by James A. Bacon
“We’re not anti-Semitic, we’re anti-Zionist.”
That’s the refrain we hear from pro-Palestinian protesters calling to free Palestine “from the river to the sea” and to “globalize the intifada.” They don’t hate Jews, they say. They hate the Israeli state, which just happens to be populated by Jews. Anti-Semitism, according to this logic, is something that emanates exclusively from the far Right.
There is anti-Semitism on the far-right, to be sure, although it doesn’t seem to be much in evidence here in Virginia since the infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally in which torch-bearing white supremacists (mostly from other states) marched down the Lawn of the University of Virginia proclaiming, “Jews will not replace us.” The precise meaning of that exhortation eludes me, as there is no rational scenario in which Jews comprising 2% of the U.S. population will be “replacing” anybody else. But notice what the white supremacists did not say: They did not say, “We will replace the Jews”… which is pretty much what “decolonizing” Palestine from the river (the Jordan River) to the sea (the Mediterranean Sea) does mean.
In their actual actions, as opposed to their apologetics, it appears that members of the pro-Palestinian movement are less inclined to respect the distinction between Zionists and Jews. When it comes to expressing their rage against the Israeli state, any Jew will do.
Thus, in recent days, the alleged murderer of two Jews (one of whom was American, one Israeli) in front of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., yelled, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” while a man who set eight Jews afire in Boulder, Colorado, with a makeshift flamethrower, allegedly proclaimed, “Free Palestine.”
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