Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza and its people, as well as the Israeli government’s open expressions of genocidal intent, have pricked the consciences of millions and launched a case at The Hague. While there have been many comparisons between today’s ceasefire protests and those against the war in Viet Nam, the explosion of disgust at the Gaza genocide and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians bears greater resemblance to antebellum Abolitionist outrage at the “peculiar” American institution of slavery.

The Abolitionist movement rode a long wave of 17th and 18th century Enlightenment values, and by the 18th and 19th centuries slavery was on the way out over much of the world. Successful slave revolts, the British campaign to end the slave trade throughout its empire, a similar ban by the Ottoman empire, abolition of slavery in the Northern US, Britain, Latin America, the emancipation of serfdom in the Russian empire, and France’s abolition of slavery throughout its colonies – the moral arc of the universe was straining but the South was almost alone in resisting the bend toward justice. Just as Israel is today.

What survived slavery was scarcely better. While it was no longer acceptable for individuals to exploit a hundred or a thousand lives as personal property, rules were different for empires. Virtually every empire that had abolished slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries colonized and exploited entire populations, typically of a different race. And in order to extract wealth and exert control over these subjugated people, settlers were needed to colonize, administer, and defend the ill-gotten gains.

One of Hannah Arendt’s critiques of Zionism is that it turned its back on Enlightenment values. But writing as a Jew who had just barely escaped Nazi terror no thanks to Western democracies, she was also rightly skeptical of Western liberal traditions. In the Arendt Center’s newsletter Roger Berkowitz writes,

“The weakness of the enlightenment is baked deeply into the liberal tradition. Montesquieu follows Aristotle in insisting that limited and liberal government depend upon the virtue of citizens. Liberals such as John Stuart Mill and John Locke insisted that only some countries had citizens who were evolved enough and civilized enough to enjoy the freedoms of liberal democracy. There is, as Uday Mehta has so powerfully argued, an Imperial project at the foundation of liberalism, one that insists that all peoples be assimilated into the values and virtues of liberal civilization before they can be allowed to enjoy the benefits of liberal government. Until that time, backwards peoples need to be governed by liberal colonialists. Much of the critique of enlightenment and liberal government is a result of this imperial drive in liberalism to insist that only those who think like liberals are capable of freedom.”

This is clearly reflected in the Charter of the League of Nations and also in the Charter of the British Mandate in Palestine, whose laws of military occupation Israel still uses in the West Bank.

Israel’s colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is scarcely different from the American settler-colonial project, Australia’s, or that of the British in India. China and Russia both have ongoing settler-colonial projects – and American politicians just spent tens of billions to slow down the competition. The United States too has its colonies. An estimated 15% of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlers are American citizens. Most of us live on land stolen by earlier generations of settler-colonists, some of whom were our ancestors.

We may not have colonized Africa but we literally kidnapped and enslaved the ancestors of 13% of our own population and yet have made no attempt to redress wrongs to them. We fork over up to $40 billion each year to maintain the supremacy of Israel’s 6.8 million Jewish citizens but for our own 10 million Native Americans the budget for the Bureau of Indian Affairs is $3 billion.

Israel’s bad luck is that their settler-colonial project began in the 20th Century, when – just as in the case of slavery – the evils of the “peculiar institution” of settler-colonialism were well-understood and beginning to be regarded as morally reprehensible.

* * *

I recently reread Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 and was struck by the many similarities between Zionism and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

Baptized in Blood distinguishes between the CSA’s government and the culture it represented. Wilson recognized two “civic religions” of the United States, one dedicated more or less to Enlightenment values, another to darker aspects of European nationalism, myth, and racial supremacy.

Zionism’s self-defense and propaganda efforts have much in common with the South’s vehement defenses of its “morality,” customs, and values from Northern criticism. The South rejected Enlightenment values that the North had embraced more or less at the same time early Zionists were rejecting them.

Both Zionism and the Confederacy promote a narrative of persecution and threat to a “way of life.” Their way of life, of course, means sovereignty for a chosen people who, whether at the Biltmore Hotel or at Fort Sumpter, secede from one nation to create a separate nation that privileges their ethnicity. Both the South and Israel cultivated the good will of foreign empires. Judah Benjamin, who held positions with the Confederacy as Attorney General, War Secretary, and then Secretary of State, unsuccessfully negotiated support for the CSA from both France and Britain. Similarly, the newly-established World Zionist Organization negotiated with both the British and Ottoman empires for support for its own nationalist project.

Just as both Southern religion and what Wilson calls its “civic religion” parted ways from Northern Christianity, Zionism makes a mockery of Jewish values. Early Zionists were regarded as heretics by almost every branch of Judaism, particularly Orthodoxy. Today the largest ultra-orthodox sect, the Satmars, continues to oppose Zionism. Abolitionists and a fleet of Northern clergy similarly regarded Southern Christianity as an aberration.

Civic and cultural values have also diverged because of Zionism, especially now that Israel’s 37th government includes outright fascists. It is no secret that for many years American Jews have held democratic values not shared by a majority of their Israeli cousins. A significant number of younger Jews in North America and Europe who grew up in “democracies” that claim liberal values have embraced those liberal values and reject what is, in the end, nothing but ethnic nationalism. And such was the case with a divided antebellum United States where Abolitionists were every bit as zealous as kaffiya-wearing ceasefire demonstrators.

The conscription of religious leaders into propaganda efforts was central to Southern religion and culture just as it is to Zionism today. Theodor Herzl wrote that the Zionist project depended upon the conscription of rabbis into its service (“The Rabbis will receive communications regularly from both Society and Company, and will announce and explain these to their congregations”). Ultimately the centrality of ethnic cleansing to create a Jewish majority in Israel and the centrality of the institution of slavery for the Confederacy corrupted both religions enlisted to defend them.

The South may have lost the War, but its true believers embarked upon a campaign to justify and legitimate their vision of their dying culture. In contrast, Israel won its many wars and successfully established a state (both with significant American support), yet nevertheless must justify its ongoing crimes against a subjugated and repressed Palestinian people – as well as its continuing embrace of 19th century settler-colonialism.

As is the case with Judaism, the tragedy of the Shoah (Holocaust) has been ruthlessly exploited by Zionism. Both Ian Lustick and Avraham Burg have written about how Israel’s first Prime Ministers retroactively and tautologically seized upon the Holocaust as the ultimate raison d’être for Zionism, as an excuse for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (and worse), and as a shield from criticism for crimes of the state they created. In the United States Israel employs a constellation of propaganda and lobbying groups in its service, many operating in contravention to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The South similarly spawned an entire cottage industry devoted to Confederate propaganda, much of it written by Christian ministers. In 1860 an anthology of pro-slavery propaganda, most essays by clergymen, was published under the title Cotton is King.

Zionism as “civic Judaism” and the Lost Cause as “civic religion” were both built on victimization, martyrology, and myth. Dixie and Zion are both mythic lands of the imagination. Where the South dreamed of an eventual resurrection of Dixie, the Zionists had been dreaming of Zion’s resurrection for a hundred years. Both Confederates and Zionists believed in a special destiny for their people, born of and sanctified in bloodshed and sacrifice. Both were obsessed with monuments, memory, and military heroics. The CSA had their “knights”; Israel has its elite fighting units. Both embrace ethnic supremacy.

The birth of Zionism and Southern Christianity and their corresponding civic religions owe profound debts to Romanticism and German nationalism. Fritz Stern and Wolfgang Schivelbusch have studied the Southern debt to German nationalism, while Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl belonged to a German nationalist fraternity and even advocated conversion to Christianity for a time. Herzl’s 1902 novel AltNeuLand (Old-New Land) is the story of a German-Jewish lawyer who retires to a tropical island for 20 years then visits Palestine only to discover a German-speaking, pan-European New Society that Zionists have created.

Again, the South may have lost the War but the North all too willingly embraced Southern myth, heroics, and military veneration. Since Reconstruction it’s been a struggle to rid American military bases of the many Confederate generals’ names, even as white supremacy remains as malign as ever. I would argue that our contemporary American civic religion – militarism – shares this with Israel’s, both reinforcing one another.

Whether it is turning our backs on Reconstruction, continuing to propagate neo-Confederate myth and culture through a hijacked Evangelical MAGA Christianity, or providing 75 years of bipartisan support to a racist Jewish ethnocracy, America has firmly turned its back on its supposed Enlightenment values, as a skeptical Arendt was well aware. Today – and especially since Gaza 2023 – Democrats have torn up or ignored international agreements, laws, and institutions as readily as their MAGA brethren. So much for the supposed “rule based order.” So much for the Enlightenment.

Today’s young “genocide abolitionists” represent the best in our civilizational aspirations despite being smeared as “antisemites.” There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of firings, cancelled talks, banned meetings, arrests, assaults, doxxing, and language policing of ceasefire supporters. Laws are being enacted to shut down protests, ban a social media outlet that does not censor criticisms of Israel, redefine “antisemitism,” and criminalize criticism of Zionism.

How much democracy are we willing to give up for American and Israeli imperium?

Last week New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell spent 4 days in Israel on a junket funded by the American Jewish Committee’s “Project Interchange,” a program “dedicated to connecting global leaders to Israel.” As such, it had nothing to do with Jewish life in the U.S. It was all about cultivating pro-Israel support from foreign leaders for Israel’s benefit.

The “delegation” of the US Conference of Mayors which Mitchell headed was in fact the AJC’s fourth all-expenses paid tour of Israel for mayors. The group toured Sderot, one of the towns raided by Hamas, and participants spoke with families of hostages. There were no meetings with victims of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing in either Gaza or the West Bank.

Yet according to Mitchell, “The current conflict is widening the political fault lines in our country, and I believe that it is important for mayors, as the leaders of their cities, to take opportunities like this to deepen their understanding of a situation that, as everyone can agree, is complicated and difficult.”

If only that were true. If only an understanding of a complex issue could be obtained by allowing a highly biased party in the conflict to completely shape your views. What’s next for the mayor? Trips to Riyadh and Kiev to obtain insights into what? School funding? Improving municipal services? For most of these mayors their participation in an AJC-funded junket had nothing to do with their day jobs and everything to do with performances meant to burnish their political resumes and broaden contacts with potential donors.

