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Is anti-white prejudice fuelling anti-Zionist protests?

Palestine is getting a disproportionate amount of student support. Photo: Getty

May 1, 2024 - 7:00pm

Student protests have erupted across numerous elite American campuses over the past two weeks, pitting administrations against student activists. What accounts for the energy of the movement?

The Israel-Palestine issue is complex, with a good case to be made that Israel should have acted with more restraint. Palestinian motivations are understandable. What is harder to explain, however, is the exceptional focus of white progressive student protesters on this question.

Violence committed in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine and other trouble spots elicits little response. Uganda meting out the death penalty to homosexuals occasions a shrug. These offending governments are not allies of the West. But the West invests in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who armed those who committed atrocities in Yemen. It trades with China, which is currently imprisoning half a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. Where are the analogous movements to boycott and divest?

Some argue that antisemitism underlies anti-Zionism. Indeed, Jewish students have been targeted, barricaded and harassed by protesters on several occasions while chants have included paeans to Hamas and Hezbollah.

But there is another possibility: that Left-activists only get excited when an issue can be framed as white versus nonwhite. Israel-Palestine becomes an allegory for white supremacy and settler colonialism. Consider the fact that a Harvard-Harris poll in October showed American 18-24s evenly split between supporting Hamas and Israel. Around the same time, 44% of Gen-Z respondents to a Skeptic Research Center survey agreed with the statement, “The Israeli government advocates for white supremacy.” It can reasonably be argued that the emotional energy behind support for Hamas comes from viewing the conflict as part of a wider white-on-BIPOC morality play.

According to Jeremy Carl, author of a new book entitled The Unprotected Class, this anti-white animus underpins the worldview of the western Left, and, by extension, American institutions and elite culture.

Carl’s impeccably researched book makes the argument that the elite institutions of post-Civil Rights America have been engaging in open discrimination against white people. As a result, white Americans must organise as a group, along with nonwhite allies, to defend their right to equal treatment under the law.

This is a provocative thesis. And yet, a majority of white respondents in surveys in the US, UK and Britain positively identify with being white. As with minorities, I find that the strongest predictor of racial identity is whether a person identifies with their ancestry: white Americans who are attached to being Irish or Italian are much more likely than other whites to identify as white. Likewise, those who identify strongly as Chinese identify strongly as Asian. Yet only one pan-ethnic entity is prohibited from expressing itself and mobilising as a group, and must obliquely argue its case by appealing to liberal universalists.

It would be healthier for all if those who identify as white could speak openly and moderately in defence of their group interests, marshalling support from the many fair-minded non-whites who abhor anti-white discrimination. Only in this way can we rebalance our culture and institutions toward colourblind justice.

This might lead campus activists toward a less Israel-centric view of the world, focusing more attention on regimes which currently fly under the radar while viewing Israel’s misdeeds in a less totalising manner.


Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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J Bryant
J Bryant
3 months ago

Well done, Eric Kaufmann.
Left-activists only get excited when an issue can be framed as white versus nonwhite.
anti-white animus underpins the worldview of the western Left, and, by extension, American institutions and elite culture.
The truth that dare not speak its name.

Peter D
Peter D
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

It is here in Australia too. White men can only be fools or villains.
Maybe the only solutions for the righteous left is to boycott all inventions made by white men!

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago
Reply to  Peter D

“White men can only be fools or villains.”
Did your feelings get hurt, Petey? Are you triggered?

Robbie K
Robbie K
3 months ago

Enoch Powell nailed it tbf.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago
Reply to  Robbie K

Nailed what? The angry old racist part? Aye, he had that one down pat.
Rivers of blood? Yet to appear over 50 years later…

Darena Dineva
Darena Dineva
3 months ago

What a stupid and pointless comment. It adds nothing to the discussion other than the troll’s vitriol.

Katja Sipple
Katja Sipple
3 months ago
Reply to  Darena Dineva

CS is the forum’s resident troll! Don’t engage! It feeds off comments like yours. Simply ignore. It’s the worst punishment you can dole out to these toxic parasites.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
3 months ago
Reply to  Darena Dineva

CS is either a troll or a bot or a dolt.

Bored Writer
Bored Writer
3 months ago

What a foolish remark.

LeeKC C
LeeKC C
3 months ago
Reply to  Peter D

It is not just white men, it is white women also.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

A certain subset of people concentrated in academia had been pushing this narrative for years. Why should we be surprised some people, particularly the young and inexperienced begin to believe it? A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth –Joseph Goebbels

David L
David L
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

In further shock announcements the Pope has revealed that he is a Roman Catholic and that bears do indeed shit in the forest.

A D Kent
A D Kent
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

People generally protest actions of their own governments. No more needs to be said.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

The question is who were largely the instigators and drivers of the anti-white movement and the ones that gave it faux intellectual and social credibility, and are they regretting it now?

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 months ago

After decades of constantly policing their speech and moderating their behavior, liberal Americans have found the perfect outlet for all their pent-up rage and spite: ‘The White Jew’.
White liberals can now unite with their black brethren in coming together in hate-filled synergy while threatening violence toward a group of people who have become a convenient scapegoat for the sin of Whiteness. It must all feel so gloriously righteous: after years of being ever so careful never to offend the perpetually offended, they now get to join forces with them.
Who would have thought that a pedagogy of racial self-hatred would eventually give way to real racial hatred?

ChilblainEdwardOlmos
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
3 months ago
Reply to  Julian Farrows

And ironically over 50% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi expelled from ( or their descendants ) MENA countries with dark skin. They also tend to be more conservative compared to their Ashkenazi brethren. But kids don’t do nuance. It’s Manichaeans all the way down.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

Yes, here’s an irony to consider: From an article in Resist the Mainstream: Campus Anti-Israel Protests Aren’t Actually About Israel:“While Israel’s outward face is that of the European-descended Ashkenazi, the culture on the ground has been thoroughly Arabized by these Middle Eastern and North African immigrants. Though these swarthy Jews of the Islamic world may insist that they are not Arabs (and may indeed hold in contempt the Arab nations that expelled them in the 20th century), in physical appearance and culture they are indelibly marked with characteristics typical of the Islamic world. While the Israel of 1950 was essentially an island of European customs in a sea of alien cultures, the Israel of 2024 is far more continuous with neighboring polities than almost anyone seems to acknowledge. The fundamentally Arabized character of Israeli culture is seldom discussed, as both political sides of the conflict find it unflattering to their preferred narratives, yet it is a remarkable and increasingly relevant fact of the matter. While Palestinian activism internationally is tied in with a third worldist opposition to the supposed evils of whiteness, this narrative translates awkwardly to a situation in which a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Levantine Palestinian might be bombed by fleets of hirsute, swarthy IDF soldiers of recent Iraqi and Yemeni descent.”
How do the crazy wokists rationalize this? Guess the whole point is that they do not reason in the first place. 

Brad Sealand
Brad Sealand
3 months ago

The term “White Adjacent” has been coined to justify discrimination against any race and religion that, no matter its history of struggle and survival, can be targeted as as “colonial” or “repressive” in the modern world.

J Bryant
J Bryant
3 months ago
Reply to  Brad Sealand

For me, the term “white adjacent” really gets to the root of the animus propelling the Left. “White adjacent” means successful. Hence it is routinely applied to Asians and to people from India.
The root of anti-white animus within most of the Left is jealousy. It is the religion of those who can’t, or won’t, compete in a relentlessly competitive and changing world. Anti-white animus within the affluent Left is merely virtue signaling.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

These are the ramblings of a madman!

Vesselina Zaitzeva
Vesselina Zaitzeva
3 months ago

Is this the apex of your argumentation? You just throw insults, without saying anything of substance. Is this your idea of meaningful communication ? Or a fulfilling life, more generally speaking?

