—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative
The following text is an expanded English-language version of the German article “Palestine Avenue,” published in Konkret 2/24, pp. 38–39.
I remember it well. It was in the spring of 1987 when I commenced my lecture in Osnabrück on the German left with these remarks: “So that we understand each other: Regardless of my heavy criticisms and profound objections to many facets of its current affairs, I fully accept the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and do not want its destruction!” People looked at me as if I had lost my mind!
But I said: “Such a fundamental statement of situating the speaker’s normative orientation is de rigueur at the beginning of every discussion involving anything relating to Israeli politics, society, and culture. The very existence of the country has simply never been accepted as a matter of course. Thus, it must be affirmed in every case.” Nothing has changed in the ensuing forty years. None of the 193 UN members must experience this every day in the most varied discussions all over the world, be it about their politics or society, culture or food, language or habits. None of these items are legitimate in Israel’s case. Just witness the bitter conflicts involving “inauthentic” Israeli food and its alleged appropriation of “authentic” Palestinian food, conveniently forgetting that all foods everywhere are appropriations and amalgams of various cultures. The more appropriation, the better, I would argue. Look at how much better food in Germany has become by appropriating Italian, Turkish, and Greek food.
Following violent conflicts, hostile neighbors may not accept each other’s post-conflict existence for a while, but none have had the temporal length (seventy-five years and counting) or the spatial dimension (reaching across the globe, far from the respective country’s borders) that pertains in the case of Israel. Serbia may not accept the existence of Kosovo, nor Georgia that of Abkhazia, but either’s alleged nonexistence does not matter in a discussion about them in Nigeria or Thailand. What makes the Israeli situation so unique is that this ubiquitous unacceptance exists in all corners of the globe and among the most varied publics. Making it more pernicious still is that this unacceptance is perhaps more prominent in spaces of civil society than in those of governments. Even in the case of apartheid-ruled South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s (with which Israel is always associated), it was South Africa’s apartheid regime that was anathema, not the country’s existence per se. One did not have to begin any discussion about South African apartheid by stating that one did not desire the destruction of South Africa as a country.
Following a twenty-year period (1947–48 to 1967) when Israel was a hero of the global left (when that leftist icon Pete Seeger and his Weavers proudly sang “Tsena, Tsena” and other Israeli folk songs; when thousands thronged the Champs Elysée protesting the Arab blockade of Israel preceding the Six-Day War in June 1967), Israel has become the most powerful unifier of all the world’s lefts. With the possible exception of the extolling of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, never has one theme so unified the most diverse factions of the global left than affinity with the Palestinians and antipathy for Israel. The Palestinians have become the global proletariat. Just as the proletariat for Marx was the only universalizing subject of history who could and would bring salvation to all, so too has the Palestinian cause attained a global importance of universalized liberation for most progressives.
But why not the Kurds, for example? Or the Uighurs? Both are stateless, oppressed peoples like the Palestinians. The reason is that in both cases—and in many others, one might add—the oppressors are non-White, non-European or non-American, which exempts them from any evil.
To be sure, there are gradations in the left’s aversion to Israel: it is weaker overall among social democrats than among variants of the far left, but a stout antipathy is common to them all. I would go further and argue that the rejection of Israel in some manner has become the most significant credo of what it means to be left these days, far surpassing a belief in the objective antagonism between capital and labor, a universalistic concept that was the unifier of the various factions of the old left, which was supplanted and surpassed by the new left’s preoccupation with identitarian issues of profound particularism.
Sadly, of course, antipathy toward Israel easily bleeds into antisemitism. While this need not be the case conceptually, it has increasingly become so empirically. Nothing makes this clearer than materials assembled in a fine new book entitled Judenhass Underground: Antisemitismus in Emanzipatorischen Subkulturen, edited by Nicholas Potter and Stefan Lauer. No realm of progressive politics—be it Black Lives Matter, pride demonstrations, women’s marches, LGBTQ+ movements, climate justice, and many more—is devoid of severe antagonism toward Israel, featuring massive myths of classical antisemitism, sometimes with new packaging but often not. In precisely the milieus that see their whole raison d’être as being inclusive of the weak and the disenfranchised, of advocating for the voiceless and the brutalized, we encounter nothing but venom for Israel and Jews. The reason is crystal clear: Jews to these groups are not weak but powerful, not victims but perpetrators. Thus, members of these milieus had to tear down posters with pictures of hostages abducted to Gaza and could not abide by the fact that Israeli babies were decapitated or that Israeli women were raped because this would have rendered Israelis and Jews as victims, which they, as white, male colonizers, could by definition never be. In a Manichean worldview of good and evil that has become so common for these progressive groups, the Jews clearly fall to the core of evil!
