A few days ago, I finally managed to synthesize an observation that has bothered me for decades: “Being an asshole to Palestinians is an excellent way to launch a media career in the United States.” From Martin Peretz to Bari Weiss, the strategy has rarely failed writers seeking bylines in prestigious newspapers.
Native informants and sellouts have always been part of the U.S. media landscape and so it was only a matter of time before the ruling class conjured up some Arab and Muslim compradors adapted to the social media age. In stepped the Muslim Leadership Initiative, a shady outfit with ties to the IDF and various Islamophobic organizations.
In 2014, the MLI began sponsoring junkets to Israel for enterprising Muslim pundits. Those who participated immediately enjoyed an elevated media profile. Rabia Chaudry showed up in Time Magazine. Haroon Moghul became a “professional Muslim” for NPR. Abdullah Antepli was soon a fixture on the interfaith circuit. And Wajahat Ali went from CounterPunch to the New York Times.
That was always the tradeoff for normalizing Israel as a gesture of Muslim civility. These fast-risers weren’t feted for their insight or originality. They offer no attraction to corporate media beyond a lack of principle. Even though the cohort is mainly South Asian (with no Palestinians), they position Islam as a unique source of authority on Palestine and thus remove colonization and imperialism from the equation. The “conflict” becomes a silly misunderstanding between Jews and Muslims (Palestinian Christians cease to exist). Only Enlightened Muslims free of atavistic prejudice can fix the problem.
“Muslim Zionist” only sounds contradictory because we’re conditioned to understand Zionism as an ethnic characteristic. In reality, Zionism is more than anything a political ideology, beyond the domain of any specific religious group. Most Zionists, in fact, are Christian. Zionism probably has been the defining feature of Jewish life after World War II, but it never came to define the universal makeup of Jewish people. Platforming Muslim Americans who suggest that Zionism is a primitive expression of Jewishness serves two purposes: to mystify the actual indivisibility of Zionism and imperialism; and to reify the false indivisibility of Israel and Judaism.
Wajahat Ali has probably been the most successful MLI alumnus. On Twitter the other day, he channeled a deeply harmful form of Zionist fanaticism, accusing me of peddling an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory” for pointing out that his idea of merit is actually just deference to power.
We could spend a long time discussing everything wrong with Ali’s accusation: its defamatory character; its misunderstanding of the relevant point; its insufferably sneering tone (an Ali specialty); its ignorance of propaganda models; its historical illiteracy; its vacuous rhetoric; its scornful language common to social climbers more disposed to contempt than critique (“conspiracy theory”). But let’s focus on its assumption that identifying a preponderance of Zionism in corporate media necessarily equals anti-Semitism.
Unless we conflate all Jews with Zionism, the assumption is empirically impossible. Ali indeed made that conflation and thereby introduced Jews and Judaism into the discussion, tethering them to Israeli military violence, to the inclinations of power, to the media’s ideological constraints.
Again, we see Zionists willing to entertain anti-Semitism so long as its purveyors support Israel. Devotion to the racial colony determines utility to the Jewish people. As Sahar Ghumkhor put it on Facebook, “[Ali and Chaudry] are using the charge of anti-semitism because of their own anti-Semitic belief about who has power in the media. It’s a curious admission.”
If Ali and Chaudry were capable of curiosity, Ghumkhor would be entirely correct. Still, it’s hard to imagine that before barreling into a public debate, neither of them took a second to notice that I wasn’t speaking of Jews (again, Ali introduced the word, along with the corresponding menu of stereotypes). I was referencing the ruling class: arms dealers, CEOs, politicians, traffickers, banks, intelligence agencies. Individuals and institutions that determine the scope and effect of information. It’s basic stuff that goes back to Gramsci and was developed in subsequent work by hundreds of writers. Those who obey limits painstakingly imposed by the ruling class will be rewarded with opportunity. Convention is currency. Compradors will feast. It gets awfully lonely for everyone else.
In fact, I would classify the nature of my comment as essentially banal.
