Israeli flag at Kalamazoo Pride event called "harmful" by organizers

On June 6, a Pride festival was held in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A Jewish couple volunteered at the beer tent. Michelle Zukowski-Serlin, 64, of Comstock Township, wore a dress that featured the Star of David, while her husband, Troy Zukowski-Serlin, 62, wore a hat with the Israeli flag on it.

Days later, OutFront Kalamazoo issued a statement calling the Israeli flag a "harmful symbol" and said it had received complaints from "community members who were hurt, distressed, or angered by the presence of Israeli flags." It announced that it would "begin actively reviewing our policies and procedures to better address situations where political symbolism may create an unsafe or exclusionary environment."

How, exactly, does an Israeli flag create an unsafe or exclusionary environment? Were the Zionists harassing Palestinians? Did they insist that keffiyehs be banned for their association with terror attacks? They did neither. The only exclusionary action in this incident came from the people who want the Jews to hide away part of their self-image, and OutFront calling the Israeli flag "exclusionary" inverts the truth.

To see this clearly,  one can imagine the festival included a large number of vegetarians and vegans, and a food booth selling hot dogs. Many vegetarians are offended by the sight and smell of meat, and a good number of animal rights activists consider slaughterhouses to be literal sites of genocide. They are truly hurt by the presence of people selling and eating animal products. The pain is real.

Do they have the right to demand that the booths be banned?

Of course not. It is not a vegan festival. It is a Pride festival, and anyone who wants to celebrate pride should be welcome, because this is not a place for disunity. 

So what makes the Israeli flag different from the hot dogs? If anything the hot dogs are worse, because they are not mere symbols of harm — they are the actual remains of dead animals.

Once anyone who is offended holds a veto over the speech, clothing, or conduct of others, it does not take long for people to feign hurt to clear the space of those they dislike, and to recruit like-minded others to complain alongside them. The organizers said there were over a hundred complaints about the couple's clothing, yet Michelle reported seeing very little hostility in person. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether a hundred complaints were organized in minutes on some anti-Israel WhatsApp group. A harm standard rewards exactly that, because it turns the size of the mob into the measure of the harm.

This is a freedom-of-expression issue, and no one is talking about it. That it can happen at all in America is the real problem, not some arbitrary rule about harmful symbols.

So what kind of policy could OutFront Kalamazoo write that would be ethical, consistent, and protective of all its attendees? The standard cannot be the harm someone feels, because feelings are unfalsifiable and the most easily organized feeling wins. 

The standard has to be conduct of the attendees, not their feelings. Telling people to leave, to change their clothing, to remove their signs is exclusionary conduct. 

The exception is when the speech or symbols themselves are exclusionary. A sign saying "Support Palestine" is fine, one that says "Down with Zionism" is not. A swastika or a Klan hood are, by their nature, exclusionary because they say that they do not want Jews or Blacks to be there, by their leaders' own admission. Those declare that the space is not shared. A symbol that merely expresses who its bearer is, and asks nothing of anyone else, is the festival working as intended. The hot dog targets no one. The keffiyeh targets no one. The Israeli flag targets no one. Each is a person saying "I am here as myself," which is the entire purpose of a Pride festival.

By that rule the vegan keeps his convictions and the carnivore keeps his booth. By that same rule Michelle and Troy belonged at that beer tent, and the people who wanted them gone were the only ones in Kalamazoo actually breaking the rule.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/18 Links Pt2: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter; The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism; Hillary Clinton: No alternative to Trump’s Gaza plan

From Ian:

‘The single best diaspora experience’: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter

As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, American Jewish leaders have signed an open letter expressing gratitude to a nation “unlike so many others through Jewish history [that] did not merely tolerate Jewish life, but made possible its flourishing,” while also highlighting Jewish contributions to the country’s founding.

“From the earliest days of the American experiment, Jews were drawn to the promise of a nation founded not on bloodline, monarchy, or established religion, but on liberty, covenant, and the dignity of the individual,” the letter reads. “Having known the weight of persecution and exclusion, Jews recognized in America’s founding ideals something rare in human history: the possibility of belonging without surrendering our identity.”

The letter continues, “Here, Jewish immigrants arrived with little and built lives of dignity. Here, Jewish communities established synagogues, schools, charities, businesses, and institutions of civic life. Here, Jews rose not because success was guaranteed, but because freedom made striving possible.”

The letter was spearheaded by David Bernstein, CEO of the North American Values Institute, and Phil Darivoff, chairman emeritus of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, to increase American Jewish involvement in America 250 celebrations.

“America 250 is an opportunity to express gratitude to America, the country that’s been the single best diaspora experience that Jews have ever had,” Bernstein told Jewish Insider. “American Jews have been an integral part of this country and its story from the very beginning and we want to remind our fellow Americans of that.”

“It’s also an opportunity to ensure that America lives up to its founding ideal,” continued Bernstein. He asserted that America’s core civic values, such as freedom of conscience and the rule of law, “are the best defense against antisemitism,” which reached historic levels in America following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.

“It’s incumbent on the American Jewish community to double down on those values, both because they protect us and because they allow America to live up to its highest potential,” said Bernstein.

The letter also acknowledges America’s shortcomings, noting, “America has not always lived up to its own ideals. Its history is marked by acts and periods of injustice, exclusion and failures that wounded many communities, including at times our own.”

It concludes with a call to action for American Jews.

Adam Louis-Klein: The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.

Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.

The left’s internationalism—once the calling card of progress—has hardened into hostility to Israel, across academia, NGOs, mainstream-media outlets, and the United Nations. The constant accusations that circulate across these networks of authority are not normal critiques of a state, but claims that cast Israel as the exemplar of the three great sins of the postwar international order—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—a “rogue state” said to violate the very fabric of the world.

The progressive case against anti-Zionism recognizes the freedom of Israelis to choose the nature of the society they want to live under. It recognizes that Israel may be becoming more like other Middle Eastern countries—that its increased religiosity in recent years is partially driven by the Mizrahi segment of its population, those who were expelled from other countries in the region. And it seeks to extend to Israel the same allowance that progressives extend to other nations in the region, an acknowledgment that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.

But the left must adhere to its own standards, irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.

The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.

Jewish Statehood and American Tribal Law

The United States pursued a one-state solution to the American-Indian conflict between 1887 and 1934. Treaty promises were ignored. Tribal governments were dismissed. Territorial boundaries were erased. Native peoples were no longer classified as members of foreign nations and instead given allotments of land to build private farms and ranches. Many of their children were placed in federal boarding schools where they were taught to assimilate into the culture of the newly unified nation. Known by historians as the Allotment Era in U.S.-Native American relations, these assimilationist policies were championed in part by idealistic reformers who believed that Indian poverty would be alleviated when native peoples abandoned tribal ways for the universalist principles of American citizenship. Their intention was good; their one-state experiment, a tragedy.