Gordon Black
Gordon Black
3 months ago

Wow … look up defensive projection … it might help you.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
3 months ago
Reply to  Gordon Black

I’m telling you. CS is some kinda robot. And not a very good one. Like a machine designed to stomp on the foot of anyone who gets too close.

Katja Sipple
Katja Sipple
3 months ago

He/she/it is a troll, and trolls shan’t be fed. Nothing good ever comes of it.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

My wife is Czech and grew up there during the soviet era. I recall asking her after the fall of the Soviet Union about Czechs who were not happy with the change and remained nostalgic for the soviet days. Her reply was that most of the pro-soviet era people were either left-wing ideologues or losers who could not or did not want to complete in a merit-based capitalist system. Every one else were mostly ecstatic about the change.

Katja Sipple
Katja Sipple
3 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I think the correct word is envy rather than jealousy, but you are fundamentally correct that the left are driven by base instincts. Of course, there is also the fact that they need victims, groups of people whom they can portray as oppressed and treat in the most paternalistic fashion under the guise of speaking for them. Without victims the lefties have no justification for their existence.

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
3 months ago

Jews are white? Really? The BBC assures us that Jesus was not white.
‘ it can almost certainly be said that Jesus would not have been white’
‘We do seem to have a relatively dark skinned Jesus. In contemporary parlance I think the safest thing is to talk about Jesus as ‘a man of colour’.’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3958241.stm

David Kidd
David Kidd
3 months ago
Reply to  Steven Carr

And your point is?

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
3 months ago
Reply to  David Kidd

The point is that the BBC hates white people, and if you are a good person, then you can’t be white.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 months ago
Reply to  Steven Carr

I might be wrong, but I think about half of Israel has European roots and the other half has middle eastern roots.

ChilblainEdwardOlmos
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

You’re not wrong. Though even the “European” ones have quite significant Levantine DNA, usually with an admixture of 7-12% Italian DNA funnily enough.

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

I think all Jews have Middle Eastern roots.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
3 months ago
Reply to  Steven Carr

I suppose Jesus is a “man of colour” oppressed by the “white adjacent” Pharisees and Jews.

Who knows what Pantone skin tone fetishisers have in mind. Consistency is not to be expected where the complex divisions of ethnicity by stupid ideologues is concerned.

Of course Jesus is only referred to as a “man of colour” to try to mock Christian iconography that tends to show Jesus as similar to the ethnicity of the artist depicting him and to suggest Christians are unaware of his likely ethnic grouping.

Of course Galicians 3.28 emphasised that in Christianity there were neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, nor men or women but all are one. An obsession with race is a secular rather than religious obsession even though the whole “scientific” race division was initially introduced and propagated by nominally Christian people.

Unfortunately it is the secular progressives that now seek to keep the idiocy alive.

Linda M Brown
Linda M Brown
3 months ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

There are depictions of Jesus as Middle Eastern, Native North, South, & Central America, Japanese, Korean, Indian, various shades of African, wherever his message went he was depicted to fit the ethnicity of the people, but only white, European, people are mocked and derided for depicting Him to match their ethnicity.

David Morley
David Morley
3 months ago

I’m convinced by the diagnosis, but less so by the proposed cure. It seems too rational for what has been diagnosed as an irrational illness. I don’t see people returning to reason that easily.

It’s a dark thought, but history suggests people quite enjoy hatred and righteous anger – provided someone can rationalise this and make them feel justified. Indeed a common strategy of propaganda is to give people good reason to unleash their hate by portraying the (real or fabricated) evil actions of those they wish to hate.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 months ago

I think it runs deeper than this. These people fundamentally hate the west and its free market values. Any black person with who challenges progressive doctrines is denunciated, even more so than white critics. These kids have spent a lifetime in school being indoctrinated into Marxist beliefs of oppressor vs oppressed. They don’t know any better. And as the case was laid out in another Unherd essay, they have been rewarded for vocally opposing core western values. They are also young and stupid and know very little about the cause they are so apparently passionate about. Israel is not above criticism, but any gay or trans person who shows support for Hamas, is fundamentally ignorant of what they speak.

