From the Safe Space to the Sea

Anti-Semitism with Progressive Characteristics

Picture a scenario...a student group at a university applies to hold a “Palestine Week”, which is held with the full support of the university, but when a Jewish student group applies to hold their own campus event, they are told by the university that political activities are not permitted. At another university, the Jewish Society is stuck off the university’s register based on a resolution which equates Zionism to racism. At no fewer than 11 universities, motions are passed by student groups professing unequivocal support for a pan-Arabist and Islamist terrorist group that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, the latter objective of which is also endorsed by the student groups. Following the successful passing of such a resolution at one university, the university student newspaper publishes an article warning of the “Zionists plot” to conquer the world. At the same university that hosts its Palestine Week, a resolution is passed stating that Israel is committed to defending the interests of “Imperialism”.¹

If this sounds like an American college campus in 2024, your guess would certainly be understandable. But every example listed above occurred at British universities between 1975 and 1977. Yet the culture of campus anti-Semitism evident in British universities from the 1970s has surfaced its ugly face across America. And the line between “from the river to the sea” as a phrase with clear implications but plausible deniability, to “all Zionists deserve to die” and “there is only one solution, Intifada revolution”, is forced into question. While I do not think, as we’ll discuss further below, that every campus protestor is a rabid anti-Semite committed to the destruction of Israel, the reality is that the ideas and organisations behind the protests are, and do. The mask has truly slipped, and yet there is a desire to paint this open hatred of Jews with a veneer of legitimacy, as “anti-Zionism tho” or “criticising Israel’s policies tho”.

Anti-Semitism with Progressive Characteristics

In Tsarist Russia in 1903, a document entitled ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was forged by Russian secret police, which feigned as a report of the meetings of the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Circulated by the Russians throughout Europe and America, it provided the foundation of one of the most pervasive 20th Century anti-Semitic conspiracies; that of the “International Jew”, a plot by the Jews to control world finance and subvert Christian societies. The motif of the Jews as a subversive force within society was not new; it had been a cornerstone of the anti-Semitism at the heart of the Dreyfus Affair. The Protocols merely provided the most convincing confirmation bias for antecedent anti-Semitism. The motif found expression in diverse forms, from the Dreyfus Affair to the Nazis to Marxist-Leninism, to America’s McCarthyist anti-communist witch hunts, and today’s campus pro-Palestinian protests. These respective examples are neither comparable nor equivalent, but a common anti-Semitic motif permeates through them; that of the Jews as a force of malign power and influence.

The consequence of this conspiracy theory of the Jews as a shadowy force pulling unseen strings, as Frederic Raphael stated, has been to place the Jews in between numerous movements and their particular conception of salvation; the enemy-within that requires ripping out, root and branch. This conception of anti-Semitism represented the original Christian form, a theological iteration cemented over the early years of the Christian Church which held that if the Jews were responsible for killing God’s only begotten son, they must be capable of all manner of wicked deeds. The Jews were also distinguished from the two other Abrahamic religions in another important way; Christianity and subsequently Islam were in the business of conquest and conversion, zealously convinced that they and they alone possessed the gift of salvation. That the Jews exhibited no such desires provided further confirmation to Christianity and Islam of their suspiciousness, and further justification for their killing. When German knights set out for the First Crusade, they massacred Jewish villages along the Rhine. Why not? When Jews at Medina declined the prophet Mohammed’s creed, he supervised the beheading of ~700 Jewish men. For Christianity and Islam, in all their vicious violence and insatiable desires for global dominance, slaughtering Jews was the original virtue signal.

