Medhi Hasan's folly (an addendum regarding the political use of 'anti-semitism' as a slur)

Moral of the story? Narratives defy logic

(This essay bookends a previous essay from earlier this week, “Jamaal Bowman, AIPAC, and the politics of using ‘anti-semitism’ as a slur.”)

This week, I watched a clip of an Intelligence² debate where Medhi Hasan went up against Einat Wilf, former member of the Knesset (Ilan Pappé and Melanie Philips were part of the debate, too, but they weren’t featured in the clip in question).¹ The debate itself happened some time ago.

The motion to be considered was “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” stated affirmatively in bold red letters on a projection screen nearby.

Hasan’s overall objection had to do with the absurdity of putting anti-Zionism categorically with anti-Semitism. At one point, he called the (false) equivalence ahistoric and touched upon some reasons why. But mostly he attempted to underscore the logical inconsistencies in the equivalence, including the fact that there are Jewish and Israeli anti-Zionists as well as anti-Semitic supporters of the Zionist project.

His opponent, on the other hand, stuck to a narrative as to why early Israelis did what they did so as to justify the state of affairs today.

It strikes me that the equivalence itself, that anti-Zionism somehow equals anti-Semitism, is also a justification. That’s how it’s being used, as a shield to excuse all prior (and current) actions. It’s not presented that way, but it provides the emotional satisfaction to those who have been trained or conditioned to take the statement as an article of faith.

That sense of satisfaction, in turn, gives power to the other, explicitly articulated rationales for the overarching state of affairs. “Zionists did X, Y, and Z” — the official narrative — and “those who oppose Zionism are anti-Semites anyway, so we had every right to do what we did” is the unspoken but nevertheless asserted argument.

I commend Medhi Hasan but I think he chose to focus on the wrong thing. Not that he himself was wrong — his logic was impeccable and should, in a purely academic environment, carry the day. But shooting holes in an opponent’s argument is not the best way to dismantle a narrative, because narratives are multi-layered: when one piece is debunked or dispatched, another element or strand of story can come in to patch things up, like repairing a bald tire.

I think he was on the right track in noting that the equivalence is ahistorical, and to fight that one must, in my opinion, locate in space and time exactly where this anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism canard originated. We have to see where it started and under what cultural conditions in order to understand why it was framed in such a way and deployed against the ideological opponents that it has.

“Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” doesn’t affect anti-Semitism coming from the right wing because it’s not designed to go after the right wing. Indeed, it’s not even meant to tackle anti-Semitism as such. The blending of the concept of anti-Semitism with the stance of anti-Zionism was a rhetorical redefinition only, taken up just as leftist criticism of Zionism was beginning to have an effect. We have to look at the material conditions in which the equivalence arose.

For example, in the early ’60s, Commentary, known as “a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, Israel and politics, as well as social and cultural issues,”² was still focused on the danger emanating from the far right. By the late ’60s and early ’70s, the magazine’s focus had shifted to a lurking menace on the left. This shift, which can be seen as a cultural barometer, coincided with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

That time period also coincided with the rise of the Mizrahi Black Panthers in Israel, which provided a direct parallel in both Israeli and American societies of leftist opposition to oppressive structures. (I describe more about the Mizrahi Black Panthers below.)

The parallels between these two racialized marginalized groups in the minds of the majority populations of both societies — American and Israeli — probably had a hand in how right-wing Zionists, especially military and government hardliners, perceived opposition to their state-building project. 

Right-wing Zionists identified a threat in these left–revolutionary groups and movements and thus applied an anti-Semitic label against them, because the Zionists themselves felt that their state-building goals were representative of the goals of world Jewry (hubristic; presumptuous). “Anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism” seems to have been crafted specifically to combat the critiques of Israeli policy coming consistently from leftists, Black activists, and those who saw strains of colonialism within Israeli policy.

Matthew Berkman’s notes on the machinations of the ADL during this era sufficiently substantiate that the equivalence was advanced specifically to counter left criticism.³ And there’s more than a little racism undergirding this launch of ‘the new anti-Semitism’ as a weapon.

That’s what needs to be drawn out: how the fashioning of the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon against the left has racist undertones, specifically anti-Black undertones. Unveil that, and that puts the conversation squarely back into proper historical context.

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Journalist Asaf Elia-Shalev has spoken and written about the Israeli Black Panthers, consisting of Mizrahi Jews who, during the founding and structuring of the state, were racialized by other Israelis while being relegated to the lower rungs of society.

It is possible that the pro-Israel advocates and apologists of the ’60s and ’70s adopted an anti-Black, anti-left frame precisely because they were in the process of racializing — “blackening” — all Arabs, and Palestinians in particular. This would have been a political move.

That this may have happened concurrently with the Jewish American anti-Black backlash that occurred in the late ’60s — not to mention, as well, the decade-long process from the early to late ’70s of accepting the previous “black animals” (in Yiddish, Schwarze hayes) of Mizrahi Jews into the right-wing Israeli power bloc of the Likud Party — is both instructive and revealing.

