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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Berkley Law School's Jewish free zones is causing some stir. The student group also wants to ban Zionist speakers. I wonder how this will sit with progressive Jews, who themselves are quite often found heading pro-Palestine activism in the US. Now these bans are trotted out by progressives, not alt-righters. Accusations of anti-semitism likely won't find any purchase in the vogue that's disillusioned with Israel. And I'm not seeing any sign of American Jews tilting rightward anytime soon.

While I find "Jew free zones" to be exceedingly disingenuous, I do think people who rush to point out that they didn't ban Jews, just "Jews who support Israel" to be parsing finely in a way that doesn't apply in other circumstances.

Israel/Jews have always been a fault line among progressives. "Opposing Israel is antisemitic" is a motte-bailey used by both sides. I've seen lots of Zionists claim it's a bailey: "of course you can" in theory, oppose (some of) Israel's policies without being antisemitic. And yet there is no actual opposition to any actual Israeli action that they will not claim is motivated by antisemitism. On the flip side, a lot of leftists will claim "Oh, you're just labeling any disagreement with Israel as antisemitism" when a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is in fact motivated by antisemitism.

Except that they didn't ban Jews who support Israel. They banned everyone (actually, just all speakers ) who supports Israel: The organization "will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." See here. So, "Jew-free zones" is even more disengenuous than you thought.

Sure, but there is no good left of center reason to not support Zionism. "the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." Is just a pair of easily debunked mottos.

Thus, it is reasonable to suspect different, real, motives.

"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who go to Mass." Would it be fair to call that a Catholic-free zone? I'm pretty sure that many Catholics don't go to Mass, after all. What if you just banned people for agreing with the Pope? I'm pretty sure many Catholics don't do that either.

Banning pro-life speakers regardless of topic would be closer and, well, that is a thing that has happened, is happening, and will likely continue to happen. The usual suspects cry about it, sure, but unless you're specifically reading a pro-life magazine, it's not actually newsworthy and even most of those don't consider it discrimination against Catholics.

I occasionally gripe at left wingers here that try to make silly hypotheticals about right wing policies with actual real world examples of what the costs and benefits would be; in the interests of consistency I'm now doing the same thing to right wingers making silly hypotheticals about left wing ideas(which, to be clear, I see as much stupider than the right wing policies I have defended in the past by reference to real life).

"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who agree with the Pope on [topic]" would be closer. There are a lot of Zionist non-Jews; similarly, on any given topic, you can find a lot of non-Catholics who agree with the Pope on any given topic (exactly who varies by topic).

Now, you could claim that "the central example of a Zionist is a Jewish Zionist," or that "the central example of someone who agrees with the Pope on [topic] is a Catholic person," but in both cases, I'm not sure that's actually the case. I'm pretty confident that the set of "Zionists in the US" has a large majority of non-Jews (mostly Evangelical Christians in the Republican Party).

???? supporting Israel is the position of the Republican Party, very few members of which are Jewish, as well as the position of many evangelical Christian groups. And note the quote in the latter argument:

These trends in American politics may explain the recent statement by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer that Israel should spend more of its energy reaching out to “passionate” American evangelicals than to Jews, who are “disproportionately among our critics.” Criticizing Dermer, Israel’s former consul general in New York, Dani Dayan, added that “our embassy in the United States capital has invested most of its energy in the relationship with conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, and a certain type of Jews only.”

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