Aside from the fact that the junket took the better part of a week out of Mitchell’s schedule, the AJC is hardly an even-handed educational outfit. It is one of a constellation of Zionist lobbying organizations that exist solely to build support and sympathy for Israel, even as that nation 5,500 miles away conducts a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

One of the AJC’s chiefly pro-Israel propaganda efforts is the criminalization of any criticism of Israel. The AJC astroturf group Mayors Against Antisemitism promotes the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which includes roughly 15 features, of which 11 relate to criticism of Israel and Zionism. This is the basis on which the AJC also opposes the non-violent Palestinian BDS movement. In opposition to official US policy but completely in line with Israeli policy, the AJC also opposes a Palestinian state.

The AJC also follows the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s lead in labelling South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at The Hague “meritless” and “a travesty.” The AJC’s antisemitism glossary regards as antisemitic the recognition of Zionism as settler colonialism. It takes some extreme mental and moral gymnastics to willfully deny a historical reality like colonialism.

Partly because of DEI’s critiques of settler colonialism, The AJC has joined other Zionist and Christian Nationalist groups in opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Last December former ADL national director Abe Foxman and former AJC CEO David Harris both called for an end of DEI programs. The ongoing McCarthyite Congressional hearings on supposed “antisemitism” in the Ivy Leagues headed by MAGA Republican Virginia Foxx serves both Christian and Jewish ethno-nationalist interests at the expense of American First Amendment rights.

But academics, progressives, and intellectuals have long been a thorn in the side of Zionist groups like the AJC and the ADL. The AJC’s own history reflects this. In the Fifties the AJC was involved (again) in McCarthyite witch-hunts of supposed Communists, in the Seventies it actively opposed affirmative action (in fact celebrating the Baake decision), and in a 2007 pamphlet authored by Alvin H. Rosenfeld with a forward by AJC President David Harris, attacked a number of liberal and anti-Zionist Jews, naming names in a now-familar pattern of smearing critics of Israel.

The AJC is a far-right defender of ethno-nationalist supremacy, occupation and war crimes. Mitchell and other politicians who participate in its programs ought to be called to account. What could they have possibly learned from a tour guide like the AJC? What were their actual reasons for attending? And did any of this have even the remotest thing to do with running their cities?

Jon Mitchell owes his constituents an explanation.

Last February Massachusetts state representative Steven Howitt (R-Seekonk) filed H.1558 (“An Act relative to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism”) which, like a recent U.S. House Resolution, seeks to define any criticism of Israel as antisemitic. The Massachusetts bill declares:

The term ‘Antisemitism’ shall have the same meaning that is endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which shall mean a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Howitt’s description is incomplete if not intentionally dishonest. While the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, originally concocted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, does enumerate actual manifestations of antisemitism found in the politically-neutral Jerusalem Declaration, much of the IHRA’s definition centers on Israel and Zionism and is intended to weaponize any criticism of Israel, particularly to criminalize the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement.

Anti-BDS legislation, which threatens Americans’ First Amendment rights, is now found in 37 states. How such bills can even be filed boggles the mind. The right of Americans to boycott was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1982 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. Fortunately, most Massachusetts legislators have had the good sense to reject anti-democratic bills like these, as they ought to reject the adoption of a weaponized, revisionist definition of “antisemitism.”

The Jerusalem Definition of antisemitism explicitly rejects several elements of the IHRA definition Israel and Zionist groups use for transparent political purpose. Regarding Israel (and not Jews), the Jerusalem Definition says:

11. Supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.
12. Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism, or arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jews and Palestinians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.
13. Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state. This includes its institutions and founding principles. It also includes its policies and practices, domestic and abroad, such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the role Israel plays in the region, or any other way in which, as a state, it influences events in the world. It is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination. In general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine. Thus, even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.
14. Boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.
15. Political speech does not have to be measured, proportional, tempered, or reasonable to be protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other human rights instruments. Criticism that some may see as excessive or contentious, or as reflecting a “double standard,” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. In general, the line between antisemitic and non-antisemitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.

Let’s say it again – opposing Zionism, criticizing or boycotting Israel is not antisemitic.

Long before the establishment of the State of Israel — and long after — there has been considerable disagreement about the nature of the Israeli state, especially among Jews.

Orthodox Judaism rejected Zionism until the establishment of Israel, and Jews like Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Albert Einstein voiced numerous criticisms of the Zionist founders of Israel. For over a century even Zionists themselves have warned of the dangers of harshly treating Arab neighbors in Palestine. For example, see Hannah Arendt’s articles in Aufbau, recorded in her “Jewish Writings” (ISBN 9780805211948) .

Zionism and the nature of the Jewish State have long been a polarizing issue within Reform Judaism. The American Council for Judaism is a contemporary anti-Zionist organization that formed after Reform Judaism abandoned its previous condemnation of Zionism (see Thomas A. Kolsky’s “Jews Against Zionism” (ISBN 9781566390095).

Today anti-Zionist Jews include people from the Reform, Reconstructionist, Havurah, Humanist, and Masorti movements, even some Orthodox sects such as the Satmars and Neturei Karta. One public intellectual, Peter Beinart, a modern Orthodox Jew, was once a well-known Zionist but has since joined the anti-Zionist camp. The most likely anti-Zionist Jews today are young people who grew up embracing the promises, if not the reality, of American democratic values, not racist ethnocentrism. There are dozens of organizations in the United States, Europe, and even Israel who represent these overwhelmingly young Jews, among them Jewish Voice for Peace and Not In Our Name.

At the end of the day, Americans have a Constitutional right to disagree about foreign policy. Should we fight with Taiwan if China invades? Should we have expanded NATO after Gorbachev? Should we have invaded Iraq? Is India a democracy? As with any of these examples, Americans ought to be free to hold an opinion on whether Israel is a democracy or not, whether its treatment of Palestinians respects human rights and human dignity, and whether we ought to continue pumping billions of dollars into the economy of a nation that keeps millions of people caged in concentration camps.

Most controversial of all, should Americans support the continued existence of Israel as an illiberal ethnocracy or are we free to advocate for a true democracy “from river to the sea”? Anti-Zionists answer this question with a call for freedom — while those who promote the IHRA definition dishonestly characterize any call to abandon Zionism’s inherent racism and colonialism as somehow advocating a second Shoah.

As it happens, the IHRA definition has a long and twisted history. It was concocted by an extremist settler, Natan Sharansky, ideologically related to settler extremists Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who serve in Netanyahu’s coalition government. Sharansky’s definition of antisemitism wended its way from the Israeli government to an Israeli think tank, to Zionist advocacy groups, to the US State Department, only to be subsequently weaponized against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. A short chronology:

• 1978: For many years the Hansell Memo was the policy of the United States in terms of illegal Israel settlements. “While Israel may undertake, in the occupied territories, actions necessary to meet its military needs and to provide for orderly government during the occupation, for reasons indicated above the establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law.”
• 1986: Soviet Refusenik Natan Sharansky is released in a prisoner exchange and moves to Israel
• 1995: Sharansky founds the Yisrael BaAliyah Party to advocate for the eventual absorption of 2 million Russians, many not Jewish, as a demographic offset to rising Arab population growth. He holds a variety of governmental posts.
• 1999-2005: Sharansky serves as Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, Minister of Housing and Construction, Interior Minister, and Minister of Industry and Trade. Sharansky becomes Israel’s Minister without Portfolio, responsible for Jerusalem’s social and Jewish diaspora affairs. In this position, Sharansky chairs a secret committee that approves the confiscation of East Jerusalem property of West Bank Palestinians.
• 2005: Sharansky resigns from Ariel Sharon’s cabinet in protest of the Prime Minister’s withdrawal from Gaza.
• 2005: Sharansky invents the New Anti-Semitism (his term). This innovation includes the “3D Test” – demonization, double standards, delegitimization. The definition eventually finds its way into the EU working definition and then, after being dropped by the EU, is recycled by the IHRA. As employed today, “demonization” can refer to any type of condemnation of Israel. Avoiding “double standards” requires that, as the only Jewish state in the entire world, Israel must not be criticized. And “delegitimization” means that Israel has a right to exist in any form — even as a repressive state. Hence, criticism of Israel’s Apartheid system, for example, is off-limits if since calls into question Israeli self-determination, regardless of the form.
• 2005: The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights develops a working definition of antisemitism in conjunction with the Wiesenthal Center. It doesn’t take long before that definition is misused to smear critics of Israel.
• 2005: The EU drops the use of the working definition precisely because it is so political, igniting anger from Israel.
• 2010: Israeli Think Tank, the Reut Group, creates a “conceptual framework [as a] response to the assault on Israel’s legitimacy.” Reut has specifically studied critiques of South African Apartheid in order to develop a political firewall against so-called “delegitimization” of Israel.
• 2010: Israel’s National Security Council determines that a Palestinian state will delegitimize Israel — hence both Palestinians and supporters of a Palestinian state are by definition antisemitic.
• 2010: President Barak Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorse Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians recognize Israel’s “right” as a Jewish state. HIllary Clinton begins using the draft version of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition in her State Department.
• 2016: If at first you don’t succeed… The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance announces its working definition of “antisemitism” which includes Sharansky’s 3D test and recycles the EU’s working definition. The Pompeo State Department formally adopts the IHRA definition.
• 2018: Israel approves the Jewish Nation-State Law affirming that Israel is not only a Jewish state but “a state for all Jewish people.” The Law also establishes “Jewish settlement as a national value” and mandates that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” When the law is passed, Arab parliamentary members rip up copies of the bill and shout, “Apartheid,” on the floor of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament). United States Secretary of State (under Trump) Michael Pompeo voids the Hansell memo.

The IHRA definition is not benign. It is intensely political and the creation of an Israeli extremist in a previous extremist government who then turned it over to a think tank tasked with weaponizing it. The purpose of the IHRA definition is to pervert the natural meaning of antisemitism (baseless hatred of Jews) and punish any criticism of Israel or the nature of the Israeli state.

For any legislature to regulate what is “acceptable” speech is not only a violation of civil liberties but also (when directed at anti-Zionist Jews) both laughable and antisemitic.

Yes, antisemitic because for any legislative committee to hold a preconceived notion of what all Jews believe, or ought to believe, is the very definition of antisemitism.