PS. I happened to catch a YouTube video of Trump visiting a construction site in New York. The crowd was massive and they were all chanting U-S-A, U-S-A. What do you think they are chanting a Columbia.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Another love letter to Trump, Jimbo? For someone who claims (rather laughably) to not be part of the Trump cult you sure seem to spend a lot of time worshipping him.

T Bone
T Bone
3 months ago

I’m starting to think you’re actually a Trump supporter.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 months ago
Reply to  T Bone

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it the champagne socialists who supported the Russian revolution and then were subsequently slaughtered?

ChilblainEdwardOlmos
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

C.S. gets slaughtered on a daily basis here on Unherd. I guess he gets ( very slight ) credit for tenacity, however dogmatically imbecilic.

Linda M Brown
Linda M Brown
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

I guess some good came of it. And once they’ve stopped being useful in the west, should the Revolution come, they’ll be slaughtered again. Too bad there’ll be a lot of collateral `damage’

Katja Sipple
Katja Sipple
3 months ago
Reply to  Linda M Brown

I wouldn’t call that “too bad”. What goes around comes around.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
3 months ago

You’re so funny, CS.

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Agree. As someone who took part in a few anti-American/ anti-West demonstrations back in the early 70s, I know that sentiment has been around a long time, in universities at least. Israel is seen as being in the U.S. camp, culturally and geopolitically, hence the default position is Israel = bad.

Young students often want to rebel against the existing order and create a brave new world, so they’ve latched on to this anti-West cause. Demonstrating makes them feel powerful, but actually, it’s such a white thing to do.

Linda M Brown
Linda M Brown
3 months ago

Still, most people don’t argue for their own annihilation.

Alan Gore
Alan Gore
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It’s not just the west the left hates, but the idea of civilization itself, anywhere in the world. They value scroungers over workers, squatters over homeowners, thugs over victims, primitive (not traditional) over modern, feelings over science, superstition over engineering, and of course any other species over man himself.

Paul Carlin
Paul Carlin
3 months ago
Reply to  Alan Gore

Ultimately ushering in a landscape of chaos, where fanatics of the Hamas persuasion thrive.

Estes Kefauver
Estes Kefauver
3 months ago
Reply to  Alan Gore

Thereby leaving a cultural scorched earth — a landscape of Chaos, which is where the terrorist ethos thrives.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
3 months ago

Clinically murdered by the IDF, those three British veterans, engaged in the classic combination of aid and intelligence, had faces that matched their WASP names. See also the King David Hotel bombing, the Sergeants’ affair, the attempted assassinations of Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin, the letter bombs sent to the Truman White House, the USS Liberty incident, Menachem Begin’s explicitly vengeful arming of Argentina during the Falklands War, and the treason of Jonathan Pollard.  And think on.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 months ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

Why would the IDF kill them intentionally? It doesn’t make any sense.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It makes every sense, and was in fact encouraged by Keir Starmer, who has endorsed Israel’s strategy of starving Gaza. To starve it, aid workers have to be killed. Accidentally bombed three times to make sure that they were dead? Pull the other one. This was our USS Liberty incident, and as in 1967, the official line is designed to humiliate those parroting it, thereby asserting Israeli dominance over them. By such are we governed, and by such are they Officially Opposed.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 months ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

Ugh. Very cringeworthy. What about the 16 IDF soldiers killed by friendly fire. Is this a conspiracy as well?

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Are you really this naïve, Jimmy? Really?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

I get what you’re trying to achieve with the comments you leave, but I think you should try a little harder. They’re not quite there yet.

Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
3 months ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

You’re embarassing yourself.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago

“What accounts for the energy of the movement?”
Oh, I don’t know… Maybe the calculated murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, primarily women and children?
Question is, why aren’t you people outraged by that? Oh, because you are all hideous racists who don’t care about brown people getting killed.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 months ago

No-one should be happy about the death toll in Gaza.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
3 months ago

Reading your amusingly off-target comments always gives me a good laugh to start out the day. Thank you, sir.

Graham Bennett
Graham Bennett
3 months ago

Right back at ya! As Kaufmann rightly points out (didn’t you read it??): ‘Violence committed in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine and other trouble spots elicits little response. Uganda meting out the death penalty to homosexuals occasions a shrug. These offending governments are not allies of the West. But the West invests in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who armed those who committed atrocities in Yemen. It trades with China, which is currently imprisoning half a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. Where are the analogous movements to boycott and divest?’ See you at the next march for the plight of the Uyghurs – thought not!

David Yetter
David Yetter
3 months ago

So in your world, the side fighting against a foe whose charter calls for the annihilation not only of their country, but their ethnicity as a whole (read the Hamas charter sometime), whose enemy colocates military assets with civilian infrastructure in contravention of international law, who gives warnings to civilians of impending attacks, even though this loses them the military advantage of surprise, and who according to the best analyses disaggregating civilian deaths from enemy combatant deaths in the reporting by their enemy, who cynically conflates the two, has managed to attain a civilian to military casualty ratio somewhere between 1.5:1 and 3:1 when the average for urban warfare is 9:1 is engaged in “the calculated murder of tens of thousands of civilians”.
I’m curious. Are you retrospectively outraged by the bombing of the Ruhr dams, the firebombing of Dresden and the forcible removal of all Germans from East Prussia? I ask because, objectively, in terms of the threat to Jews posed by the ideology of its governing party, Gaza is a minature Nazi Germany, and is actually being treated more delicately by the Israelis than the Allies treated Nazi Germany.

Victor James
Victor James
3 months ago

Yes, anti-white racism intersects with anti-semitism.
The most obvious example of this is the black supremacist idea that white Jews are not real Jews, that white Jews stole the Jewish religion from the real Jews, who are black. As an aside, this idea of ‘stealing’ is a common black supremacist trope, as well as a massive projection.
Leftist Jews, who in the words of Norman Finklestein, ‘stormed the inner sanctum of American power’ in the 60’s, are partly responsible for the anti-white hate that has now turned its eye on them – the revolution eats its own, etc.
But that’s all irrelevant now, because regardless of the origins, the woke left is now essentially a black supremacist fascist cult.

John Tyler
John Tyler
3 months ago

So Jeremy Carl is sort of saying that White Lives Matter as much as others. He’s for cancellation!

Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
3 months ago

Yes, because Universities and Colleges – the very places that ought to be most committed to the free exchange of opposing ideas – have been captured by authoritarianism and now sell deliberate lies to our young.
This was bound to happen – as many of us predicted – when Critical Race Theory was championed by academics and its precepts adopted throughout universities …. in subjects that had nothing to do with racial politics.
Adherents of Critical Race Theory, and the students who’ve been indoctrinated in it, view the entire world through a lens of Oppressor and Oppressed. The aim of ‘Equality’ is thrown out in favour of ‘Equity’. Thus if two groups of people have unequal outcomes, there must be inequity in the system, most likely inequity perpetrated by the more successful of the two groups against the other.
Once you are convinced that one group is subjugating another, it is but a small step to regarding that group as tyrants. Add that into the heady-mix of “White Supremacy” myths by imagining all Jews to be white and Palestinians to be people of colour and then of course it becomes inevitable that the blame falls squarely on Israel.
Having been thus convinced of the rightness of their cause, why would these students and activists need to know any more? They can remain wholly ignorant of the history, they need have no notion of the present reality of Israel, they don’t even have to understand the genocidal implications of chanting “From the River to the Sea” – or even need to find out which River, or which Sea, they are chanting about. They simply know that Israel is in the wrong.
Once the world is reduced to the oppressor/oppressed binary, once inequality is proof of inequity, once our institutions, large parts of our media and those who think themselves “progressive” adopt such a pernicious ideology, then this is where it leads. People who imagine themselves virtuous can believe that the victims of Oct 7th somehow deserved such barbarity, and deny the world’s only Jewish state the right to defend itself against those who would see them annihilated.
In such a world can we really pretend what happens next will be a surprise that we couldn’t see coming? All the while claiming it was something we were powerless to prevent?
That it is our University lecturers and students who are at the forefront of promoting these factually incorrect and ahistorical claims demonstrates the failure of our education system, …. among much else. Countering such obvious lies should be the responsibility of the very Universities and Institutions that promote them.
It falls to decent people everywhere to stand with Jews, regardless of where any of us might be on the political spectrum.
Just be a mensch.

