They mean what they say

On giving the benefit of the doubt to "peace" demonstrators openly agitating for war.

Do it, Alex! DO IT!

Alas, when pressed further, Jones says he won’t be joining the incel exodus to Siberia. A cult leader making his followers do something provocative and risky while he sits back and watches. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

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Jonathan Chait says it’s time for his fellow liberals to stop assuming that “anti-Zionist” protesters, trying and failing to recreate ‘68 in Chicago as of this writing, have good intentions:

…the demonstrators do have a publicly articulated worldview. The Detroit action was organized by Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the University of Michigan chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

SAFE, like other branches of SJP, takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.” The group sent masked protesters to the home of a Jewish regent in the middle of the night and vandalized his law office.

“Death and more. Death and worse” is just a negotiating tactic in working toward a two-state solution which is favorable to both Israelis and Palestinians, I’m sure. I mean, you always take a hard line at first, right?

It is possible to imagine a world where pro-Palestinian protesters were aiming for a just future where Israel and Palestine could coexist. But that is not the world we inhabit. And it does no good to pretend it is.

The Chicago protests are being led by Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. On October 7, Abudayyeh made an official statement for USPCN celebrating the slaughter of Israeli civilians: “Palestinians have an internationally-recognized right to resist illegal military occupation, and today’s attacks from the Palestinian Resistance should be understood as a legitimate response to unending violence from Israel’s extreme right-wing, racist, white supremacist, zionist government and settler movement … now we have no choice but to defend ourselves, because the Israeli military and racist settlers have been attacking and killing with impunity, and must and will be stopped! We will win our liberation and Return!”

And while this rhetoric may be shocking, every major anti-Israel activist group has adopted a similar position. Students for Justice in Palestine called the October 7 attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” against “the façade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The Palestinian Youth Movement saluted “the active decolonization of Palestinian land” and stated “We have a right to resist on our own land.” Within Our Lifetime declared, “Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people,” and therefore, “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.” Jewish Voices for Peace declined to condemn the attack, instead blaming it on Israel: “The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to U.S. complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation.”

The common thread running through these statements, other than unbounded eagerness to shed Israeli blood, is a worldview suggested by the recurring terms settler and colonist. All these groups adhere to a left-wing western doctrine that is the subject of an excellent new book, On Settler Colonialism, by Adam Kirsch.

Settler colonialism is a theory of societies established by western settlers. The fact that certain countries (the U.S., Canada, and Australia) were established by settlers who displaced or killed off the native population is not novel. Settler colonialism is a way of centering this fact as an ongoing genocide that “continues to define every aspect of its life, even after centuries,” as Kirsch puts it. “Settler, in this view, is not the descriptions of the actions of an individual but a heritable identity.”

[…]

The only humane solution to the predicament is a negotiated agreement between Jews and Palestinians. Settler colonialism, instead, denies Jewish Israelis any right to live in the region, rendering any act of the Israeli state illegitimate and any action to dismantle it permissible.

Settler-colonialism theorists believe certain people have an authentic, permanent relationship to the land. Their rhetoric, as Kirsch points out, echoes the romantic nationalism of the old German right. “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinians ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land,” writes Jamal Nabulsi of University of Queensland. Palestinians have “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land,” in the words of the scholar Steven Salaita.

Compare this with the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologists such as Richard Walther Darre — “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it” — and you will have difficulty detecting any difference. Indeed, if you switched Palestinian with German, it would be hard to tell one theorist from the other.

An important corollary of settler-colonialist thought is that, because they lack a naturalistic connection to any soil, the Jews must be rendered a permanently rootless subaltern class. This has an echo of the Nazi conception of the Jew as alien, and at times its rhetoric has the same overtones. Salaita, again, on the Zionists: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … There is no real notion of the commons in Zionism. Public space is deeply personal, demarcated and apportioned based on a crude obsession with genetics … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic.” This is blood-and-soil nationalism for the left.

How do slogans like “no walls, no borders” and “no one is illegal” co-exist with “from the river to the sea?”

The answer is, “shut up, Zionist pig.”