Objectivity Wars panel held at the Columbia School of Journalism, with Masha Gessen speaking (Kegoktm, 2022, CC)

Masha Gessen knows something about totalitarianism and human rights abuses. The Russian journalist, translator, trans rights activist, and public intellectual was born in Russia in 1967 to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust only to experience Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1981 Gessen’s family relocated to the United States. As a journalist, Gessen (they, their) have written extensively about Russian authoritarianism. In 2020 they wrote in The Nation about MAGA World’s threats to American democracy. Until last week everybody wanted to hear from Masha Gessen.

In mid-December Gessen was in line to receive the Hannah-Arendt-Preis from the [Heinrich] Böll-Stiftung and the German State of Bremen for their prescient warnings and advocacy for human rights. But the latest Gaza war erupted, and with it a wave of repression of voices critical of Israel’s human rights abuses — or any advocacy of Palestinian liberation.

Just before the Böll award was to be conferred, Gessen published a piece in the New Yorker entitled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” The piece was mainly about how memory and history are managed in Europe. In it Gessen casually ripped Israel’s human rights abuses in Gaza. They framed the piece with a visit to the Berlin Jewish Museum:

“There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled ‘Fallen Leaves,’ consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.”

Gessen chafes at governmental regulation of thought and language, and takes issue with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of “antisemitism” which “began with the obvious — calling for or justifying the killing of Jews — but also included ‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor’ and ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.'” A competing definition, the Jerusalem Declaration, does not regard as antisemitic: support for the Palestinian demand for justice; criticizing or opposing Zionism; or evidence-based criticism of Israel.

Gessen goes on to criticize the German Bundestag’s resolution to condemn the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement], which was originally introduced by the ultra-right and Nazi-connected AfD Party (Alternative für Deutschland). Gessen writes: “one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews — although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish–it is antisemitic.” Gessen reminds us that the Director of the Berlin Jewish Museum Gessen began their essay with was forced to resign in 2019 for supporting the non-violent BDS movement.

Gessen mentions Zionist extremism, fascistic tendencies within it, the unprecedented extremism of the current Israeli government – and yet the demonization of any criticism by the German government and cultural institutions. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” Gessen quotes historian Tony Judt in his 2005 book, “Postwar.”

Their New Yorker article contrasts the “Holocaust Memory Wars” in Germany and Poland and the involvement of the Far Right in both countries which includes even Holocaust deniers. Despite this, “Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.”

Babyn Yar is a giant ravine outside Kyiv in the Ukraine. In September 1941, in just 36 hours, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in what is known as the “Holocaust by bullets,” which Benjamin Netanyahu inevitably compared to the Hamas attack on a rave in the Negev desert. Netanyahu has also compared Palestinians to the Jewish concept of Amalek – a biblical story about a race of people who attacked the Hebrews and mix multitudes in the desert but which now refers to the very personification of evil. Gessen writes: “Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it–that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood–has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time.”

And now we get to Gaza and the quote that landed Gessen in hot water with the German arbiters of Holocaust memory:

“For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time–in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

The reaction in the German press was predictable. Even supposedly “left-leaning” media like taz.de (Die Tageszeitung) savaged Gessen. Die Zeit, considered to be a newspaper of record (like the NYT or WaPo), favors the narrative of the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft, the German-Israel Society, or DIG, which was founded by German protestant theologians in 1957. According to die Zeit, the German-Israel Society maintains that Gessen’s article is in:

“clear contrast to Hannah Arendt’s thinking” with such statements. […] Gessen is free to repeat such views, [DIG] goes on to say. “But Masha Gessen’s views should not be honored with a prize intended to commemorate the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt.”

Anyone who has read Arendt’s work on Nuremberg, Totalitarianism, or her “Jewish Essays” knows this to be a dishonest characterization. Arendt may have been a Zionist inasmuch as she had been hounded from Germany herself, but Arendt was no friend to the Zionism that emerged following the Biltmore Conference in 1942. Arendt’s Zionism gravitated more to a binational concept promoted by Judah Magnes, whom she revered (and who was called a “Quisling” by American Zionists for warning that the Arab world was not going to accept Revisionist Zionism’s cruel vision of “Israel” and for opposing the Biltmore Conference).

Arendt gave credit – albeit with her characteristic side of critique – to a fringe Zionist group called the Ihud which promoted an Arab-Jewish federation. She made an absolute distinction between a Zionist state and a Jewish homeland. In Arendt’s writings, the latter (as long as it also provided refuge for Shoah survivors) was to be preferred. The Ihud was in fact only one of several groups with similar bi-national proposals that, as early as the Twenties and Thirties – a century ago! – knew that forcing Palestinians into cantons or concentration camps was a recipe for disaster.

Throughout her essays in Aufbau and later in the New Yorker (collected in The Jewish Writings) Arendt was brutally opposed to the extreme Revisionist Zionism that became normative Israeli Zionism and which was widely promoted by American Zionists. To cite one example, in December 1948 Arendt wrote a long essay in the New York Times in which she violated the “antisemitic” Verbot of comparing Israeli fascists to other fascists – which Gessen quotes in part in their article:

“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the”Freedom Party” (nuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.”

“A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April, The New York Times reported that terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants — 240 men, women, and children-and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Transjordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.”

“The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last year of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.”

In today’s new climate of suppressing all criticism of Israel, Masha Gessen has joined thousands of victims of firings, cancellations, shutdowns, and even arrests throughout the Western world.

The irony is that Gessen’s essay — though it may have run up against the perfunctory New German Philosemitism that replaced the reptilian Old German Antisemitism — is true to Hannah Arendt’s legacy, right down to its reaction by mainstream pro-Israel groups and the Western nations too eager to blindly defend it.

The October 7th assault on Israel by Hamas militants was a heinous, gruesome, and traumatizing act of terror for Israelis who had become complacent to inevitable resistance from people they have subjugated for 75 years. Despite members of Israel’s new government now speaking openly of genocide and ethnic cleansing, there was never much doubt that the US would side with Israel. Americans, who learn their history and geography only when wars break out, generally have little idea what kind of state they are funding, or even what kind of conflict this is.

Though almost always painted as a religious war, this last outbreak of violence is the latest chapter of a long-festering land dispute that drags on, largely because of the amount of money and weaponry the US sends Israel to maintain their grip on Palestinians and slowly erase them from lands they should have had when colonial powers carved up the Middle East in the wake of World War I.

After the attack, with concern for Israel rarely displayed toward any other country, a stream of US politicians — congressmen, senators, mayors, presidents — flew to Tel Aviv to be photographed with Israeli officials and offer condolences, even as Israel launched a barrage of over 6,000 bombs into Gaza, killing thousands of civilians indiscriminately. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” on Gaza’s civilian population (illegal under international law) and added, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Member of Israel’s Knesset Ariel Kallner called fora “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Kallner was referring to the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs in 1948, many of whom fled to Gaza and have lived in refugee camps for three generations. Similar appeals to cleanse the West Bank of Palestinians are routine now.

Ignoring these genocidal intentions, 420 congressmen signed a resolution supporting Israel without reservation and omitting any mention of war crimes being committed in reprisal for Hamas’s attack. A parallel House resolution calling for a pause in Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians and allowing Gaza to receive humanitarian aid was supported by only thirteen Democrats — all people of color. Biden’s ambassador to the UN vetoed a similar resolution, cynically saying “We believe we need to let that diplomacy play out.” As the US well knows from previous vetoes, only mass civilian casualties will result from letting missile diplomacy “play out.”

Americans love Israel so much that an Israeli “lobbying” group is permitted to operate in violation of FARA laws and regularly flies congressmen on junkets to Israel. Laws in 37 states punish criticism of Israel. Israel has been the recipient of the largest amount of foreign and military aid of any ally, to date receiving more than $150 billion, with more dished out every year. The United States reliably vetoes any UN resolution critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. State Department officials regularly speak of “no daylight” between US and Israeli positions and the two countries’ “unbreakable bond.” Israel is routinely described as “the only democracy in the Middle East” although it is no democracy at all for Palestinians inside Israel itself or in Gaza and the West Bank.

Although it’s not clear the love is reciprocated, American love for Israel is a product of similar history and religion. In addition to the ethnic cleansing both the US and Israel were founded on, there is also a religious dimension to the relationship. When Anthony Blinken flew to Israel after the Hamas attack he told the Israeli Defense Ministry, “I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state but also as a Jew.” From the Christian bleachers Lindsay Graham managed to inject good-ole-boy American racism into a call for genocide on Gazans: “To Cornel West and the Black Lives Matter group […] We’re in a religious war here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.”

When George Washington stepped down after a reasonable number of years of service (listen up, Joe!) he left behind his thoughts on foreign entanglements in his famous Farewell Address. Warning of precisely “unbreakable bonds” and “zero daylight” with allies, Washington wrote, “nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.” Washington could have been speaking of Israel and Iran.

So when progressive Democrat Pramila Jaypal referred not long ago to Israel as a racist country practicing Apartheid, all hell broke loose. Republicans seized the opportunity to force a non-binding resolution that read: “(1) the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state; (2) Congress rejects all forms of antisemitism and xenophobia; and (3) the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” The second point served to reinforce the taboo of criticizing Israel – lest one be accused of antisemitism. All but nine Democrats of color voted for the resolution.

To be fair, most white Democrats defend the United States precisely as they do Israel (we are a good people, this is not who we are) even though the U.S. was founded on genocide and slavery and continues to oppress people of color. In the case of Israel, theirs is a nation with an immense occupation by Jews of an almost equally-sized population of Palestinians, depriving them of their human and civil rights for the last 75 years and systematically taking more and more of their land.

Like the old American Confederacy through Jim Crow days, Israel promulgates laws to enshrine and reinforce Jewish supremacy and ethno-religious segregation. The degree of segregation even applies to Israeli Jews. Haredi women ride segregated buses. Segregated communities are common. Their Supreme Court affirmed the right of communities to exclude Arabs, LGBTQ+, and the disabled. Vigilantes attack Arab men dating Jewish women. More than 65 laws discriminate against Arab citizens of Israel – the 20% who were not expelled to refugee camps.

Although Israelis are officially prohibited from entering Palestinian areas, over 650,000 settlers have already seized land in the West Bank. Separate highways have been built for settler use only. Israel may be a nation of laws but Israeli courts are overly friendly to land-grabbing scofflaws while all Palestinians get is endless martial law. Life for Palestininans in Gaza and the West Bank is hell. As an occupier, Israel destroys Palestinian civilian infrastructure arbitrarily and attacks civilians indiscriminately. In the West Bank settlers operate with impunity while the government destroys Palestinian homes, schools, and crops or decides to clear a village for military purposes – only to turn around and hand it over to settlers.

