Recently, my town’s continued efforts towards tackling the bigotry that’s been welling up recently met with stark and ominous--if predictable--pushback. A few days ago, the city held a public meeting to discuss how to respond to the anti-Semitic and racist events of late--they acknowledged racism more prominently this time, which seemed promising. Unfortunately, that attempt to be inclusive of more people facing intolerance ended up sparking some “issues hierarchy,” as I might call it. Our issues are more important than your issues. Our pain is more severe than yours. Our voices need to be heard more than yours. You know the drill.
This wasn’t the only narrative that emerged, but it was a strain that rang out more clearly this time, as I watched the recording of the meeting, than I had noticed in the past.
Since the recent surge of anti-Semitic graffiti and insults, the atmosphere felt to me a bit like treading on eggshells. Issues around anti-Semitism evoke strong emotional reactions, as any incident of bigotry does, but also touches a nerve of defensiveness. Too frequently, anti-Semitism is equated automatically with criticizing Israel, and Jewish voices and others are all obscured by that static.
It is probably not invalid to say that the city and school administrations’ response to longtime anti-Semitism (even here, with a one-third Jewish population) has been weak and ineffectual. Certainly, accountability and transparency are questionable. If our record on bullying is any indication, then I can say from personal observation that our bureaucracy is deeply pockmarked with indifference and systemic problems. However, the issues at hand here are not merely that anti-Semitism was tolerated quietly until recently, and that the effectiveness of the city’s response can be doubted. The deeper problem that this represents is that all the forms of bigotry that people in my community have experienced were pushed under the rug and left to fester untreated. Trying to bring those other problems to light is not to minimize anti-Semitism. And to contract the scope of the problem to focus only on anti-Semitism and the victimization of one group of people is to minimize, ignore, and perpetuate other forms of prejudice.
It was disturbing and shocking to see residents of my town stand to denounce the attention given to racism, or assert that the main issue and only deserving point of focus here and now was anti-Semitism. The anger and self-righteousness that was stirred up is telling: the outbreak of anti-Semitism here is not special or isolated. It was bad and painful, to be sure, but a toxic atmosphere is not anathema to the status quo here, no matter our shiny and progressive surface. The tipping point and the trigger for these dialogues about how to tackle our problems happened to be anti-Semitic hate crimes--but that does not mean that the only issue we need to resolve is anti-Semitic prejudice. The hierarchy of importance of oppressions ensured that other glaring and appalling incidents of racism and Islamophobia, not to mention the general undercurrents of sexism and homophobia, were not granted enough weight to be our tipping point. That in itself speaks to how serious it is that we deal with all forms of bigotry we face.
As one Black parent who spoke up at the town meeting said, there were no emails out to parents after racist incidents took place. There was no outcry and call for soul-searching. Schoolwide discussions and town meetings were not convened. For these conversations to happen now, people with enough power and privilege needed to be affected by bigotry. This town has a far more Jewish character than it does one that is reliably welcoming and respectful towards people of color. The acts of anti-Semitism that we have experienced recently--hateful graffiti and slurs--are reprehensible, but they do not render their victims more oppressed or more worthy of justice than other people suffering from intolerance and systems of oppression.
However, because anti-Semitism is a trigger word for pro-Israel forces--who demonstrated their strength, vitriol, and fearmongering at the town meeting--incidents that target Jews become conflated with attacks on Israel. This is disingenuous in that it bulls forward a blatantly pro-Israel agenda when Israel is irrelevant in this local issue, and in that this argument implies that Israel stands for all Jews, and that all Jews stand for Israel, and an attack on one is an attack on the other.
That the pro-Israel lobby was frustrated specifically that anti-racism had been given a voice at the table as well is also a significant observation. First, the our-issues-trump-your-issues sentiment in itself is often racist and also unhelpful. As a few people at the meeting pointed out, trying to build this hierarchy of oppressions construct walls when what we need is to strive for cooperation and understanding.
Second, addressing racism can set off particular defensiveness with Zionist folks, because the state of Israel is in many ways predicated on racism. Both its portrayal as a Jewish state--in which anyone not Jewish then becomes Other--and its self-promotion as the only free and genuine democracy in the Middle East--setting Israel apart from those backward Arabs, so to speak--are racist positions. Racism is an uncomfortable subject better left alone when trying to defend a racist state. The US also shies away from real conversations about race and racial policy, because again, it is a subject that could raise questions some would rather not hear.
