The Nation’s hit piece on Fatima Mousa Mohammed reaches deep into the bag of anti-Palestinian tropes

An article in The Nation read shockingly like something out of Commentary

I’m changing up the structure of this newsletter a bit this time. Some of the articles I’ve published recently seem particularly important, so I want to begin by pointing you to them (you know, after you’ve finished this latest newsletter, of course).

At Medium, I reacted to the announcement by Professor Cornel West that he would be running for president as a candidate of the so-called “People’s Party.” I offer a critique of this decision and offer an alternative that would accomplish everything West is setting out to do without any of the harm this decision is doing.

Cornel West Is a Great Presidential Candidate, But His “People’s Party” Run Is a Big Mistake

https://medium.com/@mjplitnick/cornel-west-is-a-great-presidential-candidate-but-his-peoples-party-run-is-a-big-mistake-1a8efbd9f113

There’s been a lot of irresponsible talk in the news recently about an approaching renewal of the nuclear deal with Iran. It’s nonsense. The Biden administration has no plan for how to deal with Iran, and, while they have decided to explore the possibility of diplomacy, they are doing so while continuing to maintain Donald Trump’s policies, offering no change, and without analyzing why that strategy as well as their own bumbling approach has utterly failed. I explain why there is no deal anywhere on the horizon in this piece in Mondoweiss.

The US has no strategy for ending the standoff with Iran

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/06/the-us-has-no-strategy-for-ending-the-standoff-with-iran/

Finally, the IHRA working definition of antisemitism has been deployed all over the world to stifle and even make illegal any support for Palestinian rights. Yet its proponents continue to say it is just a non-binding guideline, a suggestion. This is disingenuous, to put it kindly, as a new report from the European Legal Support Center makes clear. This piece looks at the impact of the IHRA definition on the struggle for Palestinian rights and the battle against antisemitism.

How the IHRA definition of antisemitism is chilling Palestine advocacy in Europe

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/06/how-the-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-is-chilling-palestine-advocacy-in-europe/

As always, you can keep abreast of all my work by following me on Twitter @MJPlitnick or at my web site, http://rethinkingforeignpolicy.org

The Nation’s hit piece on Fatima Mousa Mohammed reaches deep into the bag of anti-Palestinian tropes

On June 8, I tweeted, “Pretty sad that @thenation publishes an article that would more appropriately be found in Commentary or the NY Post.”

That tweet referred to a surprisingly awful article The Nation published that same day by Alexis Grenell titled, “Does Fatima Mousa Mohammed Oppose Israel’s Very Existence?” The headline refers to a recent controversy over a City University of New York (CUNY) commencement address given by Ms. Mohammed.

In that speech, she railed against a world that saw little justice, a New York City police force that has long been among the most violent, racist, and reprehensible of a bad lot, and, most of all, against Israel. There is no doubt that Ms. Mohammed was unsparing and harsh in her criticism. But she was not saying anything about Israel that isn’t well-founded in the realities on the ground for Palestinians.

Ms. Grenell’s article in response, however, was based on unfounded allegations, undue assumptions, and, most of all, a clear disconnect with the reality of 2023 Israel. Her general disposition on the issue, it can be inferred from what she wrote, is that she finds some Israeli actions and policies objectionable. She implies some sympathy for the Palestinians’ plight. She seems to support the idea of a two-state solution (the impossibility of which, as Israel has worked so hard for so long to ensure, is another reason she comes off as so disconnected from reality).

But her anti-Palestinian bias shines through most clearly. Some would call her the epitome of the problems with so-called “liberal Zionism.” To be frank, though, my colleagues and friends in places like J Street, Americans for Peace Now, the New Israel Fund, and similar organizations, who may not share many of my views on this issue, still would not say the things Ms. Grenell does.

In all fairness, Ms. Grenell makes it clear from the outset that, while she finds what Ms. Mohammed had to say highly objectionable and offensive, she has the right to say what she says. That’s certainly better than what many of Ms. Mohammed’s attackers (many have gone way past the point of being mere ”detractors”) have said. But she also has no compunction with turning to the favorite tool of the most hardcore of anti-Palestinian bigots: spurious accusations of antisemitism.

Grenell begins her case for Ms. Mohammed’s antisemitism by blasting her for alleging that CUNY’s trustees are concerned about “investors.” Granted, that’s not the best word. No private individual, corporation, or even foundation is “investing” in CUNY. But the argument that, as a state-funded institution, CUNY need not worry about what donors think is simply wrong. CUNY actively solicits private donations, as do most universities, private and public. The CUNY School of Law is particularly robust in its gathering of contributions. The idea that the trustees don’t worry about what major donors to the university think is just wrong.

But Ms. Grenell doesn’t let facts get in the way of her argument. “New York, like other states, explicitly forbids public funding for entities that support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). Pathetic and awful as the policy is, it made her comments about the “investor-focused” CUNY administration’s opposition to student and faculty support of BDS sound less like a call to action than a lazy anti-Semitic canard.”