The Jews became the people unto which Christians and Clerics alike projected their own worst inclinations; the Jews must always be held as guilty of the very crimes perpetrated against them, the theological tautology that self-justified those very crimes ab initio. Theological anti-Semitism predated ethnocentric anti-Semitism as a form of racial theory that became popular in late 19th Century Europe and would find its most extreme expression in Nazi ideology. Yet the core motif of malign Jewish power and influence, and the Jews as the people through which salvation will be achieved, persisted. For the Nazis, exterminating the Jews was the price of salvation for a pure Aryan society of übermensch from racial “impurity”. For Marxism, erasing unique Jewish identity was a price of salvation for the economic emancipation of the global proletariat. For post-war Western Leftism, opposition to Jewish self-determination promised salvation from Western “imperialism”. Whether Jews must be killed as in the case of the Nazis, or simply disappear as a visible, unique people as in the case of Marxism and post-war Western Leftism, is a minor detail.

Given the responses to October 7th from the Western Progressives who revelled in the violence and glorified the slaughter, the needle has moved more to acceptance of slaughtering Jews as a price that many of the contemporary campus “radicals” appear willing to accept on the road to their salvation from “settler colonialism”. One assumes that if the Native Americans applied the logic of the campus cosplayers and arrived at Colombia with machetes, the brave revolutionaries would kneel and gladly accept their fate as “colonisers”. Nevertheless, when signs at institutions of virtue such as UC Santa Cruz declare “Death to Israelis”, we can dispense with the comfortable notion of anti-Semitism as a Right-wing phenomenon. The strength of the anti-Semitic association between the Nazis and the Holocaust has provided many in the West with this notion, but it is not the reality of patterns of anti-Semitism in the post-Second World War period.

There are generally three broad distinctions between sources of anti-Semitism that are drawn; Right-wing anti-Semitism, primarily racial/ethnocentric; Left-wing anti-Semitism, often modern secular forms of ancient Christian theological motifs such as the “Zionist lobby” as a force of malign power, or the “blood libel” depiction of the Jews as bloodthirsty warmongerers; and Islamist anti-Semitism, which blends theological with ethnocentric ant-Semitism. Ethnocentric anti-Semitism is not inherent to Islam; it has distinctly European origins. Its transfusion into Islam was a product of a cosy Second World War alliance between the Nazis and Muslim leaders, in particular, the once Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who oversaw a programme of propaganda during the war to import ethnocentric anti-Semitism with theological Islamism.² The propaganda focused on portraying the Allies as in the service of the Jews, the motif of the shadowy “International Jew” lifted straight from National Socialist doctrines. He also helped to raise Muslim Waffen-SS battalions in the Balkans. However, to avoid creating discord in the Arab world after the war, the Allies decided against prosecuting el-Husseini.

el-Husseini became a leading figure in Palestinian nationalism in the post-war period, shaping the incorporation of ethnocentric anti-Semitism and theological Islamism into the emerging pan-Arabist and Islamist movements. This found its first vocal expression in the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus, ethnocentric anti-Semitism wasn’t defeated with the fall of the Third Reich, it simply relocated to the Middle East, where it found rich soil to grow, fertilised by Soviet “anti-imperialist” rhetoric and designs. And this “anti-imperialist” gloss made it acceptable among Left-wing political movements in the West. The anti-Semitism of contemporary Progressivism and Islamism are thus indelibly linked, in a way that ultimately makes the scenes and chants from American college campuses and European capitals unsurprising. What we have seen since October 7th is a convergence of the two in the Progressive Left, endorsing and celebrating Islamist ideologies while calling for the destruction of Israel and violence against Jews.

How the Progressive Left arrived at this juncture is not an accident; it is an education in a very particular ideology. The post-October 7th convergence under the Progressive banner brought together several related trends from the post-war period, which were accelerated in the mid-1970s following the Yom Kippur War, when the Western Left realised that their dream of a great victory for Soviet internationalism against “imperialist” Israel by proxy of the Soviet-armed Arab countries, was doomed to fail. With Israel looking like it was here to stay, Leftist anti-Semitic apoplexy reinvented itself as “anti-Zionism”. This coincided with the end of the Vietnam War which brought profound consequences for the American academic landscape, as the failed hippy-revolutionaries retreated into the universities to console themselves with self-reverential and intellectually vapid theorising on society and identity. If they couldn’t live as radicals, they would invent an alternate universe in which they could think as radicals, insulated from the consequences of their ideas, and therefore free to pursue lines of thinking from the unserious to the unhinged. Those insulated high-priests of worthless obscurantism in turn incubated their unthinking bourgeois student-activist proteges in the articles of “anti-colonial/imperial” faith, with its implicit anti-Semitism latent in the concept of destroying “the Zionists”.

