In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones faces off against a skilled swordsman in a crowded Shuk. When the Arab man performs an elaborate display—spinning, slashing, showing a true mastery of his weapon—the choreography signals an impending dramatic and honorable duel.

Indiana Jones watches for a moment, sighs, pulls out a gun, and shoots the man in a turban.

This scene, in many ways, has become cinematic shorthand for the strategic miscalculation; where no amount of technical excellence compensates for a fundamental mismatch between the rules the knife-wielder assumes govern the fight, and the rules that Jones operates by instead.

This, I want to suggest, is the position Jewish students increasingly find themselves in when confronting anti-Zionism on college campuses and in progressive educational spaces today.

For decades, Jewish educational and advocacy responses to antisemitism assumed that the conflict over narrative and legitimacy could be won through facts, historical accuracy, moral reasoning, and good faith dialogue. If Jews explained themselves clearly enough—if we contextualized Israel properly, demonstrated our deservingness of empathy, conceded complexity, and told our story well—we would eventually convince antisemites.

That assumption no longer holds.

Contemporary anti-Zionism does not operate primarily as a debate over facts or history. It operates as a struggle over epistemic authority: who has the right to define reality, suffering, and moral legitimacy in the first place. And within this struggle, Jewish memory itself is often treated as inadmissible.

This phenomenon, which I term “replacement memory,” is not simply disagreement between Zionist and Palestinian narratives, nor is it a denial of Palestinian suffering. It is the systematic overwriting of Jewish historical experience within activist–intellectual frameworks that imagine themselves as anti-racist, anti-colonial, and liberatory. Jewish trauma is not merely misunderstood; it is re-coded as evidence of power. Jewish testimony is not weighed; it is disqualified. Jewish survival is reframed as domination.

Under replacement memory, Palestinian suffering becomes the singular moral currency of belonging, while Jewish suffering must disappear for justice to function.

This helps explain why Israel advocacy efforts on campus have failed so forsakenly: not because Jewish students lack evidence, empathy, or ethical seriousness, but because they have been trained to bring swords to a gunfight.

I........

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