The Nation magazine recently published an article by Alexis Grenell critical of Fatima Mousa Mohammed, the CUNY Law graduate who recently delivered a blistering attack on Israel and Zionism in her commencement address. There has been no shortage of vitriolic condemnations of Mohammed and CUNY itself, but Grenell’s piece is surprising as it appeared in a generally progressive publication. Of all the flaws in Grenell’s post (including her obscene accusation that Mohammed’s “anti-semitism” was comparable to the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion), perhaps the worst is her repetition of the deeply dishonest but commonly made assumption that Jews cannot live in historical Palestine without the protection of a Jewish State.
But first, Grenell’s very headline reveals an astonishing, almost comical unfamiliarity with the subject matter, as she incredulously asks “Does Fatima Mousa Mohammed oppose Israel’s very existence?” Mohammed has made no effort to hide her anti-Zionism, but Grenell seems to feel that she has landed a “gotcha” question that has boxed Mohammed and other unnamed anti-Zionists into taking a position so preposterous that they are reluctant and ashamed to admit the alarming consequences:
[C]ritics who oppose Israel’s very existence rarely state it so clearly, preferring to shroud their position in these word salads that have to be carefully parsed. If you don’t think Israel should exist, that’s fine. Just say it. The problem for many anti-Zionists on the left is that truly owning that position would complicate the narrative of oppressor versus oppressed.
So Grenell is accusing “many anti-Zionists” of deliberate vagueness to camouflage their position that Israel should not exist. That’s like accusing vegetarians of refusing to admit that they don’t eat meat. It’s perhaps a bit simplistic but nevertheless accurate to say that Zionists think a Jewish State should exist and anti-Zionists think it shouldn’t. How does Grenell not know that, and how does The Nation publish an article that so prominently features in both headline and text ignorance of this essential fact?
But it is another error in Grenell’s piece that is more pervasive and destructive. To Grenell, the end of the Jewish State would require the relocation of millions of Israeli Jews elsewhere. She thinks this is so obvious that it need only be stated with a passing reference: “The fact that so many anti-Zionists offer nothing in the way of a vision for where the Jews living in Israel should go … reveals the limits of their critique.” This is more than just an isolated indefensible line by a commentator who appears to be in over her head. It underlies commonly heard lines like “Jews have continuously lived in the Holy Land over several millennia,” which would only make sense as a Zionist argument if Jews could not continue to have any presence or life in Palestine without the special protection of, and exclusive rights within, a Jewish State.
It shouldn’t be necessary to explain that Jews actually can live in equality rather than political and military domination in Palestine, which is the essence of a “Jewish State,” but it is. To state the obvious, Jews are living in substantial numbers but tiny percentages in dozens of countries not denominated as Jewish. There are millions of Jews in the U.S. and 100,000 to 500,000 in the UK, France, Argentina, Canada, Russia, and Germany (as well as tens of thousands in many other countries as well). Yet Jews are less than 3% of the total US population, and less than 1% in every other country listed above. Millions of Jews prefer to live as a small minority in these countries rather than flee to the supposed “safety” of Israel and claim their “right” to automatic citizenship.
Israeli Jews also could survive life in a country not denominated as a Jewish State in full equality with their fellow inhabitants. In fact, they’d be much better situated to withstand the “perils” of equality than any other Jews. If all the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea were deemed equal citizens of a newly formed state, the seven million Jews would constitute about half the population. Jews would have more influence and protection in such a state than in any other country on Earth, without relegating a carefully limited minority of the citizenry to second-class status and imposing brutal military rule over millions of others. If Grenell deems it unfathomable that Jews would be able to live in historical Palestine if it were no longer functioning as a “Jewish State,” she should identify the highly unusual circumstances that exist there that would render impossible what is quite commonplace in the rest of the world.
Others have attempted to do so, referring to centuries of “dhimmi” status the Jews of the Middle East supposedly had to endure as evidence that “Arabs” in power are simply incapable of treating Jews with any semblance of equality and dignity. The argument that “We have to treat them as inferior subjects because given the opportunity, they would do the same to us” is morally troublesome, to say the least. Even more obviously, one cannot embellish or exaggerate the history of antisemitism in the mostly Muslim Middle East to the extent that it compares with, much less exceeds, the much darker experience of Jews in Christian Europe. For centuries, Europe was the undisputed epicenter of Jew-hatred in the world. The Holocaust was not a spontaneous eruption of that bigotry but the culmination of centuries of continent-wide antisemitic fervor that had plagued European Jewish life. It is no accident that Herzl conceived of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish State, to solve the insufferable problem that he had personally observed in Europe.
