Like the opening of Pandora’s box in ancient Greek mythology, the horrific crimes perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 and Israel’s brutal and ruthless war of collective punishment in Gaza, with its massive civilian toll and humanitarian disaster, have unleashed a plague of racialized hate in the United States—antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hate. We have seen violence and death threats against Jews, Palestinians, and Muslims, and against both supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestine. Individuals have been victimized simply because they were perceived to be Palestinian or Jewish. We’ve seen vandalism, threats, and the disruption of religious services in synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship. Demonstrations have targeted private residences, hospitals, museums, restaurants, and other eateries, at times directly intruding into them. Schools and college campuses have been hard-hit by these developments, as they had already been struggling with a sharp rise in the numbers of hate-motivated incidents in the wake of the Covid pandemic.
With passions roiled by events in the Middle East and reactions to them in the United States, a free speech and academic freedom crisis has developed on college campuses, with numerous attempts to censor both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli opinions. Speakers and educational colloquiums relating to the conflict between Israel and Palestine were preempted and censored by school administrations and disrupted and shouted down by hecklers. Since October 7, the libertarian organization FIRE has identified over 60 attempts to deplatform college speakers or events related to this issue, and close to 90 individuals have been affected. Conflicts over the war in Gaza and campus protests have led to suspensions, dismissals, and withdrawals of offers of appointment of college faculty, and to the forced resignations of college presidents. Cooperative academic work among international scholars has been hampered by boycotts of Israeli academics and the destruction of higher education in Gaza. While any attempt to silence speech on campuses must be opposed, it should be noted that the great preponderance of efforts coming from those in positions of power—college administrations and elected officials—is directed at pro-Palestinian opinion.
Toward the end of the spring semester, campus encampments protesting the war in Gaza were met with heavy-handed police suppression and unnecessary mass arrests. With few exceptions, these encampments did not disrupt the educational functions of the institutions or involve violence and property destruction on the part of the student protesters. The most significant violence that did occur, at UCLA, was perpetrated by outside counterdemonstrators, with administrators and police failing to take action to contain it for hours. Nonetheless, far too many college and university administrations have bowed to pressure from politicians and wealthy donors who oppose the protest message of opposition to the war in Gaza and to the oppression of Palestinians, and they employed procedural pretexts to bring heavily armed police on campus and forcibly end the sit-ins. College after college have now enacted restrictions on free speech and peaceful assembly that are, as a practical matter, viewpoint-based and viewpoint-motivated. In their surrender to outside would-be censors, these university and college administrations have abandoned their duty to serve as guardians of free thought and expression in their institutions.
To make a bad situation worse, the spread of hate speech and incidents related to the Israel-Palestine conflict has been often misrepresented as solely antisemitic, despite the undeniable parallel presence of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate. This misrepresentation has been promulgated and weaponized by members of Congress like New York Republican Elise Stefanik, who are using it in efforts to silence dissenting views critical of the Israeli government, the war in Gaza, and the underlying conflict in Israel and Palestine. It has also been exploited for political advantage, to pursue unrelated political agendas against diversity and equity programs and against higher education in general.
It’s challenging to counter these troubling developments because, in addition to the very real expressions of antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hate, we are confronting unfounded accusations used to parry legitimate criticisms of both the Israeli government and Hamas: criticisms of the Israeli government’s ruthless prosecution of the war in Gaza, with its terrible civilian toll; of its ongoing denial of Palestinian self-determination and full civic equality for Israeli Palestinians, and its repression of peaceful Palestinian protest; of its illegal occupation and creeping annexation of the West Bank, with ever-expanding illegal settlements and violent dispossession of Palestinians; and of its far-right, autocratic, and theocratic makeup, with a Cabinet that includes neofascist Kahanists who incite anti-Palestinian racism and call for ethnic cleansing and worse. In some quarters, these criticisms are now dismissed as antisemitic. In other precincts, legitimate criticisms of Hamas’s horrific crimes on October 7, its targeting of innocent civilians and children, its grotesque use of sexual violence, and its continuing holding of Israelis as hostages; of its theocratic and neofascist politics, and its antisemitism, misogyny, and homophobia; and of its vicious authoritarian rule over Gaza and murder of Palestinian opponents are now wrongly dismissed as anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and racist.
Without question, criticisms of both the Israeli government and Hamas have too often been used as vehicles for circulating dehumanizing and prejudice-filled tropes of an antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim nature. But broad, sweeping characterizations of virtually all criticism of the Israeli government and Hamas as either antisemitic or anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim are not simply wrong; they are too often calculated to preempt much-needed honest and hard conversations about the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the difficult but necessary road to resolving it.