Not so to Ali. He saw it as an opportunity to further suck up to his Zionist handlers. His failure to ever say anything incisive is written into the bargain. The pitiful figure who emerged from the arrangement drips with a sad recognition that nobody gives a shit what he thinks, that he’s needed only to repeat establishment bromides and misrepresent his community. The detritus of this bargain is evident in puerile humor and relentless smarm, the defense mechanisms of a toady whose soul is always unsettled.
Ali enjoyed a bit of groveling from his white audience, but in the end he caught a well-earned ratio. His inability to conjure support from the community he claims to represent illustrates that Palestine cannot easily be apportioned into crude identitarian categories. Ali sounded demoralized as this recognition set in, offering a series of musty jokes ignored by nearly all of his 240,000 followers. At one point he even attached a “get out the vote!” message to one of his rejoinders and this all-but-guaranteed way to get cheap retweets resulted in…nothing.
There’s a subtext here that we should recognize, one that extends into contested spaces among the pro-Palestine left: the struggle between a new leadership class reliant on liberal patronage and those who are serious about opposition to Zionism. The Palestinian American community once boasted a formidable radical energy. The radical energy that managed to survive decades of repression has been almost wholly swallowed by electoralism, social climbing, Gulf money, and Democratic Party astroturf. With his cornball zest for #resistance literature, Wajahat Ali may sound like the lost Krassenstein brother, but the Palestinians who followed his march into the Democratic Party are operating on the same terrain, no matter how different they sound on Twitter. Even the most adamant anti-Zionist will find it difficult to avoid practicing Zionism in that terrain.
People think they can game the machinery, imagine that they can maintain their dignity within a system erected atop a mountain of Palestinian bodies, but such idealism quickly dissipates. You either play by the rules, with an occasional gesture of rebellion for the sake of pretense, or you run away from the fantasy, knowing that the system will either survive or implode, but never reform.
Decide to play electoral politics in institutional spaces and everything changes. Suddenly you’re no longer free to speak your mind. Suddenly you have donors to appease, handlers to oblige, organizations to assuage. Suddenly you’ve made yourself property of the potentates and defense contractors who control the party. And soon you’ll be acclimated to humiliation. The players pretend they’re free, proclaim that they’re in fact promoting or preserving freedom, but they know the constraints better than anyone.
MLI was the test run. Keep an eye on how the project of chaining leadership to electoralism develops. We’ll continue drowning as those who profess to represent us opt for respectability, using the identity we earned through decades of struggle to satisfy the predilections of our enemy.
If you’re ever confused, ever ambiguous, ever uncertain, please try your best to remember: Palestinians need freedom. Nobody needs a media career.
While “Political Zionism” probably has been the defining feature of Jewish life after World War II, Zionism, the longing to return to the land of Israel and Jerusalem, has defined the universal makeup of Jewish people for well over a millennia. You need to remember that when you seek to discuss Zionism.
Anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitism. Just as BDS is an inherently antisemitic movement.
Palestinian Arabs do need freedom, but it is freedom from Hamas , Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority. Those are the entities that enslaves them, not Israel and not the US.
Sack Jigman
Zzzzzzzzz
No anti Zionism and BDS are not anti Semitic.
Zionism is a political ideology wrapped in religious sentiment. Ask and Christian Zionists what it means. Unless you believe they too are anti Semitic.
Zionism is Jewish nationalism. Christian Zionism is a religious ideology that may aid Zionism but has little to do with Jewish nationalism.
Political Zionism was a movement that ended with the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel once the British abandoned their mandate.
As BDS demands the destruction of the Jewish state, it is inherently antisemitic.
You know nothing about Judaism. For 2000 years the Jews have prayed every day for the restoration of our lost land in Zion. It’s right there in the Siddur, our daily prayer book. Zionism is absolutely inseparable from Judaism, which is why 95% of Jews consider themselves Zionists.
Hasbara 101 – Invert reality, Blame the victim
It shouldn’t be antisemitic, however, to criticize specific political Zionist policies, such as these segregationist measures proposed by Herzl. No political movement should be above critique even if based on a 2000-year dream.
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. The property-owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be
carried out discreetly and circumspectly. (…)
“We shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews. To be sure, we shall not be able to do this by declaring other sales invalid. Even if this did not run counter to the modem world’s sense of justice, our power would not suffice to force it through.”
