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.

Most Americans still think of Israel as the “little country that could” – what Israelis call their “startup nation.” Some fondly recall the kibbutzim or the old Labor governments, liberal-ish but not really all that liberal and certainly not democratic — at least for those in Arab villages inside and outside Israel’s borders. But since the 1967 war Israel has moved quite far to the right and has had a succession of right-wing governments. Over the years the U.S. has pumped over $150 billion into its economy, dedicated, at least in part, to maintaining a ethno-religious state many liken to South African Apartheid.

The 37th government of Israel, formed at the very end of 2022 and led by Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and Netanyahu, is the most right-wing of all time. It’s so extreme that Israel’s apologists now have an almost impossible job of defending the nation’s illiberal and openly racist policies. Liberal Israelis are alarmed by authoritarianism now directed against them and by religious extremism that now seeks to marginalize them. 28% are considering leaving the country. Tech companies (many of which are registered in Delaware) and some physicians are relocating. Both Smotrich and Ben Gvir openly call for murdering and expelling Palestinians. A settler now under arrest for murder in a pogrom on a Palestinian village once worked for an extremist Member of the Knesset who praises him as a hero.

All this is so over-the-top that a completely different response is required from the United States. And when I say “over the top” I mean: what’s happening today exceeds the routine mistreatment and deprivation of human rights that Israel has inflicted for 75 years on a population almost its own size — realities the U.S. ignores as it dishonestly claims to support a “Two-State Solution” — now impossible because of the colonization of the West Bank by over 650,000 settlers.

As enablers of Israel’s occupation and illegal settlements, U.S. administrations have complained unconvincingly that they have no real leverage with Israel. But the United States has always had both carrots and sticks. “Tough love” for Israel does not necessarily mean dismantling US-Israel military cooperation or slapping sanctions on a state that is arguably doing some of the same things to Palestinians that Russia is doing to Ukrainians. It could involve stopping the annual billions in subsidies (which even progressive Israelis are calling for). It might entail altering diplomatic status or pulling our embassy out of a colonized Jerusalem. It might be voting in the UN Security Council for or against resolutions condemning mistreatment of Palestinians on the basis of desired policy choices by Israel. Or it might take the form of rewarding Israel with economic deals (particularly in the tech, energy, and security sectors) when – and not until – Israel fully withdraws from the West Bank. That is, if the U.S. really wants to see a Two State Solution.

Speaking of economic development, a current focus for both Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu is making the Saudi-Israeli deal a reality. It’s to the personal political advantage of both to make the deal happen. Netanyahu is fighting to regain control of a coalition in which he’s now in the minority, and to stay out of jail on corruption charges. Biden is trying to score points with the American Right and Center. Supporting this effort, Hakeem Jeffries was in Israel recently with the Israeli lobby group AIPAC, which has been spending a lot of PAC money on attacking Democrats. Jeffries’ goal was apparently to send a message to an American Right that loves ethno-religious nationalism: Biden hasn’t given up on Israel. In fact, there’s a never-ending procession of Democratic supplicants arriving in Israel on either AIPAC or state and city-funded junkets. This week it was New York’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams seeking an audience with Netanyahu.

Instead of all this slavish ass kissing, Democrats ought to be exerting pressure to save what’s left of Israeli democracy and preserve the Two State option they claim to support – not endorsing an extremist government led by a prime minister about to be indicted, who was just presented with a plan from his coalition partners to put a million settlers in the West Bank.

For Netanyahu, who recently had a pacemaker implanted and has poured the last of his political, if not physical, capital into a government built out of the old Kach movement (at one time declared a terrorist organization and banned from Israeli politics), a Saudi-Israeli deal could be part of his legacy — that is, if it’s not tarnished by a prison sentence for corruption.

Liberal and Progressive — and even some not-so-liberal — Israelis are begging the U.S. to show some tough love for Israel. Organizations like ACRI (the Association for Civil Rights in Israel), the Israel Policy Forum, Partners for Progressive Israel, even the right-of-center Shalom Hartman Institute, and US Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Americans for Peace Now are concerned about the judicial coup now underway, which is intended to remove Supreme Court impediments to “unreasonable” actions by an extremist government. If the judicial coup succeeds, it will be the death of what is left of “democracy” in Israel proper (though neither democracy nor legal redress have ever existed in the West Bank or Gaza).

But that doesn’t faze Biden or Jeffries one bit. They’re playing to a right-wing or right-of-center electorate accustomed to displays of affection for “our unbreakable bond” with a nation whose ethno-supremacist dynamics are precisely like our own. And when the President invokes jingoist American exceptionalist rhetoric, calls for God’s blessings on the nation, and cheer-leads religious-ethnic supremacy elsewhere, it looks an awful lot like the “Lite” version of the Christian Nationalism that suffuses GOP politics. What ever happened to universal human rights and real democracy?

Neither Israel nor the U.S. has ever truly had a democracy for all of its people. In both cases the design of our democracies has privileged one group at the expense of deeply harming another. And now, because both designs were so deeply flawed right from the beginning — because neither even pretends to be a real democracy — they’re not even working for the privileged.

I am working on another piece on the “startup nation.” In the meantime there are some excellent books and online resources for readers and people who follow podcasts.

News from and about Israel-Palestine

The following websites feature Jewish Center and Progressive news and views, as well as Palestinian perspectives on Israel’s occupation and politics. Most have associated RSS feeds and podcasts.

• +972 Magazine: Independent Journalism from Israel-Palestine
• Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI)
• Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network
• BDS Movement: Freedom, Justice, Equality
• B’Tselem: the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• Electronic Intifada
• Haaretz (News of “The Land”)
• Channel 24 News
• Informed Comment (Juan Cole)
• Israel Policy Forum
• Israel Weekly News Roundup
• Jerusalem Post
• Jewish Currents
• Jewish Voice for Peace
• Jewish Voice for Peace Action
• Middle East Eye
• Partners For Progressive Israel
• Times of Israel
• Yedioth Ahronot (Latest News)
• Shalom Hartman Institute
• Center for Strategic International Studies
• Foundation for Middle East Peace
• Americans for Peace Now
• Institute of Middle East Understanding

Suggested Reading

I’m sure there are plenty of great books on the subject. I can only recommend ones I’ve actually read:

• 1949: The First Israelis by Tom Segev A co-editor of the Israeli newsweekly Koteret Rashit and a former writer for the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’aretz, Segev was given access to previously restricted official documents and personal diaries. The book tells the unvarnished story of the first year’s effort to build the State of Israel and in 1986 raised an uproar in Israel when many of the country’s founding myths were shown to be untrue. “1949” documents directives, many from David Ben-Gurion, to expel and prohibit readmission of Palestinians. Negev was perhaps the first Israeli to document the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The second part of the book documents Israel’s cruel treatment of Mizrahim (Arab Jews) and the growing conflict between religious and secular Jews.
• A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time by Howard M. Sachar This is a monster of a book. While Laqueur’s book (below) is on placing Zionism in historical context, this book places Israel in historical and world context. Just as one example, it describes the British Mandate which was the agar plate on which Israeli statehood grew. If you are interested in long descriptions of battles in Israel’s various wars, with accompanying maps, this is for you (I skipped past a lot of it). Though Sachar is no friend of the “new historians” and much of his material seems to reflect “official” positions of the government, other parts of the book seem fair. In a later chapter on Israeli politics, for example, he cites a 1984 Knesset report on Orthodox schools warning that “our schools have been thrown wide open to chauvinist and antidemocratic influences.” Considerable anti-Arab hate was generated by Rabbi Zvi Kook, spiritual leader of the Gush Emunim settler movement. Religious arguments were twisted into hate speech. Arabs became Amalek. “Death to the Arabs” became a common phrase. The Techiya Party was founded by Gush Emunim zealots who began calling for the expulsion of all Arabs. Other “hate” parties popped up (Tsomet, Molodet, and Kach, established by Meier Kahane). Kahane was a Brooklyn racist who founded the Jewish Defense League and then emigrated to Israel. As Sachar describes him, Kahane was a civic cancer much like Donald Trump: “Attracting public attention with his demagoguery, [and] his flagrant appeals to racism and mob intimidation […]” Israel’s Jewish nationalist bigotry is the twin of America’s Christian nationalist bigotry and Kahanists now dominate Israel’s current government.
• A History of Zionism by Walter Zeev Laqueur This is an excellent companion to Hertzberg’s anthology (below). While Hertzberg lets Zionists speak for themselves, Laqueur places each in historical context. He begins with the Jewish ghettos of the Middle Ages and ends with the establishment of the state of Israel and, finally, Thirteen Theses on Zionism. It is not unfair to say that Laqueur is a conflicted admirer of Zionism. For him the jury’s still out, but as far as he’s concerned it was a necessity. His theses are worth reading, and their implications tell us certain things about Zionism. Thesis 3, for example, points out that assimilation is the enemy of Zionism and a product of contact with Europe. Thesis 8: The Zionist movement was unclear about its objectives until Nazism arrived. The betrayal of Palestinians by the West created much of the animosity toward Jewish settlement. Thesis 9: This animosity sharpened as Zionism moved from a cultural renewal focus to statehood. Thesis 10: “Seen from the Arab point of view, Zionism was an aggressive movement, Jewish immigration an invasion […] Throughout history nation-states have not come into existence as the result of peaceful development and legal contracts. They developed from invasions, colonisation, violence, and armed struggle.” Laqueur adds, “It was the historical tragedy of Zionism that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map.” Thesis 13: Zionism has succeeded in restoring dignity to Jews in the eyes of the world and becoming a focus for world Jewry. But in terms of “fanciful” expectations (“Zion as a new spiritual lodestar, a model for the redemption of mankind, a centre of humanity”) it has not panned out quite as the early Zionists had hoped.
• How Israel Lost by Richard Ben Cramer Cramer writes, “any Jew who isn’t an Israeli and not on psychotropic drugs, could solve this Peace-for-Israel thing in about ten minutes of focused thought. Give back the land to the Palestinians. All of it [the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem]. And since Palestinians are already living in their own country, they should have equal rights, a fact so laughably obvious – the only nation that can’t see this is Israel.” And this, remarkably, is from a guy who doesn’t bother to disguise his contempt for Arabs in general.
• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé Pappé is one of Israel’s New Historians who, with the release of British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, began rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the corresponding expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians that same year. Pappé maintained that the expulsions were not on an ad hoc basis but constituted the intentional ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. By the time he left Israel in 2008, Pappé had been condemned in the Knesset, a minister of education had called for him to be fired, his photograph with an attached bullseye had appeared in a newspaper, and Pappé had received several death threats. American historians grappling with our own white supremacy know exactly what Pappé faced from those who refuse to look clear-eyed into the mirror of history.
• The Iron Cage by Rashid Khalidi This is an interesting book by a Palestinian who looks at not only Israel’s (and the West’s) tight control of Palestinians but at the historical errors pre-1948 which Palestinian leaders made and which contributed to the non-existence of a Palestinian state. Of course the West dealt the death-blow to Palestinian statehood when Britain gave up Palestine. Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour stated in 1919, “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” Translation: Fuck the Arabs. Khalidi ends with an appeal to the U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian leadership to “look honestly at what has happened in this small land over the past century […] and especially at how repeatedly forcing the Palestinians into […] an iron cage, has brought, and ultimately can bring, no lasting good to anyone.”
• The Israel-Arab Reader edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin Israel is situated in a very big neighborhood and its nearest neighbors, the Palestinians, often have no voice in historical accounts. This book does not have a “through” narrative like many anthologies, but it is provides a handy reference of important historical documents. It includes hundreds of official documents and speeches, from some of the first Zionist Congresses to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, to the San Remo Conference assignment of Palestine to Britain, to the Balfour Declaration, the PLO Constitution, speeches by Anwar Sadat, George Schultz, Yasir Arafat, and more.
• The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl In many ways this is the blueprint for Israel. This book is also found in Arthur Hertzberg’s anthology as well as on Project Gutenberg in both English and in the original German. It is a fascinating read. Herzl did not have a democracy in mind for the Jewish state (“I incline to an aristocratic republic”). Settlement was to be coordinated by a colonial enterprise he called the “Jewish Company” (not far off from the Jewish Agency which actually accomplished the task ). The Constitution (which never materialized) was to be forced upon the settlers (“Our people, who are receiving the new country from the Society, will also thankfully accept the new constitution it offers them. Should any opposition manifest itself, the Society will suppress it”). This year Herzl got his wish for an openly anti-democratic state. And as for those living In Palestine already? Expropriate their property and kick them out! “We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”
• The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin This is a collection of essays by writers, journalists, academics, and historians on the Israeli Left. These critics of Apartheid, Occupation, settlements, human rights abuses, and Israeli domestic and foreign policy are as reviled as many of their American equivalents on the progressive and socialist democratic Left. In 2009 I was in Israel and met Jeff Halper, one of the contributors to this volume, who discussed Israel’s “matrix of control” for the systematic theft of Palestinian land. His essay on the topic is included in this collection. The book concludes with Tom Segev’s essay on “Transfer” – a common euphemism for ethnic cleansing used by many on the Israeli right and center. And to be clear: ethnic cleansing is intended not only for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Former Labor Party minister Ephraim Sneh actually proposed transferring sovereignty of Israeli Arab towns, including Umm al-Fahm which is near both Haifa and Jenin, to the Palestinian Authority.
• The Zionist Idea edited by Arthur Hertzberg Zionism may have originally been intended to be Jewish self-determination in the service of self-protection, pride, and autonomy, but it has become a lot like its evil twin Christian nationalism. In this volume you hear the words of Zionists themselves. And there are many. Those whose names you may recognize include: Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State); Max Nordau; Hayyim Nahman Bialik; Abraham Isaac Kook; Martin Buber; Mordecai Menahem Kaplan – and some who actually had a hand in creating the state of Israel: Meir Bar-Ilan; Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky; Chaim Weizmann; Abba Hillel Silver; and David Ben-Gurion.
• Whither Israel? The Domestic Challenges edited by Keith Kyle and Joel Peters This book by British foreign policy specialists was first published in 1993 – thirty years ago – but still identifies many of the issues catching up with Israel today. From the book’s blurb: “As it enters the 1990’s Israel faces crucial political, economic and social challenges. Its parliamentary system is proving increasingly ineffective, prompting demands for electoral and constitutional reform; its economy is beset by stagnation, inflation and unemployment and its economic difficulties feed and exacerbate existing social and political tensions. This book considers the impact of these problems and their implication for the future direction of Israeli politics and society. Different chapters examine the social and ideological divisions that beset Israel, the roots of the country’s economic problems, the dynamics of the Israeli political system and recent developments within political parties.”

Required Reading

If you want to understand Israel you have to understand its longest-serving Prime Minister and his attachment to Jabotinsky’s strain of Zionism.

