What is "All Lives Matter-ing"?

A trend I've noticed in Jewish discourse recently is an uptick in people complaining about folks allegedly "All Lives Matter-ing" antisemitism. Sometimes, the complaints strike at behavior that seems obviously dismissive or denigrating towards Jewish activism against antisemitism. Other times, they seem to target statements that seem utterly anodyne or even salutary in clearly addressing antisemitism. There doesn't, however, seem to be a clear unifying thread save that the targets usually are not talking just about antisemitism -- they're either talking about antisemitism alongside some other oppression(s), or they're speaking in general terms about "oppression" without mentioning antisemitism specifically.

Does that suffice to explain what it means to "All Lives Matter" something? And if not, what, exactly, does this complaint mean? What is the proper understanding of "All Lives Matter-ing"?

I should start by saying that I'm not wild about the appropriation of "All Lives Matter-ing" in this context at all, for reasons relayed in this post. It often seems used less to illuminate a problem and more as a sort of nyah-nyah gotcha predicated on the wrong and alienating view that well obviously you'd see this is wrong if it were Black people frame that I loathe so much. For the most part, rather than grabbing language from other social movements that may or may not fit our own situation, we'd be better served to develop our own vocabulary that is tailored to our own case.

But to the extent there is a useful "generic" account of what it means to "All Lives Matter" something, what is it? Here's my rough stab at it, which certainly is open to refinement:

To "All Lives Matter" something is to respond to a complaint of an injustice experienced by a particular community by suggesting the complaint is illegitimate or exclusionary unless it is reframed away from focusing on the particular community and instead presented in more universal language.

Under this account, "All Lives Matter" ALMed "Black Lives Matter" because it responded to the particular claim of injustice identified by the BLM slogan by suggesting that this claim, or the campaign around it, is illicit and exclusionary because it is particularly about Black lives and should instead speak of all lives.

The first important feature of my account is that ALMing is necessarily reactive. It responds to something; it chastises another statement or movement or campaign that is already on the table. If it isn't responsive, it isn't an ALM statement. Consider the following sentence:

"We should treat people of all backgrounds with courtesy and respect."

Is that sentence "All Lives Matter-ing"? Not on its own, no. People say sentences like that all the time, with no particular controversy or compunction. There is no general proscription against saying banal universalistic niceties.

However, if one has just heard an account of how, in one's organization, Black employees are consistently denigrated, viewed as inferior, have their views shut down, concluded with a plea that the organization needs to "treat our Black employees with courtesy and respect", responding

"We should treat people of all backgrounds with courtesy and respect,"

with an arched voice and a tone of reproach -- that's All Lives Matter-ing. It responds to a specific account of injustice faced by a particular group by suggesting it's illegitimate precisely because it speaks of a particular group rather than of the universal "all". That, of course, is the original relationship of "All Lives Matter" to "Black Lives Matter" -- the objection was not to any sentence that expresses universalist humanist sentiments, it was to a particular sentence uttered in a particular context where it was expressly presented as a retort to "Black Lives Matter." Absent that reactive character, such a sentence is not All Lives Matter-ing.

Second, "All Lives Matter-ing" does not encompass every situation where someone tries to link different forms of oppression or marginalization together. Again, this is very obvious once one looks at the original context of how ALM related to BLM. After all, say what you will about Black Lives Matter activists who posit links between police violence in Ferguson and Gaza, or Chicago and Colombia, it would be weird to claim that they're "All Lives Matter-ing" themselves. Clearly, the objection to "All Lives Matter" is not meant to encompass any effort at solidarity or inter-group alliance.

If someone says "our experience with misogyny calls us to stand with victims of homophobia," they are not ALMing. If someone says "we oppose worker exploitation in San Juan, just as we oppose it in San Jose", they are not ALMing either. If someone says "we oppose racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and homophobia", they also aren't ALMing unless they're doing so in response to pressure which suggests a statement which solely focused on any one of those would be illegitimate for not mentioning the rest. But of course people are permitted to say, of their own accord, that they oppose multiple forms of oppression -- how weird would it be to argue otherwise? 

Again, attempts at coalition-building wouldn't satisfy the above definition of ALMing at least insofar as they are not done to delegitimize the initial claim of injustice, or to suggest that the initial, "unadorned" protest against it was illicit or improper. One can imagine circumstances where calls for coalition do take such a form, but the mere fact that someone is seeking to draw two cases of oppression together and forge an alliance among those fighting them is obviously not enough (how spectacularly self-defeating if it were!).

With this account in mind, how do the alleged cases of folks ALMing antisemitism fare? As one might guess, it depends.

On the one hand, consider a recent case where the diversity officer for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators was terminated one day after releasing a statement addressing antisemitism and hate crimes spikes against the Jewish community -- allegedly because releasing such a statement was disrespectful to Palestinians (the statement, for what it's worth, did not mention Israel, Palestine, or Zionism in any way). That case fits the ALM frame I promote above quite well -- the backlash was in response to a statement regarding the particular problem of antisemitism, which was presented as illegitimate insofar as its specific focus on Jews was interpreted as implicitly denigrating the status of other groups unnamed. Where the mere fact that a given organization is talking about antisemitism, specifically, is portrayed as exclusionary and thereby illegitimate, with the proposed correction "talk about all these other groups too" -- that's ALMing.

On the other hand, I recently had a conversation with a Jewish professional regarding how to mobilize against hate speech online, such as Cynthia McKinney's tweet about Zionists being responsible for 9/11, by working with other communities who also experience a glut of hateful and harassing speech on social media. In the course of explaining why I didn't like the (false and hurtful) frame that companies like Twitter "protect every group but the Jews", I proffered an alternative:

"Social media has a hate problem, of which McKinney's tweet is just the latest example. Jews know it, Muslims know it, women know it, people of color know it, the LGBT community knows it -- everyone seems to know it but Twitter."

For this, I was accused of promoting an "All Lives Matter" frame. Now, I'd have been entirely fine with just saying "Cynthia McKinney's tweet was antisemitic, and Twitter needs to show it takes antisemitism seriously." I have no issue with attacking her tweet as antisemitic, unadorned -- it doesn't have to come attached to discussion of any other form of hatred in order to be opposed. But it struck me as extremely weird -- bizarre even -- to tell me that even trying to present this issue in a way that presents a unified front with other groups is a form of ALM. Seriously?  If we ever try to make common cause with other groups (to say nothing of the members of our own community whose identities intersect with other groups), we're now out-of-bounds? That's not standing up for oneself, that's setting oneself up for political failure.

This is part of a worrisome pattern, where any time someone situates the fight against antisemitism as part of any larger struggle or campaign, they'll be accused of ALMing. Woe befall the statement condemning antisemitism that also mentions racism, or the social movement which tries to establish linkages between antisemitism and Islamophobia -- it's All Lives Matter-ing!

The kernel of legitimate worry here is the fear that fighting antisemitism "alone" will be viewed as illegitimate unless it is sanctified by association with these other, supposedly more prestigious, struggles. This worry, of course, is what actuates my own definition of ALMing above (a complaint about X specific oppression is delegitimated  as exclusionary unless it is folded into a larger and non-particular campaign). But when that worry causes one to lash out against any and all endeavors which locate the fight against antisemitism as existing alongside other struggles, all one ends up doing is obliterating the possibility of allyship and solidarity. That it is justifiable to fight against antisemitism alone does not mean it is preferable to fight against antisemitism alone. 

And indeed, while I think Jews are absolutely entitled to talk about antisemitism unadorned, we also should be free to decide that in certain situations it is better to talk about antisemitism as part of a network or relationship with other bigotries -- a larger practice of hate speech online, a larger system of White supremacy, a larger complex of discriminatory dismissal -- without being accused of treating antisemitism as "lesser" for doing so. It can be better because it's better tactics; it can be better because it builds relationships with other communities we care about (or, for some of us, are part of as well!). But the fundamentalist form of the ALM accusation undermines those efforts, and that's a problem. Particularly given how deeply much of our community thirsts for solidarity from other groups that we feel is not forthcoming, it is impossible to overstate how spectacularly self-sabotaging misapplication of the "All Lives Matter" charge can be.

I suspect the root of the problem, to circle all the way back to the beginning, is that often the "All Lives Matter" accusation really isn't about a thought-out analytical account of how to appropriately versus inappropriately talk about antisemitism. Its main motivator is the perception -- at best incompletely accurate, at worst absolutely misguided -- that "ALM" is an accusation people listen to, and so if we can invoke it (regardless of whether it makes sense to do so) people will listen to us too (or if they don't, we can bask in the satisfaction of knowing they're hypocrites). For Jews who feel like we can't get others to listen to us, that promise can be intoxicating -- even though when the "ALM" charge fails to compel others to listen we won't be uncovering a hypocrisy so much as we'll be experiencing the same failures others experience right alongside us.