Just as in the United States, where Christian nationalism is rapidly destroying what’s left of our so-called “democracy,” Jewish nationalism, with its attendant racism and illiberalism, has similarly brought Israel’s “democracy” to the point of collapse. Almost every Israeli political party has historically embraced Palestinian expropriation or expulsion to some degree, but now the most extreme Zionist elements have “taken the gloves off” and are coming not only for Palestinians but for secular Jews and their secular values. Suddenly religious settlers are being recognized for the dangerous fanatics and racists they are.

Israel’s 37th government includes elements from the Kach party, once banned as a terrorist organization. Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “tak[ing] the Ku Klux Klan and [bringing] them into the government,” equating ministers Itamar Ben Gvir, Betzalel Smotrich and others with the KKK (which actually operates in Israel). Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionism had a long association with extremism and fascism, long before the founding of the state.

Israel’s extremist government acknowledges that Apartheid is their goal. Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who once displayed a photo of the man who massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in his illegal settlement home, told an Arab journalist on Israel’s Channel 12, “excuse me, Mohammed, but this is the reality. This is the truth. My right to life outweighs your right to move on the streets.”

The West Bank Yishi community, which was built on land stolen from the ethnically-cleansed village of Dayr Aban, used to advertise two-acre plots with tennis courts and a forest preserve to Americans eager to emigrate. “Looking for the American Dream in Eretz Yisrael? …. Do you want American neighbors and immediate access to Bet Shemesh and Ramat Bet Shemesh schools? …. Does an Arab-free environment sound appealing? Yishi is miles inside the green line and even further from the nearest Arab settlement… A place in Israel that comes as dreamed, no concessions, no compromise.” Its residents would heartily endorse Alabama governor George Wallace’s declaration, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

While American politicians ignore the grim reality for Palestinians and pretend that Israel is a Western democracy, Israelis are much more willing admit that their country practices Apartheid.

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem asserts it. Israeli author David Grossman has said it. The Israeli anti-occupation group Yesh Din calls the occupation Apartheid. Before he was assassinated by an extremist from the settler movement, Yitzhak Rabin called the settler movement a “cancer” and warned that Israel risked becoming an Apartheid state. In the 1980‘s Uri Davis, an Israeli activist, and Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli political scientist, used the phrase. The Israeli groups Adalah, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Combatants for Peace, Gisha, HaMoked, Haqel: In Defense of Human Rights, Human Rights Defenders Fund, Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel and Yesh Din all supported an Amnesty International report calling Israel’s practices Apartheid.

And who knows better than the nation of South Africa? South Africa downgraded Israel’s embassy in protest of Israeli Apartheid and openly called Israel an Apartheid state at the UN. Of course, perhaps they were just sore that Israel actually supported South African Apartheid.

Many other voices recognize parallels with the old South African system. Last April, for the first time, the venerable journal Foreign Affairs ran an article calling Israel an Apartheid state. Human Rights Watch considers Israel’s treatment of Palestinians Apartheid. Amnesty International says so too. The American group Jewish Voice for Peace agrees. The American Friends Service Committee uses the term “Israeli Apartheid.” Former UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon cautiously says Israel is “inching” toward Apartheid. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman blasted a Republican pro-Israel position as pro- Apartheid. Marine Corps General James Mattis used the term describing Israel’s “democratic” dilemma: democracy or Apartheid. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made exactly the same argument. Former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean called Israel an Apartheid state. Former President Jimmy Carter thought so too. He even wrote a book making the case.

And if compassion for Palestinians is antisemitic, you’d better tell American Jews. Among respondents of a 2021 survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by prominent Jewish Democrats, 34% agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25% considered “Israel is an apartheid state” and 22% thought that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.”

Yet none of this has managed to reach the ears of Congress or the President.

House Republicans may have an excuse for the open embrace of ethnic cleansing and ethno-religious supremacy – that’s just who they are – but Democrats who refuse to call out a violent occupation and an Apartheid regime deserve nothing but contempt for their cowardice. In fact, the defense of racist ethno-religious nationalism in Israel only undermines Democrats’ credibility if not their ability to fight it here at home.

The United States has never applied either carrots or sticks to Israel. Instead we just turn on the spigot and keep the money flowing for Apartheid. This needs to stop now. Let Israel fund its own repressive racist regime without our help.

Poster in Wing’s Court, New Bedford (Author, 2023)

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) considers the call for Palestinian liberation — “from the river to the sea” — to be both anti-semitic and an endorsement of terrorism:

“This rallying cry has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the PFLP, which seek Israel’s destruction through violent means. It is fundamentally a call for a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, territory that includes the State of Israel, which would mean the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.”

But it’s not quite so simple as the ADL would have it, and accusations like theirs are symptomatic of a new McCarthyism that demonizes people who recognize that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict simply cannot continue without a just resolution, and that the root cause has always been the injustice of oppressing Palestinians.

Setting aside for a moment the terror required to subjugate millions of people for three generations in prisons, reservations, city-sized ghettos, or refugee camps weaponized into concentration camps, let’s consider the terror of only the last month.

Long before we heard an Israeli general call Palestinians human animals and long before our jaws dropped as a member of the Knesset demanded a doomsday nuclear strike on Gaza, fatalities related to Israel’s occupation were already over 10,000. Craig Mokhiber, a UN human rights official who recently resigned in protest, called Israel’s actions in Gaza “a text-book case of genocide.” US State Department Political-Military affairs analyst Josh Paul resigned in protest over US aid to Israel, while State Department foreign affairs specialist Sylvia Yacoub wrote a policy dissent, warning that the US is “complicit in [Israeli] genocide.”

Plans for dropping the entire population of Gaza in the Sinai desert — which an intelligence report called the “final rehabilitation” — were published in even the Israeli news. And now that Israel has surpassed Hamas’s terror by slaughtering another 10,000 civilians (with another 2,200 missing and presumed buried under rubble) and has imprisoned 10,000 Palestinians without charges versus the 200 kidnapped by Hamas, it’s clear that the winner of the terror sweepstakes is Israeli state terror — aided, abetted, and funded by US tax dollars.

Subject to steady encroachment by violent fundamentalist settlers who refer to it as Judea and Samaria, the West Bank has for decades avoided total annexation by Israel and represents an inconvenient impediment to a contiguous span of entirely Israeli territory. If Israel’s extremist government succeeds in their stated goal of full annexation of the West Bank and completes its task of ethnically cleansing Gaza, it will mean the death of any sort of Palestinian state and the denial of self-determination for Palestinians. But that has been the objective of Zionism since the beginning.

You’ve got to hand it to the ADL — which has moved over the years from sounding the alarm on discrimination against Jews to becoming little more than a pro-Israel mouthpiece — for the consistency of its hypocrisy. The ADL regards any challenge to or criticism of Zionism to be anti-semitic. Protests are anti-semitic. Boycotts are anti-semitic. Calls for freedom and liberation are anti-semitic. Murals like the one in Wing’s Court, New Bedford (image above), which use the dreaded phrase must also be anti-semitic.

But is there really anything objectionable in “from the river to the sea” — other than the obvious shorthand for borders, as Americans might use “coast to coast” or “sea to shining sea”? Or is it because American protesters, many of us Jews, are allies in pushing for Palestinian freedom? Such accusations and pushback from pro-Israel mouthpieces like the ADL are precisely like the segregationists who had derisive names for whites who supported civil rights. One was “race traitor” and the other ended in “–lover.”

As it happens, the word “river” never actually appears in the original Hamas Charter, which is indeed an offensive document rivaling equally offensive Zionist documents like Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall or the propagandistic and racist pseudoscience coughed up by Yair Netanyahu, the Prime Minister’s son and Israel’s Eric Trump.

But the 2017 Hamas Charter does contains two mentions:

“Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit.”

and another sentence uses the ADL’s censored words:

“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Interestingly, the Likud uses similar language in its 1977 platform, which calls for complete Jewish control of all of Palestine between the river and the sea, and specifically rules out a Two State solution:

from Jewish Virtual Library

“Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan [river] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

Israel’s Revisionist Zionist movement, the progenitor of Netanyahu’s Likud party, had greater territorial ambitions than a state bounded on the east by the Jordan River. In pre-1948 posters from the Irgun, the Harut youth movement, and in fundraising appeals to North American Zionists and others, Revisionist Zionists used a verse from Bereshit (Genesis) 15:18 which refers to the Euphrates river, not the Jordan:

On that day, the Lord formed a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt until the great river, the Euphrates river.

That biblical quote appears at the top of the left-most poster shown below with the caption “Land of Israel” and in another Irgun poster advocating taking not only the portion of the British Mandate reserved for Jews and Arabs (west of the Jordan) but Transjordan (present-day Jordan) as well — by force:

Left to right: 1947 Irgun map; Herut youth movement; Tel Chai fund; Irgun Poster showing all of Transjordan as “the only solution”

The Revisionists, and every bible-thumper they appealed to, were no doubt also familiar with verse 13:

And He said to Abram, “You shall surely know that your seed will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and they will enslave them and oppress them, for four hundred years.“

Whatever the origins, and whoever has adapted or used it in some variation, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now used by peace activists — anti-Zionist rabbis among them — to signify liberation and justice for Palestinians in both Gaza (which borders the sea) and the West Bank (which touches the Jordan but is an occupied military zone).

For many the phrase is simply an affirmation — long denied — of a Two State Solution that successive US administrations give frequent lip service to. For some of us it’s the recognition of both the futility of Two States and the impossibility of continuing to support an Apartheid state while denying any kind of statehood to Arabs. A bi-national secular democracy uniting Jews and Arabs in a single secular state could be a solution. Israel, as a Zionist nation built on an Apartheid model, would cease to exist. And so would Hamas’s dreams of an Islamic state.

In any case, just as Israel still has no Constitution after 75 years, it also has no internationally recognized, undisputed borders. Perhaps the best anyone can do is to speak of the river and the sea and the possibilities of freedom in between.

Shortly after October 7th, the Atlantic Monthly published a piece by Simon Sebag Montefiore, British aristocrat, Tory, earnest defender of colonialism, and sloppy Pop historian.