• The Iron Wall by Ze’ev Jabotinsky “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” Jabotinsky was an admirer of Mussolini as were many of the Revisionist Zionists (until Italy’s alliance with Germany). Benjamin Netanyahu is at heart a Revisionist Zionist and, not coincidentally, his father was Jabotinsky’s secretary.

Among the many unsettling images from last Wednesday’s attempted coup at the Capitol were vicious attacks on Capitol police officers, bombs, terrorists with stun guns and spears, a lynch mob with its own gallows, a mob prepared to kidnap legislators, numerous Confederate flags, with many of the participants screaming anti-semitic and racist slurs.

One of the insurrectionists, Robert Keith Packer of Virginia, sported a sweatshirt reading “Camp Auschwitz – Work Brings Freedom.” Packer’s presence at the Capitol reminded us of the very real American anti-semitism which, most starkly, resulted in the murders of 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, and an attack on the Poway synagogue in 2019 which left one dead and three injured.

That year was especially bad because, in addition to Poway, there had also been an attempt to blow up a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado, followed by a shooting in a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, and a mass-stabbing during Hanukkah in Monsey, New York.

There is no denying that anti-semitism exists. It is toxic and it is pervasive. At Passover each year we recite the line “in every generation they rise up against us.” In good years the oppression is universal. In bad years, it’s all too literal.

But one of the memes that has come out of the unrest and displays of hatred in this country is the claim that both the Left and Right are equally guilty of hatred and violence. These claims have been so powerful that they have become potent weapons. Precisely as intended, they resulted in a purge of thousands of Leftist members of the British Labor Party. In the United States, progressive Democrats have had the same target drawn on their backs.

While memes like this may tap into a naive desire to return to an imaginary “center,” there is really no center to return to. The Democrats have moved right since Clinton, but the Republicans have moved into fascist territory since Trump. We can preserve the center only by moving back a bit to the left.

In a community conversation sponsored by the YWCA yesterday, a couple of people claimed that “Far Left” violence was just as bad as the Far Right’s. But this is a baseless claim. We may have seen people upset with an epidemic of racist police murders marching in the street last May, along with some property damage — but you’d have to go back to the days of the Weather Underground to match the violence of today’s Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, KKK, neo-Nazis, militias, QAnon conspiracy nuts, and lone wolf terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.

Another remark made yesterday by a good friend of mine with whom I have disagreed on this topic for many years is that the Left is equally guilty of anti-semitism.

Sorry, friend. This accusation has only empty calories if you lump in critics of Israeli domestic and foreign policy with those who actually shoot up synagogues or spread conspiracies of Jewish “cosmopolitans” trying to take over the world.

More specifically, the accusation of “Left anti-semitism” targets people with legitimate criticisms. Is it anti-semitic to point out that Palestinians have no legal protections and have lived under martial law since 1948? Is it anti-semitic to point out that, under international law, Israel is obligated to provide for Palestinians but has not even made COVID-19 vaccines available to them? Is it anti-semitic to prefer the non-violent Boycott and Divestment (BDS) campaign to an armed intifada?

Precisely because BDS has touched a moral nerve and has been so successful, its supporters are now in Israel’s crosshairs, and also in the crosshairs of a number of domestic groups which lobby in Israel’s interests. Worse, these lobbying efforts have convinced many Americans that opposing Zionism is precisely the same as hating Jews and this has given rise to legislation that punishes those who support BDS.

Long before Theodor Herzl wrote “der Judenstaat” Zionists dreamed of “returning” to the Israel from which Jews were sent into exile in the 2nd Century. 19th Century anti-semitism made their dream more vivid, and the Holocaust made the dream a necessity, as Jewish refugees were literally turned away at ports by many countries, including Britain and the United States.

But Herzl’s description of the Holy Land as a “land for people without land” was not exactly true, and if you read his pamphlet you note the variety of methods for making those already living there leave in favor of the newcomers. Interestingly, Herzl did not envision Israel as a democracy but as a regency. And Herzl himself proposed Uganda as one possibility for settlement at a Zionist Congress. Zionists also considered buying a portion of Argentina. The Balfour Declaration essentially gave Britain’s post-war colony to Jewish settlers. As in Herzl’s pamphlet, settlement was originally handled by a corporation that would buy land. And for a short while, Israel did purchase land. But then Israel simply took land from the Palestinians.

The history of Israel and Palestine is complicated, but one thing is indisputable. Zionism is a colonial settler enterprise. Stripped down to its basic function, it was designed to send settlers to a land with indigenous people and take land and resources from them. Whatever you think of biblical justifications for taking land, or the fact that two millenia before Jews had lived there, Zionism was a project precisely like the Puritans arriving in Massachusetts with the London Company and taking what the Wampanoag owned — including their lives.

No one expressed this dark side of Zionism more clearly, more unapologetically, than Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Russian admirer of Benito Mussolini, who is credited with creating “revisionist Zionism” and writing “The Iron Wall” — in which he wrote:

It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.

That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say “non” and withdraw from Zionism.

Jabotinsky understood well what Israel was doing was replacing Arabs with Jews, committing cultural and political, if not physical, genocide. Jabotinsky’s program was to erect an “Iron Wall” — not a literal wall like Trump’s but a “no concessions to indigenous people” policy. This is the policy that the Likud Party has followed since its inception. It is no coincidence that Binyamin Netanyahu’s father was Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s secretary.

The Neo-fascist revisionist Zionists of yesterday were more honest than their American defenders today who ignore the ongoing oppression, land theft, and human rights abuses. Jabotinsky actually called the Palestinians by their name in contrast to Golda Meir — often associated with a more “liberal” pre-Likud Israel — who denied Palestinian peoplehood.

Today, Liberals continue bending over backward to defend Israel’s abuses and to demonize its critics. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted Israel’s definition of anti-semitism for the U.S. State Department, and it includes the murder of Jews in synagogues but also numerous forms of criticism of Israel. The author of this definition was Natan Sharansky, Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs and Jerusalem. Imagine not being able to criticize the House of Saud or the Vatican. Imagine not being able to “single out” Britain because it is the only nation whose official church is the Anglican Church.

Israel’s defenders include not only pro-settler elements of the Republican Party like former ambassador David Friedman or the late Sheldon Adelson. But reflexive defenders also include American liberals who long ago decided that having white nationalist, Christian fundamentalist control of the goverment did not add up to a democracy — but, somehow, Jewish supremacy and extreme racism toward Arabs does. This is a country where half of Israelis believe in expelling Arabs and where one out of four prefer Jewish law to democracy.

To the credit of many Israelis — including a sizeable diaspora of those who have left, and for a large segment of American Jews — nationalism of any kind is a scourge.

If you think these are fringe observations, check out the human rights reports of B’Tselem, take a look at Israel’s liberal newspaper Haaretz, visit +972, a collective of Jewish and Palestinian writers, or get on the Jewish Voice for Peace mailing list. And inform yourself about the BDS movement.

Nationalism — white, Christian, Hindu, Polish, Hungarian, German, or Jewish — is fundamentally undemocratic, divisive, and toxic.

Honestly, I don’t know why I even have to write these words.

“America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” AIPAC, has long sponsored legislation to stifle the American public’s right to discuss or protest Israel’s abuses. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s founder Omar Barghouti, is prohibited from entering the US, while Israel’s lobbyists have successfully sponsored legislation in roughly 30 states and in both the US House and Senate to make BDS boycotts illegal. Amazingly, these lobbyists are not required to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). At the federal level, with AIPAC’s legislation opposed by numerous civil liberties groups, AIPAC is still trying to keep their foot in the door. Senate Resolution S.Res.120 and House resolution H.Res.246 still support criminalizing boycotts of Israel.

Perhaps the only silver lining in all this is that AIPAC just made it easier to decide the fitness of Democratic candidates in the coming election. Representatives Tim Ryan and Eric Swalwell, and Senators Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar are all co-sponsors of the AIPAC-written resolution. For me, human rights, foreign policy, and free speech are all litmus test issues. These candidates apparently have no respect for any of these concerns. Other Democratic presidential candidates have had their flirtations with AIPAC as well. Only Bernie Sanders — ironically the only Jewish candidate in the bunch — has refused to attend AIPAC conventions.

In Massachusetts, half the Democratic delegation support AIPAC’s assault on free speech. No surprise from the usual Blue Dogs — Representatives Bill Keating, Joe Kennedy III, Richard Neal, and Lori Trahan — but a shock to see Senator Ed Markey joining them — by supporting the AIPAC resolution, all just displayed their contempt for both human rights for Palestinians and Americans’ right to do something about it peacefully.

Regardless of what some Republicans think, Israel is a secular nation like any other. As such, it has all the usual warts — traffic jams, corruption, poverty, and pollution. But Israel also imposes martial law and has occupied Palestinian territory for generations, closely resembling South Africa’s Apartheid system — separate courts, separate roads, the original Trumpian wall, imprisonment without charges for parents and children alike, and Israel has enacted ugly race laws that determine who is a citizen. Naturally, not everyone thinks this is such a great thing. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a non-violent protest against Israel’s policies. AIPAC, which serves as Israel’s attack dog on BDS, does not even remotely represent any shared value with the United States. But it certainly is an effective, unregulated foreign agent for Israel.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) may be the best-known of BDS opponents, there are dozens of organizations that lobby for Israeli interests, foreign, military and economic aid — including changes to American laws. There are about three dozen pro-Israel political action committees that funnel millions of dollars to politicians of both parties. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CoP) consists of over fifty organizations that advocate on behalf of Israel, all of whom sit on AIPAC’s executive committee.

The American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) is a branch of AIPAC that runs free junkets for congressmen to Israel to hear from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and provides funding to AIPAC. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) pushes hard-line, anti-Arab, anti-Iranian Middle Eastern policies. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) used to be a civil rights organization, but now primarily attacks critics of Israel and promotes Likudnik foreign policy. The Israel Project disseminates Israeli propaganda, while the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF) raises funds for a foreign military [!!] and brings Israeli soldiers to the US as good-will “ambassadors.”

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) links 125 Zionist organizations to 17 umbrella groups for 4 main Jewish religious currents in the US. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) receives much of its funding from Sheldon Adelson and has embraced the American Far Right. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) describes its mission as “advocating for Israel and the Jewish people.” The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) — like many of the others — conflates Jewish life with Israeli interests and functions primarily as an extension of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

The Jewish People Policy Insitute (JPPI) is dedicated to “strengthening the attachment of young American Jews to Israel.” Its board of directors includes former US Ambassadors Dennis Ross and Stuart Eizenstat, Iran hawk Elliot Abrams, and other leading lights of US Zionist organizations such as Michael Steinhardt (Birthright Israel) and Steve Hoffman (Cleveland Jewish Federation). Interestingly, JPPI is critical of far-right politics — In Israel — but grateful for the help from the American far right.

And then there are the media watchdogs, which attack journalists critical of Israel. These include: the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which at times has provided questionable translations of news from the Middle East; the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) which often targets specific news sources as “antisemitic”; the Middle East Forum (MEF); and the Haym Salomon Center, which disseminates pro-Israel spin and Islamophobic content “in order to defend Western civilization.”

Campus organizations like Hillel used to provide a friendly place for Jewish students to come together. But, as right-wing benefactors have politicized and weaponized Jewish institutions, Hillel has now become a means of silencing Israel’s campus critics, including faculty. Hillel’s FAQ describes its mission: “Israel is at the heart of Hillel’s work. Our goal is to inspire every Jewish college student to develop a meaningful and enduring relationship to Israel and to Israelis.” Stand With Us and Israel on Campus Coalition likewise promote pro-Israel messaging on American college campuses.

In Congress itself we have the Republican Jewish Coalition — which, despite the word Jewish, does not study Torah but instead promotes pro-Israel policy. There is also the National Jewish Democratic Council, which “educates Democratic elected officials and candidates to increase support for Jewish domestic and foreign policy priorities” — as if all American Jews supported the Israeli occupation or its far right governments. American lawmakers frequently participate in all-expenses-paid economic missions to Israel courtesy of the Association of America-Israel Chambers of Commerce. Who, after all, would fault a politician for trying to drum up a little business back home?

Then there are the Christian Zionist groups — the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFC) — “be an advocate for Israel.” Christians United for Israel (CUFI) is run by Evangelical minister John Hagee, who is eagerly waiting for the Middle East to blow up to bring on the End Times. Passages “offers Christian college students with leadership potential a fresh and innovative approach to experiencing the Holy Land to make them “voices for Israel.” The Israel Allies Foundation (IAF) promotes “Judeo-Christian values” and, once again, is nothing but an unregulated foreign lobbying group.

In 2006. foreign policy scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were commissioned by the Atlantic to write about the Israel lobby — and they covered many of the groups mentioned above. But the Atlantic refused to publish their article and it was left to the London Review of Books instead, a foreign publication, to give the essay an audience. The essay was later fleshed out in a much-maligned book that was savaged by most liberal newspapers and magazines.

A decade later the tide is turning on the acceptability of criticizing Israel’s occupation and treatment of Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze. And some Israelis themselves are doing the same. As Americans come to terms with their own White Supremacy, many of the similarities between Israel and the United States have come into focus. After years of lying to ourselves about the meaning of words, some have refused to use “alt-Right” and instead write ‘fascist.” Journalists have begun to criticize their own timid use of “racially charged” and some opt for the more honest word “racist.”

Courageous legislators have become disgusted by the Orwellian term “detention facilities” and now simply call them what they really are — “concentration camps.” The freedom to use honest language has had a liberating effect on young Jews, who recently committed acts of civil disobedience in front of ICE facilities all over the country.

So it is long overdue that we had a long, hard look at Israel’s aggressive, unregulated “lobbying.” It’s time we confronted Israel’s relentless efforts to alter American law for its own benefit that it conducts in coordination with a sprawling network of American groups with ties to the American far right.

Let’s call it what it really is — foreign meddling.

For over a century Iran has experienced US meddling in its affairs and, for all our professed love of democracy, it was the US which ended Iranian democracy in 1955 when it installed a dictator. After Iran subsequently became an Islamic theocracy, the United States has spied on it, unleashed the Stuxnet computer virus on it (and half the world by accident), supported violent Iranian exile groups like the MEK, hit Iranian civilians with crippling sanctions, and parked aircraft carriers of Iran’s coastline at no greater a distance than from Falmouth to Oak Bluffs.

Most recently the United States unilaterially withdrew from the US-Iranian nuclear agreement, placed the Iranian military on a terrorist watchlist, and put economic sanctions on Iran’s Ayatollah. But let’s remember — Iran was not responsible for 911, nor has Iran been implicated in any act of terrorism in the United States. And yet American politicians of both parties file bill after bill, resolution after resolution, ratcheting up sanctions on Iranian civilians — all to stop supposed Iranian aggression. But who’s the aggressor here?

