A “youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process”, Sunrise is a spin-off from the Justice Democrats, the tomorrow-belongs-to-me wing of the American left.
The Sunrise Movement mission statement is punctiliously progressive: “We’re mobilizing young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America, end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics, and elect leaders who stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people.”
Last week, the movement’s Washington DC branch was meant to take part in a rally for statehood the US capital. And why not. Bumper stickers in DC read “DC: Taxation without representation.” George III would have laughed at the irony.
But Sunrise DC felt obliged to boycott the rally. Its members refused to associate themselves with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
All these groups focus on domestic issues; the Reform group isn’t much to the left of Sunrise DC when it comes to the environment.
The problem was these groups’ “alignment with” Zionism and the State of Israel, which, Sunrise DC says, is a “colonial project” in “occupation of the land of Palestine”, views “Black and brown Jewish-Israelis” as “second-class citizens”, and treats them with “extreme policing and brutality”.
Zionism itself, Sunrise DC asserts, is “incompatible” with the progressive commitment to “racial justice, self-governance, and indigenous sovereignty”.
The Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt called this “overtly antisemitic”: “What it is saying is that, ‘You Jews, as a people, you do not have a right to a national identity.’” She noted that Sunrise DC did not object to the presence of non-Jewish groups that also support Israel.
Sunrise’s national office agreed: the DC group’s actions were “unacceptable and antisemitic”. The DC chapter issued a non-apology that noted that “DC is facing the highest record of antisemitic incidents to date”, but “we continue to stand against Zionism”.
Sunrise may have disavowed its DC chapter, but in May it tweeted out some educational material on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “We’re in solidarity with the Palestinians. Climate justice cannot exist without collective liberation, and collective liberation is only reached when people are freed from colonial and imperial violence worldwide.”
Sunrise gave links to websites that informed young members that “palestine is a country… being occupied by the state of israel, a jewish ethnostate established by zionists in 1948”, and that “the only way towards justice” is the “complete abolishment of the state of israel”.
The consistent presence of antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the recruiting drives and public statements of left-wing climate groups isn’t a fluke. It’s a worldview.
The radical left has repurposed the revolution away from the workers and towards the climate, but its theory of class enemies remains the same.
We might even ask if propaganda against Israel and the Jews — so white, so capitalist, so successful — is being used as a wedge issue and a recruiting tool. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?
“We believe in the abolition of all oppressive structures and the rebuilding of a new world that will liberate all people, with a focus on transformative justice,” Sunrise says.
Freedom for all people — except the Jews. Collective liberation for all equals collective liberation from the Jews. We, it seems, are due for some “transformative justice”.
This is the language of 1890s Vienna or 1920s Weimar, and it is being taught to young Americans in order to gather votes for the Democrats.
In this respect, if no other, the problem for Jews is not unlike that of the climate cultists: we have no second planet.
Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition
