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Final week, Susanne DeWitt, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who later turned a molecular biologist, spoke earlier than the Berkeley, Calif., Metropolis Council to request a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. After paying attention to a “horrendous surge in antisemitism,” she was then heckled and shouted down by protesters on the assembly when she talked about the bloodbath and rapes in Israel of Oct. 7.
On the identical assembly, a girl testified that her 7-year-old Jewish son heard “a gaggle of children at his college say, ‘Jews are silly.’” She, too, was heckled: “Zionists are stupider,” a protester mentioned. On the identical assembly, others yelled, “cowards, go chase the cash, you cash suckers” and “you might be traitors to this nation, you might be spies for Israel.”
Protest actions have an honorable place in American historical past. However not all of them. Not the neo-Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978. Not the white supremacists who chanted “Jews won’t substitute us” at their Unite the Proper rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
And never an excessive amount of of what passes for a pro-Palestinian motion however is basically pro-Hamas, with its calls to do away with the Jewish state in its entirety (“from the river to the ocean …”), its open celebration of the homicide of its folks (“resistance is justified …”) and its efforts to mock, minimize or deny the struggling of Israelis, which so rapidly descend into the antisemitism on bare show in Berkeley.
How did this occur?
It wasn’t a response to the human struggling in Gaza in current months. A coalition of Harvard pupil teams issued a statement on Oct. 7 holding “the Israeli regime totally liable for all unfolding violence.” Professional-Hamas demonstrations broke out worldwide on Oct. 8. A Black Lives Matter chapter posted a graphic on Instagram of the Hamas paragliders who murdered a whole bunch of younger Israelis on the Nova music pageant. A Cornell professor mentioned he discovered the bloodbath “exhilarating,” and demonstrators rallied in his support.
Neither is it a matter of in search of a Palestinian state — one other reality the demonstrators overtly avow. Among the many fashionable chants at many protests is “We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” — all of what had been Necessary Palestine earlier than the creation of Israel. Israeli troopers and settlers vacated Gaza almost 20 years ago. The cities and kibbutzim that Hamas invaded on Oct. 7 are solely “occupied” if one believes that each one of Israel, in any type of border, is a type of occupation.
In different phrases, the central, animating sentiment behind a lot of the protest motion is neither humanitarian nor liberationist. It’s eliminationist. And it expresses itself routinely within the techniques adopted by so lots of its main activists and followers.
Techniques like the grotesque and routine removal or defacement of posters of Israelis kidnapped to Gaza. Or holding a loud and aggressive demonstration outdoors of New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer hospital (“Be certain they hear you, they’re within the home windows,” mentioned one of many protest leaders), apparently as a result of the hospital has collaborated with Israeli medical establishments. Or forcing a Jewish teacher at a public school in Queens to flee her classroom for security as a whole bunch of youngsters rioted by way of the varsity, some waving Palestinian flags. Or shouting down Representative Jamie Raskin on the College of Maryland for being “complicit in genocide” when he got here to the campus to offer a chat on democracy and “the menace to cause within the twenty first century.” Or surrounding a theater on the College of California at Berkeley that was presupposed to host a chat by an Israeli lawyer, smashing home windows, breaking by way of locked doorways, spitting on and grabbing at least one student by the neck and forcing Jewish college students to flee by way of an underground exit.
That is solely a partial checklist. However it reveals the bullying mentality on the coronary heart of the pro-Hamas motion. It isn’t sufficient for them to talk out; they have to shut different voices down. It isn’t sufficient for them to make a robust or clear argument; in addition they intention to instill a palpable sense of worry of their opponents. American civil libertarians of the previous as soon as understood that inherent in the fitting to protest was the duty to respect the fitting of individuals with differing views to protest as properly. That understanding appears to be wholly absent from the individuals who suppose that, say, heckling Raskin into silence can also be a type of democracy.
On this sense, critics of Israel who declare that American Jews should select between Zionism and liberalism have it backward. The illiberals aren’t the folks defending the fitting of an imperfect however embattled democracy to defend its territory and save its hostages. They’re the individuals who, like the previous Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, need Israel wiped off the map and aren’t ashamed to say so. Not surprisingly, in addition they appear to share Ahmadinejad’s attitudes towards coping with dissent.
It’s true that in almost each political trigger, together with probably the most justified, there are ugly components — the Meir Kahanes or the Louis Farrakhans of the world. However the mark of a morally severe motion lies in its dedication to weed out its worst members and stamp out its worst concepts. What we’ve too usually seen from the “Free Palestine” crowd is exactly the alternative.
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