race

 In June, Stanford University Press released a book edited by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin titled "Race and the Question of Palestine." 

The very title of the book all but announces its conclusion that Israel is racist. The Introduction confirms this impression, not by carefully arguing its case, but by building the conclusion into its premises and then presenting the result as discovery rather than assumption.

From the opening pages, the editors insist that race is not merely one analytic lens among many that might be used to understand the conflict, but the essential framework for interpreting Zionism, Israel, and Palestinian experience. Other explanatory models – citizenship law, nationalism, security doctrine, regional war, even ethnicity itself – are treated not as competing hypotheses to be weighed, but as evasions that obscure the truth.

Once this framing is in place, the logic becomes self-sealing. If Zionism is defined as settler colonialism, and settler colonialism is defined as inherently racial, then Israel must be a racial state. The conclusion is embedded in the premise.

This is where the circularity becomes impossible to ignore. The Introduction does not begin by asking whether race best explains Israeli policies, institutions, and conflicts. It begins by asserting that race does explain them, and then rereads every legal distinction, border regime, and security practice as confirmation of that claim. Evidence no longer tests the theory; the theory filters the evidence. That is coherence masquerading as correspondence – an internally consistent story that never seriously risks being wrong.

The most revealing moment comes when the editors turn their attention to human rights organizations that do not foreground race. B’Tselem, for example, is criticized not because its factual claims are false, but because it frames Israeli domination primarily in terms of ethnicity and citizenship rather than race.

See the circularity here:

Speaking of race in the context of Palestine, readers may ask why use “race” instead of “ethnicity,” “people,” or “nation,” and what analytical and explanatory work “race” does that “ethnicity” or “nationality” does not. ...[T]heir use alone without race analysis, I suggest, not only fails to capture the work of race, racialization, and racism as constitutive of colonial projects, but also conceals it. The apartheid reports, mentioned above, provide an example—one of many—of such concealment through their failure to recognize settler colonialism and race as the defining features of Israeli apartheid or to account for Zionism as the racial ideology that drives Israeli-Zionist colonization.

The circularity is explicit. If race is defined as the only valid explanatory category, then any analysis that does not center race is, by definition, accused of concealment. If you do not begin with race, you cannot arrive at race as the conclusion. The framework does not merely privilege a lens; it morally disqualifies alternatives.

This same structure governs the Introduction’s core claims:

The colonization of Palestine—like other imperial, colonial, and settler-colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Concepts such as ethnicity and nationality do not capture the history or the political work of race as a project of colonial distinction that rationalizes dispossession and domination....

But if Zionism is understood as a movement of an indigenous people returning to its ancestral homeland – which it is – the argument collapses. That possibility is never seriously entertained, because the framing makes it impermissible from the outset. Alternative explanations are not rebutted; they are ruled out in advance.

A strong theory clarifies what it can and cannot explain. It specifies the conditions under which it might fail. It does not declare rival models ethically suspect simply for existing.

We have discussed many times that Israeli law maps far more cleanly onto distinctions between citizenship and non-citizenship than onto any racial hierarchy between Jews and Arabs. Arab citizens of Israel live on both sides of the Green Line and possess the same civil rights as Jewish citizens there. Arab Israelis and Druze serve at the highest levels of government, the judiciary, medicine, industry and the military. They aren't tokens. Their existence should be fatal to the claim that Israel operates as a racial regime in the sense implied by the book. Instead, they are ignored, leaving the reader unaware that such counterevidence even exists. The framework does not invite comparison; it forecloses it.

None of this is happening on the margins of activism or social media. This is a flagship academic press lending its imprimatur to an argument that relies on premise smuggling rather than demonstration. Stanford University Press is not Jadaliyya, a political blog, or an NGO position paper. It occupies a role that signals to readers, students, and journalists that what follows has passed serious scholarly scrutiny. When a press of this stature publishes a text that substitutes moral intensity and theoretical coherence for falsifiability and causal testing, it sends a signal far beyond this one book.

Once you see the circularity of the argument, you cannot unsee it. The fact that this passed through one of America’s most prestigious academic presses should trouble us far more than the argument itself.

What is at stake here is larger than a single book or a single conflict. When prestigious academic institutions normalize circular reasoning, moralized framing, and premise smuggling, they teach students and readers that conclusions matter more than truth-seeking, and that theory is a substitute for evidence rather than a tool for understanding reality. Once that lesson is absorbed, the damage is not confined to Middle East studies. It spreads outward, hollowing out the intellectual norms that make serious disagreement, genuine pluralism, and honest scholarship possible at all.

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monde

 Le Monde published an op-ed by sociologist Eva Illouz arguing that modern anti-Zionism is antisemitic. She gives four reasons:

First, anti-Zionism calls into question the very legitimacy of nationalism and the Jewish national home. There is no other instance where a people is denied the right to continue living in their state with such obsessive insistence by a political ideology ...

