Don't Call It a Jihad
It's been here for years.
How are intelligent, compassionate, normal people driven to a hatred of Israel unparalleled in ferocity? For months, pro-Israel Jews have been kept awake by this question night after night. Is it the DEI complex, which inverted our understanding of the world into oppressor/oppressed categories? Is it Marxism/socialism/anarchy, a vision of class revolt and social reorganization in opposition to capitalism and imperialism? Is it a generation of empty, under-educated, over-privileged souls looking for fulfillment in a social movement? Is it just group think? Left with the answers falling through their fingers like sand, some of the best Jewish writers and thinkers are left with one meager, beleaguered answer: anti-Semitism, the world’s oldest hatred.
But the simplicity of this answer doesn’t land. People want the free and democratic state of Israel to be dissolved because people have always hated Jews? Is that it?
All of these explanations are true and intertwined. But there is something else. Watching campus occupiers form human chains to keep other students out, watching them tear up Israeli flags, hearing them scream for intifada, watching as they devolve into chaotic outbursts of intimidation and violence lends another explanation.
Talking about the role of Islam and Arab influence in this conflict is a third rail; touch it and risk electrocuting your whole career and maybe more. As hard as it is to admit, the connective tissue driving this vitriol stems from the Islamic ideology of jihad and a fanatic obsession with Arab nationalism.
Jihad is a fluid concept with a variety of meanings, from an internal personal struggle to the murder of infidels and the conquest of land. In the eternal fight against Israel, religious and the national are bound up together. As historian Benny Morris writes in 1948:
The assault of 1947-1948 was an expression of the Islamic Arabs’ rejection of the West and its values as well as a reaction to what it saw as a European colonialist encroachment against sacred Islamic soil. There was no understanding (or tolerance) of Zionism as a national liberation movement of another people…. Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders. This is a mistake. The 1948 War, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest, a divinely ordained necessity. (p. 394)
At prestigious American universities, including ones funded by US taxpayers, slogans referencing holy war echo through the halls and across grassy lawns: “the only solution is intifada revolution,” “we don’t want two states, we want all of ’48.” Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” translate in Arabic to, “From the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab.”
These slogans are rooted in an Islamic worldview that has no room for Jewish power. For thousands of years, Christians and Jews of Muslim Arab lands were subjected to what might be best described as a sort of Jim Crow legal system. How these disciminatory laws were applied depended on time and place, but as a rule Jews lived as second-class citizens, often despised and subjected to a menagerie of humiliations. Jews generally could not wear green, could not walk on the right side of a Muslim, could not ride a horse, could not build houses taller than Muslim homes, could not repair or build new synagogues, and had to pay an additional tax. Up until the Jews of Yemen left in 1949, they had not been allowed to wear shoes.1
At a time of crumbling empires, the retreat of European colonialism, and rising nationalist spirit, the idea that the lowly Jews could have self-determination on a tiny patch of former Ottoman soil was out of the question. So much so that in November of 1943, Haj Amin el Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, visited Berlin to praise the Germans. “But most of all, [the Germans] have definitely solved the Jewish problem…[which makes] our friendship with Germany not a provisional one, dependent on conditions, but a permanent and lasting friendship based on mutual interest,” he said. Later, the mufti went on Radio Berlin to announce, “Arabs, rise up as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.”2
No one should be surprised that Hamas “militants” unloaded bloodied hostages and disfigured corpses in Gaza to the undulating chant of “Allahu Akbar.” Bear in mind that Hamas, in Arabic, is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement. They work alongside Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
While young activists shy away from condoning Hamas and PIJ in speech, if not in actuality, they lean ideologically toward the more Marxist/socialist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is responsible for suicide bombings, hijackings, one assassination and, while it’s been on the decline since the fall of the Soviet Union, the PFLP has aligned with Iran and fought alongside Hamas and PIJ in Gaza and is a designated terrorist organization by the United States and Europe. Yet the PFLP’s ideology of “decolonization,” violent liberation, and a “democratic” single state of Palestine with equal rights is celebrated by the socialist sector, and it explains why so many socialist organizations have been energized by October 7th.
The PFLP even appears to have representation on the University of Washington campus.
