The gist of Chait's piece is that most people have been arguing about the political expediency of anti-Zionist protests, both the ones that started last year on college campuses and the ones happening now in Chicago. Sure, some Democrats will say, we support Palestinians but now is not the time to split the party. There is too much at stake.

But Chait sidesteps all of that and goes to the core of the real argument. Are the protesters on the right side of history as they claim or are they just riding a wave of publicly acceptable hate (acceptable on the left). Chait believes it's the latter.

The demonstrators do have a publicly articulated worldview....

SAFE, like other branches of SJP, takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.”...

Students for Justice in Palestine called the October 7 attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” against “the façade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The Palestinian Youth Movement saluted “the active decolonization of Palestinian land” and stated “We have a right to resist on our own land.” Within Our Lifetime declared, “Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people,” and therefore, “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.” 

He notes that when it comes to right-wing protests, the left (and the media) usually judges them by the single most extreme statement or act associated with them. When it comes to anti-Zionist protests they are far more forgiving. In fact, there is seemingly nothing left-wing protesters can do that will be criticized by the left. They are given a pass. As Chait puts it, "It is difficult to steer the protesters away from extreme rhetoric and counterproductive tactics if you are abiding a norm of treating them as beyond critique."

Underlying all of this is the growth of a species of critical theory called Settler-Colonialist Theory. While this theory has a lot to say about the history of the US and other colonial states, Chait notes that as far as practical matters go there's no much to it beyond the occasional land acknowledgement. No one beyond the most extreme fringe is really calling to return the land to the descendants of Native Americans. But the situation is different in Israel. There, returning the land—all of it— is precisely what the activists have in mind.

Settler-colonialism theorists believe certain people have an authentic, permanent relationship to the land. Their rhetoric, as Kirsch points out, echoes the romantic nationalism of the old German right. “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinians ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land,” writes Jamal Nabulsi of University of Queensland. Palestinians have “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land,” in the words of the scholar Steven Salaita.

Compare this with the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologists such as Richard Walther Darre — “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it” — and you will have difficulty detecting any difference. Indeed, if you switched Palestinian with German, it would be hard to tell one theorist from the other.

You can see this same ideology in action on many college campuses. Leftist students lay claim to a central space on campus and then do their best to exclude and forbid Zionists (usually Jews) from using the space or even passing through it in some cases. Remember this scene at Harvard?

Or this one at UCLA:

Or this example in NYC:

What they want to do in Israel is what they are modeling on campus. They don't want peaceful coexistence, they want domination and exclusion. And because they are absolutely sure of their own righteousness, they won't accept criticism from anyone, not eve AOC.

The movement could not be any more clear on this point. Its members will not stop harassing and intimidating Jewish people. Nor will they adopt any standard of behavior. When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.

So whatever happens this week in Chicago, the Democrats earned it. They chose to coddle and support this extreme movement and now they'll have to deal with the consequences.