The project of “civilizing” native children in boarding schools became notoriously abusive. Many allotted lands proved unfit for small-scale agriculture while others required costly equipment most families could not afford. Thousands of impoverished Indians were left with no choice but to sell their property or lose it through foreclosure. Tribal landholdings plummeted from nearly 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by the time the allotment policy was repealed in 1934. It was a loss whose “devastation and trauma to tribal communities…cannot be overstated,” to quote the textbook Mastering Native American Law.

It was into this climate of anti-tribal reform, now largely forgotten, that Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State first entered the public debate in the United States. Various reform rabbis and Jewish intellectuals, who had absorbed the anti-tribal zeitgeist, opposed Herzl’s “tribal” assumptions. Prominent among them was the distinguished philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen who in 1919 published an influential essay in The New Republic entitled “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?”

Cohen argued that Zionism and Americanism are irreconcilable. “A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a peculiar religion, a tribal religion, and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil,” he wrote, “whereas liberal America has traditionally stood for separation of Church and State, the free mixing of races, and the fact that men can change their habitation and language and still advance the process of civilization.” When Cohen reissued the essay in his 1945 book The Faith of a Liberal, he likened Zionism to Nazi Aryanism, declaring that “tribalism is a creed that leads to grief and massacre.”

Against Herzl, Cohen insisted that “the Jewish problem is one that must be settled in each country separately” through assimilation and individual freedom. He maintained that as the world’s nations became ever more liberal, antisemitism would wither away. Though global Jewry’s faith in such promises mostly evaporated after the traumas of the Holocaust and the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, Cohen’s portrayal of Zionism as inherently illiberal and backward nevertheless reverberated down the decades, giving birth in our time to a school of anti-Israel thinkers whom this paper calls anti-tribalists.

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06/18 Links Pt1: The Ceasefire Neither Ends nor Eases the Iranian Threat; Florida man planned mass shooting at AIPAC office; Germany foiled Hamas Oct. 7 anniversary plot

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Hamas weaponized our desire for quiet; now Israel must learn it can't afford innocence

The newly exposed Hamas files have forced Israel to confront one of the most painful truths of the October 7 massacre: Hamas caught Israel off guard by studying it, feeding it the signals it wanted to see, and turning its wish for quiet into part of the battlefield.

Yonah Jeremy Bob’s exclusive report in The Jerusalem Post, based on documents provided by the Military Intelligence Directorate to the Meir Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute, shows a calculated deception effort that began long before the massacre.

A Hamas document from September 2022 addressed the need to build a “strategic deception” plan for a surprise attack. Another, from September 25, 2023, shortly before the invasion, described calibrated border pressure, mediated demands, and the use of Jewish festivals as tactical opportunities.

That is the horror of these documents. They show planning, patience, and confidence.

Hamas understood that Israel had come to see Gaza through a management doctrine: More work permits. More Qatari money. More indirect messages through mediators. More rounds in which Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired, and Hamas sat on the sidelines.

Quiet became evidence. Restraint became analysis. Economic distress became deterrence.

The documents suggest Hamas understood all of this and weaponized it. This deepens Israel’s self-indictment. A serious country expects enemies to lie. Terrorist organizations deceive. Intelligence exists because hostile actors conceal intentions, simulate routine, and exploit assumptions.

The question is why so many warnings, patterns, drills, border incidents, and signals were forced into a theory that said Hamas wanted calm more than war.

The answer begins with the old “conceptzia,” the preconceived notion that the enemy is deterred because our logic says he should be.

Israel has known this failure before. In 1973, it believed Egypt and Syria would refrain from launching war under conditions Israel considered irrational.

In 2023, it believed Hamas would prioritize its rule, its money, and its economic arrangements over a catastrophic confrontation. Hamas read that arrogance and built a trap around it.

The Saudi-normalization context makes the lesson wider. Hamas saw a regional order forming that could push the Palestinian issue aside and strengthen Israel’s place in the Middle East. It chose mass violence to blow up diplomacy.

Mark Levin: The US-Iran MoU is a dangerous gamble

The nuclear issue
Item 8 states that Iran “reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons” and that the fate of enriched uranium and other nuclear-related issues will be resolved later.

Shouldn’t that have been the first issue addressed?

The agreement offers relief and concessions immediately, while postponing the most critical details about permanently dismantling Iran’s nuclear program and eliminating its enriched uranium stockpiles.

Now there is talk of merely degrading the uranium. At best, this provision amounts to little more than a slogan.

Item 9 prevents us from strengthening our regional military posture or imposing new sanctions while negotiations continue, surrendering even more leverage.

Item 10 immediately grants waivers for Iranian crude oil exports, petroleum products, banking, insurance and transportation services.

In other words, the Iranian regime is back in business before any final agreement is reached. Billions of dollars will begin flowing into Tehran immediately.

Item 11 releases frozen Iranian assets and restricted funds.

Again, billions more flow directly to the regime before it has demonstrated any meaningful change in behavior.

What’s missing
Notably absent from the agreement are several critical issues.

First, there is not a word about Iran’s ballistic missile program, the regime’s most destructive conventional weapon and one capable of killing tens of thousands of people. This omission is a grave concession.

Second, there is nothing addressing Iran’s support for terrorism and terrorist organizations. I have no illusion that Tehran’s sponsorship of terrorism will end under this arrangement.

Third, there is no mention of the Iranian people, whom we once promised to support. They appear to have been abandoned.

Fourth, there is no discussion of reparations owed by the regime to the United States, Israel or Arab states for the devastation caused by its missile attacks.

During the next 60 days, this MoU requires serious changes—if not outright abandonment.

Bret Stephens: The Ceasefire Neither Ends nor Eases the Iranian Threat

Iran's military leaders have greeted the ceasefire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that "through the imposition of their divine and iron will" they had "humiliated American and Zionist enemies."

Today, Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is worthless. The leadership rules an unhappy population that would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow.

Americans who supported the war believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests. This ceasefire neither ends nor eases that threat. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran - the naval blockade of its ports - before there's any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office.

Trump's Iran Deal Isn't Perfect. It Doesn't Need to Be.

Notions that the U.S. should have held out for more upfront nuclear concessions from Iran gets things backward. The U.S. and the world need shipping to resume through the Strait of Hormuz. They do not need a nuclear agreement with Iran, and Mr. Trump should not make negotiating one a priority in his postwar Iran policy.

For all the operational capability demonstrated by the U.S. military over the course of this conflict, there is no painting the preliminary outcome as a resounding American victory. Food and energy costs have spiked; U.S. military resources have been depleted; America's alliances in the Middle East and Europe have suffered. Nor was the war a win for the Iranian regime, whose conventional military capability is diminished, economy crippled and leadership demolished.

