Former president of Al-Quds University and member of the Palestinian National Assembly, Sari Nusseibeh once gave a paper at the American Philosophical Association (APA) that compared the ultimatum that ancient Athens gave to the far weaker island of Melos, an incident recounted by Thucydides, to the negotiations between Israel and Palestinians. Since there were no possible good outcomes, the Melians should not, Nusseibah claimed, have engaged in negotiations at all. He meant to say that Palestinian negotiations with Israel were hopeless. Since he had in fact recently been involved in such negotiations—his presentation was in 1996—his conclusion was especially dispiriting. Yet, what was most memorable about that session was not what he said, but the intensity of the anger, the moral outrage, of his audience. There are plenty of controversies at APA meetings, but no critic of substance dualism or functionalism has ever come close to eliciting what I saw in this audience.

Fighting for the right of national self-determination in a land to which Jews have laid claim for more than three thousand years, Israel has always seemed to me to have the moral high ground. But this audience was convinced that Israel had stolen the land, abused its rightful owners, and, thereby, committed moral atrocities. And unlike every other issue raised at the APA in my roughly 50 years of association with it, there was simply no room for discussion.

I’ve thought about this anger these past months as I watched supporters of Hamas parade through streets in cities around the world as well as in my own college town. They have been celebrating Hamas’s spree of murder, rape, and kidnapping on October 7. Likely, most of these marchers do not appreciate Hamas’s Islamist ideology, its hope to destroy Israel, and the ideas of Sayyid Qutb and others that are central to this resurgence of Islam as a force against democracy. But there is clearly something common to them all: a moral outrage against Israel. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they declare that Hamas is the real victim and that it is, therefore, justified in its actions against Jews. It is this anger against Jews that interests me.

Ideology and Hatred

The Nazis always thought that they were fighting a defensive war against the Jews. We forget this today because the idea proved so ludicrous. The German army was able to conquer defenseless Jewish communities easily and slaughter their inhabitants—some 6 million of them. Sadly, the vaunted Jewish power and wealth that the Germans felt it necessary to crush existed only in their twisted minds.

We also tend to forget that National Socialism was not only a political party, but also an ideology. In the distance of time, it seems quite clear to us that Nazi ideology sprang from anti-Semitism. Putting the economy in the hands of Germans, exalting the spirit of the German nation, and National Socialism—were all reactions to what Henry Ford had called the “International Jew”—the International Jew. In 1933, however, when the philosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi party, it may well have been possible to think that ideology was primary. Certainly, it resonates deeply with Heidegger’s own ideas about the preeminence of Germany. His posthumously published Black Notebooks record his musings during this period. They leave no doubt about his anti-Semitism, but it is based on ideology rather than personal hatred. As he came to realize that the Nazis put hatred above any ideology, Heidegger was, I speculate, caught between admitting that he had acted on anti-Semitic hatred or, what may well have been worse for a political philosopher of his stature, admitting that he had been duped by a political movement. Although he repudiated the party, he never repudiated its ideology.

Anti-Semitism is not a casual aspect of intersectionality: it is the linchpin of the theory.

Justifying Germany’s treatment of the Jews, Hitler had pointed to America’s treatment of blacks. I don’t think that it was accidental that the civil rights movement in the US took off after the war. Americans had seen the ultimate consequences of extreme racism, and they were revolted. The promise of American democracy needed to be extended to all, and Jews were on the front lines of the 1960s civil rights marches. For various reasons, relations between blacks and Jews soured in subsequent decades, but Jews remained a reliable voice for civil rights, anti-poverty legislation, and progressive politics, and the horror of the Holocaust kept anti-Semitism at bay for more than a half a century after World War II.

It was, therefore, a shock to Jews to find themselves not just excluded by current “progressives” but villainized. After the 2018 Women’s March, three principal organizers met with Louis Farrakhan. They not only refused to condemn his anti-Semitism but forced out a prominent Jewish activist from the leadership and excluded Jewish groups from participation. Today, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib never tires of declaring that anyone who supports Israel cannot be progressive. Those who are progressives support encampments that threaten students supporting Israel, and they tolerate or, indeed, perpetrate violence against Jews at elite universities. Is this anti-Semitism among progressives an unfortunate, but superficial mistake in their war against oppression, or is it more deeply rooted? Could it be as inseparable from the current progressive ideologies as Nazi anti-Semitism was from Nazi ideology?

