Monthly Archives: February 2022

On Friday, Feb. 4, my world was shaken. It hit me as though it were a fresh wound: My father, Elie Wiesel, was really gone.

It hurt terribly when he died over five years ago, on July 2, 2016. But I also found peace and awakening as I grieved. I had this sense from the very moment he passed that he would be with me always. Through his dreams for me, I felt that as long as I lived, he would too as would my ancestors.

This feeling deepened over the years that followed. My year of Mourners Kaddish ended and I still found myself drawn to Shabbat peace, to morning tefillin, to the intentionality of a minyan gathered to pray, to the stories of our people in ancient texts. I felt the wholeness of history, of the chain of which he had always wanted me to feel a crucial part, which he so keenly felt himself. And although I miss him daily, I unfailingly find that thinking of him makes my footsteps feel sure.But on Feb. 4 I had to stop and catch my breath as I realized the depth of my loss, our loss.

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Because that day was the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and millions were tuning in to the opening ceremony. Most of the world didnt seem to know, or care, that the host country is hosting a pageant of peace and friendship while simultaneously terrorizing its Uyghur minority.

The Chinese governments systematic oppression of the Uyghurs, a Muslim group in northwest China, is not the Holocaust. But although we may not have seen this particular movie, we know the genre.

I have heard the painful testimony of Uyghur dissidents, who manage to get the word out despite a media clampdown that makes it almost impossible for the Western press to report on the facts. Forced internment camps target people for thought crimes and racial affiliation. Medical data suggests that forced sterilizations are taking place among this targeted racial group. Families have been forcibly separated and threatened into silence.

Just like in 1936, the International Olympic Committee is unwilling to push the issue. And our community is mostly silent.I saw 100 or 200 brave souls rally on a rainy Thursday in Times Square. In the gray neon light, the young leaders called on each other and passersby via megaphones whose batteries could not keep up with the urgency of the message: Turn off the Olympics, and close the concentration camps in Xinjiang.

It should have been the whole city turning up to honor their message.

I know now that we have failed my father in this regard. He did not fail us. He spoke of how he always felt he had to answer to the dead: Did he do enough? And yes. He did.

He was there to speak up against atrocities in Darfur, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda. He tried with everything he had to tell us. And all the words he spoke and wrote could not change the fact that five years after his death, 1 million people are reportedly in concentration camps, because of their race and religion, in the grip of a totalitarian regime a regime honored to host the worlds nations, on a global television platform that packages sports with advertising.

Todays culture of workplace activism is highly developed. In corporations and small businesses across the United States, Black Americans and their allies, for one, showed with emotion how cries against police brutality could be heard in board rooms and executive suites.

But are men and women of conscience reaching out to their managers at the corporations that sponsor the Olympics? Are voices inside corporate America respectfully but insistently calling for company conversations about their responsibility when they hear survivors reports of genocide on the part of the Chinese government? If they are, they are not making themselves heard.There are brave leaders, like Steve Simon of the Womens Tennis Association, who canceled a lucrative tournament in China when the WTAs demands for player Peng Shuais safety and freedom went unanswered. Natan Sharansky and Bernard-Henri Lvy, two leading Jewish intellectuals, signed an ad in The New York Times, organized by me and paid for by the Elie Wiesel Foundation, urging a protest of the Beijing Olympics; Jewish organizations across the denominational spectrum have spoken up for the Uyghurs; and Jewish World Watch is trying to generate widespread action around the issue.

But they are still too few. I fear that Chinas state-sponsored capitalism has silenced us through our greed.

My father believed passionately that speaking up mattered, especially to the victims.

Have I, blessed to live in this country which stands for freedom, done enough?

Shame on Xi Jinping, shouted the determined young people in Times Square on Thursday night.And I think: Shame on me, if we cant find some way to help. Shame on us.PJC

Elisha Wiesel is the son of Marion and Elie Wiesel. This piece first appeared on JTA.

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When I recall my father Elie Wiesel, my shame about these Olympics only deepens - thejewishchronicle.net

In the summer of 1990, I stood where the wall had been and wondered at what had happened to Europe. I wasnt alone: the rest of the city, the rest of the continent, was wondering too.

I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.

The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadnt been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming.The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didnt think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didnt seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus a change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didnt believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the death strip from East to West would make you think again.

And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didnt know what was coming next. But from todays perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign globalisation, in which free markets, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have apositive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. Populists continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didnt see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, its hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called the free world. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people dont change, not really. Im just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didnt know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

This was the thesis of Patrick Deneens 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two communism and fascism were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism the elder brother is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedomforthe individualfromsociety itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.