If there is a war — and it’s looking more likely every day — it won’t be over drones and shipping channels. It will be a long-desired war to ensure Israel’s status as the only nuclear superpower in the region, and a war to augment the power of the Saudi dictatorship. And, if Trump’s neoconservatives John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Michael Pompeo have their way, it will also be another war to effect regime change in the Middle East. Because the United States, always playing God more than policeman, seeks to make the world in its own image.

The War in Vietnam, the Iraq debacle, and the Spanish-American war were only possible because a credulous American public allowed itself to be deceived by nationalism, propaganda, and outright lies. U.S. claims of Iranian attacks on marine vessels in the Persian Gulf are the just the latest justifications for war.

Neoconservatives have convinced Republicans that invading Iran is one way to make America Great Again, and that an American invasion would be a “slam dunk.” Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton thinks it wouldn’t take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.” But an entire generation has grown up since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq, a much smaller country than Iran. After hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US is also still in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime.

Cooler and better-informed heads remind us that Iran is 3.7 times the size of Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska, with 3 times the population of Iraq — 81 million people. Iran can also mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty military. And while the Gulf War “coalition” could count on NATO allies, Europe is now skeptical of another American war and is still party to the nuclear agreement the U.S. unilaterally dropped out of.

Understanding the conflict with Iran is to understand the history of American Imperialism and military adventurism. While Native American genocide, slavery, colonialism, Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine all had roots of U.S. Imperialism, the United States embarked upon Imperialism with a vengeance during the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars. The American SouthWest, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam were all taken from Spain and Mexico. Several islands are still colonies after more than a century.

The modern period of American Imperialism began after the US emerged relatively unscathed by World War II. The United States regarded the Soviet Union as its enemy in the post-war period, and the profitable machinery of the military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned of, kept churning. The Cold War was the result of a combination of prudence, paranoia, ideological zealotry, and capitalist profit-taking.

1950

In 1950 the National Security Council circulated a document, NSC-68, which made its recommendations to President Harry Truman. NSC-68 lays out a view of a bi-polar world in which the U.S. and the USSR compete for power. It establishes “containment” of the Soviet Union as its primary goal, which requires fostering “the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system” and requires becoming a nuclear superpower “in dependable combination with other likeminded nations.”

1960

Starting in roughly 1960, Israeli nuclear technology was acquired by stealth and back-door help from Western nations, including the U.S., France, Norway, and Germany. Neither Israel nor its colonial allies has ever acknowledged its nuclear weapons program.

The first nuclear reactor in the Middle East was Israel’s Dimona reactor

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/israel-nuclear-weapons-117014?o=3

“three successive U.S. administrations–under presidents Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon–would have to deal with it as well. Kennedy chose the toughest path of struggle and confrontation in his effort to check the program; Johnson realized that the U.S. had limited leverage on the issue and planted the seeds of compromise and looked the other way; finally, in a bargain with Prime Minister Golda Meir, Nixon accepted the Israel’s de facto nuclear status as long as it stayed secret–a controversial and unacknowledged deal that remains in place effectively through the current day.”

1965

In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a disgruntled worker with Israel’s nuclear program, blew the whistle on the program. In 2014, former member of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, blew the whistle on both Israel’s nukes and chemical weapons. When reporter Helen Thomas asked Barak Obama if Israel had nukes, he dodged the question and refused to “speculate.” Experts believe Israel now has between 80 to 100 nukes.

1981

One question not frequently asked is: what was the U.S. involvement in Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Israel’s 2007 bombing of Syria’s al-Kibar reactor? If past is prologue, then it might be useful to examine the history. A “senior US intelligence officer” testified to Congress in 2008 on American participation of the al-Kibar bombing:

“One of the things that I’m sure also people are wondering is whether there was any discussion between us and the Israelis about policy options and how to respond to these facts. We did discuss policy options with Israel. Israel considered a Syrian nuclear capability to be an existential threat to the state of Israel. After these discussions, at the end of the day Israel made its own decision to take action. It did so without any green light from us – so-called ‘green light’ from us; none was asked for, none was given. […] We understand the Israeli action. We believe this clandestine reactor was a threat to regional peace and security, and we have stated before that we cannot allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to acquire the world’s most dangerous weapons.”

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

The facility had been under watch by the United States since 2003. Without having to read between the lines too much, it is clear that the bombing of the al-Kibar reactor was done with the assistance, permission, advance knowledge, and blessings of the Bush administration, which saw the reactor as an effort by two of Bush’s “axes of evil” to threaten “regional peace and security.”

2007 – October

U.S. plans to bomb Iran (Biden no, Clinton yes)

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/opinion/10dowd.html

2008 – June

A year ago Israel conducted war games U.S. officials said were intended to send Iran a threatening message. The BBC reported the same story as “Israelis ‘rehearse Iran Attack’.”

2008 – August

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius dismissed the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran. But, like a bad penny, it’s a story that keeps coming back.

2009 – February

In February Reuters reported that Israel claimed that time was running out and it had only about another year to attack Iran.

2009 – May

In May Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak offered to give up settlement outposts in exchange for the U.S. letting Israel “focus its attention on the Iranian nuclear threat”. Make your own inferences about what that means.

Israel offers to trade settlements for U.S. permission to bomb Iran

Netanyahu: Outposts in exchange for Iran

2009 – June

Pundit M. J. Rosenberg’s last posting on Talking Points warned that the Fall would bring renewed calls for liberals to support a military attack on Iran – not necessarily a U.S. attack, but one by Israel. Rosenberg pointed to hasbara efforts by Jewish organizations to soften up public acceptance of an Israeli military strike on Iran:

Anyway, this fall will be critical. While we’re sweating the health care issue, the usual suspects will be ignoring all that and trying hard to set us up for a third war in the Muslim world. And, I hear, that it will be a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans who will join in opposition to President Obama to sneak this one by us. Why not? Both parties want to please the pro-war crowd in advance of the 2010 elections. Watch your favorite liberal. I expect that if you pay attention, you will hear things that you haven’t heard come out of a Democrat’s mouth since the run-up to Iraq. […] If we go to war or give Israel a permission slip, it will be the Democrats who bear prime responsibility. Pay attention.

AIPAC statements, the view from Israel that contradicts the State Department’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear readiness, the American Jewish Committee, the Zionist Organization of America, the World Jewish Congress, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and a poll commissioned by the Israel Project which purports to show a massive increase in public support for a specifically Jewish state and concern over Iran’s nuclear program. But not a peep about Israel’s own nuclear program.

Participating in, or permitting, an attack on Iran would have frightful consequences. The Christian Science Monitor ran an article last June entitled ‘How Iran would retaliate if it comes to war.’ The Atlantic Monthly ran one titled ‘What if the Israelis bomb Iran’ War colleges, foreign policy wonks, and even Fleet Street and Wall Street have begun speculating on the results of such an attack.

American Zionist organizations may resent the claim that Jews are being unfairly associated with neoconservative politics and Israel advocacy at odds with American interests. But if this were true, then they would stop wallowing in that swamp and dragging American Jews, whom they claim to represent, into the muck with them.

2009 – July

In July, the Jerusalem Post reported that a deal between European nations and Israel was evolving, which would permit Israel to attack Iran in exchange for unspecified “concessions in peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors.”

2009 – September

Neoconservatives and pro-Israel organizations and ideologues have been calling lately for military action against Iran. House Democrats with close ties to Israel have also been making the same noises. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations organized a call for rabbis to condemn Iran from the pulpit during the High Holy Days. And now Obama’s Defense Secretary is trying to sell war on Iran – to the Arab world.

It sure looks like we’re being prepped for another war.

The Jerusalem Post, in an article titled “Arab world should arm against Iran,” quotes US Defense Secretary Robert Gates calling for Arab nations to beef-up their militaries. The article is based on an interview with Al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara, which can be viewed below. According to Gates, large weapons purchases are already being negotiated with the United States.

In the interview, Foukara asks Gates about the double-standard of asking Iran to give up nuclear research while never questioning Israel’s nuclear program. Gates responds:

First of all, it’s the Iranian leadership that has said it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Those threats have not been made in the other direction. It is the Iranian government that is in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions with respect to these programmes, so focus needs to be on the country that is feuding the will of the international community and the United Nations.

There’s so much wrong in Gates’ response that it requires some comment. First, I am still looking for a credible translation of an actual threat by Iran against Israel. Neoconservative and pro-Israel warmongers apparently found what they were looking for in some flowery Farsi. But in terms of violations of UN resolutions, Israel is the clear winner. Then Gates has the threats backwards. Israel’s war games last year, this year’s demonstrations of Israeli naval force in the Suez Canal, and countless Israeli speculations of the “best time to bomb” all convey the impression that, if anyone is about to become an aggressor, it’s Israel.

This is a very troubling interview because it demonstrates that the Obama administration itself, as much as any lobbyist or group of pro-Israel House Democrats, is also starting the beat the drum of war.

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Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

FOUKARA: The issue of Iran and Israel is obviously rattling a lot of countries in the region, the Israelis, the Gulf states, who are thinking about buying more and more weapons, and indeed there has been some sales authorised by the United States. Some estimates put the weapons packages to the Gulf states and Israel at about $100bn. How much substance is there to that?

GATES: That figure sounds very high to me. But I think there’s a central question or a central point here to be made and it has to do both with our friends and allies in the region, our Arab allies, as well as the Iranian nuclear programme, and that is one of the pathways, to get the Iranians to change their approach on the nuclear issue, is to persuade them that moving down that path will actually jeopardise their security, not enhance it.

So the more that our Arab friends and allies can straighten their security capabilities, the more they can strengthen their co-operation, both with each other and with us, I think sends the signal to the Iranians that this path they’re on is not going to advance Iranian security but in fact could weaken it.

So that’s one of the reasons why I think our relationship with these countries and our security co-operation with them is so important.

FOUKARA: I mentioned $100bn and you said that doesn’t sound right to you. What does sound right to you as a figure?

GATES: I honestly don’t know.

FOUKARA: But there are a lot of weapons being asked for by the countries in the region?

GATES: We have a very broad foreign military sales programme and obviously with most of our friends and allies out there, but the arrangements that are being negotiated right now, I just honestly don’t know the accumulated total.

FOUKARA: You’re asking the Iranians to give up their intentions to build nuclear weapons. They are saying they’re not building nuclear weapons. On the other hand, a lot of people in the region feel that you know that the Israelis do have nuclear weapons and they say why doesn’t the West start with Israel, which is known to possess nuclear weapons rather than with the Iranians, who are suspected of having them. What do you say to that argument?

GATES: First of all, it’s the Iranian leadership that has said it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Those threats have not been made in the other direction. It is the Iranian government that is in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions with respect to these programmes, so focus needs to be on the country that is feuding the will of the international community and the United Nations.

FOUKARA: But you decided that the rhetoric of the Iranians reflects the reality of what’s going on in Iran in terms of nuclear weapons. Isn’t that a leap of faith?

GATES: Well, we obviously have information in terms of what the Iranians are doing. We also have what the Iranians themselves have said, so we only are taking them at their word.

FOUKARA: So you know for sure that they are working on a nuclear bomb?

GATES: I would not go that far but clearly they have elements of their nuclear programme that are in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

We want them to adhere to these resolutions and we are willing to acknowledge the right of the Iranian government and the Iranian people to have a peaceful nuclear programme if it is intended for the production of electric power so on. What is central, then, is trying to persuade the Iranians to agree to that and then to verification procedures under the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].

That gives us confidence that it is indeed a peaceful nuclear programme and not a weaponisation programme.

The truth of the matter is that, if Iran proceeds with a nuclear weapons programme it may well spark and arms race, a real arms race, and potentially a nuclear arms race in the entire region.

So it is in the interest of all countries for Iran to agree to arrangements that allow a peaceful nuclear programme and give the international community confidence that’s all they’re doing.

FOUKARA: But the Obama administration seems to have a difficult circle to square because on one hand they’re saying that they want improved relations with the Muslim world. On the other hand, any pressure on Iran, is seen by people in the Muslim world as an indication the US is not genuine in wanting to improve those relations because many Muslims say Israel has nuclear weapons, and the US is not doing anything about it.

GATES: The focus is on which country is in violation of the UN Security Council resolutions. The pressure on Iran is simply to be a good member of the international community.

The neighbours around Iran, our Arab friends and allies, are concerned about what is going on in Iran, and not just the governments.

So the question is how does Iran become a member in good standing of the international community. That’s in the interest of everybody.

2009 – September – more

Zionist organizations in America are on the warpath. A war with Iran over nuclear exclusivity. The American Jewish Committee released a video on Youtube today entitled “This is the button,” inexplicably accompanied by lounge music, showing a toy truck followed by a terrorist explosion in Argentina attributed to Iran. Then the image of a child’s toy truck is followed by video footage of Iranian thugs on motorbikes terrorizing demonstrators in Teheran. Then videos of hangings of adulterers, and finally the words “This is the button” followed by another image “You don’t want to see what Iran does with the button.”

Clearly any nation that would murder civilians, suppress dissent, or make a mockery of its legal system cannot be trusted to have nuclear weapons. I certainly agree, but unfortunately these characteristics describe every nation that already possesses nukes, including Israel.

The AJC goes on to inform us in its online petition to Congress:

“With enough low-enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon, and more centrifuges spinning each day, Iran is dangerously close to crossing the nuclear threshold. A nuclear Iran would particularly threaten Israel and our moderate Arab allies, and would destabilize the Middle East and threaten the security of the entire globe.”

“The security of the entire globe.” Why is hasbara so melodramatic? A nuclear Iran would indeed spell the last days of Israel’s nuclear hegemony but, according to Ehud Barak last week, “Israel is strong, I don’t see anyone who could pose an existential threat.” The Iran War will be all about Israel’s ability to remain the only nuclear power in the immediate region.

The nation’s synagogues have also apparently been enlisted in the Iran War by former American Michael Oren, now the Israeli Ambassador to the United States. Oren sent a letter to most American congregations, including mine, to be read during services at Rosh Hashanah. The instructions read:

“We are facing a critical juncture in our history. The Jewish community must confront this unprecedented threat before it is too late. I urge you as leaders of the Jewish community to impress this situation on your congregations. It is imperative to act now, at the start of a new year, and to join our voices in doing what [is] absolutely necessary to stop the Iranian nuclear threat.”

Meanwhile, hardly a peep from the mainstream media on Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which now has an estimated 150 to 400 nuclear weapons. The AJC letter sounds like we’d all be doing the Saudis and Egyptians a favor by defending Israeli nuclear hegemony. But those familiar with Israel’s history of violence are buying none of it. Egypt, for one, has categorically rejected this notion:

“The Middle East does not need any nuclear powers, be they Iran or Israel – what we need is peace, security, stability and development.”