The ideologies that now delimit progressivism are relatively recent. They are espoused by academics and taught at universities, and they stand behind current efforts at “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” I do not think any of these ideologies really deserves to be called “progressive.” They are inimical to the goal that has traditionally defined progressivism: a society without discrimination that provides ample opportunities for all to fulfill their human potential. Indeed, for the most part, these ideologies are the new clothes that do little to hide the Emperor’s nakedness or, rather, their proponents’ bare anti-Semitism.

Intersectionality

One prominent progressive ideology is “intersectionality.” The term was introduced in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw to signify that people who are black and female and, thus, victims of discrimination on both counts, receive even more discrimination than people who are members of only one of these groups. Since that time the emphasis has shifted away from the effects of multiple grounds for discrimination toward uniting those of all groups who are victims of discrimination. The assumption is that those who oppress any minority oppress all minorities. The oppressors are, notably, white males.

Since Jews are victims of the oldest, most intense, and, by far, most deadly discrimination, they should be included among the oppressed. Usually, though, proponents of intersectionality claim that Jews no longer suffer discrimination in the US and that, as white and wealthy, Jews are themselves oppressors of minorities—even Jews who belong to other “marginalized” groups. This response is disingenuous for at least two reasons.

First, although Jews have taken advantage of opportunities they found in the US, so have other groups, notably, Asians and Muslims. If economic hardship is requisite for inclusion among the oppressed, Muslims in the US could not qualify: many have studied or are now studying at elite universities and were able to come to the US because their families are wealthy. 

Second, there is a more important reason for intersectionality’s exclusion of Jews from among the oppressed. Tom Lehrer sang about it years ago in his “National Brotherhood Week” song:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.

Each ethnic group tends to hate the others, even if all are in much the same position with respect to the larger majority. Intersectionality posits that, despite appearances, all oppressed minorities are really victims of white supremacy and should, therefore, unite against this common enemy. Of course, plenty of work needs to be done to explain why oppressed groups seem to hate each other and why they are not uniting, but this work is within the normal realm of theory refinement. The one detail that would undermine the theory completely is to include Jews among the oppressed because Jews are the one group with which other oppressed minorities would never, ever unite. From this perspective, anti-Semitism is not a casual aspect of intersectionality: it is the lynchpin of the theory. By locating Jews among the oppressors, intersectionality brilliantly turns interethnic hatred of Jews into a unifying principle for all other “oppressed” groups. Anger against Jews becomes anger against all oppressors.

Even so, intersectionality is more of a political aspiration than a descriptive theory. It is constantly undermined by sharp conflicts among various “oppressed” groups: Asians and blacks over affirmative action, and Muslims and gays over sexual identity curricula.

Colonialism and the Settler-Colonial State

Many advocates of intersectionality have adopted the ideas of Edward Said. In Orientalism (1978), Said argued that the “Orient” is an idea invented by the West to justify European colonialism. He was following a pattern he set in his first book. There he argued that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness constructed an image of black Africans that would justify the Western conquest and continued oppression of Africa. Said was a literary critic: he dealt with the import of literary images without considering the subjects they describe. He castigated scholars who had actually studied those subjects, especially the noted Jewish scholar of Islamic civilization Bernard Lewis. Only a brilliant rhetorician, like Said, could transform the discussion of the Middle East into a discussion of its colonializers. Aside from spawning the whole field of “post-colonial” studies, he bequeathed to us the idea that the “victim” plays no role in his victimization. It is a short step from there to the idea that anything that the victim does against oppression is justifiable and, thus, to claim that Hamas’s October 7 murders of babies and rapes of women were really Israel’s fault.

