Cary Nelson is the author, most recently, of Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (2024). He argues that the latest document of the Nexus Task Force – a body of academics created in 2019 to ‘analyze issues at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism’ – is an obstacle to tackling campus antisemitism. Its primary concern, argues Nelson, is to make certain ‘the permissive spaces it made available to anti-Zionism with its February 2021 “Nexus Document” have not been curtailed or disqualified by the flood of antisemitism that engulfed the world following the 7 October Hamas assault on Israel’.
‘On the face of it,’ a new Nexus Task Force policy document tells us, ‘the term “From the River to the Sea” does not invoke traditional antisemitic tropes.’ I have to say to the contrary that, for me, when hundreds of students and community members gather to chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ it feels rather like a call for a Judenrein terrain. OK. Johnny Appleseed, pioneer American nurseryman, calls out ‘From the river to the sea, we’ll plant trees for all to see.’ Agreed, no antisemitic implications. But Nexus did not actually have the isolated first phrase in mind. It is trying to de-semanticize the whole slogan by separating out its opening half. So, we’ll set that aside for now as an irrelevant exercise in casuistry.
This effort to defang the defining chant of the spring 2024 worldwide Gaza Solidarity encampments is one of Nexus’ purportedly clarifying efforts to establish what statements should today count as antisemitic. It is part of the group’s three-part, nine-page, 5 September 2024 “Campus Guide to Identifying Antisemitism in a Time of Perplexity”. Are you perplexed? I’m not. I’m horrified and very worried. But I’m not confused, puzzled, uncertain, or perplexed. Neither, really, is the Nexus group. It wants to be certain that the permissive spaces it made available to anti-Zionism with its February 2021 “Nexus Document” have not been curtailed or disqualified by the flood of antisemitism that engulfed the world following the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel.
‘On the face of it,’ meaning ‘at first glance’ or ‘on the surface,’ implies a thoughtless reaction lacking serious reflection or interrogation. You walk by that campus demonstration and feel excluded, threatened, and cast out of the community. Israel is not castigated purely as a political entity; it is condemned as a Jewish state, as the home of the Jews. But give pause. Admit nuance into your heart. Those joyous or enraged demonstrators are calling for true equality across the land. A Palestinian majority from the river to the sea, boosted with the returning grandchildren of 1948’s exiles, will lovingly share the land of milk and honey with their Jewish neighbors. A plea for such ‘nuance’ is both explicit and implicit in the Nexus Group’s new intervention. Evidence for the political guarantees is to be found in the hearts of those blocking ‘Zionists’ from access to university facilities and calling for their exclusion from the campus.
Nexus promises ‘a nuanced and contextualized approach to thinking about antisemitism in this current moment.’ Indeed, they call for a ‘judicious review’ of meaning ‘in different contexts,’ but then they abandon context in a futile search for intrinsic meaning. That may be the crux of the problem with what the Nexus group has done. Other, of course than its dedicated anti-Zionism.
‘Ambiguous words,’ they tell us ‘cannot be automatically presumed to carry an antisemitic meaning, absent sufficient proof.’ Context will often give us precisely the evidence we need to decide whether a given statement has clear antisemitic impact, but it will not typically provide proof beyond all doubt. Language often cannot be stripped of its ambiguities, its multiple meanings, and its connotative plurality. When a mob chants ‘Death to Jews’ one can claim it is meaningless hyperbole, purely performative, or fundamentally satiric, by Jews will feel its hostility nonetheless. By asking for definitive proof of hateful intentions, Nexus inoculates much anti-Zionist agitation from the conclusion it is antisemitic. And that is exactly what the Nexus group has always wanted.
The new statement explains that potentially antisemitic statements should be evaluated ‘depending on the context, the intent with which they were uttered, and the impact with which they land.’ But they acknowledge quite fairly ‘the difficulty of knowing what is in another person’s mind,’ rendering intent largely irrelevant, then go on to ignore both intent and impact. We are left with inherent meaning, a criterion they have supposedly disallowed.
In fact, the statement moves from its introductory principles (the first section) to a series of nine ‘screening questions’ that all address inherent meaning and that form the guide’s second part: ‘Does the claim or statement promote,’ ‘does it apply,’ ‘does it deny or minimize,’ ‘does the claim or statement advocate,’ ‘does it involve assaulting, harassing, or threatening,’ ‘does it discriminate against,’ ‘does the claim or statement hold,’ or ‘does it assume?’ The last one is then repeated. Sure enough, when you cannot answer these questions definitively, the statement cannot be judged antisemitic.
They offer extremely narrow examples of when statements and actions are antisemitic. If ‘the claim of apartheid is predicated on purported Jewish features of criminality or avarice, the label of apartheid is antisemitic.’ But such social practices can be grounded instead in fear or ignorance, which does not absolve a polity of culpability or a defining designation. The designation of apartheid remains a severe moral condemnation with antisemitic consequences. If individuals, by dint of their being Jewish, must pledge that Israel is an “apartheid state” before being permitted to participate in an activity, this is antisemitic.’ So if you say Israel is obviously an apartheid state because Jews are evil, well, that qualifies. In case you thought factual errors would decide the matter, you are out of luck: ‘Even if the claim that Israel is engaging in apartheid proves to be false or reductionist, that does not necessarily mean that the claim is antisemitic.’ But intent is unreadable, and context forgotten. So we are back to intrinsic meaning, which has also just been disallowed. We are trapped in an endless loop.