Nonetheless, if ALM is going to become a generic charge (and again, my own reservations notwithstanding, perhaps that ship has sailed), we have a responsibility to get it right. Getting it right does not mean tossing it out like candy any time antisemitism is mentioned in the same breath as another oppression. It means opposing a very specific move, where people respond to entreaties about antisemitism by viewing them as illegitimate unless they universalize themselves. Does that happen? Absolutely it does, and it's repellant. Is that what's happening every time someone talking about antisemitism is accused of "All Lives Matter-ing"? No, and it's high time we learned to tell the difference.

A Letter to Fellow Jews on Open Discourse, Rigorous Inquiry, and Generosity of Spirit

A few weeks ago, Tema Smith and I began circulating a letter about how leaders in the Jewish community talk about "social justice" concepts -- things like Critical Race Theory, White supremacy, and intersectionality. We were concerned at how often prominent Jewish figures treated these terms in a strawmanned or caricatured fashion -- held out as boogeymen responsible for every stupid column some college sophomore penned at UC-Santa Cruz. This treatment did not reflect the values of open discourse, rigorous inquiry, or generosity of spirit that are essential to fair and productive dialogue (ironically, values that many of the offenders cited in cavalier dismissal of the relevant concepts).

The letter was delayed by the eruption of hostilities between Israel and Palestine in Gaza, but now has been publicly released. I am tremendously proud of the diverse set of prominent Jewish leaders who have signed on. To name just a few, we have:

• Esther Lederman of the URJ
• Rabbi Amy Eilberg, the first woman ordained by the Conservative Jewish movement
• Aaron Keyak, Joe Biden's director of Jewish engagement
• Eric Greene of the Jewish Multiracial Network

As Tema put it, reading the list of signatories makes me feel a part of very good company!

 

In addition, while our letter is not a direct response to the "Jewish Institute for Liberal Values" missive published last month, I will note that we also have several signatories from the original "Harper's Letter" onboard our piece as well, and I daresay that ours represents a more faithful manifestation of the values of that letter in terms of insisting on fair, rigorous, and generous readings of contested social phenomenon.

I reprint the content of the letter below. If you wish to add your name, we still are accepting signatures via this form.

***

A Letter to Fellow Jews on Open Discourse, Rigorous Inquiry, and Generosity of Spirit

We are Jews of a variety of political, religious, and ideological stripes. We hold diverse views but we unite in affirming the indispensable need for rigorous, open discourse in all aspects of Jewish communal life.

We write to note our concern that, in many key contexts and several critical moments, significant portions of our community have not successfully lived up to these values when assessing contemporary social justice movements. Too many Jewish public figures have engendered discussions of concepts like “intersectionality”, “critical race theory”, “white privilege” (or “white supremacy”), and other like terms where they are painted in simplistic, even glib, forms that bear little to no relationship to what proponents of these theories actually advocate. It is especially alarming that these bad faith critiques have accelerated alongside the growing recognition of the impacts of racism in America, including inside our Jewish community.

Unfortunately, we have regularly seen Jewish organizations, public figures, and media outlets level “critiques” of social justice concepts that are almost entirely unmoored from any engagement with their actual content. We have read with dismay too many articles that purport to speak authoritatively on social justice without ever citing or even referencing crucial primary source material, leading to a marked gap between what these concepts are alleged to assert about Jews (and others) compared to what they actually say. Nuance is swept aside to support uncharitable or outright hostile interpretations, and obvious absurdities are presented so that these concepts can be dismissed without further thought. The result is an impoverishment of Jewish communal discourse and a failure of our thought leaders to fulfill the basic obligations of an honest interlocutor.

Ironically, while those who criticize these social justice terms (and their associated political movements) often level their concerns in language of free speech and liberal discourse, they frequently do not display the generosity of spirit and commitment to fair, impartial, and rigorous reading that makes genuine inquiry and debate possible.

Just as Jews can reasonably insist that those who speak about, e.g., Zionism, antisemitism, Orthodoxy, “chosenness”, or other weighted terms avoid strawman caricatures of such concepts, basic respect should compel Jewish speakers to seek out genuine knowledge of social justice theories grounded in actual, reputable primary source texts. Sweeping statements that such theories (for example) make crude divisions of the world into “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes, or explicitly identify Jews as White supremacist dominators, must be supported with evidence, not simply stated as if fact. Indeed, it seems apparent that the purpose of framing social justice concepts in such obviously farcical fashion is to avoid a reasoned discourse which might have to engage seriously with the significant normative, analytical, and observational insights such concepts bring to bear on crucial issues of equity. Such evasion is fundamentally incompatible with principles of open inquiry and fearless engagement that characterize Jewish communal discourse in its most robust and authentic form.

The signatories to this letter may take differing views as to the degree to which concepts like intersectionality and critical race theory aid in improving our understanding of Jewish experience. But we agree that any discussion about these concepts must take them seriously and read them fairly, and we are concerned that the attempt by some in the Jewish community to present such theories as inherently offensive, dangerous, or (paradoxically) censorial is in effect demanding the suppression or dismissal of important conversations the Jewish community should be having.

Many inside and outside of the Jewish community, including but not limited to Jews of Color, have been intimately involved in the creation, development, and application of social justice concepts — to the Jewish case and beyond. We urge that the Jewish community commit to including these voices as part of developing our collective understanding of what these concepts actually mean; and avoid speaking on these subjects based on rumor, innuendo, or hyperbolic sentiment. A commitment to such inclusion and to fair readings does not compel any particular conclusion; it does not demand either blind acceptance or knee-jerk criticism. Rather, it is the indispensable foundation on which any informed position on these matters must rest.

We, again, reiterate our view that liberal deliberative values are absolutely essential to the health and vitality of the Jewish community — values which include openness to challenging ideas and refusal to indulge in strawmanning, hyperbole, or other tools of dismissal. Precisely because we commit to these values, we are insistent that we live these values out in all contexts — including when engaging with theories of social justice that may be discomforting or controversial. We are confident that a recommitment to these values in the social justice context will help promote free, sophisticated, generous, and charitable engagement with all those who care about securing an equitable world.

We invite you to sign onto this open letter to add your voice to this call for open discourse, rigorous inquiry and generosity of spirit.

[Signatories]

Antisemitism vs. Illegitimate Anti-Israel(i) Discrimination

One thing I noticed come up a few times in the Moshava Philly saga was folks who (a) agreed that the conduct in question represented illegitimate discrimination against Israelis on the basis of nationality but (b) denied it was antisemitic. That is, they agreed it was wrong, just a different wrong from antisemitism.

I confess I haven't put a ton of thought into making this differentiation myself, particularly in cases (as here) where it seems that the "anti-Israeli" discrimination is inextricably bound up with the fact that the targets are Jewish Israelis, specifically (it is dubious that an Israeli Arab food truck would have faced the sort of pushback Moshava Philly experienced). In concept, it is obviously possibly for someone to have a prejudice against Israelis that has absolutely nothing to do with Jewishness -- it is even-handed hatred towards Israelis of all backgrounds and faiths. In practice, there are very few cases of illegitimate anti-Israel biases which are not linked in some way to its Jewishness (even if, on occasion, the link is that the non-Jewish Israelis are tied too closely with the Jewiness of it all).

But my own views notwithstanding, this got me to wondering: What are the stakes of insisting on this distinction between antisemitism and concededly illegitimate anti-Israeli discrimination? And if we do make the distinction what short-form name should we give to illegitimate anti-Israeli discrimination?

On the latter, the lack of a pithy title is inconvenient to say the least. I've heard "Ziophobia" used a few times, but let's just say not by the people who I'd expect to be invested in rigorously policing the difference between antisemitism and anti-Israeli discrimination. But I'm not sure a better term currently exists out there. Suggestions welcome.

On the former, certainly one often hears people emphatically distinguish between "antisemitism" and "legitimate criticism of Israel" -- an important distinction, to be sure. But this is different, since by stipulation the persons I'm talking about concede the "criticism" in question is not legitimate -- and, in particular, is not legitimate in a discriminatory and thereby morally wrongful fashion (there are plenty of cases where a criticism may be technically "wrong" but does not morally wrong anyone -- free speech must allow for some play in the joints where people are free to be mistaken -- but these cases go further and entail circumstances where by concession the bad behavior generates a valid claim of injustice). Given that, what are the consequences of being sure to say "this is wrong, and discriminatory, and should be opposed -- but we shouldn't call it antisemitic"?

My instinct is that it is part of a broader campaign to disassociate discourse about Israel in any form -- even concededly illegitimate forms -- from claims of antisemitism. In that way, it is an adjunct to the "legitimate criticism of Israel is not antisemitism" contention, albeit different in content. Holding fast to this distinction even in the cases of illegitimate criticism helps build the firewall which blocks accusations of antisemitism in the cases of legitimate criticism (or, perhaps more importantly, in the arguable cases).

And a side-effect -- perhaps desired, perhaps not -- is to prevent this form of discriminatory from accessing the particular moral punch of "antisemitism" as a concept. While nominally there's no reason why "antisemitic" discrimination has to be worse than "national origin discrimination against Israelis", practically speaking it represents a retreat -- it's bad, but not antisemitic bad. 

