Author Archives: David Ehrens - Page 2

Where does fascism come from?

Posted by on 2024-12-20 No comments

some of Trump’s “good people on both sides” (Charlottesville)

Our first Fascist president

Americans have finally come to the realization that Donald Trump really is a fascist. We got the first inklings when an ex-wife revealed that he kept Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand. But it’s never been a secret. Trump actually sounds like Hitler and acts like Mussolini. Even his own supporters don’t bother denying it since they themselves have been rubbing elbows with European fascists for years at CPAC conferences along with their spray-tanned Führer.

At least two of Trump’s new appointments, Pete Hegseth and Sebastian Gorka, seem to be fascists (Gorka even belongs to a pro-Nazi Hungarian order). Steve Bannon, Trump’s old campaign manager, has been trying to organize a fascist “Internationale” for years. Trump’s new Rasputin, Elon Musk, was raised in a fascist family that abandoned Canada for South Africa. It also came as no surprise to anyone when, barely a year into his first term, the German magazine Stern pictured Trump giving the Roman salute – better known as the Hitlergruß. Germans know a fascist when they see one.

Germans know a fascist when they see one

Fascist movement don’t just pop up out of nowhere. For sure, they have their autocrats, führers, caudillos, jefes, and strongmen; and of course they have a disaffected citizenry; but most importantly they represent they robber barons whose stream of barely-if-at-all-taxed riches will be affected by an annoying hoi polloi mobilizing to serve their own interests.

It is no coincidence that MAGA 1.0 really took off after the 2008 market crash and that MAGA 2.0 came back like a bad case of herpes right after the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement exploded.

As soon as anyone could say “Cheeto Hitler”, America’s rulers began banning books and cracking down on dissidents. Biden’s war on Gaza (yes, almost all the weapons came from the US) had a sobering effect on both citizens and rulers: it radicalized many of us and created a mass movement that questioned American empire, colonialism, and human rights violations — which proved to be one step too far for both the fascists and those claiming not to be.

For all of this, the unanswered, million dollar question remains: why did a large segment of the working class get 100% behind the fascists, while a similar-sized segment continues to fight them?

Sociologists, psychologists, and even political scientists have failed to adequately explain the phenomenon. Liberals are embarrassed to talk about class conflict or study what Marxists call the bourgeoisie. But we’ve had fascists at the door before, and the Marxists may just have the best analysis. So bear with me as I take you through how fascism has been studied — by liberals and Marxists alike — in the aftermath of National Socialism.

The Books

While Americans were busy trying to figure out whether Trump was or wasn’t a fascist, a huge number of books hit the market, each trying to define what fascism really is. But the emphasis in virtually all them is on the personal characteristics of fascist leaders or attempting to define the characteristics of fascist movements. None really deals with the class dynamics that push America’s ruling class to create and direct fascist movements.

Popular books making the rounds after Trump’s first election include: Timothy Snyder’s 2017 On Tyranny; Jason Stanley’s 2018 How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them; Levitsky & Ziblatt’s 2018 How Democracies Die; Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s 2020 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present; and Masha Gessen’s 2020 Surviving Autocracy (to name just a few).

Liberals also dusted off their copies of Robert Paxton’s 2004 The Anatomy of Fascism and Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And we kept making trips to the bookstore. One new arrival this year was Ann Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World.

All of these books are useful up to a point. But for each the focus is on diagnosis and classification. None deal with how people like Trump or his MAGA movement — or the German AfD, the French Front National, Spanish Vox, Portuguese Chega!, Dutch PVV, or Hungary’s Fidesz Party — actually come to power or how reactionary interests conjure these movements out of peoples’ anger, almost like alchemy.

Fascism is as American as apple pie

Fascism has knocked on the door many times in America’s relatively short history. After the Civil War fascists rolled back Reconstruction in what W.E.B. Dubois considered a counter-revolution, establishing a terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, which at one point had 4 million members. Eugenists and nativists created the “American Party,” better known as the Know Nothings. An offshoot of the KKK called the Black Legion actually attempted a coup. The Bund, a German-American group, famously held a massive rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 — just as Hitler was constructing his 6th concentration camp — urging Americans to “take back their country” from the mongrel races, especially the Jews. George Lincoln Rockwell launched America’s first Nazi Party.

After the McCarthy period, which attempted to break a growing labor movement, more fascist groups emerged, such as the Traditional Workers Party, Stormfront, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Oathkeepers, and the Three Percenters. Many of them are now well entrenched in the police and military.

These were little more than a lunatic fringe until the Tea Party movement brought them into the political mainstream, welding them together with the Religious Right. The Tea Party “movement” — neither a legitimate movement nor even an organic upwelling of working-class sentiment — spun off hundreds of astroturf groups to do the ruling class’s dirty work. For instance, it was former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey who created Freedomworks and who wrote the Tea Party Manifesto.

When we actually look closely, America’s illiberal movements are usually orchestrated by moneyed interests. The John Birch Society, for example, was created by Massachusetts candy magnate James Welch. Today, like Welch, the Koch brothers, Miriam Adelson, the Hunts, Leonard Leo, and the Bezoses and Musks of this world don’t just dabble in politics; they expect something for all the money they lavish on autocracy and repressive politics.

Trump just appointed 14 billionaires to his executive team. One of them seems to think he’s a co-president. All will use their cabinet appointments to enlarge already obscene wealth and to shape society to their advantage. Add to this the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and hundreds more autocratic democracy-killers, all funded by right-wing billionaires. This, my friends, is what Capitalism has been doing to democracy since time immemorial.

an early “dictator-buffoon” hybrid

Fascists defining fascism

One of the best descriptions of fascism was written by a fascist, Benito Mussolini. His Doctrine of Fascism (1932) rejects liberal social democracy, socialism and syndicalism (Mussolini was previously involved in both), as well as the classical liberal notion of the individual. Instead, for Mussolini, everything must serve the state — in Italy’s case, a nation eager to recreate the glory of Rome. It was Mussolini who gave fascism its name, from fasces, a Roman image depicting rods bound together with an axe, symbolizing the power of the state over an individual.

For Mussolini the state was supreme. Individuals were only important in terms of their function within the state. Only the state conferred morality and identity: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Like contemporary fascists, Mussolini rejected internationalism (which he correctly associated with socialism). Contempt for liberal democracy meant that single-party rule and authoritarianism were ideals, not defects. Contempt for the individual and worker’s organizations meant corporatism, by which the state would direct the economy (a complex maneuver since fascists certainly weren’t about to privatize corporations).

Fascist militarism is intrinsic because force and brutality, both by the military and the autocrat himself, are necessary to maintain an authoritarian state. Finally, fascism promises to create a “new man” unencumbered by conventional morality, weakness, hesitation, or qualms. As a replaceable human widget completely dedicated to the nation-state and dependent upon it for meaning, the new man abandons the materialism inherent in both capitalism and socialism.

Adolf Hitler’s conception of fascism, developed in two volumes of his autobiographical rant, Mein Kampf (my battle), covered much of the same ground as Mussolini’s but obsessed over the racial purity of the German nation-state. Hitler’s theories of Aryan supremacy and Jewish degeneracy led to the Nuremberg Laws (based on American Jim Crow), a host of antisemitic laws that purged Jews from the Civil Service and elsewhere, and embraced a weaponized form of Social Darwinism. Many forget that the first victims of Nazi extermination were average Germans with birth defects and mental health problems.

For Hitler Jews were a one-stop explanation for every ill in Weimar Germany; the removal of Jews would therefore address all these problems. Jews were Communists. Jews were Capitalists. Jews were internationalists. Jews were insular. Jews were diabolically clever. Jews were mental defectives. While expulsion and genocide had already begun, the “final solution” for Jews (complete annihilation) was finally formalized at the Wannsee conference in 1942. Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum (room to expand) was also a reaction to the limits placed on German nationalists by the victors of the first world war.

Psychological explanations of fascism

Although she was otherwise an astute political observer, Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, tied fascism’s appeal to lonely, atomized individuals. Her explanation resonates with modern readers for several reasons. It offers a mechanism by which the COVID epidemic could have contributed to the MAGA movement. Declining marriage and birth rates, alienation through social media and the breakdown of social institutions and consensus also fit tidily into Arendt’s essentially psychological theory.

Arendt wrote that, through propaganda and pseudo-science, alienated individuals can be easily manipulated into participating in the destruction of institutions they no longer believe hold any advantage for them, particularly when lies and propaganda are deployed. This includes the violation of laws and the rejection of social norms. Scapegoating and racial and ethnic intolerance are features of fascism and Arendt discussed in great depth the staggering number of refugees created in the wake of World War I — not so different from today’s global refugee crisis created by American wars in the Middle East as well as global warming.

Arendt is best known for her phrase “the banality of evil,” found in another of her books, Eichmann in Jerusalem. In it she maintains that Eichmann, in organizing a genocide, did so without really thinking, barely conscious he was committing crimes against humanity. Having abandoned his own humanity (as Mussolini and Hitler demanded of citizens of a fascist state) Eichmann also abandoned personal morality. This was a thesis that few believed and many, particularly other Jews, found offensive. In 2014 German philosopher Bettina Stangneth repudiated Arendt in Eichmann before Jerusalem. Stangneth’s thesis, developed from archival material unavailable to Arendt, was that Eichmann was every bit the monster everyone believed him to be, and was an ambitious, vain, calculating monster at that. But once again, all this was a debate about the psychology of a single fascist.

storming the Capitol, January 6, 2017

The Frankfurt School

From 1923 the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany) was known for social theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and others collectively known as “The Frankfurt School” despite widely-differing analyses.

Their work — much of it written in exile — drew from disparate intellectual currents of the early 19th Century: psychoanalysis; Marxism; and Critical Theory, a method of analysis that looks at power structures. As fascism manifested in real time, the Frankfurt School had much to say about authoritarianism, mass culture, propaganda, ideology, and power.

While haphazardly integrating Marxist class analysis into its work, the Frankfurt School focused mainly on psychology and sociology. Theodor Adorno examined the authoritarian personality. Walter Benjamin viewed fascism as an aestheticized politic glorifying war and violence and as theatre or religious spectacle in which myth and propaganda mimic religious ritual. Wilhelm Reich theorized that fascism appealed to the sexually repressed who more easily submit to authoritarian control. Reich believed that fascism could not be fought merely politically but had to address human and mass psychology that made it so attractive.

Contemporary diagnosticians

Contemporary analyses echo many of the theories first developed by the Frankfurt School.

Jason Stanley describes the tools and strategies that autocrats use to cement their power: “us versus them”; the mythic past; “alternate facts” and propaganda; attacks on intellectuals and universities; appealing to “law and order” while demonizing minority groups as criminals; promoting a “traditional” hierarchical society (appealing to the religious right and to racists); attacking democratic norm; pushing the Overton window of unacceptable or criminal acts; and advocating or initiating political violence.

Timothy Snyder finds fascism to be essentially opportunistic, feeding on fear and unrest. He points out that fascists are given to apocalyptic rhetoric — “on the brink”; “American carnage”; “complete destruction of society by our enemies” — as well as associating the Leader with God.

Robert O. Paxton offers an excellent summary of fascism’s features (again, not its etiology) in one paragraph:

“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Paxton enumerates five stages of fascism’s development: (1) the creation of movements, when a movement steps in to respond to a social crisis; (2) rooting or embedding of fascism within the political system (going mainstream); (3) seizing power; (4) wielding power; (5) radicalization or decline, where either the regime amasses even greater power or is finally repudiated by the people (or hung from a hook like Mussolini, or committing suicide in a bunker like Hitler).

Paxton observes that fascism seeks out elites who will control the economy or the military. Trump’s appointments and Project 2025 would seem to confirm this idea.

But is it fascism that seeks out elites, or elites that create fascism?

Since liberal analysis neglects class analysis and discounts internationalism, liberals often excoriate obvious enemies while letting their “friends” off the hook. Read Robert O. Paxton’s definition of fascism again and tell me how he has not just described to a “T” the Israeli state and its ultra-nationalist ideology, Zionism.

fascism ultimately depends on violence

The Marxists

While the liberal analysis of fascism offers insights into its characteristics and its repertoire of dirty tricks, Marxists can actually explain it.

The smoke had barely cleared following the Russian Revolution when fascism arrived to roll back social and economic gains of the revolution. Fascists openly declared war on socialism and socialists, leaving no doubt that their reaction was not a corrective to some vague social disquietude — as almost every modern commentator paints it — but a violent reaction to the growing demands and power of the working class.

While there are certain methods and strategies that fascist movements share, not all are alike. Each is typically shaped to fit the particulars of the nationalism being promoted. While liberals may argue about characteristics of fascism that differ among movements, Marxists have done a far better job of describing the mechanics of how fascists take power and mobilize part of the working class.

Here are a few who made contributions to understanding fascism using a class analysis:

Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist, eventually jailed by the fascists, who wrote his famous prison notebooks behind bars. One of Gramsci’s observations was that fascism doesn’t always have to overpower or destroy its enemies; sometimes it simply operates by manufacturing mass consent. Gramsci examined how propaganda is used to accomplish this. He noted that one of fascism’s most important objectives — one that the wealthiest strata of society benefit from enormously — is the destruction of working-class organizations like unions and worker’s advocacy groups, replacing them with corporatist structures under state control.

In 1921 Gramsci wrote The Two Fascisms, describing how the fasci di combattiemento was created after the first world war, how disaffected veterans and farmers had been drawn into one form of fascism — weak and under-represented in Parliament — while urban shopkeepers and small businessmen were drawn into a second form with significantly more power in the legislature, and led by Benito Mussolini. Gramsci wrote that the two fascisms related somewhat differently to liberal and social-democratic parties. The urban fascists were only too happy to reach agreement with the social democrats (who were only too happy to give in to the fascists’ demands) while the rural fascists remained intransigent in the face of all the back-slapping and deal-making. Gramsci also gives us a clear sense that, by understanding precisely how fascism works and what its weaknesses are, we can better fight it.

ready to play ball with fascism

Zetkin

Clara Zetkin was an another early theoretician of fascism. In 1923 she wrote The Struggle Against Fascism setting out a Marxist theory of fascism. Her words sound modern even a century later — though to properly-conditioned Americans certain words (bourgeois, proletariat) will evoke a conditioned response.

“[W]e view fascism as an expression of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy and as a symptom of the bourgeois state’s dissolution. We can combat fascism only if we grasp that it rouses and sweeps along broad social masses who have lost the earlier security of their existence and with it, often, their belief in social order. Fascism is rooted, indeed, in the dissolution of the capitalist economy and the bourgeois state. There were already symptoms of the proletarianization of bourgeois layers in prewar capitalism. The war shattered the capitalist economy down to its foundations. This is evident not only in the appalling impoverishment of the proletariat, but also in the proletarianization of very broad petty-bourgeois and middle-bourgeois masses, the calamitous conditions among small peasants, and the bleak distress of the “intelligentsia.” […] At present all these layers are experiencing the collapse of the hopes they had placed in the war. Their conditions have become significantly worse. What weighs on them above all is the lack of security for their basic existence, which they still had before the war.”

By crushing government institutions that sustain liberal democracy, as well as by imposing austerity programs, fascists accelerate the immiseration and fragility of the working class. It is no coincidence that Donald Trump has tasked Elon Musk with precisely the job of destroying the civil service. As Zetkin explains:

“As a result there are countless thousands seeking new possibilities for survival, food security, and social standing. Their number is swelled by lower and mid-level government employees, the public servants. They are joined, even in the victor states, by former officers, noncoms, and the like, who now have neither employment nor profession. Social forces of this type offer fascism a contingent of distinguished figures who lend it in these countries a pronounced monarchist hue. But we cannot fully grasp the nature of fascism by viewing its evolution solely as a result of such economic pressures alone, which have been considerably enhanced by the financial crisis of the governments and their vanishing authority.”

Zetkin provides a detailed analysis of Italian and German fascism, its strengths and vulnerabilities, and lays out a strategy to fight it. One of those strategies is the United Front:

“But proletarian struggle and self-defense against fascism requires a proletarian united front. Fascism does not ask if the worker in the factory has a soul painted in the white and blue colors of Bavaria; or is inspired by the black, red, and gold colors of the bourgeois republic; or by the red banner with a hammer and sickle. It does not ask whether the worker wants to restore the Wittelsbach dynasty [of Bavaria], is an enthusiastic fan of Ebert, or would prefer to see our friend Brandler as president of the German Soviet Republic. All that matters to fascism is that they encounter a class-conscious proletarian, and then they club him to the ground. That is why workers must come together for struggle without distinctions of party or trade-union affiliation.”

Trotsky

Although Leon Trotsky served as foreign minister, defense minister, and economic minister under Lenin’s Bolshevik government and was considered to be the “second in command,” he was later regarded as an enemy of the state after Lenin died and Stalin came to power. Stalin forced Trotsky into exile in 1929 and between 1936-1938 Stalin initiated a campaign of purging political enemies called the Great Terror, which claimed 1.2 million lives. In 1940 Stalin finally assassinated Trotsky, who had sought asylum in Mexico. During Trotsky’s 12-year exile in various countries, the former foreign minister studied political developments and wrote voluminously. This was precisely the timespan during which European fascism emerged. And Trotsky had a lot to say about it.

In 1944 Trotsky wrote Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it. Fascism always arises during periods of deep crisis in capitalist countries because the ruling class uses discontent to create fascist movements, whose objective in turn is to crush revolutionary movements and protect capitalist interests.

Trotsky argues that what Marxists call the petit bourgeoisie (middle classes, small business owners, and skilled professionals) is affected like anyone else by economic collapse. However, they do not necessarily see their interests overlapping with what Marxists call the proletariat (instead let’s use marginal, gig, and blue collar workers). It is usually the petit bourgeoisie that first succumbs to the siren call of fascism.

From Capitalism’s perspective, the capitalist class (the 1%, let’s say) rolls out fascism as a last resort after all other methods of maintaining control have failed. Suddenly we get censorship, political persecution, enemy lists, as well as the suppression of labor unions, demonization of socialists and others who challenge the corporate-friendly state, its foreign policy, or its military/police. Sound familiar?

In order to accomplish its goals, fascism relies on all the tricks and techniques described previously. But then comes the violence. Mass fascist movements begin to target and scapegoat minorities, encourage violence and paramilitary thuggery. Trotsky predicted “Stand back and stand by” 80 years before Trump ever uttered the phrase. Eventually, shutting down unions and criminalizing leftist political groups is undertaken.

While liberals see fascism’s emergence as a consequence of the weakness or absence of revolutionary struggle (or even mass movements), Trotsky viewed fascism as the dialectical consequence of the rise of revolutionary struggle. Fascism, for Trotsky, is what you get when increasing demands for social change scare the hell out of the ruling class. Trotsky was very clear that working people can expect no help from social-democratic parties (i.e. Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, lets say) who often end up brokering deals with the fascists all too quickly once they take their seats in government.

The wildcard in all of this is that segments of a disaffected working class and a frightened petit bourgeoisie can go either way — right or left. Social democratic party half measures to relieve social and economic pressures rarely do anything more than shift the social democrats to the right in their efforts to compete in elections or convince voters they’re not radicals. This is why the Democrats lost the last election. By the time the social democrats have ceded most of their power to the fascists, there may no longer be elections.

Moral integrity and solidarity

Posted by on 2024-11-30 No comments

“Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten…”

For the last year Palestinians have been living in an extra-hellish hellscape, harried from place to place by Israeli military and systematic bombing that has killed between 45,000 to nearly 200,000 people, depending on which figures you trust.

Early on, the American political establishment and an empire-friendly media settled on the dishonest narrative that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” after which the US threw tens of billions of dollars at Israel, arming and funding it to the teeth with brutal weapons that alarmed even politicians who voted for the transfers.

Anyone who opposed either Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians or the US breaking its own laws to fund human rights abuses became a dissident — to use a word we once reserved primarily for the Soviet Union. We turned on our own dissidents as a host of new legislation appeared, criminalizing protest of what has now been rightly judged to be a genocide.

Dissidents in putative “Western democracies” suffered arrest, censorship, loss of income, public humiliation, charges of “antisemitism,” doxxing, and show trials. These occurred under “liberal” governments as well as authoritarian ones. In the US, McCarthyite hearings were conducted to purge college presidents and shut down student groups. Current legislation proposes to shut down non-profits and human rights groups that oppose Israeli genocide.

Bipartisan consensus gives the middle finger to international law and international bodies like the UN and the ICC. The Imperial State has unabashedly shown us its long, bloody fangs. And, amazingly, they look just like those in dozens of repressive regimes across the globe. Gaza has offered Americans a dismal peek into the realities of every one of their national institutions. For anyone paying attention.

All of this is to be expected. Imperialism and Capitalism are ultimately incompatible with democracy, so guess which one takes the hit? The Capitalist gods have created a government in their own image. On January 20th it will be: out with Democratic Party billionaire donors (who prefer to quietly wield their influence) and in with triumphal Republican billionaires who will screw up your life as much as the Democratic billionaires, but will troll you as they do it.

Corrupt, malevolent regimes never fail to produce dissidents — just as unbearable repression produces resistance movements, including some you may not like. No one can be a disinterested spectator forever. Sooner or later someone comes to take your house, your orchards, your land, your life, your job, or your voice. Eventually you have no choice but to take a side.

“Beit Lahiya is gone, Beit Hanoun is gone. Operations are underway in Jabalya, essentially clearing the area of Arabs.”

If there was ever any question of what the war in Gaza was really about, we now have confirmation from former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, acknowledging — in the Jerusalem Post of all places — that Israel’s disproportionate response to Palestinian resistance was a fantastic opportunity for Zionists to start a new round of annexation and ethnic cleansing. Just as in Israel’s first round of ethnic cleansing in 1948, “Nakba 2.0” was accomplished through terror, slaughter, and the forced transfer of civilians. But this is what Zionism is, even the “friendly” version Joe Biden espouses: I win, you disappear.

Both American political parties signed on to support and commit war crimes and human rights abuses, bringing dissidents into the streets all over the globe. The blunt and clumsy instrument used to defend Israel is “antisemitism.” We are asked to swallow a crude and nonsensical explanation — that “antisemitism” has spontaneously spiked by orders of magnitude for no good reason. The fact is: people don’t hate Jews any more or less than they did a year ago. But there is considerably more reason to hate the Israeli state. And incidentally, that includes a lot of Israelis too. But criticism of Zionism is not antisemitism, as much as Democrats are now willing to create laws to criminalize the former as the latter.

It’s a long relay effort involving both parties. Democrats may have (again) brought us to this point but Republicans are about to (again) take the baton and run with it. But it wasn’t just the Democratic Party that left us in such a tough spot; it was the party’s liberals who placed all their eggs in the “lesser-evil” basket, hoping they could save a few domestic rights at the cost of sacrificing, quite literally, the lives of others out of sight thousands of miles away. They ended up saving neither.

As long as pesky dissidents were only the allegedly “antisemitic” Left or a bunch of disobedient college students, Liberals were content to throw them under the bus too. Enough Democratic politicians broke ranks to vote for repressive laws, condemn dissidents, or conduct McCarthyite hearings with MAGA Republican colleagues, that we can fairly say that both parties have brought America to ruin.

If you’ve ever read Martin Niemöller’s quote beginning with “First they came for the Communists,” you know that by the time the fascists came for pacifist Lutherans like Niemöller, there was no one left to defend them because all their predecessors were dead. Niemöller’s point was the importance of both moral integrity and solidarity.

Moral integrity and Solidarity: a little something to think about as Trump takes power and the Democrats conduct one more political post-mortem.

Bonhoeffer: Vampire Hunter

Posted by on 2024-11-25 No comments

I recently saw the trailer for “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin.” It reminded me of another film with similar historical accuracy, 2012’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

As you might imagine, this is a film that has nothing to do with the actual, historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

As soon as it was released concerns arose that “Bonhoeffer” was primarily a vehicle for Christian Nationalism. The Bonhoeffer Society itself has condemned it. Even the cast of the movie has had misgivings:

STATEMENT: Lead Actors in “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin” Speak Out Together Against the Misuse of Bonhoeffer’s Legacy

In Germany, Die Zeit published a scathing review, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: How Trump’s radical supporters weaponized Dietrich Bonhoeffer”):

https://www.zeit.de/2024/44/dietrich-bonhoeffer-theologe-donald-trump-unterstuetzer-gewalt

And an article in German Broadcast Culture read: “Fake News about a Nazi resistance fighter”:

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/film-bonhoeffer-radikale-christen-usa-100.html

The film was produced by Utah-based Christian Nationalist media company Angel Studios and was adapted from a “biography” (in quotes for good reason) by Eric Metaxas, a right-wing talk show host and rabid supporter of the Orange Führer himself.

https://www.ywampublishing.com/p-1554-bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy.aspx

The Baptist News didn’t like the film:

New Bonhoeffer film offers a mixed bag of emotions

And the Jewish online magazine The Forward had concerns about modern day Nazis falsifying history:

https://forward.com/culture/film-tv/677167/dietrich-bonhoeffer-todd-komarnicki-biopic-review/

So don’t bother with this garbage. In any case it won’t be long before you’re drowning in a flood of Christian Nationalist propaganda.

