A serious red line has been crossed: America’s democratic freedoms, expansive on paper, will simply not tolerate serious dissent on the U.S.–Israel relationship. As criticisms of Israel have become more mainstream, the attempt to shut them down entirely has become more extreme.
In pursuit of this blank-check relationship with an Israeli government that is becoming ever-more intransigent with each passing year, pro-Israel forces in the U.S. are attacking our own democratic freedoms in order to suppress public outcry about apartheid and potential genocide 6,000 miles away. And, if the recent campus crackdowns are any indication, these forces are winning their battle.
With tens of thousands of Palestinians left dead and the Israeli assault on Gaza ongoing, the U.S. protests targeting university ties with Israel over the last month — voluble and outspoken — have been overwhelmingly nonviolent.
Yet these nonviolent protests have met with the full brutal force of the U.S. security state. Dispersing the protest encampments, police have viciously beaten protesters, fired rubber bullets, and enveloped students in dense clouds of tear gas.
People want their side to be all good and the opposition to be all bad.
I mean, the opposition is all bad in this case, but one’s own side is rarely all good. People more often engage in hagiography than analysis.
It’s just important to know that the side that is at fault is Israel and not Jews. If people understood that, then antisemitic hate crimes wouldn’t be up 400%. The real ignorance is people hearing Biden and Congress condemning antisemitism and conflating it with judgement of anti-Israel protest. They are not the same. Biden knows that, as do the thirty-something Jewish members of Congress. I blame Netanyahu for manipulating that term in defense of Israel, but that doesn’t excuse the ignorance of Americans.
If Biden wasn’t trying to imply that the protesters were doing the antisemitism, why did he bring it up every time he talked about the protesters? You don’t muddy concepts like that at that level by accident.
How do you not see that one leads to the other without understanding the difference between Israel and Jews?
I can’t follow the ones and the others you’re intending or make sense of the point you’re trying to make.
Biden reliably brought up antisemitism whenever talking about protests. This wasn’t Biden overestimating whether the public understood that anti-Zionism is different from anti-semitism. He did it on purpose because he wanted to smear them, because the protests are effectively against his actions (even though their short-term target was their schools) and he wanted the general public to think they’re illegitimate and a valid target for administration and police crackdowns. If he wanted to draw a clean distinction between criticism of Israel and hate against Jews, he would have.