Montefiore’s article was nothing but Zionist apologetics laced with talking points from the American far right’s war with “woke” intellectuals. It was not surprising that the Atlantic printed it, as this has long been a publication for Democratic neocons and Zionists. The issue of Palestine has always exposed the dishonesty and hypocrisy of certain liberals, quoting conservatives and claiming to support democracy and equality here at home while supporting the opposite in Israel. This is precisely the debate that is now tearing the Democratic Party apart. Young Americans who grew up knowing nothing but non-stop American wars since 2001 now understand that support for Israel is part and parcel of the militarism and imperialism that followed September 11th, 2001, and of course the militarists and imperialists are pushing back.

These Young Americans have also taken note of the undeniable similarities between Zionism and Christian nationalism. Both are malignant nationalist, supremacist ideologies. Zionism, which pretends to be a perfectly natural, reasonable form of self-determination by one people is in fact the ideology underlying a racist state built upon the suffering and ethnic cleansing of another.

Jews, especially those from the Austro-Hungarian empire who settled in Palestine long before Herzl wrote “Der Judenstaat,” had a very different conception of what life in the “Heiliges Land” meant. Early “Palestinians” were largely motivated by religion. These early Zionists thought of living in the land peaceably with the indigenous people and it was normal to think of themselves as citizens of the Ottoman empire. It wasn’t until the Revisionist Zionist movement that the notion of territorial maximalism took root. This was formalized at the 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York City. In any case, there is only one Zionism now, and it is a cruel, savage, selfish ideology based on a zero-sum calculation — Jews must own all of Palestine, and no sharing or compromise can be possible for the state to be fully “Jewish.”

There are now almost 10 million Israelis. No one imagines anyone marching them into the Sinai desert — as Israel has long fantasized about marching Gazans. Even without formal recognition, there are numerous regional trade deals, particularly between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the UAE. If official recognition is withheld it is chiefly because of the brutal treatment of Palestinians. Israel’s preoccupation for its existence — at a time when it is the 14th military power in the world, BFF’s with every other colonial power, can claim to have had a couple of US aircraft carriers deployed as a courtesy, and is the only nuclear power in the Middle East — is overwrought if not outright propaganda. The “massed Arab armies” so often cited (as in Montefiore’s piece) are in fact Palestinian liberation movements without states, navies or air forces.

Although Israel has always regarded Palestinian statehood as a non-starter (see Jabobinsky and the Likud platform), it is touchy when anyone questions its legitimacy.

But Israel’s legitimacy is not a question of the right of Jews to exist, or even to remain in Palestine. The question of Israel’s legitimacy concerns Israel’s “right” to exist as an Apartheid state — a designation many Israelis accept, by the way. Israel’s legitimacy also depends on its geographical boundaries. Just as I have a legitimate claim to my own home but not my neighbors’ or the entire neighborhood, Israel’s legitimacy depends on how much of other people’s property it has stolen or has claimed.

Besides annexing the West Bank and openly seeking to reclaim Gaza, Israel occupies both Lebanese and Syrian territory. Israel’s legitimacy is also called into question when asking why Jews should hold all the power in the state, while 56 laws discriminate against non-Jewish citizens of that state. Or when asking what right Israel has to keep millions of stateless Palestinians under martial law, in ghettos and concentration camps. Or the legitimacy of a Law of Return for Jews that lets any Jew anywhere “return” to Israel while the same is denied to Palestinians. In the United States, the legitimacy of the state flows from the consent of the governed. In Israel, the legitimacy of the state seems to flow from the fact of being a Jew. To describe Israeli and American democracy as indistinguishable is completely wrong. Americans may live in a racist nation, but not one with laws literally based on race.

So let me get on with my critique of Montefiore’s rubbish.

• The usual racist trope of the barbaric Palestinian versus the civilized European: “The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies–except it was recorded in real time and published to social media.” However, Israel’s siege of Gaza seems to harken back in history before the Mongol’s, to the Hebrew genocides recorded in the Bible – sieges of civilian populations behind walled cities (as Gaza is) and genocide of civilians.
• Anti-intellectual posturing: Western academics have supposedly “denied, excused, or even celebrated the [October 7th] murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program.” Montefiore has been watching FOX News too much, as apparently have the editors of the Atlantic. If you take the effort to look at the first controversy at Harvard, one by a group of students supporting Palestinians, it is in fact not a celebration of Hamas at all. For the most part academics have nuanced views of both colonialism and the right of oppressed people to fight back, and apparently Montefiore believes there is no colonialism or oppression in Palestine.
• Right-wing epithets used for effect not clarification: “fashionable ideology” “leftist intellectuals” “Marxist theory” “Soviet propaganda” “anti-semitism” “intimidating jargon” “once-respectable intellectuals” “radical follies.” I can only conclude that Montefiore has been hanging out with Ron DeSantis or Chris Rufo and exchanging notes on Truth Social. He’s not talking to the average liberal; he’s signaling to Christian and Jewish Zionists — extreme ones. Montefiore is one more link in the attack engine that has been going after academics who don’t toe the line on Israel.
• Resents calls for “decolonization: Well, guess what? Israel is a colonial settler project. Zionism had a long history of appealing to colonial empires (Ottoman, British, American) for its existence, and it now depends on colonial empires (Britain, France, US) for its continued existence. It may be a great shock to Montefiore, but colonized people resent being colonized. There is nothing wrong with trying to shake off the oppressor, though I wish Hamas had not ended its breach of the Gaza concentration camp security walls with the massacre of civilians and kidnappings. He goes on to insult those who share the view that colonized people have a right to fight their oppression as poseurs, wine-drinking fakes.
• Antisemitism: Montefiore claims that the Hamas massacre is pure and simple antisemitism, and he provides a list of all the Jewish calamities that Jews recall at Tisha B’Av. He fails to mention that in the Zionist madrassas in the West Bank they are teaching kids that Palestinians are Amalek — the personification of pure evil. He fails to mention that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is first and foremost a land dispute.
• Genocide denial: Montefiore denies that a genocide is taking place in Gaza. When General Yoav Gallant announced a total siege on civilians and called them “human animals,” it was clear that a genocidal war was about to begin. And sure enough, it began with cutting off everything civilians need to live. Then half of Gaza’s 2.2 million people fled south for their lives, only to be bombed there. Over 8,000 civilians have been killed, half of them children. More than half of all Gaza homes were destroyed a week ago; by the end of the war there will not be anything left. Wolf Blitzer interviewed an Israeli colonel who left him speechless when he admitted slaughtering 50 civilians to kill one Hamas commander. PBS showed an Israeli tank shooting a passenger van in Gaza. Thirty journalists have been bombed. The New York Times reported that Israeli officials told State Department officials they were going to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Gazans. And liberal Israeli media is reporting on two different plans to illegally transfer whatever is left of the carpet-bombed Gazans to 10 cities in Egypt in further violation of laws of war. Of course this is genocide. Instead, Montefiore mentions some harassment of West Bank Palestinians by settlers but glosses over the 1948 Nakba, where Zionist militias wiped out 500 villages and displaced 750,000 Arabs, many of whom live in Gaza today and for whom this is a second Nakba. He claims the Jewish exodus of almost a million Mizrachi Jews is somehow equivalent. However, two thirds were recruited by the Jewish Agency and the Knesset debated the necessity of doing so. The only thing that makes them equivalent is that both the Nakba and the various aliyot were organized by Israel.
• Montefiore whines about corrupt Arab governments – as if the multiple-indicted Netanyahu were also not the head of a corrupt government.
• Montefiore admits that the British stiffed the Arabs when it promised its new spoil of war to British Zionists in a letter from Balfour to Rothschild. He writes that the only promise of an Arab state was a 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein, but he omits the many partition plans that were proposed. One, the Morrison-Grady plan, included the Negev in an Arab state, but it was thwarted by the Jewish Agency’s establishment of “11 points” — militarized kibbutzim in the Negev which included some of those attacked by Hamas on October 7th. I could go on, but Montefiore’s history lesson is simply a dishonest exercise by a professional historian.
• Montefiore writes: “It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state. Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in.” What a warped portrayal. Montefiore would have you believe that the West was opposed to Zionism but it was only saved by plucky Zionists who persisted. Not so. The British outsourced much of the administration of Palestine to the Jewish Agency, which was a plus because it didn’t cost Britain a cent, and the departing colonizers bequeathed Israel with most of their infrastructure, armaments, and the military laws used to subjugate Palestinians to this day. Britain had departed long before May 14, 1948 and when they finally issued the official Termination of the Mandate it praised Zionists for making the desert bloom. The United States recognized Israel 11 minutes after its independence was declared. Israel has always been the darling of colonial powers and not the plucky little victim. It didn’t take long at all after independence for the colonial powers to arm Israel with nukes.
• Montefiore is either wrong or lying when he writes: “Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949.” This is complete garbage. In 1947 the population of Israel was roughly 650,000 Jews and Arabs twice that number. From 1948-1951, 690,000 Jews immigrated; from 1952-1960 300,000 Jews immigrated; from 1961-1971 430,000 immigrated; from 1972-1979 268,000 immigrated; from 1980-1989 154,000 immigrated; from 1990-2001 over a million; from 2002-2010 181,000 immigrated; from 2011-2020 237,000 immigrated. An overwhelming majority of Israel’s population came as a result of recent settlement efforts funded by Zionist organizations, notably the Jewish Federations of North America. Over 2 million European Jews immigrated after 1948 and 1.2 million Russians came in the Seventies — many of them not even Jewish but useful as a demographic counterpoint to Arab birth rates. Although the American Jewish community has played an outsized role in colonizing Israel, only about 140,000 Americans have immigrated.
• Montefiore writes that if Americans are no longer settlers, then Israelis should not be considered such either. I suppose the implication of his argument is that if Americans can normalize the occupation of indigenous lands, why can’t Israelis do so too? There’s too much to unpack here but I will point out that Native Americans can move anywhere they like within the United States, can vote, run for political office, and are subject to dual systems of law ONLY when one system is their own, not imposed on them by race laws.
• Montefiore attempts to put a spin on Israel’s ethnic mix, citing Ethiopian Jews and Mizrachim. It’s the “some of our best friends are X” argument only slightly repackaged. But Ethiopians and Mizrachim serve in the IDF and prisons and drive the bulldozers which destroy Palestinian homes. They live in West Bank settlements where they destroy Arab and Bedouin crops and livestock. Israel’s Ashkenazim are sill the Cabots and Lodges of the Jewish state. Newer olim (immigrants) from Ethiopia, Yemen, Iraq, and even Russia lack the status but thank their lucky stars they’re not reviled Arabs.
• Identifying Israel as a colonial settler project is antisemitic: “But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians.” This is quite the stretch. What Hamas did was immoral and a war crime; What Israel is doing to Palestinians is immoral and a war crime. I think we can condemn both, especially when the scale and historical breadth of Israel’s crimes is so much greater.
• Identifying Israel as a colonial settler state blocks a solution: “The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.” This in itself is vapid rhetoric. How can anyone deal with systematic land theft, an occupation, a double set of racist laws, and genocidal suppression without talking about throwing off the yoke? And if Apartheid and settlements are the problem, they should be named and stopped.
• Zionist lobby groups have made it difficult to criticize Israel. In 37 states there are laws on the books which create penalties for people and organizations who support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement. But Montefiore is ready to declare war on academic institutions where students and faculty exercise their free speech: “Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.” For a guy who hates boycotts, here he is ready to launch boycotts on multiple levels.
• Montefiore laments the feckless Palestinian “governments” of the West Bank and Gaza. Surely he must know that Abbas has only one function: to be the West Bank’s police chief. Abbas was not elected, while Hamas held elections most recently in 2006 — a full generation ago! It’s safe to say, Palestinians never voted for any of these crooks and thugs. And how could they? Democracy can never thrive in a prison, or where faux Palestinian “governments” are selected by Israel.
• Montefiore waxes poetic as he sings of the peace made between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat. He neglects to mention that Israel’s settler movement, now in power, actually assassinated Rabin while Israel tried to take out Arafat before he became ill, and then cynically invested millions of shekels in Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood group they thought had no chance of gaining traction or popularity, in order to marginalize Fatah and the PLO. And now we’ve seen how that’s worked out.