These results obscure an important detail: the U.S. has significantly reduced the nuclear threat posed by Iran. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, Iran's nuclear program was advanced enough that it was capable of producing sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon within a matter of days, and a small arsenal's worth within just weeks.

Today, Iran's nuclear program is arguably the weakest it's been since the early 2000s. To produce a nuclear weapon, Iran would need to reconstitute its infrastructure, which is believed to have been largely destroyed, while facing the prospect of additional strikes as it tried to rebuild.

Much of the global economic pressure that has been building as a result of this war will dissipate once the Strait of Hormuz reopens, but Iran's economy will remain in tatters. Whatever agreement Washington and Tehran reach, an Iranian regime determined to dominate its region and control its people through force will be unfriendly to American interests and its regional partners.

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To hyphenate or not to hyphenate - is the wrong question

Earlier this week on my Substack I promised a follow-up on whether to write “anti-Zionism” or “antizionism.” The follow-up grew into something much larger.)

In the 1870s Wilhelm Marr needed a better word. “Jew-hatred” — Judenhass — named the thing too plainly, carried the stink of the mob and the medieval church, and marked its holder as a relic. So he reached for a clinical substitute built from Greek and Latin, founded a League of Antisemites, and gave the world “anti-Semitism.” It was the same hatred masquerading as a legitimate, even scientific position. Many Europeans could now profess anti-Semitism the way they might profess a position on tariffs, as the considered conclusion of a serious person rather than the reflex of a bigot.

A century later the heirs of that hatred needed the same favor in reverse. While the term never took hold in English speaking countries as anything but prejudice, the Holocaust had made “anti-Semitism” toxic, a prejudice a respectable person could not own in public. So the hatred required a new address, a category that sounded like a stance rather than a sickness.

It found one in opposition to the Jewish state.

“Anti-Zionism” arrived already dressed for the part. It named a real object, Zionism, and opposition to an object reads as politics, the proper business of citizens. The maneuver was Marr’s maneuver run a second time: take the same animus and move it into whatever vocabulary the age treats as legitimate. Marr fled religion for science. His heirs fled the post-war horror of “anti-semitism” for the safety of “politics.”

The move succeeded by construction rather than accident.

In the first decades after 1948, irrational hatred of Israel was understood, by the ordinary person and by the chancelleries alike, as the old hatred wearing a flag. The American Council for Judaism opposed Zionism on principle and remained marginal, a curiosity rather than a movement. When Arab spokesmen insisted they bore no grudge against Jews and quarreled only with Zionists, the disclaimer was received as the propaganda everyone knew it to be — the Arab League boycott of those years targeted Jewish-owned firms worldwide, not only Israeli ones. The line between a legitimate critic and an eliminationist was visible to the naked eye, and almost no one mistook one for the other.

Moscow started erasing that line. During the mid-1960s negotiations over the international convention against racial discrimination, the US and Israel tried to include antisemitism as something to be condemned; the Soviet Union refused to allow that unless Zionism was condemned alongside it, along with Naziism and apartheid. In the end, the ICERD condemned neither to avoid the conflict, but the seed was planted to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism. After 1967 Moscow intensified the campaign, recasting Israel as the moral heir of the persecutor it had so recently escaped. The rhetoric matured into United Nations Resolution 3379 in 1975, which declared Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination, and which the General Assembly passed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The resolution was repealed in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, but the association lived on. The equation migrated out of the Soviet bloc and into the academy and the human-rights NGO, where it shed its Cold War accent and acquired the idiom of decolonization. There the hatred completed its costume change: from a sickness one had to deny, to a politics one could defend, to a virtue one could parade.

That migration is the campaign whose half-success we now live inside. The modern anti-Zionist no longer denies the charge of hatred in the embarrassed tone of the 1950s Arab diplomat. He preempts it. Every article carries the disclaimer, every placard the mantra — “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” — repeated with a discipline that would impress any marketing department, and a growing share of the audience has come to believe it. The bolder ones complete the inversion the Soviets drafted and announce that Zionism is the true bigotry, that the Jews who insist on a state are the racists. The Big Lie method works. The line that once stood in plain view, between the man who criticizes Israel and the man who wants it gone, has been deliberately smudged until much of the public can no longer find it.

The question is, how do we restore that line?

There are three options. Each has a real advantage and a real cost, but they are not mutually exclusive.

The first is to call the hatred by its name and say plainly that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. The advantage is that it is true, and true at the root, because the thing that animates the obsessive hatred of the one Jewish state is the same thing that animated the obsessive hatred of the Jew next door for two thousand years. The cost is that the enemy has spent sixty years inoculating the public against exactly this sentence. He hears “that is antisemitic,” reaches for the prepared rebuttal, and the exchange collapses into a meta-argument about whether the accuser is weaponizing the term — which is itself the victory, since the oxygen meant to counter the hatred gets spent instead on the accusation.When a bigot denies his bigotry, the level of proof needed to refute him is quite high, and this ends up moving the argument into a distraction.

The second is to defend Zionism as the moral and legitimate thing it is, and to turn the enemy’s own word against him. This is my preference, because it concedes nothing. The whole force of “anti-Zionism” as a shelter depends on Zionism being a fair target, an ideology one may decently oppose; the moment Zionism is restored to what it is — the national liberation movement of an indigenous people returning home — opposition to it stands revealed as opposition to that people’s existence, which is the hatred under a thin coat. The cost is that the coat has been painted on for decades. “Zionist” has been so thoroughly poisoned that to defend Zionism is to fight uphill against a meaning the enemy has spent a half-century manufacturing. This battle is also hard. The battle cannot be abandoned, because to abandon it is to concede the enemy’s central premise that Zionism is the kind of thing a good person opposes.

Here my own definition of antisemitism does its sharpest work, because it locates Zionism where it belongs, inside Judaism rather than beside it. Zionism is an expression of Jewishness no less central than religion, culture, or descent — the longing for return is woven through the liturgy and the calendar millennia before it became a political program — and an attack on it is therefore an attack on an aspect of the Jewish whole. Most Jews today do not keep kosher, yet a campaign to ban shechita is recognized as antisemitic without difficulty, because the prevalence of a practice has never been the measure of whether hatred of it targets Jews. Zionism stands in the same relation to Jewish identity, and hostility to it is antisemitic on the same logic, whatever the proportion of Jews who happen to be Zionists or live in Israel.

The line falls between criticism that means to repair and criticism that means to wound. Honest critique aimed at improving the thing is legitimate for both — the agunah problem, the plight of the woman chained to a dead marriage, is a serious criticism of Jewish law made by people who love the law and want it mended, and criticism of an Israeli policy by people who want Israel to be better stands on exactly the same footing. Sharansky’s three Ds mark where repair ends and hatred begins: demonization, delegitimization, and the double standard. The agunah critic trips none of them. The campaign against the Jewish state trips all three.

