Accusing Israel of Genocide is Racist

The arts and letters must expunge the perpetrators of the Jew-hating turn in progressive politics.

Over the weekend, many noted the irony that as recently as 2015, Yale was the site of a struggle session in which senior Jerelyn Luther was seen shrieking at residential college head Nicholas Christakis because his wife Erika, who held the same position, had circulated an email gently suggesting that it wasn’t necessary for Yale to censor Halloween costumes. “Have we lost faith in young people's capacity—in your capacity—to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?” she asked. “Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.” Students deemed that intolerable:

That controversy led to a confrontation last Thursday, where a student [Luther] screamed at Christakis to “be quiet” as he tried to explain his position, and then called him “disgusting” and said he “should not sleep at night” because of what he’d done.

The irony is that a couple of nights ago, protesters at Yale formed a human chain to corral the movement of a Chasidic student.

It didn’t take long for people to make the obvious connection to this scene at the University of Vienna in 1938.

The Jewish Yale sophomore reporting on the protest, Sahar Tartak, was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag by this as yet unidentified keffiyeh-clad man who, frankly, doesn’t look especially Palestinian:

(source)

Progressivism has come a long way in a nigh-decade, from “You should lose your job for suggesting that I can withstand offense” to “Assaulting Jews is a valid form of protest.” Title your party a “trap house,” as one Yalie did in 2021, and you’re going to be hauled through a disciplinary process from hell. Get assaulted as a Jew, and campus police will tell you that they can’t do anything, as they told Tartak.

We got here thanks to a lack of resistance to a rhetorical maneuver that was pushed early on in Hamas’s war on Israel (not, as it is so often called, “Israel’s war on Gaza”), namely that Israel is conducting a genocide. Obviously the characterization predates last October, but it has become especially prevalent since then.

“There is an old Jewish saying,” recalls Alex Rivchyn: “the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.” So it is with the genocide libel.

Israel is not committing genocide. Genocide has a definition, “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race.” The defense in Hamas’s war on Israel is attempting to rescue hostages, 134 of them nearing their 200th day of captivity, and permanently neutralize Hamas as a military force, for the crime of their attack on October 7, which they have vowed to repeat. It is not directed at the Palestinian people as such, and will conclude once the well-defined military objectives have been reached.

Jews the world over pray every morning for all victims of war, and that includes the Palestinian victims. That said, the casualties, even if you accept the patently bogus numbers from the Palestinian leadership, are among the lowest rates of death in the history of modern urban conflict, thanks to discretion and adjustment of tactics on the part of Israel. Given that these death rates would drop to zero if Hamas returned the hostages and surrendered, the continuing loss of Palestinian life and the associated agony demonstrably does not trouble Hamas. For Israel’s part, not only do the casualties remain proportional, but its decades-long concern with proportionality has arguably misled its military to avoid violence when it shouldn’t have.

So the first reason to refrain from calling this conflict a genocide is that it’s a lie. But why perpetrate the lie? Why is it insufficient to say, for instance, that Palestinian casualties are too numerous? Because the moderately worded opinion doesn’t accomplish the intended purpose: to connect the Jewish state to the Nazi regime, which was genocidal, and thereby justify the oppression of and violence against Jews the world over. Which we are now seeing. It is racism. It is Jew-hatred.

As Bari Weiss noted yesterday:

For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted: Go back to Africa. Or imagine that a gay student was surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit with a stick at Yale University. Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they ought to head home for Ramadan because campus public safety could not guarantee their security.

It bears mentioning because protesters at Columbia just told Jews to go back to Poland, and a Rabbi advised his Jewish students to go home for Passover and stay there until the school troubled itself to secure the campus. Tartak’s case was mentioned overhead. “There would be relentless fury from our media and condemnation from our politicians,” notes Weiss. But she doesn’t get into why: that kind of aggression offends the contemporary progressive ethos but directed at Jews, it comports with it.

Some progressives at this point will insist that such actions are an abomination of progressivism and they condemn them as much as anyone. Good, I answer, but you are being sidelined from the movement by activists who think otherwise, and it behooves you to join us non-progressives and speak out against them—act out against them too, should that be required.

There is no shortage of opportunities in the arts and letters to do so.

Last week 21 authors addressed a statement to PEN America stating, “We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars. And we refuse to take part in celebrations that will serve to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide.” PEN should respond like so: “We reject the signatories’ racist characterizations and will consequently disregard the letter’s demands. The remarks of writers who cannot couch their opinions about the world’s conflicts in humane language are not of interest to the organization.”

Hyperallergic has characterized Hamas’s war on Israel as an Israeli genocide of Palestinians since last October, and was heard to do so again as recently as recently as four days ago. This recent case is worth discussing because the author conspicuously identifies himself as “an American Ashkenazi Jew whose father was born in Occupied Palestine.” Jew-haters are fond of such Jews just as conservatives are fond of anti-woke blacks, and for the same suspicious, calculated reasons. Unfortunately, such deluded or devious types as the author soil our history. His Jewishness excuses nothing. He is employing racist language and a Jew should not be trafficking in it. Tellingly, Hyperallergic is still accepting advertising dollars from Columbia even though the school is so overrun with anti-Jewish racism and anti-Jewish violence that they switched to remote learning this morning. These people are racists. Call them that. Break from them accordingly.

Those are just two examples of many. Good people let this foolish talk go on for too long unchallenged. Many of us saw, early, through the cynicism of the so-called “anti-racism” with which the arts and letters have so thoroughly enmeshed themselves for the last four years. Now that the real purpose of the project has been revealed, the establishment of a postliberal progressive racial order that requires the denigration of the Jews, true opposition to racism demands that we fight it.

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