Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gaza and the anti-semitism of fools

2024; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s10624-024-09726-y

1573-0786

Anthony Marcus, Jaume Franquesa,

Middle East Politics and Society

As of May Day 2024 students at hundreds of universities across the world have protested against their universities' investment in and support for the Israeli mass killing machine in Gaza.In the United States where almost 2500 students have been arrested encampments have been the chosen vehicle for protest.These young comrades have often lost their seats at the university and been banned from the campus housing they depend upon.Many have been doxxed, publicly humiliated, and called anti-semites and Jew-haters on the internet and in the news media -for their opposition to the murder of nearly 50,000 Gazans.Many of those accused are practising Jews and people who identify as being of Jewish ancestry or descended from the historically Yiddish speaking peoples of the Tsar's empire.The irony of this is not lost on us, but seems to be generally lost, ignored, or dismissed by most of the major news outlets -even those that have done stories on anti-Zionist Jews holding Passover seders in tent encampments.The first thing that must be commented on is that it is no mystery that students are protesting.This is a generational cohort facing a growing crisis of capitalism, increased inter-imperialist conflict, declining standards of living, an unprecedented rise in labour militancy, and rapidly growing subjective socialist consciousness -even in the historically anti-communist US social formation.The pandemic seems to have been a catalyst or trigger event that has transformed quantity into quality, and made us acutely aware of the contradictions described by Antonio Gramsci's famous quote "the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."The mass murder in Gaza manifests the work of monsters who have a long and unrelenting nationalist history of eliminationist abuse against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Amharic and Tigrinya speaking Jewish communities, and Yiddish speakers (the majority descent group in Israel) whose language was famously banned for public use during the first (with apologies to Ferdinand Kronawetter and August Bebel who are credited with first describing anti-semitism as "the socialism of fools")