It sure is a difficult time to be a progressive “Zionist”! 

I’ve suggested before that the “Z word” is so loaded that we ought to jettison it entirely – after all, if a progressive Zionist is just a nice guy who supports the creation of a Palestinian state, then why not simply say that, instead of launching into a forty-five minute explanation of what “your Zionism” is. (If someone were to reply, “But what of Israel?” the answer could be, “Well, there’s nothing anyone can do about that. You want Palestinians to die for another hundred years? I don’t!” Or just shrug.)

Everything is Worse Now

A couple of years ago, we just needed to worry about how to distinguish ourselves from Religious or Revisionist Zionists, and how to avoid unpleasantness in social circles. But it’s worse today. No one can help but notice that our enemies no longer merely sneer at the Z-word but, today, actively celebrate our slaughter. 

Could anyone blame us if we were to accept friendship when it is offered? It seems that so few are offering friendship to the Jews these days. 

So I was not surprised the other day when a progressive Jewish friend of mine posted a link to a new book by a clickbait conservative that purports to examine campus antisemitism. 

She wrote, “I am looking forward to Douglas Murray’s new book!”

I was not surprised. But I was nevertheless dismayed. 

We do ourselves and the world no favors when we make common cause with the likes of Douglas Murray (or Nigel Farage, or the many others of their ilk), even by actions as seemingly minor as reposting or otherwise expressing admiration on Facebook or X for their allegedly “pro-Israel” views. 

My progressive Jewish friends, I hear your agony. We Jews don’t have the luxury at this time of choosing our allies are carefully as we might like, you say. Because it feels like there are precious few of them in the world right now. 

And so, when Douglas Murray writes a book decrying campus protests that were blindly insensitive to a massacre of Jews, some of us will celebrate and spread his message.

You might ask, more innocently, why not emphasize common ground where we can find it? 

The Alt-Right’s Pro-Israelism is Inseparable from their Odious World View

Many intellectual or institutional conservatives, like Bret Stephens, David Frum and a significant number of others, have carved out a principled position apart from MAGA-world. They support Israel from a reasoned position, generally free of hatred and bigotry. 

But reactionary populists, on the other hand, like Douglas Murray, Nigel Farage, Richard Spencer and all the other right-wing Israel-supporting bigots are not our allies. Importantly: they are not our allies even on this one issue.

It is simply not the case that these “pro-Israel” figures are wrong about almost everything, but right about this. 

They support Israel, but for the absolutely wrong reasons. 

One cannot pull the “pro-Israel” part of their agenda out and support it. That is like trying to eat the “good” part of a moldy piece of brie cheese. It is inseparable from the rancid whole. 

They speak up for Jews, but not out of love or solidarity for Jews. They use our trauma as cover for an anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-left, anti-intellectual and anti-tolerance agenda. 

It reminds me of the situation, about twenty years ago, when some Jews formed political alliances with certain evangelical dispensationalists, people who sincerely believed that Jews must return to Israel so they could ultimately be gathered into one place, witness the Second Coming and be either converted or, if we refused, murdered and then cast into Hell. By Jesus. 

In the name of helping Israel, we supported a group whose eschatology literally ends in our destruction, one way or another. Sure, they wanted to murder us, but in Israel. That’s not allyship. 

Douglas Murray is Not Our Ally

Let’s consider Douglas Murray, for example, because he is the author my friend has chosen to praise. 

Murray has trafficked in antisemitic tropes and aligned himself with far-right populist movements and figures in Europe who have antisemitic histories, like Victor Orban (another good pro-Israel ally, some would say), he has never condemned the rise of antisemitic violence from the white nationalist movement, and he advocates the return to something he calls “Christian Europe,” a monolithically cultural civilization that would have no place for us. 

Murray’s instrumental view of Christianity borders on ethno-nationalism, using Christianity not as faith, but as a boundary marker for who belongs in “Western civilization.” It’s less about Jesus and more about drawing lines between “us” and “them.” And we Jews are “them.”

Even where he nominally supports us, his “pro-Jewish” views are really “philo-antisemitism”, a posture of affection or support for Jews that flattens, exploits or instrumentalizes our identity for other ideological ends. Murray invokes Jewish suffering as a rhetorical tool to advance his broader agenda of anti-Muslim, anti-immigration and anti-left arguments, using us to score ideological points.

Seen in this light, the campus protests are just another target in Murray’s long-standing Great Replacement narrative and his narrow-minded culture wars. He does not oppose current campus culture primarily because it celebrates murder. Indeed, he hates tolerance more than anything. He most hates the good things about the current young generation. So he uses these admittedly wrong-headed aspects of campus culture to go after his real targets, which are a diverse and open-minded society. 

