Pro-Hamas protesters obscure their motivations, but can’t hide that they’re antisemitic | Opinion

Pro-Hamas demonstrators in the United States calling for Israel’s demise insist they are not antisemites. They are, they say, anti-Zionist, or anti-colonialist, or pro-human rights. They say they have nothing against the Jews and say the problem is Israel as a “settler-colonial state” practicing racism and genocide.

The misuse of these terms did not emerge overnight. Open antisemitism was discredited after the Holocaust, because it lay at the heart of Nazi racism itself. Arab leaders rejecting more Jews in Palestine, therefore, said they had nothing against Jews as such, just the “Zionist” ones, who they claimed were “the new Nazis.”

They were more truthful in private. Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatly pleaded with a U.S. diplomat two years before Israel’s creation: “Can you not see that while Muslims and Christians can work together, it is abnormal that either should make common cause with the Jews? . . . Our Koran inveighs against them specifically.” The problem was not that the Jews were Zionist. The problem was that they were Jews.

The ruse was re-deployed by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) after the 1967 Six-Day War. The 1968 PLO charter denied any Jewish connection to “Palestine.” “Zionists” were foreign invaders, labeled “racist,” “colonial,” “fascist” and “fanatic.” Israel, the charter continued, was “the geographic base for world imperialism.” Israel’s destruction and the expulsion of all Zionists, it promised, would bring world peace and reaffirm human dignity.

The Soviet Bloc, which armed Israel’s enemies, adopted this language in attacking Israel, and also East European Jews. Poland’s anti-Zionist campaign of 1967-68 ran thousands of Jews out of the country. So-called scientific studies in the Soviet Union concurred that Zionism promoted racism, colonialism and hostility to human rights. West European leftists, who viewed themselves as anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, readily agreed, even as PLO affiliates were hijacking airplanes and killing Jews in Europe.

The U.N. General Assembly gave these slanders its global imprimatur, resolving in 1975 that “Zionism is a form of racism.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, answered that the U.N. had given “the abomination of anti-Semitism . . . the appearance of international sanction.” But it had also, Moynihan said, drained critical terms like “racism” of any meaning, for if Zionism was racism, then everything else (or nothing else) fit racism’s definition. “There will be new prophets,” he predicted, “who will justify their actions with the help of just such distortions. . . . The damage we now do to the idea of human rights . . . could well be irreversible.”

Post-colonial theory, a noxious strain of which now infests many universities, completed the job. Born in the 1960s, its premise was that colonialism constructed false realities. Our view of native Americans, for example, had been tainted by myths of westward expansion that had to be deconstructed in order to consider victim societies by their own lights. The idea was not wrong. But the aiming of post-colonial theory at Israel, particularly by Middle Eastern Studies departments after the 1970s, represented the weaponization of academic theory.

Consider the jargon. “Settler-colonialism,” a derivative term, means the erasure of indigenous peoples by foreign invasion and settlement. It is defined by Western racism, systematic ethnic cleansing and genocide. The term has been leveled at Israel for decades. But factually, it only fits if one continuously denies the truth of the ancient Jewish connection to Israel, of the Jewish acceptance of the U.N.’s 1947 partition plan, of the refugee character of Jewish arrivals after 1948 from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East, and of the Arab attacks and terror that drove much of Israeli policy.

For the past weeks, we have seen the poison tree drop its overripe fruit at Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Tulane, UCLA and elsewhere. The insistence that Hamas is a resistance organization rather than an antisemitic band of killers, the argument that murdered Jews including infants had it coming because they were “settlers” and the assertion that any Israeli response is genocidal are arguments not dissimilar from those of the Nazis, who insisted that the Jews started World War II and that killing them was a self-defense measure that would bring world peace. Indeed, many activists have gone off script by intimidating Jews and even calling for their deaths.

But equally disturbing is the dogmatic nature of the protests. Their heads filled with pseudo-academic doctrine and well-rehearsed lies, anti-Israel demonstrators can do little beyond repeat robotic slogans with the misapplied key words of “apartheid,” “settler-colonialism” and “genocide,” as they call for Israel’s destruction.

They know nothing of Israel’s history and culture and nothing of past attempts at peace. They are ignorant of the consequences of an Iranian-dominated Middle East. Nor do they wish to learn, since learning would legitimize “colonial speech.” The demonstrations are thus also an indictment of those faculty educating adults who can chant, but who cannot think.

Norman J.W. Goda is the director of the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies and the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida.