Liberal Writer Calls on Democrats to Condemn Anti-Zionist Protesters: They ‘Will Not Stop Harassing And Intimidating Jewish People’

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, Pool, File

New York Magazine’ s Jonathan Chait condemned the anti-Zionist protesters expected to cause a ruckus at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week in a blistering column on Monday calling on his fellow Democrats to join him.

He argued that while many of the groups leading the protests in Chicago and cities across the country have had pure motives ascribed to them, most of them celebrated the barbaric October 7 attack on Israel, wishing “death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state,” and systematically harassing prominent Jews.

“This practice of lionizing and glossing over protesters’ actual beliefs insulates their ideas from correction,” wrote Chait . “The bill for this indulgence is coming due in Chicago. The long-anticipated protests against the Democratic Party have prompted angst over the impact on the election and the chance that Donald Trump will benefit.”

“They will not stop creating fear and discomfort for Zionists because they simply don’t believe in liberal ground rules that would permit people with different beliefs about the Middle East to go about their lives in peace. Even if they lack the power to murder Zionists, they retain the power to make them deeply uncomfortable,” he submitted. “It is why they consistently surround their targets with taunts and vandalize their homes.”

“What Democrats and progressives need to decide is whether to treat these groups as noble idealists broadly on the right side of history or as the fanatic adherents of an illiberal and unjust program,” continued Chait after outlining his own issues with Israel and some of its advocated in the United States. “In the Middle East, that program calls for endless war until the Jews have been expurgated from a soil on which they unnaturally reside. In the West, it means imposing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome.

To advance justice for Palestinians and Jews does not require placating, forming alliances with, or ceding ‘leverage’ to followers of this hateful program,” he concluded. “The morally just response is to meet this ideology the way liberals meet other forms of hate: by calling it what it is.”