European colonialism began around 1500. It was well in decline when the literary tropes Said studied appeared. Western writers and scholars came far too late to justify colonialism, and their work drew on long experience with colonized populations. Seeking wealth and power, Western colonialism was not substantially different from Arab colonialism of the seventh and eighth centuries, ancient Persian, Greek or Roman colonialism, and its legacy was far more nuanced than current “anti-colonial” crusaders acknowledge. Like other Arab aristocrats, Said was himself a beneficiary of British colonialism: he attended elite British schools in Jerusalem and Alexandria before studying at Princeton and Harvard.

Was it, then, really colonialism that excited Said’s ire? By the early 1960s, there were virtually no colonies left. There was only one nation to which his anti-colonialist stance could be actively applied: Israel. Said wanted to say that as victims of Israeli colonialism, Arabs have every right—indeed, they have an obligation—to attack Israel and Jews whenever and wherever possible. An anti-colonial theory that applies only against Israel is not a theory at all, neither a literary theory nor a political theory: it is a cloak for anti-Semitism.

These days “anti-colonialism” is often coupled with Marxism, and it is the basis of the often-repeated charge that Israel is a “settler-colonial state.” This phrase was invented by the French-Jewish Marxist Maxime Rodinson, and he applied it to Israel in a 1988 book. Whereas most colonial powers aimed only to exploit the resources and the labor of lands they conquered, settler-colonialism aimed to displace the original population and possess the land. The best examples of settler-colonial states are the US, Canada, Argentina, and Australia. However, their success is so well established that their native populations have no chance of expelling the “settlers.” The only state regularly accused of being a “settler-colonial state” is Israel. Can the reason be that it is the only one where the supposedly “indigenous” population retains hope—fanned by world sentiment—of itself displacing the displacers?

The only things shared by Hamas and progressives are anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

However, Israel does not fit the model of a settler-colonial state. First, Jews have been present in Israel for at least 3,000 years, and those who began to return to the area in the late nineteenth century saw themselves as reclaiming their historic homeland. In contrast, many Arabs in the area proudly trace their roots to Arabia’s seventh-century conquest. More recently, Arabs came from Syria and Egypt after the influx of Jews brought more economic opportunities to the region. They see themselves as reclaiming Israel for Islam. To describe the conflict in Marxist terms that are far from the way either side sees it is patronizing.

A second way that Israel does not fit the settler-colonial model is that Jews did not come to Israel as agents of a “mother country” or to extend European culture. They came to exercise their own right of national self-determination. Third, since the Jews did not come at the behest of another country, there was no country to which they could return. Fourth, Jews did not conquer Israel with force. Initially, they bought the land they occupied, parcel by parcel. Many of its owners were absentee Ottoman landlords, rather than Arabs. When the UN granted Israel sovereignty, the state acquired unclaimed land within its borders. Those borders did expand in war, especially in 1967, but Israel fought to defend itself, not to gain land.

Fifth, while critics like to focus on European Jews immigrating to Israel, most of its population are descendants of Jews who were refugees from Muslim countries after Israel became a state in 1948. This was also the time that many Arabs, encouraged to flee by their leaders, left Israel expecting to return in triumph after the fledgling state was destroyed. So there was a de facto population swap between Jews living in Muslim countries and Arabs in Israel. There have been other populations swaps; e.g., between Greece and Turkey (1923) and between India and Pakistan (1947). The Jewish-Arab swap is the only one that continues to fester.

For all these reasons, Israel is not a settler-colonial state. The only reason to use the phrase is to identify the anti-Israel movement as a struggle against imperialism. That allows Arabs to claim to be Marxists, despite all evidence to the contrary. As Rodinson—who was a Marxist—foresaw, since there is no home country to which Israelis could return, those who wish to end the Israeli “settler-colonial state” aim for a massacre.

While those in the West tend to think in terms of Western ideologies, Arabs tend to think in terms of Islam. It is an Islamic doctrine that once a land has been conquered for Islam, it cannot revert to being controlled by non-Muslims. An Islamic state does not allow non-Muslims to have equal rights with Muslims. They can have limited influence and are famously subject to an extra tax. So, from the point of view of Islam, a Jewish state in Israel is simply intolerable. That is a significant reason for the intractability of the conflict.

