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Among older American Jews, this assertion of a Zionist consensus comprises some reality. But amongst youthful American Jews, it’s false. In 2021, even earlier than Israel’s present far-right authorities took energy, the Jewish Electorate Institute discovered that 38 p.c of American Jewish voters beneath the age of 40 considered Israel as an apartheid state, in contrast with 47 p.c who stated it’s not. In November, it revealed that 49 p.c of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed Mr. Biden’s request for added navy assist to Israel. On many campuses, Jewish college students are on the forefront of protests for a cease-fire and divestment from Israel. They don’t converse for all — and perhaps not even most — of their Jewish friends. But they symbolize way over 2 p.c.
These progressive Jews are, because the U.S. editor of The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz, famous to me, a double minority. Their anti-Zionism makes them a minority amongst American Jews, whereas their Jewishness makes them a minority within the Palestine solidarity motion. Fifteen years in the past, when the liberal Zionist group J Street was intent on being the “blocking again” for President Barack Obama’s push for a two-state answer, some liberal Jews imagined themselves main the push to finish Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Today, the prospect of partition has diminished, and Palestinians more and more set the phrases of activist criticism of Israel. That discourse, which is peppered with phrases like “apartheid” and “decolonization,” is usually hostile to a Jewish state inside any borders.
There’s nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future during which Palestinians and Jews coexist on the premise of authorized equality moderately than Jewish supremacy. But in pro-Palestine activist circles within the United States, coexistence has receded as a theme. In 1999, Mr. Said argued for “a binational Israeli-Palestinian state” that supplied “self-determination for each peoples.” In his 2007 e book, “One Country,” Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, an influential supply of pro-Palestine information and opinion, imagined one state whose title mirrored the identities of each main communities that inhabit it. The phrases “‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are pricey to those that use them and so they shouldn’t be deserted,” he argued. “The nation might be referred to as Yisrael-Falastin in Hebrew and Filastin-Isra’il in Arabic.”
In latest years, nonetheless, as Israel has moved to the proper, pro-Palestinian discourse within the United States has hardened. The phrase “From the river to the ocean, Palestine shall be free,” which dates from the Sixties however has gained new prominence since Oct. 7, doesn’t acknowledge Palestine and Israel’s binational character. To many American Jews, in reality, the phrase suggests a Palestine freed from Jews. It sounds expulsionist, if not genocidal. It’s an ironic cost, provided that it’s Israel that immediately controls the land between the river and the ocean, whose leaders brazenly advocate the mass exodus of Palestinians and that the International Court of Justice says may plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.
Palestinian students like Maha Nassar and Ahmad Khalidi argue that “From the river to the ocean, Palestine shall be free” doesn’t suggest the subjugation of Jews. It as a substitute displays the longstanding Palestinian perception that Palestine ought to have turn out to be an impartial nation when launched from European colonial management, a imaginative and prescient that doesn’t preclude Jews from residing freely alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbors. The Jewish teams closest to the Palestine solidarity motion agree: Jewish Voice for Peace’s Los Angeles chapter has argued that the slogan is not any extra anti-Jewish than the phrase “Black lives matter” is anti-white. And if the Palestine solidarity motion within the United States requires the genocide of Jews, it’s arduous to clarify why so many Jews have joined its ranks. Rabbi Alissa Wise, an organizer of Rabbis for Cease-Fire, estimates that apart from Palestinians, no different group has been as outstanding within the protests in opposition to the warfare as Jews.
