It is often said that “politics makes strange bedfellows.” The same could be said of ideology.
There is now one ideology that unites an especially wide range of groups: college faculties of Middle East and “identity” studies, campus and corporate diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies, rap artists, Black Lives Matter activists, progressive Democrats, much of the NGO sector and the mobs of keffiyeh-clad protesters. That singular ideology? Israel eliminationism.
Besides their mutual loathing of the one Jewish state on the planet, these eliminationist ideologues share one other characteristic: They regard themselves as avatars of woke progressivism who are upholding “the right side of history.”
That self-image rests on massive inversions of reality. ‘Eliminationism’ ideology tags Israel as a colonialist project, when, in fact, it is the epitome of decolonization, as a globally persecuted people finally returned to their indigenous homeland. There is no mothership.
Israel eliminationism frames Israel’s founding as a genocide of the native Palestinian Arabs, even though Israel’s founders agreed to yield much of their indigenous land for a separate Palestinian state and guaranteed full civic equality to Palestinians within Israel’s borders. It was the Arabs who attempted a genocide of the new Israeli state, a goal they proudly and repeatedly declare. Eliminationism also indicts Israel for denying Palestinian sovereignty, when, on multiple occasions, the nation has endorsed specific proposals to bring about a Palestinian state. All the proposals were rejected or sabotaged by Palestinian leaders, and all were followed by the Palestinians’ resumption of their permanent terror war to eliminate Israel.
Despite the demonstrable falsities that form the entire basis of Israel eliminationism, the ideology has seeped into mainstream media and the arts. This long-simmering bias helps explain the shocking response across American colleges to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Far from showing empathy with grieving men, women and children—as they do with Palestinian Arabs—college campuses around the world exploded with celebrations of Hamas’s horrors and chilling calls to bring this savage “intifada” to America.
These mobs of protesters seek not only a second Holocaust targeting Israel, but also the elimination from American civil society of all Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist, meaning most of American Jewry.
The latter objective is now being pursued by two parallel and mutually reinforcing streams of activity. At the “street” level, this involves raging protest mobs who seize and vandalize university spaces and then deny Jewish students access unless they denounce Israel’s right to exist. Off-campus, similar mobs surround synagogues, Jewish centers and Jewish old-age homes, shouting epithets and calling for the death of Jews. Especially concerning is the fact that while those mobs violate multiple criminal laws regarding threats, intimidation and civil rights rulings, arrests and prosecutions have been sporadic and inconsistent, as seen on a good number of college campuses, where protesters keep returning to block and intimidate Jewish students.
Encouraging both the mobs’ rage and the lax law enforcement is the second and parallel stream of Israel eliminationism activity, namely, the deeply embedded loathing of Israel that has captured the great opinion-shaping institutions across America. This includes:
- Middle East and identity studies departments at universities advocate academic and other boycotts against Israel, but not China for its Uyghur genocide or Russia for its mass brutalities in Ukraine.
- Campus efforts to ban Jews from student government, claiming that their Jewish identity renders them “biased.”
- The embrace by kindergarten through 12th-grade school districts of the antisemitic “liberated ethnic-studies curriculum,” which falsely instructs that Israel is a “colonial-settler state” founded “through genocide.”
- Cancellations of Jewish authors by publishers and writers’ groups, based solely on their presumed guilt-by-association with “genocidal” Israel.
- The loathing and bullying of Jewish writers at major media outlets, as described in Bari Weiss’s resignation letter from The New York Times.
- Awarding a 2025 Pulitzer Prize to an antisemitic Palestinian writer, whose columns falsely deny Hamas’s savage murder of the kidnapped Bibas babies, and Hamas’s abduction and starvation of two recently released female Israeli hostages.
The woke sectors of American society are indeed beginning to cultivate exclusion against American Jews. Unless the underlying false ideology and its entrenched promoters are confronted, delegitimated and disempowered, the tentacles of this woke anti-Israel, anti-Jewish movement will continue to extend their reach.
{Reposted from JNS}