There are good reasons for Americans to be worried and disturbed by all these developments. As they have grown in number and intensity, manifestations of antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hate have increasingly threatened the sense of security and well-being of the affected communities. Enmity of this nature is a toxin in a free and pluralist civil society. The duty of citizens in a democracy to actively oppose it is paramount.
Antisemitism on the Left
By principle and out of tradition, the left should not find it difficult to respond to this challenge. In the past, we have viewed racialized hate of all types as contrary to our foundational values of equality, solidarity, and human dignity, and we have recognized that it divides the broad coalitions necessary for progressive political and social change. Historically, it has been the right that either openly embraced or turned a blind eye to such hate, so it could be used instrumentally in the defense of concentrations of wealth and power. Moreover, freedom of expression and the right to peaceful protest are core freedoms on which democracy—and the left—depend. In an era when we face the clear and present danger of a far-right authoritarianism that promotes illiberalism and racist, antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hate, it should be a simple enough matter for the left to oppose all of these expressions of hate, and to separate ourselves, completely and unequivocally, from them; it should not be hard for the left to support universal freedom of expression and the right to peaceful protest.
Yet, in the current moment, there are parts of the American and Anglophone left that are not rising to this challenge. While there has been strong and uncompromising opposition across most of the broad swath of the U.S. left to anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate and to restrictions on pro-Palestinian speech and protests, as there should be, this stance has not been accompanied by an equally universal, strong, and uncompromising opposition to antisemitism and attacks on pro-Israeli speech and protests. For some, illiberalism is viewed as a problem only when coming from the right. There is a failure to understand that freedom of expression for those with whom we strongly disagree is the price of that same freedom for our own views. Here I present in detail two illustrative and particularly stark examples.
First, consider the controversy stirred by Verso Books’ publication of the essay “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” by politics professor Jodi Dean of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, or HWS. In the name of “radical universal emancipation,” Dean enthusiastically embraced the antisemitic, theocratic, and neofascist Hamas, describing images from October 7 as “exhilarating” and “energiz[ing]” and declaring that these actions “create[d] a new sense of possibility, liberating people from hopelessness and despair.” Wielding the cliché that “oppressed people fight back against their oppressors by every means necessary,” Dean indicated her support not only for the “anti-imperialist” violence of Hamas on October 7, with its brutal murders, sexual violence, and kidnappings, but also for the hijacking of civilian airplanes and attacks on civilians that had been carried out by other Palestinian organizations in the past. She pronounced Hamas, whose founding charter included lengthy antisemitic attacks on Jews, to be the leader of the “struggle for Palestinian liberation” and declared that it is the obligation of anti-imperialists in the United States and elsewhere to provide it with unconditional support. (In 2017, Hamas issued a new charter with softer and more oblique language, but its leaders insisted that it was a supplement to, not a substitute for, the original charter.)
Ringing, unqualified endorsements of Hamas and its criminal acts of October 7, especially when proffered by an academic political theorist like Dean, can only be read as a knowing acceptance of the well-known, central features of Hamas’s political ideology—its theocratic authoritarianism, its antisemitism, its misogyny, and its homophobia. There are reasonable debates over where to draw the line that demarcates justified criticism of Israel from discourse that has crossed over into antisemitism. But Dean’s essay is not a close call; you can’t celebrate Hamas and October 7 as instruments of radical universal emancipation, ignore the many manifest ways in which the group is deeply and violently oppressive, and then pretend that you have not made yourself wholly complicit in these forms of oppression, including antisemitism.
Following the furor caused by the publication of her essay, the HWS administration suspended Dean from teaching. That action should be opposed by all who believe in academic freedom, which must include the ability to engage in political speech—even abhorrent political speech—outside of the classroom without fear of discipline or dismissal by your educational employer. The poorly conceived action of HWS, which has recently been reversed, only allowed Dean to pose as a martyr for free speech. Yet in the same breath that we defend academic freedom against the HWS administration, we must also condemn, with full throat, the contents of Dean’s essay.
