Naya Lekhet
Jerusalem Post, Aug. 13, 2023
“… progressivism has a great response to this point, which in many ways is a contradiction to being progressive and a Zionist: in a hierarchy of marginalization, Jews are near the bottom. We don’t get to be free from persecution at the cost of a higher ranked “persecuted” minority: the Palestinian Arabs.”
This may sound counter-intuitive and perhaps even mad, but if you want to combat Jew-hatred in progressive spaces, don’t fight the antisemitism, fight the progressivism. To explain this wild idea, it may be helpful to examine language found in the description of the recently launched Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which aims “to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.”
In sum, architects of this declaration seek to primarily divorce Zionism from Jewish identity and secondarily, position Zionism outside of the pale of progressive ideology.
For founders of ICSZ, the world is understood as a battlefield between two major forces: those who have political power and those who are politically powerless. For example, the white man, simply because of his skin color has inherited a privilege, a certain power, in society and exerts this power simply by existing.
… [To read the full article, click here]
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