When the United Nations branded Zionism to be a form of “racism” in 1975, most mainstream African American leaders openly objected. Martin Luther King’s friend Bayard Rustin wrote a column invoking King’s famous comment that “when people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.’” Vernon Jordan, the National Urban League president, wrote: “Black people, who recognize code words since we’ve been victimized by code words … can easily smell out the fact that ‘Zionism’ in this context is a code word for anti-Semitism.” Other civil rights leaders signed an ad proclaiming, “We have fought too long and too hard to root out discrimination from our land to sit idly while foreign interests import bigotry into America.” Nevertheless, by singling out Jewish nationalism as “racism,” the U.N. assisted in the effort to frame the Palestinian struggle as a racial conflict.

The equation of Zionism and racism, no matter how obviously ahistorical and unfair—no other form of nationalism is accused of being inherently racist—resonates and contaminates, inasmuch as race continues to have a hold on American emotions. The purpose of the slur is obvious and toxic: It aims to place American Jews, the vast majority of whom identify as some form of Zionist, outside the bounds of normal American morality, while stigmatizing Israel with America’s own historical guilt over race relations.

In the 1980s, the international left’s crusade focused on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Palestinian propagandists quickly appended the term “apartheid” to the Palestinian cause, further entrenching the racialist approach.

The Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s deprived leftists of their ideological glue, while the end of South African apartheid deprived leftists of a favorite cause. Yet paradoxically, in the vacuum, these historic breakthroughs cleared the way for “Palestine” to become the paramount cause célèbre on the activist left. Wearing a kaffiyeh proved to fellow progressives that you passed a default ideological litmus test. Throughout, spearheaded by its Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, established while passing the 1975 Zionism-is-Racism resolution, the United Nations kept amplifying the Soviet-Palestinian antisemitic project.

Since 2010 or so, when progressive Third World sectarianism became quasi-official ideology among all right-thinking people, the Palestinian cause has become increasingly central in left doctrine, bounding to the top of the American left’s “anti-racist” agenda. Time and again, the Palestinian cause gets a free pass other movements somehow don’t merit. When the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, its activists policed any attempts to broaden their slogan to include other identity groups. Yet pro-Palestinian activists were allowed to appropriate the slogan “Palestinian Lives Matter” and to embed themselves in an internationalized framework against “oppression” that extends “from Ferguson to Gaza.”

BLM has helped Palestine activists repackage their predecessors’ racialist slogans and tailor them to fit America’s current pathological zeitgeist. In addition to run-of-the mill charges of “racism” and “apartheid”—the new hot items, in line with the broader political agenda and official terminology of the Democratic Party, are “white supremacy” and “white nationalism,” resulting in the charge that American Jews and Israelis are beneficiaries of “white privilege,” a statement that casually erases nearly all of Jewish history up to and including the Holocaust. Apparently, Jews—whether American or Israeli—are so privileged that not even centuries of exclusion and pogroms, culminating in the worst genocide in human history, can detract from their inherent status as “privileged,” i.e., evil.

During the George Floyd riots in 2020, Palestinian activists commandeered “I can’t breathe” as part of their transnational campaign painting Blacks and Palestinians as fellow victims of the same “structural violence, occupation, and colonial oppression” inflicted by “whites.” In what was dubbed the “deadly exchange,” intersectional propagandists for Palestine charged that the “Israeli military trains U.S. police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies.” This lie transformed some police junkets into nonexistent IDF boot camps where innocent American cops were systematically reeducated into specialized Israeli techniques of racial brutality.

The point of this bizarre accusation was not just that the Jews are oppressors. It was that “the Jews” are guilty of the most heinous crime in the American cosmos. Eerily echoing traditional blood libels, Jews became racist oppressors, complicit in, even responsible for America’s original sin, racist oppression. After all, it was the IDF that “perfected” the chokehold “used to murder George Floyd,” hundreds of academics and students in the University of California system declared. In other words, it was “the Jews” who had actually killed the 21st century’s leading American Black martyr.

In a way, this trajectory was inevitable, once progressives decided on a vision of social justice in which America would be run according to a sectarian quota system, in which they defined which groups would be worthy of everything from university admissions to political power. According to this logic, success and failure is—and should be—a function of group identity, which pigeonholes individuals as either “oppressors” or “oppressed.” Within this new taxonomy, American Jews have been defined as the quintessential “white oppressors,” since “Jew” is defined as being synonymous with “white” and “successful.” The Jewish connection to Israel makes the Jews doubly or triply as oppressive as other “white people.”

It is no coincidence that at its core the Palestinianization of the U.S. civil rights movement is an anti-American project. The intersection of the Palestinian cult of victimhood with the “anti-racist” progressive ideology being pushed institutionally by DEI regimes, not only declares that Israel is inherently racist, it also maligns America as systemically racist. The implication is clear: Both projects should be dismantled. That a generation of young American radicals chooses to ignore the real-world implications of these insane slogans is scary enough. That many of them, their professors, and other influential politicos in fact embrace the broader message, is terrifying.