Stop Using Twitter and Facebook

Posted by on 2024-11-17 No comments

If you wouldn’t vote for the fascist on the left, why are you using the fascist on the right’s social network?

Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it from an already toxic platform into a white supremacist’s dream. Musk implemented schemes to gouge his customers, blocked third party developers from the Twitter API that had contributed to the platform’s success over the years, and invited back virtually every banned hate group you can think of. After renaming Twitter “X” it has now become indistinguishable from Parler, Gab, Trump Social, and it’s not that many goosesteps away from Stormfront. In joining the Trump administration, Musk intends to use his new position for personal gain despite the many conflicts of interest it poses. Just like Trump.

That other Trump-flirting social media mogul, Mark Zuckerberg, is not quite the Bond villain Musk is, but his four social media platforms operating under the grandiose title Meta (above it all) — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and now Threads — represent a social media monopoly dedicated to hoovering up as much of your personal data as they can get. Meta censors content and de-platforms users for the most obscure of reasons. Many users who posted criticisms of the Gaza genocide, for example, found themselves banned on several of Meta’s sites. Despite best efforts to keep your account private, Facebook will often “relax” your privacy settings without permission. If you use forwarding emails or phone numbers to preserve your privacy, Facebook will treat you like a criminal. Facebook’s registration process may even require you to hand over a photo of your driver’s license. In short, Meta is designed for one thing — to suck up as much of your personal data as it can for resale. You are the product Mark Zuckerberg is selling.

There are other options out there, though none are so popular as to make it possible for your long-lost high-school friends to find you. But if you want to share your views — or your cat pictures — you can try BlueSky, Mastodon, or Substack. Among others. That is, if you’ve had enough of censorship, violations of your privacy, and neo-Nazis.

Getting out

To delete your Twitter/X account, click the three-dot menu icon and on X’s left sidebar and choose Settings and privacy. From there choose Deactivate Your Account. To delete your Meta accounts, go here and delete Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads accounts through Meta’s Accounts Center.

Blocking the bastards

Deleting Meta and Twitter is one thing. Removing them permanently from your life is another. Both Meta and Twitter use cross-domain trackers to keep an eye on you even if you aren’t a user. There are browser extensions and tracker blockers you can install to try to prevent this, but they may not always work with all internet apps,

One way to stop all access to and from Twitter and Facebook is by blocking them at the domain name server level. On every desktop system there is a hosts file that can accomplish this by telling DNS to ignore certain websites, resulting in a refusal to resolve a domain name (like “www.facebook.com”) to its IP (internet) address.

One tool, available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, is Switchhosts, which makes it easy to safely edit the hosts file. You create a profile similar to this one and simply enable it in Switchhosts. No more Facebook or Twitter! Attempts by any of your internet apps to forward personal data will not be completed because they won’t be able to find the IP addresses of Facebook’s or Twitter’s trackers.

If you want to accomplish the same on your mobile devices, you can use a custom domain server that will do the blocking for you. One popular and currently free solution is NextDNS. You create an account, choose the social media networks you want to block, and NextDNS creates a profile for you. You then load the profile onto your mobile device, where it overrides your network settings and points to a custom DNS profile on NextDNS that is all yours.

Any time your browser or any other app tries to connect to the social media networks you want blocked, it’s as if the site simply doesn’t exist.

Which, in the best of all worlds, would be totally fine with me.

Trump’s America

Posted by on 2024-11-15 No comments

I have spent the last three quarters of a century in and out of the United States and lived though tumultuous chapters of our national history that have often been measured in wars of choice and countless instances of undermining other people’s democracies. Now things have come full circle; it is our own democracy that we’ve decided to torch.

If authoritarianism — or let’s just call it by its proper name, fascism — seems like a new choice, Americans have always had a rather low opinion of actual democracy. This is why we purge voter rolls and disenfranchise ex-felons. This is why we give cops carte blanche to murder civilians without consequence. This is why the majority of our national treasure is spent on destruction instead of lifting up the people who pay the freight. This is why the building blocks of our democracy, like the electoral college and the Senate, were designed to be inherently undemocratic. This is why we have a Supreme Court that gives lie to what you learned in social studies — that it is held in check by two other branches of government. Clearly it no longer is.

Americans could care less about democracy. We worship at the altar of raw power and we sneer at equality, justice, civic virtue and social cohesiveness. We are not all in this together. It’s every man for himself, and that’s just the way the capitalists like it.

There is so much in Trump’s win that boggles the mind, from his obvious dementia — if not outright insanity — to his incessant lying, the multiple felonies, the sleaze and corruption, and the fascist toadies and evangelicals who have sidled up to him. But the greatest insanity is the expectation that a corrupt billionaire and a coterie of other corrupt billionaires will somehow make things right for the common man — instead of simply lining their own pockets. What moron would believe such nonsense?

It turns out that the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump are not morons. While they may not have been voting in their own long-term self-interest, and many no doubt disapproved of Trump’s countless moral, intellectual, and mental failings, they were not voting for a man but for a Führer who will dictate and decree the kind of country they have always wanted — dominant Christian and White-controlled. If there are any doubts about this, Trump’s cabinet appointments make it abundantly clear.

Emergent fascism is scary enough, but what was equally shocking about this election was how fluidly the Democratic Party moved from years of denying that its incumbent president was cognitively impaired to fielding a new one — all without the inconvenience of a primary. How easily the party machine raised billions from mega donors while continuing to gaslight voters about the benefits (it turns out, mainly to Wall Street) of Bidenomics. How easily, barely raising any alarms, the Democratic Party moved significantly to the right on immigration, war, military spending, foreign policy, and even social issues. How coldly the party provided “ironclad” and excessive support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. And refused to change course, even with a new candidate.

Democrats of every stripe behaved badly in this election, from Blue Dog Democrats to Democratic Socialists. From Congressman Bill Keating, who cheer-led the Gaza war while profiting from his Boeing investments — to good old Bernie Sanders and [former?] Democratic Socialist spitfire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who both shepherded progressives, herding them into line to stick with an administration that was illegally funding the genocide of Palestinians even as they both supported performative legislation to stop it.

The Democratic Party is finished. Or it should be. Like a trojan virus in an operating system, unless thoroughly rooted out, the Democratic leadership will continue to advance the neoliberal policies and losing strategies that have had it on the ropes for decades and are its hallmark. Like a trojan or root virus, the most reliable solution is to start all over again, installing a new OS on the bare metal.

The Left has always argued for a new party of working people. Now liberal Democrats are slowly discovering they need one too.

IAC National Summit 2024

Posted by on 2024-09-30 No comments
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The Israeli-American Council (IAC) is yet another node in a vast network of pro-Israel and Israel-linked organizations known as the Israel Lobby. As opposed to American Jewish groups which might embrace Zionism, the IAC is openly operated, and in apparent violation of FARA laws, by Israelis on US soil.

The IAC was created in 2007 by Israel’s Consul General, Ehud Danoch, and it immediately began recruiting dual (Israeli-American) nationals, primarily with backgrounds in American business. In 2013 the IAC obtained additional financial support from casino mogul and Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, as well as Hollywood producer/investor and Biden donor Haim Saban. In 2014 a third billionaire and convinced Zionist, Adam Milstein, was appointed its chairman.

To say the IAC’s politics are far-right is an understatement. On September 19, 2024 the IAC convened its three-day National Summit at the Washington DC Hilton, and it had all of the features of a MAGA Republican CPAC Hungary conference — militarists, authoritarians, enemies of civil liberties, propagandists, Christian Zionists, and even a wannabe dictator — two if we count Donald Trump’s surprise appearance at the event.

Kim Jong Un was unavailable

The DC Summit featured three days of workshops, among which the following were offered:

  • “Taking Antisemitism to Court” featured speakers from the Brandeis Center, the Lawfare Project, the National Jewish Advocacy Center, and IAC Action, which coordinates its efforts with right-wing Republicans.
  • “The IHRA Definition: A Tool for Fighting Antisemitism” hosted MAGA Republican legislators from Georgia, South Carolina, and Arkansas sharing tips with two Israelis from IAC for Action.
  • The “Civic Engagement” workshop was a hodge-podge of miscreants that included: Elise Stefanik, who represents Israel more reliably than her own Congressional district; Trump defender Alan Dershowitz; Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi of Falls Church, Virginia, son of Iran’s brutal Shah, who now supplements his CIA stipend by hitting the conference circuit; Shabbos Kestenbaum, who sued Harvard for not doing enough to shut down free speech; Christian Zionist actress Patricia Heaton; and several other nobodies from stage, screen, and television.
  • At “Head of the Snake: The Global Terror Network and Iran’s Leadership Role” Israeli defense analyst Yoav Limor moderated a discussion with: Elliot Abrams, war criminal, convicted felon, Gulf War cheerleader, and now one of Biden’s national security advisors; Victoria Coates, another warmongering American neocon and former National Security Advisor under Trump; and two Israeli terrorism “experts” — Boaz Ganor and Anat Berko.
  • “Tragic Awakening Documentary Film & Conversation” was a film screening by its director, Rabbi Raphael Stone, founder of the Clarion Project, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group because of its Islamophobic focus.
  • “The US-Israel Alliance Now and Tomorrow” was moderated by Israeli broadcast journalist Yuna Leibzon and included: Ofir Akunis, Likudnik and Israeli Consul General of New York; former Middle East envoy and “Israel’s Lawyer” Dennis Ross; former NSC advisor Victoria Coates; and Michael Oren, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.S.
  • And, finally, for those who needed to hear justifications for the carpet bombing of civilians, there was “Ethics in Combat and the Law of Armed Combat” featuring: Alon Ben David, who specializes in “International communications” at Bar-Ilan University; Colonel Richard Kemp of the Gatestone Institute, a far-right Islamophobic advocacy group founded by Nina Rosenwald and funded by billionaire megadonor Rebekah Mercer, whose more recognizable members include John Bolton, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, R. James Woolsey, Dutch fascist Geert Wilders, and Amir Taheri, who has repeatedly been accused of fabricating stories about Iran.

A partial list of participants

Assessing the Damage

Posted by on 2024-09-30 No comments

We are in the midst of another McCarthy era. Universities and public schools are under attack by organized witch hunts. Slanderous accusations of antisemitism are ending careers. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act is being weaponized by Zionist “lawfare” organizations. Protests against Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza (not to mention the West Bank and over half a dozen Middle East countries) are twisted as endorsements of terror. Conversely, condemnations of Israeli terror are twisted as antisemitism.

It is rare that we encounter a single story involving Israel and its strong-arm tactics with so many moving parts. It is even rarer that we encounter one in our own backyard. The following story illustrates just how the state of Israel and unregistered agents and lobbyists, coordinating with American Zionist organizations and MAGA Republicans, can marshal the resources of federal investigators, police agencies and prosecutors, to threaten an Ivy League university and take down its president, throw a school district into chaos, and manipulate politicians — all to suppress protests of Israel’s war crimes and to ruin its critics.

The Inciting Incident

In the early days of Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up a “die-in” at the Harvard Business School’s campus in Allson. Yoav Segev, a Jewish Harvard Business School student, was attempting to surveil the “die-in.” As Segev stepped awkwardly over the bodies of prostrate protesters attempting to film their faces, he raised suspicions he was trying to dox them. Corinne Shanahan, a Harvard Law School student, felt Segev was filming “in bad faith, either to intimidate or dox” the protesters.

Shouting “exit!” and “shame!” student safety monitors told Segev to stop and, after he refused to leave, half a dozen students blocked his camera with scarves and banners. This included Divinity School student Elom Tetty-Tamaklo, a safety monitor, and also Harvard Law Review editor Ibrahim Bharmal. In what now appears to have been clearly a set-up, Segev claimed he had been “assaulted” and two of the camera-blockers were soon arrested by an undercover Harvard campus police officer working on a federal task force. As an editorial in the Harvard Law Record points out, both Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal were trying to protect protesters from Segev. Somehow the safety of this segment of Harvard students has been forgotten.

It was Segev’s father Ilan who emailed the Harvard University police (HUPD) with the complaint. The elder Segev knew just whom to contact using intelligence from an unnamed source, and he provided HUPD with the identities of two students, informing HUPD that the son wanted to press charges. Out of more than half a dozen students the two Segevs could have accused of “assault,” the two chosen were both men of color. A letter of support from Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine asks “why Tettey-Tamaklo, who is Ghanaian, was singled out from the other protesters as a threat?” While racism was certainly one possibility, another become apparent when we learn that Tettey-Tamaklo was a co-founder of the campus group Harvard Graduate Students 4 Palestine. He was targeted because he was the leader of the pro-Palestinian group.

While Segev is only 26, he owns a tony condominium in Boston’s South End purchased for just over $1 million and now valued at $1.24 mil. His parents, as we will see, are extremely well-connected. Tetty-Tamaklo, on the other hand, was a proctor from a poor country who lived in student housing, receiving meals as part of his aid package. Ibrahim Bharmal had been a member of the Harvard Law Review — that is, until Harvard’s Chabad rabbi Hirshy Zarchi, Harvard megadonors Bill Ackman, Jonathan Neman, and David Duel, 94 Jewish alumni, and the Brandeis Center, a Zionist “lawfare” group, all showed up with pitchforks demanding the two students’ heads on spikes.

The lynch mob

Both Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal face charges of Assault and Battery and Violations of Civil Rights. Although the cases against them are weak and have not yet been dismissed by Suffolk County DA Kevin Hayden, neither Tetty-Tamaklo nor Bharmal have court dates, much less convictions. Rejecting any presumption of innocence, Harvard punished the two without hearings anyway. Zionist attack groups further “punished” the two with character assassination. Someone set up a libelous webpage using Tettey-Tamaklo’s identity, and both are being doxxed by Canary Mission, a particularly repulsive Zionist attack group funded by deep pocketed donors, including the late Sheldon Adelson and Adam Milstein. Harvard quickly bowed to the well-orchestrated attack campaign, evicting Tetty-Tamaklo from his university housing. And after megadonor Bill Ackman demanded to know, “How does this man remain Editor of the Harvard Law Review?” Ibrahim Bharmal’s bio was yanked from the Harvard Law website. But still the Defenders of Israel weren’t done with their enemies.

The mob takes down a president

With the university scrambling to appease its attackers, donors like Bill Ackerman, long critical of both the Harvard Trustees and its President, as well as Zionist and MAGA organizations, demanded President Claudine Gay’s head — and those of the Trustees. On December 5th, 2023 Virginia Foxx (R-NC) launched her McCarthyite Congressional hearings at which a grandstanding Elise Stefanik (R-NY) outdid herself defending Israel while haranguing Gay and assaulting free speech and freedom of association. It was a shameful display of deference to a repressive, foreign regime.

Unfortunately, Gay’s spineless defense of student Constitutional rights and academic freedom at Harvard was nearly as shameful. Even Gay’s apologies and assurances were not enough to assuage the MAGA and Zionist zealots. After a month of “deeply personal and sustained attacks [that have] played out in […] the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls” the beleaguered university president had had enough. On January 2nd Gay stepped down.

An extremely weak case

Those who have seen footage of the Segev incident are hard-pressed to recognize anything resembling an assault. Adrian Walker writes in the Globe, “As someone who has covered crime in Suffolk County for decades, I’ll just say this: I can’t remember a weaker assault case. Not only does this case not clear the bar for prosecution, it doesn’t even approach it. Assault by scarf? Please stop it.” Thomas Nolan, a former Boston Police lieutenant, commented: “I didn’t see anything in the video that I would characterize as an assault and battery … or anything remotely approaching a civil rights violation.”

Barbara J. Dougan, legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Massachusetts, found the politically-motivated prosecution of the two troubling: “As a lawyer who has represented the victims of hate crimes for 25 years, I view the way this incident is being handled as highly unusual. In my experience, police departments are unwilling, despite the victim’s wishes, to bring charges for incidents that don’t clearly rise to the level of a crime. […] I trust that Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden will take a good, hard look at the facts of this case when deciding whether to prosecute.”

More on the Segevs

But the story gets more interesting. Not merely another Jewish student at a school that is 25% Jewish, Segev junior is a student member of Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education (JAFE), part of a pro-Israel “lawfare” group, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB). LDB has filed dozens of legal complaints of alleged “antisemitism” against universities and school districts all over the U.S. based on purported violations of Title VI protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sniffing for antisemitism is exactly what LDB does. It is reasonable to assume Segev was operating as an operative of LDB the day of his confrontation with protesters.

LDB was created by Kenneth L. Marcus, Donald Trump’s former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. Not related to a similarly-named university, LDB has been at its game a long time and was party to the lawsuit which ultimately dismantled affirmative action admissions. Besides opposing affirmative action and launching a tsunami of Title VI lawsuits, LDF and JAFE also work to pressure universities to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

LDB’s interests overlap considerably with those of MAGA Republicans who, like Zionists, are fierce foes of DEI and affirmative action and reject any suggestion that the U.S. is or ever was a settler-colonial state. The nation’s 30 million Christian Zionists also see Israel as a model for a Christian Nationalist renewal in the U.S. Zionist and MAGA interests also converge in opposing anti-colonialist Middle Eastern studies programs and the faculty who teach courses on, critique, or even discuss settler colonialism with their students. Christian Zionists promote the IHRA definition, which will eventually result in arrests and punishment if fully weaponized. Maybe they’re just thinking ahead to the day when criticizing Christian Nationalism will result in similar repression.

Within MAGA World the accusations of “antisemitism” have been increasingly adopted and weaponized by grandstanders like Elise Stefanik, who libeled Segev’s “assailants,” and Mitt Romney, Harvard class of 1974, who signed a letter painting a melodramatic picture of “Jewish students [who] have locked themselves in dorm rooms across your campuses afraid for their own safety.” The fact that a Jewish student like Segev could feel safe enough — if not entitled — to wade through a field of protesters knowing he wouldn’t actually be harmed undercuts such rightwing talking points.

All of the chaos created by reckless and slanderous accusations is ultimately to the advantage of the Israeli government, which makes young Segev’s family background all the more interesting.

Segev’s father Ilan is a former Israeli diplomat who transitioned to American investment manager at Morgan-Stanley, where he manages portfolios sizable enough to attract the occasional lawsuit. Segev senior is founding Co-Chair of and donor to the Israeli-American Council of Boston, a member of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN), whose leadership overlaps somewhat with the ICA’s. Segev donates to a variety of Boston-area institutions, including: the Jewish Community Day School, where he is a Director; the [former] Kehilla Schecter Academy, where he was also a Director; the Landmark School, a secular school for autistic children; and Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where he is on the Board of Overseers. Segev held diplomatic posts in Qatar and served as Israel’s Vice Consul in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2001 Segev visited Wake Forest University to deliver the Foreign Ministry’s message that Palestinians are entirely responsible for their own occupation, their loss of territory, and the many racist laws they are subject to.

Segev’s mother Shiri (Shira) is also a former diplomat with the Israeli Foreign Ministry and is now a financial compliance officer at Omniguide. She serves on the Boston Jewish Community Day School’s Board; like her husband is also a member of the Israeli-American Council; a trustee of the Gann Academy, a Jewish day school; Educating for Excellence, a pro-Israel education group; the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, where she is a director. Owing to their wealth and connections, the Segevs have a lot of friends in very high places.

IAC and ICAN

The Israeli-American Council (IAC) to which both parents belong is yet another node in a vast network of pro-Israel and Israel-linked organizations known as the Israel Lobby. As opposed to American Jewish groups which might embrace Zionism, the IAC is openly operated, and in apparent violation of FARA laws, by Israelis on US soil.

The IAC was created in 2007 by Israel’s Consul General, Ehud Danoch, and it immediately began recruiting dual (Israeli-American) nationals, primarily with backgrounds in American business. In 2013 the IAC obtained additional financial support from casino mogul and Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, as well as Hollywood producer/investor and Biden donor Haim Saban. In 2014 a third billionaire and dedicated Zionist, Adam Milstein, was appointed its chairman.

To say the IAC’s politics are far-right is an understatement. On September 19, 2024 the IAC convened its three-day National Summit at the Washington DC Hilton, and it had all of the features of a MAGA Republican CPAC Hungary conference — militarists, authoritarians, enemies of civil liberties, propagandists, Christian Zionists, and even a wannabe dictator — two if we count Donald Trump’s surprise appearance at the event. For a closer look at the conference, click here.

There are now between 200,000 and as many as one million people with Israeli citizenship living in the U.S. In the Boston are there are some 30,000. As an organization for Israeli expats, IAC shares much of its membership, some of its leadership, and — owing to its ongoing connections to the Foreign Ministry and IDF — it shares Israeli government objectives with other Israeli-American groups such as the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) and its sister group, the Israel-American Civic Education Institute (both headed by lobbyist Dillon Hosier). All three target American educational institutions and cultivate friends within MAGA World. For example, ICAN Massachusetts recently endorsed Steven Howitt, arguably the most right-wing representative on Beacon Hill.

ICAN and ICA have gone all out in attacking the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which supports a ceasefire and voted to develop materials that can be used for teaching the Israel-Palestine conflict. Joined at the hip in unsavory ways, MAGA World and the pro-Israel media both went into simultaneous attack mode.

Fox News commentator Kassy Akiva (Dillon) of the Daily Wire published an attack on Ricardo Rosa, who had been tasked with developing the MTA curriculum, and this was followed up by a press release from Steven Howitt, issued in the name of the Massachusetts House and Senate Republican Caucus. The Times of Israel and Canary Mission then attacked the MTA. Parents Defending Education and JNS, the Jewish News Syndicate, piled on, accusing the MTA of rank antisemitism, putting targets on both Rosa and Newton City Councilor BIll Humphrey, whose only crime was failing to fall in line by condemning the MTA. The Jewish News Service, the MAGA Patriot Post, and other far-right sites followed suit. It was quite the team effort by Israelis, the Israel lobby, and the American far right. Rosa showed me the death threats recorded on his phone.

One important objective of the Israeli-American Council — and the Israeli Foreign Ministry that created it — is shaping perceptions of Israel and Zionism within American educational institutions. In June 2016 the IAC hosted a meeting at its Newton headquarters, chaired by Ilan Segev, to which Mayor Setti Warren was invited. The Forward describes Newton, a city 30% Jewish, as “one of the most Jewish cities in the United States.” Ignoring how ludicrous such allegations are, Segev charged Newton’s schools with “sweeping antisemitism under the rug,” while Charles Jacobs, a notorious Islamophobe who led opposition to the construction of the Islamic Center of New England (since built), claimed the Newton schools were using maps of Palestine created by the PLO. For both Israel and its MAGA friends, talking points don’t have to be true. it’s all about manufacturing outrage.

Thomas Karns

Returning to the thread of the “assault” at Harvard we now meet Thomas F. Karns Jr., the campus cop who arrested Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal. Karns is a former Boca Raton police officer and Gulf War veteran. In 2019 he was briefly suspended for calling a Black colleague a “f—t n—r.” His LinkedIn page lists extensive training in computer forensics and provides references from at least one federal prosecutor. Karns set up Veritas ex Machina Consulting LLC in Marblehead MA in 2015. His organizational filing states the purpose was “digital forensic consulting and computer incident handling.” Karns’s LLC was dissolved by court order in 2019.

In 2008, in a strange echo of the 2023 incident, Karns arrested two Massachusetts residents during campus protests against Israel’s Cast Lead operation in Gaza. Karns was then wearing a track suit, not a police uniform, filming protesters. He later admitted he was “conducting plain clothes surveillance on a demonstration.” Karns illegally arrested the two for simply documenting his surveillance of pro-Palestinian protesters, not for committing an actual crime. In 2020 Karns was again seen monitoring Black Lives Matter protesters after George Floyd’s murder; his suspension for racist behavior the previous year seemed relevant to the Harvard Crimson.

