I guess this video from now former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder is okay. But note how Snyder never connects the dots to how come there were so many Jewish college students who took part in the protests. There were and are a whole lot, Professor Synder. Where were YOU during the encampments? Where was YOUR voice on what Revisionist Zionism in Israel has done over so many decades of power? There is an element of Pastor Niemoller here as the right-wing part of the establishment and elite powers finally came for the universities themselves--and only now he is speaking up on the topic of antisemitism relating to but still not touching the very essence of the problems of Zionism as practiced in Israel against an indigenous people.
As far as I saw, Snyder never spoke up about the wrongful conflation of Zionism and antisemitism. And despite his learning and knowledge, he missed how a belief in Zionist causes can go hand-in-hand with antisemitism. It is not the opposite of antisemitsm. See this critique of a book Snyder wrote over a decade ago where the reviewer shows how Snyder missed how Revisionist Zionism in Poland was a vehicle for Polish Christian antisemitism--not a philo-semitism.* Worse, in an October 2022 lecture, Snyder was expressly willing to designate Putin's war crimes in Ukraine as genocide. But somehow, Snyder has been missing in action regarding what is actually a more obvious case of Israeli genocide against Palestinians under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of genocide.
When I watched Synder's new video and read the transcript, I was struck by how ultimately how hollow it is because of his continued inability to understand how politically-oriented Zionists, not only Jabotinsky and the Revisionists, sold Zionism to European and British leaders as a colonial project--and were adamant against those relatively few cultural Zionists who envisioned a multi-cultural or binational state for Palestine (Rabbi Judah Magnes, philosopher Martin Buber, Jewish Biblical scholar Morris Jastrow, among more than a few others).
Yes, Timothy Snyder. You've been great at sounding the alarm regarding Trump. But, really, man, get your ass out of Hebrew school mythology about Zionism and the State of Israel. It ain't our religion. It's a political ideology attempting to respond to 19th and 20th-Century European Christian-based antisemitism, at best. At worst, even the "good guys" like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann have been exposed as bad guys when Israeli historians began going through their review of the archives.
The only one I will defend is Herzl because, while he may have written The Jewish State in the late 1890s and was the leading founder of the Zionist movement, his novel, published around the time of his early death, New Old Land, posited a binational state where Arabs and Jews from Europe and elsewhere lived in harmony, equality, and peace. Herzl was a true visionary who sensed that building Zionism as a colonial project could lead to precisely what we see today. I wish American pro-Zionist Jews in particular would read the then-hopeful book from the mid-1990s by the now late Israeli Labour Party leader, Shimon Peres, The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodore Herzl in Israel. Peres went deep into the Herzl novel and why it needed to be resurrected from the dusty shelves of a privileged few who knew it.
* It is stunning to me that such a renowned historian as Snyder missed how Zionist ideology is premised on the immutability of antisemitism, and helps explain why at various points, early Zionists through the end of the 1930s, tried to forge agreements with antisemites, including the German Nazi leadership. Wikipedia is actually very good on the idea of the overlap between Zionist ideology and its acceptance of the assumptions that drive antisemitism. Joseph Massad's polemical essay is, notwithstanding the polemicism, worth reading to take us through today, particularly why it is not odd for Israel to cultivate relationships with far-right and antisemitic politicians throughout what used to be called "Eastern" Europe (at one time "Central" Europe). Most sadly, based upon this series of tweets, I am not sure Snyder is still getting what is wrong with his perspective. He is cogent in recognizing how Trump is following a playbook that overlaps with Hitler and Mussolini. However, he seems oblivious in how Zionist ideology and Israel's leadership are ultimately in league with the thinking and policies that undergird right-wing, nationalist, and antisemitic ideologies.