He uses Jews to attack Muslims; but even more, he uses us in his argument against a supposedly “woke” culture that embraces LGBTQ rights, and especially nonbinary identity, which is his broader goal. “Just a reminder on ‘NonBinaryPeoplesDay’,” he wrote recently on X, “that there is no such thing as ‘non-binary’. It is a recent invention by people who want to identify as ‘Look at me,’ ” a view he expanded on in his recent book, The Madness of Crowds.

This is vile; and it is also scientifically untrue. Like many of these guys, he hates science. 

Don’t Blindly Support the Enemy of Your Enemy
My friend defended her support by saying Douglas Murray has no power because he’s not a politician. 

But he absolutely has power. Not through laws, but through influence. He shapes public opinion, gives cover to harmful rhetoric and legitimizes bigotry under the guise of “reasoned debate.” That’s how cultural harm spreads: not just from governments, but from intellectuals and media figures who make dehumanization sound respectable. 

You don’t need to hold office to do damage. This is how his movement grows. If we let him speak for us, we become tools in a campaign that ultimately turns against us too. Because exclusionary, Christian-nationalistic political movements have never been good for the Jews. 

So his “pro-Israel” agenda is a tiny party of an “anti-tolerance” agenda, from which it is completely inseparable. 

But even if you could somehow separate it, even if this was the one thing that Douglas Murray “gets right,” the messenger does matter. Reposting a pro-Israel quote from a right-wing bigot will convince precisely no one that Israel deserves a second look, and it sends a message to peaceful Muslims and nonbinary people that their fate does not matter to us. 

Is Hitler Your Not-Always-But-Sometimes Ally?

Consider this lovely quote: “One day the world will look back on the period of meat-eating as it looks back today on cannibalism.”

If you are a vegan or a vegetarian, you probably agree with that sentiment. But that quote is (perhaps questionably) attributed Adolf Hitler; his views on meat-eating are entirely noble and separable from his less tasty pro-genocide positions. You would not use this quote as support for your position, no matter how well-written it is, no matter how much you agree with it. (You would not even use it while arguing that it may not even be from Hitler. The Hitler-stench would be enough to disqualify it.) 

You would not say, “Let’s emphasize the areas where we agree,” or “I don’t agree with everything Hitler ever did, but this is so well-written.”

Because using Hitler as support for your position does not help you change the world. Because using Hitler as support for your position will not convince anyone that you are right. And it sends the message that the genocide of undesirables matters less to you than the slaughter of cows. 

We Do Have a Choice

It simply is not true that we have no allies beyond the far right. The entire premise of this argument is wrong. While many left-leaning movements have either failed to condemn the October 7 massacre or have celebrated it — and this is despicable  —, plenty of individual commentators, queer, left-wing and Arab voices, have condemned the massacre and supported peace and coexistence without abandoning moral clarity. 

John Aziz, to name one, is a Palestinian who lost family in the Gaza war, but who has remained solidly pro-peace and anti-Hamas. 

Brianna Wu is a progressive trans woman, software engineer and political activist who has publicly opposed Hamas and expressed support for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. She has also spoken out against antisemitism and called for nuance and accountability in progressive circles when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her stance is notable because she maintains progressive values on gender, race and social justice while also refusing to excuse or minimize extremist violence. 

I will provide a full list in a later column.

When we make common cause with the Islamophobes, we tell John Aziz, Brianna Wu and others like them that we do not want their help and support, that we will instead support the elements within our society that want to erase them. 

We do have a choice; we do not have to cast our lots with the crowd that would erase LGBTQ, Palestinian and even Jewish identity, among many other things. 

What Comes Next

I do hope that the alt-right does not remain in power for long. I hope that they will be swept away in the next mid-term election, and then, for good, in the next presidential election, and that, after the damage they have done to America, they will cease to be a force in our culture.

I hope this for many reasons; among other things, having an alt-right government, and an alt-right culture, is not good for the Jews! 

We see this today, as the administration destroys public education and research in the name of the fight against antisemitism, throwing many Jewish researchers out of work. Today, government agents in masks pull Muslim immigrants off the streets and disappear them, for speaking against Israel. And the administration promises to disappear American citizens to a foreign prison. This kind of a climate has not historically been friendly to us! 

If we Jews go all-in with the right, and this lot is all swept out of political power and cultural influence as they deserve to be, here in the U.S. and around the world, then what will be left for us when the flotsam and jetsam of their chaos is washed away? 

If we are their allies, if we have allowed ourselves to become our allies, if we are seen by society at large as one element within the discredited alt-right that supported political oppression and the destruction of science and education, in our name, then we and our stories and perspectives will all be swept away too. We will be out of the proverbial frying pan.

These are terrible times, in a lot of ways. If it doesn’t help, don’t do it. That’s a simple rule. We need to keep our heads. What we do and say matters, now.

^^^

Steven S. Drachman is a novelist and journalist. He has written for The New York Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly and many other papers and magazines.