New York does have such a shameful law, enacted by fiat by the disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo. But that has nothing to do with what Ms. Mohammed was saying. She was speaking more broadly of the influence of big investors on the entire question of Palestine. It must be noted that many donors, like many politicians who go to the mat to defend Israel, are not Jewish, and much pro-Israel money actually comes from non-Jews. Ms. Mohammed did not exclude that reality in order to focus on Jewish people. Ms. Grenell did. So, who exactly is employing the antisemitic canard here?

Grenell digs in even deeper, saying, “The rest of it was a more coded indictment; her calls for her fellow graduates to ‘confront systems of oppression created to feed an empire with a ravenous appetite for destruction and violence’ invoked the specter of shadowy, destructive forces, imagery straight out of 4chan—or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

This makes one wonder whether Ms. Grenell listened to the speech or just the cherry-picked portions of her critics. To be sure, Ms. Mohammed included Zionism with ills afflicting the world such as capitalism, racism, and imperialism. But given Israel’s role—both currently and historically, with its role in supporting such regimes as Apartheid South Africa and its clandestine involvement in aiding right-wing U.S. governments in their work in Latin America and other places—in the surge of the global right, it’s hardly an indefensible claim. Israeli support for the likes of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Boris Johnson, and other far-right leaders is undeniable. Israel is active in right wing global politics, an allegiance that is all the more shameful for the antisemitism that is overwhelmingly more present there than anywhere else.

Moreover, even aside from the work with the far right, Israel is a key partner with the United States, the biggest military and economic imperial force the world has ever known. There’s no conspiracy theory here, all of this is very much out in the open, and it is not at all similar to the antisemitic caricatures in the Protocols.

But then we get to the real meat of Ms. Grenell’s argument. “The one thing Mohammed didn’t say was whether or not she thinks Israel or a Jewish state shouldn’t exist, even though her logic led right up to the inescapable conclusion. This is where the rubber of anti-Zionism hits the road of anti-Semitism (sic).”

The great strawman of this debate returns. The “right to exist” argument seems persuasive until you think about it. It holds a prominent place in pro-Israel talking points, prominent enough that Prof. Marc Lamont Hill and I devoted an entire chapter to it in our book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Policy. The pro-Israel argument is that no other state has to defend its “right to exist.” Well, that’s because no other state keeps talking about it, and there are reasons for that.

States do not exist by right, they exist by some combination of force; the consent, submission, or acquiescence of the governed; and recognition by other states (i.e. sovereignty). Nations (a term that is itself incredibly fraught and nearly impossible to truly define) do not have a “right” to a state. Many nations in the world do not have their own state. Some fight for states, like the Kurds, Catalans, and Sahrawi, although even there, not all members of the nation agree on the need for a sovereign state. Few indeed are the indigenous or First Nations who have their own state. We may have collapsed and confused the terms “nation” and “state”, but they do not mean at all the same thing.

When people argue for Israel’s “right to exist,” they do not mean its physical existence. Its military might and its alliance with the United States make it perhaps the most secure country in the Middle east. They are, instead, defending Israel’s purported “right” to exist as an ethno-nationalist state that privileges one nationality over others. When people talk about the “destruction” of Israel, certainly in terms of the Palestinians, they are referring to changing the nature of the state from the apartheid structure that has always existed in Israel to a democratic state for all its citizens.

It is important to note that, while the “apartheid” label has stuck more to Israel recently, not only have Palestinians been saying it all along, but the evidence for it has always been there. From 1948 to 1966, Israel’s Palestinian “citizens”—including many who were internally displaced—lived under martial law.  It’s impossible to describe two decades of different sets of laws for different ethnicities as anything other than apartheid. The year after martial law was abolished, the occupation began.

Let’s be clear: there is absolutely nothing about anti-Zionism that is, in and of itself, antisemitic. Objecting to a political ideology is not bigotry. Opposing, for political reasons, a Kurdish state is not, by definition, anti-Kurd bigotry. Opposing an ethno-nationalist Jewish state is also not antisemitism, regardless of how harshly or passionately that opposition presents itself.

That is not to say the two cannot co-exist. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not mutually exclusive. Of course, as we’ve seen from Viktor Orban, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and even Yair Netanyahu, as well as virtually the entire Christian Zionist movement, Zionism and antisemitism are not mutually exclusive either. But the one is not evidence of the other, and there is no intrinsic connection between the two. If both antisemitism and anti-Zionism are present, that is true independently of one another.

Ms. Grenell harps on this point for a time and graduates it to the next phase of strawman hyperbole. “The fact that so many anti-Zionists offer nothing in the way of a vision for where the Jews living in Israel should go, including the thousands of Mizrahim, reveals the limits of their critique.”

The movement Ms. Grenell has been hammering away at, the BDS/anti-Zionist movement in the West, which she is clearly not at all familiar with, does not talk about expelling Jews. Indeed, forced relocation of Jews is part and parcel of the two-state solution, not the one state movement. True, Jews could no longer live in Jewish-only settlements, and of course there are serious questions of reparations for the enormous amount of theft of Palestinian property and generational wealth caused by their dispossession. One can even discuss a concomitant program of compensation for the many Jews of the Arab world who lost a considerable amount when they left those states.