What is crucial to understand and this is what makes liberalism an ideology is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to becreated. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally evolve from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the sovereign individual from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In thismigration of the holyour religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether inJacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism the system which G. K. Chesterton called themonster that grows in deserts with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this waytotalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalisms Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalisms very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of public health, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of todays West the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity all of this is the manifestation not of liberalisms failure but of its success. The progressives who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals.These woke radicals,they cry,are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to classical liberalism! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of classical liberalism, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both Left and Right. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its diversity becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesnt have much to say.

But theres more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that weve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again whether we like it or not.

So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: a future of self-limitation, in which people choose to practice self-governance in local communities, or a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression.

I know which Id prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent the people. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more populist (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both Left and Right and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians wont roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted liberal order, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

See original here:

The liberal order is already dead - UnHerd

When a group in black fatigues called Alpha Men Assemble began practising paramilitary manoeuvres in a park in Staffordshire at the beginning of this year, it looked pretty threatening. These men, we were warned, were about to launch an insurrection against vaccines and in favour of the sovereign citizen. Since then, silence. It wouldnt be surprising if the group had dispersed: a society of self-proclaimed alphas is bound to fall apart.

This was just one example of the incoherent protests now sweeping rich, English-speaking nations. Others include the truck blockade in Ottawa and its duplicates in Australia, New Zealand and the US, and the angry men outside the British parliament, waiting to pounce on passing politicians. By incoherent protest, I mean gatherings whose aims are simultaneously petty and grandiose. Their immediate objectives are small and often risible, attacking such minor inconveniences as face masks. The underlying aims are open-ended, massive and impossible to fulfil. Not just politically impossible, but mathematically impossible. Listening to these men (and most of them are men), it seems that every one of them wants to be king.

The sovereign citizen theory is a powerful current running through these movements. Its adherents insist that they stand above the law. Some of them refuse to buy vehicle licences, or pay taxes or fines. They believe they are exempt from public health measures, such as lockdowns and vaccine passes.

In other words, they arrogate to themselves sovereign powers that not even the monarch enjoys. They produce elaborate pseudo-legal documents to justify these claims. The memorandum of understanding published by two of the leading organisers of the Ottawa blockade, which makes impossible legal demands of the government, looks like a classic of the genre. It was supposedly signed by 320,000 people before the organisers withdrew it.

What explains the appeal of this movement? Such claims of individual sovereignty arose in the 1970s with an antisemitic, racist agitation called Posse Comitatus. They appear to surge in hard times. Some people believe they can annul their debts or tax arrears by renouncing their citizenship. But I suspect its about more than money. The promise of capitalism is that one day we will all be alphas just not yet. It is a formula for frustration and humiliation. The less equal the economic system becomes, the wider the gap between the promise and its fulfilment yawns. Humiliation, as Pankaj Mishra argued in his excellent book Age of Anger, is the motor of extremism. Noisy assertions of sovereignty look like an obvious attempt to overcome humiliation.

There was a time, in the rich nations, when it seemed as if we could all triumph. From the second world war until the late 1970s, general prosperity rose steadily. The top 1% captured a decreasing proportion of total income. But then, in the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia, the curve suddenly turned, and the 1% began to grab an ever greater share. The trend has continued to this day, sustained by the neoliberal doctrines that were first imposed in the rich world by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The ultra-rich have gained most: since the beginning of the pandemic, the worlds 10 richest men have doubled their wealth, while 163 million people have been pushed below the poverty line. Wages for many people in the Anglosphere have stagnated, but the costs of living, especially housing, have soared.

But even during the glory years (1945 to 1975) the universal triumph capitalism promised was an illusion. The general rise of prosperity in rich nations was financed, in part, by poor ones. Decolonisation was resisted by the rich world with extreme violence and oppression, then partly reversed through coups and assassinations (such as the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, the crushing of Jacobo rbenzs government in Guatemala in 1954, the murder of Patrice Lumumba in Congo in 1961, Suhartos coup in Indonesia in 1967 and Augusto Pinochets in Chile in 1973). Today, such extreme measures are seldom required, as the transfer of wealth is secured by other means. The rich worlds wealth continues in large part to rely on the exploitation of black and brown people.

