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A few days ago, a Jewish event at UC Berkeley was violently shut down and now an upcoming event with Tzipi Livni at UCLA is being moved online for fear of violent disruptions. Worth noting that Ms. Livni is a liberal secularist with a history of arguing for the necessity of negotiations and a path to peace.
How representative are these of a broader shift against Israel within the left? The polls are mixed. On the one hand, the US public appears to be overwhelmingly favoring Israel over Hamas (>80%), but I am not sure if this means as much as Israel's supporters claim. I've seen many pro-Palestinians and anti-Zionists denounce Hamas for other reasons and I got the sense that not all of them were for sake of optics. And even many who refuse to condemn Hamas do so out of a "an oppressed people has a right to resist" framework rather than a genuine sympathy for the group.
It's worth recalling that even before Oct 7th, the sympathies for Israel among democrats in America were collapsing. My sense is that this trend was halted - and perhaps even reversed somewhat - in the immediate aftermath of the attack but soon began to resume its plunge. It now appears to be very difficult for even liberal Zionists to get a fair hearing among only Jewish audiences on progressive campuses, let alone to a wider public.
While it is true that the core groups making these interruptions are small and heavily concentrated among muslim and "POC" demographics, along with a few white leftists, what's remarkable to me is the wider silence among the broader progressive coalition. Many Jews have remarked upon this, that sympathy seems to be muted or even absent. There is an unwillingness to police these radicals among the wider liberal public, which seems to suggest a hidden reserve of silent sympathy which is not being publicly expressed.
The former AIPAC president Steve Rosen once said that the Israel lobby is like a nightflower: it best operates in the shade. That is now becoming impossible as progressives with a national profile such as AOC are publicly likening them to NRA. Another very important principle has been bipartisan support. Israel needs Western backing and among all Western countries, the US stands heat and shoulder above the rest. America was unique among Western countries that Israel had broad support among both the left and right for so long, whereas in Europe the left gave up on Israel early. The UK Labour party's Keir Starmer may try to resurrect matters after the Corbyn years, but one gets the sense he is fighting against his own base which is usually not ending well for leaders in the long run.
But this exceptionalism now appears to coming to a close as well. Support for Israel among the right-wing is as strong as ever, but being a Zionist is now increasingly a right-coded statement. It was remarkable to see Biden in his latest interview with Seth Myers to state publicly that he is a Zionist. It's an uncontroversial statement for a man of Biden's age, but I suspect it will be a toxic statement for liberals under the age of 40, at least among non-Jewish liberals. I think Israel becoming a bipartisan football is ultimately bad for the country, but I don't see how it ends any other way. And given how liberals dominate elite institutions in America, I'd argue that this does not augur well in the long run. If Biden loses in 2024 because of Michigan, then a narrative will be set that you cannot be too pro-Israel as a democrat anymore.
In the year of our lord 2024, we should not believe political activists when they claim an event was violent without videographic evidence. Given that the event was hosting an IDF soldier and director of the Kohelet Policy Forum (the think tank responsible for Netanyahu’s judicial changes), it’s reasonable to assume many of the students in attendance were Jewish/Israeli ethnonationalists — so, political activists in the purest sense of the term. The group hosting the speaker, Tikvah, explicitly “espouses the repatriation of Jews to their homeland, Eretz Israel,” so these students don’t even believe that America is their home, showing their extreme political stance.
The Kohelet Policy Forum collaborates with the Misgav Institute, which writes stuff like:
I looked at all the videos on Twitter and see no evidence of any violence.
Imagine if whites took back power in South Africa, pushed the people in Lesotho into an area 1% the size of current Lesotho. Then they put up a fence around it and economically blockaded Lesotho. Imagine, 30 000 people in Lesotho were killed in a military campaign with relentless airstrikes against Lesotho. Imagine that an event was being held in which a South African soldier was going to visit an American university and talk about how South Africa must ethnically cleanse itself of black people as there was no black state before the Boer.
Would anyone be the slightest bit surprised if the event got cancelled?
The difference here is that the Israeli mass expulsion of Palestinians is close to the EU. From Sinai to the EU is the same distance as Miami to Daytona Beach.
Israelis are allowed to get away with things nobody else can get away with and are surprised that they can't get away with more.
Lesotho is a bad comparison in that it is completely surrounded by South Africa. Since Israeli abandonment of Philadelphi Corridor in 2005 Gaza has a border with an Arab and Muslim majority state of Egypt. That Egypt shows no compassion to its co-ethnics (97% of Palestinians identify as Arab) and co-religionists (99% of Palestinians identify as Muslim) isn't Israel's fault.
Egypt has no reason whatsoever in aiding Israels ethnic cleansing of Palestine by helping Israel move millions of Palestinians into Egypt.
The Russian view of Ukranians being ethnic brothers would seem to refute this. It’s a valid reason. It is one rejected by Egypt mainly due to fears Palestinians would destabilize Egypt.
Doesn't stop us from engaging in fratricide, though.
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