New Left Review 144 (2023)

To understand the unique position Israel occupies in American domestic politics, it is enough to compare the passions aroused by the successive wars over Palestine with those generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If the latter has been ubiquitous, attachment to it has for the most part been shallow and media-driven. To wit, the near complete collapse of interest in the fate of Kiev, on which the struggle between liberal democracy and autocracy was supposed to turn, after the Hamas attacks and Israeli onslaught in October directed all attention to the Middle East. If there has been no shortage of whipped-up emotion since, the share of genuine feeling—hatred, fear, indignation—is far higher, deriving from a century of Zionist colonization and regional resistance, overdetermined by imperial calculations. The extermination of Jews in Europe, and the expulsion of Arabs from their ancestral home in Palestine, are catastrophes that continue to reverberate among the respective kin of four continents.