"What is happening now in left and progressive spaces quietly reverses that progress. It teaches people, often without realizing it, that some identities can be treated as morally contingent. It reshapes how people think about other groups. It lowers the threshold for dehumanization. It makes it easier, over time, to more broadly justify dismissing suffering, othering, acts of discrimination anywhere it becomes politically inconvenient.
That is exactly how prejudice evolves itself into something systemic. By changing the rules of who is allowed to be seen clearly. And this is where it becomes personal.
Most people reading this do not think of themselves as antisemitic. They would never use a slur. They would never straight out and openly deny someone’s humanity. But that is not how this shows up anymore. It shows up in smaller decisions we make as progressive and left leaders these days. In what we excuse. In what we scroll past. In which deaths feel complicated instead of tragic and unacceptable. In whether we instinctively see a person or a position when we hear the word “Zionist” or “anti-Zionist.”
You can oppose Israeli policy. You can reject Zionism. You can defend it. None of those positions require you to sort Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims into categories that determine whether they deserve empathy. If your framework depends on deciding which Jews are acceptable and which are not, or which civilians matter and which do not, then the issue is not that your politics are controversial. It is that your reasoning has already crossed a line that civil rights traditions were meant to prevent. The civil rights standard was never agreement. It was consistency. No collective guilt. No dehumanization. No conditional empathy.
We already know how to apply these principles. We are watching what happens when we fail to. The only question is whether we are willing to apply them when it challenges our own assumptions. Because if we cannot, then all we have really done is learn how to recognize injustice selectively.
And selective justice is not justice for all."
How We Learned to Sort Jews Into “Acceptable” and “Unacceptable” Again and Why No One Wants to Admit It