What Israel is doing now in Congress and within the Jewish community is reckless: drumming up support for bombing Iran and laying the groundwork for American military and economic support for this needless piece of aggression. One thing the United States does not need right now, and cannot afford, is a third war in the Middle East. If Israel wants to initiate the Iran War, it should be prepared to accept all costs and all consequences itself.

If nuclear non-proliferation is truly an American goal, then a nuclear-free Middle East should be the objective. And that includes Israel. Selectively choosing countries for the nuclear club, particularly those with a history of violence in the region, is a bad idea. And going to war to defend a foreign nation’s exclusive nuclear capabilities is not only a bad idea, it’s a dangerous game that risks pulling us into a third war.

2009 – September – even more

Shimon Peres, in his letter to the Diaspora, asks Jews to:

• seek peace, even as he insults Palestinians
• fight for Israeli nuclear hegemony
• oppose BDS by investing in Israel
• keep indoctrinating your children
• stand united with Israel, quoting scripture for political ends

This is all increasingly a tough sell from a state that consistently betrays Jewish values while appealing to them:

Message from the President of the State of Israel, HE Shimon Peres, to the Jewish communities in the Diaspora, on the occasion of the Jewish New Year 5770

Hopefully, the coming New Year will be marked by the realization of our aspirations: attaining peace, increasing security, promoting economic growth, safeguarding the future of the Jewish people and strengthening the ties between Israel and our Jewish brothers in the Diaspora.

The opportunity to attain peace is beckoning, and must be seized, even at the cost of painful concessions. The Arab world’s intractable position to say “No” to negotiations, “No” to recognition of Israel and “No” to peace, has today been replaced by the three-fold “Yes” to the Saudi Initiative. The international community is keen to support endeavors to move the peace process forward, and I am confident that, with concerted efforts, the vision of a comprehensive peace can be realized. This will create stability, tranquility, security and prosperity for our children and their children after them.

Nuclear arms in the possession of extremist fundamentalist hands pose a danger to the whole of humanity and not only to Israel. A broad and consolidated stand by the international community against Iran is called for. I pray that this terrible threat be removed from all of humanity and that the world may enjoy a new era of peace and security.

Israel’s economy is showing the first sparks of recovery from the global economic crisis. The macro-economic signs are promising, and these indications are reflected in a growing scope of investments, the hi-tech industry is reviving and start-up companies are again sprouting. This is the time to seize the opportunity. This is the time to invest in Israel in fields such as alternative energy, water production, homeland security infrastructures, educational and learning-related tools, and in the stem-cell industry. This constitutes the future and it is in our hands.

It is vital to build with our brethren in the Diaspora ties based on solid foundations of partnership and education. Indeed, the role of Jewish education in the Diaspora cannot be overestimated. It serves as the very building-blocks of the bridges that connect the Jewish communities abroad and Israel. It serves as the terms of engagement between the young generation of Jewish youth and our nation and as the stepping stones to a greater awareness of the significance of Israel-Diaspora relations. It will serve to preserve our rich heritage and traditions.

The spirit of partnership must be enhanced in every area of Israel-Diaspora relations. We face dramatic challenges, which again underscore the necessity to stand united in moments of trial, responsible one for the other, as dictated by our Prophets. Indeed, a threat to the well-being of Jewish communities in the world equates a threat to Israel itself, and the fate of Diaspora Jewry is at the very core of Israel’s heart.

Dear Friends, as we embark on this New Year, I want to convey my heartfelt good wishes to all of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, in the hope that it will be a year of joy and good tidings to all.

And let us pray for the safe return home of the hostages and missing soldiers.

Shana Tova U’Metukah,

Shimon Peres

2009 – September – much more

The mainstream media and right-wing blogosphere is filled with strange theories about Iranian plans to destroy Jews in some variant of a nuclear “Final Solution.” What’s frightening is that the same people who spread this nonsense are the ones that got us into Iraq. And the ones who believe these lies are the same ones who claimed that the Iraqis were responsible for 9/11. And when we listen to a Khadafy or an Ahmadinejad at the UN, their words make no sense to Western diplomats — if they stay to listen to these speeches at all.

Lost amid the religious verbiage, hate of Israel’s Apartheid form of government, posturing for the rest of the Muslim world, and their downright quirkiness, both Khadafy and Ahmadinijad have nevertheless been delivering a consistent, coherent message to Western nations of the Security Council: Your time is up and we’re tired of playing by your rules. For its part, the West has also been delivering a message: Nothing has changed. The world is still ours. This was certainly the case in New York and Pittsburgh this week.

In his rambling, extemporaneous speech at the UN, Moammar Khadafy slammed the notion of privileged Western nations leading the Security Council:

[The Security Council] is political feudalism for those who have a permanent seat. […] It should not be called the Security Council, it should be called the terror council. […] Permanent is something for God only. We are not fools to give the power of veto to great powers so they can use us and treat us as second-class citizens.

An even more reviled speaker in Western eyes, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, made the same points more lucidly in his speech:

It is not acceptable that the United Nations and the Security Council, whose decisions must represent all nations and governments by the application of the most democratic methods in their decision making processes, be dominated by a few governments and serve their interests. In a world where cultures, thoughts and public opinions should be the determining factors, the continuation of the present situation is impossible, and fundamental changes seem to be unavoidable.

[…] Marxism is gone. It is now history. The expansionist Capitalism will certainly have the same fate. […] We must all remain vigilant to prevent the pursuit of colonialist, discriminatory and inhuman goals under the cover of the slogans for change and in new formats. The world needs to undergo fundamental changes and all must engage collectively to make them happen in the right direction, and through such efforts no one and no government would consider itself an exception to change or superior to others and try to impose its will on others by proclaiming world leadership.

Ahmadinejad took aim at Israel, likening the slaughter of civilians in Gaza to “genocide”:

How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.

This was apparently too much for France and the United States to bear. “It is disappointing that Mr. Ahmadinejad has once again chosen to espouse hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Mark Kornblau, a spokesman to the US mission to the UN, said in a statement. Right on queue, 13 Western nations then walked out of a speech that covered much more ground than Israel.

Between New York and Pittsburgh, backroom meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria involving the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Israel, the Obama administration has been busy. Busy swatting down the Goldstone report, abandoning serious demands on settlements, and engaging in war frenzy to either impose more sanctions on Iran, or support bombing it, on behalf of Israel. When Obama came to the podium, he enumerated four main themes in a “new” American relationship to the rest of the world:

First, we must stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and seek the goal of a world without them. […] Because a world in which IAEA inspections are avoided and the United Nation’s demands are ignored will leave all people less safe, and all nations less secure.

That brings me to the second pillar for our future: the pursuit of peace. […] That effort must begin with an unshakeable determination that the murder of innocent men, women and children will never be tolerated.

Third, we must recognize that in the 21st century, there will be no peace unless we take responsibility for the preservation of our planet. […] We will press ahead with deep cuts in emissions to reach the goals that we set for 2020, and eventually 2050.

And this leads me to the final pillar that must fortify our future: a global economy that advances opportunity for all people. […] In Pittsburgh, we will work with the world’s largest economies to chart a course for growth that is balanced and sustained.

Yet when we parse the Obamaspeak and compare it to the President’s actual actions this week and this month, all the flowery speech rings hollow. Nothing has changed. The world order will remain the same.

Rather than the global or regional non-proliferation he spoke of, Obama’s actual non-proliferation consists of: No nukes for Iran. North Korea, a much more terrifying nuclear power ruled by an unhinged despot who has actually killed millions of his own citizens and whose nation has already tested nuclear weapons, merits a mere “tsk tsk” from the President. While Israel and the United States have staged simulated war exercises against Iran, Iran has not threatened Israel and no Iranian weapons testing has been detected. But Israel and/or the US are on the verge of attacking Iran militarily solely because Israel, our proxy in the region, fears losing its nuclear monopoly.

The pursuit of peace, particularly the claim that the murder of innocent civilians will never be tolerated, becomes another one of the President’s hollow high school valedictory speeches when measured against his own administration’s promise to torpedo the UN’s Goldstone report and prevent Israeli war crime charges from ever reaching the Hague. Of course, the United States could someday find itself in the same position as Israel, given Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, illegal renditions, assassinations,  waterboarding, drone bombings, and the use of mercenaries in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. So perhaps avoiding the Hague is just American pragmatism. But for a country winding up one war in Iraq, escalating another in Afghanistan, and rattling drums for a third in Iran, the “pursuit of peace” is Orwellian Newspeak.

The last two themes, global warming and globalism, don’t inspire confidence either. Neither the President nor I will be around in 2050 when emission levels are low enough to do any good, and I wonder how much of the planet will be. As for global prosperity, Obama seems to offer a view that opportunity in the developing countries will be linked to sustained, balanced growth in the traditional industrialized nations. Did no one else hear anything new? Globalism and Capitalism have failed. Oratory won’t change the facts.

Even though we might not share the Libyan president’s taste in clothing or the Iranian president’s mock Holocaust denial, you’ve got to admit: the UN Security Council is an anachronistic body. It’s 1948 in a time warp. It still consists of the colonial powers who made such a mess of the Middle East right after WW2, and they’re still trying to set the rules, still reminding everyone that the Security Council is theirs, and that they control memberships in the nuclear club. And, with the exception of China, an old White Boy’s club at that.

But out with the old and in with the new. Two of the permanent members, France and Britain (each scarcely over 60 million) have insignificant populations compared to Indonesia or Pakistan (both Muslim states), India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, or Brazil — all of which have populations over 100 million and two of which are also nuclear states. At least two of these would be better candidates for permanent memberships on the Security Council.

So Khadafy and Ahmadinejad’s arguments really shouldn’t come as a surprise in a world that has changed greatly since 1948. These two leaders may not be the most accessible to Westerners, but they have been echoing the sentiments of many of the 187 other nations of the UN whose views are routinely ignored or vetoed by present members of the Security Council.

The Goldstone report is a case in point.

The report, commissioned by the UN, condemns Israeli and Hamas crimes against civilians during Operation Cast Lead last winter. Aside from various ad hominem attacks on Judge Goldstone, himself a Zionist Jew, no one has seriously attacked its actual findings. The only issue that the US, France, and Britain have with the report is that the investigation was not initiated with their blessings. Hence, in UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s words: no mandate. Apparently the rest of the world did not agree. Yet the US will very likely veto the transmission of the findings to the Hague.

Iran’s nuclear program also illustrates the same point.

In the Sixties a handful of Western nations were instrumental in providing Israel with nuclear weapons: the US, France, and Norway all played various parts. The United States has played a game for decades of pretending Israel has no nuclear weapons, and the other members of the Security Council have played along. When the Shah of Iran was in power, the United States and Germany actually helped Iran develop nuclear power. But now with an Iranian government that no longer takes orders from the West, the rules were simply changed.

When the world is yours, you can do what you want.

2009 – December

Michael Freund (American-born rightwing Israeli who supports expansionism and who worked as Netanyahu’s propagandist) calls for bombing Iran

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4008

2010 – May

Elliott Abrams calls for crippling sanctions on Iran

https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/32802/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-iran

https://www.thenation.com/article/an-actual-american-war-criminal-may-become-our-second-ranking-diplomat/

https://inthesetimes.com/article/21758/war-criminal-elliott-abrams-nicaragua-venezuela-maduro-trump-ilhan-omar

2010 – June

J Street joined with AIPAC and broke with Americans for Peace Now in applauding new sanctions on Iran. To its credit, J Street made one distinction from AIPAC — in calling for continued diplomacy and warning against war:

We believe that a dual track approach that combines meaningful diplomatic engagement with broad-based sanctions is necessary to convince Iran to clarify its nuclear intentions. We commend the President for his efforts in strengthening the resolve of the international community on Iran. […]

We reiterate that nothing in this bill should be taken as authorizing or encouraging the use of military force against Iran. We are opposed to the use of military force by Israel or the United States against Iran.

While J Street joined with AIPAC in welcoming the sanctions, it broke with APN and Gush Shalom. Americans for Peace Now, on whose board J Street’s Jeremy Ben Ami also sits, condemned the sanctions. APN’s Deborah Lee issued a statement which contained this critique of sanctions — any sanctions:

APN’s core concern about this bill remains unchanged: imposing sanctions the goal of which is to ‘cripple’ the civilian economy and inflict misery on the population — in the hopes that this population will rise up against its government — is a flawed and in all likelihood counterproductive approach.  It is an approach that has failed for decades in Iran. It failed in Iraq and Haiti. It has failed in Cuba and North Korea. And it is an approach that only last week Israel abandoned in Gaza, recognizing that squeezing the population of Gaza with a blockade on civilian goods had not only failed to force Hamas out of power, but had enabled Hamas (and the world) to blame Israel for all the misery the people of Gaza were facing. It took Israel three years to recognize the error of this approach.  It is regrettable that Congress did not draw the obvious lesson from these experiences.

While J Street has taken it on the chin from mainstream Jewish organizations and the Israeli Lobby for its unwavering support of a Two State solution, many of its recent positions — endorsing supplemental military aid for Israel and sanctions on Iran — seem designed to blunt right-wing criticisms and win supposedly “moderate” Jewish support.

J Street today applauded increased sanctions on Iran at the UN. An enrichment processing proposal brokered by Turkey and backed by Brazil, which had previously been acceptable to the United States, was rejected by the US in backing Israel’s demands for sanctions on Iran. A J Street press release supported the move:

J Street welcomes the passage of enhanced multilateral and broad-based sanctions on Iran at the United Nations Security Council today.

This vote would not have been possible without the tireless diplomatic efforts of the Obama Administration. We commend President Obama and his team for their effort and this step in the right direction, and urge them to continue employing a dual track approach – meaningful engagement plus multilateral sanctions – to convince Iran to change course.

Today, the Government of Iran hears a clear message from the international community that there are real consequences to continued obfuscation, delay, and intransigence over its nuclear program, as well as real benefits should they fully address international concerns.

We expect the Iranian regime to immediately make clear it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, to submit to international inspections, and to end its support for groups that use violence and terror against Israel. Such action will put Iran on the road to reintegration into the international community.

These sanctions are particularly stupid because there was an opportunity to try a reprocessing scheme the US had once supported and to insist on monitoring access. Teheran had warned that the offer would be off the table if sanctions were imposed, and this now gives them a domestic popularity boost in standing up to the United States. There will also now be no monitoring, and Iran will have scored points for its home team.

The imposition of sanctions, however ineffective they are expected to be, coupled with the attack on the Mavi Marmara, is also a setback for NATO ally Turkey and a gain for Israel. A message certainly not lost on certain Middle Eastern and new European allies, these sanctions make it crystal clear that the United States is willing to betray NATO allies and friends when it comes to Israel. Stephen Walt calls it right when he cites Stephen Cook of the Council of Foreign Relations complaining about how Turkey needs to be “kept in its lane.” We can’t have just anybody running around being a regional power broker in the Middle East. There’s already a reserved seat.