Incoherent protest movements tend to be infested with racism and white supremacy. Some of the key organisers of the Ottawa action are reported to have a grisly history of racist statements, and some of the protesters have flown swastikas and Confederate flags. When black and brown people assume positions of power and authority, and appear more alpha than those who expected tribute from them, this is perceived as an intolerable reversal. The current wave of incoherent protest began in the US with the reaction against Barack Obamas government, and soon evolved, with the encouragement of Donald Trump and others, into undisguised white supremacism.

Some of the Ottawa organisers also have a history of attacks on trade unions. The independence they demand means freedom from the decencies owed to other people, freedom from the obligations of civic life. In pursuing these selfish freedoms, they reinforce the neoliberal policies such as the crushing of organised labour that helped cause the impoverishment and insecurity suffered by those they claim to represent.

Canadian truckers, for example, especially immigrant workers, now suffer from wage theft, unsafe conditions and other brutal forms of exploitation, caused in part by a loss of collective bargaining power. But the protest organisers seem uninterested. Sovereignty and solidarity are not compatible.

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Theres no solidarity in sovereign citizen protests only incoherent rage - The Guardian

Alexis Grenells January 24/31 column Goysplaining provoked a heated response from Nation readers. A selection follows.1

Thank you, Alexis Grenell, for your passionate article Goysplaining. For too long, Jews have had to weigh their commitment to progressive causes and groups against the strong possibility that their Jewish faith and ethnic identity would be attacked. Call it what it is: anti-Semitism. With the news of the terrorist attack against the little synagogue in Colleyville, Tex., perhaps it is high time for progressive groups to listen to what Ms. Grenell is saying.Rabbi Gerry Waltercincinnati2

I was all set to dissect the anti-BDS tirade by Alexis Grenell in your January 24/31 issue. But today Im too shaken and broken-hearted from seeing the rubble of the Salhiya family home in Sheikh Jarrah, which was demolished by Israeli forces yesterday morning at 3 am. Instead, I will share three observations. First, Grenell deploys considerable energy pathologizing supporters of Palestinian rights and proscribing our advocacy efforts. Surely if she is gifted a platform to trash tactics aimed at securing justice for Palestinians, she could spare a moment to let us know what form of persuasion she finds acceptable. Only the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement has caught Israels attention; but perhaps thats the point. Second, Grenell is curiously silent on the de facto BDS of Palestinians. It seems safe to conclude that denying visas to Palestinian athletes, academics, and artists, criminalising Palestinian human rights organisations, and raiding Palestinian universities are A-OK with her. Finally, I dont know of another instance in modern history in which the motives of advocates for justice were examined so forensically, nor the character of those advocates smeared with such unremitting ferocity, as supporters of the Palestinian cause.3

Instead of maligning pro-Palestine leftists, perhaps Grenell might ask herself why she is incapable of seeing Palestinians as fully human, and not merely a projection of her own racist anxiety.4

Juliana Farhalondon5

As soon as I read the first sentence of this apologia for mainstream Zionism, I recognized a familiar and egregious fallacy in Grenells thinking: her wholesale reduction of Jews to a monolith. It was clear where this was going when she began right out of the gate by rekindling the feminist controversy over the Womens March from three years ago and the accusations of anti-Semitism against its leaders, in particular Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian, and the African American feminist Tamika Mallory. Grenell writes as if the charges of anti-Semitism were unanimously embraced by Jewish feminists, or even as if all Jews agree on what counts as anti-Semitism. But I and many of my Jewish feminist counterparts publicly disagreed at the time. One could argue that this kind of homogenization is itself an age-old form of anti-Semitism.6

In late December of 2018 I posted a long defense of Linda and Tamika and an appeal to Jewish women to support their leadership of the march. I was far from alone; some 13,000 people read and responded favorably to this post, and large national organizations representing thousands of Jewish womensuch as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP, my organization), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), and even the more mainstream National Council of Jewish Womencontinued to support the Womens March and its women of color leaders. Grenell parenthetically acknowledges that many American Jews reject the equation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and do support BDS, but the main direction of her piece is to convey the opposite: that anti-Zionists dont know our own history and that condemning Israel as an apartheid and settler colonial state is anti-Semitic.7 Current Issue

