British socialist Daniel Randall’s important 2021 book Confronting Antisemitism on the Left offers an important critique of the phenomenon—but is limited by stopping short of a forthright anti-Zionism that can incorporate Jewish liberation into an anti-oppressive praxis. Drawing on my experiences in the US and Randall’s in the UK, I argue that Left anti-Semitism has some of its strongest roots in a Stalinist approach that instrumentalizes Jews and other oppressed groups as political chess pieces. This can be repudiated in a Jewish cultural resurgence that calls for “smashing Zionism not Israel.”
For weeks, East Jerusalem has seen nightly protests over the impending eviction of hundreds of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah district—culminating in violent clashes with riot police at al-Aqsa Mosque. Compounding the anger is another grievance—Israel's denial of East Jerusalem Palestinians' right to participate in elections for the Palestinian Authority's Legislative Council. With the overwhelming majority of East Jerusalem Palestinians denied Israeli citizenship by an array of bureaucratic artifices, this means they are effectively disenfranchised of the vote in either sovereignty.
President Joe Biden's pledge to rebuild the Iran nuclear deal is already deteriorating into a deadlock—a testament to the effectiveness of the Trump-era intrigues that sabotaged the agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Biden and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei have each traded "You Go First" statements—the White House demanding Tehran return to compliance with the JCPOA and Khamenei insisting the US lift the sanctions that were re-imposed by Trump. There is indeed a case that the US, having abrogated the pact first, should now be the party to "blink" in the stand-off, and lift the sanctions as a good-faith measure.
The world is breathing a collective sigh of relief after General Services Administration chief Emily Murphy officially contacted the team of president-elect Joe Biden, marking the Trump administration's belated initiation the transition process. But along with the news of Murphy's capitulation come reports that the US has deployed heavy bombers to the Middle East, and that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a secret meeting in Saudi Arabia with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Simultaneously, Yemen's Houthi rebels have conveniently claimed responsibility for a missile attack on a Saudi oil facility in the port of Jeddah. And this all comes just days after the disconcerting news that Trump had gathered his cabinet and advisors for a White House conclave weighing the options for military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. With his attempted judicial coup failing, Trump's Plan B could be postponement (read: cancellation) of the presidential transition under pretext of a world crisis of his own making.
A long time ago, not long after the end of the end of World War II and still in the shadow of the shoah, a nice (half-)Jewish girl in New York's Long Island suburbs decided to wear a Star of David to make sure people would know at a glance that she was a Jew. This, ironically, proved to be the first step on her path to anti-Zionism—a life journey that led from Berlin to the refugee camps of the West Bank.
President Trump's executive order, ostensibly extending civil rights protections to Jewish students on college campuses, is a masterpiece of propaganda and disguised motives, actually criminalizing opposition to the expropriation of the Palestinians, making a consistent anti-racist position legally impossible—and thereby, paradoxically, abetting anti-Semitism.
Two Israeli ex-prime ministers are now involved in the cannabis industry, and legalization became a key issue in this month's elections. But in a case of strange bedfellows, legalization was aggressively taken up as a campaign plank by the far right.
The lines are starkly drawn in Pittsburgh—and, hopefully, across the country—in the wake of the synagogue massacre that left 11 dead. President Trump visited the synagogue, and was joined by the Israeli ambassador. More than 35,000 people signed an open letter to Trump from the local chapter of the progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc, stating: "You are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism." Hundreds demonstrated against Trump's visit under the standard of another Jewish progressive formation, If Not Now, with banners reading "ANTI-SEMITISM = WHITE NATIONALISM" and "ANTI-SEMITISM UPHOLDS WHITE SUPREMACY."
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