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

September 17, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcasters represent the Zionist mainstream

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

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

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

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

America’s antisemitism czar with two sociopaths

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

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

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Meningher working on Netanyahu’s campaigns

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

The Times of Israel’s founder attacks liberal news outlets

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

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

Turns out, genocide is a mainstream Zionist sentiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allan C. Brownfeld — Issues Spring – Summer 2024

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

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

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

Jewish Americans Are Not In “Exile”

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

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

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

A Rupture in American Jewish Life

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

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

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

No Liberal Rights for Palestinians

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

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

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

“Atrocities committed In Our Name“

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

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

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

Reform Jews for Justice

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

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

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

Muddying The Waters About Antisemitism

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

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

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

Younger Jews Disconnected from Israel

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

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

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

Protesting Against Slaughter Is Not Antisemitism

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

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

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

“A Piecemeal Holocaust”

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

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

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

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

Jewish Critics of AAA Legislation

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

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

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

Danger Of “Weaponizing Antisemitism”

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

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

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

“Netanyahu Making Israel Radioactive”

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

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

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

Worshipping A False Idol

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

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

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

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

Zionism Was a Minority View

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

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

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

Not A Nation but A Religious Community

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

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

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

Zionism: A Dangerous Wrong Turn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These tweaks included:

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Our Clergy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Why “Hell?”

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

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

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

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

Can you see or understand why Israelis are afraid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.