Emotional politics of Jewish American Zionism: hegemonic feelings and the paralysis of facts
Claire Rosen Sultan - Independent researcherABSTRACTBy mapping the emotional politics in circulation today among Jewish American Zionists (JAZs) and the identity constructions and core beliefs therein, this essay explores how those emotions manifest in behaviours and their implications on the capacity for JAZs to engage with facts challenging their core beliefs. This essay traces myriad actors and processes that have led to the normalization of hegemonic JAZ emotional politics, for example, the hegemonic enmeshing of Jewish fears about annihilation with Israel’s fears about (meta)physical security. Engineered emotional politics permeate Jewish American identity formations to such an extent that they are furthering the Zionist mission to violently colonize Palestine. By manufacturing Jewish American repulsions from facts which criticize JAZ identity formations, and by engineering a normalized behaviour response (weaponizing antisemitism) to routinized elicitations of JAZ fear, Zionist narratives are systematically inhibiting engagement with facts revealing Israel as a Genocidal ethnic cleanser. For JAZs to understand Israel as the perpetrator of immense harm, the individual would first need to relinquish the core beliefs upon which their identity formation is constructed. The focus of this essay is the struggle for Jewish liberation from Zionism, which is separate – and inherently linked to – liberation and justice for Palestine.
The amount of psychological projection by Claire Rosen Sultan is off the charts. Anti-Zionists are the ones who refuse to engage with acts that contradict their deeply held positions. And Sultan herself is an anti-Israel activist, saying in November 2023 that the "Gaza genocide" was worse than anything anyone had ever seen before.
The paper itself is just as unhinged as the abstract, as Sultan writes how disturbed she is about being given a JNF charity box at her bat mitzvah to steal Palestinian land.
But one part of the article is even more troubling in that it was allowed to be published altogether.
Throughout the article, the word "genocide" is capitalized when referring to Israeli actions, and a footnote gives the rationale:
The United Nations International Commission of Inquiry (UN COI) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) have adopted the capitalisation of Genocide as marker of the ongoing event's elevated status to a proper noun akin to a named historical event, signalling a direct accusation of the most serious international crime against the Palestinian people (United Nations General Assembly, 2024; International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2025)
I looked up the reports referenced, and other UN reports, and never do they capitalize "genocide" when they are accusing Israel of that crime. This footnote is a lie.
But while the paper consistently capitalizes "genocide" when referring to Israeli actions, when it refers to the Holocaust, it deliberately places it in lowercase!
This means that the author does not consider the Nazi Holocaust to be worthy of having an "elevated status to a proper noun akin to a named historical event" - but a war started by Hamas is.
She is saying that the Gaza war was worse than the Holocaust, and that the Holocaust was not unique but just one of many.
Not capitalizing "Holocaust" is, fundamentally, Holocaust denial - in the sense that it is denial that the Holocaust was a unique event. Capitalizing "genocide" continuously indicates that the Gaza war was more consequential and more devastating than the Holocaust was.
Claire Rosen Sultan may have been borna Jew but she is an antisemite.
How can Postcolonial Studies have allowed publication of a paper that violates normal standards of English language capitalization to minimize a real genocide?
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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