Much has been made of younger Democrats’ shift away from sympathy for Israel and how future Israeli governments can, therefore, expect intense pressure to make even greater concessions toward a Palestinian state. But since October 7 we’ve gotten a very good look at these progressive voters and activists and institutions, and their vision for the future suggests a two-state solution is the farthest thing from their minds.

This puts them on the same page as the more militant patrons of the Palestinians: Iran and Qatar. Which is how we ended up with the comical but uncannily representative pro-Houthi event last week, hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America and billed as a way “to learn about Yemen’s position as an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist force in West Asia, its just actions in the Red Sea in defense of Palestinians in Gaza, and its decade-long resistance to US-led bombardment and siege.”

The idea of the Houthis—slave-driving putschist proxies of a foreign power, Iran—as some kind of “anti-imperialist” force is genuinely hilarious. But the “anti-Zionist” descriptor is an interesting one: the terror group’s motto is “God is Great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” The embrace of eliminationist anti-Semitism as synonymous with anti-Zionism is the most honest expression of where antipathy toward Israel is heading.

This is far from being a fringe position among modern Western activists. Pro-Palestinian protesters in New York and Washington DC shout “We don’t want no two-state, we want ’48!” You can also hear “end the settler Zionist state,” “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” or its more literal Arabic version “from water to water, Palestine will be Arab.” Contrary to misconception, those chants didn’t start in October. They’ve just become ubiquitous since then.

The focus on anti-Semitism at the nation’s most “elite” universities has shown the dominance of the underlying ideological obsession with “decolonization,” a blood-and-soil nationalism infecting campuses across the country. The idea is that the People of Israel have no ties to the Land of Israel. (These people are not the sharpest tools in the shed, but they are legion.)

It would be easier to dismiss this all if it were contained to college campuses, but of course it’s caught fire in the United States Congress as well. In 2022, Rashia Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Betty McCollum, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Marie Newman sponsored a resolution that began: “Whereas the United Nations General Assembly recommended on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine into two states against the wishes of Palestine’s majority indigenous inhabitants.”

That influential members of Congress would read a resolution into the congressional record that denies Jewish indigeneity in the land of Israel would normally be considered shocking stuff. But in our current era, this sort of conspiratorial Jew-baiting incitement is regarded as uncontroversial. This week, New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen wrote that Jewish self-determination in the land is one expression of “the dying gasps of the old colonial order.” She went on to discourage violence against the Jews of Israel, as if they deserve it but the Godheads of the Order of the New York Times choose magnanimity instead.

The one thing you can’t help but notice about this modern blood libel is just how popular it is. The idea that these influential strains of progressive politics and culture would seek to pressure Israel into agreeing to a two-state solution completely ignores the fact that its proponents believe, as the Squad members have said on other occasions, that the two-state proposition in 1947 is the “root cause” of the region’s misery today.

The “settlers” in the phrase “settler Zionist state” aren’t a few messianic hilltop youth but every Jew who lives between the river and the sea. The Nakba-ization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, on the American left, virtually complete.

All of which is why the surge in anti-Semitic activism dressed up as “anti-Zionism” since October 7 has done more to bury the two-state solution than anything that came before it save the several times Palestinian leadership explicitly rejected the offer of a state. And that doesn’t mean the region goes back to the drawing board, or some creative solution is found that merges all parties into one sovereign entity. It means the Palestinians will be denied an independent state of their own, because Israel isn’t going anywhere.

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