In writing this response article I wanted to focus specifically on what Luke Spaltro wrote in the Daily Targum on Thursday. In his commentary on Rutgers SJP’s suspension (and subsequent reinstatement) Spaltro concluded with, “To be for divestment is to be anti-Zionist, anti-settler colonialism and anti-apartheid, not antisemitic.To be for divestment is to envision a democratic Palestine, restoring a land where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in harmony before the settler-colonial project of Zionism implemented the Nakba and a system of apartheid.”
Now, this article was filled with mistruths and historical ignorances, but these two short statements managed to deny both history and reality in a way that couldn’t be ignored. The first alleges that anti-Zionism is not an anti-Jewish ideology, completely ignoring both the history of anti-Zionism and its modern manifestations. To understand the connection between the “anti-Zionism” we see today and antisemitism we must first understand where modern “anti-Zionism” finds its roots.
What many refer to today as “anti-Zionism” is tangibly connected to the Soviet Union’s state policy of antisemitism. William Korey in 1972 described how the Soviets redefined “corporate Jews” and “Zionists” as imagined villains to scapegoat their own Jewish populations and further their own foreign policy interests. When the Soviet Union opposed Israel they simply recycled older antisemitic tropes and ideas under the guise of a new ideology called “anti-Zionism.” As scholar Izabella Tabarovsky explains, Soviet propagandists used older antisemitic tracts such as the Protocols and the Elders of Zion and even Hitler’s Mein Kampf as sources about Zionism. Tabarovsky links this decades-long propaganda push by the Soviet Union against Jews to modern anti-Zionism, finding anti-Jewish sources for every anti-Israel trope.
Recently, right-wing antisemites and leftist “anti-Zionists” have found a lot of common ground.
An easy example is the Boston “Mapping Project”, which began as a BDS led effort to map “Zionist” institutions and was promoted by white supremacists. Another example is when former KKK Leader David Duke praised Representative Ilhan Omar for publicly promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories of dual loyalty amongst American Jews.
The Brandeis Center has also published a report which concluded that, “One of the strongest predictors of perceiving a hostile climate toward both Israel and Jews is the presence of an active Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group on campus.” (emphasis added) Spaltro can claim that “anti-Zionism” isn’t antisemitic, but doing so actively ignores the historical and contemporary connections between the two.
Moving to Spaltro’s final point, he expresses a desire to return to a Palestine before 1948, before the modern state of Israel, when Muslims, Jews, and Christians all apparently lived in peace. But actually looking at history shows that this was never the case.
Before the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947 and Israel’s independence in 1948, the land was controlled by Britain as Mandatory Palestine E”Y. Under British rule several massacres of Jewish communities unfolded, where Arab mobs butchered Jews in the streets and in their homes, in some cases with no British interference. This includes the infamous 1929 Hebron massacre, where dozens of Jewish residents were slaughtered by their Arab neighbors. Many of those killed weren’t even recent immigrants (not that it should matter); this was a millennia old Jewish community that was entirely destroyed. The Hebron massacre was not unique; there were the Jaffa riots of 1921, the Nebi Musa riots of 1920, and the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, which sought to prevent Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany from entering the land on the eve of the Holocaust. There is a certain callousness required to call the blockade of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany “living in harmony”.
This strategy of blocking Jewish refugees from safety in Palestine dates further, to when the Ottoman Empire controlled the region. In the 1880’s it became Ottoman policy to stop Jewish immigration to the region, which had increased due to state-sponsored pogroms in the Russian Empire. During this time of supposed “harmony,” it was literally illegal for Jews to even seek refuge in Palestine!
Under Ottoman governance, Jews in the land were also often left unprotected from pogroms and massacres perpetrated by local Arab leaders, and many of these massacres predated the inception of modern Zionism in the late 19th century. The 1517 Hebron and Safed Massacres, the 1660 Safed and Tiberias Pogroms, the 1834 Hebron and Safed Pogroms, and the 1838
Safed Riot, all predated Theodor Herzl’s birth! So to claim that this violence came from some idea of “anti-Zionism” is a totally misguided notion with a complete lack of historical understanding, as all the massacres of (ancient) Jewish communities listed predate any idea of modern Zionism.
Jews all over the Middle East were subject to these pogroms and massacres, not because they were “Zionists,” but because they were Jews. The Farhud in Iraq was a precursor to the mass expulsions and violence Jews would soon face all across the Middle East in the wake of the U.N Partition Plan. The Jews who were killed in the 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo (from where my family came) were the ones who did not emigrate to Mandatory Palestine, yet they were still killed, their ancient synagogue burned, and their businesses looted.
Spaltro’s claims that anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitic and that everything was fine in Palestine before Zionist Jews showed up are historically illiterate, anti-Jewish propaganda. Modern anti-Zionism is just repackaged Soviet Jew-hatred, which is why white supremacists tend to love it so much. There never was harmonious coexistence in Palestine, even before Jewish immigrants arrived. Zionism didn’t upend an orderly system, it simply demanded that Jews get the same rights to life, dignity, and self-determination that others already enjoyed. Ignoring this history does not help anyone, and ruins any chance of healthy campus dialogue.
A edited version of this article was published in the Daily Targum, the official campus paper for Rutgers University, New Brunswick.