A political position has arguments and posits critiques about policy decisions. A subculture is different. A subculture has specific clothing, an insider language, a worldview: as a social movement, antizionism has all three. It meets the criteria for a subculture.

I’ve written about the chants, lexicon, inversion, curriculum, detection, and code-words of modern antizionism: now it’s time to examine it as a subculture.

It seems we’ve been arguing back and forth about antizionism the wrong way. Some treat it as a set of propositions, true or false, fair or unfair. We answer it with counter-evidence about what Zionism amounts to, marshaling historical facts, and questioning their values. We don’t realize that a proposition was never in front of us. What assembles on the quad and spreads in the feed is not an argument, it’s a culture. A dense interwoven knitting of clothing, speech, norms, heroes, and martyrs. You don’t refute a culture: you identify, read, and critique it.

Dowd and Dowd reduce a subculture to three conditions: its members “interact frequently,” “share a worldview,” and “remain unwilling or unable to assimilate into the dominant culture.” Those in subcultures don’t want their membership to become normalized and assimilated. (Dowd & Dowd, 2003).

What follows is a kind of ethnography. If we learn antizionism’s norms, aesthetics, rituals, and social habits, we don’t need to condense it to a definition like “opposition to Israel.” And unlike a definition, this form of antizionism can be seen, heard, and touched. It has clothing, slogans, codes, and social expectations.

Antizionists can be found from Southeast Asia to Norway, each setting shaped by its own history and style. In the West, the dominant form is organized through the pro-Palestinian movement, but antizionism is not reducible to that movement. Its ideas and vocabulary have been shaped by Soviet Russia, Arab states, the Global South, and Nazi Germany.

Today antizionism appears at the UN, throughout academia, and within the professional class. “American antizionism,” writes Shaul Kelner, “finds its social base in the same educated, urbanized professional class that most Jewish Americans inhabit.” Because of this, Kelner points out, “Jews are more likely to personally encounter antizionism in their workplaces, schools, and communities.”

Let’s begin with dress, because a subculture outwardly shows its membership before it speaks. The keffiyeh is the foundational garment. It’s worn not as a Palestinian wears it. To the member its connection to the Levant has generally been severed, its meaning has been emptied of geography, being replaced as a symbol of allegiance. Around it are other recognizable markers: the “Free Palestine” t-shirt, kaffiyeh-print everything, the bag and bandana in tatreez cross-stitch, the silver shape of Mandate Palestine with Israel deliberately absent, the way it’s taught in Palestinian textbooks. There’s Arabic the wearer cannot read, “فلسطين حرة,” “Free Palestine,” or a line taken from Mahmoud Darwish. There’s the merchandised face of Greta Thunberg. There’s images of “political prisoners.” The wardrobe is not incidental. It’s the most efficient set of products the movement issues.

A culture........

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