This move is also exceptionally misguided because it further complicates the United States’ relations with other nations in the Middle East. But the president, the State Department, and apparently J Street, all continue to see the world as it was during the Bush administration. The US with the help of Israel will continue to try to project its power in the Middle East – at least for a few more years. Other regional players need not apply for the job.

2010 – August

In 2010 foreign policy wonks went into overdrive dissecting the musings of Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic Monthly on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran. Goldberg’s career has been notable as a shill for the IDF (he was also a former Israeli solder) and he was also a notorious proponent of the Iraq war, so Goldberg’s conclusions on the inevitability of such an attack were not surprising. But neither is the fact that so many of his sources were anonymous. The piece was a major piece of Israeli propaganda masquerading as a liberal essay in a liberal US publication. On page 63 of the magazine’s print edition there was an obligatory picture of IDF jets flying above Auschwitz as if to highlight the “reasons” for Israel’s posture.

It’s all about the U.S. interest in Israel’s nuclear hegemony.

Goldberg is correct only in his conclusion that the US will assist Israel with the attack – not for all the Israeli propaganda reasons he enumerates.

Israel’s reason is not to protect itself from an “existential threat” but to continue to amass armaments to delay the inevitable end of its Occupation of Palestine and create more “facts on the ground.”

The U.S. reason is not to preserve regional peace and security but to simply ensure continued nuclear hegemony by its proxy, Israel.

If and when the US becomes involved in the bombing of Iran – even if only by logistical support, looking the other way while Israeli F16s fly over Iraq, or providing the bunker-buster bombs Israel will use – it will not be an unwilling participant in the next war, its fourth and possibly a World War.

2010 – August – more/worse

While foreign policy junkies were busy parsing Jeffrey Goldberg’s overhyped article in the Atlantic on Israel’s likely future attack on Iran, another article in the same issue of the Atlantic by Robert D. Kaplan attempted to repurpose one of Henry Kissinger’s old Cold War theories for use with Iran – specifically, that the only way to deal with upstart revolutionary nations like Iran is to be willing to engage with them in limited nuclear war. Kaplan writes:

We must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but, as Kissinger does in his book of a half century ago, to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.

What is he saying? That, should Goldberg’s wet dream not come true and that Iran does get the bomb, the United States should be willing to use its own against it – regardless of preemptive use or massive civilian casualties. Kaplan reflects a little on the implications, but seems pretty happy with the war criminal’s approach anyway:

At the time of his writing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, some analysts took Kissinger to task for what one reviewer called “wishful thinking”- in particular, his insufficient consideration of civilian casualties in a limited nuclear exchange. Moreover, Kissinger himself later moved away from his advocacy of a NATO strategy that relied on short-range, tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance the might of the Soviet Union’s conventional forces. (The doctrinal willingness to suffer millions of West German civilian casualties to repel a Soviet attack seemed a poor way to demonstrate the American commitment to the security and freedom of its allies.) But that does not diminish the utility of Kissinger’s thinking the unthinkable.

This analysis is typical of Kaplan. In 2005 he tried to sell the same stinking Kissinger fish, this time for war with China.

Couldn’t the Atlantic have hired two writers with different views for these bookended articles? More to the point: couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of real Iran experts? And couldn’t the Atlantic have hired a couple of writers who personally had NOT served in the Israeli army?

Kaplan, a stealth neocon armed with only a BA from UConn, seems to have the ear of ostensible Liberals. Unfortunately, his influence is all out of proportion to his scholarship or the quality of the goods he’s selling. Tom Bissell’s blistering review of Kaplan’s career and work shines light not only Kaplan’s errors of judgment – but that shown by those who peddle Kaplan’s work.

2011 – August

This morning’s editorial section contained a piece by Lawrence J. Haas advocating war on Iran. It was typical of ramped-up calls from neoconservatives inside and outside the Obama administration, many of whom have a misplaced preoccupation with Israel and who claim Iran has promised to incinerate half of the world’s Jews in a second nuclear holocaust. No matter that it is Israel which possesses the nukes and that no proof of Iranian nuclear weapons actually exists.

While this war-mongering is really all about who shall maintain a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and Central Asia — and in so doing preserve oil-dependent colonialism for a few more decades — the war mongers and their friends in the defense industry and pro-Israel lobby have stepped up the calls for U.S. military action, and they’ve added a few new justifications for it. Now in addition to threatening to nuke Israel with (non-existent) nuclear weapons, Iran is being blamed for attacks on Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and allying itself with Al Qaeda. And now that the U.S. has successfully assassinated bin Laden, we really need another bogeyman.

But since our country seems bound and determined to get into — frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of wars we’ve got going on now — let’s just call it another war, it might be good to understand precisely what the Iranians think of us. Simplistic formulations like “clash of civilizations” and “they hate us for what we have” don’t provide any insight. Apparently nobody wants to re-hash or even look at history: the U.S. coup which removed a secular, democratic Iranian government in the Fifties, American support for the Shah and his brutal secret police, or recent American and Israeli assassinations and sabotage. But in fact, the U.S. has been meddling in Iran since the beginning of the 20th century and the Iranians have a long list of gripes. Iran also has legitimate concerns for its security, as Ron Paul pointed out yesterday in a GOP candidate debate. It is virtually surrounded by the United States. Given all this, it is unlikely Iran presents much of a military threat to anyone, including Israel. And even Ehud Barak agrees.

So, if the real issue is not the bogus existential threat to Israel, and the real issue actually is the preservation of Israel’s nuclear monopoly, how do the Iranians feel about it?

One of the best documents to gauge Iran’s views is the transcript of a speech given in 2001 by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Iranian presidents come and go, but the mullahocracy remains to guide not only domestic life in Iran but also foreign policy.

In this 2001 speech, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani discussed colonialism, capitalism, the world since 1948, and Israel’s nuclear advantage, which he sees as a colonial effort and not a Jewish conspiracy. A passage below on “US-British support for Israel” is often cited as a veiled threat to destroy Israel. But the speech discusses neutralizing Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons, not destroying the nation. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

2011 – September

Once the Israel Lobby digests its meal of the remains of the Palestinian state, what’s next on the menu? Already the pro-Israel hawks are calling for war on Iran. Most of the Republican hopefuls are nodding in agreement with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon when he says: “All options are on the table.”

Whose table is that?

2011 – October

The Standard Times again is raising a cri de guerre from Lawrence J. Haas, a man who never met a war he didn’t want the taxpayers to fund. I will again make the observation that readers are being treated to more of this syndicated rightwing fare than ever before.

Haas is one of a number of neoconservatives who believe the answer to a failed policy of trying to remake the Middle East in America’s image is more of the same. The Kagans, Raymond Tanter, various Republican presidential candidate’s advisors, and others have been on the warpath lately, calling for military strikes, bunker busters, or – in the case of Haas – “surgical strikes” on Iran. Were it only true that surgeons, rather than butchers, conducted wars.

The cockamamie story of a Texan-Iranian used car salesman and his supposed contacts within the Iranian government plotting an assassination and attacks on multiple embassies, as sketched out by Attorney General Holder and Secretary of State Clinton, has never been properly explained. The Texan-Iranian is an habitual offender with a penchant for drugs and domestic abuse. The missing man, Gholam Shaakuri, whom Haas and others claim is a member of the Iranian government, actually turns out to be a member of the Mujahadeen e-Kalq, the MEK – a terrorist organization which opposes Iran from exile. I wouldn’t expect the administration to show any proof because there is none.

We’ve gone down this road many times before, with the Gulf of Tonkin, in Central America, with exiled Cubans (Bay of Pigs), exiled Iraqis (non-existent yellowcake, fabled WMDs, thanks to Chalabi and others). Pretexts for war are an American tradition. Remember the Maine?

We would do well to get a grip and not let the shrill voices of militarism dictate entry into another war – especially when the only justification is ideological. After decades of wars and drone attacks in Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and now even Kenya, the head spins, and the only thing certain is that we are bankrupting ourselves and making yesterday’s friends into tomorrow’s enemies.

2012 – August

When it comes to Israel, we seem to be continuously inundated with Israeli hardliner views. The August 21st piece (“Cooling off Israel: Five ways to avert a strike on Iran”) by former chief of Israeli intelligence Amos Yadlin, curiously labelled “National View” since it hardly reflects an American view on the subject, was no exception. The “five” views in his article basically boil down to one: Israel can’t go it alone, so the U.S. should see that it is in “our” interests to bomb Iran for Israel, or at least threaten it with war. But while Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak may bluster about unilaterally bombing Iran, they first need to drag the U.S. into such a war. Why? Because they can’t even sell their war domestically.

The Israeli public is justifiably wary of such go-it-alone threats. A recent poll by Israel’s Dahaf Institute showed 61 percent of Israelis believe Iran should not be attacked without U.S. consent. Yadlin’s article, and those like it, bear the fingerprints of a massive P.R. offensive – by AIPAC stalwarts; the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren in a recent WSJ article; frequent Standard Times contributors Richard Haas and Charles Krauthammer calling for war; a recent article in the NYT by Uzi Dayan, former IDF chief of staff; a recent barrage of Israeli government “leaks,” including a “shock and awe” style war plan; speculations in Israel’s English-language newspaper, and elsewhere.

And both House Democrats and Republicans, as well as every Republican candidate up to and including Mitt Romney, have eagerly parroted the Likudnik line: Iran has the bomb; Iran presents an existential threat to Israel; Israel’s interests are American interests.

None of this is true. This is about nuclear hegemony: Israel’s.

Despite the alarm an Iranian enrichment program provokes, Iran does not yet possess either a nuclear weapon or a missile capable of delivering it. In fact, “recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” (NYT article by James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, Feb 24, 2012).

America’s intelligence agencies say: baloney.

Hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties would result from an Iranian response to an Israeli (and/or American) first strike. If Americans still have a taste for reckless wars after our many adventures in the Middle East, we could delude ourselves that the mighty American military could make quick work of Iranian missile defenses (Iran has a military budget of only $6 billion a year), but no one can predict Iran’s non-military responses. Would the Straights of Hormuz stay open? How would the rest of the world respond? Even a brief (unlikely) war would cost at least $40 or $50 billion, to be paid for by either Israeli – or more likely American – taxpayers who already shell out $4 billion a year to the highly militarized state.

But here’s an even better idea for averting another unnecessary war.

Israeli nuclear scientist Uzi Even suggests that Israel shutter its nuclear plant in Dimona and dismantle its own (approximately 200) nuclear weapons in exchange for Iran dismantling its program. After all, if we are concerned with nuclear weapons presenting an existential threat to the 7 million people in Israel, we should also be at least somewhat concerned that Israel’s nukes present an existential threat to the other 350 million people in the Middle East.

If the U.S. goal is not simply to ensure Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the region, an approach other than beating the drums of war is necessary. On the other hand, if this kerfuffle indeed is about preserving the Zionist state’s nuclear advantage and thumbing our nose at the rest of the world, well, then we’d better be prepared to pay the price for this madness.

2015 – March

John Bolton writes Op Edi in NYT calling for bombing of Iran

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html

Joshua Muravchik writes a similar article in WaPo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/war-with-iran-is-probably-our-best-option/2015/03/13/fb112eb0-c725-11e4-a199-6cb5e63819d2_story.html

2017 – May

Last year Democrats drafted a national party platform that some said was the most progressive platform of all time. And maybe it was – for the Democratic Party – and only when limited to certain domestic planks.

But when it came to foreign policy, the Democratic Party’s hawkish platform reflected its presidential candidate’s worldview. We would fight ISIS by giving taxpayer money to repressive and right-wing governments – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel – the Usual Suspects – though so far they’ve been useful only to Defense contractors. The DNC platform ignored Congress’s right and obligation to declare war while calling for the use of presidential AUMF statements – like the one Donald Trump used last week. The platform downplayed the use of ground forces while preferring technology – Tomahawks and drones – like the ones Donald Trump used last week. Nobody really has a different plan – just keep on using extrajudicial killing indefinitely, without ever declaring war, without ever clearing the endless war with Congress.

The DNC platform is full of jingoistic phrases such as “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” But many are beginning to question whether it just might be the United States that has inflicted the most damage on world peace and stability. We originally funded Islamists to fight the USSR, have given Israel $128 billion since 1948 while simultaneously turning our backs on Palestinians, created failed states in Iraq, Libya, and Syria – and then created millions of refugees Europe and Turkey have had to deal with.

2017 – June

In June 2017 the Senate voted on S.722, “Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017,” a bill which slapped economic sanctions on both Russia and Iran. The vote passed almost unanimously except for two senators with fiercely independent streaks. One of them was Rand Paul. The other was Bernie Sanders.

On his website Sanders wrote that, if fashioned as a separate bill, he would have voted for Russian sanctions and noted he has previously voted for sanctions on Iran. But the bill, he wrote, “could endanger the very important nuclear agreement that was signed between the United States, its partners and Iran in 2015.”

Massachusetts senators Warren and Markey, however, both enthusiastically voted for the sanctions, as did every Democrat in the Senate. Warren had previously been opposed to Iran sanctions and supported the Iran deal. But on Thursday she voted with the herd to both jeopardize the work John Kerry had done and to wage economic war on Iran. In fact, Warren not only voted with the herd but was a co-sponsor.

Bernie Sanders was right. The vote by every Democratic senator jeopardizes the Iran nuclear deal and creates a more precarious world. Here in Massachusetts we just learned our so-called “progressive” senators just couldn’t resist waving the flag and voting for more American bullying.

Sanctions

Economic sanctions are acts of war. The Council on Foreign Relations characterizes them as alternatives to war, but the targets of sanctions understand quite well what they really are. When, in 2015, the EU slapped sanctions on Russia, one Russian banker called it “economic war.” And North Korea has never minced words: “We consider now any kind of economic sanctions to be taken by the Security Council as a declaration of war.”

As economic acts of war, sanctions can provoke military responses just as easily as bombing. Students of history may recall that reparations and economic sanctions against Germany following World War I fed both German nationalism and militarism leading up to World War II. Writing in Foreign Policy Journal, Gilles van Nederveen wrote:

Sanctions can lead to war “if the state is militarized and the central government is backed to the wall. Consider an example of pre-World War II Japan. American and Japanese militaries prepared for a confrontation throughout the twenties, but real tensions did not start until the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan. At the outset of U.S.-imposed oil blockade in 1940, Japan estimated that it had a fuel reserve of just under two years. The Imperial Japanese Navy drafted plans to seize the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia) in order to maintain steady supply of oil and its military strength. International organizations like the League of Nations were powerless in curtailing aggression during the thirties. After the initial oil blockade in 1940, each Japanese move was met with yet another U.S. embargo: scrap metal, access to the Panama Canal, and finally, the U.S. froze all Japanese accounts in the US, effectively putting Japan on the collision course with the U.S.”