It is for this very reason that even the Holocaust has become contested terrain. By not seeing it as a victimization of Jews but rather either remaining silent about it or—better still—framing it as one of the many incidents in the long process of colonialism, any sympathy for the Jews becomes superfluous and the enmity toward the Jewish State can run rampant. And let us not forget that in the daily colloquialism of people talking about Israel, they readily slip from “Israelis” to “Jews.” This may often be an act not of conscious antisemitism but of habit and ease that, however, shows the inseparability of the two and the easy drifting of enmity toward Israel into Judeophobia, if not outright antisemitism.
Not surprisingly, this construct has fully conquered the American representatives of this milieu, who are massively present at the country’s leading academic institutions, especially in their departments of humanities and social sciences. Since it is precisely in this very milieu that the Democratic Party has also established a monopoly that is beyond impressive (professors at my very own University of Michigan—very typical for this world—enjoy a ratio of 25 Democrats to 1 Republican, whom I am still eager to meet after having served for twenty-five years on this university’s faculty), it is not surprising that over the last decade or two, the Democratic Party has witnessed an incursion of people who are deeply hostile to Israel. With the United States’ political life more deeply divided than ever before (with the obvious exception of the Civil War), and with these two hostile opposing camps valorizing pretty much every item in the war against each other, it is no surprise that Israel serves as welcome ammunition for both. I will not be able to address in this short essay the disastrous Israeli policy of openly favoring the Republican Party to the point of becoming its de facto ally and making Israel de facto “Republican,” even though 75 percent of American Jews continue to vote for the Democrats. But simply by this aligning of Republicans with Israel, the Democrats by default came to distance themselves from Israel.
And the situation is dire! New polls reveal not only a massive cleavage between Republicans and Democrats concerning Israel—thus, for example, a brand-new New York Times/Siena College poll of late December 2023 shows 77 percent of Republicans but only 31 percent of Democrats favoring Israel in the current war between Hamas and Israel (4 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of Democrats support the Palestinians)—but an even more troubling cleavage by age inside the Democratic Party. Whereas 46 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds overall favor the Palestinians as opposed to 27 percent the Israelis, 75 percent of the 18- to 29-year-olds in the Democratic Party favor Palestinians over Israelis. The respective numbers for 30- to 44-year-olds are 24 percent and 36 percent; for 45- to 64-year-olds, 13 percent and 57 percent; and for those over the age of 65, 11 percent to 63 percent, making it crystal clear that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is perceived very differently by varying generations in the United States.
I am positive that these numbers deeply worry the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign. Statements by young people such as “After Biden’s support of Israel’s criminal war against Gaza, I will under no circumstances vote for the man again” are very problematic for the president’s reelection since he would not have defeated Donald Trump in 2020 without the massive support of young people’s vote, and without it he will fail to do so again in 2024. Add to that the even more explicit departure from Biden by a vast majority of the Arab American community, numbering more than 300,000 in my state of Michigan, and the trouble becomes even more acute. With Michigan having the largest agglomeration of Arab Americans in the Union, and with Michigan once again being one of the five most significant battleground states in the country, which Biden won narrowly in 2020, the president can ill afford to lose this state. If that happens, one can easily regard it as a consequence of the acuteness of the current Israeli–Palestinian conflict for American politics. After all, the all-Muslim city council of Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb—formerly a bastion of Polish Americans—just voted to name parts of “Holbrook Street,” which runs through the heart of town, “Palestine Avenue.” For me, the horrors of the Pogrom of October 7, 2023, would reach yet another apogee were its ramifications to contribute to the election of a man as president of the United States who has openly declared as one of his aims to dismantle the very foundations of the uninterrupted, nearly 250-year-old American Republic and establish a dictatorship. I still hope and think that this is unlikely, but I fear that it might not be impossible!
Andrei S. Markovits is currently the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author and editor of many books, scholarly articles, conference papers, book reviews, and newspaper contributions in English and many foreign languages on topics as varied as German and Austrian politics, antisemitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, social movements, the European right, and the European left. He has also worked extensively on comparative sports culture in Europe and North America. His newest book is his memoir, entitled The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness, published by the Central European University Press located in Budapest, Vienna, and New York.
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