What distinguishes post-war Right-wing and Left-wing anti-Semitism in the West is also the fact that while the former primarily finds expression in low literacy, socially deprived contexts, the latter primarily finds expression in intellectual circles and academia. This reinforces the comfortable notion; if a group of skinheads from a council estate march shouting “Sieg Heil”, the chattering classes might condemn them in the pages of the Guardian, but if tenured academics at elite American universities call for the destruction of “the Zionist entity” and justify Islamist violence, well, that’s different, a respectable political position of “anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism”. Anti-Semitism for the Progressive Left is justified by the notion that they are not letting it distract from “the real issue”, which is Israel. Additionally, the Western Progressive chattering classes are more interested in defending Islamist extremism than the right of Jews to safety. So when an elderly Jewish lady, Sarah Halim, is thrown out of her Paris apartment window to her death by an Islamist, the Progressive prerogative is to absolve the murderer of any religious or ethnocentric hatred. Because isn’t “Islamophobia” the “real problem”? And don’t let the Zionist media distract you from the real issue, what about Israel? Thus, in the post-Second World War era, Western Progressivism and Islamism became increasingly ideologically aligned.

The pseudo “scholarship” in “post-colonial studies” and related fields, upon which contemporary Progressivism draws its ideas and its performed activism, played with rhetorical obscurantism in earnest from the 1970s, deliberately using the terms “Zionist”, “Israel”, and “Jews”, interchangeably. This provided plausible deniability against allegations of anti-Semitism in the form of some common tropes, such as “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism” and “criticising Israel’s policies”. Both have always been little more than smokescreens because the core issue for Progressivism has never had anything to do with any Israeli government or policy, but the very existence of Israel itself. “Criticising Israel’s policies tho” implies a critique that is political, independent of any specific people; but in action, this “criticism” is identitarian, and inseparable from Jewish people. This ruse is a readily falsifiable premise because it fails every limb of the “Three D’s” test of anti-Semitism: demonisation of Jews, double standards selectively applied to Israel, and delegitimisation of Israel’s existence.³ This is nothing new; in the 1970s, Leftist student groups at British universities sought to ban Jewish speakers from campus and prohibit Jewish religious meetings and Jewish student groups. Progressive hostility towards Israel has everything to do with the Jews themselves.

That the rhetorical obscurantism of “anti-Zionism” is somehow divorceable from anti-Semitism is equally inadequate. “Anti-Zionism” has always acted as a Trojan horse for anti-Semitic motifs; the sins of the Jews as agents of shadowy power, of the “Jews controlling the media”, of the “Zionist lobby”. It reconstitutes the ancient “blood libel” projection of Christianity onto the Jews and projects it onto the Jewish state, particularly with the projection of “Nazifying” Israel. The Progressive creed fetishises violence by and to victims only; Israel represents the end of Jewish victimhood, which Progressivism responds to by reconstituting the blood libel motif against Israel as an entity. Only so long as Jews are ashes in an oven can they be accepted under the doctrines of Progressivism by satisfying the essential criteria of victimhood and oppression. In this respect, a unique contribution of Progressivism is to reframe Zionism as a cause of anti-Semitism, rather than the reality of Zionism as a consequence of anti-Semitism.⁴

Historically, territorial eviction of the Jews preceded their physical extermination; the alternative was assimilation. Western Leftism has generally exhibited a preference for the latter; the Good Jew was the invisible Jew, the Jew that doesn’t trouble society with their Jewishness, rejecting any form of national conscience.⁵ This is why Israel, as the territorial safeguard against the physical destruction of the Jews, is so abhorrent to Western Progressives; it represents both a national conscience of visible Jewishness and a refusal to be victims at the mercy of the tolerance of another society. It also perpetually falsifies the fantasy that such a territorial safeguard and scepticism of “tolerance” is not required; in response to the surge of anti-Semitic hate crimes and Islamist terrorism in France over the past two decades, since 2010 some ~50,000 French Jews have emigrated to Israel.