(Herzl Diary vol. I p. 88-9)
It is not antisemitic to criticize many of Herzl’s ideas, just as it is not anti-Islam, nor anti-Palestinian Arab, to criticize Arafat’s antisemitic goals. Jusy as it is not anti-Christian to condemn the antisemitism in Christian scripture and as espoused by Martin Luthor. It is not anti-Islam to criticize the Mufti of Jerusalem.
Your idea of Zionism only exists in a magical imaginary world where nothing and nobody exists except for this ideology. For Zionism to exist, it has to exist on planet Earth, specifically in Palestine. For Zionism to exist in Palestine, it has to exist at the expense of the Palestinians. It can only exist at the expense of Palestinian expulsion, Palestinian colonisation, Palestinian subjugation and more…
Zionism was born in 1897, just over a hundred years ago. Many of the Palestinians that were forced out of their homes can trace their roots back for hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
Since you’re so familiar with Zionism, I’m sure you’re aware of this quote from the founder of Zionism himself, Herzl, : “the idea of Zionism, which is a COLONIAL idea, should be easily and quickly understood in England….If you wish to COLONISE a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land,….or else give up your COLONISATION….Zionism is a COLONIAL adventure and therefore it stands it falls by the question of armed forces”.
While Political Zionism had its breakthrough in 1897, Zionism is well over a millennia with several attempts to return to the land of Israel. Regardless of Herzl’s dreams, he is not, and never has been, the be all and end all of Zionism.
The Jews did not recolonize the Palestinian region. They legally immigrated, for the most part, they bought the land, they built homes, farms, orchards, vineyards, schools, factories, hospitals, universities, and institutes of democracy.
How long Arabs may have lived there is rather meaningless when you consider they waged a genocidal war against legal residents who were not Arabs. They lost that war. And because they waged that war, those who did not run away in fear were driven out into other parts of British mandate Palestine. They may have lost the 100 square meters they were renting but they were still on the land.
You cannot change the facts by using capital letters.
Loool, demented hasbara BS
Read Gen 12-25 ” It is with Abraham that the story of the Hebrews begins and it is clearly stated that their origins lay outside of Canaan/Palestine ”
Add to that European converts to Judaism have no real link to the Holy Land. As for Genocidal war, that is exactly what Israel is engaged in, with its multi faceted policy of Persecution, Incremental Genocide. You can’t change facts with pure BS or biblical fables.
Whatever your reference, it has nothing to do with the situation today, 72 years ago, 123 years ago, nor 1850 years ago.
Even Richard Falk, basically an enemy of Israel, has admitted that Israel has not committed genocide. Pappe had to invent a type of genocide to make any accusation at all.
Your opinion might have some merit but not your “facts.”
100%
exactly. Too many antisemites who seek respectability by calling themselves “anti-Zionists”
Too many genocide apologists who seek respectability by conflating Jewish religious identity with Zionist political identity.
Zionism is genocide! Fuck you, judeo-Nazi, I spit on your future grave!
Sore loser.
You think mass murder is a game where there are winners and losers? No, if mass murder is a game all of humanity are the losers. Zionism will die or people will continue in the degradation of our own humanity. Every moment Israel exists is a stain on the soul of time, and Zionism is a stain on the soul of the earth.
Sore loser
It was wrong when the German Nazis did it, and it’s wrong when the Judeo-Nazis do it.
And if the Judeo-Nazis succeed in their invisible extermination of the Palestinians, then Zionists will go down in history as worse than the German Nazis.
There is no comparison between the goals and actions of the German Nazi regime and the Israeli government.
Zionism follows the course of its own ruthless logic, accruing power and influence to secure the position of Israel, once its established that power it has no more intention of giving it up than giving up an inch of land it’s colonised in Palestine.
It was truly embarrassing to witness all the leadership candidates for the UK Labour Party having to identify as zionists, either genuinely or for fear of the repercussions if they didn’t.
Alongside Muslim and Christian Zionists you can rank ‘professional’ Zionists
As there is no state of Palestine, there could be no colonization. regardless, the Jews did not return to the Ottoman Palestinian territory as colonists. they came a legal immigrants. they bought the land from Arabs and other legal owners. They invested, they built, they prospered. The Arabs, threatened like Texas white supremacists by Mexicans, attempted to wage a genocidal war and they lost. They fled and they were driven away. Too bad.
