*Subject: Re: Nessel says she won't attend* Kristin's claim deserves a better answer than Mark's because there is a real history behind it, and the movement is worse off pretending otherwise.
Proudhon's notebooks, Bakunin's Polémique contre les Juifs , the entire tradition Bebel had to name as the socialism of fools precisely because it was a live danger inside the German workers' movement, Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, the Slánský trial, and the Doctors' Plot. And in our own moment, the conspiracist habit of explaining US policy in the region through the lobby rather than through the strategic and accumulation interests of American capital, which is a substitution of a cabal for a class analysis and slides toward the older thing, whether or not anyone intends it. That deformation is real. It should be fought where it appears, and it appears. What the history cannot do is the work Kristin wants from it. "The Democrats are being taken over by antisemites" is not an analysis. It is a moral characterization offered in place of one. The thing actually requiring explanation is a coalition fracture: a party whose voting base, especially under forty, has moved decisively on Gaza while its officeholders, its donor layer, and its foreign policy staff have not. That gap does not need bigotry to produce it. It needs only a party form in which the base has no mechanism to bind the people who speak in its name. Nessel is on one side of that gap and has the standing to feel the pressure of it. Reaching for antisemitism to explain what she is feeling is what people reach for when the structural explanation is unflattering to them. Mark, I think your answer concedes too much ground too fast. "I have not noticed it in 56 years" invites exactly the reply Kristin gave you. The correct answer is not that antisemitism does not exist on the left. It is that its existence does not license the inference she is drawing and that the inference is doing political work independent of its truth. The conflation converts a dispute about a state's conduct into a dispute about the moral character of its critics, which means the state's conduct never has to be argued. Draper said the same thing about how anti-Sovietism functioned in the other direction, and the mechanism is identical. Michael is right on the substance and right that the largest concentration of actual antisemitism in American politics sits with a Christian nationalist current that is also the most reliable bloc of support for the Israeli state. That is not a paradox. It is what it looks like when a state is valued instrumentally by people who do not much care what happens to the population it claims to represent. Now, John. I have to say this plainly. Your post is worse than useless here. "Anti-Semitism has often been a recurring racism shown against Arab peoples" is a philological dodge. The word has a settled referent, fixed since Marr coined it in 1879 to mean exactly one thing, and redefining it does not broaden our solidarity; it just hands Kristin the argument that we cannot name the phenomenon because we do not want to look at it. The rest is wrong in the details, which matters, because everyone on this list who wants to dismiss the anti-Zionist position will quote the errors and skip the argument. The Palestinian general strike of 1936 ran roughly six months, April to October, not six years. The revolt that followed ran to 1939. The Betar naval school operated at Civitavecchia under the Fascist regime from 1934, which is a real and damning fact and is not the same as Mussolini providing boats to attack British installations. The approach to the Axis powers was Lehi in 1940 and 1941, not the Irgun generally. IBM's Dehomag subsidiary and GM's Opel plants were corporations, not "this very U.S. government," and collapsing the two destroys the point you are trying to make about American complicity, which is better made through the St. Louis, the Wagner-Rogers bill, and the 1944 refusal to bomb the rail lines to Birkenau. Those are documented, and they are enough. The position is not complicated and does not require any of that. We oppose the Israeli state's conduct, and we oppose a state form that constitutionally subordinates a fifth of its citizens, on democratic grounds, the same grounds on which we oppose every confessional and ethnically defined state. We oppose antisemitism wherever it turns up, including in our own ranks, and we do not treat it as a lesser matter to be managed. Neither commitment is a concession extracted by the other. They are the same commitment, and the whole force of the conflation is to make us believe we have to choose. 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