The second reason is that anti-Zionism adopts all the prejudices, tropes, and fantasies of anti-Semitism. Thus, instead of killing children to use their blood to make matzah, another persistent rumor claims that Israel harvests the organs of dead Palestinians. The conspiratorial logic at work in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion  [an anti-Semitic text published in 1901, quickly exposed as a forgery that fantasized a Jewish plot to control the world] is also found in the work of the Swedish environmentalist Andreas Malm. According to him, Zionism was the superstructure enabling the infrastructure of Western oil extraction and is responsible for climate change, and therefore for the destruction of the planet. Contemporary anti-Zionism is not an opinion, but hatred, since it attributes an evil essence to Israel. 

The third reason is that anti-Zionism contains an agenda of denying antisemitism, its denunciation being viewed with suspicion as a form of manipulation. This, in turn, makes killing Jews less scandalous and more legitimate. Slogans like "Globalize the Intifada" are in reality calls for the indiscriminate murder of Jewish civilians worldwide, since the Second Intifada  [2000-2005] was a series of terrorist attacks against more than 1,000 Israeli civilians over five years.  Such a slogan thus equates Israelis with Jews and, by establishing this equivalence, exports the conflict to a global scale.

While the Dreyfus Affair was French, Marr's anti-Semitic leagues German, and the Kishinev pogroms of 1903 Russian, anti-Semitism is now a global phenomenon, operating on several distinct levels. It is now coordinated worldwide. This is what the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has achieved with great success. This movement emerged following the counter-summit to the UNESCO conference in Durban  , South Africa , in 2001. Some 2,000 NGOs declared Israel guilty of being an "apartheid state ," of "racism , " "genocide," and "ethnic cleansing ." On the sidelines of this infamous conference,  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were being sold . Heir to this infamous event, BDS is active in approximately 120 countries and thus has a global reach. Good luck organizing a scientific conference today with Israelis and, increasingly, by association, with Zionist Jews.

 Some prominent Jewish French anti-Zionists published a rebuttal in the same newspaper. The crux of their argument is this:

The necessary critique of Zionism... rests on a threefold rejection: the rejection of the idea that the destiny of the world's Jews is to emigrate to Israel, the rejection of their assimilation into that state, and the rejection of its ethno-religious character. For us, Jews, combating antisemitism does not involve endorsing Zionism but, on the contrary, recognizing the inalienable and equal rights of all human beings, engaging in universal struggles for the rights of all, and consequently, for the rights of the Palestinians.

1. Zionism does not say that the destiny of all Jews is to emigrate to Israel. This is a straw man argument. Zionism makes no such demand - it is a refuge for Jews who need or want one, ready to accept any Jews who are unwanted where they live.

2. I think this means that since Israel calls itself a Jewish state, then it is responsible for antisemitism against Jews who live outside it done in the name of "anti-Zionism." That is absurd: antisemitism is the fault of the antisemites, and believing their ever-morphing excuses for their hate is playing into their hands. 

3. Many other states have an ethno-religious character. As long as there is no discrimination against the minority in everyday life, this is not a moral flaw. On the contrary, I would argue that this is superior to the model of the same universal system for every country in the world, which is not practical in any other context. Only Jews are expected to live under the benevolent rule of people who hate them, but not the Kurds, Tutsis, or Uyghurs.  And if you deny Arab antisemitism, you are denying reality - every poll shows that Arab populations are overwhelmingly antisemitic. 

The other arguments in the letter are also tired, like conflating legitimate criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Zionism, which is by definition eliminationist.  These same anti-Zionists were against Israel's existence as a Jewish state even before the 2018 Nation-State Law that they are so worked up about.  

Or their claim that Israel is illegitimate because it is "colonialist." Even if you accept that false argument, do they call for the dismantling of Australia, the US and Canada as well?  

The implication of the response is that Jews are not really a nation, which we have discussed is antisemitic at the outset. If the Jewish people are a nation - which was universally understood over the two-thousand years of exile, by both Jews and non-Jews - then they have national rights. If they have national rights, then any alleged crimes do not take away those rights; if you argue otherwise then every Arab Muslim nation is illegitimate, and a Palestinian state would be invalid at the outset. 

The rules are always different for the Jewish state. And that is what makes anti-Zionism antisemitism. Pointing out these double standards isn't whataboutism - it is evidence of the antisemitism at the core of the arguments themselves. 

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carlson

I recently came across an excerpt of an interview that podcaster Theo Von did with Tucker Carlson. Oddly enough, the theme of the interview is revealed at the very end of the clip:

Theo Von: Oh, I think it's brave to be able to speak up; sometimes if you're right or wrong, it's brave to try.