It would be a mistake to view the essay as nothing more than the fulminations of an individual. Dean is a prominent member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL, a Marxist and Leninist sect of Trotskyist origins. The PSL has a long, dishonorable record of offering apologies and making excuses for bloody dictatorships worldwide: Syria’s Assad, Russia’s Putin, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, and China’s Communist Party during the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests. Through its front group, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, or ANSWER, the PSL has been deeply involved in the organizing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the United States. It was PSL member Eugene Puryear who, speaking at an October 8 Times Square demonstration, gleefully announced before the hundreds of dead from the Re’im music festival massacre had even been buried that “there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters.” In her essay, Dean makes much of a purported symbolism in Hamas’s use of hang gliders and kites in its attacks; in an echo of Puryear at the Times Square demonstration and others, she tells us that they represent liberation.
There is a sordid history of alliances like this, of individuals and organizations that purport to be on the left and yet, out of a dogmatic ideological commitment to violent and authoritarian revolution as the only effective means of resistance and change, ally themselves with and support organizations of the extreme right like Hamas, organizations that are racist, misogynistic, and homophobic at their core. For authentic leftists with democratic convictions, there is only one appropriate response: We separate ourselves from being part of such alliances, totally and without qualification.
Second, consider the controversy that has developed from pro-Palestinian students’ attacks on Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Chemerinsky is an outspoken civil libertarian, known nationally as a person of the democratic left. On the record, he has declared: “I strongly oppose the policies of the Netanyahu government, favor full rights for Palestinians, and believe that there must be a two-state solution.” While criticizing expressions of antisemitism among campus opponents of Israel, Chemerinsky has defended the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators, even when they involved offensive actions directed at him personally, such as the antisemitic caricature of him described below. He has been clear that “criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitism, any more than criticizing the policies of the United States government is anti-American.”
With no policy complaint more substantive than Chemerinsky’s declarations that Israeli Jews have the same right to national self-determination as Palestinians and that Israel has the right to exist alongside a free Palestine, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, or Berkeley Law SJP, targeted him with a demonizing, overtly antisemitic campaign. He was accused of participating in a “Zionist conspiracy” and of supporting “genocide.” These attacks reached a nadir around a social dinner Chemerinsky hosted for Berkeley law students at his home, an annual spring tradition he had started six years ago when he first came to the law school. With bold letters announcing NO DINNER WITH ZIONIST CHEM WHILE GAZA STARVES, posters distributed in the law school and published on social media declared that the dinner was a “prime example of a normalization P.R. event that hopes to distract students from Dean Chem’s complicity and support for the genocide of the Palestinian peoples,” and called for boycotting the dinner until the University of California, Berkeley, divested from Israel. The posters prominently featured a cartoon caricature of Chemerinsky with blood on his lips and blood on a knife and fork in his hands—a plain allusion to the age-old antisemitic “blood libel” myth, which accused Jews of kidnapping and slaughtering Christian children to drink their blood in religious rituals.
If these actions were not disturbing enough, a group of students decided that rather than follow through on their call for a boycott, they would attend the dinner with the intention of disrupting it and promoting their campaign against UC Berkeley and Chemerinsky. At the dinner, Malak Afaneh, then co-president of Berkeley Law SJP, pulled a portable microphone and speaker from her backpack and began addressing the guests; others of her group recorded her speech. Despite several requests by Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, to leave their house, and despite explanation that the two were opposed to the carnage in Gaza and had no say in the university’s investments, Afaneh persisted, insisting she had been advised by the National Lawyers Guild that she was engaging in protected First Amendment speech. After several minutes, Fisk grabbed the microphone and put her arm around Afaneh in an effort to usher her out of the house, and the students from her group finally left.
Under any circumstances, such attacks would be indefensible. But what made these attacks especially odious was that they were directed at a person who had a record of support for the struggle for Palestinian human rights. In 2003, a young American pacifist, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer that was illegally destroying Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip; she had attempted to stop the demolition by putting her body in its path. Unable to obtain justice in Israeli courts, Corrie’s parents turned to the U.S. courts. And their chosen counsel? None other than Erwin Chemerinsky, who served as their pro bono lawyer in a lawsuit against Caterpillar, the U.S.-based supplier of bulldozers to the IDF; in addition to Corrie’s family, the suit included five Palestinians families who had lost their kin to Caterpillar bulldozers. Chemerinsky would pay a price for this advocacy; his appointment as law school dean at UC Irvine was later held up, with his representation in the Caterpillar lawsuit looming large in that decision.