Third, tunnel-vision outrage at anti-Semitism that channels itself into defensiveness of Israel does not lend itself well to intersectionality and addressing all oppressions. Particularly since, as stated, Israel relies on racist policies itself, and in addition regards with hostility interracial coalitions in solidarity with Palestinian rights, such as the Black-Palestinian solidarity movement that is burgeoning (and released a powerful statement and video last year). Indeed, the similarities between the struggles for Black and Palestinian liberation are striking: both communities, for instance, may experience the deprivation of water rights, due process, and safe homes, and both struggle against the violence of an occupying military or paramilitary force (I’m thinking militarized police in communities of color in the US). Perhaps there is a fear is that too much attention on or too close an analysis of racism here might provide an environment more likely to be critical of the systemic racism in Israeli society as well. Or the backlash against intersectionality could simply come from a desire to prioritize anti-Semitism, which is so often co-opted as a platform to promote and defend Israel.
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My town’s relationship with blatant and hostile Zionism is neither short nor benign, but to paint anti-Semitism as the core issue we face--and especially to conflate it, as I have said, with anti-Zionism--would conceal this. While one man at the meeting was railing against supposed pro-Palestinian propaganda in our schoolbooks and an alleged “leftist alliance with radical Islamists,” if I recall correctly, I could not help remembering that teachers at one of our high schools have received death threats for teaching history through a lens deemed too sympathetic to Palestine. Our schools also have ties to pro-Zionist organizations (particularly Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a rabidly Zionist and anti-Islam organization, which some of the disruptors at the town meeting belong to), which encourage reports of anti-Israel going-ons in the schools, and inflame Islamophobia. Glaringly absent, as far as I could tell, from the meeting was any mention at all of Islamophobia, despite the high visibility (in my observation, anyhow) of that type of bigotry and hate speech. This is a significant omission, and perhaps quite a strategic one, in order to focus on anti-Semitism at the expense of addressing other religious prejudice.
Why all this fervor and agitation is being stirred up now is not, I think, because Massachusetts in particular is caught is some kind of unprecedented whiplash of prejudice and hate crimes. The roots and the timing reach beyond our state. Some of it--the hair-trigger defensiveness of the Zionist side--may stem from continued friction and strife over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions (BDS) movement, which, in unintentional testament to its power and potential, is facing crackdowns from multiple levels of government and academia, including at many schools right here in Boston. .
But a great deal of the tension, of the hate crimes, of the fear, is spawned by the fear- and hatemongering happening at the national level of politics, most remarkably with Donald Trump’s brand of reckless incitement. The hate speech and tension in the US has been amplified to an unusually shameless and publicized degree. The sweep of anti-LGBTQ laws across the country, further crackdowns on reproductive rights, violence and racism on full display at Trump rallies--are these kinds of trends related to the uptick in anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry on display at my school? Is the national culture of anger and prejudice trickling down to the educational system? At times, this country looks a bit like a powder keg and a bit like a surreal nightmarescape, and the actions of my peers may be reflecting that.
The response to the incidents of bigotry or hate reflects the volatility of this moment as well, it must be noted. Hillary Clinton, for example, displayed her remarkably bald Zionism and fearmongering at a recent speech to AIPAC, and the amplification of her rhetoric may well be stoking the kind of flames that erupted in my town a couple days ago.
I’ve heard that hardline Zionist positions hold less sway among youth, and the same goes for Clinton’s campaign and ideology. These trends may also have been visible at the town meeting as a marked generational divide. The students who spoke at the meeting--even those who I know to lean towards the Zionist narrative--were far more rational, eloquent, respectful, intersectional, and thoughtful than many of the adults who took the microphone.
One of the sadder things about this devolvement of the bigotry situation here, of course, is how much of the potential conversation will be lost if the Zionists succeed in commandeering it away from an (already flawed) intersectional narrative. Cynical I may be about whether my town would ever seriously address or fundamentally change the culture that keeps racism, sexism, and other oppressions simmering, but any opportunity for change that might have arisen from the recent attention to our fault lines could be lost if the conversation is hijacked to focus solely on anti-Semitism--and on Israel. Since attitudes here tend towards the pro-Israel line anyway, this would be only a perpetuation or intensification of the unhealthy status quo.
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