In Israel, 2024 is still about 1948.

The popular chant, “We don’t want two states, we want 1948!” states that about as clearly as can be, as does “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

A colorized photo of Israeli soldiers in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (National Photo Collection of Israel)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Andrew Pessin, author of “Anti-Zionism on Campus.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/in-israel-2024-is-still-about-1948

---

“I was forced to leave my study group because my group members told me that the people at the Nova Music Festival deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.” — MIT student Talia Khan, on her campus environment

It may be 2024, but the ongoing campus responses to October 7th show that, for many, it is still 1948.

Appreciating that point is essential to determining just how we who believe that Jews and Zionism have a rightful place at today’s university table need to deal not only with the ongoing crisis, but with repairing the enormous damage we, and academia, have suffered.

Many campuses exploded in outright celebration of the barbaric violence, the enthusiasts typically invoking, by way of justification, the massacre’s “context” or “root causes” (in Israel’s “occupation,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” et cetera) and the legitimacy of “resistance” to those evils “by any means necessary.”

Even many who did not quite “celebrate” the violence invoked the same by way of explanation quickly bleeding into justification. And many of those who remained silent about October 7th, too, were no doubt thinking the same when they said things such as: “I need to learn more about this complex situation before rendering judgment.”

Now normally after watching armed men tie up a mother and father and three small children and burn them alive you don’t need to “learn more” to determine who the bad guys are, but hey, it is “complex.”

I have argued elsewhere that this silence amounts to complicity, to borrow the popular expression many progressives apply everywhere except to themselves: You are in favor of October 7th or you are against, in other words, and silence entails the former.

But now this shocking campus response itself has its own “context” and “root causes.” In my view, the 20-year-long campus Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign of lies against Israel combined with the more recent expansion of progressivism (i.e. Critical Race Theory, DEI, Wokeism) has amounted to a campaign to delegitimize and dehumanize not just Israeli Jews but all Jews.

And the clear success of that campaign explains why so many are somehow unable to see the torture, mutilation, rape, and murder of babies, children, women, pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly as a straightforward moral atrocity constituting a mass terror attack.

If every Jew is fundamentally guilty, then their torture and murder is not merely permissible but even obligatory; if every Jew is guilty, then nothing you do to the Jew can make the Jew a victim. Plus a bonus: If every Jew is guilty then you, in persecuting or even executing him, must be very good. 

Well, that idea — that every Jew is guilty — has a long and distinguished pedigree in the history of antisemitism. The antisemitism built into Christianity from its roots and beginnings — from its scripture, early Church Fathers, through the medieval Disputations, in Protestantism founder Martin Luther’s delightful book, “The Jews and Their Lies,” et cetera — is well documented, and surely “fertilizes the ground.”

But the contemporary campus “progressive” moment, in its synthesis with the BDS movement, likely takes little direct inspiration from that source: it is not only quite anti-Christian itself but also somehow quite pro-Islam, despite the astonishingly poor fit between most progressive principles and the Islam that drives Hamas, Hezbollah, and ultimately the BDS movement itself.

That mystery is for another discussion, but for now we must trace today’s manifestation of the idea that every Jew is guilty to something more recent.

The Nazis are a natural next possibility, for example as represented by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbel’s famous 1941 essay, “The Jews are Guilty!” But even that is perhaps a bit too obscure for today’s not entirely scholarly campus activists, not to mention that they at least officially claim they are opposed to the Nazis, despite supporting the same literally Nazi eliminationist doctrines as manifest in Hamas.

(Indeed, Hamas’ openly genocidal founding charter quotes liberally from the antisemitic forgery “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to justify their eliminationism toward the Jews, precisely as the Nazis did.)

The idea that every Jew is guilty really traces back, for these people, to 1948.

The dehumanization campaign above in fact rests on the premise that the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State of Israel was a massive injustice. For consider: If that establishment were perfectly just, then the military efforts to prevent it then and the 75 years of nearly continuous “resistance” to it since, whether military, terrorist, diplomatic, cognitive, or other, would be unjust.

In turn, many of the measures that Israel has taken over the years that detractors cite as “root causes” above — as Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians, as mechanisms subserving its “occupation” and “apartheid” and so forth — would be seen not as illegitimate aggressive measures of domination but as legitimate reactive measures of self-defense.

Take just two examples, the security barrier along western Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and the blockade on Gaza instituted after Hamas took power there in 2007 by an illegal violent coup.

Detractors call the former an “Apartheid Wall” and say of the latter that it makes Gaza an “open air prison.” But to those who see the establishment of Israel as just, these are legitimate defensive measures warranted by the unremitting preexisting violence directed toward Israelis by Palestinians.

The security barrier — mostly a fence, not a wall — helped bring to an end the relentless suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, while the blockade on Gaza, though clearly not as effective as desired in light of October 7th, aimed to limit the military capacities of Hamas.

If Jewish sovereignty there is legitimate, in other words, then Jews are ordinary human beings with ordinary human rights including the right to defend themselves, by walls or blockades or even by today’s military actions as need be.

But if Jewish sovereignty is not legitimate then Jews are simply evildoers who, per campus dehumanization, lack even the basic human right to defend themselves, and all such measures become aggressive mechanisms of an unjust occupation (or in the case of today’s war, of “genocide.”)

On this latter view every Jew indeed is guilty and therefore deserving of even the atrocious harms of October 7th, including the babies, and Hamas is not a genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group but “freedom fighters” fighting for “decolonization.”

If 1948 is just, in short, then October 7th is a terrorist atrocity; if 1948 is unjust then October 7th is political liberation. 

So 2024 really still is about 1948.

This point has actually been clear for some time. Those who follow the campus scene know that the anti-Israel movement long ago gave up on the demand merely for a Palestinian state alongside Israel in favor of undoing Israel entirely.

The popular chant, “We don’t want two states, we want 1948!” states that about as clearly as can be, as does “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” — which despite occasional protestations to the contrary, in its origin (in the Arabic expression, where it concludes with “Palestine will be Arab”) and in its practice means “free” in the sense of Judenfrei, German for an area that has been “cleansed” of Jews.

The Jews are really evil because of 1948 and therefore only one outcome is just, their complete removal, dead or alive. But it took October 7th to see how profound and visceral that demand is, as it revealed itself in the celebration of the slaughter. For them, the massive injustice of 1948 means that the Israeli Jews of today have it coming to them, even the babies, as the MIT student above quoted her antagonists.

Clearly campus Israel advocates need to double down on disseminating their “narrative,” the one grounded in the long Jewish history in this land, and on finding ways to do it that will break through the ideological fortress that BDS and progressivism have established.

That will require an enormous amount of ideological and theoretical work, in breaking down that fortress, as well as practical work, in restructuring the universities. It will probably require dismantling the bureaucratic bloat of recent decades, in DEI administration and more, and may even require the dismantling of the institution of tenure.

That will take time, effort, and money. 

Still, it must be pursued — lest the focus on 1948 moves the campus movement, as increasingly seems to be happening, a few years further back, into 1939.

---