This week, a new group called the United Front for Liberation got attention on the front page of the Seattle Times for staging a new encampment on the UW quad. This group, which is also referred to as the United Front for Palestinian Liberation, first posted on Instagram on December 21, 2023. Its logo is remarkably similar to the PFLP’s.
This Instagram post, from Super UW, celebrates the founder of the PFLP, George Habash. Note the quote attributed to Che Guevara:
Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
Just a reminder that the PFLP is a designated terrorist group.
While the United Front’s mission is boilerplate American college student Marxism (“Inspired and motivated by the Palestinian struggle, we weave these methods into a tapestry of change—acknowledging that the liberation of Palestine is intricately linked to the liberation of all, and that the blueprint to global liberation lies in the successful liberation of Palestine”), it sometimes crosses over into religious territory.
Where are these groups coming from? They sprout up, disappear, and reemerge as something else. One thing we can say with certainty is that the ideology has been germinating in loamy American soil for at least a quarter century. The non-negotiable Arab position of one state, no Israel, yes to armed resistance, has been irrigated into American universities by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP started in 2001, though its leadership can be traced through American Muslims for Palestine and the defunct Holy Land Foundation, which was found to have been providing material support to Hamas in 2008.
SJP has steadfastly pushed a strategy that resonates with groups like Hamas and the PFLP: demonization and isolation of Israel, no compromise, no normalization, justification of violence, and the ultimate dissolution of Israel. Using the language of liberation and intentionally working to disentangle Judaism from Zionism, SJP and its allies are seeing the returns come in. This week, both Portland State University and The Evergreen State College started to take the protestors’ demands seriously and enter negotiations to divest from Israel. Meanwhile, this video from the Portland Police shows what the PSU library looked like after protesters were cleared out and arrested. In addition to extensive damage, they found improvised weapons.
On the flip side, the AMP and national SJP just got hit this week with a lawsuit accusing them of being Hamas affiliates. Curiously, Columbia’s dormant SJP chapter announced its comeback not on October 7th, but at 6:52pm October 6th. Assuming it was posted in Eastern Standard Time, that would have early morning in Israel, shortly before the attacks began.
Notice the irony of the protests: ceasefire now; no peace on stolen land. Ceasefire now; all resistance is justified. Do they want the war to end or continue? Those who have died are considered not losses to be mourned, but martyrs to be honored. They are holy. How could a progressive anti-war effort be so comfortable with the idea that death is not a tragedy but a goal, and a sanctified one at that?
But it’s not ironic. The national quest is intertwined with the religious quest, and each so-called liberation movement is forged from the fire of violence. The rage is the point. And the target of rage is the Jew, the interloping thief, abandoned by God twice, a caricature carried in the back pocket of history, a card ready to be pulled as needed. “Go back to where you came from” does not refer to a place. It refers to a status. Good Jews know their place. Jews who step out of line are called Zionists. They deserve what they get.
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Shoutouts
Mazel tov to Deva Hasson on joining the Samis Board of Trustees and to David Ellenhorn on becoming the new Samis Board Chair. —Samis Foundation staff
Sending appreciation, support and koach to the team at Hillel at the University of Washington. So thankful for your thoughtful, steady and important leadership, especially at times like this. —Lisa Colton
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Happy Jewish American Heritage Month from the Washington State Jewish Historical Society. Make history every day! —Lisa Kranseler
Shoutout to Karen Treiger and the organizers and readers for the Women/Girls' Shir Hashirim - Shabbat Chol Hamoed Pesach. —Linda Clifton
Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, p. 381.
Quoted in ibid., p. 390.
Well done. Read it 3 times. Worthy of a reprint to a broader audience. Atlantic or NY Times mag.
Thank you Emily for your willingness to call out radical Islam and the various manifestations that have come to campus. The Arab hatred of Jews in the land of Israel has been brewing for over a century. They have been raised through their teaching to look down at Jews and treat them as inferior. The fact that students on campus have fallen for this calumny shows how pervasive it has been in academe since Edward Said and his book Orientalism if not before. This is not about land or peace, it is about as you say pushing Jews back in their place in history. Try as they might this will not happen. The slogans Globalize the Intifada and Intifada Revolution speak to a hate that is beyond only Jews.
The West is next up...ignore at your peril