The Extent of Antisemitism
There are further examples of discourse in this vein from the precincts of the left where excuse-making for Hamas fades seamlessly into dehumanizing, hateful rhetoric. While it by no means represents a majority or even a substantial minority sentiment on the left, it is not possible to dismiss it as entirely insignificant or isolated. Dean may be an academic of little note, and her PSL a small, fringe organization of the authoritarian far left, but through its front organization, ANSWER, the PSL has been able to parlay itself into a position of inordinate influence in off-campus pro-Palestinian demonstrations, where its members often speak. The Berkeley law student group that attacked Chemerinsky is part of the national Students for Justice in Palestine. Like Dean and the PSL, the national SJP achieved notoriety for its post–October 7 statements of fervent support for Hamas and its actions, describing them as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” against “the Zionist entity.” “This is what it means to Free Palestine,” SJP declared as news of the October 7 massacres was breaking, “not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.” An SJP “tool kit” issued shortly thereafter declared that Israeli citizens, whom it called “Settlers,” were “not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law,” but “military assets” who were legitimate targets of Hamas and other armed Palestinian organizations. Unfortunately, SJP has been a presence in many of the campus encampments protesting the war in Gaza—a minority presence, to be sure, but still a presence.
By contrast, Verso Books, which published Jodi Dean’s essay, and the National Lawyers Guild, which provided support to Berkeley Law SJP and accused Chemerinsky of “complicity” in “genocide” without even the pretense of evidence to support such a charge, are long-standing and influential institutions on the left.
Cheerleading for Hamas and antisemitism does not appear uniformly across the entire spectrum of the left but is heavily concentrated in the authoritarian ultraleft. Indeed, there is a pattern suggesting that the war in Gaza is being weaponized by the ultraleft to mount attacks on leaders of the Democratic left it opposes politically, despite the fact that these very same leaders are forthright critics of the Israeli government. Among these attacks is harsh criticism of Senator Bernie Sanders—the most forceful, consistent, and high-profile critic of the Israeli government in Congress, who is also a Jewish opponent of offensive military aid to Israel—for being insufficiently pro-Palestinian and for supporting the reelection of Joe Biden. Then there was the disruption of a speech on democracy given by progressive Representative Jamie Raskin, a longtime advocate of Palestinian self-determination and a critic of the Israeli government (Raskin was one of two Jewish members of the House to vote against national security supplemental legislation that included offensive military aid to Israel), as well as the Democratic Socialists of America’s withdrawal of its national endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, driven by the ultraleft and sectarian forces that now control the organization. The justification? She had supported Israel’s right to exist; signed a statement with other congressional progressives saying she would support defensive, but not offensive, military aid to Israel; backed Biden’s reelection; and sponsored and participated in an online seminar on identifying and opposing antisemitism, which DSA’s leadership viewed as a “deep betrayal.”
This campaign fits a well-established pattern inside DSA of ultraleft attacks and the imposition of extreme litmus tests on onetime members who have been elected to Congress and are leading critics of the Israeli government in Congress: on Greg Casar of Texas, over his unwillingness to endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel; on Summer Lee of Pennsylvania; and on Jamaal Bowman of New York, who was the target of a vitriolic campaign of character assassination over his refusal to endorse BDS and his ties to progressives in the American Jewish community and the peace movement in Israel. Incredibly, a campaign rally on behalf of Bowman was met with a protest organized by the group Within Our Lifetime, accusing him, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders of being “genocide enablers.” (Bowman, of course, lost his primary race in June to a more moderate opponent who was financed in part by a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.)
Nor are these ultraleft sallies directed only against elected officials. Despite being one of the first U.S. unions to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, the United Auto Workers and its president, Shawn Fain, have been targets of criticism from those who wanted the union to refuse to endorse Biden, over his Gaza policy. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, the Jewish president of the largest union in the AFL-CIO who led it to take a position in support of a cease-fire in the war in Gaza and for humanitarian aid to Gazans, also came under attack. (Disclosure: I have worked for the national AFT for a dozen years and previously served as a vice president of its New York City local.) The surreal quality of these ultraleft attacks is perhaps best expressed in wild accusations of support for genocide being launched at the very members of Congress AIPAC has targeted for defeat because of their criticism of the Israeli government and support of Palestinian rights, and at the very union leaders who have led the American labor movement to call for an end to the war in Gaza.
An ultraleft and authoritarian element can be found in the student encampments, where it has been the source of antisemitic slogans and counterproductive tactics, such as the occupation of a building at Columbia University. To be clear, it is a decidedly minority current; the full panorama of the movement is much broader and more politically diverse. Those who have examined encampments in some detail, such as The New York Times’ Lydia Polgreen, have found the preponderance of the student protesters to be thoughtful, compassionate, and motivated by their anguish over the war in Gaza. But she also noted the protests were not without troubling chants with connotations of antisemitism. In her reporting, the most explicit expressions of antisemitic hate came not from the students, but from outsiders seeking media attention.
