Few progressive Jews, I suspect, ever expected to see UCLA students rallying around the chant, “Israel, you can’t hide/We want Jewish genocide”
Charles Cooke made an important observation in National Review in the wake of the multitude of pro-Hamas demonstrations on university campuses, while the images of Hamas savagery were still fresh. To wit, the dividing line is not between left and right, Zionist and anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, but between “normal human beings” and “unreconstructed crackpots who have lost their minds.”
“It is simply not within the normal bounds of human behavior to look at what has happened in Israel and to filter one’s instinctive moral reaction through whatever goofy, specious, ugly ideology one might have picked up in an overpriced seminar hall when aged 19,” Cooke wrote.
Happily, the numbers of normal people turned out to outnumber the crackpots, and to include in their ranks President Joe Biden (who both backed Israel’s right to rid itself of Hamas on its border and decried the “grotesque” anti-Semitism run rampant on university campuses), almost all members of Congress, and the leaders of most European countries.
Nevertheless, for many discovering how many crackpots there are whom one once considered comrades in creating a better world, all this has been profoundly disorienting. Few progressive Jews, I suspect, ever expected to see UCLA students rallying around the chant, “Israel, you can’t hide/We want Jewish genocide.” (I suppose we owe those students a debt of gratitude for making their goals so explicit, and not engaging in happy talk about a two-state solution. The Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent World War II in Berlin, would be so proud.)
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