Part of what the disassociation campaign is doing, after all, is trying to split off discourse about Israel from the broader histories and structures of antisemitism that accentuate its dangers -- tying certain discourses into extreme manifestations of violence and oppression. The goal, in some ways, isn't just about protecting "legitimate" criticism but also about degrading the dangers of "illegitimate" criticism. There are all sorts of cases where we might think someone is being kind of extreme or ridiculous or unfair to, I dunno, Canada, and so we might "oppose" it insofar as we generally oppose extreme unfair ridiculousness, but we also don't view it as a four-alarm moral fire. The goal is to do the same thing when faced with unfairness towards Israel or Israelis -- not so much justify as make it mundane, make it small-potatoes, isolate it from any broader pattern or practice of systemic wrongdoing.

Chauvin Sentenced to 22.5 Years

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd.

No sentence can bring George Floyd back to life, and hence no sentence can in itself create justice. Moreover, no sentence of Derek Chauvin can, in itself, reform the structures of policing that enabled George Floyd's murder. A single sentence, after the fact, does not change anything.

Nonetheless, the criminal sentence is important -- it is important for providing some measure of closure to Floyd's family, it is important as a signal of the seriousness with which we take crimes of this nature, and it is important as a means of communicating to other officers that this sort of behavior will be met with significant consequences. Chauvin faced a maximum of forty years; he asked for probation. The guidelines for an offender without a previous record would have been 12-15 years, but as the sentencing judge noted there were aggravating factors in this case.

Paul Butler said that taking all of that into account, an 18 year sentence struck him as appropriate. Twenty-two and a half years is more than that, but in the same ballpark. It strikes me as appropriate, proportional, and -- as far as can be achieved in unjust circumstances -- just. But my opinion is not especially important, so my main hope is that Floyd's family and community feel the same.

The Coda to the Israeli-American Food Truck Fiasco

(Previous posts here and here)

Eat Up the Borders, which ignited a firestorm of criticism after uninviting an Israeli-American immigrant food truck from its festival, has issued an apology.

It is, I think, a good apology. It provides relevant context, while making absolutely clear that they own their mistake and affirming their absolute intention to keep working with Moshava Philly in the future. While the apology is primarily -- an appropriately -- directed at Moshava and the Jewish community, it also at one point extends its apology to "the Jewish and Palestinian communities." I've seen some people push on this -- why the apology to Palestinians? -- but I don't have any particular problem. Eat Up the Borders made its own mistake, and yet Palestinians are having it imputed to them. To the extent Eat Up the Borders dragged them into a mess of their own creation, it's fine to apologize for that.

More broadly: apologies are important, and we should be encouraging Eat Up the Borders for doing so here. It's hard to apologize, and harder still when you know that many won't accept the apology and many others will be furious that one deigned to apologize at all. Sometimes it's paradoxically more comfortable sitting with obvious, outright antisemitism -- there is a weird sense of relief in finding a situation where everyone knows this was not okay, and there is the temptation to continue sitting in that comfortable position of righteous anger than to transition to the far more precarious, vulnerable, and uncertain posture of trying to grow forward. 

This is a temptation that must be resisted. If we want people to apologize and work to do better, one needs to respond favorably when they earnestly try to do so. Positive reinforcement is good! And this, I'd note, has been the consistent tone taken by Moshava Philly, which has been emphatic that it likes Eat Up the Borders, thinks they do good work, wants to continue working with them, and thinks this was a mistake they'll learn and grow from. If one refuses to allow for that possibility, one cannot hold oneself out as an ally to Moshava Philly.

In other thoughts: It was notable that, once this story broke into the mainstream, one spotted very few defenders of the decision to expel Moshava Philly. Obviously, they exist and one could find them if one looked, but the usual suspects remained pretty quiet and the slightly-less usual suspects tended to use this as a case of "here's an example of where a 'boycott' goes too far." So that's notable. 

Those who did come out in defense of the expulsion -- JVP's Swarthmore branch was probably the highest-profile case I saw -- really did a sterling job of demonstrating how BDS, at least for that camp of fundamentalist, is about objecting to Israelis existing in any form or capacity. Eater Philadelphia got a quote -- one of the first I've seen -- from one of the persons who initially put pressure on the festival to cut ties with Moshava Philly based on the view that its food was "appropriated Palestinian food that they’re marketing as Israeli food" and therefore "contributes to the marginalization and erasure of Palestinian culture" (as Ron Kampeas notes, when it comes to the food in question, this is both historically illiterate and erasive of Middle Eastern Jewish history).

But the flailing effort to find something -- anything -- that supposedly rendeered their targeting of Moshava Philly something more than just naked national origin discrimination made them look more ridiculous than righteous. A popular move was to claim that "moshava" means "settlement" (it means something like "small village", which, yes, most thesauruses would say is a synonym for "settlement", but not in the sense referred to here). Others poured over social media to find basic statements of pride in being Israeli or love of their country to present as mortal sins (Manny's in San Francisco endured a similar strategy). One "collective", for example, made the shocking discovery that a product that Moshava Philly sold had its origin in a farm which the proprietor began working on "illegally" in 1993 (the intended implication being that it was from an illegal West Bank settlement). Even that six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon tag fell apart when it was discovered that the farm in question was in pre-48 Israel (who knew that BDSers had so much respect for Israeli property law!), at which point they showed their whole self by declaring flatly that "It’s all a settlement: Tel Aviv is a settlement just like Havot Ma’on, or Kiryat Arba." So yeah, that's who we're dealing with.

Ultimately, this story ends on an optimistic note. The festival apologized. The promise to keep working with Moshava Philly was secured, and it appears neither grudging nor coerced. Moshava Philly has been very vocal about how humbled they've been from the outpouring of support they've received. Few, if any, mainstream actors did anything but say "this was wrong". Those are all good things. We can be happy about those good things, and work to build on them -- and it looks like both Moshava Philly and Eat Up the Borders are committed to doing so.

A Buffalo Socialist in the Heart of America

In a significant upset, self-described socialist candidate India Walton has dethroned incumbent Buffalo mayor Byron Brown in the Democratic primary, which makes her almost a shoo-in for the mayor's seat next election. The victory would make Walton the first socialist mayor of a major American city in sixty years.

Occurring on the same election day where Eric Adams looks likely to win the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, this will certainly spark some chatter about where the future of left-wing politics lies in America. Upstate New York -- the old rust belt -- is a Democratic Socialist's fantasy of where they most want to be competitive, but historically haven't made much inroads compared to their success in upscale, wealthy areas like suburban Maryland. The dissonance between where they were winning and where their ideology says they should be winning was taking a toll, so this probably feels really good for them. It does mean the rest of us probably need to brace for another flurry of "socialist policies can win in the heartland" takes -- but listen, as skeptical as I remain, the one thing which can give that old tune new life is actually winning elections. So they've earned the right to drop another nickel into the jukebox.

In more immediate terms, I know virtually nothing about Walton, or Brown, or Buffalo. But in my uninformed opinion -- and what is the internet for if not uninformed opinions? -- Buffalo is the perfect place to try out a socialist as a mayor. It's a big enough city that one actually has to govern it and engage with diverse stakeholders rather than just grandstand, and it's far enough from the glare of national attention that Walton should be able to do her job more or less as a normal mayor without constant spotlight. That isn't to say she won't face opposition or pushback from various constituencies and power-brokers -- that's part of local politics, and navigating those shoals is part of what it means to be a success at local politics. But it's a good test case. Laboratories of democracy and all that.

So congratulations to Ms. Walton -- I look forward to seeing what you accomplish in your tenure!

What the Israeli-American Food Truck Fiasco Tells Us About (Some) BDSers

Briefly following up on the saga of the Israel-American food truck, and in particular JVP Swarthmore's position that expelling the truck from an immigrant food festival is a righteous example of BDS in action, I want to return to something I wrote a few years back about none other than Natalie Portman. In 2018, Portman refuses to travel to accept her award of the Genesis Prize in Israel because doing so would involve sharing a platform with Bibi Netanyahu. At the same time, she emphatically rejected that she was endorsing BDS, and affirmed her commitment to continue engaging with other Israeli voices and institutions.

Many pro-BDS persons nonetheless insisted that Portman -- her own avowals notwithstanding -- was in fact engaging in BDS. So (part of) my column was trying to explain why it mattered that Portman was so insistent that she was not doing so. Here's what I wrote:

It is one thing to say that a particular politician or a specific company stands beyond the pale, such that they cannot be productively engaged with until they alter their behavior. But when it is every politician, every company, every university, every artist, every film - at that point the message communicated becomes something different. 

The (well, a) problem with BDS, as a movement, is not that there is something intrinsically objectionable to not wanting to share a stage with Bibi or not purchasing a Sodastream. 

The problem is that BDS does not just cover Bibi or Sodastream. It covers the Anti-Defamation League and Jerusalem Open House and A Wider Bridge. It covers Moshe Halbertal and David Grossman and Ami Ayalon. It covers Tel Aviv University and it covers random middle schoolers who have questions about horses. 

It covers every Israeli company and every company that does business in Israel; it covers every Israeli movie, every Israeli actor, and every Israeli theater production.

(I didn't include perhaps the most incredible example I've seen in this ilk: complaints that a newspaper quiz that had a question about Israel's national bird was in breach of the BDS: "This includes any reference to their wildlife." But I digress.) 

