Anti-Zionism's Confederacy of Dunces
Free Palestine From Its Supposed Allies
Friedrich Nietzsche observed that “At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.” While it does not always pursue the wisest policies or elect the most visionary leaders, Israel benefits from the sheer malignancy of its enemies. (Though some, I assume, are good people.) The shared opposition of Islamists, Communists, and Nazis does not ipso facto make Zionism a just cause. But then again, as Jonathan Swift prophesied, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Whether or not Israel deserves the label “genius,” it is certainly arrayed against a confederacy of dunces. You don’t even need to call yourself a Zionist to recognize that “anti-Zionism” has become a catch-all for moral and intellectual rot.
By anti-Zionism, I don’t mean the sanewashed version promoted by the center-left. For example, a New York Times article notes that “some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state.” If Zionism means a project of expanding the Jewish state, then Israeli leaders like David Ben-Gurion (who accepted the initial United Nations partition of British Palestine), Menachem Begin (who withdrew from the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt), and Ariel Sharon (who removed Jewish settlements from Gaza) were not Zionists. For a credible definition of anti-Zionism, we need to turn to that movement’s leaders, not its media apologists. Since Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah are no longer available for comment, let’s inquire with their American proxies at Columbia University.
The Burqa and Sickle
As a would-be vanguard movement, Columbia University Apartheid Divest represents the cutting edge of anti-Zionism: Communist/Islamist fusion. I’m using “Communist” in a descriptive, not pejorative, sense here. Their Substack calls for anti-capitalist revolution, refers to members as “comrades,” and liberally name-checks Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. But though these real Communists were militant atheists, Columbia’s anti-Zionists don’t quote bon mots like Mao’s “Religion is poison.” Instead, they extol the “martyrdom” of Nasrallah and praise October 7 using Hamas’s mosque-inspired name for the massacre: “Long live Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” One “comrade” castigates the tendency to view Islam as a “reactionary force that contradicts the revolutionary aspirations of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle.” Rather, Islam is a source of “ethically rooted and counter-hegemonic traditions, a potent critique of the horror-scape that has been produced by late-liberal capitalist/colonial modernity.”1
The willingness of campus revolutionaries to cast aside basic Marxist materialism shows who the master is in this Communist/Islamist master-slave dialectic. Lacking a compelling Communist lodestar like the Soviet Union once provided, malcontents disgusted with our late-liberal capitalist, fascist imperialist, etc, etc, horrorscape must turn their hopeful eyes to the only seemingly viable source of resistance: Iran’s helpfully named Axis of Resistance. China, while Communist in theory, has lost its revolutionary luster and is too focused on catching up with the West instead of destroying it. Putinist Russia, though anti-Western, is too parochial with its dreams of a revived Tsarist Empire. Columbia’s anti-Zionists call themselves “Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Their aims are universal—“nothing less than the liberation of all people”—and only Islam, outside of the West, has sufficiently universalist aspirations. Yet in a nod to Marxism, the Palestinians fulfill the role of the messianic proletariat: “Gaza and all of occupied Palestine continue to usher in the new world.”
All this sweeping rhetoric, you may be wondering, because of a religiously intensified conflict over a land the size of Vermont? But anti-Zionism is not fundamentally about Israel or the Palestinians anymore. It has metastasized into a generalized anti-Western hatred. Hence chants of “Death to Israel” are reflexively followed by “Death to America” or even “Death to Canada.” Were there to be a two-state solution, anti-Zionism would still exist. Even if a Palestinian state replaced Israel, and all Israeli Jews were killed or displaced, anti-Zionism would still soldier on. After all, the movement rejects “every genocidal, eugenicist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized.” Post-Israel, Zionism would simply be redefined to mean the right of other Western “settler-colonial” countries to exist. The logical end-point of a globalized intifada isn’t a localized victory; it’s a global caliphate. Brazen in their revolutionary fantasies, craven in their praise of mass murder, the words of Israel’s enemies are the greatest Zionist propaganda of all.