ChilblainEdwardOlmos
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
3 months ago
Reply to  Paddy Taylor

Spot on. Thank you Paddy.

Graham Bennett
Graham Bennett
3 months ago
Reply to  Paddy Taylor

I only disagree with this in one respect – please do not essentialise university lecturers and students. The people you talk of are a tiny, although admittedly aggressive and violent, minority. I am an academic, in a British university, and I know many colleagues who would agree with what you are saying. They just keep their heads down for fear of being victimised (which is extremely unpleasant), not because they’re cowards, but because they know that their managers and the union are either too gutless or indoctrinated to protect their freedom of speech rights, acquiescing to the mob and thus allowing them to be mauled, cancelled, and potentially sacked. I’ve always found it odd that the so-called ‘BeKind’ mob are among the most aggressively abusive, vengeful, and hate-filled people I have ever come across. Quite a significant number of university academics (and students) want shot of them, none too soon!

Walter Lantz
Walter Lantz
3 months ago

Personally, I see two elements at work in the campus tantrums. The first is that narcissistic children are posturing against a situation of which they are blissfully clueless. All they know is that if they yell “Israeli genocide!” loud enough someone will pay attention to them whereas shouts of “Uyghur genocide” will attract a few crickets. It’s all about as annoying and useless as what parents used to call the Terrible Twos.
Normally groups of entitled idiots stunned senseless by a constant stream of pseudo-academic ‘let’s make socialism cool again’ nonsense wouldn’t matter but clever Hamas agitators have waded in with bags of ‘look at me’ candy and soothing bed-time tales of ‘take down The Man’ justice. These would be groups like Samidoun for example; banned as terrorist undesirables in more discerning democracies but happily accommodated in Canada.

Arthur G
Arthur G
3 months ago

If the leftists want to pick a “white vs non-white” fight, they’re going to have a rude awakening in the US. More than half of “hispanics” identify as white.

David Yetter
David Yetter
3 months ago

In answer to the question of the title: almost certainly “yes.” In America most Jews are Ashkenazim, and are indeed white (in the coarse categorization of race and ethnicity Americans use) and Israelis are (wrongly) perceived as the same. Most Americans do not know about the forcible exile of Jews from the majority Arab countries in the wake of the establishment of Israel, or that most Israelis are descended from Sephardim driven out of Arab countries, rather than from Ashkenazim from Europe (or from Europe via America), and by their skin color would fit in the “people of color” category.
But there is, I think more to it than that. The anti-white prejudice among what passes for a Left these days is in many ways antisemitism repurposed to attack a larger target: everyone of European ancestry. The structure is the same. A successful group is held to be the source of the world’s ills for centuries or millennia. The success of the target group is held to be not the result of better cultural norms nor even of simple historical good fortune, but of some sort of underhanded connivances. The target group is held to be morally defective both collectively and individually. An enterprising wokester in California, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, has even found a way to repurpose the hoary old antisemtic charge of deicide for use against all whites (albeit renamed in neologism “theocide”, which whether in ignorance of or contempt for classical languages mixes Greek and Latin roots). No, we didn’t kill Jesus. We slaughtered the entire bloodthirsty pantheon of the Aztecs. Everyone whose ancestors hailed from Europe are guilty of the actions of Hernán Cortés, even as the medieval antisemite held his Jewish contemporaries guilty for the actions of the Sanhedrin in 33 AD. But, of course, the target is only larger, not actually moved off of the Jews.