A 2012 paper by the Massachusetts ACLU documented the practice of policing dissent in New England. The Boston Police Department routinely collaborates in federal task forces, violating the Constitutional rights and civil liberties of those it spies upon, just like the [private] Harvard University police. Although Harvard denied that Karns was operating as part of a federal task force, Massachusetts ACLU Legal Director John Reinstein pushed back: “They claim they don’t have a political surveillance ‘unit,’ but they do have a guy who goes out and takes pictures of people in peaceful demonstrations…” According to an article by Mike Damiano in the Globe, Karns testified in sworn testimony in another case that he was there as part of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Brigitte Karns

Brigitte Karns (Thomas Karns’s wife) is a Marblehead teacher and a fitness instructor at the JCC North Shore. She owns a registered “educational enrichment” company. It turns out that Karns is also deeply involved in pro-Israel advocacy — just like the Segevs, with both the Israeli-American Council and the Israeli-American Civic Action Network. When criticism of Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza surfaced at Karn’s school, she was so outraged that her first impulse was to shut down opposing views: “As you know, my parents are Holocaust survivors and most of my family lives in Israel and what you’re saying is incorrect. You need to stop.”

Karn’s wrath seemed focused on three fellow teachers, members of her school’s DEI committee. Karns’s simmering gripes surfaced at a June 10, 2024 webinar organized by a “who’s who” of far right Zionist organizations: ICAN, Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism (a front for ICAN), CAMERA Educational Institute, Christians and Jews United for Israel (CUFI), StandWithUs K-12 Educator Network, the “anti-woke” Combat Antisemitism Movement – and of course the Consulate General of Israel to New England.

On June 20, 2024, at a meeting again sponsored by the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) Brigitte Karns went after her fellow Marblehead teachers, specifically targeting Candice Sliney: “Marblehead has been knowingly supporting a hostile work environment of some of the Jewish teachers and students. The Marblehead Education Association is using intimidation tactics to silence Jews and then the administration is perpetuating antisemitic and anti-Israel ideology by remaining silent.”

Sliney — who is a member of the Marblehead Task Force Against Discrimination, which partners with the ADL to train students and teachers to fight antisemitism and discrimination — was astounded by Karn’s allegations: “Every single accusation was a lie. She has attacked my character, endangered my family and put my career at risk, with zero evidence.” Sliney urged the School Committee to hire an independent investigator. Voices from the community fortunately came to Sliney’s defense.

But Karns wasn’t finished with her colleagues. She went on testify to the psychic trauma of having to listen to fellow teachers condemn Israel’s war on Gaza: “This anti-Zionist interaction has left me feeling unwelcome and isolated at work. The encounter pierced deeply, shaking my trust in the place I work and with whom I work with. The silence from the administration and the union amplified my feelings of isolation. It’s like a double blow, being marginalized by a colleague and then having administration ignore my feelings and concerns.”

It’s really a shame that our fantasies of forcing everyone we interact with to adopt our own views and refrain from uttering contradictory ones can’t be realized, but at some point we need to pop out of it and accept reality.

Following Karns’s allegations, the Marblehead Current reported that the Marblehead Schools had been forced to conduct an “antisemitism” probe — at taxpayer expense. Schools superintendent John Robidoux signed an agreement specifying that “the district shall pay Kurker Paget at a rate of $360 per hour for the services of any partner of the firm and $160 per hour for the services of the firm’s paralegals, billed in six-minute increments. MPS will incur fees for the time Kurker Paget staff spend traveling in connection with the investigation.”

The Current also reported that the Marblehead schools did receive a number of letters accusing the schools of doing little to protect Jewish students. But most were identical, generated by a computerized form, and began with, “I am emailing you to show my support for the Jewish teachers that have experienced antisemitic/anti-Israel incidents in the Marblehead schools…”

Assessing the damage

To date, a handful of zealots, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Israel lobby, and its MAGA fellow-travelers, all working together, have managed to take down a university president, ruined the lives of two human rights advocates and at least one teacher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in hearings and needless studies, subverted free speech in universities and public schools, marshaled the powers of Congress, the FBI, the police, and the courts against Americans and those protected under our laws — and they’ve done it all without a single shred of oversight or regulation.

New York Mayor Eric Adams is politically finished as a consequence of acting as an unregistered agent for the government of Turkey. Robert Menendez’s career is over after acting as Egypt’s. Paul Manafort went to prison after acting as an agent for Ukraine. All of these men violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act in one way or another. And all of them were Americans. Yet somehow none of this applies to the Segevs and the “Israeli-American” and pro-Israel organizations running amok over the American political landscape.

In 2018 M.J. Rosenberg — who worked for AIPAC himself at one point — argued that AIPAC and lobby groups like it ought to be required to register under FARA laws. Rosenberg described the mind-bending loophole that allows such groups to function as agents for Israel (and apparently only Israel). If a similar loophole had been in place in the Fifties allowing Americans to act as agents for the Soviet Union, perhaps Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (no relation) could have avoided the electric chair.

The conclusion Rosenberg drew in 2018 is as relevant as ever today:

“No, AIPAC is not a ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. It’s the Netanyahu lobby and our laws should treat it as such […] As for the thousands of Americans gathered in Washington this weekend, they need to know one thing: They are not supporting the dream of a secure, democratic Israel at peace with its neighbors and the world. They are, unwittingly, supporting a right-wing political agenda that is placing Israel in ever-deeper peril and, frankly, jeopardizing its very existence.”

Judith Butler’s ‘Parting Ways’

Posted by on 2024-09-25 No comments

Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231146111

In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Judith Butler makes the case that Judaism and Zionism represent vastly different world views. Butler’s readers are more likely to be liberal and progressive secular Jews, but no doubt readers also include both political and religious Zionists. Because Butler does not address the Zionists directly, as Shaul Magid does in The Necessity of Exile, they may be scandalized by the critical studies approach drawing on a variety of Jewish scholars, postwar philosophers, German-Jewish thinkers, and Palestinian writers. Nevertheless, Butler addresses Jewish ethics as well as Zionism’s use of state violence and its newfound messianism.

After Israel’s 2008 Operation Cast Lead, Butler sought to debunk the claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, proposing that Judaism is in fact opposed to injustice, state violence, expulsion, dispossession; and that in all its traditions — secular, socialist and religious — Judaism is dedicated to social justice and social equality. And if that case could be made, “it would be a painful irony indeed if the Jewish struggle for social justice were itself cast as anti-Jewish.”

Thus Butler sets out to show “that there are bona fide Jewish but imperative Jewish traditions that oppose state violence and modes of colonial expulsion and containment [,…] affirming a different Jewishness than the one in whose name the Israeli state claims to speak.”

To do this Butler needs to show that resistance to Zionism is itself a Jewish value, that Zionism’s illiberal exceptionalist lens must be replaced by a democratic universalist, and Jewish, lens. And, to overcome the objection that Zionism’s violence is only reactive and not intrinsic, it must also be demonstrated that a critique of state violence, which Israel uses to repress Palestinians, is not only inherent in Jewish values but that Zionism is not inherent in Judaism or in Jewishness. It’s a tall order.

Butler’s main task, like Magid’s, is to rescue Jewishness and Judaism from Zionism and to rescue Judaism from the grip of a Zionist framing:

“It continues to surprise me that many people believe that to claim one’s Jewishness is to claim Zionism or believe that every person who attends a synagogue is necessarily Zionist. Equally concerning is the number of people who think they must now disavow Jewishness because they cannot accept the policies of the State of Israel. If Zionism continues to control the meaning of Jewishness, then there can be no Jewish critique of Israel and no acknowledgment of those of Jewish descent or formation who call into question the right of the State of Israel to speak for Jewish values or, indeed, the Jewish people. Although it is surely possible to derive certain principles of equality, justice, and cohabitation from Jewish resources, broadly construed, how can one do this without thereby making those very values Jewish and so effacing or devaluing other modes of valuation that belong to other religious and cultural traditions and practices?”

In deriving first principles from an ethical or religious tradition, Butler asks if Jewish sources can be reinterpreted anew and if non-Jewish sources can ever be used to illustrate Jewish values.

One would think that these arguments would depend on firmly establishing that even Jewish sources regard Zionism’s qualities as alien to Judaism. And they do. But Jewish values such as cohabitation with the “other,” equality, and justice can be applied universally. Jewish experiences, such as dispersion and exile, may have particularist but also universal meanings. Certainly both Jews and Palestinians have experienced both. Butler acknowledges that universal concepts may not always hold precisely the same meaning for all parties. Even Jews are famously heterogenous. Everyone, Butler argues, perhaps Jews especially, must contend with the notion of the “other,” with alterity.

Ultimately, Butler elects “to depart from a[n entirely] Jewish-centered framework for thinking about the problem of Zionism and to locate Jewishness in the moment of its encounter with the non-Jewish, in the dispersing of the self that follows from that encounter.” These encounters are far-ranging, and if one does not have a solid background (which I don’t) in critical theory they will find themselves treading water instead of swimming happily along. Nevertheless, Butler’s book offers some useful framings to consider Zionism’s hijacking of Judaism.

Butler begins their meditations with an insight from Edward Said, who noted that Moses the Egyptian, Judaism’s founder, is recognizable as both a Jew and an Arab. The moment we begin to grapple with these opposing identities, we are engaging, in Butler’s terms, with alterity. Said makes the point that the only thing that really distinguishes Moses as a Jew is receiving the tablets at Sinai. The two peoples he embodies have much more in common — chiefly, their refugee status, both in scripture and in the modern historical record.

Outwardly it’s difficult to distinguish Mizrachi Jews from Arabs. It’s hardly a surprise that Jews (including many Ashkenazim) and Arabs share much of the same DNA. Now, many centuries after Sinai, having joined a world of nation-states, the real difference between contemporary Israeli Jews and Palestinians boils down to who has the power to deploy violence against the other to maintain its claim of exclusive ownership of a contested piece of land.

While critical studies certainly have their challenges, they are also remarkably capable of identifying central issues. In Zionism’s case it is institutional violence toward the “other.”

The weaponization of “alterity” and its counterpoint in the [non-militarized] idea of “cohabitation” are thus flip sides of a major theme of Butler’s book, whose first two chapters largely focus on Emmanual Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Rashi’s discussions of how Jews relate to non-Jews, and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence.

Butler demonstrates that Judaism itself, Jewish scholars like Levinas, and sages like Rashi have long grappled with the ethics of the “other.” Contrary to Judaism, Zionism cannot see — in fact, refuses to recognize — the humanity of the “other,” valuing only survival, relying on state violence and operating by the law of the jungle.

Although Butler themself does not quote Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, this foundational document expresses Zionism’s almost sociopathic “survival-over-morality” in terms that ought to make any religious scholar shudder:

“We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality.”

Zionism’s fundamental absence of morality was echoed recently in a statement by Israel’s Kahanist National Security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir:

“My right, my wife’s right, my children’s right to travel on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than Arabs’ freedom of movement. Sorry, Mohammad, but that’s the reality, that’s the truth.”

I had thought I was up to the challenge of reading Parting Ways because I had previously read several of the works of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, which Butler uses as departure points. I thought I might be able to keep up. And even though I had also read the Kafka mentioned and Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I had never read Benjamin’s famously obscure meditation on violence, which also treats divine violence and wades into messianism. Despite a better than average chance of understanding Butler’s many eclectic references, some of the chapters were still a very tough slog.

It pains me when Zionists claim that their beloved Apartheid state and the twisted, amoral ideology that undergirds it are central to Judaism. There may once have been a Kingdom of Israel (actually two, which only lasted 125 years) but that Israel is clearly not the same as today’s ethno-state, despite the fantasies of Kahanists, hilltop setters and Christian Zionists.

So I don’t mean to slam Butler’s overall thesis at all, because I agree with it. But this slim volume makes something relatively straightforward unnecessarily complex. I also found the book physically painful to read because the font size is 8 or 9 points. There are far more approachable dissections of why Judaism and Zionism are not only completely separate but stand absolutely in opposition to one another.

We could start with the Talmud, for one. There is nothing in the Talmud’s 63 tractates that describes the contemporary state of Israel now run by fascists, Kahanists, and religious lunatics. Look at the Talmud’s laws of war to see how Israel has violated virtually every stricture. Or look to the pre-state Zionists for their objections to contemporary Zionism, discussed in Chapter 6 of Parting Ways.

Even before Israel’s founding, many of the early Zionists like Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Judah Magnes quickly distanced themselves from the ethnic cleansing and fascism that had become inevitabilities of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism embraced at the 1942 Biltmore Zionist Conference. Their argument was that stealing from and murdering Arabs would create an unsustainable, racist state and violate every tenet of Jewish ethics.

And, really. How could Zionists have proceeded to steal an entire land from its indigenous people in spite of such easily-foreseen consequences? Because Zionism has no morality, no concern for the “other,” no respect for universal values. Even after there was no longer a Nazi threat to Jewish life, Zionism continued on its trajectory of genocide and dispossession of Palestinians.

Today finding Jews critical of Zionism is not very difficult. There are hundreds of Jewish organizations, even some within Judaism itself, that are critical of Zionism. If you’re looking for a contemporary, theoretical critique, check out the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which numbers a respectable share of Jewish intellectuals. Visit https://criticalzionismstudies.org/ and their podcast.

In the final analysis, recognizing the differences between Judaism and Zionism requires no esoteric meditation. Zionism, with its attendant, even logically consequential, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression, is diametrically opposed to Judaism’s Tzedek, tzedek tirdof! (Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue!). And Zionism most surely contradicts Hillel’s dictum: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary.”

The Two State Lie

Posted by on 2024-09-24 No comments

After years of illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank, the only thing left of the “Two State Solution” is as a prop for liberal politicians and liberal Zionists to point at while doing nothing to advance any now clearly impossible partition plan.

The charitable or gullible may view these liberals as idealistic dreamers, but realists will recognize them for what they are — purveyors of an obvious, damnable lie. In truth, Israel and its colonial enablers will permit only an exclusively Jewish state — and this has always meant the inevitable mass-murder or expulsion of a people who will never renounce their claims on their own land.

Even when the opportunity has presented itself to create or move forward the idea of a Palestinian state – even a rump state or a disconnected set of cantons or reservations — the United States has rejected or vetoed the idea, pointing to its other gaslighting prop — the equally dead and pickled Oslo Accords — as the “only game in town,” as George Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell used to call it.

Oslo may be long-dead but it is still the straw man that US presidents and their Western allies recite while demanding that Palestinians negotiate directly with Israel — as if such were negotiations between states on equal footing. But since Israel has physically destroyed literally every Palestinian government (and that includes assassinating its leaders and negotiators), only the toothless, highly unpopular Palestinian Authority remains, and it has absolutely no mandate to negotiate with anyone.

Meanwhile, no American president has ever made any effort to hold Israel to account for its illegal settlements, actively worked for two states, or even presented a vision for one. That’s because for decades it has been impossible (not to mention embarrassing) to look at a map of the West Bank and explain to anyone with a straight face how a Palestinian state could ever be cobbled together from the tiny crumbs still left on the table. So when I hear liberal stalwarts like Elizabeth Warren mumbling “two states” I want to demand that she show me her detailed plan. Or shut the hell up.

As reasonable as a demand that the thief return the property he stole, or the home invader vacate the home he invaded, or that damages (criminal or civil) must be paid to a victim, no Western nation with its own sordid history of slaughter and displacement of indigenous people will will ever impose this sort of justice on a fellow settler-colonial state. When you think about it, this is nothing more than professional courtesy between rogue states.

But now, after 75 years of injustice and now an exceptionally well-documented genocide, the world is screaming for a solution to be found. Israel’s solution is to double down on every technique that created its Apartheid state in the first place — massacres and ethnic cleansing. The Zionist state remains committed to “thinning” the Palestinian population — as if it were a herd of animals, stealing even more land, and devising ever more creative schemes to push Palestinians into the Sinai, Jordan, or Egypt. But a previously inattentive world has been paying attention, and now Israel’s many crimes have justifiably made it a pariah.

AND YET American politicians are still on board with Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and continued annexation. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have suggested that Israel “bounce the rubble,” drop atomic bombs, or “finish the job” — echoing genocidal calls openly and increasingly advanced by members of Israel’s Knesset and its public. The Democratic president, a self-described “Zionist,” generously funds the ongoing genocide, has placed boots on the ground and boats in the Gulf. His National Security Advisor and Secretary of State shamelessly lie about the scale and scope of Israel’s war crimes.

Democratic Party politicians avert their eyes from the victims of Israel’s genocide, and couldn’t bring themselves to allow a Muslim congresswoman to address their national convention (while allowing two Israelis the platform). They vote with Republicans to criminalize protests, vote for new laws to muzzle speech critical of Zionism or opposition to Israeli policies — all while continuing to hide behind Oslo and the fictive Two State Solution. And while the Democratic majority is too well bred to openly cheer for genocide like their Republican brethren, they still do everything they can to sustain the “lethal” slaughter.

Zionists interpret the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call to exterminate all the Jews. I doubt they actually believe this propagandistic “interpretation” any more than I do because Israel’s ruling party actually uses a similar formulation in its own platform. What is true, however, is that throughout all the territory it controls Israel — and no other people — maintains an actual One State ethnocracy by extreme violence. Again, literally from the river to the sea. This single state includes 5.5 million Palestinian subjects in areas occupied by Israel and Israel’s 9.1 million citizens, totaling 14.6 million souls.

Of this total population 7.2 million – a slight minority – are Jewish. But Israel’s One State Jewish minority is even smaller because up to a million Israelis don’t actually live in Israel and many of the Russian olim were admitted under an amended 1970 Law of Return which permitted non-Jews to immigrate (specifically to offset Arab demographics). So when you also factor in the Palestinian diaspora — between 6 million and 7 million people displaced by the 1948 Nakba — Jews represent only a third of the total number of people who have claims to Palestine.

This, together with the racist, repressive, even neofascist, nature of the Israeli state, perfectly justifies classifying Israel as an Apartheid state. As a state for only a fraction of its “subjects,” Israel maintains the status quo only through violence and terror, and it can’t even do this on its own.

As its colonial era Mandate expired, Britain turned over its military and colonial infrastructure to the Jewish Company, not the majority Palestinian population it had occupied. Since its founding, Israel has depended on hundreds of billions of dollars of American subsidies to its military, defense, tech, and energy programs. Billions of dollars in funding came from North American Zionist organizations, notably the private Jewish Federations and large donors. Like a failing tech startup, the Zionist state only exists by pumping more and more money into it. In the long run it is unsustainable.

France made Israel the nuclear power it is today. Russia armed it in its early years. Americans can’t have national healthcare, but between 15-20% of Israel’s defense budget is paid for by American taxpayers. In any other financial arena where expenses are properly scrutinized, from business to government to non-profits, throwing wads of cash at a recurring disaster is the very definition of insanity.

By at least 1990, with hope for a Palestinian state all but dead, it was obvious that a different version of the One State solution — not exclusively Jewish — would be necessary to end the madness of Zionism’s ruthless control over all of Palestine. Though different, several of these plans end exclusive Zionist control over Palestine by giving Palestinians a long-denied voice and exactly the same rights as Jews — security, respect for personal property, freedom of movement, a political voice, and the right of refugees to return to their communities.

Taxonomy of One State solutions

In 2005 Tamar Hermann, a liberal Zionist Israeli political scientist who now works at the Israel Democracy Institute, looked at the structure of four different One State solutions:

  1. a “unitary state” that denies the non-dominant nationality any rights, redress, or power
  2. a system that grants the non-dominant group [some] individual rights but no collective political rights or power
  3. a classical liberal democracy in which no nationality has special or collective political rights and where the relationship of citizen to state is not mediated by ethnic or religious membership
  4. a “parity-based” bi-national framework in which each nationality becomes a collective political unit and is accorded equal status and power regardless of size
  5. a “consociational” bi-national arrangement which recognizes ethno-national rights within “cantons” (preserving one aspect of the “two state” solution) while permitting freedom of movement and property ownership for both nationalities within all of Palestine

Although it’s a bit dated, Hermann’s taxonomy provided both a useful outline and an analysis of how Israel has systematically opposed both one- and two-state solutions. Note that Option #1 is the current reality, and the only reality acceptable to Israel and its Western enablers. Note also that various options that would address injustices toward Palestinians have been systematically rejected by elements of the Israeli Left, Right, and Center.

Early Jewish Bi-nationalism

As Hermann writes, Zionism ignored and discounted both Arab existence and resistance to displacement:

“For many devoted Zionists, it came as a severe blow to realise that implementing the dream of the Zionist movement – the ingathering of the Jews in the land of their forefathers and the building of a national home for the Jewish people – bluntly interfered with the life of the Arab community in the same land. Although warnings in this regard were expressed as early as 1907–08 (Epstein 1907/1908), awareness of the hostility that massive Jewish immigration created among the Arabs was minimal.”

But there were plenty of Jews who recognized the flaw in Zionism:

A small minority, however, rejected these strategies as early as the 1920s, denouncing them as immoral for disrespecting the national rights of the Palestinians and for putting the Jews and Arabs on a collision course. Instead, this minority position advocated a bi-national arrangement. Thus, in 1925 the Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) group was formed with the aim of promoting Jewish–Arab understanding and co-operation.

The members of Brit Shalom, some of them prominent figures in the political or academic establishment, believed that the domination of one people by another would lead to severe friction and, eventually, war. At least in its early days, Brit Shalom’s bi-nationalism could be described as optimistic: it was meant to forestall the conflict before it ripened. Switzerland and Finland were the examples of successful bi-nationalism that encouraged Brit Shalom. In practical terms, the group advocated creating a legislative council based on Jewish–Arab parity, which would run the affairs of a bi-national state in which the two peoples would enjoy equal rights irrespective of their relative size at any given time.

The “Disturbances”

The wave of violent Arab riots against the Jews in 1929, known as the ‘disturbances’, were a severe blow to the group [my note: and should have been to the Zionists as well] since they suggested that time was running out faster than they expected. Brit Shalom warned that these ‘occurrences’ were not a sporadic, transitory phenomenon but the beginning of a national liberation struggle that would only get fiercer if not properly handled. Nevertheless, as noted, the chances for bi-nationalism to be adopted when other, more ‘natural’ options have not yet been tried, and failed, are slim.

Indeed, Brit Shalom was harshly attacked by the mainstream and accused of defeatism. The fact that they spoke their minds while the murdered Jews were not yet buried infuriated their rivals even further, and the Zionist establishment denounced them as either pathologically naive or traitors. It is important to note that the bi-national advocacy of Brit Shalom and its successors in the pre-state days was not echoed on the Arab side. Given their numerical superiority, the Palestinians rejected a parity-based regime.

Magnes

Detroit Jewish Chronicle, October 3, 1941 calling Magnes a “Quisling”

The “Ihud” (Union)

Apart from Brit Shalom, however, the group most identified with it is Ihud (Union), which was led by Martin Buber and Judah Magnes and was active from the early 1940s till the establishment of the state, though it continued its activities until the mid-1960s. Ihud was established in 1942, almost a decade after Brit Shalom had expired.

By that time the conflict was already an undeniable and very violent reality. Moreover, Ihud operated against the background of World War II and the catastrophe of European Jewry. Its members believed that bi-nationalism offered the only way of saving both the Jewish community in Palestine and the survivors of the Holocaust. They did not deny the Jewish people’s special attachment to the Land of Israel but maintained that together with the Arabs living in Palestine they must develop the country without one side imposing its will on the other.

In their submission to the Anglo-American Commission (1946), Magnes and Buber, who represented Ihud, argued, in stark contrast to the position presented by the Zionist establishment, that since both Jews and Arabs had a national claim to Palestine, it could neither be an Arab state nor a Jewish one. They also rejected the partition option, saying it was impractical and a ‘moral defeat for everyone concerned’. Instead, they recommended that a bi-national state be formed in which Jews and Arabs would share power. According to this parity-based model, Jews and Arabs would have equal representation in a democratically elected legislative council, and the head of state would be appointed by the United Nations Organisation, with each community exercising autonomy in cultural matters.

Zionism’s conflict with Jewish values apparent

Indeed, the bi-nationalism of Brit Shalom and Ihud had a strongly moralistic aspect. They saw it as a natural derivation of the Jewish tradition of antimilitarism – the victory of the spirit over the flesh. At the same time, they promoted bi-nationalism as the only practical solution that might be acceptable to both sides.

A brief appearance by Israeli Bi-nationalists

The tiny camp of today’s (2005) Israeli bi-nationalists can be divided into two subgroups. First there are those, mostly belonging to the radical, non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist Left, who favor this model per se. Second are those who would prefer a different scenario but have concluded that the existing geopolitical and demographic realities dictate bi-nationalism.

The bi-national idea was already raised by a few Israelis in the 1970s, and again, strongly but by very few, soon after the launching of the Oslo process. Political activists of the radical Left, such as Michael Warschawski of the Alternative Information Centre and others, warned against the pitfalls of the Oslo paradigm, claiming that the Palestinian state to be established in this framework could not be viable but would only be a Bantustan-type entity.