The political costume fails the same test that exposes the welfare argument against shechita. When a European parliament bans Jewish ritual slaughter on grounds of animal welfare while leaving hunting untouched, the welfare concern is revealed as pretext by what it declines to prohibit; the principle is selectively applied to land precisely on the Jewish practice. That selectivity is Sharansky’s double standard in miniature, and anti-Zionism dressed as principled politics performs the identical sleight on a global scale. The professed concern for human rights, self-determination, and the rest finds its single uncompromising application in the one Jewish state, and the selectivity gives the game away. Any move that admits anti-Zionism as legitimate political expression is as disingenuous as crediting the hunting enthusiast with tender feelings for the welfare of animals.

The third way is to change the playing field. “Anti-Zionism” is now a loaded term because the haters have made Zionism a loaded term. This new fight intends to change the nomenclature to “antizionism,” closed and unhyphenated, as the scholars and activists now naming it have done, because the closed form makes it easier to show that what wears the mask of politics is hatred underneath. Anti-Zionism is indeed a hate movement but the haters who apply that term to themselves deny it; by calling it “antizionism” the haters cannot counter it because they don’t accept that term for themselves. The fighters against antizionism are able to create their own definition that can bring the stigma back to “anti-Zionism” since the words are pronounced the same.

This is where the lexical comparison to antisemitism is relevant. Using the older term “anti-Semitism” opened up accusers to the spurious charge that Arabs are Semites (or Jews are not Semites) and therefore they cannot be considered anti-Semites. It was an attempt to distract from the actual meaning of the word and unhyphenating it showed that it is its own word, unrelated to semitism. “Antizionism” does the same - it separates the word from Zionism itself and moves the argument away from endless discussions about the minutiae of the history of Zionism and into a new territory, where it is much more clearly a term of bigotry.

The cost of this move is that it implicitly concedes the pro-Zionism argument. Those who use “antizionism” are not defending Zionism, they are calling out a hate movement. Moreover, to name antizionism as its own distinct thing concedes, by the grammar of the move, that it might be something other than antisemitism — which may hand these modern antisemites a victory

This is why my own old instinct ran the other way. Years ago I coined “misoziony” — hate of Israel built from the Greek root for hatred — to point out that this is just as irrational as traditional antisemitism is. Misoziony is no more moral than racism or misogyny. The verdict is built in to its own body. The term never spread, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it was right: my blog was too small to mint vocabulary, the prefix means nothing to an English ear, and no one was sure how to pronounce it. The lesson is not that coinage fails but that naming is hard for reasons orthogonal to truth, and that the word which already owns the public’s stigma will always start the race far ahead of the word that must build its own. (”Israelophobia” falls at the same hurdle and one more, because the dominant emotion is hatred and not fear, so the word mislabels the thing at its root.)

Set the three side by side and you see that they all have pluses and minuses. Calling it antisemitism is the truth-claim, but it bounces when the targets deny it. Shifting to “antizionism” is the tactical entry, but it implicitly concedes the war over the morality of Zionism when it stands alone. The defense of Zionism alone is the most comprehensive and least possible of the three, an impractical one in today’s environment.

But it isn’t a menu where you must pick one. Each strategy has its place, depending on the audience and the medium.

I will continue to use the term “anti-Zionism” because I defend Zionism as much as I denounce anti-Zionists as antisemites. I refuse to concede that battle.

Others, like the ICSA and Movement Against Antizionism, see antizionism as its own pathology disconnected from Zionism. They are not wrong: Antizionists use Zionism as a bogeyman to direct their hate of Jewish national rights, and since these groups’ tactics are to go on the offensive, “antizionism” works well for them. Defending Zionism, for them, is a distraction from their missions.

My only disagreement is that the term “antizionism” may also implicitly cede the other argument, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By studying it or fighting it as its own phenomenon, it can be seen as admitting that antizionism is unrelated to the world’s oldest hate, not merely a new flavor. If we can agree that antizionism is in fact a straight line descendant of the entire catalog of other antisemitisms, then we are on the same page. This is not a question of tactics - it would be a distraction for these organizations to expand their missions to fighting antisemitism, and there are plenty of others who (claim to) do that. I just want to make sure that the new antisemites who claim to only hate a political movement are still, in the end, recognized as antisemites, across the board, from all of us fighting the good fight, even if that is not where the argument is made.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Swedish Antisemitism Survey Admits What Most European Surveys Bury

Sweden's government tracks antisemitism the way few other countries do. Every five years the Forum för levande historia (Living History Forum) commissions a national survey of attitudes toward Jews, and the new edition comparing 2020 and 2025 is out. The headline not surprising. After fifteen years of steady decline, antisemitic attitudes reversed direction, with an average rise of roughly 15 percent across all three measured indices — traditional and Holocaust-related antisemitism, social distance from Jews, and Israel-related antisemitism. The largest single change was the erosion of the people who used to actively reject these statements, many of whom slid from "strongly disagree" into a noncommittal middle. That passive normalization is the real story of the deterioration.

The numbers are sobering on their own. Strong acceptance of a Jewish prime minister fell from 50 to 41 percent. The share doubling down on hard anti-Jewish social distance doubled from 2 to 4 percent. The proportion actively rejecting the dual-loyalty trope that Swedish Jews care more about Israel than Sweden collapsed from 38 to 22 percent. The Israel-related index showed the sharpest movement of all, with 43 percent of Swedes now agreeing with at least one of its statements.

The report is unusual in that it faces a major question head-on: what do immigrants from Uslim and Middle Eastern countries think about Jews?

The standard European approach treats immigrant antisemitism as radioactive. Surveys measure it, find it, and then either omit it from the published summary or surround it with so many caveats that the finding disappears. They sre concerned that acknowledging that arrivals from the Middle East and North Africa carry higher baseline antisemitism hands ammunition to the anti-immigration right, so the data gets buried to deny that ammunition.

This survey didn't flinch.

Individuals born in the MENA region scored about 17 percent higher on traditional and Holocaust-related antisemitism than the reference group of Swedes born to Swedish-born parents. Those born in non-MENA Asia scored 14 percent higher and those from non-MENA Africa 12 percent higher. Respondents identifying as Muslim scored 14 to 18 percent higher across all three indices, with no statistically significant elevation found among Christians or other faiths relative to the non-religious baseline. The authors ground this in social learning theory and point to international polling, including the ADL's global surveys, showing that antisemitism is far more mainstream and politically normalized across the Middle East and North Africa than in Western Europe. People carry the norms of their society of origin when they move.