But the one-person, one-vote movement that is being led, contrary to another of Ms. Grenell’s assertions, by Palestinians, makes no demand for expelling Jews. To be sure, there are those among the Palestinian people who employ rhetoric about forcing the Zionists out, but that rhetoric is not found among most Palestinians, in or outside of Palestine and Israel. There is no significant group of people telling Israeli Jews to go anywhere.

Rather, they are telling those Israeli Jews to live in peace and equality with Palestinians. If Ms. Grenell wants to debate why Israeli Jews should be allowed to maintain their superior status to Palestinians, let her make her case. I suspect it will sound too racist to her ears to say it out loud.

In discussing Yemeni Jews, Ms. Grenell notes that there were periods historically of co-existence and others of persecution for the Jews of Yemen. She implies that the latter greatly outweighed the former, which was not the case. But there is no doubt that as the Zionist enterprise moved closer to success in the 1930s and 1940s, many Yemeni Jews decided to leave for Palestine amid growing hostility. And, when the State of Israel was created, there were real waves of violence against Jews in Yemen that caused many who had stayed to leave. The Jewish community in Yemen numbered only about 50,000 in 1948, but today it is close to zero.

That’s deeply troubling and problematic, but it is not connected to the denial of Palestinian rights and the incessant violence against them by Israel. Ms. Granell makes a snarky comment about how supporters of the Palestinians are relatively quiet about other injustices in the Middle East, once again showing her lack of familiarity around this question. The media coverage is not the same as with Israel, but there is plenty of activity around the awful human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the civil war in Syria, the devastation of Lebanon, the ongoing strife in Iraq, and beyond the Arab world, the human rights situation in Iran. Those of us who actually do work on the Middle East, rather than bleat on about Israel “facing destruction” from the forces of democracy know that.

Ms. Grenell writes of Yemeni Jews in Israel, “These Jews are brown, indistinguishable from their former Arab Muslim neighbors, making them an awkward fit into an analysis of Zionism as white supremacy.” You’d think a writer for The Nation would have a better grasp of the dynamics of white supremacy. In the U.S., for example, some of the leaders of white supremacist movements like Ali Alexander, Enrique Tarrio, and far-right public figures like Tim Scott and Clarence Thomas are Black and Brown people. Other far-right figures are out gay people like Dave Rubin and Milo Yiannopoulos. These ideologies have transcended individual skin color and identity in the modern era.

More than that, Ms. Grenell writes that “Yemeni Jews living in Israel are Zionists,” and “Their Zionism is essential to their very existence.”

That sort of statement tells us a lot about how Ms. Grenell approaches these questions. The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis are Zionist, and a great many of them consider their Zionism, or, in some views, patriotism, fundamental to their existence and identity. The only groups we can definitively say are not Zionist as a whole are those for whom membership in that group is literally defined as non- or anti-Zionist. We can say that if an Israeli Jew identifies as Neturei Karta, an ultra-orthodox sect, they are anti-Zionist because this is the definition of that group. Other ultra-orthodox groups hold similar beliefs as either non- or anti-Zionist. Other individuals come to anti-Zionism or post- or non-Zionism from a political and ideological journey.  

But there is no such thing as an ethnicity of Jews that is, by definition, Zionist, anti-Zionist, or beholden to any other political belief. That Ms. Grenell is willing to make such blanket statements about Yemeni Jews—who, themselves have faced and continue to face discrimination in Israeli society—reflects the privileged perspective that runs through this article.

Ms. Grenell’s article was a master-class in the art of Jews setting boundaries for others on how Israel can or cannot be discussed. It’s a presumptuous position. Jews who are marginalized in the rest of the world can and should make clear what we see as antisemitism, as crossing a line into areas that are dangerous for us. But in Israel, the positions are reversed. There, the fascists running rampant are Jews. The supremacists are Jewish supremacists. It is Arabs who are the targets, the marginalized, the oppressed.

It is not Fatima Mousa Mohammed who was “speaking in code,” as Ms. Grenell alleges. She was quite forthright and held nothing back. That’s why she now faces death threats and harassment, which, to her credit, Ms. Grenell rightly denounces. But it is Ms. Grenell who is obfuscating her own true meaning.

She closes her article by comparing Ms. Mohammed’s speech to a prosecution and concluding, “And if you’re going to argue for the death penalty, you should be up-front about it.” Once again, the idea of killing, of violence, of execution is thrust forth. But that’s not what is on the table by any definition. It is not death, or destruction that is at issue. It’s not even the elimination of a state. It is, quite simply, the promotion of equal rights, of changing a system from apartheid to democracy, changing the character of the state from an ethno-nationalist state that denies rights to millions to one that sees all people under its governance as equal both de facto and de jure.

If Ms. Grenell sees that as the death of Israel, it says as lot more about her Zionism than it does about any kind of anti-Zionism. And if that’s the kind of Zionism she wants to preach, she should preach it in the pages of Commentary or Tablet, where such ideas are commonplace. Let’s be fair and leave The Nation for progressive points of view.