For this they mainly blamed the expansionist Zionist ideology and the Israeli government, while also criticising the Palestinian Authority’s impotence and inability to defend its people’s interests: ‘If Arafat had not accepted the conditions laid out at Oslo, this miserable agreement might have remained a mere position paper (Ben Efrat 1997; see also Pape 1999, Warschawski 2001). These activists called for the adoption of the PLO’s ‘secular-democratic state’ model, which they referred to as bi-national in essence. However, theirs was a cry in the wilderness; it was heard, if at all, only within small circles of the Left and was mainly understood in the context of the internal rivalries between the Zionist and non-Zionist components of the peace camp.

Until very recently, however, bi-nationalism was not a significant (albeit highly contested) option in the Israeli repertoire of possible solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian strife. Thus, when in the summer of 2003 the weekly supplement of the Haaretz daily published a lengthy interview with two public figures, Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi, in which both expressed their support for a bi-national, Israeli–Palestinian state, many within and outside Israel were taken by surprise. In this pathbreaking interview Hanegbi, a well- known figure of the radical Left, admitted to his initial support for the Oslo process (Shavit 2003).

Yet as time passed and the process seemed to be leading nowhere, he came to view Oslo as a mistake – a diversion of everyone’s attention to Israel’s rhetoric rather than its deeds, namely, the ongoing settlement expansion. Therefore, dwelling on sweet memories of his childhood in Mandatory Jerusalem amid Jewish–Arab harmony and coexistence, Hanegbi asserted that Israel was unable to free itself from its expansionist mentality since ‘it is tied, hands and feet, to its core ideology of dispossession and original mode of action’. His conclusion was that: ‘Only binational cooperation can save us. Only this can transform us from foreigners in our land to locals, to natives’.

More on the debate

Benvenisti, the second interviewee in this scandal-stirring article, is also a nonconformist but comes from the heart of the Israeli establishment. Having warned prophetically for years that the ever-growing settlement project was becoming irreversible, his shift to bi-nationalism reflects much frustration and pain: Israelis, like the Afrikaners in South Africa, should realise that the present discriminatory regime ought to be dismantled, since it has failed to impose its hegemony over the dominated collective, and replaced it with a regime of individual and collective equality. Like Hanegbi, Benvenisti also admits to making a mistake in the past – in his case, defining the Israeli– Palestinian struggle as a national one when the correct definition, he now acknowledges, is that of a struggle between natives and settlers/colonisers, resulting from the atavistic hatred of those who feel dispossessed by foreigners.

Separation, then, is no longer an option, and the entire Land of Israel should be regarded as a single geopolitical entity (Shavit 2003). Although in this interview Benvenisti did not describe the details of the bi-national arrangement he suggested, he mentioned some combination of a horizontal sharing of powers on a parity basis and a vertical (territorial) one, a federalist structure that would include the entire land west of the Jordan River and be divided into several ethnic cantons.

In an article published a few months later, however, Benvenisti advocated the consociational model, ‘which recognizes the collective ethnonational rights and enables cooperation in the government at the national level while guaranteeing well-defined political rights for minorities’ (Benvenisti 2003). He views such an arrangement as based on a cantonal division under a federal umbrella. Such an arrangement, he states, also enables maintaining ‘soft’ borders and constructive ambiguity, which facilitates handling symbolic issues such as Jerusalem and even the refugees and the settlers (ibid.). He also states his pessimistic bottom line: ‘I am not happy with what I have just suggested. . . . We are not going to have peace here. Even if there is some binational arrangement, it can only manage the conflict. At its outskirts, however, violence will always prevail’ (Shavit: 10–14, 2003).

The publication of the interview with Benvenisti and Hanegbi by a major Israeli newspaper brought strong aftershocks, including many letters to the editor and opinion columns in the printed and electronic press. Paradoxically, for reasons to be explained below, the most negative reactions came not from the Right but from the Centre and moderate Left, both supporting one or another version of the two-state solution. For example, Yosef Gorni, a mainstream Zionist historian, fiercely attacked Benvenisti, who is also a historian along with his other professional activities:

As Benvenisti knows very well, this approach [bi-nationalism] is a complete non sequitur. . . . This is essentially because of the national spirit and history of the Jews and the Arabs. Both peoples find it very difficult to have minorities in their midst. . . . Furthermore, this idea also has a deplorable moral aspect, as it is unthinkable to legitimate such collective discrimination, by which all other peoples of the region, besides the Jews, will be entitled to a national state of their own. (Gorni 2003)

Another mainstream critic (Shacham 2003) fiercely attacks Hanegbi: ‘better not to bamboozle us with some bi-national phrasing when what one actually means is a regular state, with a majority and a minority, with the majority defining the rights of the minority’ (ibid.). His criticism of Benvenisti is no gentler: ‘The use of the phrase ”bi-national paradigm”, which sounds so intelligent, cannot compensate for the total lack of thinking on how such a state can be established and function’ (ibid.). Shlomo Avineri, a prominent political scientist and former director-general of the Foreign Ministry, states categorically: ‘A binational state? There is no such thing. Simply put: nowhere in the world has a conflict between two national movements been resolved by squeezing two national movements, holding each other’s throats, into the boiling pot of a binational state’ (Avineri 2003). Clearly alluding to Benve- nisti, he continues:

What happened to them [i.e. the advocates of bi-nationalism who were not part of the radical Left but came from the mainstream] was that they simply collapsed in the face of the Palestinians’ determination and resistance and their readiness to sacrifice themselves, reaching the conclusion that Zionism can never win and hence should be given up altogether.

Interestingly enough, there is also some opposition to the Hanegbi and Benvenisti-style bi-nationalism on the radical Left, the traditional (albeit tiny) support base in Israel for the PLO-style, secular-democratic bi-national state. These voices maintain that dividing the entire country into cantons a la Benvenisti has a misleading ring of plausibility. Israel boasts a First World economy, while the Palestinian-populated areas belong to the Second or even Third World. In such a situation, where the Jewish cantons are ‘haves’ and the Arab ones ‘have-nots’, the chances of real equality under the new federal or other framework are practically nil. Yet the question is idle, the argument goes, because there is no apparatus for realising this concept anyway; there is nothing to motivate Israel, which has brought Arafat to his knees and divided the Palestinian national movement, to enter into such an adventure (e.g. Ben Efrat 1997).

As noted, the Right’s criticism of the ‘new school’ bi-nationalists was surprisingly mild, apparently because any plan that implies retaining the Land of Israel as a single unit is appealing – with some amendments – to supporters of that principle. Thus, in November 2003 the Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) Council released its own ‘bi-national’ plan as the solution for the conflict. It divides the entire historic Land of Israel into ten cantons, each of which would have cultural autonomy, with their boundaries delineated according to the ethno-national composition of the population in the specific region. These cantons would come under a federal umbrella.

However, according to this plan’s principle of division, only two of the cantons would be Palestinian, thereby guaranteeing a Jewish majority in parliament (Eid 2003). The right-wing activist and journalist Israel Harel proposed another bi- national model: ‘We should take the Arabs on both sides of the Green Line as one body and the Jews on both sides as one body, and give the Arabs Jordanian citizenship and the Jews Israeli citizenship’ (Harel, in Susser 2003). There are, however, moderate right-wingers who fear that if such positions are embraced, the bi-national reality may impose itself on the land and destroy the settler community from within.

Thus Yair Sheleg, a journalist living in a settlement yet writing in Haaretz (which is left-of-center on Israeli–Palestinian relations), urged his fellow settlers to agree to the two-state solution before it was too late. With their powerful opposition to evacuating even the smallest, most isolated outpost, Sheleg argues, the settlers have created a balance of deterrence with the government. Sheleg urges the settlers to stop pressuring the government and concludes: ‘In specific moments of their life, individuals often agree to undergo painful operations, including amputating this or another organ of their body so as to save their life. The same level of responsibility such individuals take regarding their private life could be expected from those who aspire to be in the leadership position regarding the good of the nation.

Glimmers of One State

In 2004, frustrated with an Oslo process that was going nowhere, with Israel still occupying Gaza and beginning to wall off Jerusalem, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alta) – who would shortly be succeeded by Hamas’s Ismail Haniyah – threatened that if there was no real progress in negotiations Palestinians would call for one binational state.

The United States, smack in the middle of a Middle East war of its own making, placed its heavy thumb on the scales, acting as the biased peace broker it has always been. Elliott Abrams, soon to become a convicted felon and an accused war criminal, was part of the American delegation tasked with making sure Israel would prevail. US Secretary Colin Powell “categorically” rejected a one state solution and demanded that Palestinians “wrest authority” from President Yasir Arafat. For its part, Israel rejected any sort of a Palestinian state.

And prevail Israel did. The 2006 elections which swept Fatah from power and ushered in Hamas were a consequence of Israeli intransigence and American connivance. The US and Israel had no idea at the time that anointing (and later funding) Hamas would eventually blow up in their faces so spectacularly.

Thus, rather than “Palestinians never failing to miss an opportunity” for peace, peace in Palestine has been systematically subverted by Israel and the colonial powers (notably the US) that created it. These parties have worked tirelessly, always behind the scenes, to scuttle any sort of just solution or compromise that would allow two peoples to live in peace on the land one party stole.

Apology

Posted by on 2024-09-21 No comments

My last post addressed two letters in the New Bedford Guide concerning Zionism. One clearly defended it, while another by my friend Betty Ussach only sounded like it. I have known Betty for many years, worked with her on social justice issues, and, while I may not have been the only person to misread her intentions, I should have given her much more credit for what should have been read as a principled objection to Israel’s violence in Gaza, not the opposite. Another letter she published in the New York Daily News leaves no doubt as to where she stands. Betty, again, I’m really sorry.

While I am apologizing, the New Bedford Guide did eventually publish my response. As uncomfortable as the issue may be for some to confront, covering vital public discussions that have otherwise been banished from the local papers is an important function of the press. Anyone who, even belatedly or reluctantly, publishes unpopular views on the war in Gaza or Zionism is doing an important public service. I hope the NB Guide will keep it up because the other local news outlets aren’t.

While to some people Gaza may be somebody else’s war — a topic made radioactive because of cynical accusations of “antisemitism” or something having nothing to do with our national priorities — without American bombs, naval fleets, intelligence sharing, missile defense systems, vetoes at the UN, and cumulatively hundreds of billions of dollars of military aid to Israel, neither Israel’s Apartheid system nor their genocidal war on Palestinians would be possible. And everybody knows it — most of all the vast Israel lobby.

At some “Walter Cronkite moment” in the future, with almost every international body condemning the war and Israel’s Apartheid system, Americans are going to finally realize that pumping billions after billions to prop up a nationalist supremacist state is simply throwing bad money after bad.

Anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism

Posted by on 2024-09-19 No comments

It’s been said that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. This is certainly the case with the New Bedford Guide, which falsely claims “in fairness and objectivity, we share opinions from our readers whether we agree or disagree with their opinion.” Not even remotely true. NB Guide refused to print either an August comment on one pro-Zionist letter or the following rebuttal to two of them.

September 17, 2024

Two recent contributors to the New Bedford Guide have made separate arguments that opposing Zionism is antisemitic. Both may be passionate but are wrong.

On August 22nd Abrah Zion expressed her opposition to posters at Wings Court featuring quotes from well-known Jewish critics of Zionism. One poster depicted Albert Einstein and a quote from his December 4th, 1948 letter to the New York Times decrying widespread massacres and the ethnic cleansing of Arabs, as well as the presence of fascist elements in Israel’s first government. Mrs. Zion found the posters “antisemitic” and went so far as to make the strange claim that they somehow threatened her children, further asking that Mayor Mitchell censor the posters critical of Zionism by having them removed.

On September 16th Betty Ussach published a letter, again equating opposing Zionism with antisemitism. I have several quibbles with her arguments. First, Israel’s genocidal response to Hamas’s incursion on October 7th was not “Netanyahu’s war” alone. It took its place in a series of disproportionate Israeli responses to Palestinian resistance over the 75 years Israel has imposed British-era martial law on the Territories. She writes that opposing Zionism now seems to be an “acceptable” way for antisemites to express their hatred of Jews, and that conditioning aid to Israel will only unleash worldwide attacks on Israel, implying that the US should give Israel carte blanche to continue to slaughter Palestinians.

The only thing wrong with this argument is that MORE Israeli aggression and the strong possibility of drawing the US into Israel’s conflicts — exemplified by post-October 7th bombing attacks on the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran — is the result of NOT conditioning aid. And her insinuation that opposing Zionism is tantamount to yelling “Jews will not replace us” simply refuses to acknowledge any of the many valid criticisms of Zionism and the violence required to sustain it that were raised by Arabs and Jews alike long before the founding of the Israeli state.

As the Einstein letter indicates, Israel was founded on terror and expropriation of Palestinian territory. Fascist elements in the first Israeli state whom Einstein mentioned have now been joined by new ones. Just listen to Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir from the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party. Listen to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who represents radical religious settlers. Both want Palestinians completely dead or gone. Listen to Likud Knesset member Revital Gotliv, who advocates nuking Gaza. Last week the English language podcast “Two Nice Jewish Boys” told listeners that if there was a button that could wipe out all Palestinians, they’d press it in a heartbeat. Moreover, they suggested, this is a widespread Israeli sentiment.

I certainly hope not, but I also hope that this is not what my American tax dollars are subsidizing since the US pays for between 15% and 20% of the Israeli military.

The ideology which founded Israel, sustains it, and makes possible the continued expropriation of Palestinian land and even personal property has a name — Zionism. For many of us — Jews included — Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. Another Jew on the Wings Court posters was Hajo Meyer, a survivor of Auschwitz. This is his quote from the poster:

“Because Zionism was created by Mr. [Theodor] Herzl and others at the end of the 19th Century, and in that era it was commonplace to be colonialist, to be racist, to be super-nationalist, to adore the nation-state — so the idea of France for the French, Germany for the Germanics, and then some state for the Jews. They were very bad ideas and they all formed the basis for Zionism. […] Zionism and Judaism are contrary to each other. Because Judaism is universal and humane, and Zionism is exactly the opposite. It is very narrow, very nationalistic, racist, colonialist, and all this. There is no ‘National Judaism.’ There is Zionism and there is Judaism, and they are completely different.”

Just as Americans are right to fear Christian Nationalism and its ugly manifestations, we are equally right to reject “Jewish” Nationalism (in quotes because I agree with Hajo Meyer). Nationalisms and supremacist states of every stripe are repellent, and it is no more antisemitic to oppose Israel’s supremacist state than the “Christian” version MAGA America has lined up for us.

Zionism’s genocidal fantasies

Posted by on 2024-09-09 No comments

Recently an episode of the podcast “Two Nice Jewish Boys” fantasized about slaughtering 6 million Palestinians. The video was taken down — but nothing ever disappears completely from the Internet.

Podcasters represent the Zionist mainstream

Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein have the longest-running English language podcast in Israel. The two, who met in film school, have been producing Two Nice Jewish Boys since 2016. They have a YouTube channel, they’re on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, SoundCloud, Podbean and others, and their podcast is syndicated on the Jerusalem Post. The duo also produce a second podcast, The Melting Podcast, which promotes moving to Israel. They pen dozens of Zionist-themed news articles every year for Jewish publications. These two guys are an entire cottage industry.

While anti-Israel opinions are quickly censored and de-platformed, none of the internet platforms these two sociopaths use have knocked them off the air yet — even though I’m pretty sure that calling for genocide is a violation of Apple’s, Google’s, and Overcast’s Acceptable Use policies.

So mainstream are these two, so in tune with Zionist attitudes within Israel and with Zionist policies defended from criticism outside the state, that the co-hosts have nothing to fear. Meningher and Weinstein not only have the rapt attention of Israeli society and Jewish English-language listeners worldwide, they have been interviewing mainstream Israeli and Zionist cultural figures for the better part of a decade. They appear on Israel’s most influential news outlets, are featured on virtually every important English language Jewish publication outside of Israel, and have extremely high level government and Zionist connections.

For instance, here they are interviewing Deborah Lipstadt, now America’s Antisemitism Czar with the U.S. State Department.

America’s antisemitism czar with two sociopaths

These two “nice Jewish boys” are as mainstream as you can get, so Weinstein’s assertion that genocide is a mainstream sentiment among most Jewish Israelis is particularly troubling — and, unfortunately, backed up by plenty of evidence.

Meningher is the producer of the podcast and has written hundreds of articles for: Arutz Sheva, which is identified with the Israeli settler movement; Israel National News, the English-language version of Arutz; Channel 7 News; and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, a Zionist publication originally distributed by the Jewish Federation. Meningher’s website is currently down for “maintenance” but an archived portfolio highlights his skills in video production, setting up chatbots, and running political campaigns — including the five that he worked on for Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Meningher working on Netanyahu’s campaigns

Eytan Weinstein was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. His father Gilbert is an associate professor of math and physics at Ariel University, built illegally on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank. Weinstein junior has written for: Arutz Shevah and Israel National News; Channel 7 News; the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles; the Algemeiner Journal, originally a Yiddish publication whose board includes Martin Peretz (neocon, Islamophobe, and owner of The New Republic), Abe Foxman (former ADL President), and Malcolm Hoenlein (executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, founding executive director of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, and head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York).

The Times of Israel’s founder attacks liberal news outlets

Both Meningher and Weinstein write for the Times of Israel, published in English and funded by American hedge fund billionaire Seth Klarman (who donates to Birthright Taglit, founded the David Project, a now-defunct Hillel spinoff that attacked academics critical of Israel, and funds other Zionist attack groups). The Times of Israel also hosts New York’s Jewish Week, Britain’s Jewish News, the New Jersey Jewish Standard, Atlanta Jewish Times, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, and Australian Jewish News — many of which Meningher and Weinstein write for as well.

These guys are not just mainstream themselves — their audiences are as well.

Turns out, genocide is a mainstream Zionist sentiment

When South Africa filed charges of genocide with the International Court of Justice, one of the submissions to the Court was a list of 500+ instances in which prominent Israelis had called for genocide on Palestinians. It seems that every other day an Israeli politician calls for Palestinians — dehumanized as “animals,” “Nazis,” or “Amalek” — to be nuked, slaughtered, expelled, burned, tortured, or executed. “Death to Arabs,” “Muhammad is Dead,” and “Burn Your Village” are widely shouted at soccer games, graffitied on Arab homes, and shouted at nationalist rallies.

In an interview on Israeli channel 13 last December, former Knesset MK Danny Neumann said, “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be terminated, all of them must be killed. […] We will flatten Gaza, turn them to dust, and the army will cleanse the area. Then we will start building new areas for us, above all …”

And Israel’s war on Gaza has matched this genocidal fixation on a Final Solution for Palestinians. With few targets left to bomb in Gaza, the West Bank is now being destroyed, its land annexed at a furious pace, while pogroms have become a daily occurrence. For Palestinians every night is Kristallnacht.

Israel has now almost completely demolished Gaza and slaughtered nearly 41,000 people (or more) with 2000 pound ordnance and bunker busters. Despite this, according to a Tel Aviv University poll, 58% of Israelis say that the IDF has deployed “too little firepower” on Palestinian civilians. Israeli politicians are less and less inhibited about calling for Palestinian erasure. And there is now absolutely zero appetite for protecting the civil rights of, or listening to, the Palestinian citizens of Israel who are treated as a fifth column.

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last April, 70% of Jewish Israelis (versus 18% of Arab Israelis) want social media content sympathetic to Palestinian civilians to be censored. There is widespread censorship in Israel. Loyalty oaths, arrests, intimidation and purges in Israeli universities have become routine. As Russia, criticizing the war on Gaza has severe consequences.

In 2016 Israel passed legislation that assumes that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are all hostile to the state. Of course, Zionism almost by definition is antithetical to universal human rights. An analysis of the bill showed virtually every anti-occupation or human rights group, including B’Tselem, ACRI, Ir Amim, Gisha, Breaking the Silence, or Zochrot, would be severely limited by the law. Only two days ago, Likud Party Member of the Knesset Revitaly Gotliv asked prosecutors to arrest B’Tselem’s executive director Yuli Novak for “assistance to the enemy in war,” a charge that carries the death penalty.

In August 2014 the Times of Israel published an article titled “When Genocide is Permissible” by Yochanan Gordon, sales manager for an Orthodox newspaper owned by his father that serves five New York boroughs. Gordon’s post was eventually taken down but was saved elsewhere. Gordon wrote that President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry approved of Israel’s right to defend itself, that Prime Minister Netanyahu had stated that the 2014 invasion of Gaza was “protective,” and that any government has a right to ensure the safety of its people; so therefore:

“If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?”

Gordon’s post was retracted after complaints. But after issuing an initial and insincere apology in which he said he had been misunderstood, Gordon then doubled down on his argument for genocide in a Tweet:

“The existence of Israel and the Jewish people is at stake. How do you suggest we neutralize the threat?”

Just as with Gordon’s post, the “Two Nice Jewish Boys” podcast has been disavowed by a few fellow Zionists, to the tune of “these are not our Zionist values.”

But it’s clear that Zionism has run out of ideas. For Israel, there are really only two options: either share Palestine with the Palestinians — an option Zionists reject outright — or carry out extermination, pogroms, and genocide.

You only need to watch the news to see which option Israel really believes in.

Lying about genocide

Posted by on 2024-09-03 No comments

In the early 70’s I was working in Germany, living in a low-rent district near the train station in a small city in Baden-Württemberg. I occasionally watched the evening news with my elderly landlady, who had grown up in the same building she now rented out. After a news segment touching on Germany’s Nazi past I asked her what she and her parents had known of the trains that took Jews to their deaths from the train station just a few blocks away: “Gar nichts!” (absolutely nothing) was her emphatic and earnest-sounding response.

Of course this was a lie — millions of people had been arrested, stripped of their possessions, spirited away on a vast transportation network constructed expressly for an extermination project, gassed and turned into powder all over Europe. Sports facilities in some cities were not available to the public because they had been commandeered as staging areas for concentration camp transport.

The Nazis began their Reinigung (cleansing) in 1939 by first “euthanizing” disabled and mentally-ill family members of even non-Jews. The photo above of a work party from Dachau was taken by a German civilian who simply snapped it from his balcony in 1945.

For years atrocities went on under everyone’s eyes. Who could not have known?

The Holocaust, just like today’s Gaza genocide, was no secret to either the Nazis or the Allied powers. Every Western power simply ignored the Holocaust, denied it, cast doubt on its scope and scale, or lied about the desperate plight of Jews when asked to help save their fellow human beings. For these Western powers, Jews were apparently not fully human.

In 1943, shortly before Yom Kippur, 400 rabbis marched on Washington to plead with Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rescue European Jews from the ovens. FDR, a Democrat like any today, myopically focused on domestic issues, told the rabbis to go take a hike. FDR also made no effort to destroy German rail infrastructure critical to the transport of so many to mass slaughter, even when advised it would save lives. Fortunately for FDR, social media hadn’t yet been invented to document his sins of omission and commission.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration, addressed to Lord Rothschild and conveyed to the British Zionist Federation, which “gave” Palestine for Jewish settlement, was not offered out of love but in order to facilitate British Jews leaving the country, and also to raise money for the war effort. British antisemitism also determined the response to the desperate plight of European Jews. As Louise London documents in “Whitehall and the Jews: 1933-1948,” the British government had no use for refugees, especially more Jews. Britain simply let them die, like FDR.

This is more or less where we are today with Palestinians — the world’s new Jews. But this time, rather than simply ignoring mass atrocities and loss of life, Western colonial powers are actually contributing to the genocide through arms sales, diplomatic cover, boots on the ground, and boats in the Gulf — and then lying about it, denying the root cause of the conflict, disputing the severity of human suffering, defending the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, and recycling propaganda points provided by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and a galaxy of domestic lobbying groups that serve only Israel’s interests.

The biggest lie of all is that this is a war Israel is waging to protect itself. Like a parody of the Manchurian Candidate (“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life”), politician after politician gets up before the cameras, repeating virtually the same words, “Israel has a right to defend itself and has the ironclad support of the United States,” when referring to a slow-motion genocide.

This is a genocide that began — not as a response to October 7th, 2023 — but with the massacres, terror, and mass-expulsions of Palestinians by Yishuv (pre-Israel) terrorist groups in 1947 that created the state of Israel. American support for this has led to decades of loss, dispossession, and exile for Palestinians. Now, led by Israel’s most far-right government of all time, including nationalists literally calling for genocide, Americans are still siding with the original perpetrator and waving away the latest genocide.

Think of all the genocides we have managed to ignore in our lifetime. Some of the blame is personal. Sticking one’s head in the sand when faced with horrific barbarity — especially from our so-called “friends” — and having no real political power to stop it, seems to be a reaction typical of the human societies and governments we have inherited.