In May 2022 Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), spoke at the organization’s leadership summit, telling attendees, “To those who still cling to the idea that anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism — let me clarify this for you as clearly as I can — anti-Zionism is anti-semitism.” Greenblatt directed his remarks at three organizations. One of them was CAIR, the Council for Islamic American Relations, which fights discrimination against Muslims.

Another was Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), with half a million mainly Jewish members and 70 chapters throughout the country. JVP rejects Zionism as strongly as it condemns Christian Nationalism, Zionism’s equally evil twin. But JVP is not an anomaly. For decades if not longer there has been strong anti-Zionist sentiment within the Jewish world.

Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet “Der Judenstaat” outraged Orthodox Jews. Zionists arriving in Palestine were informed upon by Palestinian Jews to the Ottoman authorities. Before it eventually embraced Zionism, Reform Judaism rejected Zionism at its 1885 convention in Pittsburgh:

“We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

Jewish communities in Lithuania, Britain, Germany, the United States, and Russia objected to Zionism for a number of reasons: Jews were already at home in their own countries; creating a temporal state contradicts the messianic promise of Judaism; it would jeopardize relations between Jews and Muslims in Palestine (!!); it would destroy acceptance of Jews in countries in which they live; Judaism is a religion, not a political theory; Zionism would exacerbate suspicions of dual loyalty and foster anti-semitism (!!); and a Jewish state is inherently undemocratic (!!).

In 1919 Jewish Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to Woodrow Wilson signed by 300 prominent American Jews including Henry Morgenthau, Sr.:

“We protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish. Whether the Jews be regarded as a ‘race’ or as a ‘religion’, it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.”

In 1944 Hannah Arendt published Zionism Reconsidered, in which she points out the obvious:

“Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours […] If the Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future […] it will be due to the political assistance of American Jews […] if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country, who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East.”

And in fact, Zionists have depended on colonial powers for Israel’s existence as well as its continued existence. The dependency has persisted for over 75 years.

According to Zionists like the ADL’s Greenblatt, anti-Zionism is “anti-semitic” because it rejects the “peoplehood” of Jews. “Peoplehood” in the political sense is a Zionist innovation, not a necessity of Judaism. Even between the destruction of the Second Temple in the 2nd Century and the establishment of Israel in 1948, Jews managed to remain a “people” in cultural, religious, and linguistic terms. With the founding of Israel, however, Zionists expected Jews everywhere to embrace, if not immigrate to, the temporal state of Israel without questioning its policies, legal structure, or its human rights practices. This expectation was doomed from the start because of the long Jewish antipathy to Zionism.

American Jews, particularly younger generations, recognize the many obvious defects of American democracy but revere the ideal of a secular republic which privileges no one and offers justice to everyone. Some of America’s most democratic jurists have defended this kind of America, from Louis Brandeis to Ruth Bader Ginzburg. But Zionism, in order to express itself in a Jewish state, must privilege Jews and Jewish rights at the expense of “others” it must subjugate. When anti-Zionists hear the words “Jewish and democratic” in relation to Israel they hear the same contradictions in terms that anti-Zionists a century earlier noticed.

Peter Beinart may be one of the best-known ex-Zionists in the United States. In 2019 Beinart penned an article for the Guardian, concerned with the rise of anti-semitism but also cautioning to distinguish between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.

Beinart systematically debunked the Zionist argument that anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism by pointing out that (1) statehood for any group is neither guaranteed nor always desirable; that (2) there is nothing inherently discriminatory in dismantling a state itself built on discrimination (the example he gives is South Africa); and that (3) the conflation of the two terms is contradicted by the existence of anti-semites who are full-throated supporters of Zionism (examples provided are Christian Zionists and Christian Nationalists).

In a 2020 podcast Beinart advocated a One-State solution in Palestine. Rejecting the hollow phrase “the Two-State solution,” now impossible because not enough contiguous land remains for a Palestinian state, Beinart explained his reasons for writing another essay, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.”

“If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fulfills his pledge to impose Israeli sovereignty in parts of the West Bank, he will just formalize a decades-old reality: In practice, Israel annexed the West Bank long ago. Israel has all but made its decision: one country that includes millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights. Now liberal Zionists must make our decision, too. It’s time to abandon the traditional two-state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”

In an article in Jewish Currents Beinart explained that, just as Judaism thrived when it transitioned from temple-based practice to rabbinic study, it will likewise be the better for abandonment of Zionism:

“For roughly a thousand years, Jewish worship meant bringing sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem. Then, in 70 CE, with the Temple about to fall, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai imagined an alternative. He famously asked the Roman Emperor to “Give me Yavne and its Sages.” From the academies of Yavne came a new form of worship, based on prayer and study. Animal sacrifice, it turned out, was not essential to being a Jew. Neither is supporting a Jewish state. Our task in this moment is to imagine a new Jewish identity, one that no longer equates Palestinian equality with Jewish genocide. One that sees Palestinian liberation as integral to our own. That’s what Yavne means today.”

Beinart went on to explain why the Two-State solution is dead and what might replace it. He warned that “Averting a future in which oppression degenerates into ethnic cleansing requires a vision that can inspire not just Palestinians, but the world. Equality offers it.”

With the carpet bombing of “human animals” in Gaza we just saw how prescient Beinart’s words were.

Nobody in Palestine is going anywhere. Millions of Jews, millions of Palestinians will remain attached to the land. The only thing prolonging the conflict is the massive financial and military aid to Israel by the United States, used mainly for the repression and carpet-bombing required to maintain Jewish supremacy.

But would the fabled “massed Arab armies” actually attack a democratic Jewish-Arab state that offered the same rights to everyone? Would a unified state be any more dangerous to live in than two states, each building walls and stockpiling weapons against each other?

This is why many anti-Zionists share Beinart’s vision of a single state in Palestine. But to get there Israel’s Apartheid state must be dismantled and in its place something equitable for both people must be built.

Killing the “animals” – Israel’s “surgical” bombing of Gaza

Genocide and ethnic cleansing are part of America’s DNA and many of us would prefer to not think about it. Maybe that’s why American politicians bristle at those words when applied to Israel. It is inconceivable to many of us that a nation often described as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and (for Believers) the second incarnation of Biblical Israel could ever commit such atrocities. Congressional resolutions, preferred trading status, military and intelligence cooperation, and vetoes at the UN shield Israel from the consequences of its actions. Israel has received over $165 billion in aid from the US, the largest for any country. Laws in 37 states penalize or criminalize criticism of Israel. It’s been a veritable love-fest. Until this month Israel has largely enjoyed impunity for humanitarian crimes against a civilian population almost as large as its own.

But these last couple of weeks have been very different. Israel’s bombing of Gaza has moved well beyond retaliatory, far beyond indiscriminate, to a level bordering on genocidal. And there is no clearer sign of the persistence of the ethnic cleansing that created Israel than a widely-discussed plan to use it again in concert with the bombing of Gaza.

On October 9th Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared a siege on the entire civilian population of Gaza, calling them “human animals.” Intended was apparently a return to primitive warfare where walled cities are conquered by destroying all life within. But a walled city is more than just a metaphor in Gaza, where the world’s largest open air prison is surrounded by deadly border technology.

Palestinian home vandalized, reads – “Death to the Arabs”

Voice after Israeli voice promised vengeance on Gaza’s civilian population for the Hamas attacks. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” retired IDF Major General Giora Eiland wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. In a nation that enshrines Jewish supremacy in law and where “Death to the Arabs” is chanted at marches, rallies, soccer games or sprayed on Palestinian homes and graves, and where government ministers invoke it while encouraging anti-Arab pogroms, it’s not just Hamas Israel is looking to expel or kill. It’s every Palestinian in Gaza.

Gallant’s orgy of bombing, which launched as many strikes in a single day as the United States launched in Afghanistan in a year, was originally to be followed up by forcible transfer of all Palestinians from Gaza.

Leaflet warning Gazans to flee south

On October 13th Israel dropped leaflets telling residents of Gaza City:

“You must evacuate your homes immediately and go to the south of Wadi Gaza. For your security and safety you must not return to your homes until further notice from the Israeli Defense Forces. Public and known shelters must be evacuated. It is forbidden to approach the security wall, and anyone who approaches exposes himself to death.