Sanctions are an overused tool of both neoconservatives and neoliberals. The Heritage Foundation pointed out in 1997 that, during Bill Clinton’s administration, Clinton managed to slap sanctions on 42% of the world’s population. Of course, this was twenty years ago when Conservatives were out of power and posing as reasonable statesmen. Fast forward twenty years: they’re back in power and they’re leading the charge themselves.

Economic sanctions are often accompanied by physical blockades, embargoes, interdiction of shipments on the high seas, proxy wars, and covert warfare. All of these apply to Iran. Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment, former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew described sanctions in the same terms as precision bombing:

“The sanctions we employ today are different. They are informed by financial intelligence, strategically designed, and implemented with our public and private partners to focus pressure on bad actors and create clear incentives to end malign behavior, while limiting collateral impact.”

But economic sanctions do not limit collateral impact. Sanctions are every bit as lethal as bunker-busters. On May 12, 1996 — long before Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal — Madeline Albright was asked if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from U.S. economic sanctions were worth it. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State didn’t shed a tear or miss a beat when she answered “yes.”

2017 – July

Keating was reluctant to support Obama’s and Kerry’s Iran deal and has courted the MEK, an exile group which until 2012 was designated a terrorist organization seeking to overthrow and replace the Iranian government with its own “government-in-exile.” Thanks to Republican and Democratic hawks the designation was lifted.

Keating is pro-Likud. He has fought international efforts to support a Two State Solution, advocated moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, opposed the use of the word “Palestine” and threatened to cut off U.S. contributions to the U.N. and funding for U.N. refugee efforts because of the international body’s criticism of Israel’s land theft and occupation.

2019 – May

Elliott Abrams is a war criminal convicted of lying to Congress, though he was subsequently pardoned. Mike Pompeo is fond of threatening enemies with US invasion. Like Pompeo, John Bolton has never met a war he didn’t love, pressing for “regime change” in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, North Korea, and Iran. With the selection of these three sociopaths, Trump is telegraphing plans for Venezuela and Iran. Like Iraq, both countries have long been in the crosshairs of American neoconservatives. The administration’s plans may be old but they’re reliable — coups, puppet regimes, and manufactured threats to the US and its allies. All depend on gullibility and attention deficit from the American public.

Of all the chaos that Trump has unleashed, the threat of an attack on Iran is the most terrifying. Neocons have never been happy with John Kerry’s Iran deal, in which Iran and the US agreed to an accord that would keep Iran from enriching weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for relief from US sanctions. Despite zero evidence of violations by Iran, Trump withdrew from the deal and is considering prosecuting Kerry for violating the Logan Act — for speaking with foreign diplomats, as most former American diplomats do even after leaving their diplomatic posts.

To escalate the provocations even further, Trump denoted the Iranian Guard a “terrorist” organization. And last week, following the deployment of a carrier strike force and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf, the US accused Iran of sabotaging tankers. Two Saudi, one Norwegian, and one Emirati ship were allegedly attacked with improvised limpet mines close to the Emirates. Trump threatened to send 120,000 troops to the region, telling the press, “It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that. They’re not going to be happy.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suggested that the sabotaging of vessels was a “false flag” operation and ascribed war noises to the work of the “four Bs” — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, United Arab Emirates crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and White House national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 advocated bombing Iran. And if one looks at a map of US military bases surrounding Iran, it is hard to imagine why Iran would want to provoke the US.

Europeans, who remain party to the Iran agreement, are skeptical of Trump’s accusations. Norbert Röttgen, chair of the Foreign Affairs committee of the German parliament, downplayed American warnings of imminent Iranian attacks. He said that the BND (German intelligence) has not found any escalation in Iranian threats. In fact, Röttgen described the US warnings as mere “saber rattling, a show of force to demonstrate seriousness and to justify American foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran.”

But, after a generation of American wars in the Middle East, there is still an appetite for more. The Trump administration and its supporters believe invading Iran would be a “slam dunk,” as the Bush administration thought Iraq would be. Almost a generation has gone by since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq. And after a generation, hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US still remains in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime. Geniuses like Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton doubt it would take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”

Cooler heads remind us that a US invasion would be the Mother of all Quagmires. Juan Cole, a Mideast expert at the University of Michigan, published the “Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War.” Among them:

• Iran is 3.7 times bigger than Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska
• Iran has 3 times more people than Iraq — 81 million
• Iran can mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty personnel
• While the Gulf War “Coalition” drew on NATO allies to fight Iraq, Europe is now skeptical of a war on Iran
• Iraq’s neighbors were happy to see Saddam go; Iran still has many regional friends

Even FOX News host Tucker Carlson was concerned about Bolton’s influence. “More than anything in the world, national security adviser John Bolton would love to have a war with Iran. It will be like Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday [all] wrapped into one,” Carlson said.

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has introduced a petition to block Trump’s unilateral entry into a war with Iran, and Nancy Pelosi reminded everyone that “the responsibility in the Constitution is for Congress to declare war. So I hope that the president’s advisers recognize they have no authorization to go forward in any way. They cannot call the authorization, AUMF, the authorization for the use of military force that was passed in 2001, as any authorization to go forward in the Middle East now.”

Impeachment might be largely a formality in the almost certain absence of Senate prosecution of Trump’s crimes, but proceedings should be initiated anyway. Congress must insist on all its rights and powers, which include declaring war. As for Abrams and Bolton, they deserve tenures just as short as Anthony Scaramucci’s — if not cells at the Hague.

But if anyone should be getting regime change this month, please, let it be the American people.

Suddenly a few Republicans are demonstrating that they actually have souls. Franklin Graham, Laura Bush and even Melania Trump are among those who have recently spoken out against separating children from their parents at the border.

Another insidious form of child abuse has taken place for decades in Palestinian occupied territories, where Israel routinely rounds up and imprisons hundreds of children each year. I am forwarding an appeal from Jeff Klein, of Mass Peace Action, asking Congress to support the McCollum Bill, which so far has only two Massachusetts Congressional sponsors. I have written about Betty McCollum’s legislation before. Please read Jeff’s letter and then contact Congressional Reps. Richard Neal, Niki Tsongas, Joseph Kennedy III, Katherine Clark, Michael Capuano, Stephen Lynch, and Bill Keating, to let them know they need to be on the right side of this issue. They need to be better friends to children than to a government that just last month slaughtered hundreds of demonstrators.

STAND UP AGAINST THE ABUSE OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN

Dear Activist,

When many Americans and their elected officials are protesting the mistreatment of immigrant minors at our southern border, it is time to renew our demand that Members of Congress also speak up to protect Palestinian children.

When we sent out our earlier alert on the McCollum Bill, Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, H.R. 4391, only one member of the Massachusetts delegation, Rep. Jim McGovern CD2), had co-sponsored the resolution. Since then, CD6 Rep Seth Moulton has joined him in supporting the bill. But other members of our delegation have not yet taken a stand against the abuse of Palestinian children. This is unacceptable.

There are two things you can do.

0. CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS to ask that they co-sponsor the McCollum Bill. Do it again even if you have called before. (And please thank Reps. McGovern and Moulton for their co-sponsorship.)

This is Rep. McCollum’s explanation of the bill:

“Given that the Israeli government receives billions of dollars in assistance from the United States, Congress must work to ensure that American taxpayer dollars never support the Israeli military’s detention or abuse of Palestinian children. Congresswoman McCollum’s legislation, the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, requires that the Secretary of State certify that American funds do not support Israel’s military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.”

2. ASK THAT THEIR OFFICES ATTEND A BRIEFING JUNE 25 on H.R. 4391 and the situation for Palestinian children after the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem. You can use the No Way To Treat a Child campaign tool to send an email asking Members of Congress to send a representative to the briefing. If you are in contact with a relevant Congressional staffer, also please phone them directly.

Each year the Israeli military arrests and prosecutes around 700 Palestinian children. Last year alone, more than fourteen Palestinian boys and girls under the age of 18 were shot dead by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — and many more were wounded – using resources provided by our own government. We cannot allow this situation to continue.

For Massachusetts Peace Action and its New Day for Israel and Palestine organizing project.

Jeff Klein, Convener, MAPA Palestine/Israel Working Group

Please sign the letter today!

A NEW DAY is a network sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action.

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Tonight is the first night of Passover.

This is a night for celebrating Jewish liberation from slavery with friends and family. Jews first came to Egypt during a famine and lived as guests a short while, but then in a bitter turn became slaves under Pharaoh. Only after generations of suffering, and only by miracles and plagues demonstrated to Pharaoh and his sorcerers and military, were the Israelites able to gain their freedom. A final miracle — clearing a path for the Israelites across a dry sea bed — brought forty years of wandering in the desert before the establishment of their own kingdom.

This, in a nutshell, is the story told at Passover. It is both a story of liberation and persecution (“In every generation they rise up against us)”. For many liberal Jews there’s far too much of the supernatural and too much about one peoples’ story. For this reason many of us prefer to see our story as the universal struggle for freedom. In our family we sing “Go Down Moses” as poorly as we do “Dayenu.” In years past we’ve had an orange to signify gay liberation. We’ve had an olive for Palestinian freedom. When conducting a seder, in fact, innovation is a requirement. What always brings life to Passover is the truth that — in every generation they rise up against someone.

Dayenu — literally “enough” — is a song with fifteen questions that begins by asking if it would have been enough for god to bring us out of Egypt, to part the sea, to provide manna, and it ends with the building of the temple. The grateful answer to each question in turn is — yes, this would surely have been enough even without all the other gifts.

But one question Dayenu doesn’t ask is what would have happened if the Israelites had met immigration agents in the desert. What would the arc of history have been if we were sent back into Egyptian slavery?

Dayenu doesn’t ask what the descendants of the Israelites would be expected to do with 40,000 African refugees who — just like their own ancestors — travelled thousands of miles across deserts to Israel and now sit in detention centers awaiting deportation. Or Palestinians, who have lived under martial law almost twice as long as the Israelites wandered the desert.

Dayenu doesn’t ask what kind of society we are obliged to create to treat fellow human beings better than we were treated by Pharaoh — an especially relevant question this year as the number of police murders of black men is exploding. And at a time white Americans still continue to rise up against African-Americans, even after centuries.

Dayenu never asks, but the seder certainly points at, the seemingly endless procession of new Pharaohs emerging on the world stage — strutting dictators surrounded by their modern-day sorcerers and charioteers. A plague on all of them; they certainly do rise in every generation.

Dayenu doesn’t ask, but the implication seems clear to me, that those who have found their freedom are now obligated to help others realize their own liberation. After all, didn’t the Israelites take the mixed multitudes with them out of slavery?

For some it is enough to recognize persecution and victimization. Dayenu. For others it’s enough to recognize persecution and demand liberation. Dayenu. But for liberation to be truly realized, as the Passover story reminds us, injustice and cruelty must be directly challenged and crushed.

Chag pesach sameach.

I’ve written about this before and it is now closer to becoming law. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S.720) is a piece of legislation promoted by a foreign nation that will violate the civil liberties of Americans. It joins recent laws in Turkey and Poland criminalizing “insults” to a nation. But it is fundamentally a form of thought control that has no place in a democracy.

S.720 is co-sponsored by 51 U.S. Senators. To their shame, thirteen are Democrats: Michael Bennet (CO); Richard Blumenthal (CT); Maria Cantwell (WA); Christopher Coons (DE); Joe Donnelly (IN); Margaret Hassan (NH); Joe Manchin (WV); Claire McCaskill (MO); Robert Menendez (NJ); Bill Nelson (FL); Gary Peters (MI); Charles Schumer (NY); and Ron Wyden (OR).

S.720 criminalizes speech and forbids political expression. The Anti-Israel Boycott Act is basically a Sedition Act in disguise which punishes any American joining a boycott to oppose the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestinians with a fine of up to $1 million or imprisonment up to 20 years.

S.720 wants to have it both ways — doing the bidding of a foreign nation (Israel) while punishing Americans from following boycotts suggested by a foreign entity (the UN and the still-stateless Palestinian people).

Whether the bill is eventually successful or not, the ACLU notes the harm it has already done:

“On its face, the bill appears to directly prohibit boycott activity that is protected under the First Amendment. Even if the bill could be interpreted more narrowly, as some of its supporters claim, its broad language could still chill protected expression by scaring people into self-censorship. Either way, the bill would impose serious First Amendment harms.”

According to S.720’s subsection (a)(1) the bill criminalizes even gathering information about companies doing business in Israel or in occupied Palestinian territories. You post an inquiry on Facebook — for example, does Sodastream manufacture its products in the West Bank? The next thing you know, you face arrest or a fine.

Besides violating the rights of Americans, S.720 is a perfect example of the sort of foreign meddling that Democrats claim to hate. S.720 is promoted by numerous pro-Israel groups like AIPAC whose single focus on promoting Israeli interests should require it to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Even Canada is obliged to register its lobbyists but no such limitations apply to AIPAC, which literally pays American legislators to work for Israel’s interests.

Imagine if Russian lobbyists did the same — worked through a group we’ll call ARPAC — the American Russian Political Action Committee — to create legislation to criminalize sanctions against Russia and its oligarchs. Or imagine ATPAC — the American Turkish Political Action Committee — buying support to keep Americans from mentioning the Armenian Genocide or protesting Turkey’s treatment of Kurdish people.

What’s especially galling to Americans is that the Senate is telling us we can’t take political action against a foreign country knee deep in corruption — a country with a prime minister about to be indicted for criminal conspiracy. A country in which the former prime minister went to jail for bribery and influence-peddling. The Senate needs to be reminded: Israel is not our 51st state.

S.720 echoes laws in Israel which have already criminalized the BDS movement in “the Middle East’s only democracy.” The Senate bill also joins a growing list of American “gag” legislation written for agribusiness, anti-abortion zealots, and pipeline companies. The Trump administration now seems eager to join its authoritarian counterparts in China, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Poland, the Philippines, and elsewhere in policing the views of its citizens.

And thirteen Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, are just fine with that.

A politician’s legacy is not his alone. He often builds on policies and practices of previous administrations. While Trump’s mendacity and incompetence (and dementia) are his and his alone, many of his most noxious initiatives have been bipartisan projects all along. Trump’s recklessness simply airs America’s dirty little secrets and turns already bad policies into unbearable ones. Forget the “kinder, gentler” versions. Now the worst of militarism, racism, and predatory capitalism are simply official.

If we tremble at the recklessness with which Trump toys with American nukes, we forget that Obama authorized a $1 trillion upgrade to them. If we abhor Trump’s new Mexican wall, we forget that Democrats helped build them. Twice. If we despise the racism of the GOP, we willfully forget that Democrats had a hand in drug, crime and prison policies that disproportionately harmed people of color. If we detest Trump’s shady friends in high places, we forget that these were the guys Democrats bailed out in 2008. If we mouth concern about Trump’s affinity for dictators, we forget that the Obama administration kept them in power in Honduras and Egypt and the Ukraine. If we wring our hands over Trump’s saber-rattling toward Iran, we forget that Democrats destabilized Libya and Syria.

