[Jesse] Jackson ran again in 1988, in a crowded field in which he was, again, the only genuinely exciting candidate. The New York primary was in April, and the mayor of the city was Ed Koch, who had taken particular offense to Jackson’s characterization of Zionism as “a kind of poisonous weed that is choking Judaism.” In the heat of campaigning for his chosen candidate, Al Gore, the ever-unconstrained Koch declared that “Jews and other supporters of Israel would have to be crazy to vote for Jackson.”
A firestorm erupted—but this time it wasn’t about what Jackson had said but rather about what Koch had said. The columnist Richard Cohen declared, “Jews don’t ‘have to be crazy’ to vote for Jesse Jackson. They can make up their own minds on that. But they have to be crazy to listen to Ed Koch.” There were myriad such comments. According to reporter Roger Simon, Gore called Jackson every night for a week to apologize. Koch later said he had gotten “carried away,” but it was too late for him. A “Stop Koch” movement, whose purpose was to deny him a fourth term as mayor in the next election, was born out of his words—and succeeded when Koch lost to David Dinkins in the 1989 primary.
What this revealed was that, Hymietown or no Hymietown, Jackson had achieved a sacrosanct position in the Democratic firmament as the most influential and popular black political presence in the country.
Jackson’s strength derived almost entirely from his domination of the black vote—polling showed that 19 out of 20 black New Yorkers voted for him. But he had also made significant inroads with leftists, many of them Jews, whose views of Israel had turned sour after the 1967 Six-Day War. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism was reframed by radical thinkers in the 1970s as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians—the idea that gave rise to the notorious 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Conventional American politicians in both parties loathed the resolution—and under U.S. pressure in the wake of the end of the Cold War, it was rescinded in December 1991. But the animating idea behind the resolution had already gained purchase in academic journals and university departments. In 1989, UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw devised the theory of “intersectionality,” according to which all political oppression stemmed from an imbalance between the powerful and powerless. Its application to the Middle East conflict was obvious: Israel was powerful, the Palestinians powerless, and therefore Israel was, by definition, an oppressor.
It became the most influential sociopolitical theory of our time. And it dovetailed nicely with the dominant book about the modern Middle East. That was Edward Said’s Orientalism, a jeremiad against the imposition of Western ideas on non-Western cultures. Said was an English professor at Columbia by day but moonlighted as an official of the Palestine National Council, and was a critic of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from the left.
The ideas (and disciples) of Crenshaw and Said were disseminated throughout the academy in the 1990s and 2000s. They became the default view in political science and Middle Eastern studies departments and on tenure committees. Those who preached the intersectional anti-Zionist gospel had the loudest voices on campus and the greatest influence on the college-educated Americans who came their way. Even as the Clinton and Bush administrations were widely viewed as friendly to Israel, and even though the halls of Congress were populated by friends of Israel, the next generation of American political activists was being trained in darker and uglier ideas.
In the mid-2000s, campuses across the country were suddenly lit up by the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement, an idea conceived in 2005 in a Palestinian document called “the BDS Call.” It sought to isolate Israel by excluding its scholars and scholarship and forbidding the use of university financial resources in any way that might be seen as aiding the Jewish state. The plan was a direct lift from the anti-apartheid movement that helped bring down the white supremacist government in South Africa in the 1980s.
The anti-apartheid cause had been a key feature of all political conversation on campuses in the 1970s and 1980s. BDS sought to duplicate its success and build on it, and it found unexpected allies in its efforts. The idea was immediately taken up by former president Jimmy Carter, who believed his 1980 defeat had been partly the result of an evildoing Zionist cabal working on behalf of Israel.
Carter published a book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006. This was, in its own way, an earthquake, not only because Carter was a former U.S. president but because he had been one of the negotiators of the Camp David Accords of 1979, the first peace deal ever struck between Israel and an Arab country (Egypt). That same year saw the release of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by two august political-science professors who claimed that this itty-bitty country had come to control Capitol Hill by the power of Jewish money. John Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. Stephen Walt was tenured at Harvard.