The Challenges in Confronting Antisemitism
Before October 7 and the war in Gaza, the most recent manifestations of antisemitism in the United States were politically uncomplicated for the left: the antisemitic “the Jews will not replace us” chants at the 2017 ultraright demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Donald Trump’s refusal to repudiate the violent fascist demonstrators; Trump’s long history of using antisemitic tropes, and his open consorting with some of the nation’s most notorious antisemites; the fatal mass shootings at the Poway and Tree of Life synagogues, carried out by white supremacists motivated by the fascist “great replacement” theory that Jews were bringing immigrants of color into the United States as part of a conspiracy to engage in the “genocide” of white people; the mainstreaming of the “great replacement” theory by leading figures in conservative media, such as Tucker Carlson and Republican Party leaders such as J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, and House Speaker Mike Johnson; and the normalizing of antisemitic tropes throughout the Republican Party. In each of those instances, the antisemitism was emanating from the politics of the authoritarian far right and its white supremacist culture, and vigorous and uncompromising opposition was the obvious and straightforward response.
By contrast, the antisemitism that has appeared over the last eight months is a minority current in a movement whose primary objective—ending the brutal war in Gaza—is righteous. While Israel’s initial cause of responding to the crimes of October 7 was unquestionably just, its subsequent prosecution of the war, with the infliction of massive civilian casualties, including a conservative estimate of 8,000 dead children, has rendered the war very clearly unjust. International and Israeli human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, and B’Tselem have found evidence that Israel has violated international law with its indiscriminate and disproportionate use of violence and force. There is no more telling indictment of the Israeli government’s war of collective punishment than how that war has brought the people of Gaza to the edge of starvation, while the Israeli government has failed to provide desperately needed humanitarian aid to them; particularly obscene is the license the Israeli government has given to neofascist Kahanist settlers to block and destroy convoys of food relief. This failure to provide food aid is not just a violation of international law; it is an affront to the most basic sense of human decency. The fundamental values of the left, starting with respect for human life, require support for a movement to end this war. The urgent tasks of the moment are to stop the bloodshed, feed the children, and free the hostages.
To further complicate the issue, the loudest accusations of campus antisemitism come from three different sources, each one quite problematic in its own way. First, there are those who have their own documented histories of antisemitism, such as Donald Trump, Elise Stefanik, and other MAGA Republicans, making it next to impossible to credit their current professed outrage over campus antisemitism as genuine. Instead, it is clear that they are interested in antisemitism only insofar as they can use it as a “wedge issue” to their political advantage.
Second, there are those who have adopted an “Israel, right or wrong” posture, such as AIPAC and Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, in which the charge of antisemitism is applied loosely and instrumentally to discredit the broadest possible swath of opposition to the Israeli government’s conduct of the war in Gaza and its oppressive treatment of Palestinians. In these quarters, unquestioning support for Israel now takes precedence over authentic opposition to antisemitism. In the wake of Elon Musk’s opening of X (formerly Twitter) to a surge of right-wing, racist, and antisemitic hate speech, and immediately following an overtly antisemitic tweet in which Musk had endorsed the “great replacement” theory, Greenblatt still found reason to embrace Musk because he vowed to ban the words “from the river to the sea” and “decolonization” from X.
Lastly, there is the far-right, autocratic, and theocratic government of Israel itself. In his quest to dismiss all opposition to his government’s conduct of the war in Gaza as motivated by antisemitism, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned the campus protests, falsely proclaiming without a shred of evidence that they called for “death to the Jews,” and demanded their suppression. While attempting to deflect an impending International Criminal Court indictment for his government’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, Netanyahu has now taken to comparing demonstrations by Israelis calling for a cease-fire agreement that would end the war and return the hostages to what he calls the “mobocracies” of campus protests in the United States.
All three sources have sought, in an illiberal fashion, to silence pro-Palestinian speech and speech critical of Israel; all three are singularly focused on antisemitism, as if there were not parallel expressions of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate on campus and in the larger society; and all three have exaggerated the extent of antisemitism, with wild accusations that college protests are “nascent pogroms” reminiscent of Hitler Youth at Nuremberg-style rallies, and that protesters are agents of the Iranian government. The myth that Jewish philanthropist George Soros is the evil, all-powerful “black hand” behind various left-wing causes has been a staple of the contemporary far right’s antisemitic conspiracy theories. Now the same circles are suggesting Soros is responsible for the campus protests against the war in Gaza.
