The editors deserve major kudos for having compiled an impressive anthology featuring contributions in opposition to the deeply sordid, yet potentially potent, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Underlining the pervasive presence in the contemporary discourse of academic life in North America and – quite likely – most English-speaking countries is the fact that the target of these powerfully negative actions is ubiquitously known and needs no further specification to any audience. It is not Russia, not either of the Koreas, not China, not Iran, not Syria, not Britain, not Germany, not the United States – it is solely the State of Israel. The agenda for this large book is beautifully set by the brilliance of Paul Berman’s preface which, confirming yet again its author’s vast knowledge and elegant writing, shows how ‘the anti-Israel boycott has proved to be, ideologically speaking, the world’s most adoptable boycott – a boycott that, without the slightest embarrassment, changes its costume every few years in order to present itself as Muslim, Christian, supernaturalist, right-wing, left-wing, liberal, secular, and sometimes all of the above … as if no single doctrine or philosophy or theology or geographical perspective, but only the lot of them ensemble, could possibly sum up the justifications for conducting the boycott, so various are Israel’s sins.’

While some contributions – most notably one of Ilan Troen’s two – highlight both synchronically and diachronically the abundance and diversity of boycotts of Israel and Jews invoked by Berman’s characterisation, it is evident that the major thrust of virtually all presentations concentrate on the contemporary situation in American post-secondary education and thus on a decidedly left-wing version of this phenomenon. Indeed, as Cary Nelson correctly points out in his introduction, boycotting Israel as a solid manifestation of detesting its very existence has become arguably the single most potent marker of being of the left today. He quotes one of the global left’s most cherished gurus, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who states the obvious that, ‘by now, anti-Zionism is synonymous with leftist world politics.’ Even if one is explicitly and actively anti-racist and anti-sexist, opposed to oppression, favours economic equality, fights for workers rights, actively supports the LGBT community, advocates strict gun control, stands for ecological reforms; one will be at best a very suspect, indeed even an unwelcome, member of what constitutes today’s left and being progressive without having decidedly and explicitly anti-Zionist views.

Opposition to Israel has mutated into the most important common denominator – the core, as it were – of what it means to be a leftist, a progressive in contemporary North America, Western and Northern Europe, the Antipode, in short the liberal democracies of the advanced industrial world. As I argued in my book Uncouth Nation, together with anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism has become the litmus test par excellence for being of the left in today’s world. These twin convictions have become the left’s core lingua franca. Nowhere is this sentiment and conviction more pronounced, indeed solidly hegemonic in the full Gramscian sense, than in the universities of these countries, particularly their humanities departments.

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.