Time and again BDS has shown itself to be a train that has no brakes. Vagaries about targeting "institutions, not individuals" - often only honored in the breach regardless - serve as no limit when any every institution is found guilty and any affiliation is implicating. 

Crossed with cousins like "anti-normalization" and "pinkwashing," BDS becomes a systemic and inescapable net ensnaring and excluding Israelis indiscriminately. Too often, it stretches even further and simply serves to exclude Jews-qua-Jews - anywhere, everywhere, in toto.

What's striking about the Moshava Philly fiasco is how it gives lie to so many of the purported limiting constructions of BDS that are meant to explain how it isn't simple antisemitism, xenophobia, or national origin discrimination.

• Some argue that BDS doesn't target Israelis-qua-Israelis, only organizations which have specific ties to problematic Israeli policies and are personally implicated in wrongdoing. But nobody is arguing that Moshava Philly has such ties -- its sin is simply that it serves the food of its own proprietors.

• Some argue that BDS is justified against all Israeli firms insofar as, by being in Israel, they are inherently acting as occupiers of Palestinian land. But Moshava Philly is, as the name suggests, in Philadelphia -- in turns out that even when Israeli Jews come to the, ahem, "real promised land" the taint still follows. It is its Israeli origin, not where it sits or does business in, that generates the contagion.

• Some argue that BDS doesn't object to Jewish presence in modern-day Israel per se, only that which is attributable to the "Zionist invasion" (see PLO charter Art. 6). Yet the term "Moshava" refers to villages the earliest of which were established prior to the First Aliyah by a mix of immigrants and persons who were already living in the Old Yishuv. This makes it all the more striking to witness the word "Moshava", literally "village",  being re-translated to mean "settlement" or "colony" in order to present Moshava Philly as some avatar of colonization -- an ordinary word made sinister by judicious leveraging of its exotic foreignness (we've seen this before). It turns out that when push comes to shove, the projects of pre-Zionist Jews in Eretz Yisrael are going to be portrayed as foreign, colonial impositions too -- because it's Jewish existence, not policy or practice, that ultimately is sufficient to earn the label of invasion.

• Some argue that "Israel" doesn't have a right to exist because only people, not states, have a right to exist. But here we see the view that the entire existence of an Israeli peoplehood -- even purely as culture -- is viewed as corrupt, tainted thievery, hence why the mere existence of "Israeli" food is presented as an affront. The problem, it turns out, is Israelis existing -- anywhere, anyhow, in any context. (I think even JDA would consider this antisemitic, though as always the question is whether any of its backers will actually stand up and apply the document to the case).

One thing I've said before about BDS is that, like other social movements, it will moderate as it mainstreams. People who endorse some forms of boycotts, divestments, or sanctions are a diverse group, and not all of them have any interest in these fundamentalist applications. It is wrong to say that anyone who says they won't buy wine from a West Bank settlement also necessarily endorses barring Israeli immigrant food trucks.

But we should be clear that there is a contingent -- and not a trivial one either -- that does intend to ride the train all the way to the end. For them, the train really has no brakes. And for them, their vision of BDS really is one that is incompatible with Jewish equality -- whether in Israel or abroad. We should be clear-eyed about who they are, and what they represent.

"Safety in Solidarity" and the Israeli-American Food Truck

Yesterday, Jewish social media was roiled by the story of a Israeli-American food truck, Moshava Philly, was expelled from the "Eat Up the Borders" immigrant food truck event after reported community pressure and threats. It was a depressing story, obviously, and a story about antisemitism, also obviously. But I have a few slightly-less (I think) obvious thoughts as well.

It is, right now, unclear whether the event organizers made their decision to remove Moshava Philly because they agreed with and/or where sympathetic to those objecting to Moshava Philly's presence, or whether they regretted the decision but felt their hands were tied due to credible threats that could endanger the entire event. The evidence is mixed, but for purposes of this post I'm going to assume the latter -- partially because that seems to be Moshava Philly's interpretation, and partially because if it's the former then there isn't really much interesting-non-obvious commentary to add.

It is a depressing reality that one has to assume that an organization like Eat Up the Borders, dedicated to promoting immigrant businesses in America, has experienced or at least contemplated what would happen if there was a racist backlash to its practices. This is not an unforeseeable development, at least in broad strokes. One has to think they had an idea of what they'd do in a case like this. So the question is whether this -- removing the targeted truck -- is in accord with that idea. People are saying that Eat Up the Borders would not have reacted in the same way had the racist backlash targeted a Mexican-American truck or an Iraqi-American truck or a Chinese-American truck.

Normally, I hate that "imagine if it were X group" argument, in part because is it often acts as if it is inconceivable that there would be a backlash against any other group. To the contrary, I can absolutely imagine a scenario where a racist backlash targeted the food truck of another community; I can even imagine a situation where the backlash got so dangerous and threatening that the event organizers felt no choice but to remove them from the event. It's not implausible.

But. I do think there is something different happening here. If Eat Up the Borders was facing a racist backlash, I think under normal circumstances they would not hesitate to vocally name it as a racist backlash. It might be a backlash that temporarily defeated them, it might be one that forced them to make a decision they'd rather not make. Racists can be powerful that way. But by naming it, they would lay the foundation for a counterattack: leverage the community to rally against the racists and provide the necessary support, resources, and security to ensure that all are welcome at the event and that the racists would not win in the end.

"Safety in solidarity". That's the motto we hear -- that threats like this don't need more police, they need a community response that unifies in support to keep everyone safe and included.

Something about this case, though, apparently made turning to that idea feel untenable to Eat Up the Borders. For whatever reason, they did not have the confidence that naming this as a racist backlash would generate the sort of outpouring of solidarity that might yield safety. The core "idea" wouldn't work here. People, Jews and non-Jews alike, sense that the foundations for such solidarity have not yet entrenched themselves, at least for Jews. For Jews, there still are hang-ups and excuses and rationalizations for why solidarity can be withheld -- they're powerful, they're appropriating, they're colonizers ... the list goes on. And they know, too, that to some extent the calls for racist exclusion against Jews are coming from inside the house -- opposing this form of racist backlash isn't about standing tall against big bad bigots "out there", but involves standing up and saying no to people on the inside.

At the end of the day, Jews know that "safety in solidarity" is not, at least right now, a check we're entitled to cash. It might be different if the people who loudly promoted "safety in solidarity" as the proper Jewish response to antisemitism got loud about instances like this. If they put out the call for solidarity and got a response, that could prove otherwise -- a powerful rallying and mobilizing on behalf of Moshava Philly that would blow away the assumption that solidarity would not be forthcoming. 

But they don't. Maybe because they themselves have mixed feelings about the presence of Israeli-American immigrants -- even as those "mixed feelings", at root, cannot be disaggregated from simple antisemitism and xenophobia. If one has a problem with immigrants because of the policies of the nation they immigrated from, or because they do not express outright hatred and contempt for their home, or because one views the entire culture of that nation as irrevocably tainted and grotesque -- that's xenophobia, full stop. If nothing else, Moshava Philly represents a very clean case where all of the supposed guardrails that distinguish "anti-Israel" from "antisemitism" -- from "it's about the government, not the people" to "it's about institutions, not individuals" -- have fallen away.

But mixed feelings is not the only problem here. Even if there is no such ambivalence, even if the "safety in solidarity" crew knows without a doubt that this is hate, I suspect they're quiet because, deep down, they harbor the same doubts as everyone else about what the response to their call would be.  Even if they know this is hate, they don't know that everyone else knows it too. They know the foundation isn't there yet.

It is worth noting that the entity in this sad affair that seems most invested in actually building this foundation is ... Moshava Philly. They've committed to staying invested in this community, of reaching out to Eat Up the Borders and doing the work. I wish I could say with confidence they'll succeed. It's not guaranteed. But it's worth trying, and they deserve our support as they try to use this terrible moment to build up rather than tear down.

UPDATE: NBC Philadelphia reports two new developments I hadn't heard before. The first is that now event organizers are claiming it had a policy of only allowing an Israeli food truck if a Palestinian one was present as well (and vice versa); this time the Palestinian food truck couldn't make it so they removed the Israeli one. That's a profoundly stupid reason, and also very different from what folks on both sides had been saying yesterday.

Second, it appears now the entire festival has been canceled.

UPDATE 2x: That JVP Swarthmore -- which has "safety through solidarity" in its bio -- is enthusiastically backing the expulsion of the Israeli-American immigrant vendor as a righteous example of BDS is almost too on-brand and makes for the perfect coda to this post.

Democrats for More Democrats

One of my favorite social campaign slogans of all time is "Neighbors for more neighbors" -- the mantra of supporters of upzoning in Minneapolis-St. Paul. And to co-opt it, Democrats should support policies that create more Democrats.