Popular Front for the Immiseration of Palestine
Where does this leave the Palestinians, the supposed beneficiaries of anti-Zionism? As usual, saddled with the worst allies imaginable. During World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler and propagandized for the Axis.2 The Mufti and the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been funded and influenced by the Nazis, then encouraged the Arabs to wage a disastrous war to destroy Israel at birth. (Had the Arabs peacefully accepted partition, there would have been a Palestinian state larger than any now seriously proposed back in 1948.) Following Stalin’s brief support for Zionism,3 the Soviet Union armed and supported the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and pan-Arabist Egypt and Syria. The Soviets backed the Arab belligerents in the Six-Day War, which ended with Israel’s conquest of the majority-Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.4 The PLO subsequently supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, ultimately resulting in the expulsion of over 300,000 Palestinians from Kuwait. And, of course, the Palestinian cause has been taken up by Islamists like the mullahs of Iran, who, as the saying goes, will fight Israel to the last Arab.
The price of backing, and being backed, by losers—from World War II to the Cold War to the Gulf War and beyond—has been the immiseration of the Palestinian people and the diminution of their territory. As Shany Mor writes, “Again and again, the Palestinians have served as the tip of someone else’s spear. But the tips of spears tend to break when thrown, and when they do, it’s evidently easier to blame the wall they hit than the person who threw them.” American students calling for jihadist revolution from the safety of their dorm rooms are the latest, most pathetic iteration of a long and sordid tradition. It’s unrealistic to expect the Palestinians to become ardent Zionists. But perhaps, out of self-interest and a healthy contempt for failure, they might reject anti-Zionism. Instead, they could turn towards anti-anti-Zionism: not love for Israel, but rather rejection of its would-be destroyers, whose actual target seems to be the Palestinians themselves.
The comrade also claims “the resistance has articulated in no unclear terms the sharī`a basis for their profound respect for the ethics of war, demonstrated in their humane treatment of prisoners (especially women prisoners).” Victims of Hamas’s October 7 mass rape campaign, not to mention the Yazidi sex slave whom the IDF recovered in Gaza, would beg to differ.
More broadly, as Winston Churchill noted in a 1943 memorandum: “With the exception of Ibn Saud and the Emir Abdullah . . . the Arabs have taken no part in the fighting, except in so far as they were involved in the Iraq rebellion against us. They have created no new claims upon the Allies, should we be victorious.” By contrast, approximately 1.5 million Jews fought for the Allies, including over 30,000 members of British Palestine’s Yishuv (pre-Israel Jewish community). In a 1947 United Nations special session, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver thusly argued, “Surely the Jewish people is no less deserving than other peoples whose national freedom and independence have been established and whose representatives are now seated here. The Jews were your allies in the war, and joined their sacrifices to yours to achieve a common victory.” Quotations are from Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return: The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland (1978), p. 262, 300.
Though generally anti-Zionist, Stalin voted for Palestine’s partition based on anti-British sentiment and the hope, soon disabused, that socialist Israel would become a Soviet satellite state. However, Stalin’s role in the creation of Israel doesn’t stop one of Columbia’s comrades from praising his “great victories” in Russia.
As
writes, “A complete belief in the inevitable superiority of the USSR led to betting the future of entire societies on its radical triumph coupled with an adamant denial of Jewish historical reality, seeing Israel only as an ephemeral ‘Zionist entity’ that would soon be blown away into oblivion by the battle cry of the awakened Arab giant.” The awakened Arab giant, needless to say, was no match for the Jewish short kings.
I'm curious as to what it means and what it says about humanity that every person or movement that preaches “nothing less than the liberation of all people” ends up shortly thereafter building concentration camps, mass-murdering both its external and internal enemies, and starving and otherwise immiserating its people until its collapse. (Or in this current example, excusing massacres and chanting for genocide while denying it.)
Is it just like Dostoevsky said? "Starting from unlimited freedom, I have arrived at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social equation other than mine."
But if you looked at a supposed pro-Palestinian protest and muted the volume and blurred any words, would anyone think that these people were marching for anything resembling peace, liberation, freedom, etc? Or would it just seem like an eruption of blind rage and hatred?
The poor Palestinian people have been incredibly ill-served by being transformed into a Cause. Once a people become a Cause their actual welfare and futures become secondary (or irrelevant) to all the supporters of the Cause, who are usually cheering for some vicarious bloodshed or to be able to witness the most barbaric conception of Justice—watching people you hate get killed. If the Palestinians were treated as just one party to a land dispute where both side had good claims, this could have been worked out long ago. But that would spell the end of the Cause (without any erotic release), thus the bloodshed must continue.
God forbid you or your tribe become a Cause!
Great essay. Re: "Had the Arabs peacefully accepted partition, there would have been a Palestinian state larger than any now seriously proposed back in 1948," I recently imagined a counterfactual history in a recent note: https://substack.com/@ellisgeist/note/c-78418567