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Grenells rant against the critique of Representative Jamaal Bowman by the Democratic Socialists of America follows the same pattern of erasing dissentingand particularly anti-ZionistJewish and feminist voices. Many of us may deplore Bowmans failure to fully support Palestinian justice and BDS but think its crucial for other reasons to keep him in office. Those Jews who have continued to support Representative Bowman include JVP Action, JFREJ, and many members of DSA who also happen to be Jewish. Grenells denunciation of the left for ignoring the experience or perspective of Jews also strikes a double whammy of stereotypical reductivism. Who are the left? DSA hardly encompasses the entire spectrum of left organizations in the US, and its members are by no means unified. And whose Jewish experience is she talking about? Not mine, not that of so many of my friends and colleagues in JVP, young and old. Grenell parenthetically acknowledges that many American Jews reject the equation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and do support BDS, but the main direction of her piece is to convey the opposite: that anti-Zionists dont know our own history and that condemning Israel as an apartheid and settler colonial state is anti-Semitic.8

I suggest that if Grenell wants to stop trying to speak for all Jews and to practice what she preaches, she might educate herself about anti-Zionism and its long, vibrant history among Jews in Europe, the US, and even Israel. She could start by reading the review of the new Amnesty International report in The Nation [Amnestys Echo, by Omar Barghouti and Stefanie Fox].9

Rosalind Petcheskynew york cityThe writer is a member of the Leaders Group of JVP-NYC; Distinguished Professor Emerita of Political Science, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York; and the co-editor, with Esther Farmer and Sarah Sills, of A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (Monthly Review, 2021).10

Grenell is correct that there are currents in DSA who weaponized support for BDS to attack Bowman and by implication DSAs electoral strategy as well as J Streets. However, DSAs National Political Committee, reflecting the majority of the membership, rejected that sectarian posture. Conflict within a big-tent organization is inevitable and messy.Paul Garver11

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BDS calls for a boycott of the Israeli apartheid state, not Jews, and the international movement led by Omar Barghouti makes it clear that it condemns anti-Semitism. More and more young Jews are supporting BDS and equal rights for all. Kudos to DSA for holding its member Bowman to account for his votes that bear on this issue.David Schwartzman12

I would like to commend Dave Zirin for taking time from his sportswriting to respond to Grenells terribly wrong-headed diatribe against the pro-Palestinian left [How the Democratic Party Alienates Young Jews: A Reply to Alexis Grenell, online only, Jan. 27]. In fact, Grenells piece was not only an attack on the pro-Palestinian left, it was also an attack on Palestinians themselves and their history, of which Grenell seems unable to go beyond mainstream media tropes. Her article is replete with innuendos and falsehoods that come right out of the AIPAC playbook.13

Take, for example, her suggestion that the overwhelming opposition to BDS among American Jewry is partly the result of a public and oft-stated goal of many of Israels neighboring countries to annihilate the Jewish state. The latter is a claim straight from the Zionist and right-wing canon, using the most bombastic of terms (annihilate). But which countries is she referring to? Is the threat to annihilate coming from Lebanon? From Syria? From Jordan? From Egypt? All of these countries have been ruled for at least half a century by dysfunctional, unpopular governments or military dictatorships, which actually fear or bow to Israels military might and the US behind it, and are perennially more concerned about their own internal problems than about Israel.14

By Grenells reckoning, a two-state solution is Zionisms compromise offer, because it will parcel out small pieces to the Palestinians inside the Zionist claim of a historical homeland. The implication is that Palestinians should be grateful and thank their oppressors for being offered walled-off portions of landi.e., two or three Bantustan enclaves, which are then called a stateinstead of being thrown out completely. How generous!15

Assaf Kfourybrookline, mass.16

Grenell states in her piece that DSAs anti-Israel position is often thoughtless, self-righteous, and anti-Semitic, presumably because of its support for BDS. BDS is a call for political help to the world at large that comes from the Palestinian people themselves. To deny the validity of BDS is to effectively deny that colonized peoples are capable of any understanding of their own political situation. It denies the very political agency of Palestinians and arrogantly presumes to speak for them, as Washington and Tel Aviv (and before them, London) have done since the beginning of the military colonial project of the Nakba.Timothy Wongbrisbane, australia17

Do most American Jews really cringe like frightened mice when hearing the word boycott, thereby drinking the Anti-Defamation Leagues Kool-Aid? The first thing that comes to mind, as a son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, is the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. That was the boycott that triggered the retaliatory Nazi boycott of German Jewish businesses. The Jewish boycott was broken with the help of the senior Zionist leadership of the Yishuv, which formulated the infamous Transfer Agreement, propping up an economically vulnerable Nazi regime.18

Ms. Grenell seems unaware of a recent poll taken by the Jewish Electorate Institute that showed that 25 percent of American Jews believe Israel to be an apartheid state. The membership of my own organization, Social Democrats USA, has tripled since 2017, when we endorsed BDSnot as anti-Zionists but as Democratic Zionists, opposed to the apartheid of State Zionism and supportive of a genuine two-state option. Even Bernie Sanders can stand to learn something new.19