Contesting Antisemitism
On this complicated and contradictory political terrain, fears that forceful public opposition to antisemitism on the left could be exploited to defend the indefensible in the war in Gaza, and thus prolong the long train of horrors that have defined that war, are not unreasonable. For that matter, fears that such opposition could be used to advance the illiberal, repressive agendas of Trump, Stefanik, and the MAGA GOP, of AIPAC, ADL, and the current Israeli government, are not without foundation. Seemingly out of concern about such fears, there are those who have bitten their tongues, and avoided speaking the complicated truth. Some have gone so far as to proclaim that charges of antisemitism are nothing more than a “moral panic,” manufactured out of next to nothing for the purpose of instituting a new McCarthyism. (This is an argument that rests on a fallacy of composition, in which the claim that charges of antisemitism are generally untrue is based on a demonstration that a limited and discrete number of particular charges are without substance; examples that would contradict this sort of judgment, such as those described in this essay, are simply ignored.)
Tactically conservative thinking like this may be understandable, given the complex political terrain and the high stakes of political interventions, but it is nonetheless seriously mistaken, as a matter of moral principle and as a matter of political strategy. The moral urgency of ending the war in Gaza and bringing essential and desperately needed humanitarian supplies to the people of Gaza demands that we act, but it does not absolve us of the responsibility to choose with deliberate thought and care actions that advance this cause. The left’s choice of silence in the face of antisemitism does a profound disservice to this—to our—cause. If silence on antisemitism prevails, the right will weaponize that silence and gain a free hand to smear as antisemitic all opposition to Israel’s brutal war of collective punishment in Gaza. Only a left that is morally credible as a principled opponent of antisemitism—morally credible precisely because it has unambiguously and completely condemned and separated itself from the parts of the authoritarian ultraleft that trade in antisemitism—will be in a position to fend off unprincipled accusations and advance the antiwar cause.
Left-wing politics is not a team sport, where winning is everything and we cheer “our side” and oppose the “other side,” no matter the actions taken by each side. What distinguishes a politics as authentically left is a commitment to a set of emancipatory values that together provide a vision of a just society, economy, and polity. We seek power in the service of those values and that vision, and judge our actions against them, not against the deeds of those who do not share our view of the world. The wrongs of the “other side” cannot provide justifications or excuses for the compromise of our own values. It is not just that opposition to racialized hate is a fundamental moral precept of the left—or that the failure to oppose one of its forms, to pick and choose when and where we honor that principle and for whom, opens us to valid charges of hypocrisy and double standards. Just as importantly, opposition to all forms of racialized hate is the strongest political approach to combating various particular expressions. When opposition to antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hate is combined, it eliminates the suspicion that our opposition is little more than special pleading for one side in this conflict, instrumentalized to gain political advantage in a power struggle, and it focuses discussion on what is so profoundly objectionable in the hate. It is long past time for all on the left to act on the insight of Edward Said’s Orientalism, that anti-Muslim hate is a “secret sharer” of the same dispositions and prejudices as antisemitism, and to unequivocally oppose both. Moral consistency makes the political case against each particular form of hate that much more powerful.
The same must be said of opposition to illiberal attempts to suppress free political speech and peaceful protest around the issues of Israel, Palestine, and the war in Gaza. Generally speaking, these rights are essential for political democracy, and the lifeblood of left organizing for social and economic justice. The weaponization of antisemitism, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hate to suppress free speech and peaceful protest, most recently manifest in the misnamed Antisemitism Awareness Act, which targets broad categories of political expression critical of the Israeli government, is best fought when those rights are treated as indivisible. When an opposition to repression of pro-Palestinian speech and protest is combined with calls for censorship of pro-Israeli speech and protest, and vice versa, it reduces the issue to an exercise of brute force; under those circumstances, the left almost always comes away the loser. As Vox’s Eric Levitz has argued with respect to the current Israel-Palestine conflict, advocacy for the disempowered is best pursued hand in hand with a vigorous defense of free speech, which must include speech for those with whom we disagree on fundamental questions.
The complications of the political terrain on which we labor require that we act deliberately and with care. The burden of the historical moment places upon us the responsibility to condemn and separate ourselves from those who partake in antisemitism and attempt to suppress the free speech and peaceful protest with which they disagree.