R Wright
R Wright
3 months ago

Careful you’ll get the ADL on you.

RM Parker
RM Parker
3 months ago

Just to throw this in the mix: the whole “BIPOC” thing is such a grift, too.
“Black”, I get – even though the relevance of the term, beyond the simply descriptive, escapes me.
Indigenous – well, everyone is indigenous to somewhere (in my case, the north of England). Meaningless attempt at a distinction, in my view. Everyone, everywhere.
And “people of colour” – what committee floated that piece of patent idiocy? Everyone is of some colour. Even the palest skinned Celt is a pale pink.
So, yes: the whole enterprise is set up to sow division and grievance, perpetuated predominantly by white middle class numpties, often aided by (mostly) US-based “academics” of multifarious ethnicity. Careers built on the misery of others by the recycling of tired tropes and other people’s tragedies. The perpetrators should be ashamed, but that seems to be the one thing they just can’t be “woke” to.

Saul D
Saul D
3 months ago

What we’re seeing is the nonsense of white identity groups emerging because a lot of American black identity politics continually frame the world as us and them. Instead we ought to do is stop boxing people in by skin colour. Ethnicity, identities and self-perception are far less binary than the race reactionaries demand.

Emmanuel MARTIN
Emmanuel MARTIN
3 months ago

Does the bear shit in the woods ?

A D Kent
A D Kent
3 months ago

 Any discussion of why the US students are protesting right now that reaches for anti-white animus without even mentioning the fact that their President could stop this slaughter with a phone call is beyond fatuous. Biden could call Netanyahu this afternoon and tell him the money will stop, the arms will stop, the spares will stop and the UN vetoes will stop. He could tell him any one of those four and things would be over by the morning. Sure the US sponsor some of the regimes mentioned in Kaufmann’s little list, but they’re up to their genocidal necks in this one. It really is as simple as that.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

Equally, the war would be over if Qatar and/or Iran stopped funding Hamas unless the Israeli hostages were released, or if the US threatened to dismantle UNRWA unless Hamas ceded control of Gaza to a non-Jihadi government. Israel did not start this – Hamas did, yet you believe Israel is the one who should be defunded. Also, stop calling it a genocide because it isn’t one – there isn’t neither the numbers or the intent. It’s a brutal war, made 10x more devastating by the fact that Hamas is literally trying to get its own population killed by turning hospitals, schools and mosques into military based.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

If Israel falls the terrorists will aim their sights at the rest of the Western world. We are dealing with an ideology that needs a fresh supply of enemies to perpetuate itself. This is why wokeism and jihadism work so well together.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
3 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

Hamas could and should surrender, but they won’t because of people such as you …

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
3 months ago

Yes, traditional anti-Semitism amongst the US black community (we don’t have the same tradition in the UK).
It’s not even that the young people there want to play at being Black Panters – and by ‘young’ we’re talking about militants long out of college and virtually in their 30s. It’s that they are looking for a platform for their cultural anti-Semitism and have found it in the Middle East question.

Linda M Brown
Linda M Brown
3 months ago
Reply to  Tyler Durden

I think you should be using the past tense, didn’t have the same tradition

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 months ago

Probably, which is ironic, considering that the “activists” could not distinguish Arab from Jew at gunpoint. By the way, the US Census Bureau regards both groups as white, so the thesis behind these protests is wrong to start with, not that this makes a difference.
Further irony is that the bulk of the protesting horsepower comes from usually affluent, soft white students who just want in on ‘the current thing’ so they can hang out with the cool kids. Many cannot name either the river or the sea; they simply engage in performative acts.