None of this would be so offensive if Democrats had changed their ways or said their mea culpas for, say, wrecking Iraq or Vietnam or creating a carceral state. Yet for all the crocodile tears and hypocritical indignation over Trump’s policies, Democrats have some very selective memory.

This week it was Donald Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Democrats responded immediately and harshly. Nancy LeTourneau, in her piece “Trump’s Dangerous Pandering to White Evangelicals on Jerusalem” in the Clinton-friendly Washington Monthly, wrote:

“the announcement from Trump today that the U.S. will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and begin the process of moving our embassy there is a key ingredient to this president’s support among white evangelicals.” [… and ] “this is a perfect example of what happens when we tear down the wall separating church and state. Having a foreign policy that panders to people who welcome war in the Middle East as a sign that we are approaching the climax of history is as nutty as it is dangerous.”

But LeTourneau and the rest of her Pants Suit Nation “forget” the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

That was the year that Barak Obama added a plank in the party platform at the behest of the Israeli lobby group AIPAC to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It was a plank that had somehow been omitted. But a majority of delegates opposed the restoration. Convention Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa kept calling for voice votes to affirm the adoption of the plank, and it kept failing. Finally, Villaraigosa simply ignored the “nays” and declared that it had passed — a moment that revealed how democracy really works in the DNC.

“Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel.” This has been the DNC position since at least 2008. LeTourneu’s complaint that Trump’s foreign policy panders to people who welcome war in the Middle East is certainly true — but it applies equally to her own party. The rest of the language in the plank — completely disregarded by Democrats — called for an open city, not for gifting the Al Aqsa mosque to Israel:

“The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain a divided city accessible to people of all faiths.”

Yet for the last fifty years of Israel’s martial law over Palestinians only the United States has defended the occupation and the settlements. The U.S. has consistently shut its eyes to Israeli abuses and Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes and businesses in East Jerusalem without a peep of protest or without the U.S. using its considerable supply of sticks and carrots. The U.S. could easily cut off military and economic aid or vetos at the Security Council. Or it could sanction Israel’s nukes.

Democrats now fume at settler donors Jared Kushner and David Friedman working so transparently in behalf of Israel, but it was former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller who first coined the phrase “Israel’s attorney” in 2005, referring to the United States.

Whether out of gutlessness, lack of empathy for those whom Israelis displaced, craven political opportunism, or maybe just the cash, Democrats have presided over an irreversible buildout of Israeli settlements and half a century of oppression of Palestinians. By being “Israel’s attorney” Democrats have neglected the peace process so long that there is no longer any hope of a Two State solution and so-called U.S. “leadership” is a cruel sham.

Trump just made it official.

Finally. For the first time ever someone in Congress is doing something about Israel’s systematic abuse of Palestinian children — abuses that include torture and incarceration of kids as young as eight.

As Israel celebrates its 50th anniversary of land theft, martial law, and human rights abuses on Palestinians, Democratic Minnesota Congresswoman Betty McCollum quietly filed H.R.4391, the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act, which prevents U.S. tax dollars from supporting the “Israeli military’s ongoing detention and mistreatment of Palestinian children.” The bill has twelve cosponsors, all of them progressive Democrats.

H.R.4391 has been endorsed by the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International USA, Center for Constitutional Rights, Churches for Middle East Peace, Defense for Children International – Palestine, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Global Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and United Church of Christ, Jewish Voice for Peace, Mennonite Central Committee, Presbyterian Church (USA), the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR), and United Methodist General Board of Church and Society.

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Read about it.

The progressive Jewish magazine +972 features a number of articles on Children Under Occupation.

Do something about it.

Sign a petition, write, call, or email your Congressman and ask them to co-sponsor H.R.4391.

Sign a petition

Take action

And remember.

When midterm elections come around, check if your Congressman cared enough to try to end child incarceration and torture.

If not, why are you supporting him?

Israel’s influence is all out of proportion to its objective strategic importance to the United States. Yet because of American religious sentiment and a strong Israel lobby, any attempt to end its occupation or alter its settlement policies are rebuffed, while conversely the tiny nation seems to constantly intrude into our domestic politics.

Israel is an insignificant trading partner, although every state governor travels there on a trade mission during his term. The state of Israel is not part of NATO, though NATO has provided it with an office in Brussels. No Israeli troops have ever assisted in any US-led military “coalitions” in the Middle East. Israel serves as a check to Hezbollah and Syrian power, tests American military equipment, assists in intelligence gathering, and its nuclear weapons can more easily reach Asia and Eastern Europe. Still, not even NATO allies during the height of the Cold War ever received the level of military aid Israel has.

Since its founding Israel has received more foreign and military aid than any other nation – $124 billion as of 2015, plus another $40 billion this year. An analysis by the Congressional Research Service describes Israel’s unique benefits:

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $124.3 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance, although in the past Israel also received significant economic assistance. Strong congressional support for Israel has resulted in Israel receiving benefits not available to any other countries… In addition to receiving U.S. State Department-administered foreign assistance, Israel also receives funds from annual defense appropriations bills for rocket and missile defense programs. Israel pursues some of those programs jointly with the United States.”

Negotiations over Israel’s aid package last summer were a lopsided and distasteful affair, with Israel demanding more money from the United States and Congress hammering the American president in Israel’s behalf.

Although often described as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” Israel’s “democracy” extends many rights only to its Jewish majority and punishes Arabs – from a right to immigrate only for Jews and sixty years of occupation for Arabs; to civil law for Jews but martial law for Palestinians. On land that has been expropriated from Palestinians separate roads and services exist only for Jewish settlers. There is also widespread segregation of Jews and Arabs within Israel’s own disputed borders and numerous instances of racism and Islamophobia. This has led many to compare Israel with the old South African Apartheid system, which never qualified as a democracy, though in 1985 Ronald Reagan tried to sell it as such:

“They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country — the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated — that has all been eliminated.”

Of course, Reagan also said that ketchup was a vegetable.

Democrats have been unreliable peace brokers in the Middle East, and – just like Republicans – censor any criticisms of Israel. Democrats pretend that Israel’s nuclear weapons don’t exist, while other countries are sanctioned or threatened with fire and fury if they so much as spin up a centrifuge. When Israel kills American citizens our own government does little or nothing. Every politician from Susan Rice to John Kerry, to Mitt Romney, and now Donald Trump, has used the tired old phrase “no daylight between Israel and the U.S.” to imply that the interests of both countries are identical.

The Democratic Party has wrestled with “Israel as Foreign Policy” in each of its last two conventions. Actually, the party has a serious AIPAC problem and its wrestling is mainly with AIPAC’s power. Now, with Donald Trump in office, some Democrats say they are worried that the president’s settler-ambassador David Friedman will move the American embassy to Jerusalem.

But in 2012 the DNC itself tried to push through a motion to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. An undemocratic roll was called by Antonio Villaraigosa and an unexpectedly loud “no” vote caught the DNC offguard. AIPAC had “vetted” the motion – had actually written the text – and Obama was counting on its passing. The “no” vote was finally overturned after multiple attempts in a clearly undemocratic maneuver, and the incident remains an ugly stain on the party’s ethics and democratic practices.

In 2016 the issue of the occupation of Palestine came up again. Clinton supporter Robert Wexler insisted that Democrats could not afford to mention the “O” word if a Two State Solution could be salvaged. Sanders supporter James Zogby pushed back, pointing out that everyone knows the occupation exists. Both sides disagreed whether Democrats should support or condemn the BDS movement. At the end of the day, the DNC adopted wording that made AIPAC and Clinton happy. And the Democratic Party has since chosen to tar the BDS Movement with the Israel lobby’s “anti-Semitic” brush.

So in December 2016, when the UN Security Council took a vote on a motion to condemn Israeli settlements, the US abstention was remarkable, something that had rarely been done before. Obama was again denounced by Republicans and the Israel lobby as an Islamist-Leftist who loved Shariah and hated Jews.

But what had happened was that a tiny crack of daylight had opened up between the United States and Israel. Because Israel’s interests are not identical to ours. Not even close.

Obama’s abstention was a Hail Mary to save the Two State solution. America’s extreme right white ultrationalists in their brown shirts and white hoods, and uncompromising Zionists like David Friedman, are now singing a triumphant tune: there will never be a Two State solution.

But, really, what is the alternative?

Between Gaza and the West Bank there are 4.5 Palestinians living under continuing Israeli military occupation. There are another 1.7 million Arab Israelis. There are almost 6 million stateless Palestinian refugees waiting for a homeland. There are 8 million Jewish Israelis in Israel, some of whom live most of the time in Europe or the U.S. Demographics are not on Israel’s side. By 2035 Jews will be a minority in Israel-Palestine.

Israel can either (1) work with the international community to create a contiguous Palestinian state that would accommodate some number of the Palestinian diaspora; (2) continue the occupation indefinitely; or (3) turn Israel into a multicultural democracy under secular law.

Democrats had better figure out if they prefer option (1) or option (3) because option (2) is barbaric and cannot be sustained. And Democrats will need to develop muscle and guts to push back against AIPAC and the boatload of Israel lobby groups that work tirelessly to keep the occupation in place – to steal more land and build more settlements.

And, frankly, it’s hard to understand why Democrats have such a problem with a secular, multicultural democracy. If that’s what they truly believe in.

As he was leaving office, George Washington offered a few pieces of advice. One was a warning about permitting double standards that favor a particular nation:

“… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter… It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions … and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity…”

No one in modern times has said it any better.

One of the most disturbing realizations of the past election was how many of Donald Trump’s supporters are racists, anti-Semites and white supremacists. A majority are Islamophobes as well, supporting Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and – here’s the strange part – they’re also enthusiastic Zionists.

How can anti-Semism and Zionism manage to coexist? This was the question Naomi Zeveloff asked in a piece in the Forward, a lefty Jewish magazine.

Zeveloff found that many white supremacists admire Israel for “fighting the ‘good fight'” with Muslims. They admire a society which privileges a single ethnicity and religion and actively discourages multiculturalism. For white supremacists Israel is a “model for white nationalism and/or Christianism.”

Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin put it less charitably:

“Anti-Semitism and right-wing Zionism are varieties of ultra nationalism, or, to put it more pejoratively (as it deserves to be put) tribalism. They both presume that the embattled righteous ones need to bristle at, wall off, and punish the damned outsiders. They hate and fear cosmopolitan mixtures. They make a fetish of purity. They have the same soul. They rhyme.”

Weeks after the election white supremacist and anti-Semite Richard Spencer gave a talk at Texas A&M University. Security was provided by Houston’s Aryan Renaissance Society and WhiteLivesMatter. Some came to listen, others to protest. But Texas A&M Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg came to engage. After Spencer’s talk Rosenberg asked Spencer, somewhat naively, to join in a “loving and radically inclusive” act of studying Torah together. Spencer scoffed at the idea that he needed some loving to counterbalance all the hating, and instead used the rabbi’s invitation to point out Zionism’s uncanny similarity to white supremacy:

“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? […] Jews exist precisely because you did not assimilate to the gentiles […] I respect that about you. I want my people to have that same sense of themselves.”

Birds of a feather.

Despite plenty of evidence Donald Trump has a thing for Russian mobsters and Kremlin operatives, we still don’t know if he actually conspired with Russia to throw the 2016 presidential election.

But last week I wrote about some indisputable foreign meddling – AIPAC’s attempts to take away political rights of Americans to protest Israel’s domestic policies with economic boycotts.

And Israel is trying the same thing right here in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts House bill H.1685 and Senate bill S.1689 sound harmless enough (“An Act prohibiting discrimination in State Contracts”). No one would ever admit liking discrimination. And one would hope that any legislator co-sponsoring bills like these would have only the best of intentions.

But these two bills do much more harm than good.

Like cookie-cutter legislation crafted by ALEC, these were pushed by a pro-Israel organization, the JCRC, which regards them as tools to block the BDS Movement. Lobbyists for Israel have introduced similar legislation in 35 states and they have been enacted in 19.

Seekonk Rep. Steven Howitt was crystal clear about the bill’s intent: “This bill clarifies to businesses that either support BDS or who boycott Israeli-owned businesses and products that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will not engage in commerce with them.”

In short, this is an attack on the exercise of the Constitutionally-protected right to boycott a foreign nation on political grounds. Not surprisingly, the Massachusetts ACLU opposes H.1685.

The bills’ supporters claim that any criticism of Israel’s occupation and settlements is tantamount to anti-semitism. But the international BDS Movement has specific political goals. And Israel’s domestic policies as well as American foreign policy toward it are political issues. Both bills are opposed by a number of Jewish organizations, including the Boston Workmen’s Circle, Jewish Voice for Peace, over 100 progressive organizations, and also the National Council of Churches.

In 1982 the Supreme Court affirmed the right of Americans to use boycotts for political purposes. After fifty years of occupation and creeping settlements Israel just might need a little economic incentive to stop. But no matter how you feel about Middle Eastern politics, Israel’s problems can not be solved by violating the civil liberties of Americans.

Contact House and Senate sponsors from your district and ask them to kill these bills and withdraw their co-sponsorship.

Lately there’s a Russian under every rock if not every bed. We’ve also been seeing some new bipartisan frenzy over Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Senators keep heaping sanction after sanction on America’s many enemies, including Russia, and there is revived interest in the registration of foreign agents. “People should know if foreign governments, political parties or other foreign interests are trying to influence U.S. policy or public opinion,” says Iowa Republican and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Chuck Grassley.

Indeed, people should know who is trying to influence U.S. policy and public opinion.

And they should also know who the worst offender is.

AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, is unique in bending U.S. policy and public opinion to a foreign government’s will. Try to imagine a ChinaPAC, a SaudiPAC, or a RusskyPAC operating with as much impunity, introducing whatever federal legislation it wants on a regular basis, sending hundreds of congressmen on junkets to Moscow every summer recess, establishing Russian trade delegations in every state, letting Russians decide how we interrogate terrorists, giving a major voice to Russia on our foreign policy in Eastern Europe. It’s shocking when our relationship with Israel is described like this, but It’s especially shocking that Israel gets away with it because neither political party objects.

AIPAC is only a slice of an Israel lobby that spans dozens of organizations, but it is the largest of the Israel attack dogs, and it has teeth. As FORTUNE magazine put it, “if a congressman from Kansas gets a call from an AIPAC lobbyist, he and his constituents may not think much about about Israeli affairs, but voting with the lobby is politically beneficial. Voting against them, meanwhile, gives that congressman a powerful enemy.” Plus, the money and junkets are great.

Unlike lobbyists who represent China, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Russia, the Ukraine or other foreign interests, AIPAC seems free to flaunt FARA, the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. Indeed, this week, in the middle of discussions on Russia, Senator Lindsay Graham asked [rhetorically] whether AIPAC should be required to register: “They come up here in droves: lobbying Congress to do things, in their view good for the U.S.-Israel relationship. I know they have a lot of contacts in Israel. Should somebody like that be a foreign agent?”