Sheldon RanzDirector of Special Projects,Social Democrats USAbrooklyn, n.y.20

In complaining that Jews should be leading the conversation about Israel and BDS on the left, Grenell falls into precisely the trap that the Israeli government has set for us all: mistakenly equating the nation of Israel with Jews worldwide, assuming that all Jews support Israel and oppose BDS, and thus branding opposition to Israeli policy as anti-Semitic. She glosses over the legitimacy and efficacy of the BDS movement, damning it with faint praise as a standard political campaign against a state entity, much as she understates the genetic cleansing and apartheid in Israel as simply the oppression of the Palestinian people. Instead, she notes that a lot of Jewish people oppose BDSmaybe, she says, because of the Nazi Holocaust, or maybe because Israel is threatened militarily, or maybe because the nation of Israel is often used interchangeably to mean the Jewish people. When she says the Jewish people, she apparently means only Jews who identify with Israel.21

No progressive would say that the Holocaust justifies oppression such as bombing the worlds largest outdoor prison (Gaza) or the eviction of Palestinians from homes their families have lived in for generations, even if it helps explain the desire for a Jewish homeland. And the military situation is a reason for, not against, taking action against Israel, which receives more military aid from the United States than any other country ($3.8 billion annually) and whose government, under Bennett as well as under Netanyahu, continues to seize Palestinian land, to maintain an apartheid wall, and to authorize Jewish-only settlements in violation of international law, making it clear that they prefer war over a two-state solution or any other peace agreement.22

So were left with Jews in this country taking criticism of Israel as an attack on the Jewish people, which is precisely the fallacious conflation of the two that Grenell bases all this on. In fact, the term Am Yisrael means the Jewish people, not the nation of Israel as Grenell says it does. The nation of Israel did not exist when that term became part of Jewish liturgy; the Hebrew word for nation is goy. This misdefinition of the Jewish people not only ignores the Jews in leadership positions in progressive organizations such as DSA that Grenell focuses on, but also overlooks the rapid growthespecially among young peopleof progressive Jewish organizations that support BDS, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (of which I am a member) and IfNotNow. These groups and individuals are not excluded from the conversation about Israel and BDS, as the article suggests; theyre just excluded from the article.23

Grenell seems to endorse a two-state solution as a compromise position that reflects a historical reality dating back thousands of years, but not only does that treat racial discrimination as a compromise, it also ignores its impracticalityindeed, impossibilityin light of Israels rejection of the idea of any Palestinian state. No one can seriously deny the virulent anti-Semitism in this country (Charlottesville, Tree of Life), in Europe, or in the Arab world. Nor can we deny that anti-Semitism often leads to attacks on Israel (though anti-Semites like Richard Spenser express their great admiration for the nation-state of Israel precisely because of its racist policies). But that does not mean that a peaceful BDS tactic aimed at illegal and inhumane government policies is anti-Semitic.24

Clyde Lelandberkeley, calif.25

This is a horrifying piece. While I disagree with DSAs stance on Bowman, Ms. Grenells stance is equally abhorrent. Israel occupies Palestineillegally, immorally, and, from a personal point of view, in a manner that fundamentally contradicts what I, a Jew, a member of J Street and Americans for Peace Now and raised in a temple, consider to be Jewish values. While one may disagree with actions of the so-called left, the real problem is that of Israels occupation, which has no more moral standing than does Chinas of Tibet or Russias of Ukraine.Marilyn Katz26

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In arguing that American Jews should be leading conversations about BDS, Grenell accepts as given the dual-loyalty trope. American Jews are not a direct party to what is happening in Israel-Palestine, and to suggest that we defer to the opinions of American Jews on this issue acts as if American Jews were synonymous with Israel. BDS is about justice for Palestinians, and the campaign targets Israel. It is wholly inappropriate to invoke identity politics on behalf of American Jews to argue that our opinion be given special weight on this matter. When America debates our policy regarding Russia and Ukraine, no one suggests we give special credence to Americans of Ukrainian ancestry. The very idea of appealing to Ukrainian Americans to lead this conversation would be absurd.27

