Emmaia Gelman, 2/27/2024
On Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the New Cold War on Ethnic Studies published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies, Fall 2023/Feb 2024.
Author’s note: Just before this article went to print, the Israeli state launched a genocide in Gaza. As of this writing, it has dropped twenty-two thousand U.S.- provided bombs, killed over eighteen thousand Palestinians, wounded fifty thousand, displaced 90 percent of the population, and left two million without water, food, shelter, or medical care. In North America and around the world, many millions of protesters, often led by Palestinian and Jewish groups, have called for an end to the genocide, an end to racial citizenship (reflected in the often-heard chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free”), and a reckoning with Israel’s colonial history. Zionist organizations and civic leaders have characterized those calls as “antisemitism,” “hate,” “supporting terror,” and, perversely, “calling for genocide.” The U.S. Congress and the Biden administration have adopted their rhetoric; under the banner of protecting Jews, they have implemented a wide-ranging, fast-moving push for militarism and repressive action, including attacking universities, escalating policing, and tripling aid to the Israeli military. The stakes of clarifying how Zionist politics leverage “rights talk” to implement materially repressive projects, and collectively refusing those efforts, are incredibly high.