Muslims have an obligation to spread Islam, but for most of the last several centuries, they have not actively done so. The relatively recent rise of political Islam signals the return to active dissemination of Islam. It is clearly a reaction to the spread of Western values, democratic aspirations, and rights for women in Muslim lands. Hamas is the Palestinian version of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The key thinker behind its ideology, Sayyid Qutb, had a British-style education and worked as a teacher. When he lived in the US (1948–50), he was thoroughly repelled by what he took to be the promiscuity of the women, the physicality of blacks, and the freedom and materialism of the culture. Qutb promoted Islam as an alternative to Western values and democratic government.

Hamas is sometimes thought to be a social welfare organization. It has as much claim to be one as the medieval church—both aided the poor, but not without tight strings and a good deal of repression. Ironically, Western progressives support a regime that (a) deprives Gazans of all the human rights progressives claim to cherish: such as free speech, free assembly, free press, freedom to elect a government, (b) oppresses women, and (c) murders gays. Hamas retains its power by force but also by tightly controlling the economy. The extensive tunnels and fortifications were built with aid money from people who had few other employment opportunities. The only things shared by Hamas and progressives are anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

Critical Race Theory

The last ideology I will discuss, “Critical race theory” (CRT), is closely aligned with intersectionality, Marxism, and anti-colonialism. The same people see themselves as working in all of these theoretical frameworks. Its chief tenet is the idea that ostensibly race-neutral laws actually promote racism. The evidence lies in personal experience and “systemic racism” (also called “structural racism”), that is, in the disproportionate ratios of whites to blacks in certain professions, and similar disproportions in wealth, incomes, access to resources, medical outcomes, and so forth. When, for example, race plays no role in university admissions procedures, the acceptance of blacks is well below their percentage of the overall population and, therefore, evidence of systemic racism. Because systemic racism is statistical, there is no identifiable culprit or, rather, the entire system is at fault.

CRT aims to explain why there remains a significant black underclass that has not been lifted out of poverty despite years of affirmative action, anti-poverty, and social welfare programs. And it aims to provide special advantages to those whom it perceives as victims of the system.

One problem with appealing to “systemic racism” is that there are fields that would show the opposite kind of racism: there are disproportionately high percentages of black athletes and musicians. Why has their success been more limited in other areas? The persistence of racism cannot be discounted. Yet anti-Semitism also persists, as has become all too clear after October 7, and Jews were nevertheless able to persevere in overcoming obstacles in ways that blacks were not. Some reasons for this perseverance seem to lie in solid families and a culture that values education and achievement.

This analogy or, rather, disanalogy, seems to me to lie at the heart of CRT. There are ever more voices claiming that the causes of black poverty lie not in racism so much as in absent fathers, drugs, gangs, and so forth. In other words, there are increasing claims that the condition of blacks is not due to external causes so much as social deficiencies within black families and communities.

Humiliating aggression from Jews is central to the oppression narrative of progressive ideologies.

It seems to me that CRT exists to quell these claims by providing an alternative analysis—that is, to promote the idea that external factors are indeed the source of black poverty. For it to make this case, it must undermine the notion that a community’s culture and the inner drive of its members can overcome external obstacles. CRT does this by ascribing Jews’ success to their whiteness and unfair privilege. If this analysis is right, anti-Semitism is not an attitude that somehow crept into what is basically a good theory: anti-Semitism is intrinsic to the theory and its goals. Anti-Semitism serves the function of forestalling any real consideration among black leaders about what internal reforms they might seek for their community.

Shortly after Barack Obama became President, he urged black children to work hard in school to get ahead. Obama knew what he was talking about: my children, who all went to our local, predominantly black high school, reported to me that black children who did well in school were often socially ostracized by other Black children who accused them of “acting white.” However, the outcry against Obama from many Black leaders was intense. They claimed that he was blaming the victim. To be sure, slavery destroyed family life and nearly all remnants of the African culture of their home, but there have been plenty of black artists, writers, musicians, etc. who have created a vibrant American black culture. Sadly, to insist that issues in the black community stem from racism and other external causes—and, thereby, to demand external remedies—is to perpetuate the very plantation mentality that they decry. On the other hand, to lower standards in universities and professions for the sake of higher minority admissions and retentions, including, shockingly, no longer giving grades in medical school, is to provoke the very sort of prejudice that CRT purports to combat.