Local newspapers play their part in keeping us unaware or distracted by mindless fluff. This is what the New Bedford Standard Times has written about Gaza: virtually nothing. The New Bedford Light, originally conceived to shed light on important topics (and I would include Gaza), has refused for the better part of a year to report on local efforts to stop the slaughter in Gaza. These publications apparently regard genocide as not “newsworthy” — or their timidity betrays political bias or a fear of alienating sponsors and advertisers.

When the media is not deep-sixing articles on Gaza, mass-producing fluff, or blatantly censoring its reporters, it pulls on its fatigues and boots and ten-huts, proudly serving in the propaganda wars that obscure the history of Israel’s colonization of Palestine or de-contextualize the conflict. Too many news sources, notably the New York Times, demonstrate lazy journalism, outright bias, violations of professional ethics, or simply toss journalistic standards in the dumpster.

In politics, consider also how institutionalized the denial of the Gaza genocide has become throughout government, Republican and Democrat alike. Even with widespread knowledge of the scope of destruction — and Gaza is the best-documented genocide in world history — Western “democracies” still do exactly what my old German landlady did: deny, deflect, and lie.

And if you’re a nationalist propagandist or lobbyist or a politician receiving money from any of them — Christian Nationalist or Zionist, it makes no difference — you follow the Narcissist’s playbook — deny, attack, and make yourself the victim. And there seems to be a willing market for their disinformation.

In the case of Gaza, there is no information deficit, nor is there a deficit of empathy and humanity. Despite the moral darkness of this politically-unchallenged genocide and the sheer madness of a nation which exploits the phrase “never again” while actually doing it again, I still believe in the inherent decency of humankind and refuse to accept that a majority of us values life so cheaply as our politicians.

And polls confirm my woolly-headed, idealistic views — a majority of Americans want a ceasefire and disapprove of Israel’s crimes against humanity and the Zionist nation’s genocidal destruction of Gaza. Americans are, truly, decent people. But they are also mute and spineless, too fond of their vast military, too attached to the creature comforts an advanced Capitalist economy provides, too credulous when fed heaping, stinking propaganda.

As a consequence we have a foreign policy and a hyper-aggressive militarism no one ever wanted and no one ever voted for, almost always imposed on the world’s most oppressed people. This is what Americans call “democracy” without a trace of irony.

In my own lifetime our nation has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people — slaughtered in the name of anti-communism, or the war on terror, or the war on drugs, or for “peacekeeping” missions, or in the “defense” of authoritarian, repressive regimes, and — now — as a willing participant in a genocide. Americans not only have blood on our hands; we are dipping them into a bucket of blood every day we remain complicit in the elimination of Gaza.

For More and More Jewish Americans, Zionism Looks Like

Posted by on 2024-08-30 No comments

Zionism — White Christian Nationalism’s kissing cousin — has been the* problem in Palestine for 82 years, and it is increasingly difficult or career-ending to say this out loud in public. Nowadays anyone — Jews included — who criticizes Zionism is accused of antisemitism. This is patently absurd, especially since anti-Zionism has a long history within Judaism itself. The* American Council for Judaism is a group of anti-Zionists within Reform Judaism who have been extremely vocal for 82 years that Zionism is not Judaism, and for Judaism to make a central place for Zionism in American Jewish life is a terrible mistake. For more on the history of Jews opposing Zionism, see my November 2023 piece. The following post is reproduced with the kind permission of the author, Allan C. Brownfeld. You can subscribe to the ACJNA’s newsletter here.

For More and More Jewish Americans, Zionism Looks Like a Dangerous Wrong Turn

Allan C. Brownfeld — Issues Spring – Summer 2024

In recent months increasing attention has been focused upon developments in the Middle East. The October 7 terrorist assault on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s response, which has already cost the lives of more than 34,000* Palestinians, including thousands of women and children, has focused attention upon the way in which Zionism has come to dominate American Jewish life.

More and more Jewish Americans are coming to the conclusion that Zionism was a dangerous wrong turn for American Judaism, as the American Council for Judaism has argued from the beginning. In the Council’s view, Judaism is a religion of universal values, not a nationality. American Jews are American by nationality and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim. Zionism, on the other hand, argues that, somehow, Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews, and Jews living elsewhere are in “exile.” Zionism has come to dominate American Jewish life, with Israeli flags on synagogue pulpits and Jewish schools promoting the idea that emigration to Israel is the highest ideal for Jewish young people.

Much of American Judaism seems to place the state of Israel in the position of a virtual object of worship, a form of pagan idolatry much like the worship of the golden calf in the Bible. This is not Judaism, which is a religion of universal values dedicated to the long Jewish moral and ethical tradition which declares that men and women of every racial and ethnic background are created in the image of God.

Jewish Americans Are Not In “Exile”

Jewish Americans are not, as Zionism proclaims, in “exile,” but are very much at home, and always have been. In 1841, in the dedication of America’s first Reform synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski told the congregation, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.”

Zionism, many forget, was a minority view in Jewish life until the rise of Nazism in Europe. Even then, many Jewish voices warned against substituting nationalism for the humane and universal Jewish prophetic tradition. In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish state.”

The prominent Jewish philosopher Martin Buber spoke out in 1942 against “the aim of the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of international maneuvers.” From Jerusalem, where he was teaching at the Hebrew University, Buber, speaking at the time hostilities broke out after Israel unilaterally declared independence in May 1948, cried with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion; it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.”

A Rupture in American Jewish Life

In an article titled “The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life” (New York Times, March 22, 2024), Peter Beinart, an editor of Jewish Currents, notes that, “For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing pressure to choose between them.”

Beinart points out that, “The American Jews who are making a different choice — jettisoning Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality under the law…their numbers are larger than many recognize, especially among millennials and Generation Z…The emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish life for decades to come.”

American Jews, wrote Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism in 1988, “have made of Israel an icon—a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.” In the years to come, Peter Beinart believes, “For an American Jewish establishment that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, these anti-Zionist Jews are inconvenient. There’s nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future in which Palestinians and Jews coexist on the basis of legal equality rather than Jewish supremacy…For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on contradictions. Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now, here and there are converging. In the years to come we will have to choose.”

No Liberal Rights for Palestinians

Many are in the process of choosing now. Noah Feldman, the Harvard Law School professor and First Amendment scholar, and author of the book “To Be a Jew Today,” declares: “Today, many progressive American Jews find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights.” Shaul Magid, a professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, says, “In my view, the Zionist narrative, even in its more liberal forms, cultivates an exclusivity and proprietary ethos that too easily slides into ethnonational chauvinism.” Oren Kroc-Zeldin, director of Jewish Studies at the University of San Francisco, says that “Jewish liberation in Israel was predicated on the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” He says he rejects “a monolithic Pro-Israel identity.”

Within Reform Judaism, there have been calls for a move away from Zionism. A letter signed by more than 1200 alumni and current members of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) addressed to the organization on Dec. 16,2023 declares, “We grieve for the 1,200 killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7th attack and the more than 18,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military—almost half of whom have been children —since then. Israel has cut off water, electricity, fuel and supplies to Gaza. We are deeply concerned that tax dollars have been so easily provided to support Israel’s military assault on Gaza, while we struggle for the basic needs of our communities.”

The letter declares that “The URJ teaches practicing Pikuach Nefeshz, ‘saving a life,’ and Tikkun Olam, ‘repairing the world.’ An immediate cease-fire is in line with these Jewish values.”

“Atrocities committed In Our Name“

At the same time, a letter was released from descendants of progressive rabbis and leaders to express “our horror at URJ’s failure to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. We are alarmed that the leadership of our community has not demanded an end to Israel’s devastating violence against Palestinians in addition to the safe and immediate return of the hostages…A decades-long campaign to dehumanize Palestinians has hardened the American Jewish community’s hearts. Atrocities are being committed in our name. We do not consider the killing of thousands of innocent civilians to be a justifiable consequence of ensuring our community’s protection.”

The letter concludes: “The URJ continues to actively alienate alumni with its uncompromising Zionist rhetoric…We will reconsider our and the next generation’s membership and support for the URJ unless there is a public and dramatic shift in the way the movement addresses Israel.”

Among the original signers of the letter are Zippy Janas, a descendant of Rabbi Julius Rappaport, Chana Powell, daughter of current URJ rabbi Talia Yudkin Toffany, and Zachariah Sippy, son of Rabbi David Wirtschaffer.

Reform Jews for Justice

At the same time, an organization called Reform Jews for Justice has been established (https://reformjewsforjustice.com). It declares that “As Reform Jews we stand together for Justice in solidarity with Palestine. We unite in our values to call for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. …We have come together to call on our movement to engage in Solidarity with Palestine. We envision a Reform Jewish movement that…rejects the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism…The URJ leaders have unabashedly demonstrated shameful tactics of ethno-nationalism and tribal political priorities over simple ethics and the illegitimate and dangerous conflation of Zionism and Judaism. We have been alienated from the movement that raised us to ask, ‘If I am only for myself, what am I?’—through binary language suggesting that our affiliation is conditional on Zionism. We will not stand by.”

In recent years, there has been a growing effort to redefine “antisemitism” to include not simply bigotry toward Jews and Judaism, but also criticism of Israel and Zionism. In May 2022, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Ignoring the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, he has been strenuously promoting this false and ahistoric notion ever since. Some Israelis admit that falsely equating anti- Zionism with antisemitism is a tactic to silence criticism of Israel. Shulamit Aloni, a former Israeli Minister of Education, and winner of the Israel Prize, described how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are antisemitic.”

The tactic of equating criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism has come under widespread criticism. Writing in Slate (April 29, 2024), Emily Tamkin headlined her article, “The ADL has abandoned some of the people it exists to protect: For those with the wrong opinions, the group is now a threat to Jewish Safety.”

Muddying The Waters About Antisemitism

Tamkin writes: “Over the past six months, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, has stressed repeatedly that he is concerned about rising antisemitism. Unfortunately, he has also made clear that he cares about antisemitism only as he defines it and as it affects people who agree with him on the definition…The ADL… is insisting on conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and it has made its conflation central to the ADL’s work. This has not only muddied the waters of its own antisemitism research, it has also undermined the safety, security, and pluralism of American Jews.”

One example is the fact that ADL evidently mapped protests for a cease-fire led by the Jewish groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow as “antisemitic incidents” on its calculation of how much antisemitism has risen. This makes it more difficult to assess the year-over-year change in antisemitic incidents. Tamkin notes that, “Of course, an increase will seem more dramatic if you are now counting incidents, you weren’t before—but it also arguably undermines the rest of the ADL’s reporting of antisemitism.”

When it comes to Jonathan Greenblatt, a story in Jewish Currents from 2021 revealed that former ADL employees felt that Greenblatt was choosing defense of Israel over protecting civil liberties, one of the group’s- stated missions. In March 2023, Jewish Currents published a report on internal dissent at ADL over Greenblatt publishing a report comparing pro-Palestinian groups to the extreme right. Greenblatt has compared pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University to the explicitly neo-Nazi march in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He likened the group Jewish Voice for Peace to the terrorist group Hezbollah and called it an “on campus proxy for Iran.”

Younger Jews Disconnected from Israel

In Emily Tamkin’s view, “I wonder how likening a Jewish student group to a terrorist organization helps stop the defamation of the Jewish people, or scores justice and fair treatment to all…Younger American Jews are increasingly critical of and feel disconnected from Israel. The Pew 2020 study on American Jews found 51% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 were not emotionally connected at all to Israel…Young American Jews were “less likely to view antisemitism as ‘a very serious problem.’…Greenblatt is failing to stand up for the rights of all American Jews. He is using his position to make clear that some Jews are more worthy of protection and political representation than others. He’ll have powerful allies, including non-Jews who have made common cause with open antisemites.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely described student protestors on behalf of Palestinian rights as “antisemitic mobs” and likened the demonstrations to “what happened in German universities in the 1930s.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (IND-VT), who is Jewish and lost members of his family in the Holocaust, pushed back against Netanyahu’s characterization of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. He declared to Netanyahu: “It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless—almost half the population.”

Sanders continued: “Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable things to many millions of people. But please do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the illegal and immoral policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in Israeli courts.”

Protesting Against Slaughter Is Not Antisemitism

Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and now professor of public philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, writing in The Guardian (April 3, 2024) makes the point that, “Protesting against this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus —taking a stand against a perceived wrong, thereby provoking discussion and debate.”

In the view of Robert Reich, who is Jewish, “Education is all about provocation. Without being provoked—stirred, unsettled, goaded—even young minds can remain stuck in old tracks…The Israel-Hamas war is horrifying. The atrocities committed by both sides illustrate the capacities of human beings for inhumanity, show the vile consequences of hate. Or it presents an opportunity for students to re- examine their preconceptions and learn from one another…Peaceful demonstrations should be encouraged, not shut down…To tar all offensive speech ‘hate speech’ and ban it removes a central pillar of education…”

Jewish critics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians are receiving increasing attention. The Forward (May 6, 2024) carried a feature article with the headline, “This 100-year-old Jewish activist is speaking up again—this time about Gaza.” It reports that, “Jules Rabin stood at the busiest intersection of Montpelier, Vermont in early April with snow still on the sidewalks, protesting the war in Gaza. Accompanied by about 75 friends and family members —holding a sign that asked, ‘How could the Nazi genocide of Jews 1933-45 be followed by the Israeli genocide of Palestinians today?’ He was celebrating his 100th birthday.”

“A Piecemeal Holocaust”

Jules Rabin, a World War 11 veteran, graduate of Harvard, former Goddard College professor and a pioneer in Vermont’s bread-making renaissance who, with his wife, ran a bakery for more than 40 years, appeared on a podcast on the nonprofit Vermont Digger. He referred to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza as a “piecemeal Holocaust.” He told podcast host David Goodman that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza “resembles what the Germans did to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and everywhere else in Europe.” In Rabin’s view, the Jewish claim for restitution after World War 11 should have resulted in the Germans awarding Prussia or Bavaria to the Jewish people. Concerning the latest news from Gaza and the West Bank, Rabin says, “One can’t look the other way when something dreadful is going on.”

In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would enshrine a contentious definition of antisemitism into U.S. law. The Antisemitic Awareness Act (AAA) passed the House by a wide margin. It mandates government civil rights offices to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. This definition has drawn widespread criticism because most of its examples of antisemitism involve criticism of the state of Israel, such as calling it a “racist endeavor.”

If this bill is passed by the Senate, which will consider it at a later date, it would mean that this definition would apply when officials adjudicate Title V1 complaints alleging campus antisemitism. Opponents say it chills legitimate criticism of Israel. The bill passed by a vote of 320-91. Opponents of the IHRA definition include Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the House’s longest serving Jewish member. He declared that “Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination. By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into Title V1’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.”

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (May 2, 2024) reported that, “Americans for Peace Now, a dovish pro-Israel group worried that the bill, should it become law, would be used as ‘a cudgel against the millions of Americans, including many Jewish Americans, who object to the Netanyahu government’s decisions and actions.”

Jewish Critics of AAA Legislation

Even some members of the Jewish establishment are critical of the AAA legislation. Alan Solow, who serves on the board of the Nexus leadership Project and is a former Chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, wrote this in The Forward (May 3, 2024): “Distinctions…are vital for developing strategies to fight this prejudice. If those with whom we disagree about Israel—sometimes vehemently—are labeled antisemitic without regard to nuance or context —they will not join us in coalition against anti- Jewish bigotry…A viable strategy against this scourge…must recognize this….It cannot ignore…the diversity that exists in this country, a diversity reflected in an intense debate about Israel within the Jewish community, on college campuses as beyond…If the Senate passes the AAA, it will alienate our political allies, including stalwart supporters of Jewish causes and Israel, and narrow the coalition we need to confront the spread of antisemitism.”

An editorial, “Not in Our Name” appeared in the Jewish journal Tablet (May 3,2024). It declared, “There is no exception for hate speech in the Constitution —it is not, according to the Constitution of the United States of America, illegal to say that the State of Israel ‘has no right to exist’…No governmental authority has the standing to penalize you for (making such a statement) …That includes Congress. The fact that a word or idea is annoying or upsetting to you —or us! —does not make it illegal.”

Tablet declares that “This includes the phrase ‘From the River to the sea,’ which the House of Representatives voted to condemn last month. This is wrong. No citizen of America, Jewish or not, should support the condemnation of speech by those whose conditional authority is entrusted to them by the people. You are American citizens. However noxious your beliefs, as long as they stay beliefs, they should be done the business of government.”

Danger Of “Weaponizing Antisemitism”

The staff attorney for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Chris Godshall-Bennett, who is Jewish, provided this assessment: “In weaponizing antisemitism by equating it with criticism of Israel, this bill evades the fundamental principles of free expression and academic freedom. As a Jewish person, who stands hand-in-hand with my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and who works daily against anti-Arab hate, I found this weaponization of my identity particularly disgusting. Criticism of Zionism and of the Israeli government is not antisemitism and conflating this only serves to provide cover for Israel’s ongoing human rights abuses in violation of international law…”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) strongly condemned the House of Representatives for passing this legislation (H.R. 6090) which, it declared, threatens to censor political speech critical of Israel on college campuses under the guise of addressing antisemitism. Christopher Zanders, director of ACLU’s Democracy and Technology Policy Division declared that “The House’s approval of this misguided and harmful bill is a direct attack on the First Amendment. Addressing rising antisemitism is critically important, but criticizing America’s free speech rights is not the way to solve the problem. This bill would throw the full weight of the federal government behind an effort to stifle criticism of Israel and risks politicizing the enforcement of federal civil rights statutes precisely when their robust protections are most needed. The Senate must block this bill that undermines the First Amendment protections before it is too late.”

As a recent ACLU letter to Congress made clear, a federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment by federally funded entities, and the Antisemitism Awareness Act is not needed to protect Jewish students from discrimination. Additionally, as the Supreme Court ruled more than fifty years ago in the landmark decision of Healy v. James, “This Court leaves no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large. Quite to the contrary, the vigilant protection of Constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of America’s schools.”

“Netanyahu Making Israel Radioactive”

Many of Israel’s longtime supporters are expressing dismay over recent events. In a column, “Netanyahu is making Israel Radioactive” (New York Times, March 12, 2024), columnist Thomas Friedman writes: “Israel today is in grave danger, with enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, Israel should be enjoying the sympathy of much of the world. But it is not. Because of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition have been conducting the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, Israel is becoming radioactive…”.

Friedman argues that “I fear it is about to get worse…No fair-minded person could deny Israel the right of self-defense after the Hamas attack…But no fair-minded person can look at the Israeli campaign…that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza…and not conclude that something has gone terribly wrong there. The dead include thousands of children, and the survivors many orphans… This is a stain on the Jewish state…Netanyahu has sent the IDF into Gaza without a coherent plan for governing it after any Hamas dismantling or cease-fire…Israel has a prime minister who apparently would rather see Gaza devolve into Somalia, ruled by warlords…than partner with the Palestinian Authority or any legitimate broad-based non-Hamas Palestinian governing body because his far-right Cabinet allies also dream of Israel controlling all of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, including Gaza, and will oust him from power if he does.”

In an important and much discussed article entitled “We Need an Exodus from Zionism” (The Guardian April 24, 2024), Naomi Klein, a Guardian columnist and director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, writes: “I’ve been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the Mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf. It is about false idols, about the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.”

Worshipping A False Idol

In Klein’s view, “Too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again… Zionism is a false idol that has taken the idea of the promised land and turned it onto a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate. It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of Justice and emancipation from slavery —the story of Passover itself—and turned them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, road maps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.”

The whole concept of a “promised land” has, Klein declares, become “a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land — a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe —-and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnic state… Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba…Zionism has brought us to our current moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said it clearly: it has always been leading here….It is a false idol that has led far too many of our people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core Commandments: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet…We seek to elevate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid.”

More and more One-time advocates of Zionism have moved away from this position. One of these is Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic Culture Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. In his book, “The No-State Solution, A Jewish Manifesto” (Yale University Press), he writes, “I was a Zionist in my youth. In those years, I thought of myself as a left-wing Zionist. I was very active in Habonim (a Socialist Zionist youth movement). I think I ultimately caught the leftism and socialism more than the Zionism. And when it became clear to me that I had to make a choice, I finally realized I had to let the Zionism go. That choice came when Yitzhak Rabin stated that the Israeli Army should break the legs of Palestinian kids who threw stones at soldiers. I asked at that time, what is this cruel idea of breaking the arms and legs of little boys? And somebody explained to me that this was necessary in order to maintain the state. I said, if that’s necessary…then the state is clearly a wrong thing…I remember the first time I wanted to say I was an anti-Zionist…. I couldn’t say the words. That’s how hard it was for me.”

For Dr. Boyarin, “…the dilemma is how to maintain a truly, vital, authentic, rich, lively and compelling Jewish cultural life without falling into the kinds of nationalism and ethnocentrism that we find all over the world today.”

Zionism Was a Minority View

Zionism, many now forget, has, before the Holocaust, always been a minority view among Jews. It seems likely that it is on its way to becoming a minority view once again. Only during the period of the Holocaust, when Jews were endangered by Nazism, did the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine gain support. The fact that Palestine was already fully populated was largely ignored. Deena Dallasheh, a historian of Palestine and Israel who has taught at Columbia University and Rice University, told the New York Times ((Feb. 4, 2024) that, “The Holocaust was a horrible massacre committed by Europeans. But I don’t think the Palestinians figure that they will have to pay for it. Yet the world sees this as an acceptable equation. Orientalist and colonial ideology were very much at the heart of thinking, that while we Europeans and the U.S. were part of this massive human tragedy, we are going to fix it at the expense of someone else. And the someone else is not important because they are Arabs. They’re Palestinians and thus constructed as not important.”

Most Jews historically believed that their Jewish identity rests on their religious faith, not any national identification. Jews in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, Italy and other countries never viewed themselves living in “exile,” as Zionist philosophy holds. Instead, they believe that their religion and nationality are separate and distinct. The God they believe in is a universal God, not tied to a particular geographic site in the Middle East.

An early leader of Reform Judaism, Rabbi Abraham Geiger, pointed out in the 19th century that the underlying essence of Judaism was ethical monotheism. The Jewish people were a religious community destined to carry on the mission to “serve as a light to the nations,” to bear witness to God and His moral law. The dispersion of the Jews was not a punishment for their sins, but part of God’s plan whereby they were to disseminate the universal message of ethical monotheism.

Not A Nation but A Religious Community

In 1885, Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh adopted a platform which declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.” In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state and declaring that, “America is our Zion.” In 1904, The American Israelite declared, “There is not one solitary native Jewish-American who is an advocate of Zionism.”

To the question of whether Jews constitute “a people,” Yeshayahua Leibowitz, the Orthodox Jewish thinker and long-time Hebrew University professor, provides this assessment: “The historical Jewish people was defined neither as a race , nor a people of this country or that, nor as a people which speaks the same language, but as the people of Torah Judaism and its commandments…The words spoken by Rabbi Saadia Gaon (882-942) more than a thousand years ago: ‘Our nation exists only within the Torah’ have not only a normative but also an empirical meaning. They testified to a historical reality whose power could be felt up until the 19th century. It was then that the fracture which has not ceased to widen with time, first occurred: the fissure between Jewishness and Judaism.”

An early leader of the American Council for Judaism, Rabbi Irving Reichart of San Francisco, made his first significant declaration of opposition to Zionism in a January 1936 sermon: “If my reading of Jewish history is correct, Israel took upon itself the yoke of the law not in Palestine, but in the wilderness at Mt. Sinai and by far the greater part of its deathless and distinguished contribution to world culture was produced not in Palestine but in Babylon and the lands of the Dispersion. Jewish states may rise and fall, as they have risen and fallen in the past, but the people of Israel will continue to minister at the altar of the Most High God in all the lands in which they dwell…There is too dangerous a parallel between the insistence of some Zionist spokesmen upon nationality and race and blood, and similar pronouncements by Fascist leaders in Europe.”

Zionism: A Dangerous Wrong Turn

In America at the present time, Zionism looks to more and more Jewish Americans like a dangerous wrong turn. Those who resisted Zionism from the beginning appear to have been prophetic in their warnings and misgivings. Let us hope that prophetic, universal Judaism will be restored.

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What, do you support Hamas?

Posted by on 2024-08-21 No comments

Anyone who opposes Israel’s genocidal wars is smeared as a Hamas sympathizer. I got my first taste of this myself in 2009 when I visited then-Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s office in Washington, DC to lobby against US support for Israel’s “Cast Lead” operation, which was a smaller version of today’s genocidal war on Gaza. I was asked, and I quote, “What, do you support Hamas?”

