The eternal settler conundrum outlasts the encampments
And more of what we're talking about
How 2020 explains 2024: Phoebe Maltz Bovy on antisemitism as settler-guilt-deflection as Palestine becomes part of politics everywhere
As someone who’s had an eye on French Jewry for years, out of personal and professional interest, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of the Israel-Palestine conflict ‘playing out’ in other lands. Things flare up in the Middle East and suddenly, on a different continent, there are street fights, antisemitic attacks, some much-publicized Jews supporting (or becoming) far-right politicians, maybe the occasional torture of a Jew in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it will all be kind of in reference to the Mideast conflict but also about a whole host of at most tangentially related domestic concerns. Like, tensions between Jews and Muslims (or white leftists) in France will be said to be about whichever intifada, but also about the Crémieux Decree; the dual legacies of the Holocaust and French colonialism; and whatever happens to be going on in France at the time.
And so it has seemed both familiar and bizarre to see the same happening in Canada, and more so in the United States, since Oct. 7. Canada, at least, you might say, is a bit more European, and more than a bit more French. But why do American college students and activists—including many who are neither Arab nor Muslim let alone specifically Palestinian—suddenly care so much about this conflict?…
If Jews are settlers in Israel, where are they not settlers?
It was true before Oct. 7, but especially afterwards: an increasing number of progressive-minded people are viewing Jews as settlers in Israel. “Go back to Europe,” some especially antisemitic ones chant at rallies. But it begs the question: if Jews are settlers in Israel, where aren’t we settlers?
Ben Wexler, a writer and academic who recently graduated from McGill University, has been thinking about this question a lot. He recently published an essay in the French Jewish magazine K. Les Juifs, l’Europe, le XXIe siècle, titled “The Eternal Settler“. In it, Wexler discusses the troubling rise in antisemitic violence, often carried out under the guise of decolonization and conflated with criticism of the Israeli government.
Soon after this rebuttal was published, Ezra Levant sent an email letting Rebel News followers know The CJN let him respond—along with his requisite fundraising pitch.