Tucker Carlson: It's our obligation to try. I was quiet for 30 years. I shouldn't have been I didn't want to fight but I shouldn't have been

Theo Von: People say like you get information wrong, but if information is given out that's wrong, then how do you expect someone to know accurate information?

You would be hard-pressed to find a more heartfelt defense of spreading misinformation. The implicit argument is that error is excusable so long as it is delivered with confidence and moral self-regard. That is precisely the license Carlson gives himself as he proceeds to traffic in fake history, scientific illiteracy, and anti-Israel propaganda, all wrapped in a tone of faux humility.

Carlson advances his own peculiar version of supersessionism. Rather than claiming Christianity replaces Judaism, he suggests something even more radical: that Judaism itself no longer exists, and that modern Jews have no meaningful connection to the Jews of antiquity or to the land of Israel. In a neat rhetorical trick, Carlson simply denies Jewish continuity altogether:

Theo Von: But because this Israel is not the Israel from the Bible, right? This is…

Tucker Carlson: I've tried to have this conversation. If it is, tell me how? What are you even talking about? And I'm not a theologian. I'm a freaking Episcopalian like I admit I know nothing but I do read the Bible every day, so I just don't see what you're talking about.

So you tell me what you're talking about. This is the Israel we read about. This is the inheritance of Abraham.

Theo Von: No way!

Tucker Carlson: How is it genetically the same? Are the people who live there now related to the people we read about in the Old Testament? If they are, we have DNA test. Tell me how that works? Oh, those are banned.

Okay. So then you tell me it's the same religion. How is it the same religion? There's no temple like, what are you even talking about? By the way, maybe there's a good answer that I just don't understand.

On at least one point, Carlson is refreshingly honest: he does not understand. Unfortunately, ignorance does not stop him from lecturing millions of listeners as though he does. His insistence that he “reads the Bible every day” is beside the point. This is not a theological question; it is a matter of history, archaeology, and population genetics—fields in which Carlson appears to have invested no effort at all.

Carlson reaches for a conspiracy theory. He claims that DNA testing is “banned” in Israel to hide the supposed lack of Jewish continuity. This is simply false. Snopes debunked the claim last year, noting that it is part of a broader attempt to accuse Israel of concealing evidence that undermines Jewish ancestral ties. More recently, an article in the Israel Institute of New Zealand was published, No, DNA Tests Are Not “Illegal in Israel': Debunking a Libel While Acknowledging the Real Policy Debate:

Few modern anti-Israel talking points are as bizarre — or as revealing — as the persistent claim that “DNA tests are illegal in Israel.” As with many libels, the accusation begins with a thin thread of truth, wraps it in distortion, and emerges as another conspiracy theory designed to delegitimise Jewish identity and the State of Israel.

The truth is that such tests are not banned--they are regulated, nor is Israel the only country that does this. The fact that such tests exist—and are widely studied—fatally undermines Carlson’s argument. He also betrays a basic ignorance of Jewish diversity. Sweeping claims about “the Jews” ignore well-documented distinctions among Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Mizrahi populations, all of which have been extensively studied.

According to a 2001 report on the website of the National Library of Medicine

although Ashkenazi Jews were found to differ slightly from Sephardic and Kurdish Jews, it is noteworthy that there is, overall, a high degree of genetic affinity among the three Jewish communities. Moreover, neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic Jews cluster adjacent to their former host populations, a finding that argues against substantial admixture of males

The LA Times reported in 2010 on a study of Ashkenazic Jewish ancestry:

The study shows that there is "clearly a shared genetic common ancestry among geographically diverse populations consistent with oral tradition and culture …and that traces back to the Middle East," said geneticist Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. "Jews have assimilated to some extent, but they clearly retain their common ancestry."

Carlson’s final move—arguing that the destruction of the Temple somehow severed Judaism from its own past—is just as foolish. Judaism did not end in 70 CE. It adapted, as living civilizations do. Jewish law, liturgy, language, and communal identity evolved organically from Second Temple Judaism, preserving continuity across catastrophe and exile. To suggest otherwise is not scholarship; it is historical vandalism.

But Carlson is not trying to educate. As with his claim that Benjamin Netanyahu called him a Nazi or that American taxpayers somehow “pay Netanyahu’s salary,” the goal is provocation, not accuracy. He gives his audience what it wants: grievance dressed up as insight, ignorance masquerading as courage.

Tucker Carlson’s performance is not merely uninformed—it is reckless. By presenting his lack of knowledge as a form of bravery, he invites his audience to confuse curiosity with certainty and skepticism with denial. Jews, Judaism, and Israel are not abstractions to be waved away with rhetorical questions and conspiratorial shrugs. They are among the most thoroughly documented continuities in human history. Carlson’s failure to grasp that is not a moral stand. It is a choice—and one that trades truth for applause.

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