Stop The War

I write this minutes after Donald Tromp bombed Iran. This is a war both unconstitutional (AOC has already called for impeachment!) and nonsensical. For more on that nonsensicality, I highly recommend this discussion from a few days ago between Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor on Pod Save The World. If you can, go all the way to the 50-minute mark where Rhodes makes a passionate plea for Democrats to oppose this calamity. Tromp has circumvented potential Congressional opposition by first claiming he’d wait two weeks to make a decision on entering the war, and then precipitously sending in the B-2 warplanes. (Claiming that a plan or decision will come “in two weeks” is both rhetorical tic and strategic dodge for Tromp, as Megan Shannon and Dareh Gregorian comprehensively catalogue here.) Here are the House Dems who signed on to a War Powers Resolution to prevent the U.S. bombing of Iran, and who presumably will continue to oppose Tromp’s recklessness. My rep, Jan Schakowsky, is on it. If yours is not, please contact them. And I’ll be calling my Senators Durbin and Duckworth, who have not yet signed on to Bernie Sanders’ No War Against Iran Act.

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As far as I can discern, the only person in the whole world who benefits from Tromp’s tough-guy tantrum is Bibi Netanyahu, who has leveraged a continual state of war — in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, and now in Iran — to keep his fractious ruling coalition together, hold on to power, and avoid prosecution for corruption. Netanyahu’s stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy is now complete. How did it get this way, despite the fact that Tromp’s own base (according to the polls) opposed U.S. involvement in Iran? Well, a major tool has been the weaponization of “antisemitism” to blunt opposition to Israeli governmental policies, as I wrote about in my first and (until now) only substack, “Michigan faculty and students call for University to stand up to Trump.”

So I’ll give some updates on that post, before winding back to the current catastrophe. I do have some decent news to share, and we could all use some decent news right now, right? Friday, a federal district judge blocked Tromp’s efforts — part of a vendetta justified by charges that Harvard has not cracked down on antisemitism — to prevent Harvard from enrolling foreign students. Also on Friday, Mahmoud Khalil — the Columbia University student activist who had been held in a Louisiana ICE detention center for 102 days — was released on bail. This follows the release last month of Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who had also been detained by ICE in Louisiana for no other reason – as the judge in the case pointed out — than her co-authorship of an op-ed in a student newspaper. And at my alma mater in May, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s spurious charges against pro-Palestinian campus protestors were dropped.

Also at the University of Michigan, Santa Ono — the school president who refused to meet with concerned Jewish faculty about their concerns described in that previous substack —decided that his brand of administration might be more popular in a red state; he resigned from his post to take on the same role at the University of Florida. In the Sunshine State, Ono perhaps reasoned, he would not have to deal with pesky faculty and student protestors. To get the Florida post, Ono bragged about dismantling U-M’s DEI office. But — and I say this with a heaping dose of schadenfreude — Ono’s attempts to prostrate himself before Florida’s Board of Governors failed. These far-right guardians of Florida’s higher education said “oh no” to Ono; his anti-DEI stance was just not extreme enough for them.

And how extreme are the right-wing politics at U-Florida? Consider the case of Preston Damski, the Nazi law student who was given a “best student” award by his adjunct professor, a Trump-nominated judge. He won the kudo with a paper on the legal theory of Originalism, in which he argued that the Constitution’s “We the People” only includes whites; that nonwhites should be stripped of the right to vote; and, according to Richard Fausset’s excellent article in the New York Times, for ‘the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.’”

The granting of the award set off months of turmoil on the law school campus. Its interim dean, Merritt McAlister, defended the decision earlier this year, citing Mr. Damsky’s free speech rights and arguing that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”

Damski was only suspended when he started an X account, where

he argued in one post that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “controlled by Jews,” whom he called “the common enemy of humanity.” In posts about Guatemalan illegal immigrants, he said that “invaders” should be “done away with by any means necessary.” He lamented the “self-flagellatory mind-set” of modern-day Germans, noting their failure to revere Hitler.

With the Damskis of the world getting collegiate honors, it is almost laughable to claim that the greater threat to Jews comes from the campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace. But that is the world-view that Netanyahu and Tromp and the Heritage Foundation and right-wing media have put forth. And where do I see the gravest peril to me, as a Jew? Well, I never expected to be quoting Tom Friedman in my substack, but even a mainstream columnist like him cannot avoid the conclusion that “This Israeli Government Is a Danger to Jews Everywhere.”

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I’m aware that many would read the paragraphs above and conclude that my opposition to Israel’s wars makes me antisemitic and a threat to my fellow Jews. It boggles my mind but, in an effort to become unboggled, I have found a couple recent podcasts very helpful:

• The Code Switch episode “The administration’s fight against antisemitism is dividing Jews,” in which host Gene Demby interviews The Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld and Ken Stern of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.

• The This Is Hell episode “Overbroad Antisemitism Definitions Discipline the Jewish Diaspora,” in which my dear friend Chuck Mertz interviews Lihi Yona and Itamar Mann on attempts to stretch the legal definition of antisemitism.

These podcast episodes provide a framework to understand how we can fight antisemitism of all kinds without allowing Netanyahu and his allies to control the discourse and use our fears to get U.S. support for his wars. I highly recommend them.

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The weaponization of antisemitism continues to permeate our political lives, beyond college campuses. In the New York mayoral race — election day is Tuesday! — Andrew Cuomo (not a Jew) gave a speech in April accusing his opponents of being insufficiently supportive of the Israeli government. The Times of Israel reported on the delicious reaction from one of those opponents, city comptroller Brad Lander.

Lander, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the city government, lashed Cuomo with the Yiddish insult, “A beyzer gzar zol er af dir kumen,” which literally translates to, “May an evil decree come upon him.”

“For the non-Yiddish speakers, that roughly translates as, ‘Get the fuck out of here,'” Lander said. “Andrew Cuomo doesn’t get to tell me how to be Jewish.”

Meanwhile, Cuomo has tried to burnish his anti-antisemitism credentials by volunteering to join Alan Dershowitz on a “legal dream team” to defend Netanyahu in the International Criminal Court. It’s another example of how Bibi has come to dominate U.S. foreign and domestic politics, and how he threatens to divide the coalition that will be necessary to defeat Trompism in 2026 and 2028. My greatest hope is that whatever anti-Tromp coalition emerges will have the pursuit of peace as one of its core tenets.

Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts on how we can oppose the U.S. bombing of Iran right now, please leave them in the comments

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