As Israel is the original sin for Progressive theories of “anti-colonialism”, the fundamental tenet, and desired outcome, is the eradication of the state of Israel. The rhetorical substitution of “Zionism” for “Jews” serves to keep the implications for the people in question at arm’s length, the quiet part left unsaid. You are invited to believe that “destroying Zionism”, i.e., the only Jewish state in the world, would somehow occur without regard for the Jewish people. Such a position invokes an adage Frederic Raphael relates, of Adolf Hitler in post-war hiding; he turns to someone and says: “Next time, I’m going to finish off the Jews...and two ballet dancers.” “Why two ballet dancers?”, the person asks. “See...”, Adolf replies; “who cares what happens to the Jews?”

From the Safe Space to the Sea

What makes the recent convulsions on American college campuses so enigmatic in some ways is that it has occurred in environments that for the past decade have been characterised by an extreme culture of safetyism, as students have demanded to be insulated against ideas, speech, or even statues and objects, which they deem “harmful”. The word “violence” took on metaphysical dimensions, while “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings" became anchors of a culture that sought shelter from any source of disquiet or perceived offence. The spectacle of the cosplaying campus radicals wearing N95 masks might be the most striking image of the contradiction on display.

And yet, it isn’t really a contradiction. It is precisely because of an environment that combined ideological radicalism with radical campus safetyism that such a culture could emerge. As the Free Press reported, the Columbia encampment blended its opposition to the “Zionist settler entity” with Goop-culture self-care and pseudo-spirituality, replete with melatonin gummies, gluten-free bread, organic tampons, essential oils and tinctures. The bizarre relationship was arguably best exemplified by a protestors’ spokesperson imploring the university for “basic humanitarian aid”, still dependent on institutional care to give effect to their ideological radicalism. This is the product of a petri-dish experiment culturing safe spaces with Edward Said, within a political ideology of contemporary Progressivism that exalts victimhood as its paramount virtue.

The perception of the pro-Palestinian protestors has, predictably, been filtered through the reducing valve to arrive at two diametrically opposed positions: one which holds them as paragons of virtue, the moral compass of the nation that we should all aspire to; the other which holds them as a rabid band terrorism-fetishising anti-Semites that deserve to be crushed by the strong arm of the law. Both are self-evidently bad-faith arguments. I don't have any sort of useful data that would help provide a breakdown of the characteristics of the protestors and their proportions within any given protest. I’m sure some are pure peaceniks appalled by the violence and bloodshed who just want to see an end to the war. I’m sure some are just idealistic young college kids who have caught an exuberant sense that this is the “right thing to do”. I have no doubt based on a lot of the ad hoc interviews circling the interweb that plenty of them are just dumb, naive kids with little idea of whether they're protesting for Palestine, Paraguay, Portugal, or wherever.

However, the problem with movements is that they are not room for individual expression. Movements are defined at the macro rather than the micro level, by the mass of the crowd. And, as emphasised in the previous section, Western Progressivism is a movement that is polluted with anti-Semitic motifs. Seven months on from October 7th there is a mountain of evidence of real, unequivocal anti-Semitism from the pro-Palestinian protests both in America and the UK. This has come from somewhere, so while we can certainly acknowledge that that not every individual at pro-Palestinian campus protests harbours anti-Semitic views, pull the thread and it becomes clear that the organisations and ideas behind the protests do.