The same steps accompany the claim of genocide: ‘Even if the claim that Israel is engaging in genocide proves to be false, or imprecise, or reductionist, that does not necessarily mean that the claim is antisemitic.’ But here the Nexus group adds something more insidious: ‘If the charge of genocide yields a call to undertake violence against Jews, then it is antisemitic.’ Whatever else they may be, the members of the Nexus group aren’t stupid. They know well that a claim of genocide triggers one and only one solution: not the reform of the guilty state but its elimination. Evil cannot be reformed. It disqualifies a state’s right to exist, and the demand to eliminate the Jewish state is antisemitic. To be sure, many accusations of genocide do not specify the remedy, so they are exempt from the antisemitic designation under Nexus’s literalist methodology.
It takes a still more elaborate series of bait and switch operations to free ‘from the river to the sea’ of antisemitic import. Here are the two opposing principles:
If the phrase conveys the aspiration for a state (or states) that grants Jews and Palestinians equal individual rights in Israel/Palestine and recognizes their collective rights, then it is not discriminatory toward Jews.
If the act of freeing Palestine from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea entails the elimination of Jews or their relegation to second-class status, then it is an antisemitic vision.
Of course, virtually no one other than self-designated antisemites fulfill the Nexus criterion for an ‘antisemitic vision.’ Pretty much everybody else mouths an ‘aspiration’ for equal rights for Jews, Muslims, and Christians across the aspirationally former state of Israel. But the dominant anti-Zionist dream, the relevant ‘aspiration’, is for the demise of the Jewish state. Nexus demands that any such intrinsic meaning be clear. It is very hard to prove the egalitarian aspiration is disingenuous, since that reverts to intent, and an ignorant aspiration doesn’t count because Nexus isn’t actually interested in the impact a politically uninformed statement can have. Nexus opens by declaring that ‘On the face of it, the term “From the River to the Sea” does not invoke traditional antisemitic tropes.’ But a one-state solution denies the right to a specifically Jewish state, denying the right of political self-determination to 7 million Jews. Prove it, Nexus demands. For Nexus, only if you call for a Nazified Judenrein utopia are you at risk for the ultimate designation.
But that is not the most important evidence at stake here. For anyone concerned with context, as Nexus claims it is, the context of 10/7 itself and of every day since, the context of all the collective uses of the slogan for the ensuing year, is consistently antisemitic. And the impact, the impact for those concerned with impact, as Nexus claims it is, the impact on Zionists in Israel and worldwide, is unavoidably antisemitic. And anti-Zionist Jews are haunted by that impact as well, however much they deny it is so.
Again, the same strategy saves anti-Zionism from condemnation. Only ‘if it denies Jews in Israel the rights to live and flourish as individuals and as a group there, then it is antisemitic.’ But anti-Zionism, at least in the West, typically, if disingenuously, assures us Jews can live happily ever after as equal citizens in an Arab majority state. Any takers?
This new Nexus project is necessary because antisemitic anti-Zionist statements and actions flooded the campuses and major cities of the West in the wake of the Hamas massacres of 7 October 2023. Given the ecstasy some students, faculty, and community members quickly expressed in solidarity with Hamas, it was inevitable that many would see the chants and slogans that followed as equivalently antisemitic. But those included the very slogans Nexus, the JDA, and their followers wanted to claim for their honorable self-regard. So there was repair work to be done. The ‘Campus Guide’ is one result.
It effectively positions Nexus as a supporter of the encampment goal of alienating and exiling Zionist Jews. Nexus is now an apologist for antisemitism. Three years ago, Nexus tried to position itself as a friend of the IHRA Definition, offering its statement as a friendly amendment. Some accepted that claim, but others did not. Now, in the face of the most serious challenge to Jewish identity for many decades, Nexus has chosen to side with our opponents.
One might argue that Nexus should feel some shame at the lengths it goes to exculpate the slogan ‘by any means necessary’: ‘Where “by any means necessary” represents an endorsement of terrorizing Jews qua Jews, it is antisemitic.’ But only if that is explicit. They even admit that ‘the phrase has long been understood to endorse violent forms of political resistance.’ Apparently, if Druze and Christian citizens of Israel are also to be eliminated ‘by any means necessary,’ along with the Jewish majority, neither the intent nor the impact is antisemitic. By doing whatever is necessary to achieve that goal. By any methods, including those ordinarily considered unethical or immoral. Here is Fanon’s formulation from Alienation and Freedom (1960): ‘We see, therefore, that the colonized people, caught in a web of a three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences, are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary. [par n’importe quel moyen].’ The phrase resonates with its history, its prior uses. But for Nexus it is at best ambiguous. They have set out to exonerate anti-Zionism by any means necessary.