At one level, that's obvious; at another, it's obscure. What does it mean for a policy to "create" more Democrats? It'd be nice if "good policy that makes people's lives better" had a direct connection to getting more votes, but I'm dubious. Typically, the process through which people become members of a political party is a little less straightforward -- working through cultural affinity and other group dynamics as much if not more so than policy preferences. And on the other side, we should not support a policy that's objectively unethical just because it might redound to the transient political advantage of the Democratic Party. All politics is, in a sense, a trade-off between what's right and what's expedient, but the very best political moves -- the true no-brainers -- are those which are both right and expedient. What we'd want, then, are policies that are both (a) objectively good and (b) are likely to inject more Democratic voters into the polity. 

Statehood for DC (and the other colonies) is an obvious one -- it rectifies a clear injustice of areas under permanent American jurisdiction which lack political representation, and most of the relevant places are strongly blue-leaning (at "worst", places like Puerto Rico are swingy) and so would add more Democrats into American politics.

Immigration reform is, potentially, another. Again, it is correct on the ethics, but it also is likely that many (not all) of the immigrant populations will be inclined to vote blue -- particularly if Republicans insist on declaring loudly and consistently that the immigrants aren't welcome here. Accelerating paths to citizenship -- basically, creating a fatter spigot of naturalized U.S. citizens -- will likely yield more Democratic voters.

A less obvious play is policies which enhance college accessibility ("free college" or related programs), resulting in more Americans getting college-educated. The big story in American voter behavior over the past decade is that partisanship is now sorted almost entirely along the dimension of education -- higher-education cohorts voting blue, lower-education cohorts voting red (this holds even accounting for differences in wealth -- high-ed/low-income voters are still blue, high-income/low-ed voters are still red). 

Does this mean that, if more Americans go to college, they'll come out Democrats? Not necessarily -- it could be that "people who are Democrats are more inclined to go to college" rather than "going to college makes people more inclined to become a Democrat" -- if that's the case, then adding new college attendees won't change the underlying partisan composition of the electorate. But I'm inclined to think that the causal arrow does flow in the direction of "college attendance --> Democrat" rather than vice versa. One hint that this is right is that we're seeing a big shift in voting patterns from college-educated voters who are long-since removed from college, which seems more compatible with college attendance --> Democrat than Democrat --> college attendance.

But what makes the pattern work? It's not because lefty professors are successfully indoctrinating students (as we often remark, we can't even get them to read the syllabus!). In part, it may be that college exposes students to people from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences than might otherwise be the case; that horizon-broadening experience fits better with political progressivism. But right now, I think the larger answer is simply a form of cultural affinity (or, to be a little cruder, tribalism): college-educated persons now are far more likely to be liberals than not, and that very consensus makes it more likely that each marginal member of the college-educated cohort will also be liberal (the same is true for non-college educated voters, but in reverse). People tend to adopt the politics of their surrounding community; if their community is fellow college-educated persons, they'll trend towards the predominant views of that set.

What this means is that if Democrats make a big push to increase the number of Americans who get college degrees, it is likely that the result will be more Democratic voters. It's not going to be everyone, of course. But I suspect if one randomly assigned a sample of Americans who were not planning to attend college into two groups -- one sent to college, one not -- the former would in four years have more Democratic voters than the latter.

It's good to give representation to places under American sovereignty. It's good to welcome immigrants who want to make their home here into the fabric of America. And it's good to increase college accessibility and affordability for Americans of all backgrounds. But each of these policies, in addition to their moral goods, may have the additional happy consequence of creating more Democratic voters. Democrats for more Democrats, please.

Blogging Queen, Young and Sweet, Only Seventeen

Happy birthday to this blog, which just turned seventeen years old today!

In that time, I have ...

• earned four degrees (B.A., J.D., M.A., Ph.D.)
• lived in eight cities (and ten different apartment buildings, not including dorms)
• taught at three universities (Illinois, Berkeley, and DePaul) in two different departments (law and political science)
• held two non-academic full-time jobs and three non-academic summer jobs
• had one girlfriend/wife (yup -- while I had some high school girlfriends, she's the only person I dated from the time this blog started to present)

And after so much flux and turmoil ... I have just officially begun as an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School! So following a move to one last city, this list should stabilize significantly over (knock on wood) the next seventeen years.

Bad Clients Make Shaky Law on National Origin Discrimination

I just saw an interesting new decision out of New York, Bibliotechnical Athenaeum v. American University of Beirut, concluding that "national origin" anti-discrimination protections do not encompass discrimination against a company for its place of incorporation. The short version of the facts: BA is incorporated in Israel with it's principle place of business in New York, it sought to participate in AUB's online job fair, when it told AUB it was an Israeli company, AUB locked it out of the fair, BA sues alleging national origin discrimination.

It is well-established that a corporation can be subjected to "discrimination" under federal law (on account of race, ethnicity, national origin, or other protected characteristics). But that right is derivative of the identities of members of the corporation -- its shareholders, officers, employees, etc. -- and so merely noting that a company has incorporated in Israel does not demonstrate that any of its human beings are of Israeli national origin. For example, sometimes a company incorporates in a given state purely for tax purposes, but none of its officers or employees have any particular connection to the company. BA, for its part, did not plead any facts demonstrating a connection to Israel beyond the fact that it was incorporated there, and so the court concluded that if that was its only link to Israel, discrimination based on that fact is not actually "national origin" discrimination.

Precedents like this make me nervous. I get the example of how weird it would be for a company which incorporates in some random country for tax purposes being imputed as having the "national origin" of that country for discrimination law claims. At the same time, any time one opens a hole like this -- "national origin discrimination is forbidden, but this thing that's one step adjacent to national origin discrimination and could be used to effectively do the same thing as national origin discrimination is a-ok" -- one does serious damage to the vitality of anti-discrimination law. Exempting from "national origin discrimination" "discrimination on basis of place of incorporation or place of business" is an exception that could easily swallow the rule.

What's going on here? The name "Bibliotechnical Athenaeum" rang a bell -- I had heard of litigation they launched a few years ago against the National Lawyers Guild when the latter refused to accept an ad from them listing their (West Bank) address as in "Israel". But I didn't know anything else about who they were, so this time around I did some research.

Or tried to, anyway. It's virtually impossible to find anything about Bibliotechnical Athenaeum aside from coverage of lawsuits like this (which it appears to launch in collaboration with the Lawfare Project). Indeed, my strong suspicion is that they only exist to launch lawsuits like this: go up to a target they suspect does BDS-like activity, say "we're Israeli and we want to participate", then sue the organization when it locks them out. But aside from that, they don't do any substantive work (the above link on the NLG litigation says that "Bibliotechnical is not an operational, commercial business enterprise."). They are a vehicle for launching lawsuits, nothing more.

Judges tend not to look favorably on this sort of concocted litigation. The most noble example one could find is the "testers" sometimes employed by the Fair Housing Authority, to see if apartments are treating Black and White applicants alike. These are usually state employees, though, engaging in a specific enforcement mission. For better or for worse, more recent efforts by people to fly solo in this endeavor are less warmly received. I recall a series of cases from the Eighth Circuit in the past few years where a guy in a wheelchair would drive hours away from his house to random restaurants looking for technical violations of the ADA, take some pictures, and then sue the business. He didn't have any actual interest in dining at the establishments -- he was just looking for the settlement. The Eighth Circuit started rejecting these "drive-by" cases on standing grounds, saying the plaintiff was not actually injured.

I suspect that the judge in this case perceived this litigation as of a similar sort -- an ideological "drive-by" from an entity that did not actually have any real interest in working with AUB or hiring at its job fair. The fact that BA couldn't plead a tangible connection to Israel other than incorporating there (and, one surmises, it incorporated there solely so it could claim to be "Israeli" when launching litigation like this) further underscored the sense that it was engaging in abusive gamesmanship. And so the court took the path of least resistance in getting rid of the claim, which was to leverage the relatively meager connections between BA and Israel (at least as the case was pled) in order to say that it does not qualify as national origin discrimination under the statute.

However -- cases launched by bad clients still establish governing law. When Bibliotechnical (and Lawfare) launch a case like this and lose, they establish precedents that make life harder for entities with actual, non-concocted legal claims. One can easily imagine an actual company that does actual business and is actually harmed by being excluded from a job fair or whatnot suing for national origin discrimination, and the defense pointing to this case and saying "no no -- we're not excluding you because of national origin, we're excluding you because of the nation you're incorporated in, and that's totally fine!"

Ideally, the cases could be distinguished -- there is language in this opinion which suggests things would be different if BA plead connections to Israel that went beyond place-of-incorporation. But there's also language that is more sweeping in suggesting that, so long as the discriminator is targeting the company for its place of incorporation, no national origin discrimination can be found, period. The former, I think, is the better read; but the latter is absolutely available. And so a bad client makes, at best, very shaky law. Way to ruin it, guys.

Condemning Antisemitism Alone

The Senate just passed S. Res. 252, "A resolution unequivocally condemning the recent rise in antisemitic violence and harassment targeting Jewish Americans, and standing in solidarity with those affected by antisemitism." The resolution, spearheaded by Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), was broadly bipartisan and passed by voice vote.

