Condemning Settler Violence is Not Enough

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. We will talk about how progressives should respond to the anti-Israel right. Our first guest will be Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American State Representative from Georgia, who in a recent comment on X about former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote, “I’m tired of Palestine being used to erase every other misdeed once someone with a platform says anything for us.” Our second guest will be Ben Lorber, co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, and a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, who writes frequently about the American right. Join us.Ask Me AnythingThis Tuesday, May 26, at 1 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.Cited in Today’s VideoB’Tselem’s report, Settler Violence = State Violence.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Mari Cohen reflects on the legacy of former ADL head Abe Foxman.In Current Affairs, Andrew Ancheta examines the similarities between defenses of apartheid South Africa and today’s defenses of Israel.In Equator, Eva Menasse discusses Germany’s warped debate about antisemitism.Reader CommentIn response to my recent video criticizing Tucker Carlson, Mujahid Sarsur, author of the forthcoming book, Palestinians at the Holocaust Museum, writes:I believe the efforts of pro-Palestinian human rights liberal Jews (including you, Michelle Goldberg, and Naomi Klein) to contribute to the Democratic/Republican establishment goal of dismissing Carlson as a bigot are extremely harmful to the Palestinian cause, and I believe such efforts, although primarily justified by focusing on Carlson’s statements that may be perceived as bigoted, partly stem from a need to defend a construct of a “Jewish peoplehood”—a construct which has been substantially shaped not by traditional Jewish ethics, but by the Zionist movement’s ethnocentric influence on the Jewish community.My deeper point is illuminated by coining the term “anti-Zionist Zionist Jews”: a person who does not believe in the need for a Jewish state but still embraces the ideological structures underlying Zionism, wanting to defend and be part of a “Jewish peoplehood,” and unwilling to look at the link between that construct and the extermination of Palestinians.The Palestine issue cannot be understood without a deep exploration of Jewish identity; few questions are more relevant to the Palestinians than “Who is a Jew?” In my upcoming book, I rely on the writings of Jewish and Israeli authors who illustrate how Zionism is ideologically dependent on the construct of “Jewish peoplehood” and who argue that Jews are no more than a faith group, to show how this construct is existentially linked to the future of Palestinians:The concept of the Jewish people has been at the center of Zionist ideology and what it did to the Palestinians. Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron argues that “the problematic situation in which modern Israel finds itself is derived, inter alia, from assumptions and ideologies about the nature of the Jewish people and the Jewish state that have largely been refuted by historical developments.” Israeli historian Shlomo Sand writes that Israel’s attachment to an “unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.” Professor of Jewish history, Yakov Rabkin, writes that what “underlies Zionist ideology” is “the concept of the Jewish people.” Israeli government policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians have always been about how to defend this “Jewish peoplehood” and whatever the definition of that peoplehood encompasses.