The bipartisan attack on Palestine solidarity is higher than ever

by Mitchell Plitnik from Mondoweiss

The campaign to delegitimize and even illegalize any support for Palestinian rights has reached a new level of Orwellian thought policing. Any statement of support for the basic rights of Palestinians is now being defined as antisemitism, with often devastating consequences, and if recent events are any indication, pro-Israel forces are just getting started. 

While the campaign is being led by Republicans who have repeatedly demonstrated their hatred for both Muslims and Jews, it is being enthusiastically supported by Democrats, especially the White House. 

On December 6, in a scene that demonstrates the absurdity of American politics, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik mercilessly interrogated three university presidents to gauge whether they were sufficiently loyal to Israel. Stefanik employed the cynical tactic of presenting her questioning as protecting Jewish students on the campuses the three witnesses headed — Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania — from the antisemitism that she claims has swept their campuses. 

What made the scene so absurd is that it was Stefanik holding the pitchfork against the three women she was trying to burn at the stake. Stefanik has espoused perhaps the most notorious of contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories, the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which claims that Jews are bringing immigrants of color into the U.S. to displace white people. If she were not concerned about the political effects on her career, Stefanik would have been perfectly comfortable with the tiki-torch carrying neo-Nazis at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville six years ago. 

Yet leading Democrats supported her witch hunt. That included the White House, which issued a statement after the hearing where the three university presidents were pilloried, that read, in part, “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.” It also included Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who said, “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.” Under this pressure, UPenn President Magill — who had been under intense pressure since she refused to cancel the “Palestine Writes” literature festival in September — finally gave in and stepped down as the university’s president.

Stefanik, in classic McCarthy-esque style, was trying to force the university presidents to condemn what she referred to as calls for the genocide of Jews by students supporting Palestinian rights. But the rhetoric she was referring to was nothing of the kind. She focused on the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and the term “intifada.”...

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