I've heard very little about this resolution -- in particular, I've heard much less than I've heard complaints over the last few years that politicians don't condemn antisemitism or don't condemn antisemitism "alone" because they link it to condemnations of Islamophobia, racism, or other forms of oppression. I don't find the latter move as offensive as some do, but in any case this resolution is exclusively about antisemitism -- no "and all forms of racism" language here. I hope that the quietude around the resolution is not because certain persons prefer complaining about Jews allegedly being left to fend for ourselves around antisemitism than they do acknowledging when America's political institutions do, in fact, come to support us in the face of antisemitism.

In terms of specifics, the resolution expressly ties the recent surge in antisemitism to the surge in hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It also notes a Department of Homeland Security report that concludes that White Supremacist terrorists "will remain the most persistent and lethal threat" to domestic security. It cites instances of antisemitism by prominent politicians in Turkey and Pakistan relating to Israel, as well as the spread of COVID-19 related conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and distortion, and hate crime spikes. There could be more. There always could be more. But objectively speaking, this is a comprehensive condemnation of antisemitism as it manifests across the political and ideological spectrum.

I thank Senator Rosen for her leadership on this issue, and be grateful that it passed the Senate with seemingly little consternation or conflict. And hopefully, the next time we are tempted by the thought that America turns a blind eye to antisemitism or refuses to condemn it or refuses to condemn it "alone", we remember this resolution.

Between "One-Sided" and "Equating", and Other Curmudgeonly Thoughts

So there's another Ilhan Omar thing in the news. I'm in Portland, and having a very nice trip thank you very much, and most certainly do not have time to give this any real attention even though it is pushing all my curmudgeonly buttons.

The short version: Referring to a discussion she had with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken regarding ICC investigations in war crimes which included inquiries into cases involving the U.S., Israel, Hamas, Afghanistan, and the Taliban, Omar tweeted that:

We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. … We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”

This generated a public response from 12 Jewish Democrats who asked Omar to "clarify" her remarks:

Equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided. Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organizations that engage in terrorism at best discredits one’s intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice.

The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups. We urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify her words placing the US and Israel in the same category as Hamas and the Taliban.

And in turn, Rep. Omar provided said clarification:

On Monday, I asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken about ongoing International Criminal Court investigations. To be clear: the conversation was about accountability for specific incidents regarding those ICC cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel. I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial system.

Framed that way, I might have ventured that this was a success story. Rep. Omar issued a perhaps awkwardly worded tweet; she was asked to "clarify" her views; she did so. Huzzah!

But of course, life is never so simple, and so in the midst of this we had people making claims of antisemitism and Islamophobia and silencing and double-standards. This Is The Bad Place.

So -- a few thoughts:

Thought #1: A common refrain I've heard many times from pro-Israel sorts is that they're fine with criticizing Israel, of course they're fine with criticizing Israel, it's slanderous to say they're not fine with criticizing Israel; but the criticism can't be one-sided criticism, it needs to be clear that Hamas commits wrongs worth criticizing too. Which, sure, that makes sense. Except that it often seems that if one does criticize both sides, then the fact of criticizing both sides will itself be indicted -- this time for "equating" the two (this is the mirror image of those who assert that any mention of Hamas misdeeds represents an illegitimate blurring of the "power dynamics" between Israel and Palestine, acting as if there are "two sides" to the conflict).  Such persons don't really object to "one-sidedness" -- they love one-sidedness, they just want the one-side to be the other side.

Indeed, the cynic might wonder whether the only time criticism of Israel is legitimate is when it's one-sided, because only then do we get the litany of affirmations agreeing that "criticism" is legitimate so long as it's not "one-sided". If one comes out of the gate with the "two-sided" criticism, those invocations go mysteriously mute in favor of complaints about "equation". That inconsistency is a problem.

Thought #2: A lot of people have been sharing a Mehdi Hasan tweet where he compares what Omar said to Trump's infamous "You think our country's so innocent?" retort to condemnations of Russian human rights atrocities. As far as Republicans go, that's a fine hypocrisy argument; but as with all hypocrisy arguments it cuts both ways -- the standard Democratic view of Trump's statement was not to say "hey, when he's right he's right" but rather to condemn an alarming failure of perspective. And to Hasan's credit, he cops to this and says forthrightly that "once you take out all the nakedly partisan pointscoring and thinskinned patriotic chestbeating, Trump's point is right." But folks who aren't willing to go down that road should think more carefully about their arguments.

Thought #3: Someone suggested on Twitter that Omar, insofar as she calls out human rights violations from sources that would normally be taboo in American politics (such as, say, American violations), stands out for being consistent in a way other politicians aren't. But I'm not sure that's quite right. It's true that Omar calls out violations in places many other politicians don't, but its also true that Omar can be weirdly reticent to call out human rights violations in places many other politicians wouldn't hesitate (see: her "present" vote on the Armenian genocide resolution). So perhaps it's fairer to say she's inconsistent in an atypical way -- albeit an atypicality that is very much aligned with a particular style of leftist politics associated with her base.

Thought #4: We saw a lot of claims from Omar's defenders that the criticism of her on this issue was itself a case of racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, or these all in combination -- a double-standard where women who look like her and have her background are jumped on by mobs baying for blood whilst other politicians of different identities are given infinite benefit of the doubt. I have more sympathy for this argument than one might expect. But, having read the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism I now know that both claimed double-standards and seemingly excessive vitriol and attention devoted to members of or entities associated with marginalized groups are not valid signifiers of bigotry, even if one disagrees with them on the merits, and that asserting otherwise is itself an attempt to silence free speech. It's nice to have that cleared up.

Thought #5: I said I'm a curmudgeon above, but I'm a curmudgeon with a heart of gold, and what that means in practice is that what I'm most curmudgeonly about is what I see as unnecessary fighting. So my main takeaway is this: Omar's original point was not unreasonable. The Jewish Democrats letter asking for clarification was also not unreasonable. And Omar's response to that letter was also, also not unreasonable. Neither "side" did anything that was worth me spending a millisecond thinking about any of this during my first "trip" in a year and a half.

So, to everyone else, I'll quote a sadly disgraced former jurist who nonetheless was good with the bon mot: "The parties are advised to chill." And let me enjoy my Portland trip in peace, dammit!

We're Going To Die in Portland!

Tomorrow, Jill and I are headed off to Portland. This time it's just an onboarding/apartment hunting trip -- we're returning to Chicago on Sunday, and not actually moving until August. But by the end of this trip, I'll be officially started as an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark!

"We're Going To Die in Portland" refers to something Jill said shortly after I accepted the job at Lewis & Clark. We've been extremely mobile in our relationship, including one period where we lived in five cities in five years. That's because every single job I've had since graduating Carleton has been temporary -- either explicitly (as in a fixed term clerkship), or implicitly (as in my stint at Covington when I knew I would leave when an academic opportunity emerged). This job, by contrast, is of indefinite duration -- there is a very real chance we'll be spending the rest of our lives in Portland. And Jill expressed that realization by saying, in a voice of pure wonderment tinged even with a little excitement: "I'm going to die in Portland!"

The Trump Post-Election Play Comes to Israel

While by all appearances Bibi has lost control of the Prime Minister's post, it ain't over until someone else's butt is physically in the chair. And until that moment happens, Netanyahu is taking a page from Trump's book on how to lose an election: raging incitement, spurious claims of fraud, and ramping up violence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned violent rhetoric on “every side” of the political spectrum Sunday but also claimed that Israel’s incoming government, which will replace him, is the result of “the greatest electoral fraud in the history of the country.”

Netanyahu’s speech came as the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service warned of a rise in rhetoric that encourages violence. A pro-Netanyahu lawmaker compared two of his rivals to “terrorists” facing a “death sentence,” and members of the incoming coalition have received death threats in recent days.

At least one American Middle East analyst compared Netanyahu’s words to former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric ahead of Jan. 6. 

One of Netanyahu's allies, Itamar Ben-Gvir (you may remember him for having a portrait of the terrorist Baruch Goldstein hanging in his house) is promising to lead a march of right-wing extremists through Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem in the obvious hopes of provoking another spate of inter-ethnic violence that might derail the new government. The march has already been deemed illegal, but Ben-Gvir says he's going to exploit his parliamentary immunity (thanks, Bibi, for shepherding him into the Knesset) to lead it anyway.

Why is Bibi doing this? Well, obviously, he's desperate to hang on to power by any means necessary -- that's been clear for awhile. But the reason he's adopting these tactics is because Trump demonstrated that they could work. They didn't, in Trump's case, and they probably won't in Bibi's either. But they came far closer to working than anyone should be comfortable with -- close enough so that Bibi's willing to give them a shot, consequences be damned.

Bye Bye Bibi

Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, has officially announced he has successfully formed a governing coalition that will send long-reigning Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to the back benches. The coalition is an eclectic mix of left, center, and right-wing parties, with Lapid and Naftali Bennett rotating as PM (Bennett will go first). I have plenty of thoughts on the new government, but I've been resisting writing on it until it actually happened. Part of me still doesn't want to jinx it until a new butt is physically sitting in the Prime Minister's chair. But at this point, I think it's safe to say it's happening.

So -- what do you need to know about the new team running the show in Israel?