Gazans from the north made the trip by car, donkey cart, and on foot in scenes reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba. Almost as soon as compliant refugees from Gaza City arrived in Khan Yunis, Israel began carpet bombing them. An episode of the New York Times podcast “The Daily” gave listeners a sense of the desperation of civilians and the indiscriminate nature of the bombing. Nowhere was safe. Everything was being bombed. Thousands of children have been killed as a result. A panel of U.N. experts has called Israel’s bombing “collective punishment” and “a war crime.”

But vast destruction and massive civilian casualties, not precision strikes on Hamas, were always the objectives.

A document provided to the Israeli financial magazine Calcalist (roughly, the Economist) and circulated within the Intelligence Ministry promotes the forced transfer of all residents from Gaza. According to Calcalist, “the document, [recommended by Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel], which is unlikely to affect government policy, may have been written to give a boost to the settler movement and its objectives [but] in any case it is a direct continuation of the extreme policy that the government has been promoting since it was established.”

“Gamliel’s document supposedly looks at three alternatives in the post-war era, but the alternative ‘to yield positive and long-term strategic results’ is a transfer of Gaza citizens to Sinai. The move includes three steps: establishing tent cities in Sinai to the southwest of the Gaza Strip, creating a humanitarian corridor to assist residents and, finally, building cities in northern Sinai. At the same time, a sterile area of several miles will be established within Egypt south of the border with Israel, so that evacuated residents cannot return. In addition, the document calls for cooperation with as many countries as possible so that they can absorb the displaced Palestinians from Gaza and provide them with absorption packets. Among other things, Canada, European countries such as Greece and Spain, and North African countries are mentioned.”

A similar white paper calling for ethnic cleansing of Gaza was produced by Misgav, the Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. The document, “A plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” is exactly what it sounds like – a plan to force all of Gaza’s inhabitants over the Rafah crossing into ten refugee cities in the Sinai desert. As with Gamliel’s white paper, the international community is expected to fund Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gazans and absorb the resulting stateless refugees. According to Misgav plan, whatever the cost, it’s

“actually a very worthwhile investment for the State of Israel. The land conditions in Gaza, which are similar to the Gush Dan area, will in the future allow many Israeli citizens to live at a high level and in fact will expand the Gush Dan area to the Egyptian border. It will also give a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev.”

The white paper goes on to say that a deal between Egypt and Israel (and also Saudi Arabia, which would provide some of the funding and construction) could be easily concluded in days. The authors salivated over the Hamas attack as an opportunity that might never come again:

“The IDF must create the right conditions for the Gazan population to immigrate to Egypt [and] there is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.”

Click image to hear Ayalon discuss the Misgav plan to expel Gazans from Gaza

While Calcalist did not anticipate that the Gamliel document would get much traction within the government, in an interview with Marc Lamont Hill on Upfront, former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon cited the Misgav plan (with its ten cities) and downplayed the forced transfer as a “temporary relocation.” But who was Ayalon kidding? Building ten cities for refugees in Egypt sounds like a “relocation” that is anything but temporary.

Nof Zion is a religious Zionist settlement in East Jerusalem created by removing the Palestinian residents of Jabel Mukaber (Author, 2009)

Friends and family know that I am no partisan of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, its 75-year occupation of Palestinians now either relegated to refugee camps or internally-displaced, controlled by barbed wire, high-tech fences, whose movements are controlled by ubiquitous checkpoints, who are surveilled, suffer warrantless searches by the Israeli military and indeterminate detention without recourse to a justice system only for Jews, whose houses are bulldozed or expropriated by settlers, who are denied their own state, ringed by settlements that further ghettoize them and breed resentment and hatred, such as we saw last week.

for Palestinians in the West Bank there is no such thing as freedom of movement. Instead, checkpoints and walls and barbed wire (Author, 2009)

I have friends and family with Israeli roots, and I am still in touch with peace activists from the Eshkol district in Israel where almost all the attacks occurred. I have plenty of anger and grief over what happened in the Negev. But I do think we have to be honest about where Palestinian resentment comes from. We also need to admit that killing a child, whether by commando, blockade, sanctions on medical equipment, or F16, is still the murder of a child.

Over the years I have followed Israel’s many military operations against both Fatah and Hamas; its shameful participation in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres of 3,500 Palestinians in Lebanon by Falangist militias; a commando attack on the Mavi Marmara, which killed 19 peace activists, including Americans trying to deliver aid to Gaza; Israel’s disproportionate use of military force in Operation Cast Lead, the 2008 version of what is likely to come this week; and the killing of journalists, last year Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, three days ago Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah.

I have met Palestinians whose olive groves are routinely vandalized or destroyed by settlers, whose young men are routinely harassed in often deadly versions of Stop and Frisk, and whose children are detained without warrant or counsel in adult prisons for throwing rocks. I have met Gazans who live in the tiny enclave of refugee camps the size of Detroit – but with 3.5 times the population – and can’t even fish the waters off their own coast. And I have met Palestinians who still have the key to a home now occupied by a Jewish family in Jerusalem. Both historical and daily wounds afflict Palestinians because of ethnic cleansing and occupation that began in the 20th Century and festers well into the 21st.

Over time Israel’s politics have lurched from right to far right. Its 37th government is now comprised of extremists who intend to neuter Israel’s supreme court – the last obstacle to full annexation of the West Bank. And they also want to impose religious restrictions, such as gender segregation and changes to marriage law, on even secular citizens. Last week’s trauma to Israel has been compared to 9/11. As with 9/11, when Americans began chanting “USA! USA!,” Israelis now heed the call to “Stand with Israel.” Trauma seems to feed nationalism. This is also true of Palestinians.

A member of the ruling coalition recently endorsed pogroms on Palestinian villages after extremist settlers went on a rampage of killing and arson. “I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the state of Israel should do it,” said Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who is also responsible for civil administration in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir enlightened journalists with his Jewish supremacist views: “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria [biblical names for the West Bank] is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

These are the gloves-off versions of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing that Israel’s government was once too ashamed to say out loud. Before Hamas attacked Israel such talk was beginning to frighten semi-liberal secular Israelis. Now Israel’s pro-democracy demonstrators are fully behind a new war government that has already killed over 2,000 in Gaza with indiscriminate bombing.

But territorial maximalism is a primary goal of all the political parties in Israel’s coalition government. Israel’s settler movement and its friends in the Knesset are still angry about Arial Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. Even if Hamas had not attacked Israel last week, many expected extremist ministers to propose re-establishing some of the 21 Jewish settlements that once occupied 45% of the Gaza Strip. Such talk has surfaced in the wake of the attacks, and Israel is now forcing 1.1 million Gazans to flee south – an incomprehensible number which Palestinians fear could create a second Nakba (catastrophe). Those with passports are fleeing across the Erez Crossing into Egypt. Between the bombing and the forced expulsions, there will surely be another reduction in the population of Gaza. Someone has called it “ethnic cleansing on the installment plan.”

Throughout the years the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians through raids, military operations, or settler violence. Israel calls this periodic bloodletting “mowing the grass.” In its efforts to target Hamas fighters, Israel manages to mow down mostly civilians, more often than not children. Each time a payment on the aforementioned installment plan.

Even assuming that reports of children being decapitated by Hamas fighters last week are true, why have so few tears been shed for the thousands of children whose bodies are blown apart by Israeli bombs paid for by American tax dollars? Perhaps for the same ugly reason it has been so easy for Americans to kill Mexicans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Puerto Ricans, Afghanis, and Iraqis. Israel certainly has some soul-searching to do. Americans too.

For all the US State Department and Israeli Foreign Ministry press releases expressing shock, anger, and solidarity — for all the many emotional appeals, for all the bias in the media, the cynical invocations of the Holocaust, the unfortunately necessary pushback against antisemitic incidents that inevitably occur in the wake of this conflict, or the religious and racial connections between Western Jews and Christians – we’re still ignoring the most glaring feature of this conflict: the wrongs done and wrongs being done to Palestinians.

The Occupation is Israel’s and Israel’s alone. Every death that emanates from this conflict weighs most heavily on Israel because Israel chooses not end the Occupation. No nation should enable, justify, defend, or fund the Occupation. Let Israel go it alone and see how quickly change can come about – when the US isn’t subsidizing it.

It is an abomination that Israel’s occupation has gone on for 75 years. The human misery it has inflicted and inflicts daily ought to shame every Western power complicit in its continuation.

The United States must not provide a cent more to Israel.

Approximate range of Hamas attacks

For some people, the Hamas attacks came out of nowhere and can only be explained by sinai chinam, the Hebrew term for baseless hatred. This of course ignores the history and the reality of the moment. With American politicians streaming into Israel to express sympathy and solidarity, it has become politically and socially dangerous to point out that the Hamas attack, while violating every standard of human decency and every law of war, was not unprovoked. It is also politically and socially dangerous to note that, unless something changes, Hamas’s savage attack and Israel’s savage response won’t be the end of it. That “something” is Israel’s 75 year occupation of a population almost its own size.

W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, is a deeply dark and political poem about the rise of Nazism culminating in the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939. In it we find these lines: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” As today, Auden’s expressions of simultaneous revulsion at Nazism and disgust for the reparations and humiliations Germany was subject to, and which fed Nazism, were not appreciated by a flag-waving public averse to nuance.

Managing the occupation of a population almost its own size has left Israel with basically three options: (1) to grant citizenship to Palestinians and create a democratic secular state; (2) clear out of the illegal settlements to permit a Palestinian state to exist; or (3) kill as many Palestinians as possible and force them to flee elsewhere. Israel has always chosen the third option and, appallingly, most Western nations with histories of colonialism and ethnic cleansing themselves have been complicit enablers — the United States especially.

Some of the 20 sites attacked

Americans may not like to face facts, but for years many Israelis, including those in Israel’s security establishment, have warned that Israel has become an apartheid state. In September, Tamir Pardo, the former head of Mossad, used exactly those words: that Israel was forcing an apartheid system on Palestinians in the West Bank. The month before, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir acknowledged exactly how the system works: “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria” — the biblical names for the West Bank — “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.” And this was the West Bank he was talking about, not the strip of squalid, densely-populated refugee camps in Gaza to which residents of hundreds of Arab villages in the Negev were forced to flee and which is now the largest open-air prison on the planet.

