Liberals Should Start Taking Anti-Israel Activists at Their Word

Behind the willingness on the mainstream left to indulge the anti-Israel radicals, argues Jonathan Chait, is a tendency to romanticize them while ignoring their actual ideas. Chait, a staunchly liberal journalist who makes some unsympathetic and highly dubious claims about Israel, sees this tendency in some of his own colleagues, who tend to ascribe “the most sympathetic possible motives” to the protesters while avoiding any examination of their “actual beliefs.” Take, for instance, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the branch of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that interrupted Kamala Harris’s speech in Detroit: