No Social Movement Deserves Uncritical Support

A reply to Gemma Sack.

The following is a response to “Adults in the Room” by Gemma Sack.

I wish that Gemma Sack had attempted to find out more about me before reacting so harshly to my piece, because we have many things in common, and there is no good reason why the real differences between us—differences of opinion and perspective that are in part generational though not reducible to age or disposition—ought to generate acrimony.

The Dissent piece to which she responded contained a bio stating: “This text is a condensed and revised version of an ‘Open Letter’ that [Isaac] posted last week in response to the crisis on his own campus.” Sack unfortunately took no time to learn anything about the crisis at Indiana University—which has been covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and the New York Times—or about my role in it.

Had she done so, she might have noted that my very public support of the students began months before the encampments, in opinion pieces in the Indianapolis Star that led to my being red-baited on Twitter by far-right Republican Congressman Jim Banks; in two pieces published in the Nation and one in the Chronicle denouncing “The New Campus McCarthyism”; and in a petition drive that I organized in support of my friend and colleague Abdulkader Sinno, an Arab-American who was suspended by Indiana University for his role as faculty advisor to the student Palestine Solidarity Committee. In February I publicly testified before the Indiana State Senate in support of the student protesters. And since October 7, I have published three pieces defending Rashida Tlaib’s pro-Palestinian activism, one in the American Prospect.

Unfortunately, Sack reduces me to a stereotype, and thus misreads my piece. She writes that “Isaac’s letter to student protesters is representative of a certain swath of left-liberals who, while decrying both Israel’s war in Gaza and universities’ repressive tactics, reserve most of their ire and anguish for the people protesting those very things.” But I did not “chafe” at the protesters’ slogans. I raised questions and expressed disagreement. At the same time, my support of the students’ rights to protest as they choose was never placed in question.

Sack denounces my appeal to dialogue, insisting that “such dialogue occurs between mutually generous parties, not those whose solidarity is so flimsy that it requires total rhetorical and tactical acquiescence.” But not a single word in my piece calls for, much less “requires” or demands, “total rhetorical and tactical acquiescence.” On the other hand, Sack seems to require precisely this of me, and to consider an honest airing of differences to be a sign of a “flimsy” support that in fact gives aid and comfort to those seeking to quash the protests. This is unfortunate.

I know that “The students’ central aim, like that of the broader Palestine solidarity movement, is Palestinian freedom,” and that “galvanizing rhetoric” is essential to this effort, as it is to all social movement activity. But while I oppose the Israeli destruction of Gaza and killing of Palestinians, and support both a ceasefire and a just peace, the galvanizing rhetoric of “no two states, we want ’48” and “globalize the intifada” does not speak for me. As a teacher I unequivocally support the rights of students—and indeed, it was precisely from this privileged subject position that my faculty colleagues and I could strongly advocate for them (repressed students typically appreciate the support of those Sack derisively calls “adults in the room”). And as a citizen I consider it my responsibility to be honest about what I think, especially about the dangers of sectarianism among many of the student leaders whose rights I defend even as I disagree with some of their political demands. And precisely because they are no less adult than am I, these students, and their supporters, deserve nothing less if they wish to be taken seriously.

Too much is at stake politically—in both the United States and Israel/Palestine—for the kind of uncritical “solidarity” that Sack demands, something I tried to indicate in the closing sections of my piece, where I linked Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar—both of whom are now justifiably accused of war crimes—with a range of other dangerous leaders including Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Vladimir Putin.

Sack unfortunately treats the anti-Zionist views of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as if they are the only voices of justice. They are not. I recommend Jon Wiener’s Nation interview with Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, recently elected to the Haifa City Council, and one of the leaders of Standing Together—an Israeli peace and justice group that has absurdly been boycotted by allies of SJP. Or the essays of Palestinian writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, whose regular essays in the Forward are relentlessly evenhanded in their criticisms of Israel, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the U.S. government. Or the regular Substack commentaries of Peter Beinart or Micah Sifry. Or Dissent board member Joshua Leifer’s “A Historic Junction,” published in the Winter 2024 issue, which features Abed and two other Israeli leftists in dialogue about ways to promote a just peace in Israel/Palestine. Leifer is a young post-Zionist writer and activist who can hardly be described as a former New Leftist or as a protege of Michael Walzer, who he has attacked in print. And yet his relentless criticism of the Israeli state has not prevented him from denouncing Hamas’s terrorism and challenging some of the very same rhetoric I question in my piece.