It is also mistaken to position Israels oppression of Palestinians as an issue about emotional harm to American Jews. Support for Palestinians should be argued on the merits, not about whether it hurts the feelings of American Jews. American Jews may get upset when Israels apartheid regime is condemned in leftist political circles, but that is not a reason not to do so. Ongoing efforts to curtail Palestinian solidarity on the left because of how it makes American Zionist Jews feel is a transparent and cynical effort to avoid the substance of this debate. Weaponizing anti-Semitism in this way (e.g., citing the Tree of Life shooting in a column about Israel-Palestine) is an attempt to shift the terms of the debate, and should be rejected.28

Andy Rattobrooklyn, n.y.29

Do most American Jews really cringe like frightened mice when hearing the word boycott, thereby drinking the Anti-Defamation Leagues Kool-Aid? The first thing that comes to mind, as a son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, is the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. That was the boycott that triggered the retaliatory Nazi boycott of German Jewish businesses. The Jewish boycott was broken with the help of the senior Zionist leadership of the Yishuv, which formulated the infamous Transfer Agreement, propping up an economically vulnerable Nazi regime.30

Ms. Grenell seems unaware of a recent poll taken by the Jewish Electorate Institute that showed that 25 percent of American Jews believe Israel to be an apartheid state. The membership of my own organization, Social Democrats USA, has tripled since 2017, when we endorsed BDSnot as anti-Zionists but as Democratic Zionists, opposed to the apartheid of State Zionism and supportive of a genuine two-state option.31

Sheldon RanzDirector of Special Projects,Social Democrats USAbrooklyn, n.y.32

Grenells article needs some respectful pushback. There are many prominent Jews such as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and Medea Benjamin of Code Pink who are very critical of Israels policies, practices, and treatment of Palestinians. Those who havent given up on the two-state solution keep pushing America and Israel to get it done. While it may seem like insensitivity toward Israel, its rather impatience and frustration with the Israeli and American governments recalcitrance toward getting it done.33

Jews have been traumatized. This is a fact. Palestinians are being traumatized. This is also a fact. All people need to push to integrate past traumas and end current traumas. This can be done, and the two-state solution is the way to do this.34

Ed Ferreiranew sharon, me.35

Grenells commentary resonated with me. As a human rights and social justice researcher and advocate, I frequently find that the human rights realities, concerns, and lived experiences of discrimination and persecution faced by Jewish people both currently and historically are neglected, downplayed, and denied by many individuals and institutions who self-identify with the left.36

There is no sound moral basis for this lack of solidarity with and abandonment of Jewish people, their human rights, welfare, freedom, and access to justice and equality. It is made all the more painful and harmful at this particularly precarious and dangerous time for so many minorities, including Jews, as anti-Jewish bigotry and violence continue to rise in the United States, Canada, and globally. An urgent course correction by the left and a concurrent effort to reflect upon and address the ideological origins of left-wing anti-Jewish prejudice and hostility are needed. The harm they have caused and continue to cause must be repaired.37

Noam SchimmelLecturer, International and Area Studies,University of California, Berkeley38

Grenell says absolutely nothing about the illegal settlements or the disproportionate response against the Palestinians whenever there is a flare-up of violence. What exactly does she want the Palestinians to do when their land is being taken and they have few recourses? BDS is nonviolent protest, yet even that she opposes. She has the audacity to say that the left alienates Jews. Well, as a very left-leaning Jew, I can say that its not the left that alienates me, but people like her that think that all Jews must accept what Israel is doing because they are fellow Jews.Miriam Applebaum39

There is a term to describe Alexis Grenell: PEP, or progressive except for Palestine. She states that DSA and the left in general are making a mistake by offending Jews. If offending Jews means recognizing the forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; the massacre of children, women, and men in Deir Yassin the same year; some 60 Israeli laws diminishing the rights of Palestinians; group punishment in which the family of a person arrested for an act annoying the Israel Defense Forces has their home demolished; extrajudicial executions, torture, knee-capping, and murder of peaceful demonstrators; and the destruction of hundreds of villages, these offended persons need more awareness.40

Today, boycotting is the only peaceful way to protest the mistreatment of Palestinians. But in a paragraph critical of BDS, Grenell compares the campaign to the Nazi boycott of Jews before confiscating their assets. I see another troubling parallel policy of Israels with that of Nazi Germany: Hitler wanted an Aryan nation, and Israels leaders want only Jews.41

According to Grenells column, Linda Sarsour stated that one cannot be a feminist and support Israel. I would find it difficult to work with a person who supported improving human rights for all women except Palestinian women under Israeli occupation. One cannot work against oppression without identifying the oppressor.42

Herschel Solesportland, ore.43

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Letters From the March 7/14, 2022, Issue - The Nation