As regular listeners will know, the last few months have seen a drastic intensification of efforts by organizations and pressure groups that support Israel in its continuing genocidal war on the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza. As we have reported in past shows, this campaign of repression of speech and activism has included collaboration with the increasingly fascistic Trump administration to detain and deport Palestine solidarity activists, the systematic assault on institutions of higher education, many of which have failed to offer any concerted resistance to this gross intrusion on academic freedom and the First Amendment, and the widespread surveillance of social media and electronic devices in search of pretexts to repress. Instrumental in this broad campaign of repression has been the weaponization of charges of antisemitism and in particular the deliberate conflation of antiZionism with antisemitism. Key here has been the tendentious definition of antisemitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, which includes criticism of Israel and of the political philosophy of Zionism among other forms of antisemitism.
Given the long history of Jewish organizations and communities that have opposed Zionism as a political philosophy, both on grounds of its contradiction of fundamental tenets or interpretations of Judaism and on account of the violent settler-colonial and apartheid regime that the realization of its Jewish supremacist has instituted, the conflation of antisemitism and antiZionism is self-evidently absurd and in fact harmful. Its absurdity has not prevented the instrumentalization of false charges of antisemitism from sustaining an unprecedented wave of repression in the United States and it is already clear that Zionist repression of free speech around Palestine is opening the doors to attacks on other social movement organizing as well as on the right of university scholars and students to academic freedom and to determine the content of their teaching and research.
In this show we speak with Professor Emmaia Gelman, Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, to discuss the traditions of antiZionism, Jewish and non-Jewish, the weaponization of antisemitism, and the work of the institute in furnishing and disseminating factual information about the history and ideology of Zionism.
Emmaia Gelman is a professor of Social Sciences at Sarah Lawrence College and the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Her research and writing investigate the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. She is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution, as well as an edited volume of social justice movement writings and academic research on resistance to the ADL. She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism.
Full disclosure: co-host David Lloyd is an Advisory Board member of the ICSZ.
For further discussion of the relation between the Movement for Black Lives and Palestine solidarity, mentioned in the course of this interview, see: https://nakbafiles.org/2016/11/01/blacklivesmatter-and-the-question-of-genocide-in-palestine/