However, the immigrants aren't the major factor in the increase of antisemitism in Sweden.  Even controlling for country of birth, parental background, and religion, a 15 to 16 percent increase remained — which means most of the worsening came from native Swedes changing their minds, not from demographic replacement.

I think the report's definition of "Israel related antisemitism" is poor. The four-statement Israel-related index asks if Israel's policies make the respondent dislike Jews, that the world cannot have peace while Israel exists, that Israeli policy reflects an Old Testament vengefulness.  These are really traditional antisemitic tropes wearing an Israeli costume. They invoke the word "Jews" directly or reach for ancient conspiracy and theological motifs. They miss the coded forms of Israel-centered antisemitism that hide entirely behind political vocabulary, the "Israelis are the new Nazis" register that weaponizes Holocaust inversion without ever naming Jews. The authors left the Nazi-analogy question out deliberately, worried that "Nazi" has decayed into generic political insult and would muddy their data. That choice keeps the index thematically clean at the cost of undercounting the most current and most slippery variety of the prejudice it set out to measure.

That methodological conservatism makes the headline numbers an undercount rather than an exaggeration. A narrow instrument that still registers a 15 percent jump and 43 percent maximal spread is measuring a floor.

The Swedish report shows that a government body can collect uncomfortable data about immigration and antisemitism, publish it without flinching, and still refuse to let that data be conscripted into a single political narrative. The honesty is the model worth copying. Most of Europe has the same data sitting in its drawers and lacks the nerve to print the inconvenient half.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/17 Links Pt2: The Squeezing of Jewish Life in Britain; Israeli flag removed at World Cup match as Palestinian flags remain; Tel Aviv remains world’s fourth-largest startup ecosystem despite wartime pressures

From Ian:

It’s Not Biased if It’s Against Jews

To paraphrase Law & Order, in the American legal system, bias-motivated offenses are considered especially reprehensible. Punching someone is bad. Punching them for racist reasons is worse. So various laws, both criminal and civil, prescribe enhanced penalties in those situations. Sometimes the racism is unmistakable. At other times, it’s hidden behind code words or dog whistles—thugs, urban, globalists, etc.—or seemingly neutral markers like hair and dress. No matter; courts, prosecutors, and legislators have become quite adept at sniffing out crafty bigotry.

Yet the invocation of Zionism has, inexplicably, thrown them all for a loop. In the United States and across the globe, participants in purportedly anti-Zionist movements are committing crimes and civil offenses. Sometimes they harm Jews. Sometimes they harm non-Jews. But, in all cases, the people who commit these crimes—as well as their legions of defenders—argue that there is no bias. Any animus, they insist, is not antisemitic or anti-Jewish. It is anti-Zionist. Some of their best friends, these assailants are quick to add, are Jews.

As much as these claims have been dissected, debated and, regularly, debunked in a variety of settings, the courts are just beginning to weigh in. Will they treat the targeting of alleged “Zionists” as purely political—and thus not evidence of racial or religious bias? Or will they see it as integral to the racial and/or religious identity of American Jews?

Earlier this month, a federal district court judge in New York gave us a sneak peek at how the U.S. legal system might resolve what many see as yet another ham-fisted effort to work around long-standing civil rights laws. The results weren’t pretty. The court adopted a number of conclusions that, if accepted by other courts, would substantially weaken the civil rights of those harmed by anti-Zionist campaigns of harassment and violence. That’s bad news for Jews, their allies, and anyone else who happened to get in the anti-Zionists’ way.

If allowed to stand, the ruling could embolden more anti-Jewish agitators, effectively furnishing them with a virtual blueprint to harass without violating the KKK Act.

Mariano Torres and Lester Wilson, the men at the center of the New York case, got in the way. Neither Torres nor Wilson is Jewish. They are janitors employed by Columbia University. And like so many trying to go about their studies or jobs in Morningside Heights or around the country since Oct. 7, 2023, Torres and Wilson found their efforts impeded—and their lives imperiled—by those obsessed with Jews and Israel, the Jewish state.

On April 30, 2024, this obsession turned riotous. Masked militants, armed with hammers, knives, bolt cutters, chains, and zip ties, stormed Hamilton Hall and confronted the two working men. Torres and Wilson each refused to yield, which drew the ire of the rioters who then assaulted the janitors, detained them, sought to bribe them, and slurred them as “Jew lovers,” “Jew workers,” and “Zionists.” Eventually, according to their lawsuit, Torres fled, and Wilson was forced out of the building. The rioters, meanwhile, kept going. They seized the building, broke windows to chain the doors shut, barricaded themselves inside, and unfurled banners declaring an “intifada.”

Torres and Wilson later filed a civil rights lawsuit. With the help of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Torridon Law firm, the pair relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, to argue that they were victimized by an anti-Jewish riot. A provision of that law prohibits people from conspiring to deprive “any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws.” To satisfy that equal protection component, plaintiffs must generally show that the conspiracy was motivated by “some racial or perhaps otherwise class-based, invidiously discriminatory animus.”

According to Torres and Wilson’s complaint, that’s precisely what occurred: The rioters, motivated by anti-Jewish animus, had conspired to deprive equal protection of the laws to people who are or are perceived to be Jews or supporters of Jews.

The clear focus of the lawsuit was illegal conduct, not speech. Torres and Wilson sought damages for alleged assault and battery during an illegal building occupation. They weren’t concerned with the rioters’ opinions on world affairs. They were concerned with the crowbars, rope, chains, and zip ties. They were concerned with their seizure of university property. They were concerned with being detained and threatened.

Torres and Wilson also happened to understand the nature of the riot because, allegedly, the rioters made it clear. Jews and those presumed to side with (or, gasp, love) Jews were the problem.

This is precisely the type of situation Congress anticipated when enacting the KKK Act—that is, the supercharging of ordinary crimes into far more socially corrosive hate crimes based on evidence of discriminatory animus. Yet the court twisted itself, the facts, and the law in knots, rendering an error-filled decision that had the effect of widening what we see as an emerging anti-Zionism exception to civil rights law. So long as you scream about Zionists and not Jews (or, as in this case, even if you interchangeably slur Zionists and Jews as you brandish knives and hammers), the courts will give you a hall pass.

Nearly a third of Canadians believe antisemitism has become more acceptable, survey finds

Nearly one-third of Canadians believe that antisemitism or anti-Jewish attitudes are becoming more acceptable in the country, according to a new poll.

The Leger survey, conducted on behalf of the Association for Canadian Studies, found that 31 per cent held that view, while the highest level of agreement was concentrated among university students (37 per cent), men (38 per cent) and Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 (35 per cent). English speakers were more than twice (35 per cent) as likely to agree with the statement as opposed to just 16 per cent of Francophones.

