We find deeply troubling the arguments that underlie Gideon Saar, Barry Strauss and David Zax’s recent column, “Why Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism in Disguise.” Zionism is an ideology, not a people. Israel is a nation-state, not a people. The government of Israel is no more exempt from criticism than is the government of the United States, which is funding, supplying and otherwise enabling Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza.
Conflating Israel with the Jewish people erases the significant percentage of Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, who oppose Israel’s colonialist policies of occupation, apartheid, annexation, ethnic cleansing and violence; as a matter of fact, Pew Research found that about one-in-ten American Jews support an Israel boycott. It also falsely labels any criticism of and resistance to such policies as antisemitic. As Jewish Voice for Peace notes, “Antisemitism is discrimination, targeting, violence, and dehumanizing stereotypes directed at Jews because they are Jewish.” The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism acknowledges that neither “supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights as encapsulated in international law,” nor “evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state,” constitute antisemitism.
Suggesting that anti-Zionism amounts to a call for the elimination of Israelis is false and misleading. The notion that Palestinian equality, human rights and the right to return mean Israeli annihilation reflects a fundamentalist, ethnonationalist outlook that denies the possibility of Jewish and Palestinian coexistence in an egalitarian, democratic society not based on occupation. Many Jewish organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and Breaking the Silence have made this point, as have some of our colleagues at Cornell and elsewhere (Boyarin 2023; Cheyfitz 2014; Magid 2023).
The equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is designed to suppress principled solidarity with the Palestinian people and distract from the vital tasks of ending the genocidal assault on Palestinians and dismantling Israeli apartheid. As of Feb. 6, Israel has killed more than 27,000 Gazans per the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. Apologists for Israel cannot justify, on moral or legal grounds, the apocalyptic destruction of Palestinian life, culture and property. Instead, they seek to silence, discredit and isolate those who defend the human rights of Palestinians — including students of color who are targets of racism.
Fueling this repressive agenda is the capitulation of university administrators to the demands of powerful elites to censor and discipline students who advocate for human rights and an end to the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. The result of such campaigns of intimidation is an inverted reality in which members of the Cornell Coalition for Mutual Liberation and other courageous students are accused of bigotry for their principled stances against oppression, genocide and ethnonationalism.
Many ironies are at work here. Opposition to Israeli apartheid and violence is not an identitarian cause; people of all colors and creeds must resist ethnonationalism and colonial occupation. But many of the Cornell students and staff who support Palestinian liberation are members of racialized and vulnerable groups. They intimately know the realities of harmful ethnoracial ideologies, the violence of colonialism and its afterlives. In the name of antiracism and liberation, and at considerable personal sacrifice, they challenge a western cultural and political establishment that continues to dehumanize Palestinians and facilitate their displacement and extermination. Yet, they are accused of racism by the defenders of an avowed ethnostate, Israel, as it carries out a genocidal assault on a colonized population of refugees in Gaza, the largest open-air prison on the planet.
Similar contradictions shape the discourse of “feelings” that is used to stifle solidarity with Palestine. As scholars, we know that the history of feelings is a racialized one (Ahmed 2014; Muñoz 2020; Yao 2021). Speaking out on behalf of Palestinian human rights, we are told, may distress Jewish students and cause them to feel unsafe. Opponents of divestment recently asked Cornell’s Student Assembly “to say no to Boycott, Divestment and Sanction and yes to a campus where Jewish students, and all students, are able to attend Cornell without intimidation or fear.” This framing erases the anguish of anti-Zionist Jewish students who are coerced into remaining silent in the face of Israeli crimes against humanity. Even more insidious is the way that the deployment of “feelings” erases the profound vulnerability of historically oppressed, nonwhite people.
When a Black, Muslim student forcefully criticizes Israel, they are labeled a bigot in ways that increase their exposure to racist assault and recrimination. The student is unable to embody vulnerability or grief. They have no “feelings”— no fear, no suffering, no outrage — that the campus community is bound to respect. The student’s trauma — and that of scores of Palestinian, Arab, anti-Zionist Jews and other anti-Zionist students — as tens of thousands of Gazans are slaughtered, does not register in the logic of western imperialism, or in the calculations of U.S. legislators and university administrators. The student’s blackness means that they can be made a target for intimidation and harassment without regard for the student’s safety or wellbeing, at a time of surging Islamophobic incidents across the U.S.
These currents are apparent in the U.S. across a range of justice struggles. Florida can pass legislation restricting conversations in classrooms about race on the grounds that such material, such as slavery, may make white students uncomfortable. But the experience of Black and Brown, Arab and Muslim students who must endure a curriculum that denies their humanity does not seem to warrant consideration. The larger truth, of course, is that the negation of Black and Brown humanity — in Palestine, at Cornell and everywhere else — also degrades and disfigures those who are granted a status of superiority, leading to their complicity in the crimes of empire.
Perhaps we should raise the question: Whose feelings matter? Whose are enshrined and instrumentalized in the official narrative and whose are denied? Whose vulnerability is politically salient in a white supremacist society? Who can wield the discourse of human fragility and pain in ways that rewrite policy and shift the public conversation from the genocide to the purported comfort of particular students?
As the feminist theorist Audre Lorde stated, “I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group.” Multiple truths exist simultaneously. Antisemitism is a reality, particularly in light of the growth of white nationalist organizing within and beyond the U.S. in recent years. Everyone is capable of consciously or unconsciously reproducing antisemitism, antiblackness and other forms of bigotry.
However, it is also true that in attempting to demonize critics of Israel, Zionists are weaponizing claims of antisemitism against Palestinians of all faiths and against supporters of Palestine throughout the world, including those who are Jewish. The real aim is to crush solidarity with Palestinians and to insulate Israel as it faces global outrage over its war in Gaza. The weaponizing of antisemitism is especially effective — and especially pernicious — when it marshals antiblackness and fearmongers racial ‘Others’ to bolster the settler-colonialist cause.
The principle of justice requires not that we guard against discomfort or hurt feelings, but that we pursue human rights and liberation. True freedom of expression and honest exchange, on a university campus, demand no less.
Tracy McNulty is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature. McNulty can be reached at [email protected].
Naoki Sakai is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Asian Studies Emeritus. Sakai can be reached at [email protected].
Margaret Washington is a Mary Underhill Noll Professor of American History Emeritus. Washington can be reached at [email protected].
Shannon Gleeson is a Professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Brooks School of Public Policy. Gleeson can be reached at [email protected].
Paul Sawyer is a Professor Emeritus of English. Sawyer can be reached at [email protected].
Natalie Melas is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. Melas can be reached at [email protected].
Russell Rickford is an Associate Professor of History. Rickford can be reached at [email protected].
Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies and Feminist,
Gender & Sexuality Studies. Salzar Parreñas can be reached at [email protected].
Darlene Evans is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Writing Outreach with the Knight Institute. Evans can be reached at [email protected].
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