Anyone who follows the online discourse of Israel-haters will find that, every once in a while—and far less frequently than one might hope—one will chastise another for engaging in the most naked forms of anti-Semitism. The chastiser will usually point out that it “hurts the movement” to put such bigotry on display. David Schraub wonders if it really does:
Anti-Semitism is one of the most powerful mobilizing forces the world has ever seen; it would be stunning if it did not provide at least some help to any movement that managed to harness it successfully. To the extent Americans can be persuaded that Jewish nationalism is why the U.S. doesn’t have good healthcare, that’s very likely to make more Americans anti-Zionist and so benefit anti-Zionism as a movement. It would be, when you think about, far too convenient that “opposing anti-Semitism” only entails opposing things that already hurt the movement—that’s a cost-free action. The trouble comes when opposing anti-Semitism means actually forgoing useful tactics and ceding promising opportunities—but that’s where the rubber hits the road.
The suggestion that Americans don’t have good healthcare because of Israel isn’t a theoretical one. Here Schraub has in mind a social-media post from one Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who believes that the “presence of Zionism in U.S. medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity.” This sentiment has emerged as a frequent calumny of the anti-Semitic left in the past few weeks. Marya later complained about the “trolls who cannot have a substantive debate about Zionist ideology” and thus engage in “ad-hominem attacks” by calling her an anti-Semite. Schraub describes this response as an
almost reflexive treatment of “anti-Semitism” not as a subject or component of “substantive debate” but as an obstacle to it. This invariably occurs in tandem with the speaker demanding absolute free rein to open fire on Zionism as racist and white-supremacist and colonialist and apartheid and genocidal. We must have an open debate on the merits about those important allegations! But not so “open” that “anti-Semitism” can be part of the discussion.
Read more on Debate Link: https://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2024/01/things-people-blame-jews-for-volume.html