As for the English, what was truly embarrassing was to witness so much of the leadership of the UK Labour Party proven to be antisemitic. More embarrassing were so many Brits didn’t care.
Your attempt to re-write history in the favor of ethnic cleansers is a crime against humanity.
As opposed to your previous spitting episode?
I spit on your grave one-thousand times. I will always spit on the graves of genocide apologists.
You must be dehydrated visiting so many Arab graves.
I always think of Alis daughter who had cancer when this happens, how little girls just like her and younger in Palestine are being killed and neglected to death; just waiting to see a doctor much less get diagnosed and treated – and without their parents allowed to be with them throughout it all. How little Ali thinks of that. His little girl going through cancer surrounded by complete strangers and refused to see her mommy and daddy for the crime of being born to the wrong faith and people.
Ali is a shameful man just for that. Just for forgetting those little girls just like his own. When his daughter grows up, inshallah, I do not she will not think kindly of her father or his actions. It is a burden to have a parent compromise their humanity for their own child. I know because my father is the same way, and we no longer speak nor do I allow him anywhere near his grandchildren.
I don’t want a sociopath near them. Teaching them that the end justifies the means. It really doesn’t. I hate him now, because he hurt so many people to give me this life I would have got morally anyway, without doing real harm to people. And here is Ali, doing exactly the same thing to Palestinians. He is doing them harm and laughing about it, all the while forgetting that his little girl is only alive today because of sheer luck. If she had been born to a Palestinian father, she’d be dead.
Our parents never think about us beyond the idea of losing us. They never think that in the end, we are the ones who have to live with their choices. And most of them, we regret.
It is certainly a shame that the parents of those being given humanitarian aid by Israel, because they are the enemy, cannot be allowed in Israel. Regardless of the situation, the safety of Israeli citizens must come before the desires of Palestinian Arabs.
However, exceptions are made. “Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is being treated for COVID-19 in a Jerusalem hospital, according to the hospital, after Israel gave the OK for his transfer from the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority severed ties with Israel earlier this year. It was not immediately clear whether the request for the transfer came from the Palestinian Authority or from Erekat personally. The transfer took place on Sunday.”
Great piece Steve, I hope you allow me to translate it to Arabic!
Thank you! Help yourself; I’d be honored–Steve
I agree with the general point of this post of course and Wajahat Ali and Rabia Chaudhry are certainly nasty Zionist-careerists. But I would ask that the charge that most MLI participants are south Asians be verified by actual evidence. If you look at its leadership and participants, there are certainly South Asians but there are also people of all ethnicities and at least one of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s faculty members is Palestinian. Just because 3 of some of the more prominent MLI participants are “south Asian” (whatever that term even signifies) doesn’t mean most participants are. Also, South Asian is a colonialist term that is being used in place of a term that could lend a lot more specificity in this context . All three of the “south Asians” named in the post are Punjabi Pakistanis, an hegemonic identity which I do not think is coincidental to their participation in MLI .
Fair enough. I mostly wanted to signify externality to Palestine, and so I have no investment in that term or in implicating any particular community. Thanks for the feedback–Steve
Thank you for considering the comment! I respect your work and I keep coming back to this great piece. I’ll be sure to share it widely- thanks for writing it!
Excellent point-especially specificity of Punjabi Pakistanis and the hegemonic nature of that form of being-ness and what it too often aligns and collides with.
just brilliant fantastic Steve.
What a pointless pile of esoteric drivel. You worthless antisemitic Pinkos really need to grow-up.
Go to hell judeo-Nazi.
Jews aren’t a Semitic people, so Jewphobia isn’t anti-Semitic any more than I would be Asian if I learned Cantonese and moved to Hong Kong. What’s actually anti-Semitic is hatred, appropriation/distortion, and erasure of Palestinian culture, which lives and will die as Zionism.
Jewphobia is a toxic attitude too but the invention of the usage of the term anti-Semitic to mean Jewphobia is Zionist horseshit and Palestinian erasure.