It is possible that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, disdainful of the American Black Panthers and similarly contemptuous of the Israeli stylings of Mizrahi Jews as the Middle Eastern counterpart, wanted not only (establishment) Israelis but world Jewry — particularly in the States, her home soil — to view Palestinians the same way (establishment) Americans had long viewed Black Americans.

Indeed, Elia-Shakev notes of Meir, “She was raised in the United States, so she’s very aware of the explosiveness of race relations and had witnessed Black–White race relations in the United States and [so she] would have been very sensitive to this issue of [Black] Panthers in Israel.”⁴

Elia-Shakev also informs us that, by 1968, Mizrahi Black Panthers “are reading the newspaper, and the coverage of the Panthers in the Israeli press is very alarmist and describes the Panthers as anti-Semitic because they supported the Palestinian cause.”⁵ This documents that, crucially, in the period just after Israel captured the Occupied Territories, those who meant to influence Israeli public opinion were already attempting to associate pro-Palestinianism with anti-Semitism.⁶

The easiest way to engender an anti-Palestinian view among Americans would be to associate a link between Black leftists, anti-Black sentiment, and anti-Semitism, where anti-Semitism is defined not as antipathy and animus toward Jewish people as such — as it historically had been — but rather as a coming-into-conflict with a representation, the state as monolith, of Jewish people.

This tarring relies on so many steps and so many submerged equivalencies. Jewish people and Israel-as-Jewish-monolith need to be disambiguated, yet the two absolutely must be intertwined for “anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism” to function.

What I’m trying to get at here is the possibility — this is informed conjecture, I don’t have a paper trail at my fingertips, though I am working on it — that (White) Americans were being encouraged to transfer their anxieties about the Black movement in the States onto the newly minted Palestinian struggle in the wake of the Six Day War. (Golda Meir, speaking to both populations simultaneously, could have served as a conduit of melded conceptions.)

If the above is true, this transfer would have served a dual function: not only would this blacken Palestinians in the American imagination, but it would serve as a lever elevating American Jewry into the white Establishment, as both segments of the population would thus and thereafter share a perspective, albeit based on anxiety and misapprehension, of the racialized Other.

One thing I mean to note is that the above would be a transfer in the way of seeing the Other. Jewish Americans, especially those participating in the emotional backlash against Black Americans in the late ’60s,⁷ were being asked or encouraged to take those feelings and transfer them onto newly occupied Palestinians half a world away, and to see them both — Black Americans and Palestinians — as problem populations.

By taking that perspective, Jewish Americans would come to occupy the same emotional space of (establishment, right-leaning) White Americans and (establishment, right-leaning) Israelis. Thus, racism serves as a bridge of unity; moreover, the identification ties the American remnant of the Jewish Diaspora even more tightly to the aspirations and attitudes of the Israeli ruling class.

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Intelligence² debate:

Asaf Elia-Shakev:

Bonus: Black Panthers Israel (this film touches upon the circumstances behind the recruitment of the Panthers into the Likud Party)

1. In fact, the clip I had watched has since been cut back from more than twenty minutes to less than one. For the full event, please see “Debate: Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism,” Intelligence Squared, YouTube, July 26, 2019. Hasan’s remarks begin at ~ 35:45.

2. Wikipedia, “Commentary (magazine).”

3. Matthew Berkman, “Coerced Consensus: Jewish Federations, Ethnic Representation, and the Roots of American Pro-Israel Politics” (2018), University of Pennsylvania (dissertation), pp. 316-320.]

4. “Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth | Asaf Elia-Shakev.” UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, YouTube, April 11, 2024, ~ 43:52.

5. “Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth | Asaf Elia-Shakev.” UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, YouTube, April 11, 2024, ~ 40:12.

6. Notably, “in 1971, a collaboration between the leftist intellectual group Matzpen and Mizrahi youth of Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood paved the way to the aforementioned formation of the Israeli Black Panthers” (Uri Dorchin, “The History, Politics, and Social Construction of ‘Blackness’ in Israel,” Currents: Briefs on Contemporary Israel (2020), Issue 2). Matzpen, a socialist, anti-Zionist group of only around 20 members, came in for the brunt of vitriolic antagonism by the broader Israeli society, who painted the group specifically as anti-Semitic. See “Matzpen, Anti-Zionist Israelis,” Matzpen, YouTube, June 26, 2020 (film originally released in 2004).

7. “According to historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, a 1967 NCRAC [National Committee Relations Advisory Council] report ‘found “Jewish backlash” in virtually every city it studied. This “varied in intensity from ‘indifference’ . . . about civil rights . . . to resentment and hostility toward Negro demands. On balance,” [the report] concluded, “the responses indicate a definite and substantial withdrawal of rank and file Jewish support”’ from the fight for racial and economic justice.” Berkman, op. cit., p. 319.