and anti-Zionism is the only just destination - whether or not it's something we can snap our fingers and create immediately with no transitional phase.
Okay, you don't hate Jews. I don't think you do and I don't care. My argument is that if you're opposed to nation states, then a Jewish one and a Palestinian one are equivalent, and these are the options, and what you need to propose to be taken seriously and for your objections to matter is a way to change both societies into societies that can coexist.