I concluded at the time that the Senator, who had just replaced Joe Biden as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, was an evil bastard incapable of understanding that opposing war crimes and disproportionate force was not at all the same as supporting terror — which by the way he seemed to define extremely narrowly since Israel wasn’t included.

When Kerry eventually became Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, the evil bastard hypothesis was confirmed, though I then understood that Kerry’s understanding of terrorism would never include his own government’s drones, assassinations, black sites, black ops, wars of choice, regime change, or support for proxy regimes that also used terror and repression. Kerry, like most American politicians, is a disappointing creature of empire not unlike his many simulacra at the DNC convention this week.

With thanks to Mehdi Hasan, who was hounded from MSNBC for his outspoken views on Palestine, here’s a list of a few others who have gotten the same treatment. It turns out you don’t have to argue for human rights or against genocide to get on this not-at-all exclusive list; you simply have to have a momentary lapse of conscience or exhibit involuntary shock at how depraved imperialism and capitalism are.

Amnesty International, AOC, Bella Hadid, Ben & Jerry’s, Bernie Sanders, Billy Eilish, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Church, Children in Gaza, Chuck Schumer, College students, Cori Bush, Elizabeth Warren, EU Foreign Affairs chief, Gary Lineker, Harvard, Hostages’ families, Human Rights Watch, Ice-skating young people, IfNotNow, Jake Tapper, Jewish professors, Jewish Voice For Peace (JVP), Joe Biden, John Cusack, John Oliver, Jonathan Glazer, José Andrés, Kamala Harris, Keir Starmer, Kenneth Roth, Mayor of London, Ms. Rachel, Norman Finkelstein, Oxford University Press, Pramila Jayapal, South Africa, Spain, State Department, Susan Sarandon, United Nations, UN humanitarian chief, UNRWA, UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, World Health Organization, and Zara Larsson.

Impunity

Posted by on 2024-08-20 No comments

The October 7th attack on Israel may have been Israel’s 9/11 but it was also a defining moment in American politics. As Israel unleashed its genocidal response, which has now destroyed almost all of Gaza, left 2.3 million homeless and snuffed out at least 40,000 lives, Americans had a choice to make. Instead of locating their moral center and preventing a barbarous human rights abuse, America sided with an ongoing, historical injustice and — as usual — against the rule of law.

But the culture of impunity that shields Israel is the same that shields our own politicians from accountability and justifies almost every injustice in this country. Our culture of impunity exists because we have always worshipped at the altar of raw power instead of true democracy.

The particular intensity of the cruelty and the barbarity of hounding 2.3 million people from one place to another, then bombing them, using crude AI models to target 100 civilians for every suspected Hamas commander, and the use of massive American munitions — all made a lie of Israel’s claims of “surgical” strikes against terrorists.

Israel’s genocidal violence, accompanied by numerous Israeli public and political expressions of genocidal intent, finally got to some Americans. Many for the first time — including a large proportion of young American Jews — began to examine the sickness and inconsistency of our foreign policy and to connect these with the sickness of our domestic institutions that rhyme so well with it.

The disproportionate Israeli Blitzkrieg on Gaza was a waterboarder’s bucket of ice-water to the face that reminded us of empire’s cruelty — not just Israel’s but our own. A handful of “terrorists” had managed to kill and kidnap hundreds of Israelis — and that led to Israel’s slaughter of dozens or possibly hundreds more of their own citizens, as the Israeli media itself has reported. The documented number of Palestinian dead is now over 40,000 as I write this, but the British medical journal Lancet estimates the number could be as high as 186,000 — 8% of the entire Gaza population.

For decades Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and pogroms against Palestinians have proceeded with the collusion of settlers, politicians, the Israeli public, the Israeli military, and the US foreign policy establishment. The barbarity of Israel’s war on Gaza is nothing new.

With revelations that prisoners of war and even civilians face summary execution (which also occurred during the 1948 Nakba) as well as torture, murder and rape in detention, Israel’s claims ring hollow that it has the “most moral army in the world.” Thousands of social media posts by IDF soldiers have documented Israel’s many war crimes, from looting to heinous crimes against humanity. I sincerely hope these are being collected as evidence in a future war crimes trial.

We are told that Israel “has a right to defend itself” and that any response to “terrorism” is justified. But what of the terror of 1948 that created Israel? And if we are discussing terrorism we should not forget that no one does terrorism as well as a state with an air force, nuclear weapons, and unlimited munitions from a friendly imperialist benefactor. If Hamas is a terrorist organization after killing 1,000 people and destroying a few kibbutzim and military posts, then what is a nation that slaughtered forty times that number, terrorized and destroyed an entire enclave?

There’s no other word for it. Israel is a terrorist state.

After international institutions like the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice condemned Israel’s war crimes, and the ICJ ruled that charges of genocide leveled by South Africa at Israel were credible, the United States and its Western imperial partners showed their contempt for the so-called “rules-based order” — the thin veneer of “civilization” they hide behind when not providing arms and diplomatic for friendly repressive regimes. It is nauseating to see a Biden, a Macron, or a von der Leyen supporting Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or the Philippines as if they did not deserve the status of international pariahs. It turns out that the “rules-based order” involves absolutely no respect for international law but simply follows the law of the jungle.

Joining Republicans in mocking the rule of law as something only for suckers, rubes and peons, Democrats screamed a loud Fuck You! to international conventions on cluster munitions and domestic laws, including the Leahy Law and the Magnitsky Act, which forbid military aid to human rights abusers. Democrats, who frequently accede to demands to dismantle or defund social programs, went on a veritable bomb-buying spree, shelling out billions for [internationally prohibited] cluster munitions for Ukraine, jets and munitions for Taiwan, and 2000-pound neighborhood-leveling bombs with which Israel has inflicted so much carnage and damage to civilian infrastructure in Gaza.

Both American political parties went on to reject the ICJ’s determination of genocide by Israel, defund the United Nations refugee program, reiterate their objections to the International Criminal Court’s mandate to indict war criminals, and to promise that, if Netanyahu and Gallant were ever indicted, the U.S. would continue to thumb its nose at international law.

For Democrats, there ought to be no whining about the lawless Supreme Court and its disregard for our domestic “rule based order.” In that institution, operating with complete impunity, habitual corruption among Justices goes unpunished — not including the Court’s own unaccountable departures from established jurisprudence and legal precedence. How can Democrats object to any of this while thumbing their nose at the ICJ?

Democrats who object to the MAGA president’s attempts to overturn inconvenient election results should not announce plans to impose unelected puppet regimes on post-war Gaza or Venezuela. Democrats who bristle at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and land theft are curiously mute on Israel’s identical crimes. The same Democrats who call for Russia’s complete withdrawal from the Donbass should not speak of a “Two State Solution” that fails at a minimum to require a complete withdrawal from the West Bank by settlers coddled by Israel and the US and funded by American Zionist institutions.

The American lame-duck president, a self-described Christian “Zionist” who cannot enunciate his own foreign policy to the American public and instead leaves that to his military-security establishment, has given Israel everything it wants, which includes the deployment of U.S. naval fleets as well as beefed-up military bases in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. There is no question that — regardless of the nature of Israel’s belligerency — the U.S. will never hesitate to put American troops in harm’s way to defend the Zionist state.

The Israeli Prime Minister, all but indicted in both Jerusalem and at the Hague, was invited to address Congress by leaders of both political parties and he used that opportunity to gaslight Congress and the American public, insulting both the American people and the institutions of the host nation that underwrites his genocidal war.

Americans listen to our elected officials using words like “ironclad,” “unbreakable,” and “no daylight” to describe the US-Israeli relationship. We hear again and again that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, that its military is the most moral, its enemies nothing but virulent jihadist antisemites bent on its total destruction. Like the fabled “beheaded babies,” such talking points begin life in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, bounce about among an armada of Israel lobbyists and Zionist organizations who serve only Israel, and end up glued to the lips of American politicians. Billions in junkets and PAC money ensure American politicians’ subservience to a foreign state.

Despite the relentless propaganda thrown at us by Israeli and domestic propagandists, Americans can see with their own eyes the carnage that Israel is inflicting with our complicity. The cognitive dissonance between the propaganda and what we see and read with our own eyes is so great that some weak minds simply deny the reality. Israeli propagandists do their part by conjuring up “crisis actors,” a term they pilfered from their MAGA bedfellows to discredit what is seen and real as “just an act.” If not slammed as “fake news” then accurate descriptions of Zionism’s dark reality are termed “antisemitic.” The White House, the State Department, and the national security establishment invariably follow Israel’s lead, disputing Palestinian casualty figures, denying documented atrocities, sanitizing Israel’s crimes, recycling Israeli Foreign Ministry talking points.

Despite all this, Americans have begun to tally the costs of our reflexive, uncritical support for a murderous rogue state. American taxpayers — denied national healthcare like Israel or even Mexico — nevertheless have to foot the bill for 15% of Israel’s military budget, more if you factor in the many buy-at-cost military programs, or the numerous joint technology, security, and energy ventures.

Uncritical American support for Israel’s murderous regime also threatens our own democracy. Israel’s defenders have thrown tens of millions of dollars at the Democratic primaries and recently unseated the second of two members of Congress they had targeted for opposing genocide.

Thousands of people have lost their jobs in purges of critics of Israel. Laws in 36 states — New Hampshire just joined them — create a legal definition of “antisemitism” that has nothing to do with “the baseless hatred of Jews” (the traditional definition) and everything to do with punishing any or all criticism of Israel. American universities, once safe places for debate and critical studies, are now in ideological lockdown, experiencing a new form of McCarthyism — as Zionist attack groups working with MAGA Republicans take down their real targets: DEI programs and the faculty members who challenge settler colonialism — including Israel’s.

The near-assassination of Donald Trump brought forth a torrent of repudiations of political violence — of the “this is not who we are” sort of argument. But this is exactly who we are.

Less than a week before a white supremacist managed to clip Donald Trump’s ear, North Carolina governor and Christian nationalist Mark Robinson told a church assembly that secular America were all Nazis and that “some folks need killing… it’s a matter of necessity.” Church pastor Cameron McGill agreed with Robinson, who suggested that the “guys in green” or the “boys in blue” were up to the job.

Not surprisingly, Americans were quick to applaud Israel’s targeted assassination of Ismael Haniya. Besides the hundreds if not thousands of our own political assassinations carried out by American presidents (remember Obama’s “Terror” Tuesday?), many more have been carried out by agents of foreign governments in our employ — just as Israel paid off two disaffected Iranian IGRC agents to plant a bomb in Haniya’s residence. The Guantanamo detention center remains open; the US tortured prisoners to death there and at Abu Ghraib and at other “black sites” — all artificially and yet unimaginably outside the reach of the Constitution. And all this occurred despite numerous U.S. laws and directives prohibiting assassination. In America the rule of law means nothing.

But Governor Robinson was simply speaking of reality when he suggested having the police carry out assassinations. This is exactly what they do in thousands of documented cases each year. We already give the police — who act like and are often armed precisely like military occupation forces in non-white and working-class neighborhoods — carte blanche to kill people. In practice “qualified” immunity amounts to complete blanket immunity, as Justice Sotomayor observed.

Likewise, the American judicial system — which convicts 95% of those it processes by inflating charges in order to coerce plea deals — carries out assassinations every time it applies the death penalty. Even knowing that we are murdering a not insignificant number of demonstrably innocent people, those who had an inadequate defense, or those who lack the mental capacity to understand their crime, makes no difference to the terror state. We go so far as to use untested drugs and mystery cocktails to stop a human heart, keeping their provenance secret, preventing the public and the press from observing or documenting these gruesome rituals — which now include the reintroduction of the firing squad and the gas chamber.

Rounding out the injustice and impunity at work in both our foreign policy and domestic government is the Presidency. The rogue Supreme Court recently ruled that whatever the President does — whether a blatant crime for personal benefit or an official act of state — is protected. The President is a goddamned emperor.

It is not the anarchists or the communists that scare me. It’s the fascist thugs and the neoliberal machinators making up the law as they go along. In this climate of official corruption, hypocrisy, lawlessness, and impunity, how is the average citizen supposed to respect the rule of law — when virtually every branch of government revels in its unchecked corruption?

If the nation’s moneyed and “connected” murderers, bribe-takers, scofflaws, insurrectionists, and war criminals can get away with anything — then open the doors to all the prisons and let them all out.

No one’s a more murderous criminal than the politician who signs a bomb bound for Gaza or the one who votes for it.

Who is Kamala Harris’s Middle East Advisor?’

Posted by on 2024-08-04 No comments

As the Democratic National Convention convenes in Chicago, a handful of “Uncommitted” delegates hopes to influence the party to stop funding genocide. With all respect to the moral certainty of this tiny group, they are tilting at windmills and have already been told to shut the hell up. The party’s 2024 platform planks on Israel remain unchanged from 2020. More importantly, Kamala Harris’s choice of Middle East advisor offers the greatest clue about her policies; the advisor may talk a good game, but in the end he joins all his predecessors as little more than a creature of empire and occupation.

Harris’s advisor, Philip H. Gordon, previously served under Bill Clinton, Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton and is a member of the National Security Council and the Council for Foreign Relations. Although tapped as Harris’s Middle East advisor, Gordon’s expertise is mainly on Europe and Eurasia. He has been around a while and published articles in The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, the Atlantic, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Le Monde, and others.

Compared to much of the American foreign policy establishment, Gordon at first glance appears to be a moderate. He has argued, for example, against US involvement in regime change schemes, for the preservation of the US-Iran nuclear deal, and has questioned the usefulness of crippling sanctions on nations the US opposes. Gordon’s less belligerent tone immediately placed him in the GOP’s crosshairs. MAGA whackadoodle Elise Stafanik actually accused Gordon of being in bed with Iranian foreign agents.

Because Israel is constantly pushing the US toward outright war on Iran, Iran-watchers have naturally been curious about Gordon’s background. Last week the Iranian expat website Iran International produced an interesting and extraordinarily detailed roundup of Gordon’s career and connections (for example — who knew? — Gordon and Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken used to play on the same indoor soccer team at the Washington DC Edlavitch Jewish Community Center). Similarly, Jewish Insider also ran a profile of Gordon, as did Politico and The Nation.

Bottom line: Gordon is simply Pepsi to someone else’s Coke or Dr. Pepper. In terms of foreign policy there is little to suggest that a Harris presidency will look any different from any that have preceded it. Gordon was a booster of NATO’s disastrous involvement in the US war in Afghanistan. And given that both Gordon and Harris support continued US support for the war in Ukraine and continued US support for arming Israel, defense contractors have nothing to worry about under a Harris presidency.

Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship

For readers of this substack, Gordon’s monograph Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship, written together with Robert D. Blackwill, the Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, may provide the best idea of his orientation toward Israel and Palestine. Gordon and Blackwill argue that the US and Israel ought to exhibit as little divergence (“daylight”) in policy as possible, particularly where Iran is concerned. In the preface written by CFR President Richard N. Haass:

“Here they note the widening gap between many in Israel and the United States over the desirability and feasibility of pursuing a two-state solution to this long-standing conflict. They then go on to suggest a more conditional American approach that would tie elements of U.S. policy to a range of Israeli actions on the ground, including settlement policy and what Israel is prepared to do to improve the daily lives of Palestinians and prospects for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state.”

Gordon and Blackwell acknowledge the dirty little secret of Israel’s reliance on the United States:

“Israel prides itself on being able to “defend itself by itself,” but the reality is that it continues to rely heavily on the United States for both military and diplomatic support. The United States has provided Israel some $100 billion in defense assistance since the 1979 Camp David peace treaty and regularly expends an enormous amount of political capital at the United Nations and in a wide range of other international organizations to shield Israel from criticism or sanction. Israel can choose to shrug off concerns about growing differences with Washington if it wants, but a decline in support from the United States would only embolden Israel’s enemies and imperil its legitimacy and security.”

but also Israel’s strategic importance to the United States:

“Despite the arguments of some of Israel’s critics, the United States profits substantially from the relationship as well. Israel is the United States’ closest strategic partner in the world’s most unstable region and shares valuable intelligence with Washington on terrorism, nonproliferation, and regional politics. The United States also derives important military benefits from the partnership, in areas such as military technology, intelligence, joint training and exercises, and cybersecurity. And, despite its relatively small population, Israel is the largest regional investor in the United States, the third largest destination for U.S. exports in the Middle East, an important research and development partner for the U.S. high-tech sector, and a source of innovative ideas on confronting twenty-first-century challenges such as renewable energy and water and food security.”

The thesis of their monograph is that certain tweaks need to be made to the US-Israel relationship:

“The future of the U.S.-Israel relationship is at risk. The two countries continue to share many interests and deep cultural bonds, but the relationship is threatened by diverging strategic perspectives on a region undergoing fundamental change and by long-term demographic, political, and social trends that are undermining the pillars on which the relationship once stood. No one is well served by pretending that these risks do not exist. For strategic, historical, and moral reasons, both governments should do all they can to reframe and revive the U.S.-Israel strategic partnership. The upcoming transition to a new U.S. administration provides an opportunity to put recent disagreements aside and to show the political will needed to reverse the negative policy trends described. This report offers several realistic and necessary steps the leaders on both sides should take as they contemplate their stewardship of this important relationship in the years to come. Although some of these steps would entail painful compromise and political risk, those leaders should understand that preserving this special relationship is worth the effort.”

These tweaks included:

  • Seek to reframe the relationship at a summit in early 2017 at Camp David focused on developing a new strategic vision for a changing Middle East, committing the United States to remain engaged in the region, seriously addressing the Palestinian problem, and institutionalizing an intensive bilateral strategic dialogue.
  • Enhance Israel’s sense of security and confidence in the United States by committing to expanded missile defense, anti-tunnel, and cybersecurity cooperation under the terms of the September 2016 longterm defense assistance Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
  • Move beyond the debate about the merits of the Iran nuclear agreement and work together to implement and rigorously enforce it, with a commitment to imposing penalties on Iran for noncompliance and a joint plan for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons after the deal’s main restrictions expire.
  • Develop detailed common understandings about how to more effectively contain Iranian hegemonic regional designs and take action designed to do so.
  • Agree on a set of specific, meaningful measures that Israel will take unilaterally to improve Palestinian daily life and preserve prospects for a two-state solution, linking continued U.S. willingness to refrain from or oppose international action on Israeli settlements or the peace process to Israel’s implementation of such positive, concrete steps.
  • Expand economic cooperation focused on bilateral trade, investment, energy, innovation, and Israel’s integration into the region.

Unfortunately, the monograph’s proposals were simply so much boilerplate. US “engagement” in the region from administrations Gordon served in had already consisted of destabilizing Iraq, Syria, and Libya, undermining the Arab Spring, and arming Saudi Arabia to the hilt. Naturally, all joint security initiatives with Israel were pursued. Ignoring Gordon’s tepid suggestions, the Biden Administration made no effort to re-establish the Iran nuclear agreement and dismissed Gordon’s concerns about increasing sanctions. “Meaningful measures” to improve Palestinian life were never implemented by either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Israel’s “integration into the region” was pursued by both Trump and Biden under the rubric of the Abraham Accords. And now the United States has doubled-down on the complete destruction of Gaza and its people.

There has been virtually no difference between Democratic and Republican policies vis-a-vis Israel or Palestine. Democrats who imagine a Harris administration will abandon a road long traveled are simply deluding themselves.

Further reading

Anderson, Lisa. “Book Review – Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.” Foreign Affairs, 5 Feb. 2021, www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2020-12-08/losing-long-game-false-promise-regime-change-middle-east.

Deutch, Gabby. “The Obama Mideast Expert Guiding VP Harris on Foreign Policy.” Jewish Insider, 22 Dec. 2023, jewishinsider.com/2023/12/phil-gordon-national-security-advisor-to-the-vp-kamala-harris/.

Gordon, Phil. “Harris’ Support for Israel ‘Ironclad’ after Attack on Golan Heights.” Reuters, 28 July 2024, www.reuters.com/world/harris-support-israel-ironclad-after-attack-golan-heights-2024-07-28/.

Gordon, Philip H. “As Israel’s Greatest Defender and Closest Friend, We Owe It to You to Ask Fundamental Questions.” Times of Israel, 9 July 2014, www.timesofisrael.com/as-israels-greatest-defender-and-closest-friend-we-owe-it-to-you-to-ask-fundamental-questions/.

Gordon, Philip H. “Back up NATO’s Afghanistan Force.” The New York Times, 6 Jan. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/opinion/back-up-natos-afghanistan-force.html.

Gordon, Philip H. “Philip Gordon and Ray Takeyh on Iran.” Council on Foreign Relations, 10 Jan. 2018, www.cfr.org/podcasts/philip-gordon-and-ray-takeyh-iran.

Gordon, Philip H., and Robert D. Blackwill. “Repairing the US-Israel Relationship.” Council for Foreign Relations, 1 Nov. 2016, cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2016/11/CSR76_BlackwillGordon_Israel.pdf.

Gordon, Philip H., and Robert D. Blackwill. “Repairing the US-Israel Relationship.” Council on Foreign Relations, 1 Nov. 2016, www.cfr.org/report/repairing-us-israel-relationship.

Gordon, Philip, and Ariane Tabatabai. “The Choice That’s Coming: An Iran with the Bomb, or Bombing Iran.” The New York Times, 6 Jan. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/opinion/irans-crisis-nuclear-expansion.html.

Gordon, Philip. “Opinion: Israel’s Arabian Fantasy.” Washington Post, 27 June 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/06/27/israels-arabian-fantasy/.

Harris, Kamala. “Readout of National Security Advisor to the Vice President Phil Gordon’s Trip to Israel and the West Bank.” American Presidency Project, 26 June 2024, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/readout-national-security-advisor-the-vice-president-phil-gordons-trip-israel-and-the-west.

Israel National News, Editors. “VP Harris’ Security Advisor: ‘Some in Israel Reject a Ceasefire Deal, We Simply Disagree.'” Israel National News, 25 June 2024, www.israelnationalnews.com/news/392050.

Civilization and its Discontents

Posted by on 2024-08-04 No comments

For some time the title of this blog has been Civilization and its Discontents, the English title of a monograph published by Sigmund Freud in 1930, shortly before Nazism finally took power. In times like that — remarkably similar to times like this — people naturally question why they live in societies, particularly those breaking down, and what their relationship to those societies should be.

The German title of the monograph is Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, where Unbehagen conveys uneasiness instead of simply discontent. In 1930 the world was changing — not in a good way — and there was a sense of dark, imminent social and political changes, much like birds know a storm is brewing.

As with much of Freud’s other work, Unbehagen dealt with id, ego, sex, religion and morality. Freud pointed out that societies offer their own pleasures while demanding of their members normative behavior (prohibiting even victimless, non-criminal behavior) that denies primal instincts that could undermine the presuppositions of social institutions. Today’s MAGA fundamentalists, with their insistence on hetero-normative sex and a hypocritical moral code from which their own leaders are always excused, have nothing on Weimar prudery or any of the world societies Freud examined.

Freud identifies “three sources from which our suffering comes: (1) the superior power of nature, (2) the feebleness of our own bodies and (3) the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society.” There is not much to be done about the first two, but the third (family, state, and society) is the subject of his monograph.

For Freud, religion was just one of a number of palliatives to reduce human suffering — something “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.” If societies stifled human desire, religion was even more pernicious:

“Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.”

Besides religion, other mechanisms of “displacements of libido” (sublimation, for example) distract humans suffering from deprivation and want. The ego, Freud says, can elevate human consciousness to spheres of imagination (art, science) or fantasy (religion, psychosis, narcissism) — but according to Freud’s “pleasure principle” a person’s underlying primal needs must always be met directly. Those needs — and the aforementioned tensions between individual, family, society, and the state — form the basis of our unease or discontent:

“[…] what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. […] How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange altitude of hostility to civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the then existing state of civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up, occasioned by certain specific historical events. […] There is also an added factor of disappointment. During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. […] But […] this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier. […] What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”

Our Clergy

Posted by on 2024-07-04 No comments

On June 23rd an Israeli company set up a real estate bazaar in an ultra-Orthodox kollel and synagogue in Los Angeles. The company sells real estate both in “Israel ’48′” and in the West Bank. Protesters protested, counter protesters hurled eggs, LAPD showed up in riot gear, there were fistfights, and it just got even uglier.

CNN commentator Van Jones called the protest a “pogrom” against Jews, likening the keffiyah that Palestinian protesters wore to a “Confederate flag” — though he had no problem with an actual, foreign flag Jewish counter-protesters draped themselves in. Newsweek called the protest a “synagogue attack” — as if protesting an illegal real estate sale was tantamount to Kristallnacht.