Simply put, if Jews today can freely live as a tiny minority throughout Europe, with over 100,000 in Germany just decades after the Nazis’ industrial-scale attempt at extermination, they can live as seven million citizens and fully half the population of an equal state in historic Palestine.
Some who favor the present necessity of a Jewish State might concede a degree of truth in this analysis but would argue that the Israeli/Palestinian so-called “conflict” has exacerbated ethnic tension and even hatred to such an extent that Jews would need protection from revenge violence perpetrated by Palestinians with longstanding grievances. South African whites in the apartheid era also felt endangered by the prospect of losing their supremacy, but they had better reason to oppose a conversion to actual democracy. Whites numbered less than 20% of the country’s population, and many genuinely feared that the millions of blacks whom they had cruelly mistreated over many decades would seek revenge if apartheid were dissolved. Nevertheless, there is virtually universal agreement that such fear of reprisal, even if sincere, could not justify maintaining a system of racial/ethnic domination and control that was the essence of apartheid. (There was hardly such unanimity during the apartheid era, when Thatcher’s Britain, Reagan’s U.S., and Israel were at the forefront of defending the status quo as a necessary though possibly regrettable state of affairs.) If this “deadly ethnic tension” argument was insufficient to defend apartheid in South Africa, it is similarly insufficient to defend Israel’s laws and policies favoring Jews above all others in the land it controls.
Grenell’s claim that Fatima and other anti-Zionists are reluctant to admit that they don’t think a Jewish State should exist is not only silly but ironic. Grenell herself is guilty of deliberate obfuscation of her vision for the future, even though she trashes the idea of one democratic state based on a straw man argument. Does she favor an endless peace process replete with references to the moribund Oslo Accords and Clinton Parameters where Israel can pretend to offer “painful compromises” and blame Palestinians for perpetuating their own oppression? Does she foresee a two-state solution that actually would require the mass dislocation of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers from their presently illegal settlements? Or a two-state solution where Jewish settlers would continue to live in a new Palestinian state, but would they have Israeli citizenship and protection or have to live under Palestinian protection?
If there is one silver lining in the publication of Grenell’s piece, it is to remind us all that her assumption that anti-Zionism requires the dislocation of Israel’s Jews, while unable to withstand historical analysis and simple observation of Jewish life throughout the world, is actually quite commonplace. In 2023, with the last nail of the (already flawed) two-state solution having been irretrievably hammered into a deeply-buried coffin, the two remaining one-state alternatives are continued apartheid or egalitarianism. Most Zionists truly are reluctant to admit that the continued existence of the Jewish State means apartheid forever, and they cling to any opportunity to portray one state of equal citizens as an extremist, immoral position. Even some who would self-describe as liberal, left, or progressive have fallen for this nonsense, but The Nation should have known better.
And while The Nation obviously deserves some blame here, but it shouldn’t be considered as a worthless forum on this issue. Its Palestine correspondent is the very impressive Mohammed El-Kurd, and it quickly published a rebuttal to Grenell that not only took issue with her piece but expressed bitter disappointment at the decision to publish it. There could be room in the magazine for a fully aware argument that the two-state solution remains a preferable option, especially where the reader could expect to see a contrary view. But publishing a writer who seems not to know the meaning of the term anti-Zionism and believes that it necessarily includes the expulsion of millions of Israeli Jews is embarrassing for all involved.
Incidentally, here’s the statement of the CUNY Jewish Law Students Association regarding Mousa:
https://wolpalestine.com/jlsastatement/
We, as Jewish students at CUNY Law, oppose and condemn the racist organizations like CanaryMission who are spreading disgusting lies about our friend. The organizations currently attacking Fatima and the rest of CUNY Law’s student body, with absurd and false claims of antisemitism, are doing so against the wishes of the majority of CUNY Law’s Jewish students, who wholeheartedly stand with Fatima and have been grateful to have her as our classmate throughout law school. As Jewish students attending an institution structured around social justice, we denounce both the murder and dispossession enacted in our name through the zionist project and the harassment and lies that zionist organizations are using to punish Fatima for her bravery and commitment to Palestinian freedom….