Slightly over a fifth (22 per cent) of Canadians agreed that “Israel’s military actions in Gaza justify negative attitudes toward Jewish people in Canada,” as opposed to nearly half (49 per cent) of respondents who disagreed. Canadians aged 18 to 34 (26 per cent) and men (29 per cent) were most likely to agree with the statement.

“The findings suggest that condemnation alone has not been enough. While many leaders have denounced antisemitism since October 7, the survey shows that a significant minority of Canadians still believe that events in the Middle East justify negative attitudes toward Jewish Canadians,” Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, told National Post in a written statement.

Roughly one-sixth (17 per cent) of Canadians surveyed agreed that they have become more negative toward Jews since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, while a majority (62 per cent) disagreed with the statement. Women (68 per cent), college students (66 per cent) and Canadians over 55 (69 per cent) were the most likely to disagree with the statement. Those born outside of Canada were more likely to agree (24 per cent) than respondents born in the country (16 per cent).

A similar split was seen on the question of whether “Jews in Canada are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.” Nine per cent of all respondents and eight per cent of people born in Canada agreed, while nearly twice the number of respondents born outside of the country (15 per cent) agreed. Strong majorities of respondents born in Canada (73 per cent) and outside the country (62 per cent) disagreed with the statement.

“It suggests that public education should not only focus on people who hold openly antisemitic views, but also on the much larger group that may not recognize when criticism about Israel becomes rhetoric that targets Jews and that presents a threat to Jewish Canadians’ sense of safety and belonging,” Jedwab said.

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06/17 Links Pt1: Israel won the war, but the peace is being signed without it; Iran's deal must weaken, not strengthen, Hezbollah in Lebanon; IDF soldier killed, seven others wounded, by IED explosion in southern Lebanon

From Ian:

Did Iran Just Get the Better of Us?

Much of the language in this document is vague, so it is difficult to pin down what each country has actually agreed to, but the plainest meaning of the text indicates a lopsided deal. The United States has committed to immediately easing its economic pressure on Iran, and Iran has only promised to set in motion a process that should eventually open the Strait. The Islamic Republic—which is still attacking shipping in the Strait—can drag its feet, but the United States must leap to comply. Tehran can continue its campaign of international terrorism, rebuild its war machine, and perhaps even extort protection money from Gulf shipping while Washington stands pat.

The rest of the document is unlikely to come to fruition unless Trump also caves on Iran's enriched uranium. The MOU's "minimum methodology" would permit the mullahs to keep a slightly lower-grade blend, which might actually ease their path to a bomb if it enables them to excavate their material that was buried by American B-2s last summer. Iran would receive over $300 billion if it came to an arrangement about its nuclear program that satisfies Trump, but with the pressure off, there is little reason to believe that it will make any further concessions. And CIA director John Ratcliffe reportedly told Trump that his agency collected intelligence indicating Iran's leaders intend to play a double game with these negotiations.

Some commentators have noted, correctly, that there are few yardsticks by which to measure compliance, to say nothing of mechanisms to enforce deviations from the agreement. That is beside the point. Trump signed this document because he escalated the conflict as far as he was willing to go, did not get the results he wanted, and is now trying to put the conflict in the rearview mirror. There will be little enthusiasm in the White House to hold Iran to its obligations and risk provoking it further.

If Trump does not find a way to recover quickly, this MOU could mark the effective end of his presidency. The air campaign inflicted significant damage on Iran's military capabilities and nuclear program, which will buy some time. But the Gulf Arabs, who have been in the crosshairs for months, are unlikely to wait until Tehran has fully rearmed to cut a deal. And since Trump has agreed to restrain Israel, which reportedly was not even allowed to see the text, he cannot use his most capable ally to curb Iran. The ripple effects could extend far beyond the Middle East. The midterms are looking grim, the Iran campaign has split the president's party, congressional Republicans are openly expressing their impatience, and Trump is now in danger of presiding over a regional collapse.

Second-term presidents often run into similar challenges, and many turn to foreign policy, where they have the fewest domestic constraints on action. Trump has a flair for improvisation and is eager to build a lasting legacy, so he is likely to make the same pivot. But to turn the tide against America's fanatical enemies, he also needs to exhibit steadfastness and resolve.

JPost Editorial: Diplomacy is not enough: Iran's deal must weaken, not strengthen, Hezbollah in Lebanon

The new US-Iran framework risks doing the opposite. By placing Lebanon inside the Iran track, it effectively ties Hezbollah’s fate to Tehran’s leverage. Iranian officials and Hezbollah’s political allies are already treating Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon as part of the next stage of US-Iran negotiations.

That is precisely the danger: Israel’s northern border becomes another bargaining chip in a deal whose central parties are not the people who live under Hezbollah’s rockets.

This does not mean Israel should reject every diplomatic initiative. Israel needs the United States, needs working ties with neighboring countries, and should support any serious effort to turn Lebanon into a sovereign state capable of enforcing its own territory. If the Lebanese Armed Forces can genuinely replace Hezbollah south of the Litani, that is an Israeli interest.

But hope is not a security mechanism. A ceasefire that leaves Hezbollah armed, politically emboldened, and protected by Iranian patronage is not a solution; it is quietly purchased on credit, and the bill will come due in the North.

Northern residents have paid too much for temporary quiet. Since October 7, they have endured evacuations, rocket and drone fire, destroyed homes, collapsing local economies, and the humiliation of not knowing when their own state can safely tell them to return. This is not just a military problem – it is a civic failure.

For years, the state underinvested in the North, neglected emergency preparedness, and allowed border communities to live with insecurity that would be intolerable in the center of the country. The result is a slow hollowing-out of the Galilee.

People leave because they cannot build a future on a warning siren, businesses close because uncertainty is not a business model, and communities meant to embody national resilience become evidence of national neglect.

Israel cannot accept less than dismantling Hezbollah
This is not new, but today it receives a different kind of validation. When an international framework appears to prioritize regional calm over dismantling Hezbollah’s threat, residents hear the same old message: wait longer, trust more, accept less.

Israel cannot accept that.

A responsible Israeli position should be firm, not reckless. Any arrangement must include enforceable benchmarks for Hezbollah’s withdrawal and disarmament, a credible Lebanese or international mechanism on the ground, and explicit recognition that Israel retains the right to act against imminent threats. It must not allow Iran to trade Lebanon’s stability for nuclear concessions, or ask Israeli citizens to return home based on diplomatic language that Hezbollah has not implemented.

Israel should welcome diplomacy that makes the North safer – and resist diplomacy that merely makes that danger quieter.

The people of the North do not need another declaration; they need protection, reconstruction, accountability, and a border secure enough to come home to.