While the protest was organized by a Palestinian student group, many of the protesters were Jewish — who saw the sale of illegal property as a violation of both the 1965 Civil Rights and 1968 Fair Housing acts. From both a Palestinian and a progressive Jewish perspective, the illegal land sales were outrageous and criminal. For the Jews among the protesters it was also unforgivable that these violations of US law and Jewish ethics were taking place in a synagogue.

But casting the Gaza-related protests as “antisemitism” has become a highly successful strategy pro-Israel groups use to distract from central issues like land theft and genocide. So much so that American media have become largely incapable of distinguishing Judaism from Zionism. Likewise, the Israel lobby’s push to create repressive laws based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews and Judaism with Israel, further threatens any distinction.

* * *

But Judaism is a religion that existed for centuries after the ancient Hebrew state (also called Israel) collapsed after only 125 years, in part due to civil war. Long after this collapse, Jewish culture still thrived in multiple cultural forms and languages. Rabbinic Judaism developed. The crown jewel of Jewish scholarship, the Talmud, was written over centuries in present-day Iraq. While early Zionists like Ahad Ha’am hoped that Zionism might enrich and strengthen Jewish culture, contemporary Zionists have managed to reduce Judaism down to Zionist land grabs and conquest — its ethical values further dishonored by the state of Israel’s repression, war crimes, and genocide and the insistence of Zionists that this is all that Judaism is.

But right from the beginning, Zionism has shamelessly placed Judaism at the service of its political agenda. In Der Judenstaat (the “Jewish State“) Theodor Herzl described (see original German in the graphic) the rather heavy-handed approach by which the Jewish Company would issue instructions to Jews:

Our Clergy

Every group will have its Rabbi, traveling with his congregation. Local groups will afterwards form voluntarily about their Rabbi, and each locality will have its spiritual leader. Our Rabbis, on whom we especially call, will devote their energies to the service of our idea, and will inspire their congregations by preaching it from the pulpit. They will not need to address special meetings for the purpose; an appeal such as this may be uttered in the synagogue. And thus it must be done. For we feel our historic sanity only through the faith of our fathers as we have long ago absorbed the languages of different nations to an ineradicable degree.

The Rabbis will receive communications regularly from both Society and Company, and will announce and explain these to their congregations. Israel will pray for us and for itself.

It is worth reading Herzl’s foundational work describing the Zionist project. Among other things he made clear how little he thought of Palestine’s indigenous people, that he recognized that in a “pure” Jewish state it would be necessary to ethnically cleanse the inhabitants by “spiriting them away” across the border. Anticipating the cognitive dissonance of today’s liberal Zionist when trying to see Israel’s Apartheid state as both “democratic and Jewish,” Herzl’s Jewish state was to be structured as either a “democratic monarchy” or an “aristocratic republic,” neither of which would tolerate popular unrest.

Herzl’s state was to be a bulwark against the Asian hordes, which would then endear it to the Western powers. The Zionist project, Herzl wrote, would depend on colonial support and patronage. And not only was Zionism to be — explicitly — a settler colonial enterprise, it was to be a settler colonial enterprise that both served and profited from European colonial nations. Today’s Zionists become apoplectic when DEI scholars and scholars of colonialism point this out, but these very words were all in the draft of the Jewish state that Herzl described in Der Judenstaat.

Herzl, who eventually helped organize the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Jewish National Fund, also helped create the Jewish Colonial Bank. In 1898 Herzl described the purpose of the bank in Die Welt: “The task of the Colonial Bank is to eliminate philanthropy. The settler on the land who increases its value by his labor merits more than a gift. He is entitled to credit. The prospective bank could therefore begin by extending the needed credits to the colonists; later it would expand into the instrument for the bringing in of Jews and would supply credits for transportation, agriculture, commerce and construction.”

Of the Jewish Company, which was central to the Zionist project in Der Judenstaat, Herzl wrote: “The Jewish Company is partly modelled on the lines of a great land-acquisition company. It might be called a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has other than purely colonial tasks.”

Acknowledging the similarity of Jewish colonial settlement to that of the American West, Herzl wrote: “In America the occupation of newly opened territory is set about in naive fashion. The settlers assemble on the frontier, and at the appointed time make a simultaneous and violent rush for their portions. We shall not proceed thus to the new land of the Jews. The lots in provinces and towns will be sold by auction…”

Which brings us to Los Angeles of 2024. The auction of stolen property at Adas Torah has been a principal feature of Zionism for over a century.

Despite attempts by early Zionist organizations like Brit Shalom and the Ihud to advocate for a binational state that would avoid ethnic cleansing, land theft and the inevitable resentment of the dispossessed, Herzl’s 19th Century dream of an undemocratic, racist Jewish state was ultimately realized.

From the moment of its founding, Israel has been an ugly, illiberal, nationalist anachronism in a world that has since adopted more democratic aspirations. As Herzl wrote, “if you will it, it’s not a dream.” And, strangely enough, Herzl was right: the ethno-nationalist state he dreamed of has become an absolute nightmare.

Abandon Biden ’24

Posted by on 2024-07-02 No comments

Long before Joe Biden confirmed his cognitive decline and unfitness for the Presidency, his center-right politics, his sale of cluster munitions to the Ukraine, his foreign policy, his coddling of Israel, his turnabout on immigration, inaction on abortion and disinterest in Supreme Court enlargement — all made him an unacceptable choice for a second term. After Gaza, the “uncommitted” movement to punish him in the primaries evolved into a concerted effort to push the Democratic Party to choose another candidate. Thus was born the Abandon Biden campaign.

Ironically, Biden himself has done the most to make the case that Democrats need a different challenger to what, after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, may well be an Imperial Presidency.

AbandonBiden24 is a campaign that Muslim and Arab Americans launched in December 2023 in Dearborn, Michigan, to send a strong message to Joe Biden about his complicity in the Gaza genocide.

With AIPAC and a galaxy of Israel lobby and propaganda organizations applying pressure to American politicians, it has been both refreshing and somewhat of a novelty to see American Muslims flexing their political muscles, particularly in a broad community process. I have seen both AbandonBiden24’s Town Hall with alternative presidential candidates and its followup Great Conversation with activists around the country and offer a few observations.

AbandonBiden24 wants to show both parties that Muslim Americans can’t be taken for granted. Republicans lost significant Muslim support after 9/11 and by 2020 a substantial majority of Muslims supported Biden. However, Biden’s blanket (“ironclad”) support for Israel and his blank checks and reckless munitions shipments — all to maintain Israel’s brutal Apartheid system — have soured Muslim voters who resent being put in the position of having to choose between a war criminal or a fascist. They want to punish Biden and want America to know that if the President loses in November it will be precisely because of angry, ignored Muslim voters:

The Abandon Biden strategy is for people of conscience to punish Biden at the ballot box and then take the “blame”–or claim the credit–for his electoral defeat. Punishing a president for his genocide would send a clear signal to the political landscape that genocide is not politically viable. It would create a political earthquake, soliciting a reckoning in the political parties.

Muslims face exactly the same dilemma as white liberals but, seen from the perspective of people who have lost relatives to American bombs, to many Trump is clearly the lesser evil. We saw this view reflected in the Great Conversation. What seemed to be a majority of the Detroit focus group not only regarded Trump as the lesser evil, but advocated voting for him instead of a third-party candidate to ensure the greatest likelihood of defeating the genocidaire-in-chief.

While there is some Muslim support for Trump in Texas and elsewhere, we’ll have to leave it to the pollsters to determine how great it is. It’s clear the GOP is recruiting. One member of the Detroit focus group was obviously in the bag for Trump, and acknowledged being approached by the Trump campaign. And he sounded exactly like he’d ingested every ounce of Kool-Aid they’d poured for him.

For the most part, however, most AbandonBiden24 campaign members appeared to be as distrustful of Republicans as they are of Republicans. When asked about the campaign’s direction, Jaylani Hussain, director of Minnesota’s CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) chapter, replied, “We don’t have two options. We have many options,” but added for clarification, “We’re not supporting Trump.”

What’s not clear is if the Town Hall invitations to third-party candidates indicated real interest in permanently breaking with both parties, or if it was simply a shorter-term strategy to court some of those “many options.”

Toward the end of the Great Conversation, three members of AbandonBiden24 discussed where the campaign might be heading.

Mohammad Ziny is a progressive, leans toward progressive politics, but fears burning bridges with “good” Democrats like Jamal Bowman. He believes the movement should call for a vote for explicitly pro-ceasefire candidates like Cornel West or the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Personally, he would endorse Stein. However, the greatest attraction to the Greens is its “infrastructure” – the fact that it has ballot access in 26 states (compared to Cornel West’s 13). Whether American Muslims would find a permanent home in a predominantly white eco-centric party is a question only they and the Greens can answer.

Kareem Rosshandler from Georgia advocates a “courting all, committing to none” strategy. He advocates keeping options open with both parties, but recognizes that the movement’s complicated relationship to the GOP could frighten liberals. He believes that America has never had the chance to talk about a “Muslim vote” before, and this is a first opportunity. But, as such, how America sees the Muslim vote will be reflected in whether Biden wins or loses. If Biden loses, the movement will have made its point that the Muslim vote counts. If Biden wins, Muslims will be reviled like third parties as election “spoilers.”

Moderator Sadia Tarranum from Minnesota agreed with Ziny on the strategic usefulness of working with the Green Party. But she also agreed with Rosshandler on the need to keep all options open.

The AbandonBiden24 campaign was born of a single goal – to punish Joe Biden for his complicity in slaughtering Palestinians. It first flexed its political muscles in the Democratic primaries, and that muscle has managed to deny between 8% and 20% of the Democratic vote to Biden in over a dozen states. The campaign has become a hostage to its own success and clearly has a mandate to continue – but as what?

* * *

For AbandonBiden24 to succeed as a movement to put Muslims on the electoral chess board, it surely needs a win, as Kareem Rosshandler rightly points out. But more importantly, it needs to know where it is ultimately headed. And with whom.

The ‘Morning After’

Posted by on 2024-06-28 No comments

Is there anyone who watched last night’s Presidential debate who really thinks Joe Biden can survive?

It’s not just Biden’s chances of winning an election I’m talking about. I’m referring to his extremely fragile physical and mental state. Voters have every reason to question whether the walking corpse we saw on CNN’s debate stage last night can see the end of a second term or function any better than what we saw last night. The man is not well, and it’s shocking that the DNC allowed Biden to take the stage in Atlanta — especially after images surfaced of him “frozen” at a Juneteenth celebration on the South Lawn of the White House.

The man most of us saw last night shuffled onto stage and squinted into the cameras, appearing slack-jawed and confused. Speaking in a barely perceptible whisper, Biden often lost the thread of what he was saying, misquoted facts and figures, or mumbled incomprehensible jibberish. Almost as troubling, a clueless and self-unaware Biden insisted his poor performance was due to a head cold, adding “I think we did well.”

In comparison, a practiced Donald Trump spoke in the convincing manner of the sleazy, racist real estate salesman he is. And to those who judge debate performance primarily on appearances, Trump’s incessant lying miraculously did not diminish a pretense of presidential command and competence.

But Biden’s abysmal performance finally grabbed the attention of the liberal pundocracy, long in denial and now terrified. A surprising number of one-time Biden cheerleaders are now calling for candidate Biden to step down, including panicking donors. By and large, however, a timid and unimaginative Democratic establishment is doubling down on support for their guy.

Among the liberal columnists now calling for Biden to voluntarily drop out of the race are: New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman, Frank Bruni, Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Nicholas Kristof; Current Affairs’s executive editor Nathan Robinson; Harold Myerson of the American Prospect; The Slate’s David Faris; and Mehdi Hassan, who jumped from MSNBC to the Zeteo platform. Sacramento Bee opinion writer Robin Epley warned readers that “for the Democrats, only a fresh injection of visible vitality and something more than a minimally-acceptable level of intelligence will save Americans from a second Trump administration.” Presciently, last month Alex Shepherd wrote in the New Republic (“Democrats have a Joe Biden Problem”), warning Democrats to replace Biden on the basis of his consistently awful polling.

But such warnings are nothing new.

A year go The Atlantic acknowledged that “Democrats would like a new presidential candidate. The problem is that the current president is plugging along fine.” But this morning things were not so fine. Franklin Foer’s article in the Atlantic is titled “Someone Needs to Take Biden’s Keys.” Another by Jerusalem Demsas counsels the same: “Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option.” In February 2023 Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the New York Times, “Biden’s a Great President. He Should Not Run Again,” warned against precisely what debate viewers saw last night.

Despite last night’s fiasco, the Democratic establishment is still not ready to throw in the towel on Biden.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an obvious dog in the fight, conceded that Biden had a “slow start” but warned that the election should be decided on the basis of “substance.” California governor Gavin Newsom, a rumored replacement for Biden who was in Atlanta for the debate as a Biden surrogate, dismissed Biden’s replacement: “With all due respect, the more times we start having these conversations, going down these rabbit holes, it’s unhelpful to our democracy, the fate and future of this country, the world. They need us right now to step up and that’s exactly what I intend to do.” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, another whispered replacement, tried to cast the debate in the best light for Biden: “Tonight, voters were presented with a clear choice — a president working hard every day to improve the lives of all Americans or a convicted felon, a selfish blowhard looking out only for himself. The contrast between these two men was clear before the debate — it is even clearer now.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called rumors of Biden dropping out “bizarre” while Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) dismissed the idea as well. “I’ve heard no credible plan B, and I’m not counting on a plan B.” Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro pooh-poohed replacing Biden, calling only for Democrats to “stop worring and start working.”

But much of the media cheering section is still with Biden.

MSNBC, the Fox News for centrist Democrats, denied that Biden was unfit and said only that Biden had had a bad night, counseling optimism: “Biden still has months to right the ship.” But no one can fault MSNBC for inconsistency: a year ago the network ran a segment denying problems with Biden’s candidacy, letting 2016 runner-up Hillary Clinton tell listeners why he was a great a candidate as she was. The Slate’s Jill Filipovic still supports Biden — but by the thinnest of threads: “That Biden bungled even his party’s strongest issue should be a moment of reckoning –not just for his supporters, of which I am one, but for the man himself.” Robert Reich wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, only leaving panicking readers with a panicky lecture on how Trump is exactly like Hitler. Heather Cox Richardson also wrote nothing about Biden’s unfitness, but dissected each of Trump’s lies. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and Israel hawk Bret Stephens is still betting on Biden but sounds like he’d prefer Republican Elise Stefanik to the Vice President.

And this is only the “morning after.”

We’re going to have to wait a few days or weeks to see if Democrats are capable of moving past their shock and denial to a rational — actually the only possible — response to last night’s disaster. In any rational universe the DNC would replace Biden.

Despite the fact that it’s never been done before so late in the game, a new candidate could soften the rift between centrists and progressives, allay concerns over Biden’s age, address his terrible polling and also his choice of VP, offer a stronger challenge to the many third party candidates in the race, and (providing the replacement is not another zealous Christian Zionist) pacify somewhat the 10-15% of Democrats who voted “undecided” in the primaries because of Biden’s collaboration in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

But this is a party that doesn’t care, never learns, and never takes responsibility. Blaming voters for Biden’s almost certain defeat in 2024 will be the the DNC’s response to their own irresponsibility. It’s going to be a repeat of 2016 unless the party grownups wake the hell up.

Of ‘Pogroms’ and Propaganda

Posted by on 2024-06-26 No comments

On Sunday, June 23, 2024 an Israeli real estate firm called My Home in Israel (“housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel”) staged a real estate event inside a synagogue, Congregation Adas Torah, in Los Angeles together with another Israeli company called International Marketing & Promotions (“We sell things to Jews. We sell Israel to the world.”). This unseemly event not only dragged a synagogue into the muck but broke U.S. civil rights and international human rights laws in the process. Yet protests against the event were quickly spun as quite literally a “pogrom” against Jews — and by some of America’s most recognizable “liberal” Democrats.

The protest was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement and was joined by a number of pro-Palestinian groups on the Left, including CODEPink. As an article in the Forward reported, “Hundreds of counter-protesters — toting their own flags and megaphones — were present when it began at 12 p.m. […] The scene recalled a fracas at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA the night of April 30 which began when a pro-Israel mob arriving after the conclusion of Passover lobbed fireworks, poles and other items at the encampment and tried to tear down its makeshift walls.”

The vehemence of the counter-protest betrays an ugly truth about Zionism. It has always used land theft and land sales to accomplish the displacement of Palestinians. Such property is illegal; international law recognizes the West Bank as Palestinian and settlements as illegal. Real estate sales like Adas Torah’s are no different from selling stereos off the back of a truck under some overpass.

The usual shrill accusations of antisemitism have been turned up a notch and the propagandists’ keyboards are on fire — because these real estate sales, more than anything else we see right out in the open, demonstrate exactly how Zionism works and its absolute depravity.

In March a similar event took place at Keter Torah synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey. This followed almost identical events — all at synagogues — in Montreal and Toronto and was to be followed in Lawrence and Flatbush. According to New York Magazine, “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event is an annual exhibition produced by Gideon Katz, a self-described ‘expert in marketing Israeli real estate to the global Jewish community.’ […] At most of the events was a company called My Home in Israel, brought along to showcase available properties in both Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies: multiple units in a building near Givat HaMatos in East Jerusalem, townhouses in near Ariel University in the heart of the West Bank, and a five-bedroom villa with a pool in the luxury enclave of Efrat south of Bethlehem.”

Rich Segal, a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey and himself Jewish, testified at a public hearing in March that he believes restrictive sales of Palestinian land to Jews-only buyers (American Muslims can’t buy any of the houses) violate both domestic and international law, including the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. “We don’t allow real estate events to be for whites only, or for Jews only. Now, as Jews, we don’t get to fly under the radar and break the law and hide it in the synagogue. Segal went on to say that such sales also violate international law because, at the Teaneck sale, homes from three different [illegal] West Bank settlements were being offered.

At these events much of the violence has come from counter-protesters. In Toronto, Ilan-Reuben Abramov, a supporter of the Israeli real estate event, attacked protesters with a nail gun. In Los Angeles pro-Palestinian protesters were punched, shoved, pelted with raw eggs, and soaked with bear and pepper spray. Well-organized counter-protesters and members of nearby synagogues, many with Israeli flags, were there expressly to confront the pro-Palestinian protesters.

Predictably, a Jewish Chronicle headline screamed “Keffiyeh-clad mob launches bloody assault on Los Angeles synagogue.” CNN commentator Van Jones actually called the protest a “pogrom.” And Democratic Party leaders at all levels — President Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — all endorsed stomping on the First Amendment by barring protests in front of houses of worship. Bass promised to meet with the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, Rabbi Noah Farkas, and “other law enforcement and faith leaders” to prevent a repeat of the protests.

President Biden, who after October 7th claimed to have seen videos of nonexistent beheaded babies on kibbutzim in the Negev, sputtered that the protests were “antisemitic and un-American.” But what of those American and international laws being broken by the Israeli real estate organizers? Isn’t violating the 1965 federal Civil Rights Act un-American? The Fair Housing Act? Apparently not to the great enabler of a genocide — who as Senator undermined civil rights provisions, lobbying his colleagues as a Delaware Dixiecrat against school busing, calling it a “liberal train wreck.”

Because pro-Israel spin has transmuted the protest into an attack on Jewish worshippers, it is necessary to point out that the protest took place on a Sunday — not the Jewish sabbath. It was also not, as echoed throughout the mainstream media, a random racist attack on a synagogue but a protest at an offensive and illegal sale.

Religious institutions, including synagogues, often open their facilities to community groups and for public meetings or voting. Churches hold medical screening clinics. Synagogues hold on-site blood drives. A New Bedford synagogue rents out part of its facility to a girls school. These are all commendable public uses of religious property, but none has anything to do with Judaism. And neither did the Zionist real estate event in a meeting room at Adas Torah.

In 2009 Stoughton (MA) synagogue Ahavath Torah hosted a series of far right speakers, including Dutch fascist Geerd Wilders. When it repeated the stunt in 2016 over a hundred clergy, including rabbis from other congregations, protested. And quite justifiably.

So, again, it is unfortunate to have to point out the obvious — but like any organization, houses of worship are capable of staging questionable (even illegal) events, and the public has every right to protest them.

Adas Torah Congregation is situated in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles in an area known as the “kosher corridor.” According to an Aish magazine profile, “In a 20-minute stroll down Pico […] I encounter 30 shuls, kollels and outreach programs: Persian, Modern Orthodox, kiruv, yeshivish, Chabad, Carlebach, Yemenite, Chassidic, Israeli. There are boutique shuls for musicians and artists; one for Moroccans and another French-Moroccan. Plus 30 kosher restaurants!”

With all these opportunities to conduct a so-called “pogrom” why was only Adas Torah chosen for protest? The answer is staring you right in the face – because of the illegal sale of Palestinian land and the violation of domestic and international laws shamefully taking place inside the building.

The Poverty of Liberalism

Posted by on 2024-06-24 No comments
chicago-1968
chicago-1968

“In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.” — Phil Ochs, intro to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (1966)

* * *

The New Republic recently ran a series of articles about Liberalism, one of which was authored by Jamie Raskin. The article is accompanied by a photo of “liberals” protesting Trump immigration policies (“no ban, no wall”) — but this was not a picture of liberals illustrating liberal immigration values but of progressives protesting Trumpian policies the party of liberals has now chosen to follow.

This is just one example of an easily-observed phenomenon: that liberals often voice approval for progressive policies while doing the complete opposite. Don’t believe me? Read the Democratic Party Platform, national or Massachusetts versions. It doesn’t matter. Both are filled with voter candy that Democratic legislators then turn around and vote against.

Right out of the gate Raskin admits that “American liberals exist for the most part implicitly — in our work, our arguments, and our values, and not so much in terms of explicit, much less exclusive, political self-identification.” What Raskin acknowledges here is that liberals have certain sentiments but absolutely no coherent political positions — which is much the same thing comedian Lewis Black was getting at when he observed that “Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.”

Liberals want to have it both ways. They want to be progressives and conservatives, both at the same time. Let’s hear more of what else Raskin has to say:

“We are indeed emphatically liberals because we defend individual liberty, but we are equally progressives because we champion progress for everyone; and these days, we are the closest thing America has to conservatives, too, because we want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public integrity, judicial independence — everything in society and nature that the party of nihilists and authoritarians wants to destroy.”

I concede that some liberals are inclined to many of these things, but few are inclined to defend, say, the “individual liberty” of Palestinians — or to even criticize their leaders for colluding in a genocide. And the political party that represents liberals has done little to defend any of it. Wasn’t it Biden, for example, who ushered Clarence Thomas into the Supreme Court? Has the Constitution ever been any more than an aspirational document for people who can be satisfied with mere verbiage? Doesn’t this same Wonder Document enshrine gravely undemocratic institutions (the electoral college, the Senate) into law? Have Democrats really defended these institutions that Raskin enumerates with anything nearing the same zeal that the GOP shows in trying to destroy them?

But Raskin was right about the conservatism. While Republicans have become a party of radicals who “violate norms” and would tear our institutions apart if they could, liberal Democrats have become the champions of these decrepit, dysfunctional institutions, including our relatively unchanging American foreign policy. While MAGA Republicans question everything from NATO to provoking Russia and China while focusing on domestic issues, liberal Democrats (according to a Pew Research Center study) are only too happy to expand NATO right up to Russia’s door and spend taxpayer money freely at the arms bazaar.

Tellingly, nowhere in Raskin’s essay does he mention foreign policy, the great Achilles heel of Liberalism — because liberal values exist only in an extremely limited geographical bubble. Move outside the borders of the United States and liberals become the most ardent defenders of empire, war, conquest, and colonialism.

Raskin goes on to assign progressive fights to the liberal scorecard. While the ACLU and the NAACP are no bastions of Bolshevism, to be sure, both struggle with “liberal” Democratic Party policies and inaction. Yet they appear on his “liberal wins” column. But liberals can’t undermine the Ilhan Omars and Rashida Tlaibs in their own party while simultaneously taking credit for their progressive activism.

Quoting John Dewey, Raskin writes that the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy; among the ills that sicken our democracy are gerrymandering (still used by Democrats, as I can personally attest since my own Congressional district is still gerrymandered) and voter suppression (Democrats are currently using an entire catalog of dirty tricks to keep third parties off the ballot in numerous states). The real problem with our democracy is that the rules of the game in the Constitution are flawed and undemocratic. And liberals aren’t interested in changing them.

Raskin goes on to slam autocrats like Putin and Orban who shut down papers and use state powers to crush political opposition. Fair enough. But the hypocrisy of his observation — at a time when Democrats have colluded with Republicans in shutting down protests over Gaza and punishing academics and college presidents for permitting critiques of Zionism and colonialism on their campuses — is sickening.