There is room for a plurality of voices on these important issues, and I don’t understand why any self-styled progressive would want to imply that voices like these should be drowned out by “galvanizing” slogans and chants. Serious protest movements can accommodate real discussion and debate.

In Haaretz, Ben Samuels’s “AIPAC, AOC, and the Left’s Antisemitism Problem” recently described how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been attacked by some as an AIPAC shill. Her crimes: (a) convening a public dialogue about antisemitism with Amy Spitalnick, Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO, and Stacy Burdett, a former senior adviser at the Anti-Defamation League, and (b) denouncing the recent pro-Palestinian protests, organized by Nerdeen Kiswani and Within Our Lifetime as part of a “day of rage” against an art exhibition about October 7. Responding to the angry chants and rhetoric of “Long Live Oct. 7” and “Zionists are not Jews and not humans,” AOC tweeted: “The callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism – plain and simple. Antisemitism has no place in our city nor any broader movement that centers human dignity and liberation.”

Is AOC—the most effective progressive member of the U.S. Congress, who retains membership in the Democratic Socialists of America in spite of efforts by some to excommunicate her—another lame, liberal “adult in the room” intent on subjugating anti-Zionist protesters? In response to her leftist critics, AOC insisted, “We can mobilize to end the atrocities in Gaza and combat the rise of antisemitism at the same time. Bigotry in organizing spaces imperils everyone’s work. I work to end the war, protect all my constituents and fight AIPAC. Believe it or not, you can do all three.” Is she not right about this?

At around this time, both Bernie Sanders and AOC attended a rally in support of “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman, who, alas, was successfully targeted for defeat by AIPAC in one of the most visible primary battles of this campaign season. Bowman is a complicated figure, and neither his decisions, nor those of Sanders or AOC, are beyond criticism. But all three are among the most vocal U.S. public officials denouncing the Israeli government, calling for a ceasefire, and demanding a just peace. And yet they were greeted by around fifty Within Our Lifetime protesters chanting “AOC you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and “AOC your hands are red, 40,000 Palestinians dead,” and carrying signs accusing Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Bowman of being “Zionists” and declaring “dump Genocide Joe and the Squad.”

How is this anything other than foolish sectarianism? Is it a sign of a lame “liberalism” to challenge this kind of activism?

Sack characterizes my piece, and the left-liberalism she associates it with, as “a capitulation to the center and the right in the guise of pragmatic leftism,” wondering “why those who find themselves in this position maintain their attachment to a left with which they find themselves continuously at odds and which understandably views them with suspicion.” Confidently declaring that “this left . . . has cohered around a vision of Palestinian liberation that extends far beyond the immediate demand for a ceasefire,” she concludes that “it is up to agonized liberals whether they deign to join it.”

But such acrimony among those committed to democracy serves no good purpose at a time when the stakes are so high and the dangers so great. Sack begins her piece with critical jabs at Dissent founder Irving Howe and his collaborator and successor Michael Walzer before setting her sights on me. But, whatever she, or I, might think about Howe’s or Walzer’s specific interventions, it is only through their efforts that Dissent exists as a broad space for dialogue and debate on the democratic left. I think this is a tradition worth keeping.

The violence and injustice currently being enacted in Israel/Palestine is awful. It ought to be ended, now, and those protesting it deserve support. I support them. But no political cause deserves unconditional support, and efforts to police the boundaries of political criticism in the name of leftist fidelity do a disservice to their protagonists; to the magazine quite deliberately entitled Dissent; and to the values of human dignity, equality, and democracy that are at the heart of any left worth defending. We can do better. If we don’t, things are going to get much worse, in Israel/Palestine and in many other places, including the United States, where only a herculean effort to practice coalition politics can prevent another four years of a fully unhinged Trump administration.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has written many books and articles, and comments regularly on the political situation at Common Dreams and at his blog, Democracy in Dark Times.