Phase Two Never Comes By Abe Greenwald

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What’s wrong with the MOU is pretty much everything. It seeks to protect Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon from Israel. The U.S. will withdraw military forces, lift its naval blockade, end sanctions on the regime, and unfreeze the regime’s frozen assets. The U.S. also pledges that Iran will get $300 billion “for reconstruction” “as part of a final deal within 60 days.” Iran is supposed to let vessels pass freely through the Strait of Hormuz once again and vows not to pursue a nuclear weapon. But any further discussion of Iranian nukes has been pushed off for another 60 days, and that’s the phase-two dead end.

If the regime refused to conduct detailed and credible negotiations about ending its nuclear program today, it’s certainly not going to feel more pressured to do so 60 days into its second life as the country that beat America.

Donald Trump didn’t need a war or an MOU to get the Iranians to pledge that they wouldn’t go nuclear. The regime has been saying for decades that it has no interest in pursuing nuclear weapons, with mullahs citing fatwas that supposedly proscribe nukes on Islamic grounds. The whole time, however, they’ve been enriching uranium to levels that are useful in achieving only one thing: making a nuclear explosive.

The regime will never abandon its nuclear quest and never stop lying about it. So once again, the Trump administration is expecting people to do things that they will never do. Hamas was happy to put off talk of disarming to a later date, and Iran is even happier to kick the nuclear can down the road. Both parties know they will never comply.

But the Iranian regime now enjoys an extra sense of security. Its leaders know that the U.S. is making a mad dash for the exits and plans never to look back. Trump says that he’ll bomb Iran again if it doesn’t comply with the agreement as outlined. The problem is that he’s taught Tehran to read such threats as signs of surrender. And Iran’s leaders are additionally aware that the U.S. has stood idly by and done nothing while the regime dug missiles out of cratered tunnels during the “cease-fire.” All parties’ intentions are now as clear as can be. The U.S. is heading out, and Iran is moving forward.

Trump also claims that if the deal goes bad, he’ll blame Vice President JD Vance, who’s taken the lead on it. But that’s not true. When the deal goes bad, Trump just won’t acknowledge it. It will be another, scarier open-ended phase one.

Jonathan Tobin: Who will stand with Israel against a new Iran deal?

There will be those who will blame this predicament on Netanyahu. His domestic opponents will claim that he depended too heavily on Trump’s friendship for Israel and that of the Republicans. And they will say he alienated Democrats.

This is both untrue and deeply unfair. Whatever one might say about Netanyahu when it comes to navigating the political landscape of his country’s sole superpower ally, the current alignment has little or nothing to do with his unpopularity in the United States or his judgment.

The drift by Democrats away from Israel is the result of the growing influence of toxic left-wing ideologies that falsely label it as a “white” oppressor state. Their willingness to accept and spread blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza is not the product of Israeli behavior, but of the hijacking of the Democratic Party by antisemitic progressives. The prime minister had no chance of preserving a pro-Israel Democratic Party; the same would have been true of any Israeli leader.

That means that Israel and its friends are in a position where they have no choice but to rely on pro-Israel Republicans to preserve the alliance. That worked wonderfully so long as Trump was behaving—as he has done during the first five-and-a-half years of his two terms—as the most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern Jewish state. But with Trump adopting a more equivocal stand in which he may be waving the white flag on Iran and bristling with resentment at Netanyahu’s refusal to stop defending his people, that leaves supporters of Israel isolated in the United States on this issue.

We must hope that it doesn’t come to that—and that Trump isn’t willing to go on deceiving himself and the American people about the dubious prospects for a policy that will preserve the despotic regime in Tehran and ensure that there will be more Middle East wars and bloodshed in the coming years.

But if he is determined to stand by his own Iran deal, it won’t just signal that the aggressive presidency of the past 17 months is about to become a lame-duck administration, even before the outcome of the midterm elections is known. It will also mean that Israel and its friends will largely stand alone when it comes to the debate about this latest appeasement of the Islamist regime of Iran that Trump has given a new lease on life.

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How Everyone Becomes a Target: The Philosophy Behind the Michigan Antizionist Cell

A federal indictment, a tenuous network of victims, and the philosophy that turns a portfolio dispute into a license to kill.

On June 10, a federal grand jury in Detroit unsealed a sixty-three-page indictment charging eight people with an eighteen-month campaign of violence: jars of butyric acid hurled through the windows of family homes, nails scattered in a driveway, houses marked with the inverted red triangle that Hamas uses to designate targets for death, a vow by one defendant to become a woman's physician and poison her slowly, and a plan to follow another target home and "burn it down." Kile B. Jones has assembled the full documentary record; the defendants are presumed innocent of every count.

The perpetrators were University of Michigan students and recent students, several of them honors students, one a medical student, operating within the TAHRIR Coalition — the umbrella of dozens of campus organizations led by Michigan's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The indictment alleges that the coalition's own social-media accounts broadcast the threats, that its lead student group was asked for "money for autonomous actions," and that the cell's targets matched the coalition's published demands.

And whom did they attack? They seem to have little in common. The university president and chief investment officer, who declined to divest the endowment. The personal injury law firm that employs a regent. The provost. A campus police officer who had policed the protests. A fellow student suspected of talking to the FBI. And the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit — a communal charity with no role in university governance, no control over the endowment, no connection to the decision the campaign was ostensibly about — defaced on the first anniversary of October 7. The targets share no obvious thread. A car-accident lawyer, a refugee cop, a charity, a classmate: what list contains all of these, and why?

The conventional answer is that hatred overwhelmed them, that the violence was a breakdown of reason. The evidence points the other way. In the very exchange where he discussed poisoning a patient, one defendant explained that he wanted to act because it was "the only way to clear my conscience." Not to silence his conscience — to clear it. The violence was the discharge of his moral sense, not its suppression. These students experienced themselves, throughout, as the few with the seriousness to do what was required. Their philosophy didn’t just allow violence against families of regents who still invested in Israel as a small percentage of the entire endowment. It demanded it. 

Step one: a theory of who is guilty

The first move is to replace acts with positions. Ordinary moral and legal reasoning assigns guilt for what a person did: you are culpable for your conduct, and innocent where you did not act. The framework these students absorbed assigns guilt for where a person sits. In the structure of oppression, culpability flows from your location — your identity, your institution, your associations — rather than from anything you chose to do. A regent who votes against divestment is guilty; but so, in principle, is anyone the structure places on the wrong side, whether or not they lifted a finger.

This is originally derived from Marx, down through Maoist and Soviet class theory, filtered down to today. People aren’t guilty for what they do, they are guilty for what positions they occupy in the class system. In recent years this idea has extended to anyone who is perceived as being “privileged.” (Which always seems to exclude the ones who are deciding who is privileged.) 