Last week’s attack on Israel was stunning and ambitious. Amid a barrage of rockets which temporarily overwhelmed the Iron Dome defense, Hamas commandos also used low-tech ordnance, drones, and paragliders to overwhelm Israel’s border surveillance systems, then systematically attacked over 20 kibbutzim. All were within striking distance of Gaza, and the targets in most cases were kibbutzim and moshavim of military importance or which had been built on “cleansed” Arab villages. There is no question that Hamas used terror, but it was not merely a symbolic act like felling the Twin Towers or crashing into the Pentagon. Hamas was conducting a military operation to test Israeli defenses, new tactics, and its own reach. For next time.

Nahal Oz, which was one of the 20 attacked, is half a mile from the town of Sakarya in Gaza. After the 1967 war it became an access point for the Gaza Strip. Because of its proximity to Gaza, it has been under steady attack since its founding in 1951 as Israel’s first Nahal (paramilitary/vocational) settlement.

Density of Israel’s agricultural settlements and Gaza’s refugee camps

In April 1956, Nahal Oz’s security officer Ro’i Rothberg was killed and his funeral was attended by none other than Moshe Dayan, whose eulogy acknowledged Gazans’ anger at being ethnically cleansed from their own land, the burden that Nahal border settlements bore to serve as security buffers for the rest of Israel, and – freely expressed – that Israel’s settlement can only proceed by ignoring the pain and anger of those it has consigned to the life of refugees. It is an astoundingly warped and profoundly un-Jewish perspective on human suffering:

Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders? […] We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.

Ashkelon, which was bombarded by missiles during the attack, was once the Palestinian town of al-Majdal with 10,000 residents, mainly Muslim and Christian. It was ethnically cleansed in 1948.

Be’eri, one of this hardest-hit by Hamas, is roughly 2 miles from Gaza and, as the crow flies, perhaps 5 miles from Gaza City. It is one of 11 settlements in the Negev established by the Jewish Agency in 1946 to block the Morrison-Grady Plan, a partition plan which would have assigned the Negev to a Palestinian state. The rave at which over 260 young people were slaughtered is just outside Be’eri, where over 107 were also butchered at the Be’eri kibbutz. Most of Be’eri’s members belong to Israel’s secular left. Vivian Silver, who was on the board of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization reviled by the Netanyahu government, was one of those abducted by Hamas.

Kfar Aza was another scene of brutal butchery of civilians by Hamas. Established in 1951 by Maghrebi Jews from Egypt and Morocco, Kfar Aza lies 3 miles east of Gaza.

Kissufim, whose residents were murdered and abducted, is another Nahal settlement founded in 1951 by the Zionist Youth Movement and is quite close to the former Gush Katif settlement in Gaza, one of 21 settlements evacuated by Arial Sharon in 2005. There is also a crossing to Gaza two miles to the West.

Magen is 2.5 miles from the Gaza border and was also overrun in the Hamas attack.

Nirim is another 11-point settlement founded in 1946 by Hashomer Hatzair volunteers to thwart the Morrison-Grady partition plan. An important battle took place in Nirim in 1948 but Israel was able to hold the town.

Ofakim was founded in 1955 by Moroccan and Tunisian Jews, displacing Bedouins in an area called Khirbat Futals. The original residents fled to Al-Muharraqa, from which they were then expelled to the Gaza Strip. Many of the hostages from the October raid by Hamas were from Ofakim.

Sderot s only a half mile from Gaza and was built on the site of the Palestinian village of Najd, whose 13,576 residents were ethnically cleansed the day before the British Mandate ended and Israeli independence was declared. Villages like Sderot were intended to serve as buffers to prevent “re-infiltration” by Palestinians to Israel. For years towns like Sderot in the Negev were where Israel’s Ashkenim settled new arrivals from the Maghreb, then Ethiopia and Russia.

The Eshkol district which includes most of these communities includes Yesha, where Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, himself a settler, owns a home.

Urim, which was attacked but not penetrated by Hamas, is built over the ruins of the Arab village of Al-Imara, whose original residents were forced to flee to Gaza.

Yad Mordechai kibbutz was founded in 1936 by Polish Hashomer Hatzair on the site of the Palestinian village of Hiribya.

Yated (“anchor”) was founded in 1982 and is among the southern-most settlements near Gaza’s Rafah crossing to Egypt.

Zikim, which was the scene of a naval assault by Hamas, was originally known as Hiribya. In 1945 it had a population of 2500. Its residents fled Jewish militias and most fled to Gaza. In 1949 Hiribya was re-settled by Hashomer Hatzair, a Labor Zionist youth group which formed several kibbutzim in Israel’s South.

* * *

One of the most disturbing videos that surfaced after the attacks was of the attack on young Israelis at a rave barely two miles from Gaza. Disturbing because 260 young people with the rest of their lives before them were massacred just to make a political point. But also disturbing that anyone can imagine the freedom to dance with joyous inhibition barely two miles from so much inflicted human misery.

Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.

Israel’s occupation has been ongoing since either 1947 or 1967, depending on how you count. An indisputable fact is that Israel has kept Palestinians under martial law for the last 75 years and has steadily chipped away at land intended to be their national homeland.

Israel and the Western nations, however, have continuously thwarted Palestinian statehood and winked as endless incursions, assassinations, land theft, and marginalization has created a de facto Apartheid state. American politicians speak of their deep commitment to a “two state” solution, knowing full-well that the land theft has now progressed so far that, without dismantling the illegal settlements, “two states” is nothing but a cynical, meaningless slogan.

Much like the US creation of the Taliban, Israel’s creation of Hamas (which was intended to neutralize the political power of Fatah and the PLO) has backfired spectacularly.

In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the decision to “withdraw” from Gaza. The Israeli military indeed withdrew from Gaza, but more controversial and traumatic for Israelis was the decision to physically dismantle 21 illegal settlements. This was seen as a betrayal of Zionist ideals by Israel’s far right, which still lists Sharon’s “betrayal” in its long enumeration of grievances.

Israel’s 2008 war on Gaza, known as “Operation Cast Lead,” killed 3 Israeli civilians and left 10 IDF soldiers dead by “friendly” fire. It also left vast devastation in Gaza and killed between 759 and 926 Palestinian civilians. A prize-winning photo by AFP photographer Mohammed Abed shows Israeli phosphorus munitions (which melt human bodies) raining down over a ruined school in Gaza. This was a brutal, disproportionate use of Israel’s military, which drew widespread international condemnation — though very little from the United States.

Israel is now in the throes of a crisis of its one-sided democracy. Amid demonstrations that have exposed fault lines in Israeli society, the nation formed its 37th coalition government around Netanyahu’s ultraconservative revisionist Zionist Likud party, Bezalel Smotrich’s ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, and Itamar Ben Gvir’s Neo-fascist Jewish Power party, which openly calls for expelling all Arabs from Israel and territory that Israel claims.

Ben Gvir’s political base is the old Kach party, which was banned for its advocacy of terrorism, and consists of extremists from the settler movement with links to Ygal Amir, who assassinated Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995, and Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer and injured 125 in Hebron in 1994.

Last year Netanyahu and Ben Gvir agreed to legalize settlements frozen, not coincidentally, in 2005. The entire West Bank is to be Israel’s Wild West. In a nation without a constitution, Israel’s supreme court is the only obstacle to human rights abuses. And now this coalition wants to neuter the nation’s court. Liberal Israelis fear the country is headed toward a future like Hungary’s.

With greater Palestinian suffering and the rise of a more authoritarian Zionism with fewer restraints and greater territorial aspirations — this is the dangerous context to this weekend’s invasion of Israel by an undisciplined group of Hamas fighters who carried out horrific murders, rapes, assaults and abductions of Israeli and international civilians in violation of international law.

But as an opinion piece by Sanjana Karanth reminds us, the Hamas attack may have been sadistic, indiscriminate and illegal. But to consider it totally “unprovoked” is to ignore 75 years of Israeli repression and Palestinian suffering.

As I watched videos of Hamas fighters moving systematically house-to-house in Sderot, it reminded me of the many videos I’ve seen of IDF troops moving house-to-house in Palestinian villages. It is likely that the Hamas kidnappings were intended in some twisted way to parallel Israel’s arrests, removal to Israeli soil, and indefinite imprisonment of Palestinians, arrested without warrant and imprisoned without court proceedings.

In 2009 I visited Israel and Palestine. I saw one of Israel’s physical Apartheid walls with my own eyes, the dehumanizing checkpoints, and I got a sense of the grim reality and deprivations for Palestinians. I visited a refugee center that generations of Palestinians have had to call home. I also visited an illegal settlement so large and so “American” that it was indistinguishable from an Orange County suburb with its ACE Hardware store and a community college. I visited Hebron and met an ultranationaist settler whose zealotry and violent fantasies alarmed me more than walking around Ramallah unchaperoned looking for a lunch spot.

In Sderot, which this weekend was ravaged by the Hamas invasion, I met with Mizrachi (Jews from Arab countries) peace activists who used to go into Gaza City to shop and who described the widespread PTSD of adults and children who have to hide in safe rooms. At the Zikim kibbutz, which was also breached by Hamas, I met with lefty Jews like me who sympathized with the plight of Palestinians despite being shelled. A huge concrete shield is built over the kibbutz’s daycare center to protect it from ketusha rockets fired so often that a cheeky rockets-to-ploughshares menorah was constructed out of the spent cylinders.

Everyone I met on that visit were all dear people, all precious lives. For everyone, Israelis and Palestinians alike, I want what we should all have – peace, enough to eat, security, a future for children and grandchildren. But for both Palestinians and Jews there can be no peace so long as Israel and Western nations (themselves no strangers to colonialism) wink at Israel’s colonial oppression and refuse to recognize the explosive potential of an oppressed people rising up in frustration because no one cares about them.

Once again this week we saw that potential.

As Israel’s “pro-democracy” movement suggests, Israelis themselves are beginning to understand that a state only for Jews with laws that privilege only Jews cannot ultimately even be a democracy for Jews. Just as white Americans have started to acknowledge this truth and our own history of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow, many Israelis are beginning to grapple with the realization that Zionism is not so different from good old-fashioned American white supremacy. It might help that many are former Americans who emigrated.

The long-awaited Third Intifada has finally broken out. The old slogan “no justice, no peace” seems particularly apt. Palestinian desperation and Israeli insecurity will be permanent features of Israel’s Apartheid state unless there is sufficient American and international pressure on Israel to abandon its vast illegal settlements to finally enable a Palestinian state to become a reality.