Postscript: BDS

This project comes at a point in time when we are observing a significant growth in the normalization of antisemitism. In academia this is largely the result of the success of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement in mainstreaming the demonization and delegitimization of the state of Israel and in denigrating and ostracizing its supporters. In the United States, the current situation has also been exacerbated because those who support and advocate for BDS feel empowered and emboldened within a highly polarized political environment. In recent years, BDS has succeeded in casting pro-Israel/anti-BDS activism as right-wing and pro-Trump, especially on campuses that have long been dominated by the political and cultural left. This allows every anti-Israel voice to be treated as legitimate, and those who espouse anti-Israel positions can signal their virtue more easily than ever before.

Facts find no room in the world of BDS. The goal of social justice, defined as erasing the alleged racist Jewish state and Zionist ideology, shapes everything related to the study of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More and more, only one set of ideas is presented, in which Israel is held up as the greatest evil—not only in the Middle East but in the world; a state which must be singled out and treated uniquely. Intersectionality, the dominant paradigm in many fields of study in the humanities and softer social sciences, advocates treating oppressions as integrally linked, with the result being increasingly impoverished research designs that further defame Israel with preposterous accusations.¹ For example, in the now popularized "From Ferguson to Palestine" meme, Israel and Jewish-American organizations are condemned for conspiring to cause harm to "black and brown" Palestinian and American bodies via alleged racist U.S.-Israel counterterror police exchanges.²

This obsession with Israel's supposed wrongdoings crowds out other scholarly pursuits—Turkey's jailing of tens of thousands of fellow academics does not register, much less China's imprisonment of a million Muslims in "reeducation" camps. Such comparative analysis, a staple methodology in the social sciences, is dismissed as mere "what-about-ism". But even the harms meted out to Palestinian academics and students in universities in the West Bank and Gaza receive little attention unless violations to academic freedom can be blamed on Israel's alleged abuses.³

In place of rigorous scholarship, including field or archival work, buzz words and catchphrases—apartheid, genocide, settler-colonialism, pinkwashing—abound. Entire disciplines, including Middle Eastern Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Ethnic Studies, now rely on these code words wielded by scholar-activists, the vast majority of whom don't know Hebrew and have spent little time in Israel. In these fields of study, a dangerous perversion of standards of evidence and open inquiry is occurring. The distortion of crucial terms has become so pervasive that we no longer can even recall how they were initially used. Accordingly, reclaiming the language is normatively desirable for better knowledge production. But it also promises to promote greater understanding and tolerance. At a time when the debate over antisemitism has become so intellectualized that individuals have a difficult time distinguishing racism from legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, improving the discourse must be of prime concern.

This becomes all the more imperative given that a "new" racial antisemitism is being built on the "old" medieval one. Cycles of hatred towards Jews reflected in Muslim and Christian writings continue to repeat many old anti-Semitic canards, but are now willing to embrace junk science and social Darwinian tropes whenever possible. What we are witnessing is a slow but steady growth in anti-Jewish animus under the guise of anti-Zionism.⁴ In Europe, there has not been such a level of concern, anxiety, and even depression among European Jewry since 1945. As the late Robert Wistrich, historian of antisemitism writes, "Europe cannot fight anti-Semitism if it appeases terrorists or blackens Israel's name. We need to insist that a linkage exists between blind 'Palestinophilia,' being soft on terror and jihad, defaming Israel, and the current wave of anti...