When you extract humans from the decision of who is guilty, you have erased any concept of personal responsibility — not only on the victim side but on every side. 

This is a coherent and fundamentally immoral philosophical position, and it is very popular. But the TAHRIR folks made it even worse. 

Step two: "directly or indirectly"

The second move is the one that removes every limit, and it appears in the indictment in the conspirators' own operating language. The targets, the document states, were those believed to support Israel "directly or indirectly." 

The enemy isn’t Zionists; it is anyone perceived as not being anti-Zionist enough. That can include literally everyone. For example, when Hamas and Fatah argue with each other, they each accuse the other one of being Zionist. 

The endowment holds shares in firms that do business in Israel: that is a real, traceable relationship, however attenuated by the time it reaches a regent's vote. But "indirectly" has no boundary at all, because indirect connection is transitive and the chain never terminates. If the regent is complicit through the endowment, then the firm that employs the regent is complicit through the regent, and the charity that shares his community is complicit through that, and the officer who guards the people who manage the building is complicit through the institution, and onward without any principle that says stop here. Once indirect association counts, the boundary of the guilty category is no longer fixed by anything. It is set by whoever is drawing the connections, and it can be drawn to include anyone.

This is not a slippery-slope worry about where the logic might go. It is a description of where the documented attacks already went. The best way to see it is to map the actual targets that were attacked (not just threatened,) and count the steps from the center of their universe, Israel.

The gray chain is the institutional one, and even it stretches thin. Israel, then firms with Israeli business, then the endowment that holds those firms, then the board of regents that governs the endowment, then one individual regent who sits on that board, then the personal-injury law firm that employs him: by the time the campaign reaches the firm it actually attacked, it is five links from the source, and not one of those links is about anything the law firm did. The university branch is no tighter — endowment, university, and then a fellow student or a campus police officer, each reached by membership or employment rather than by any decision about Israel. (The officer is the one partial exception worth conceding: campus police broke up the encampment, so the cell may have had a grievance against him as police, independent of Israel entirely — which, if anything, means the "supporting Israel" rationale was a pretext even by their own logic.)

The amber chain is stranger and more telling. The Jewish Federation has no organizational link to Israel whatsoever — no shares, no governance, no employment. Its path to the center runs Israel, then Zionists, then Jews, then the Federation: three steps, each one a substitution of categories rather than a real relationship. A state becomes an ideology, an ideology becomes an ethnicity, an ethnicity becomes a particular charity that happens to be Jewish. The Federation sits the same distance from the center as the board of regents — three rings out — but the board got there through three organizational facts and the Federation got there through three acts of redefinition. That is the Protocols logic rendered as a network diagram: by the final step, "connected to Israel" has come to mean "is Jewish," and the map shows the exact rung where the meaning was swapped.

We’ve seen this logic before.Bristol professor David Miller maps these elaborate diagrams of his fevered imagination of complicity that invariably land on Jews. Students for Justice in Palestine came under fire in 2022 for mapping out institutions in Massachusetts under the same guilt-by-position logic that ended up reaching every Hillel in New England, the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston and the jewish Arts Collaborative.

What the picture demonstrates is that "directly or indirectly" has already done its work. The people these students actually attacked were, by the campaign's own theory of connection, three to five links removed from the thing they were angry about. The arbitrariness is not a future risk. It is the documented present.

Step three: the license to kill the nodes

A map of the guilty is not yet a reason to hurt anyone. Positional guilt plus "indirectly" tells you who is on the wrong side, and draws the side as wide as you like, but on its own it justifies a boycott, a denunciation, a divestment demand — not acid through a window. The final element is what converts a node on a diagram into a body.

That element is Frantz Fanon's doctrine of redemptive violence. The Wretched of the Earth argued that violence by the colonized against the colonizer is a cleansing, recreating act rather than a regrettable necessity — the means by which the oppressed remake themselves into free agents. This is the doctrine that lets a medical student describe planned poisoning as the way to "clear my conscience." Within the Fanonist frame, the violence is not the abandonment of his morality; it is its fulfillment. Restraint would be the failure.

Fanon was describing an armed colonial settler and the colonized subject shooting back. His colonizer was a person with a gun and a farm on expropriated land, an active agent of a violent occupation. Nothing on the Michigan map is close to that. But when Fanonism is combined with the never ending mapping of who is bad, we arrive at a situation where literally anyone who is perceived as being on the wrong side of history — defined by what position they are in, not what they do — they are subject to being murdered in the name of justice.

That’s how you get to young people saying that their conscience cannot stand it if they don’t attack the families of the people they perceive as being four or five degrees separated from Israel. 

That is the combination, and it is the whole of it. Positional guilt supplies the brush. "Indirectly" makes the brush infinitely wide. The map shows the brush has already painted a car-accident lawyer and a Jewish charity. And their flavor of Fanonism hands anyone holding the brush a license to kill whatever it has painted, for the killer's own moral redemption. 

Each element is survivable alone. A theory of structural complicity, by itself, produces seminar papers. Fanon, by himself, applied to actual colonial war, produces a contestable but bounded argument. It is the multiplication that has no edge: an unlimited target set crossed with a therapeutic license to destroy its members.

Everyone is a node

The logic never ends. If the law firm is a legitimate target for employing a regent, then so is any company the endowment invests in, and so is anyone who works for that company, and so is any student who accepts a scholarship funded by it or a job offer from it. Each is connected to Israel by exactly the kind of indirect link the framework has already ruled sufficient, and each is therefore paintable, and therefore — under Fanon — killable for the satisfaction of the one who decides it. The same logic that placed a refugee cop on the list places the sophomore who took the internship. There is no node the framework excludes, because the only thing required to become a node is a connection, and the framework has defined connection so that everyone has one.

This is where the philosophy, not the temperament, is the danger. It has no brakes. Nothing in this philosophy says that the person who bought a lamp from a garage sale by the cousin of a manager who once hired an Israeli security guard is not equally guilty.  A moral framework with no internal brakes will, given enough sincere adherents, eventually produce followers who sincerely think that braking is immoral and everyone they do not like must be hounded, harassed and attacked.  

It would be comforting to treat the indictees as an aberration. The harder truth is that they are a faithful execution. They took published philosophies literally, strung them together, followed where they lead, and were stopped not by anything in the philosophy but by the FBI. 

There were other components here — the vanguardism that produced the cell structure by imitating militant movements of the 1960s, the genocide-emergency framing that set the tempo, the long-falsified Third-Worldist romance that the academy keeps teaching with its body count edited out. Each deserves its own accounting. But they are accelerants on top of the core mechanism. The mechanism is simple enough to state in a sentence, and damning enough to end on: give people a theory that makes everyone guilty by association and then makes killing the guilty an act of self-purification, and the only question left is who among them will be sincere enough to act on it.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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