THE LUNATIC MAINSTREAM

In many influential institutions, antizionism is no longer a fringe deviation from the accepted position. It is the consensus.

These people and their ideas have become mainstream. We need to push them back to the fringes.

Antisemitism used to be disreputable. Not absent. Never absent, sadly. But disreputable.

The people who spoke openly about Jewish conspiracies, Jewish money, Jewish disloyalty, or Jewish control were generally recognized as inhabitants of the lunatic fringe. They circulated photocopied manifestos, muttered about international bankers, and gathered in political swamps respectable people knew enough to avoid.

Antizionism — the belief that Jewish national self-determination is uniquely illegitimate and Israel must cease to exist — was seen as, if not the same thing, certainly antisemitism-adjacent enough that it, too, occupied the margins of Western politics.

There were always communists, religious extremists, neo-Nazis and various cranks who wanted Israel abolished. But they were understood as extremists.

They were the lunatic fringe.

What has changed is not merely the prevalence of these ideas. It is their centrality.

The lunatic fringe has moved into the mainstream.

In many influential progressive institutions, antizionism is no longer an eccentric deviation from the accepted position. It is the consensus.

The Democratic Socialists of America, who have seen some electoral successes in recent weeks, seem to think antizionism is their ticket to ride. New York’s mayor, the newly minted Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan and the coterie of crackpots who call themselves the Squad, among others, basically have one foreign policy position: hating on Israel.

Never mind the panoply of catastrophes of worldwide — Look! — self-determined Jews are protecting themselves from genociders. They must be stopped!

What would once have been an extreme factional demand became an expression of institutional identity.

In Canada’s New Democratic Party, hostility toward the Jewish state has likewise become the sole motivating foreign affairs issue. Listen to the leader of the party or their foreign affairs spokesmaniac and you would think there were no other issues in the world besides the evil of Zionism.

Across sections of the European left, Israel is not treated as one imperfect state among many. It is treated as a singular contaminant: colonial, genocidal, illegitimate, and beyond moral rehabilitation.

This mania — ostensibly “pro-Palestinian” but in practice just the same old-fashioned fixation with Jews — is visible in parts of the trade-union movement, academia, the arts, feminist organizing, and queer activism.

Again, none of these movements is monolithic. There are a few courageous feminists, unionists, artists, academics, and LGBTQ+ people resisting antisemitism and defending Jewish inclusion.

But in too many organizations, the range of permissible opinion on Israel has become: hate Israel or be canceled.

The folks who “celebrate diversity” demonstrate one hell of a contrary attitude to human and intellectual multiplicity when it comes to Jews.

The coalition built on the concept that minority communities alone define their identities tells Jews that Zionism has nothing to do with Jewishness.

The folks who teach that impact matters more than intent dismiss Jewish alarm because the speakers insist their intentions are anti-racist and, besides, those hypersensitive Jews are always complaining.

The feminists who built entire movements around believing women demonstrate astonishing disregard and doubt when the women are Israeli.

The queer activists who insist that no community’s human rights should be conditional admit Jews to the Pride party only if they repudiate their people’s right to self-determination.

The unions that exist because workers are stronger collectively single out one country — arguably the country in which the collectivist values trade unionists claim to endorse are most foundational — for ridiculous vilification.

Of course, modern antisemitism is rarely advertised under its historic name.

It fancies itself up as anti-imperialism. It dresses itself up as decolonization. It slaps on the lipstick of anti-racism, the sequins of solidarity, the fake lashes of liberation, the rouge of resistance.

The Jewish conspiracy becomes “Zionist influence.” Jewi$h money becomes the Zioni$t lobby. Jewish bloodlust becomes Israel’s alleged appetite for Palestinian children. The deceitful Jew becomes the Israeli whose every statement is derided as propaganda. The collectively guilty Jew becomes the diaspora Zionist required to condemn Israel before being admitted into respectable progressive society.

This became mainstream because institutions stopped imposing a reputational cost, let down the drawbridge and invited the ravening hordes into the castle. This is what the US Democrats, Canada’s New Democrats and Greens, and many leftist European parties have done, as have most unions, queer, feminist, and “progressive” movements.

They have legitimized antizionism and antisemitism. And they have delegitimized themselves.