• Everyone and their grandma has said "don't be too quick to celebrate Bennett as PM -- he's even more right-wing than Bibi!" And at one level, they're right: anyone on the left is solely celebrating Bibi being out, not Bennett being in. That being said -- it's a big deal that Bibi is out, and that's very much worth celebrating.
• In 2021, is Bennett more right-wing than Bibi? I'm actually not sure. This was absolutely a true statement five years ago, but much of it was based off the fact that Bennett was expressly opposed to a Palestinian state while Bibi was occasionally only implicitly opposed to it. That seems like a relatively thin reed to me. And meanwhile, Bibi has surged further and further into the recesses of right-wing authoritarianism, which is part of why Bennett broke with him. Someone made the analogy that Bibi is like Trump and Bennett is like Pence -- who is more conservative of the two? Depends on how you measure it. Bennett's probably more of a true-believer, while Bibi is more of an opportunist -- but in his capacity as an opportunist Bibi broke through more taboos and barriers than many thought possible. I don't think it's clear-cut anymore.
• It's also possible -- not guaranteed, or even likely, but possible -- that Bennett will moderate now that he's in charge. As Ariel Sharon reportedly put it: "things look different from over here." The trajectory of right-wing leaders tacking to the center once they see things from the top is not uncommon in recent Israeli history -- see Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Tzipi Livni -- and perhaps Bennett will follow, if only by a few steps. I'm dubious, but it's not out of the question.
• Irrespective of Bennett's own politics, the bigger constraint on him is that his faction is certainly the most conservative member of the new governing coalition. There's a big difference between someone like Bennett being smack in the middle of the ideological pack (as he'd have been in a Bibi government) versus someone like Bennett being at the right-most edge of his cohort (as he is in this government).
• Speaking of, let's talk about the rest of the coalition. The biggest news: an Arab party will supporting the government from the inside, in what I believe is a first in Israeli history. Irony bit number one: it's the most conservative of the Arab parties -- the Islamist United Arab List, headed by Mansour Abbas. Irony bit number two: Bibi probably paved the way for this, as in his desperate search for 61 votes he courted the UAL, thus legitimizing such courtship for other parties as well.
• It is a big, big deal that an Arab party will be part of the government. In recent years, the Arab public in Israel has started flexing its muscle in unprecedented ways -- starting, ironically, with Bibi trying to lock them out of politics altogether by raising the electoral threshold. That prompted the diverse Arab blocs to unify into the Joint List, which catapulted them overnight into one of the largest factions in the entire Knesset. Kicking and screaming though they may have been, the Israeli center and left finally seems to have internalized that there's no path to power for them without some support from the Arab parties. And even though the UAL broke from the Joint List this past cycle, it managed to squeak back into the Knesset and now has a place in government. Priorities include increasing funding for Arab towns, recognizing Bedouin villages in the Negev, and ending underpolicing (yes, underpolicing) of Arab communities. For what it's worth, Bennett has always taken the view that Palestinian equality can be bought off with economic development. Morally repulsive, yes, but it means he likely will be perfectly receptive to these demands.
• Another significant accomplishment for Israel's Arab community -- Meretz's Issawi Frej looks set to become Minister of Regional Cooperation. This would, I believe, mark just the second time an Arab MK has had a ministry with portfolio in Israel's history. Likewise, Pnina Tamano-Shata, a member of the Ethiopian Beta Israel community, looks to be on tap to be Minister of Immigrant Absorption -- and position that is important both substantively and symbolically for her community.
• Two other minister positions worth noting. Labor leader Merav Michaeli -- perhaps her party's last, best hope at staying relevant -- will be Transportation Minister. That may not seem like a big deal, but settler leaders are in a panic that Michaeli won't approve various new highways slashing through the West Bank to connect far-flung settlements with Israel proper. Good -- let them stew. In less happy, though inevitable, news, Bennett's number two, Ayelet "Eau d'Fascism" Shaked will be heading the Interior Ministry.
• So much has happened in Israel that we've all almost forgotten why Bibi was fighting like a rabid weasel to stay in charge. It's not (just) because he's power-hungry -- it's that he's under indictment, and was desperate to have an immunity law passed that could save him and his wife from prison. That's not happening now. Shed a tear if you can.
• Aside from Bibi, who else is on the outside looking in? Most importantly, the fascists from Otzma Yehudit and National Union that Bibi recruited to try and shore up his right-flank -- thank goodness. But also the Haredi parties, Shas and UTJ. These two parties had historically been ideologically "flexible" and so typically found themselves in most government coalitions -- give them the rabbinate, army exemptions, and subsidies, and they were perfectly happy to go along with whoever was in charge. But in the past few years they have more overtly aligned themselves with the political right, and the result is that now they're on the outs facing a government coalition that may be the most inclined towards supporting religious pluralism Israel has ever seen. The prospect of substantive reforms along this axis is genuinely exciting. And it's also possible that some time in the wilderness will inspire the Shas and UTJ chieftains to rethink whether going all-in with Israel's right-wing is to their benefit.

Ultimately, I have two main takeaways. One is to keep expectations in check. This is not a "left-wing" government, it's not going to revolutionize Israel, and it's unlikely to make significant headway in bringing peace and justice for Palestinians. But the second is that this is a real and material step forward along many dimensions, and can be legitimately celebrated. There's a branch of the commentariat eeyoring about this development mostly because they are ideologically committed to the notion that nothing that happens in Israel can be good news. They are wrong -- this is good news. It's not spectacular, it's not paradise, but it's good news, and can be celebrated as good news.

What To Over-Extrapolate From the NM-01 Special Election

Democrats easily held New Mexico's first congressional district in a special election tonight, with state Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D) currently leading state Sen. Mark Moores (R) by a 62-34 margin. The seat was vacant after former Rep. Deb Haaland was appointed Secretary of the Interior.

The result is not a surprise. The NM-01 is a solid blue seat. But in the grand election coverage tradition of over-extrapolating from a single data point, what can we learn?

The reason people were paying attention to this district was not because anyone seriously expected the GOP to flip the seat. It was the margins that mattered, and in particular, whether Democratic turnout would fall off with Donald Trump no longer serving as our common enemy (the other question was whether Republicans could effectively leverage a "rising crime is the fault of defund the police" narrative). Mid-term and off-cycle election turnout has long been the Democratic bête noire, with the conventional wisdom being that Team Blue struggled more to get its voters to the non-presidential polls compared to the GOP. Hence, Dave Wasserman set the following benchmarks for what should count as a "win" in this blue seat:

• Win by >15: Dems should be very happy
• Win by 10-15: about what we might expect
• Win by <10: sign of a Dem turnout problem post-Trump

For comparison's sake, Biden won this district by 23 in 2020, and Haaland (with the benefit of incumbency and Biden's coattails) won it by 16.

Stansbury is currently up by 24 -- not just blowing Wasserman's benchmarks out the water, but overperforming Haaland and at the moment even Biden (it's possible these margins might narrow a bit as the last few votes come in).

This makes me wonder if we might be missing a shift in the relevant dynamics. Is it still the case that Democrats are disadvantaged by off-cycle turnout dynamics? With the almost complete transition of party polarization away from class and towards education, I wonder if the opposite may be true -- if Democrats might start being better-positioned to hang onto their voters in low-turnout elections (high-education voters also tend to be high-turnout voters). I've been flagging this possibility for awhile now, and count this as another data point. One bonus bit of irony is that this likely means many of the GOP voter suppression techniques will actually end up backfiring -- doing more to deter their own base than the Black Democratic voters they're so nakedly targeting.

In addition, I think it's worth asking whether Trump on the ballot was doing more to boost GOP turnout compared to Democratic turnout -- and, in turn, whether the lack of Trump topping the ticket will see more of a red fall-off than a blue one. In the above post, I noted how the needle barely moved on Texas in 2020 not because Democrats failed to get their voters out -- they did, and then some -- but because Trump managed to match increased blue turnout step-for-step. Take Trump out the equation, and it's far from clear the GOP can rally its base as effectively.

All of this points -- and again, "points" is very much about over-extrapolation -- to the GOP being the one to struggle mightily as we head into 2022. Midterms are often a referendum on the presidential incumbent, and Biden's approval line has been ramrod straight throughout his term at around 53%. If he can hold onto that, and benefit from a post-pandemic recovery, he and the Democrats will be very well-positioned for a good outcome next November.

Oh, Farts

I've studiously refrained from commenting on that Tablet article by Eve Barlow (in lieu of a link, please send flowers to the gravesite that marks Tablet's death as a reputable journalistic enterprise). I've been blocked by Barlow since before it was cool (as best I can tell, it's because she was unhappy that I revealed the fabrications in a different "that Tablet article"), and suffice to say I do not find her especially impressive as a public thinker. She has plenty of bad takes, and she has nobody to blame but herself that people recognize her bad takes as bad.

Moreover (this is someone else's point, but alas I can't find it), I'm old enough to remember when people were aghast at the disrespect shown when immigrant detention centers were referred to as concentration camps; those persons seem oddly less perturbed at describing social media harassment as a "pogrom". It is hardly an accident -- but still embarrassing -- that here, of all places, some amount of hyperbole or metaphor drawing on the well of violent antisemitic oppression is accepted.