And speaking of Zionism, liberals are apparently great defenders of this 19th Century relic of ethnonationalism that is so popular with the Orbans and Bolsonaros. Our liberal President, on innumerable occasions, has called himself a Zionist. The party of the liberals unhesitatingly gives Israel whatever it needs to keep its supremacist state in place. This in turn undermines liberal claims to defend liberty and fight authoritarianism. The Israeli government that American liberals enthusiastically support is the most far-right in history and includes outright fascists who every week advocate genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is no individual freedom when an entire people is being carpet-bombed and ethnically cleansed. And there is no individual freedom when the liberal state uses its power to crush dissent over unpopular wars and foreign policy. This is as true today as it was in 1968 when liberals were slaughtering VietNamese and beating protesters.

* * *

Presidential candidate Cornel West weighed in on liberalism last year and, like Raskin, has a complicated relationship with it. On the one hand, he easily sees its weaknesses, but he also has a classical liberal orientation toward it:

“The sunny side of liberalism is its defense of these indispensable rights and liberties. The dark side of liberalism is its blindness to the threats of oppressive economic power, its blindness to militarism and imperialism abroad. But it’s very important that we never view liberalism in monolithic, homogenous terms. I hope we’re able to have a kind of dialectical understanding, so we can tease out what we see as valuable in these various liberalisms, and at the same time keep track of faults and foibles.”

Like Raskin, West identifies human dignity as Liberalism’s most important feature. But instead of massive structural change, including change initiated by conflict and the system’s inherent contradictions, West ultimately believes that civics and morality will straighten it all out:

“In Democracy Matters, I wrote a chapter on the deep democratic tradition. The backdrop of this tradition is the dignity of ordinary people. Each one of them has an equal status in the eyes of something more powerful. They have to undergo education, they have to undergo spiritual formation, they have to develop a sense of civic virtue, but it’s their voice. That’s a democratic voice, with a liberal dimension. We started this dialogue saying what? Without liberalism as a prerequisite in terms of rights and liberties, fascism is the alternative; that’s it. Let’s just be honest about it. But then the question becomes: Are we sensitive enough, and do we have the patience to tease out the resources in our own tradition that can serve as a launching pad for alternatives?”

* * *

Writing in the same issue of TNR as Raskin, Sam Adler-Bell observes that:

“Either liberalism is a necessary but insufficient condition for achieving justice and fairness, or else liberalism is an active impediment to these aims, an “ideology,” in Marx’s sense, whose chimerical aspirations naturalize and perpetuate the status quo.” […]

“I often find myself flitting between these two propositions in my writings and commitments. To be frank, I hope the former is true: that universal rights and dignity not only are compatible with but require a scheme of material redistribution to be realized. But in my darker moments, I fear the latter is more true: that individual liberty will always be, first and foremost, the handmaiden of property, that exceptions to liberalism’s universal pretensions can always be found when they imperil the privileges of the propertied class.” […]

“The timidity of liberals, our obsession with getting things right, our worry about going too far, could generously be categorized as thoughtful discrimination. More often than not, however, our wan, philosophical reticence is really some species of self-deception: a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.”

There’s that conservatism again. And — completely in conflict with justice, fairness, rights, and dignity — the liberal penchant for warmongering and repression has repeatedly surfaced even in relatively enlightened times.

Adler-Bell points out that it was Truman who signed Executive Order 9835, kicking off the [second] McCarthyite era. Likewise LBJ worked with J. Edgar Hoover to repress the American Left, the Black freedom movement, the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement. And —

“As I write, liberals, including President Joe Biden, are wringing their hands — when they’re not ringing the police–over protests by young people who have taken all-too-seriously certain universal propositions: that Palestinian lives are as inviolable as Israeli ones, as worthy of dignity and protection, and as deserving of the right to self-determination.”

And Adler-Bell sure puts his finger on the patient’s pulse when he writes:

“American liberalism, Irving Howe once wrote, cannot escape its “heritage of Protestant self-scrutiny, self-reliance, and self-salvation. Consequently, American liberalism has a strand of deep if implicit hostility to politics per se — a powerful kind of moral absolutism, a celebration of conscience above community, which forms both its glory and its curse.” This strikes me as remarkably true of today’s Democratic Party. Its loudest boosters take for granted that an aura of moral righteousness attends the party’s actions, and that it is every person’s solemn duty of conscience to walk, soberly and somehow alone, beneath its banner. Liberal politics divorces itself from interest, need, and passion; “from the soil of shared, material life,” as Howe put it. In Biden’s message, one hears a stultifying admixture of high moral panic with utter political banality and sloth. Our existential crisis demands prudent equanimity; we are called to frenzied urgency–but not like that.”

This explains, in part, how even a Protestant “radical” like Cornel West can share many of these values.

* * *

Next up to defend liberalism in the New Republic is Robert Kagan. Those who remember this Machiavellian liar and warmonger who pushed the US to invade Iraq also know that neoconservatives like Kagan and Elliot Abrams hold an esteemed place at the Democratic Party’s actual (not professed) foreign policy table. As a well-known neoconservative Zionist apologist who advocates for American domination of the “White Man’s Burden” variety, and for Jewish supremacy in Palestine, Kagan writes that he is appalled that the Supreme Court would defend white Christian supremacy. To some ears this nonsense is not as glaringly inconsistent as it sounds to mine.

* * *

Finally, rounding out the discussion in the New Republic, Jefferson Cowie wonders if Liberalism has any meaning at all:

“First, nobody can truly agree on what the term means, partially because it has rarely existed in the first place in the United States. “American liberalism,” therefore, has proved to be as much of a nostalgia trap as a forward-thinking enlightenment project. And, when liberalism did work in a politically progressive way, it tended to do so best when it transcended its own logic, ironically achieving liberal ends through illiberal means.” […]

“We begin with the nostalgia trap. The best proof of the fact that we don’t know what we are even talking about is the belief that some classical version once defined American history. What must be regarded as, at best, the most blinkered and, at worst, most pernicious interpretation of American history is Louis Hartz’s staggeringly influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz argues that Americans enjoyed the absence of a class-structured feudal past, which also meant little tradition of militant revolution or reaction. Americans were born free, capitalist, and committed to the liberal ideal. Hartz’s flat, conflictless version of history was always in conversation with European socialism more than the American historical record. It stands as a document of its postwar moment, when the United States needed to make sense of itself as hegemon of the “free” world.”

This 1955 view of Liberalism brings us directly to the 1950’s America both Donald John Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden represent. Whether by beefing up NATO or imposing tariffs, or kicking out the immigrants (which both geezers now appear to be in favor of), it’s the bad old America that was. Not the America of the future.

Cowie rattles off several competing views of liberalism, but each falls back on the old, comfortable “more democracy” argument. In naming many of American democracy’s most glaring defects, even Cowie shrinks from pointing out the obvious — that only radical medicine can treat this habitually sick patient. In the end it is liberalism’s “respect for the individual” that each of Liberalism’s advocates presented here falls back upon.

That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. This is what Robert Paul Wolff was getting at when he wrote his brilliant 1968 autopsy report, The Poverty of Liberalism.

The solution, as old math books used to say, “is left as an exercise to the reader.”

One State, Two State

Posted by on 2024-06-17 No comments

The Two State Solution is a fundamentally dishonest proposition. When Western colonial powers first conceived carving up the Middle East, starting with the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1919 League of Nations mandate system — and by way of dozens of partition schemes to take one people’s land and give it to another — the whole notion of partitioning Palestine became nothing less than an organized system of land theft persisting until the present day.

Naturally, Palestinians have reacted with understandable anger at the imposition of a Jewish state literally built on the rubble of their homes and communities — some 500 cities and towns — and the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians accomplished through massacre and state terror. Today Israel continues to extend Jewish domination on the rubble of newly bulldozed and cratered Palestinian homes and cities. And state terror continues to be an important arrow in its quiver of control and repression techniques.

Operating out of desperation, with much of the Western world arrayed against them, Palestinians have at varying times acquiesced to partition schemes — just as one might have no choice but to allow an armed home invader to move into his house while he flees to the basement. These are essentially the terms that American “peace” brokers from various, mainly Democratic, administrations have dictated to the Palestinians. Americans who live in communities that long ago overran Native American lands — I’ll wager this is most of White America — somehow find this arrangement completely normal and reasonable.

So, while incapable of condemning the home invader, the fictive Two State Solution has become the default position of Centrist Democrats who promote this “solution” at every opportunity while offering neither description nor outline of how such an impossibility could ever be conjured into existence. Lately, these Two-Staters’ biggest problem is that One State is official Zionist policy and the entity our politicians are working in behalf of — Israel, not the US — won’t consider any sort of Palestinian state — even the “basement” option. And, of course, Palestinians are none too eager to accept a third-rate rump state on a fraction of their homeland while leaving the heavily-armed home invader still in charge.

As much as a Two State solution has become a deservedly lampooned article of faith among American Liberals and liberal Zionists, it is no longer even a remote possibility. 10% of Israel’s population — 15% of them Americans, many of them non-Jewish Russians — now occupy the West Bank. The scale of Israeli settlement is so vast, especially with Israeli laws that “legalize” ongoing pretextual land grabs and encourage Judaization of even Arab communities within Israel proper, that there is no longer enough contiguous land in the West Bank — forget about the isolated Gazan enclave — from which any sort of Palestinian state could ever be cobbled together. To speak of Two States, then, is to promote a damnable blatant lie.

A few years ago I read about an 11-foot python that swallowed a baby deer. It was a meal that cost both the deer and the python their lives. Israel has exactly the same problem as the snake — in a land where Zionism has long struggled to attain and maintain a Jewish majority, Palestinians have always been an indigestible mass that a Zionist ethno-state can never control, repress, or eliminate without massive assistance from the same colonial powers that created it. Zionism, which now openly expresses itself in the most vile, racist, separatist jingoism and violence, will never be able to contend with Palestinians in their midst or make peace with the Arab neighbors who sympathize with them. And it’s just a matter of time — repeated attempts to eat the deer will eventually kill the snake.

Historically, Zionism is an aberration and an anachronism, as historian Tony Judt and innumerable Jewish writers have observed in recent years. While earlier proto-Zionists like Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes may have envisioned a bi-national homeland, by the 1942 Biltmore Conference it was clear that Zionism now meant an exclusionary Jewish state. In 1945 the last European concentration camps were liberated but that did not alter the trajectory of Revisionist Zionism’s plan — initiated in the late Thirties — to completely rid Palestine of Arabs. As Israel’s New Historians have shown, the massacres, atrocities, and mass expulsions of Arabs of the Nakba had been long planned.

Ethnic cleansing was arguably built into Zionism by its best-known advocate, Theodor Herzl, who wrote in Der Judenstaat (the Jewish State) that the indigenous people would be “spirited across” the border. Though the Nakba had been planned for almost a decade, Plan Dalet was finally implemented on March 10th, 1948 — months before the fabled “massing Arab armies” supposedly instigated the 1948 war. Any discussion of the present conflict should begin not with October 7th but with March 10th, 1948, the day that the Nakba was launched from David Ben Gurion’s offices in Tel Aviv. It has been 76 years since then, and the snake is still trying to eat the deer.

* * *

Today we live in a vastly different world than our mothers and grandfathers did in 1948. Colonialism has fallen into disrepute, South Africa’s Apartheid regime has collapsed. America’s foreign adventures in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been recognized by a significant percentage of voters as bloody disasters that not only killed millions but tore our own country apart. Here in the US we are making uneven progress with our long-festering race problems, but a significant part of America remains committed to racial justice (even as a significant number is not). All this is to say that the climate for accepting a racist ethno-state like Israel’s has changed. What was normal at the end of Jim Crow America in 1948 is now seen as obviously racist. Yet, fighting to keep JIm Crow alive in Israel, Zionists are pulling out all the stops to demonize young protesters, pass laws that criminalize criticism of Israel, and assure that Israel-friendly candidates have a leg up in the Democratic primaries.

Peter Beinart, who one could consider a “recovering Zionist,” offers one of the best explanations of why young people today, including Jewish students, are turning their backs on Zionism. One of the reasons is “intersectionality.” This generation of students has been involved in racial justice and police accountability struggles following George Floyd’s murder, gun control, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ justice, and in climate and environmental justice campaigns. Some of these issues intersect with justice for Palestinians, but mainly their activism represents the fact that young people are simply paying more attention to the greater world we live in.

And this goes for Jews too. As the list of Israeli human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, and charges of genocide grows, many Jews have become soured on Zionism, particularly the Revisionist strain that became official policy after 1942. Following the 1967 war, especially, Zionism began hijacking Judaism and threatens to destroy the religion by compromising Judaism’s values as it insists that there is no difference between an ethno-nationalist movement and a religion. This, of course, is exactly what is happening to Christianity in the United States and Eastern Europe. And in fact many Zionists are politically in bed with the autocratic Far Right and Christian Nationalists. Consider Israel’s cozy relationships with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Spain’s Vox party, and Christian Zionists like John Hagee, to cite just a few examples. Zionism is literally Christian Nationalism’s kissing cousin. Jews who fear our domestic turn to the right also fear Israel’s now shamelessly open expression of the same.

It’s fair to say that Europe-facing Israel would love to be part of an illiberal autocratic ethno-nationalist global Far Right, even as it courts the economically powerful neoliberal Western nations (US, Germany, France, Great Britain). While these nations admittedly have emerging autocratic, illiberal, and ethnocratic tendencies of their own, they also have significant numbers of people pushing back against these tendencies. This is what makes the unprecedented opposition to American and European policy on Gaza so remarkable — it is not antisemitsm, as the Zionists would have it, but a growing awareness of how our domestic turn to the right is connected with the illiberalism at Israel’s core.

Ultimately both MAGA revanchism and Israel’s attempts to preserve its antique ethno-nationalism are doomed to fail. In 2003 historian Tony Judt wrote in “Israel: the Alternative” that

“In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today’s”clash of cultures” between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.”

* * *

All this has led to the idea of a single, secular bi-national state for both Palestinians and those who made their homes out of Palestinian homes.

In 2010 Merav Michali asked Tony Judt what his idea of a bi-national state looked like:

“I don’t know. What I do know is that since I wrote that in 2003, everyone from Moshe Arens through Barak to Olmert has admitted that Israel is on the way to a single state with a potential Arab majority in Bantustans unless something happens fast. That’s all that I said in my essay.

But ok, since it looks as though Israel is determined to give itself this future, what will it look like? [It will look like] Hell. But what could it look like? Well, there could be a federal state of two autonomous communities – on the Swiss or Belgian model (don’t tell me the latter doesn’t work – it works very well but is opposed by Flemings led by people very much like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman). This could have crossover privileges and rights for both communities, but each would be autonomous. I think this would work better than a mixed single-state, and it would allow each community to set certain sorts of religious and other regulations according to its taste.”

Why “Hell?”

Because it would start from a very bad place. It would begin with Jews running the place in the name of a Jewish state, defined by Orthodox Rabbis and controlled by an army whose officer core is increasingly permeated by religious and settler communities. No Arab would feel remotely safe, much less equal or a citizen in such a “single state”. The Arabs’ lack of property, rights, status and prospects would either make them a sullen and potentially violent underclass or else the best of them would try to leave. This is no good basis for integration, though it is of course what some of Israel’s present leaders privately desire. And then there would be Gaza…

… Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also recognize that Israel is on its way to a single state. […] In such a state, Jews would soon be a minority. Doesn’t that frighten you?

Not as much as it seems to frighten others. Why is it ok for a Jewish minority to dominate an Arab majority, its leaders to call for expulsions of majority members, etc., but not ok for a democracy to have a majority and minority both protected under law? At least Israel could then call itself a democracy with a clear conscience.

What you are really asking is whether I think the Palestinians would immediately set out to rape, pillage and murder the Jews? I don’t see why they would want to — there is no historical record suggesting that this is what Palestinians do for fun, whereas we have all too much evidence that Israelis persecute Palestinians for no good reason. If I were an Arab, I would be more afraid of living in a state with Jews just now.

Can you see or understand why Israelis are afraid?

Yes, but only in the sense that someone who has been brought up to fear and hate his neighbors will have good reason to be frightened at the thought of living in the same house with them. Israelis have created a generation of young Palestinians who hate them and will never forgive them and that does make a real problem for any future agreement, single- or two-state.

But Israel should be much, much more afraid of the Israel it’s creating for itself: a semi-democratic, demagogic, far-right warrior state dominated by racist Russians and crazed rabbis. In this perspective, an internationally policed and guaranteed federal state of Israel, with the same rights and resources for Jews and Arabs, looks a lot less frightening to me.

Can you see why American Jews are fearful as well of that?

No. This is the fear of the paranoid hysteric – like the man at the dinner table in the story I wrote in the New York Review who had never been to Israel but thought I should stop criticizing it because “We Jews might need it sometime.” American Jews — most of whom know nothing of Jewish history, Jewish languages or Jewish religion — feel “Jewish” by identifying unthinkingly with Auschwitz as the source of their special victim status and “Israel” as their insurance policy and macho other. I find this contemptible — they are quite happy to see Arabs killed in their name, so long as other Jews do it. That’s not fear, that is something between surrogate nationalism and moral indifference.

Judt was certainly not the first or last to speak of a one-state land-sharing solution, but he certainly roiled the waters when he suggested it. Zionists accused him of antisemitism and of denying the Jewish people both their “historic home” and “Jewish self-determination.” Aside from the fact that all the religious states we are familiar with are nightmares (Saudi Arabia comes to mind), Germany of early 1945 was the last European nation with laws privileging or demonizing specific ethnic groups. That Israel would essentially preserve Nuremberg-style laws in a Jewish state has always seemed aberrant. Especially to many Jews.

In the last two decades there have been dozens of proposals, all with slightly different wrinkles, offering plans to end the ongoing nightmare in Palestine. Contrary to the shrill voices of Zionists telling the rest of us what we mean when we say “from the river to the sea…” Palestine will be free someday. For everyone. There will be something closer to a democracy, and it will offer the world a hopeful example.

An overview of One State proposals — good and bad — will be the subject of my next essay.

Beyond the Two-State Solution

Posted by on 2024-06-15 No comments

This is the last of three book reviews on the One State Solution I started a few weeks ago. I previously reviewed Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, and Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. From time to time I will add additional One State reviews.

Jonathan Kuttab has dedicated much of his life to human rights, first as one of the founders of Al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group established in 1979, and also as a co-founder of Nonviolence International in 1989. Kuttab is a Palestinian Christian lawyer who has practiced in Israel, Palestine, and the US and was the head of a legal team that negotiated the 1994 Cairo Agreement between Israel and the PLO. In 1980 Kuttab co-authored a study of Israeli military laws governing the West Bank that had been modified from British Mandate and Jordanian law to apply more draconian control over Palestinians and to “legalize” land theft.

Kuttab, then, is as qualifed as anyone to present a non-violent program for a One State solution in his book “Beyond the Two-State Solution,” available in English, Hebrew, and Arabic print editions and also in electronic format.

Despite his conciliatory tone, Kuttab doesn’t pull any punches. Zionism is a land grab and, following each war and Oslo, Israel always grabbed as much land as it could — finally rendering impossible a Two State solution. Kuttab analyzes the many failed brokered peace agreements and tries to isolate the unresolved sticking points.

Kuttab acknowledges Israel’s extreme preoccupation with security, the status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian right of return, and a difficult-to-imagine reversal of illegal settlements. After looking at all the proposals that bowed to Zionist domination, he eliminates Two States as a workable solution because “the language of the Two State Solution leaves the battling ideologies intact, and only requires a geographic division and spatial limitation on the exercise of each ideology. Chauvinism, racism, discrimination, and inherent problems are all swept under the rug. No real critique of Zionism or Palestinian Nationalism is required, if we accept the language of the Two State Solution.” Kuttab’s rejection of Palestinian nationalism may grate on those who want to discard one nationalism for another.

Kuttab begins by enumerating the “minimum requirements” for Jewish Israelis when entering into a bi-national state: (1) the Jewish Right of Return; (2) Security; (3) a Jewish rhythm of life; (4) Hebrew; (5) the right to live anywhere in Palestine. For Palestinians the list is virtually identical: (1) the right of return for refugees; (2) Democracy; (3) respect for and protection of Arab Identity; (4) Arabic; (5) the right to move about and live anywhere in Palestine. Kuttab sees no pragmatic impediment to a bi-national state and sets about describing how one could be realized, how national and meta-national laws and even a bi-national Supreme Court could protect both peoples with binding judgments instead of hollow actions in toothless international courts.

Kuttab throws out any number of concrete suggestions for structuring a new bi-national state, but these are only useful to illustrate the point that any serious party could come up with plenty of workable ideas. For this reason it’s not worth dissecting Kuttab’s specifics because specifics must be proposed by both parties and negotiated only after both come to terms with the reality that a bi-national state is the only possible option.

Kuttab writes that “Jewish fears need to be addressed forthrightly” (but of course Palestinians have their own well-justified fears). Kuttab demonstrates enormous (disproportionate?) sensitivity to the fears of Jewish Israelis who, even with the most powerful and only nuclear military in the Middle East, habitually reject Palestinian rights because they are perceived to limit Jewish security. So Kuttab suggests writing Jewish supremacy into the new state’s legal system with a Lebanese-style requirement that the head of the new bi-national military always be Jewish, while the head of the national police always be an Arab. As much as I respect what Kuttab is attempting here, it is an odd and lopsided provision that cannot fail to be a show-stopper.

in remaining chapters Kuttab addresses other objections and challenges to his proposals. One is that a bi-national state has never succeeded before. But is that true? Kuttab writes that Lebanon and Yugoslavia may have foundered because of ethnic strife, but Switzerland and Canada are examples of successes of confederation models.

Even if a successful model did not exist, Kuttab writes that the Holy Land is a special case that deserves special effort, and that a resolution of this particular conflict could play an outsized role in resolving other regional and global conflicts.

Kuttab asks rhetorically why Zionists — having “won” — would ever agree to anything limiting their power or supremacy. The quick answer is that Israel’s victory has never been a stable “win” and, in any case, is not sustainable without bottomless aid and diplomatic cover from Western colonial enablers who will eventually tire of subsidizing human rights abuses. And in the long run the injustices perpetrated on Palestinians cannot be ignored forever.

Another objection Kuttab addresses is the argument that the degree of enmity is so great that it can never be surmounted. If this were true then contemporary national alliances of the 21st Century would be impossible — consider Britain and France, the US and Germany, the US and Japan, Germany and Israel. Many of these former bitter enemies became friends within a generation following the end of conflict.

A final argument for pursuing a single state — and against doing nothing — is that, under Zionism, there is no place for minorities. The logic of Zionism requires that minorities (Muslim, Arab, Bedouin, Christian) can never be allowed to become a majority, and which requires that they must either be repressed or eliminated. But this is logic of the 18th and 19th centuries. A multicultural democracy is manifestly superior to endless occupation, war, racist law, and the perversion of democracy.

Kuttab never says so explicitly, but ultimately Israelis will recognize that Zionism is incompatible with democracy. As fantastical as such a prediction sounds in the middle of Israel’s most genocidal war to-date, Israelis will eventually admit that Zionism did its job of saving millions of Jews but it is now time to abandon it, just as Palestinians will have to abandon their own nationalist aspirations — that is, if a bi-national state is ever to take root.

Kuttab’s final chapter is a discussion of what one might call the “attitude adjustments” necessary to make a bi-national state possible. Kuttab, as a proponent of non-violence, rejects armed resistance for both pragmatic and moral reasons (to give you a sense of where he comes from, he’s on the board of a Christian Bible college). Before the two peoples can ever start to build a shared state, settlement will have to stop. Israeli’s aren’t going away, and not all settlers are extremists, Kuttab writes. Likewise, Hamas isn’t going away and (contrary to the propaganda) many of their members are moderates. In any case, Hamas will have to be part of any One State solution.

Palestinians have rights and agency. Thus, truly democratic elections in Palestine — not a US-Israeli-appointed regime – would have to precede any sort of political realignment in order to obtain Palestinian agreement. Collective punishment has to stop immediately. Gratuitous repression and domination for domination’s sake would have to end. “Administrative detentions” and many other Israeli excesses and daily insults would have to cease before Palestinians could enter into a new state with Israelis. Terror attacks (from both sides) and Israeli military incursions would need to stop immediately.

Jonathan Kuttab joins many other One-Staters who have reached the same conclusion — that Two States are now an impossibility and, even if feasible, would only defer and compound the conflict. As unimaginable as One State is now, it is the best and only hope for two peoples sharing one land.