You can’t erase something that never existed. There has never been, in all of human history, a sovereign country called “Palestine”. “Palestine” is, at best a colloquial reference to the region, however Israel is the name of the state that is there, with Jerusalem as its capitol. Saying otherwise is, also at best, wishful thinking.
And trying to claim that the Jew-hate among your Neanderthals is made less-apparent by claiming to be “anti-Zionist” may help you feel better about yourselves, but no one who resides in the real-world, and who applies a modicum of common-sense is buying it.
Ta!
As antisemitism has nothing to do with hatred of Semitism, a meaningless identifier, your comment make no sense. The word “antisemitism” was invented to distinguish between hatred of Jews practicing Judaism and hatred of Jews as a distinct people. Now, consider yourself educated on one clear point.
Being on the wrong side of history, (or just wrong) bestows the pundit with an “authority” only matched by his craven ambitions. It worked for Christopher Hitchens – a little less so for Wajahat Ali, who plays the lapdog role a little too obvious and upfront. Having neither bark nor bite makes him a less than ideal talking head on cable news programs. This might explain CNN’s decision to not renew his contract, and his growing desperation to broaden his appeal to Zionists. He seems only capable of wagging his tail on cue as the official representative of “Good Muslim-hood.” As Pavlov’s pundit, he has earned himself a place at the proverbial table among likeminded establishments ghouls willing to abandon all principles for a NYT byline or a TV appearance. Has he even noticed that he is seated the children’s table among the lower servants of Empire?
In short, I’m more inclined to believe the school bus driver than the willfully unschooled pundit trying to throw him under the bus.
Arabs are the largest Semitic group of people on earth. Palestinians are Semitic, and the Europeans stealing their lands are not. All these Jewish terrorists aka Zionists are the true antisemites and should be dealt with as their Nazi predecessors were.
There are a lot of dumb comments here, but this was by far the dumbest. See my earlier comment about your antisemitism – which means anti-jewish feelings/hatred to sentient members of our reality-based World.
It is unfortunate how Dr. Salata’s essays bring out so many vicious antisemites.
How many vicious anti-Palestinian racists are brought out by this essay?
I think the smear can be summed up as a “straw man fallacy”.
Whenever that asinine phrase from the CIA 50 years’-ago “conspiracy theory” is thrown around at someone, intended to serve as a “gotcha” to somehow indict the messenger and obfuscate THE MESSAGE: it’s the biggest giveaway of realizing the source of it is on the payroll of the Washington-Tel Aviv imperial war machine (which, ironically: has more to do with America wanting Israel as a proxy agitator to provoke Putin over Syria into a greater conflict than anything else). Rapture-frenzied American Evangelicals with the (mythological) view of the U.S.-as-Empire could care less about Jews (and, unfortunately, Palestinians) when all is seen in the big picture because, the Pentagon thinks a $800 billion blank check gives it license to play Rambo all over the planet.
Israel, however, has managed to take hubris and verbal acrobatics to a whole new level though; in how: 1. they (and the State Dept.) have just magically erased 80 years’-worth of Ukraine’s notorious history as the Neo Nazi capital of Eurasia; and, 2: how they’ve curiously joined the same team as Saudi Arabia (mainly because of their infamous NSO/Pegasus spyware aiding in the assassination of Khashoggi) where, almost by a parlor trick: the FACT that Saudi Arabia’s entire modernization era (1964-) was instituted by a guy (Faisal Al Saud) that was a self-professed devotee of none-other than the infamous “Protocols”; not to mention, also: the way Americans (almost suddenly) are “told” now to no longer blame the Saudi regime for high oil prices (something they had previously done without fail since 1973 like second nature). Without Israel tagging-along on the U.S.’s “War on Terror” bureaucratic boondoggle (which solely depends-upon the narrative of constantly framing the Arab as the eternal shadowy boogeyman “Other” for traction), Israel would return to being a European-modeled quasi Socialist country running regular high inflation rates. It would, as well, be forced to return to having to confront the Palestinian crisis one on one and objectively try justifying its excessive actions to the international community. Without America’s looming in the background: that is an image war Israel knows it can’t win on a global stage.