Bored Writer
Bored Writer
3 months ago

It’s not anti-white prejudice, it’s anti-white-heterosexual-male prejudice. White women of all sexual orientations, and white male homosexuals, apart from Douglas Murray, are beyond criticism.

John Taylor
John Taylor
3 months ago

Kaufman gives too much credit to the students’ worldview, if it can be called that. “Anti-whiteness” is a status cachet, an invisible line of demarcation separating the great unwashed, non-woke from those up the class scale. This ascription of moral superiority to themselves is itself a sign of white privilege, which is why none of these protests are taking place at the working class colleges here in the states, nor the HBCUs.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

Yes, here’s an irony to consider: From an article in Resist the Mainstream: Campus Anti-Israel Protests Aren’t Actually About Israel:“While Israel’s outward face is that of the European-descended Ashkenazi, the culture on the ground has been thoroughly Arabized by these Middle Eastern and North African immigrants. Though these swarthy Jews of the Islamic world may insist that they are not Arabs (and may indeed hold in contempt the Arab nations that expelled them in the 20th century), in physical appearance and culture they are indelibly marked with characteristics typical of the Islamic world. While the Israel of 1950 was essentially an island of European customs in a sea of alien cultures, the Israel of 2024 is far more continuous with neighboring polities than almost anyone seems to acknowledge. The fundamentally Arabized character of Israeli culture is seldom discussed, as both political sides of the conflict find it unflattering to their preferred narratives, yet it is a remarkable and increasingly relevant fact of the matter. While Palestinian activism internationally is tied in with a third worldist opposition to the supposed evils of whiteness, this narrative translates awkwardly to a situation in which a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Levantine Palestinian might be bombed by fleets of hirsute, swarthy IDF soldiers of recent Iraqi and Yemeni descent.”
How do the crazy wokists rationalize this? Guess the whole point is that they do not reason in the first place. 

Rachel Taylor
Rachel Taylor
3 months ago

There seems to be a strong element of media bias in the coverage given to the student protests.
As far as I can tell, the protests amount to a ragbag of activists, not great in number. However, the reporting gives the impression of vast numbers of protestors, simmering, ready to explode in mass riots. The impression given is to imply that Hamas has mass support in the West.
In a recent news report, they announced that 14 people had been arrested. That is fewer than the number of shoplifters in the local supermarket on a good day.
What we learn from this is not what students think; but what the media would like us to think.

stephen k
stephen k
3 months ago

Good question. Identity politics has replaced morality with racism & yet is oddly treated as ‘progressive’. There is a conflation, but all the talk is of antisemitism and not anti white & I think this is part of the problem. People often talk of antisemitism as a shape shifting hate – I don’t buy that. It’s far to continent. There is clearly something else. You need to talk with the activists but that’s like talking to a rock. The answer will not be easy to find.

William Brand
William Brand
3 months ago

The left hatred of whites only arose after the whites lost their power to oppress. They are now beating a dead horse. White rule ended after WWII when America forbade Europe to recover their colonial empires and America passed the Civil rights act in order to appeal virtuous to the new nonwhite nations. The ruling ethnicity is now Asian particularly Chinese. Around 1900 when whites ruled the left was very racist and opposed to any rights for blacks. Read the works of Jack London for an example of extreme white racism combined with Socialism as an Ideal. This was the left when whites ruled. Now they are attacking the deposed whites and ignoring the current ruling race

Matthew Freedman
Matthew Freedman
3 months ago

44% believe Israel is white supremacist. What a disgraceful lie leftists have told z gens. This is the Tiktok affecf. Zionism has advocated for a jewish homeland for all jews when they were homeless. Zionists literally evacuated Jews in Iraq, Ethiopia and Yemen. Such Jews from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan and Algeria have been half of Israel since the 1950s. Israel and zionism has nothing to do with US race political. Don’t bring this nonsense into it.