My recent comments on Mondoweiss articles have consisted mainly of gripes about the editing. So in that same spirit, let’s look at this article in The Nation, a publication that on its masthead lists multiple editors and copy editors.
Here are all instances of the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian”:
1. The subtitle labels the commencement speech as “less a defense of Palestine than a prosecution of the Jewish state.”
What’s meant here by “Palestine“? If intended to be parallel with “the Jewish state”, then that would mean “Palestine” as a state. But everyone who listened to the speech understands that Mohammed was not defending the state of Palestine, but Palestinian people.
2. The writer acknowledges that Mohammed made “wholly valid points about Palestinian human rights.”
“Palestinian human rights” is a phrase that stands out for its awkwardness. Do activists talk about, say, “Jewish human rights”, “Uighur human rights”, or “Rohingya human rights”? No, they talk about the human rights of Jews, of Uighurs, or of Rohingya. True, you’ll find the 3 words together in phrases like “Palestinian human rights organization”, but that’s a human-rights organization that is Palestinian, not an organization that is focused on “Palestinian human rights”.
3. “The mass exodus to British Mandate Palestine began in the 19th century, but the largest migration took place between 1948 and 1950”
There was no British Mandate in the 19th century! And the migration mentioned here occurred after the Mandate ceased to exist in 1948. Well-educated readers like us can infer that when she says “British Mandate Palestine”, in this context she means the land encompassed by the entity of that name that existed between 1920 and 1948, but there’s no other reference to the Mandate anywhere else in this article.
4. “Somehow, non-Palestinian critics of Israel tend to be far less vocal about the various other abusive states in the region.”
Why single out the critics of Israel who are non-Palestinian? Is this her way of acknowledging that it makes sense for Palestinian critics of Israel to be far less vocal about the various other abusive states in the region, because Israel oppresses or has expelled many Palestinians, and the other states took in most of those who were expelled?
5. “Just like everyone should be outraged by ring-wing American Jews who don’t believe that Palestine should exist”
“Ring wing” is an aviation term. What the heck does it mean as a metaphor here? Or is it just a misprint for “right-wing”?
And “don’t believe Palestine should exist” — Palestine meaning what here? Obviously not referring to the land of the British Mandate. Does it mean Palestinian people, as “Palestine” does in the subtitle? Maybe, but probably most likely it means a Palestinian state. So why not say that?
6. Closing sentence: “But her speech wasn’t so much a defense of Palestine as a prosecution of Israel.”
See #1.
Rather shocked at the Nation, not because of hosting the Zionist piece per se, but because of its abysmal level of thought, even resorting to the cheap trick of invoking The Protocols… Can’t they find a Zionist who can argue intelligently?
We should not let the Nation’s editor, D.D. Guittenplan, off the hook. He is directly responsible for bringing Ms. Grenell on the publication’s staff. As he himself admits (https://mondoweiss.net/2022/01/the-nation-editor-responds/) when he rushed to Alexis Grenell’s defence for an article that appeared in the Nation that was of similarly poor quality. He hired her to ‘balance’ Mohammed el Kurd. As I mentioned in a comment to his defense, he also helped to promote anti-Corbyn slanders in a Nation article that appeared before he rose to the editorship.
David – Thank you for writing again. Excellent, as always.
I agree on all the main points. On a secondary issue:
“Millions of Jews prefer to live as a small minority in these countries rather than flee to the supposed “safety” of Israel and claim their “right” to automatic citizenship.”
Yes, of course Jews – as Jews -are safer in the US and in the other countries you listed than inside the powder keg that is the Jewish state. But the more Jewish they are, the more they chafe at the all-pervasive Christianity and Whiteness of Western countries. They travel to Israel for relief. The more recognizably Jewish an American Jew is the more likely they are to move to Israel, seriously consider that or, to have at least spent significant time there. At the most traditional end of the scale, as a matter of course, all Orthodox Jews spend at least one year of study in Israel. They don’t go to beat up Palestinians or colonize settlements. They are oblivious to all that. They go there to be Jewish in ways that are not available in all these Christian countries.
I suppose that even after Israel-Palestine becomes a full democracy, Jews (like Christian pilgrims today) will still find ways to travel there and have a 100% exclusive religious experience, oblivious to all else.