This isn’t necessarily new, which is the first important point. A 2006 report on campus anti-Semitism at American universities by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found evidence of biased scholarship, overt anti-Israel ideological instruction, and a climate of intimidation and intolerance to any dissenting viewpoints. Americanised race-based politics was also inserted into the “educational” materials for students, in which Jews are presented as “white colonial oppressors” and Palestinians are “brown indigenous colonised victims”. The Commission found that “Anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist propaganda has been disseminated on many campuses that include traditional anti-Semitic elements, including age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes and defamation.” And that: “Substantial evidence suggests that many university departments of Middle East studies provide one-sided, highly polemical academic presentations and some may repress legitimate debate concerning Israel.” The Middle East department at Columbia attracted particular attention for hostility and intimidation of Jewish students by professors.

Some examples from the report are hard to swallow, such as a 2002 article in the University of Illinois campus newspaper entitled, “Jews Manipulate America”. To quote:

“The Jews, master salesmen that they are, have been able to persuade Americans that it is in American interests to support Israeli oppression of Palestinians... while in reality it was done to satisfy the desires of Jewish oligarchs....separate Jews from all government advisory positions and give them one year fully paid sabbatical...Jewish ability to promote their desires, disguised, as being in the interest of the American people, one day will evaporate. Then the Jews might face another Holocaust.”

I guess this falls under “criticising Israel's policies tho”?

At a 2001 conference for Muslim students at UCLA, a cleric stated “you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew.” When in recent campus protests at Tulane University, the demonstrators chant “Israel bombs, Tulane Hillel pays, how many kids did you kill today?”, this is not some misconceived slogan by clueless kids; it is an expression of learned behaviour, of an internalised ideology that is specifically directed at Jewish students through a pseudo-academic discourse of “anti-Zionism” and anti-Israelism.

What is being taught in classrooms is buttressed by student activist groups, none more odious than the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP). A report published in October 2019 by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) highlighted not only the affiliations between the NSJP and Islamist terrorist groups but also the openly anti-Semitic vitriol espoused by the organisation’s chapters at multiple American universities. At a 2018 conference, the NSJP leader led the students in a chant of “Intifada, Intifada, long live the Intifada.” So when, as we’ve seen over and over for the past seven months, pro-Palestinian protestors on campus chanting “globalise the Intifada” and “there is only one solution, Intifada revolution”, again this is not a misconceived slogan that sounded edgy in the moment. It is an expression of an internalised ideology. A more recent ISGAP report post-October 7th is illustrative of the unhinged rhetoric by the SJP chapters on various universities, openly celebrating the pogrom while justifying the violence with statements like “decolonisation is not a metaphor”. Perhaps this is just “anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism”?

The anti-Semitism evident on college campuses and in pro-Palestinian protests is not an accident, nor is it a “few bad apples”. It represents a culmination of over half a century of alignment between Western Leftist “anti-Zionism” and ethnocentric and theological Islamist anti-Semitism. The Progressive iteration has added its victimhood-virtue ideology and an indoctrinated education in “post-colonial”/’Middle East studies”, polluted with anti-Semitic motifs. It is an expression of very real ideologies that are learned and internalised. That this has blossomed in a campus culture of entitlement and safetyism is, however, perhaps the key to how it could be stamped out; end that campus culture, force these ideologies into the open to be confronted, and see how long the largely rich, White, Progressive “activists” fancy holding on to an open allegiance with grotesque anti-Semitism masquerading as “solidarity” with the Palestinian people.

1. Rubenstein, W.D. The Left, the Right, and the Jews. London: Croom Helm Ltd.; 1982.

2. Küntzel, M. National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World. Jewish Political Studies Review. 2005;17(1/2):99-118.

3. Gerstenfeld, M. Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism: Common Characteristics and Motifs. Jewish Political Studies Review. 2007;19(1/2):83-108.

4. Cohen, B. The Persistence of Anti-Semitism on the British Left. Jewish Political Studies Review. 2004;16(3/4):157-169.

5. Ibid.