But delegitimizing themselves carries a price only when the mass of decent people recognizes that delegitimization. In other words, if most Democratic Party voters jump on the hate-Israel bandwagon, the illegitimate becomes legitimate in that sector. That doesn’t mean it is actually legitimate. It is a topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass world in which the policy (antisemitism) is legitimate because the vessel has become illegitimate.

Let’s put this in the crudest historical terms. Antisemitism was legitimate in 1930s Germany because the mass of German people said it was.

That is how the lunatic fringe becomes the lunatic mainstream.

I am a progressive. I am gay. I believe in unions, feminism, racial equality, universal human rights, and the obligation to protect minorities.

That is why this matters to me. I can’t stop being pro-union, pro-feminist, gay, anti-racist, or an advocate of universal rights because a bunch of people have hijacked those terms and my movements. The people who agree with me, and who share my values, are the only legitimate “progressives”—but we are being made illegitimate in our own ideological spaces because illegitimate people with illegitimate ideas have taken over the spaces and tried to kick us out.

The worst thing we could do is walk away.

The Jewish Federation of British Columbia, for example, did a kind of genius thing at the Vancouver Pride Parade earlier this month. They acknowledged that Jews (and allies like me) were individually and collectively unwelcome at the event. So they rented a truck with various electronic messages to that effect and entered it in the parade. Bravo!

The left, at its best, has always stood up to majorities who tried to marginalize minorities.

Today, the majority of the left are either marginalizing Jews or remaining silent while a minority on the left do so.

There is, however, an important reason for hope.

There is no moral difference between someone who marginalizes and terrorizes a minority and those who remain silent.

Strategically, though, there is a difference. Because it means we “only” need to convince the silent good people to stand up to a racist minority in our ranks, rather than convince a hate-motivated majority to change their minds. In other words, we don’t need to convert the die-hards. We just need to mobilize those who haven’t succumbed to the ideology.

Success here will depend on unmasking the linguistic shell game the racists have developed and successfully implemented.

Unlike antisemitism on the right, which speaks in the language of race, nationalism, and conspiracy, antisemitism on the left is harder to confront, and more appealing, because it speaks in a faux-language of justice.

It flatters the people expressing it. It tells them they are not participating in an ancient prejudice but opposing power, colonialism, and “genocide.”

The old antisemites believed they were protecting civilization from the Jews.

The new ones believe they are protecting humanity from Zionists.

Everyone is the hero of his own story.

Institutional consensus is not necessarily popular consensus. The apparently monolithic voice is not necessarily representative of everyone — or even a majority — in these spaces.

I know from conversations with former allies in the NDP, the gay rights movement and other causes I have been involved in that many people inside these movements disagree privately. They recognize the obsession, the double standards, and the dehumanization, but remain silent because they fear social exclusion, professional consequences or — and this is the real secret weapon that keeps the majority in line — the raging fury of the crazed and often violent antizionist activists.

Their silence produces an illusion of unanimity.

One person speaking can rupture that illusion.

One union member can oppose the resolution — and that gives dozens, possibly hundreds, more permission to dissent.

One feminist can ask why Israeli women do not count, thereby breaking the immoral consensus.

One queer activist can refuse to make Jewish exclusion a condition of solidarity, and in so doing move our movement slightly back toward the inclusive diversity that our slogans celebrate.

One New Democrat can insist that Palestinian rights and Jewish national rights are not mutually exclusive, contesting the despicable false binary that forces people to choose which group to treat as unworthy.

This is the slow process by which we reclaim these movements — and in the process redeem their morality and legitimacy.

The fight is not against unions, feminism, queer liberation, democratic socialism, or the left broadly. It is against the normalization of antisemitism within movements that should know better.

It will require people inside these institutions to stop whispering privately and begin objecting publicly. It will require allies to accept the discomfort and cost that actual allyship entails. It will require progressives to apply their principles even when Jews are the minority asking for protection.

The lunatic fringe became the lunatic mainstream because too many reasonable people moved aside.

We need to make the lunatic mainstream the lunatic fringe again.

Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588402258315

Follow me on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/patsshtick/

Follow me on X: https://x.com/PatsShtick

*

Some people have generously asked me to make it possible to make one-time contributions to support my work. I have now set up a PayPal link for donations. If you like snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and want me to keep it up, any support is deeply appreciated. Click here.