Anger

As a child in Maryland in the late 1950s, I unwittingly attended segregated schools. I well remember my neighbors’ fear of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Unlike today, those were days when people had no qualms about voicing their prejudices. It was easier to distinguish different forms of bigotry by what we could call their “phenomenology.” The racism that was in the air in my youth was based on false judgments about character and reliability along with fear of a large, “untamed” population. The sexism prevalent then was rooted in false judgments about women being particularly liable to hold personal relationships above responsibility and, so, to be guided by emotion rather than reason. Disparagement of other groups was rooted in other, no less false, judgments and emotions. Phenomenologically, anti-Semitism really is different because it is rooted more fundamentally in anger. In this respect, the ideologies discussed here all resemble anti-Semitism: they provoke intense anger.

What is anger? Aristotle says that it is a desire to do harm that arises from the perception of a slight. Desire to harm is consonant with the fact that hate crimes against Jews far exceed, in quantity and severity, crimes against other minorities.

What, though, would the slight be? Aristotle identifies three ways to slight someone: looking down on someone, being spiteful, and humiliating aggression. Spite is inflicting pain on others with no gain to oneself. That does not seem to apply, but the other two do. Jews are often criticized for looking down on others, with some justice; yet this by itself could not provoke intense anger against Jews. The principal slight must be humiliating aggression. This will be shocking to Jews because they express no intention to dominate others, but my discussion of the ideologies helps make sense of it. And Aristotle helps us understand how the elements of anti-Semitism, each well-known, fit into a coherent whole.

Jews have been victims of discrimination in the US and Europe but survived and even thrived. They have had an impact on every profession, on business, and in academia. Despite being targeted by Muslim nations, Israel has defended itself and created a truly remarkable economy. Indeed, such is Israel’s impact on technology that the cries for BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) are empty: they would require giving up computers, cell phones, and a host of medical treatments.

How could Jews possibly have been so successful? The perception is that only through underhanded means could they have obtained what they did. Jews stole Arab lands and oppressed them. Jews took jobs and businesses away from others in the US and in Germany. Jews seized what rightfully belonged to others. Since only a large group effort, immorally conspiring against law and custom, could succeed against all odds, it is always all Jews who are collectively guilty of this aggression. Success by underhanded means is itself immoral. That Jews managed to overcome poverty, discrimination, and other obstacles is also an infuriating indictment of those who played by the rules but did not succeed. That’s why the anti-Semite not only rages against Jews but is convinced that he has the moral high ground in doing so.

As absurd as it sounds, the success of Jews in overcoming anti-Semitism slights all those who could not do as well, and it is proof that Jews have resorted to something underhanded. In this way, the success of Jews provokes the self-righteous anger of anti-Semites, an anger that they see as legitimate moral indignation. Moreover, the Jews’ very claims to be victims are further evidence of their immoral aggression. Humiliating aggression from Jews is, thus, central to the oppression narrative of progressive ideologies.

When the anger characteristic of anti-Semitism is directed not only at Jews but also at the democratic institutions that allowed them to succeed, we all risk losing those institutions. We in the US desperately need to talk about our principles and, I think, to rededicate ourselves to the principles of freedom, equality before the law, and justice that were intrinsic to our founding documents, even if they were—and still are—imperfectly realized. The current ideologies prefer to discuss “stories” of the “under-represented” because they suppose that principles alone must be ineffectual. Yet, stories are inevitably partial and one-sided. That is why they never suffice in a court. Moreover, a rich narrative can distort and obscure motivations. The ideologies that have come to define “progressivism” call for justice, and their pursuit of this principle gives them the appeal that they have. (Indeed, nothing can be more inspiring than a principle, as Immanuel Kant realized.) My problem is with the notion of justice they advance: the one-sided redress of the grievances of the “oppressed.” With their intrinsic anti-Semitism, these ideologies are quick to cast blame on the wrong parties for the wrong reasons. We need to reject the ideologies. They stand against the principles of justice and equality of opportunity and, thereby, threaten the democratic institutions that are our best hope for maintaining our freedom.