But having said all that, I have been a bit uncomfortable with how this discourse is being played out. For starters, we're seeing a clean violation of my ninth rule of good internet citizenship:

Resist pile-ons. Yes, accountability is important. And yes, each individual contribution to the pile-on would typically (not always -- see death threats) be proportionate and reasonable if isolated and placed in the context of an individual, face-to-face encounter. But aggregated together, they quickly can spiral out of control, and frequently magnify all the internet's worst qualities.

That's definitely in play here. Yes, Barlow is a deeply unsympathetic actor. But eventually, wave after wave of people bombarding here with farting puns and icons and whatever else really does cease to become "accountability" or "critique" and just turns into a harassment campaign. Likewise, I'm sure that anyone whose name starts with an "-ar" sound has gotten a few stupid "fart" puns from some of the internet's more juvenile actors.* But the difference between a couple stray morons who can be easily shrugged off and harassment is quantity, and there are people who should know better who are eliding that distinction.

Most importantly, there is a great risk -- I think it's already happening -- of people functionally sending a green light to a particular form of style of antisemitic harassment. There are, it should not be controversial to say, plenty of trolls online who like nothing better than to harangue and harass Jewish public figures. And such persons are very much on the look out for styles of harassment which will garner them praise, or at least defense. If there's a way that they can make Jews miserable and be lauded for it, they'll seize upon it faster than you can say "status-production". There is little doubt that this is driving a non-trivial portion of the pile-on -- the raw glee that one can indulge in the decadence of making a public Jewish figure miserable as a Jew, and feel righteous in doing so, and be lauded as righteous for doing so. Does it help that Barlow is an unsympathetic figure? Sure. Does that suffice to explain the totality of what's happening here? No.

And -- putting aside the point that Barlow, as unsympathetic as she is, doesn't deserve harassment -- the utility of a mode of harassment that gets lauded rather than condemned will not stay confined to the likes of Barlow. While I expect this particular moment to peter out sooner rather than later, it certainly was not hard to spot "fart" responses targeting other prominent Jews as a means of demeaning them or denigrating their experiences with antisemitism. Some of the targeted Jews were also raising hyperbolic or foolish points. Others were being entirely reasonable. But the commonality, the trigger that made this response responsive was solely that the targets were Jewish or Jewish-identified, and the belief by their "interlocutors" that if they jumped on them in this way, they'd be immunized from any condemnation or critique. That should worry us.

The fact is, the mechanics of internet harassment and brigading campaigns are not new or novel at this point, nor is the easy dismissal of them by calling them "juvenile" or "just words", or insisting on the  recipient's need to "grow a thicker skin". In all cases, there will be a mix-in of explicit calls for violence or open ethnic, racial, or gendered slurs; but these are the accent points upon a base of "replies" which do not do any of that, replies which, taken as individual, can and should be easily dismissed, but as part of a larger whole and as a constant drumbeat, become intolerable. It happens to people we like, and it happens to people we don't like. But no matter who the proximate target is, we should be very, very leery of cheering it on.

* The juvenile nature of the retort is part of its insulation -- it feels ridiculous to treat it with any sort of seriousness, and that includes writing this post. This is, in a way, a very literal application of Sartre's warning about the antisemites:

They know that their remarks are frivolous ... But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. 

When "All" Isn't Enough

The purpose behind "All Lives Matter" was not to include "Black Lives Matter", but in more universalistic fashion. To the contrary, if "All Lives Matter" ever was understood as including Black lives, it would be a failure as a slogan. "All Lives Matter" exists entirely as a reflection of conservative rage at the idea that Black people and other minorities might feel included and valued; if a motto of that form ever actually did start to carry the public meaning of including non-White Americans, the polemicists who had been pushing it yesterday would tomorrow rebel against it just as hard.

Case in point: Marathon County, Wisconsin, which just rejected a resolution which would have declared it "a community for all" (H/T):

“When we choose to isolate and elevate one group of people over another, that’s discrimination,” said Supervisor Craig McEwen, a retired police officer who is white [and voted against the resolution].

[...] 

The “community for all” story began last summer when a small group of county officials began drafting a resolution they hoped would acknowledge disparities faced by local people of color. The original title, No Place for Hate, was deemed too inflammatory, so it was renamed A Community for All. 

[...]

“They’re creating strife between people labeling us as racist and privileged because we’re white,” Supervisor Arnold Schlei, a 73-year-old retired veal farmer who has been on the county board for 11 years, said in an interview. “You can’t come around and tell people that work their tails off from daylight to dark and tell them that they got white privilege and they’re racist and they’ve got to treat the Hmongs and the coloreds and the gays better because they’re racist. People are sick of it.”

He and others opposing the resolution argued that to acknowledge disparities faced by people of color would tilt social advantages to their benefit. The word “equity,” which was included in the resolution, served as a trigger for many, who made the false claim that memorializing it as a goal would lead to the county’s taking things from white people to give them to people of color.

Those opposed to the resolution made far-reaching claims about its potential impact. The local Republican Party chairman, Jack Hoogendyk, said the resolution would lead to “the end of private property” and “race-based redistribution of wealth.” Others have argued that there is, in fact, no racism in Marathon County, and even if there was, it’s not the county board’s business to do anything about it.

"A community for all" is semantically virtually identical to "all lives matter". The only difference is not in the words, but in the publicly understood meaning -- the former understood as a measure signaling the inclusion of non-White members, the latter understood as a slogan reacting against the inclusion of Black people. And that difference made all the difference: even though its rhetoric was explicitly a compromise for those for whom "No Place for Hate" was a bridge too far, "A community for all" was opposed with the same fury and fervency as Black Lives Matter was.

And then they have temerity to say racism doesn't exist.

One Quiet Night

Imagine 24 hours of perfect peace and quiet in Israel and Palestine.

By that, I mean a full day with no new provocations, hostilities, or attacks. No rockets, no sniper bullets, no bombings, no stone throwing. No settlement construction, no police raids, no land seizures, no evictions. No riots, no clashes. Everyone can go to their holy sites, their farms, or their workplaces without molestation. The school lesson plans have no incitement, the sermons are about tolerance and co-existence, the radio broadcasts are exclusively on anodyne and boring topics. All interactions between military agents and civilians are civil and courteous. For one full, blissful day and night, everything is peaceful.

It is cliché to say that both Israelis and Palestinians have valid claims of justice that are not, in the status quo, being met by one another. But in our envisioned quiet night, I think one could fairly say that all the tangible valid Israeli claims would be met. Everything that they could justly ask for, they would have -- at least for that day. Maybe not express recognition "as a Jewish state" -- but I'm inclined to think that, in a world where there is complete peace and quiet and no provocations or attacks on Israel of any sort, it doesn't really matter what one's neighbors call you (as Abbas put it, Israel can call itself whatever it wants -- what business is it of mine?). Now, it is of course true that justice occurring for one day does not guarantee its occurrence in perpetuity -- maybe the next day the rockets come back. But at least for that 24 hour period, Israelis would be living in a state of affairs that is, as far as their interests are concerned, just.

Is the same true for Palestinians? The answer is no. Even in our day and night of quiet, Palestinians would still be an unjust situation. They'd still be under occupation. They'd still have no democratic rights in the state that is sovereign over their lives. Those injustices persist even if nobody is actively doing anything new. They are not like the injustices of rocket fire or suicide bombings or even hateful sermons -- they do not require discrete acts of renewed provocations. They simply are. And so while certainly, this day would be better than many other days, it would not represent justice for Palestinians, even within the narrow confines of just those 24 hours.

Why does this matter? Well, for one, it illuminates that while peace is a necessary component of justice, it is not a sufficient one. Simply getting to "peace" -- our one quiet night -- would not in fact necessarily lead to justice for the Palestinian people. If the status quo freezes in place, and from here on out nobody did anything more to make anything worse, what would be frozen would be an unjust state of affairs. This is why so many of those rallying in Israel right now for "peace" are doing so expressly by saying we cannot return to "normal". "Normal" -- insofar as it refers to the status quo, but with quiet -- is not justice. We need a new normal.

There is a related point as well, that's perhaps more uncomfortable. The logic of the above says that in those moments of peace between Israel and Palestine, for however long they last, Israel will have what it wants and deserves, but Palestine will still lack what it wants and deserves. But if Israel has what it wants -- if, from its vantage, the status quo is perfectly fine -- will it be willing to step out and give Palestine what it deserves? For many years, the dogma of the pro-Israel community was "yes, of course." This is the dogma of "we just need a partner." This is the dogma of "as soon as the Arabs put down their weapons, there will be peace."

I don't think we can be so sure. The past few years should give any reasonable observer pause before asserting that will be the case with confidence. Indeed, if your thought to the above hypothetical quiet night was to minimize it because "well, they can always renew their attacks tomorrow", one shows the infirmity of the belief. There will always be the possibility that hostilities renew -- there is no peace deal that can guarantee that away. And so to the extent one forestalls justice until it can be guaranteed that there will never be conflict anytime in the future, one is essentially supporting the indefinite delay of justice.