Progressive Politics

There is nothing uniquely special and legitimising about Jewishness. But these standard Western anti-Zionist tactics accept the notion, tacitly or otherwise, that there is.

Israel is inherently illegitimate due to its very nature, as a settler colonial project based on the replacement of the indigenous people and their society with a new society run by and for those considered to be a part of its settler in-group. In this case, that in-group happens to be Jews, but this does not meaningfully change anything about the dynamic. It would be the same if Palestine had been colonised by Aymara, or Filipinos, or Serbians, or Mormons, or any other group.

When the time comes to evict the Israeli settlers from the West Bank, will you laugh in the face of those framing it as an ethnic cleansing of poor, vulnerable, innately oppressed Jews and a Second Holocaust?

It’s doubtful that those who hold on to Jewish exceptionalism will be able to. It’s much more likely that they will turn against their own movement.

Israel would be illegitimate whether it had support of 100% of Jews, 50% of them, or 10% of them. No group of people gets to hold a vote amongst themselves on whether or not they can do settler colonialism.

The reality of the situation is that Israel itself is full of Jews who would sooner die than give up the racial privileges they enjoy at the expense of the Palestinian people. And—as I will be elaborating on later in this article—they are supported in this endeavour by the vast majority of Jews worldwide. Any potential future that involves anything resembling just outcomes for the Palestinian people will involve a lot of coercive force against people who happen to be Jewish, and the propaganda against this will, as always, be entirely based around the supposed uniqueness, specialness, and innate vulnerability of Jews. If we uphold Jewish exceptionalism, it will work on us. Or worse: we won’t even get there in the first place, as Jewish exceptionalism primes people to abandon anti-Zionism and become liberal Zionists at the first sign of any real conflict with the interests of Jewish people. It’s easier to support liberation in the abstract rather than in reality, where it’s often very messy and necessitates that people among the oppressor group be harmed in some way.

We got a taste of this already on October 7th, 2023. The Jewish exceptionalist groups who dominate the Western pro-Palestine movement did not meet the moment, instead allowing themselves to be pressured into making both-sides statements, denouncing the resistance and expressing their horror at the suffering of the poor, innocent, Jewish, Israeli settler-victims, with scarcely even a fight.