Weekend Reading and Viewing List
On Trump Voters, Influencer Culture, jAntisemitism, Fascism, and Autocracy
I feel like we are living in Lewis Carroll’s world, a space where up is down and arguments have been stripped of their meaning.
Consider this letter making the rounds (it was sent to dozens of my colleagues in Faculty for Justice in Palestine) and makes the argument that Jews — and not Palestinians — should be seen as “indigenous” in Israel.
I am writing to express my concern regarding your use—or support of the use—of the slogans “Free Palestine” and “Palestinian Resistance.” These slogans were first used by the American League for a Free Palestine, a Zionist organization founded in 1944 to advocate for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and to free the Jewish people in Palestine from British colonizers.
Using these slogans outside their historical and cultural context constitutes cultural appropriation. This practice perpetuates a form of anti-Indigenous racism, as it erases the Jewish people’s millennia-long connection to their ancestral homeland (supported by the Bible, the Qur’an, and substantial archaeological and historical evidence). As Native American activist Lani Anpo eloquently stated, “Placing an expiration date on Jewish indigeneity due to violent colonial displacement directly jeopardizes Indigenous communities everywhere.”
By appropriating the slogans “Free Palestine” and “Palestinian Resistance,” you are invalidating the struggle of the Jewish indigenous people for recognition and sovereignty over their ancestral land. Your failure to recognize, or worse, your distortion of Jewish indigeneity is concerning, as such denial and distortion risks weakening broader efforts to secure rights and recognition for all Indigenous groups.
I urge you to reflect on the origins and cultural significance of these slogans. Acknowledging and respecting Indigenous identities, including that of the Jewish people, is essential for fostering equity and constructive dialogue.
Palestinians as interlopers, the biblical Jewish connection overriding all other claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is Zionism in a nutshell, and why Zionism is dangerous to both Palestinians and Jews.
“The rejection of exile as a response to the collapse of European Jewry and subsequent murder of six million Jews was certainly understandable and helped accelerate the founding of the State of Israel,” writes Shaul Magid in The Necessity of Exile. But
the continual perpetuation of such trauma—combined with power and sovereignty over another population that experiences Zionism as both colonization and erasure—creates a reality whereby a truly democratic, equitable, and just society has become all but impossible.
Magid adds that “the problem is not what kind of Zionism, but Zionism itself.” He proposes a “counter-Zionism” in which “we allow Zionism to become a matter of history, an ideology that has had its time, a Jewish politics that has both done its work and created damage (as all ideologies do).”
(C)ounter-Zionism promotes a society that would one day affirm that the others who share this holy land have as much a right to it as we Jews do. The proprietary Zionist notion that “this land is ours and we will share it with you under certain conditions we alone determine,” would, in such a society, become obsolete. In its place we would build a Jewish/Arab society, or better an Israeli/Palestinian society, that protects and promotes the rights, cultures, languages, and religions of all constituencies equally.”
I’ll leave this thought here.
*
We are entering uncharted territory. The incoming Trump administration is expected to go after American universities — weaponizing antisemitism in a way that is designed to chill criticism of Israel and support for Palestinians.
As The Guardian reports, Trump views higher education as a threat to the nation, and has “billed them as an “enemy” and made them a prime target of their rightwing, anti-woke crusade.
While attacks over critical race theory and diversity and inclusion initiatives have long been part of conservative campaigns against higher education, experts say that the nationwide campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza over the last year, and a push to crack down on them that has often attracted support from Democrats, will probably provide the incoming administration their opening salvo.
“There are political actors who have been obsessed with the idea of fundamentally transforming American higher education, and they have jumped into the space made open by accusations of antisemitism,” said Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College whose research focuses on conservative efforts to undermine higher education.
Antisemitism is being weaponized by the right in a way that endangers our campuses — but also threatens Palestinians and American Jews.
The charge distorts the power relations and justifies the assault on Gaza and the erasure of a people.
*
Holocaust scholar Raz Segal
*
M. Gessen connects Trump and the Hungarian autocracy. (“Hungary Shows Us How a Second Trump Term Might Play Out.” The Opinions, a podcast from The New York Times)
*
Also in The New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom, “How Trump Got in Americans’ Heads and Stayed There.”
*