If they’re not representing Israel, who does AIPAC really represent? Although it frequently claims to speak for American Jews, Jewish Voice for Peace rabbi Joseph Berman would beg to disagree: “they don’t speak for the Jewish community.” Poll after poll shows that American Jews are, first and foremost, Americans who believe in religious plurality, do not believe in ethno-religious government, and support diplomacy with Iran rather than reckless provocation. There are already plenty of lobbyists for a strong defense and muscular foreign policy so, once again, who does AIPAC really represent? In the words of Middle East expert Juan Cole, “the only logical possibility is that AIPAC is acting on behalf of the Likud government of Israel.”

In 2005 AIPAC Policy Director Steve Rosen and AIPAC Senior Iran Analyst Keith Weissman were fired after the FBI became suspicious the two had passed classified information to Israel. The stolen information was provided by Larry Franklin, who served a 12 year sentence for espionage. And though the two AIPAC employees were plainly operating in Israel’s behalf, because of the belief that American and Israeli interests are synonymous the prosecution claimed it could not prove that passing stolen information to Israel had actually harmed the United States.

AIPAC is involved with many linked organizations, including the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) – which operates out of the same building and sent almost all freshmen Congressmen to Israel in 2015 – and Islamophobic groups like Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran (CNFI). As the INTERCEPT reported, AIPAC’s political beneficiaries are bi-partisan. Four ostensibly “liberal” Democrats, for example, advise CNFI, which in turn finances some of Frank Gaffney‘s work. AIPAC has gotten Democrats to suppress the BDS movement at both legislative and executive levels. New York governor Andrew Cuomo wrote an executive memo to establish an anti-BDS blacklist. And Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC speech made it clear that her party would fight BDS for Israel in the halls of Congress. And AIPAC was grateful when Republican David Friedman became the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

But the only party AIPAC really cares about is the Likud.

For the moment, however, AIPAC continues to pretend that it represents a domestic constituency and not a foreign government. But, like ALEC, it has numerous legislators willing to sponsor its Israel-friendly bills. And the legislation just keeps on coming.

Back in March AIPAC sponsored Senate bill S.722, “Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017,” designed to promote Israel’s foreign policy goals regarding Iran.

In May the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed H.R.672, “Combating European Anti-Semitism Act of 2017,” which makes the United States responsible for Israel’s interests in Europe. The bill accused European leaders who have voiced even tepid criticisms of Israel, including Angela Merkel, of anti-semitism.

More recently the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, also sponsored by AIPAC, appeared in both House and Senate flavors and has been roundly denounced by civil liberties and progressive organizations.

The “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” joins the federal Combating BDS Act of 2017 and last year’s Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in trying to outlaw the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in the United States. It also joins legislation filed by Israel’s lobbyists in 35 states, and enacted in 19, which outlaw the use of anti-Israel boycotts, a First Amendment right affirmed by the Supreme Court’s 1982 ruling in “NAACP vs. Claiborne Hardware” that tested the legality of peaceful advocacy of a politically-motivated boycott.

Despite its dubious constitutionality, the proposed law would make support of the BDS movement a felony, slapping $1 million dollar fines and imposing 20 year prison sentences on critics of Israel. It specifically goes after BDS supporters by suppressing political opposition to the Israeli government. The text of the bill reads: “The term ‘politically motivated’ means actions to impede or constrain commerce with Israel that are intended to coerce political action from or impose policy positions on Israel.”

And this is what the 46 Senate and 249 House co-sponsors really oppose – the political right of their constituents to pressure for change in Israel.

Because the “Israeli Anti-Boycott Act” is so vaguely-worded, it could be interpreted quite extremely. For example, suppose a consumer, before deciding to boycott an individual Israeli product, wanted to know if SodaStream machines, Naot shoes, or Ahava cosmetics are made in Israel proper or in the occupied West Bank. According to the ACLU, posting even an inquiry on social media could theoretically cost a citizen 20 years of freedom or $1 million for his exercise of free speech. Moveon.org defends the right to use boycotts, “regardless how you feel about BDS,” as a Free Speech issue. As well it is.

Another defect of the bill is that, while it was clearly written specifically for Israel’s benefit, it contains ambiguous language punishing anyone who boycotts any “country friendly to” the United States, or who joins, supports, or echoes support for a foreign boycott of that country. This could also have unintended consequences because the United States has many dubious friends – including the Saudi dictatorship, Egypt’s dictator, Philippine dictator Duterte, Pakistan, Afghanistan’s kleptocracy, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Honduras, Qatar, Kyrgyzstan, Djibouti, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and many others.

“Friends” of the United States also include several new European members of NATO that are in the process of shedding their democracies, including Poland and Hungary. And Thailand, a SEATO member, is a government currently under dictatorship. No citizen should feel safe criticizing a repressive foreign regime with a toxic combination of vague, anti-democratic legislation and our present authoritarian president.

Brand Israel has successfully sold itself as the “only Democracy in the Middle East.” Yet the government’s public relations campaign rings as hollow as anything to come out of the Trump administration. Israel has much in common with South Africa’s Apartheid regime in maintaining a cruel, repressive occupation over a people denied their civil rights. And Israel just celebrated its fiftieth year of occupation. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it, Israel is not a democracy, nor with an occupation could it ever be. “What we must challenge here, therefore, is not only Israel’s claim to be maintaining an enlightened occupation but also its pretense to being a democracy. Such behavior towards millions of people under its rule gives the lie to such political chicanery.”

Israel is no longer recognizable as the spunky little nation of friendly kibbutzniks. Over the years it has transformed into an extreme right-wing settler state and has instituted a series of anti-democratic laws of its own. Israel has cracked down on domestic human rights advocates like B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence. Like our own president, Israel treats its own press as enemies. Journalism is frequently censored in Israel and, like Saudi Arabia, the government is now trying to shut down the Jerusalem office of Al Jazeera. Despite wide support for so-called “shared values,” the more Americans learn about Israel the more its reputation in the United States suffers. Shutting down the BDS movement is not a shared value but a desperate attempt to shut down criticism within a nation that is Israel’s most useful enabler.

A few weeks ago, on a tour of Eastern Europe, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu was caught lecturing leaders of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech republic – xenophobic nations that oppose resettlement of refugees – that Israel was a bulwark in the defense of “Judeo-Christian” values against Muslim hordes and that European concern for Palestinians was “crazy.” Netanyahu sounded precisely like American white supremacist Richard Spencer and an awful lot like Donald Trump in Poland last week. “Don’t undermine that one European, Western country that defends European values and European interests and prevents another mass migration to Europe,” Netanyahu told his fellow right-wing Islamophobes.

BDS activists say that a boycott is a legal, peaceful way to keep pressure on Israel so long as its Palestinian occupation continues and land thefts persist. Only a few days ago 100 armed settlers invaded the home of the Abu Rajab family in Hebron and forcibly ejected them into the street. Speaking for the government, Israel’s Agriculture Minister, Uri Ariel, defended the home invasion: “The entry into the home is another step in strengthening the natural connection of the Jewish people to its land. In the last few days in which Jerusalem has been under incessant incitement, I am glad that the people of Israel continue to establish themselves in the City of the Patriarchs.” Another government minister, Tzachi Hanegbi, threatened Palestinians with a “third Nakba” (more ethnic cleansing).

These were voices of the government speaking and, curiously, Ariel used the word incitement, which is frequently deployed when talking about BDS or making any appeal for Palestinian rights.

Sponsors of the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” should have known a backlash was coming. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland says now that his bill was misinterpreted by the ACLU. But the ACLU’s David Cole and Faiz Shakir stood by their reading in a Washington Post editorial:

“Whether one approves or disapproves of the BDS movement itself, people should have a right to make up their own minds about it. Americans engage in boycotts every day when they decide not to buy from companies whose practices they oppose. Students have boycotted companies that sold clothing manufactured in sweatshops abroad. Environmentalists have boycotted Nestlé for its deforestation practices. By using their power in the marketplace, consumers can act collectively to express their political points of view. There is nothing illegal about such collective action; indeed, it is constitutionally protected.”

Cardin has since offered to tinker with the bill’s wording. But regardless of how it is phrased or re-phrased, the bill ultimately has only one purpose – to make political action by Americans illegal if it offends Israel.

This practically defines the phrase “un-American.”

Voters must let Senate co-sponsors and House co-sponsors of this bill know in no uncertain terms that this bill must die. Here in Massachusetts that includes Reps. Richard Neal and Joe Kennedy who once again sullies the family name.

In addition, Congress must ensure that the AIPAC lobbyists at 251 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C. all follow what their colleagues Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Monica Farley, John Podesta, and thousands of others have been forced to do – register with the Justice Department under the 1938 FARA Act as agents of a foreign country.

While Democrats argue whether a woman’s choice really is a “core Democratic value” they remain pretty comfortable ignoring the human rights of non-Americans. This week Human Rights Watch documented extra-judicial killings by Egypt’s army – let’s ditch the euphemism and call them what they really are – death squads. HRW is calling on the United States to cut off funding to Egypt’s dictator (and Trump Rat Pack bro) Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But Democrats are in an awkward position because, while they were running the circus, Clinton and Obama coddled Egyptian dictators as much as Trump. A GAO report written during Obama’s administration alluded to Egyptian human rights abuses. And they are worse now under Trump.

Last Month Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin proposed legislation that would violate First Amendment rights of those boycotting Israel for its military occupation and settlements. There is a similar bill in the House, co-sponsored by a number of Democrats, including one representative from Massachusetts. In the Massachusetts legislature there are two more of these “anti-BDS” bills being considered. In fact, these AIPAC-sponsored bills have popped up all over the country like the plague of ALEC legislation. In New York, governor Andrew Cuomo set up a blacklist to punish those using the constitutional right to boycott.

My point – foreign policy is not just national. It pulls states and even cities into controversies over everything from human rights to free speech. And out in the states and cities, we ought to have a voice.

The boycott controversy recently came up in Massachusetts Democratic Party platform discussions. Progressive Democrats want to insert language into the platform stating that “Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank are obstacles to peace.” Settlements have been condemned by virtually every nation outside the US, by the UN, and even members of Israel’s security establishment see the problem. If you can see how “gentrification” might be a problem, now imagine gentrification plus martial law, ethnic cleansing, and land theft. I’d call that an obstacle to peace. It’s as much a fact as global warming. And the reality is denied just as doggedly by Democrats.

Former AIPAC lobbyist Steve Grossman thinks the issue is “divisive” for Democrats and broadly hints that he couldn’t possibly remain in a party that won’t support Israel’s Occupation. Barney Frank’s former aide James Segel thinks the party needs to hold fast to “protect the values and commitments we hold dear” – meaning another half century of occupation and land theft? Rubber-stamp vetoes in the UN?

Democrats are on the wrong side when they attack free speech and human rights. And this has got to stop.

The Democratic Party’s platform may be the “most progressive” ever written. But this does not include its foreign policy section. That part was written by Hillary Rodham Clinton and reflects her neo-conservative and neo-liberal views. Traditionally, state parties have deferred on matters of foreign policy to a presidential candidate. But the approaches both parties have used for generations are not working. And despite Democrats calling for more “soft power” it’s hard power they always use. Invading new countries each year and spending our national wealth on war is bankrupting us, not making us safer. Right now, 53 cents of every dollar of discretionary spending goes to “defense.” And Trump wants even more.

So if Republicans are on the wrong track, what’s our plan?

One state Democrat Party – Washington – actually thought about it and did something. Progressives from this state wrote their own foreign policy platform, and it’s based on the golden rule, not on golden contracts for Raytheon and Boeing:

http://www.wa-democrats.org/issues/foreign-policy

In 2016 the two truly “divisive” issues separating progressive Democrats from Hillary Clinton-ites were her hawkishness and support for corporate-friendly trade deals. While we may all want to put the 2016 election behind us and join the unity tour with Bernie Sanders and Tom Perez, issues of Democratic support for neo-liberalism and neo-conservative foreign policy are not going away. They have to be resolved.

Democrats from each state need to weigh in separately. Like Steve Grossman, there are certain lines in the sand for some of us. I’ll never find a home in a party that turns its back on human rights. As a newbie delegate to the Massachusetts Democratic convention in June I’m optimistic that important changes can be made, at least in this state. But I’m not blind to the reality that Clinton and Obama people still own the party.

I hear the #DemExit and Draft Bernie calls, though impatience and the right wing seem to be driving many of them. I am reminded by my progressive brothers and sisters in the Greens and elsewhere that I may be on a fool’s errand. And maybe they’re right. My sixth sense tells me they are right. But I think patience and a certain amount of blind optimism are warranted right now. Now is a unique opportunity to move the center of gravity toward the left in a party that has lost its way – and admits it.

By the 2018 midterms we should have an idea of what the party is really committed to, how democratic it’s prepared to be, and how welcoming to progressive values it is.

And that should begin with a renewed commitment to Human Rights and new ways of formulating foreign policy.

Republican and Democratic coddling hasn’t stopped Israel’s self-destructive settlements. And now, with little land remaining for Palestinians, the Two State Solution is dead. Both parties got it wrong on Saturday’s editorial page.

For Charles Krauthammer Obama’s attempt to preserve the Two State Solution by abstaining from the customary U.S. veto of a UN resolution condemning settlements, was more proof Obama is an antisemite and Israel-basher. Krauthammer griped that Obama is keeping Jews from worshiping on the Temple Mount. Actually, it’s the Israeli government that is blocking End Times wingnuts from damaging what is also the site of the Al Aqsa mosque. Krauthammer joins Trump’s ambassador nominee David Friedman in a new age of Republican advocacy for extremists even too extreme for Israel.

Then there is Eugene Robinson, who praised the veto, even while acknowledging “Two States” is a dead letter. Robinson failed to hold Democrats accountable for doing little to stop the settlements, and he ends by praising Israel’s “vibrant democracy,” worrying what kind of democracy it will now become.

Become?

For Middle East correspondents based in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, for American politicians on AIPAC junkets, or for those who have never seen the West Bank or the Galilee, the sanitized version of Israel may have some trappings of a democracy. But for the 1.7 million Arab and Bedouin citizens of Israel, it’s a place where the phrase “filthy Arab” is heard repeatedly, where racial epithets are common, and brawls occurs at soccer games between Maccabi Petah Tikva and Hapoel Haifa. Arab Israelis earn 30% less than Jewish citizens, and jobs, scholarships and loans are harder to obtain. Life expectancy is lower, and half live in poverty. Israeli Bedouins are nomads and also the domestic victims of Jewish settlement.

Vigilante groups in Petah Tikva, Pisgat Zeev and Kiryat Gat beat interracial couples. Schools in Kiryat Gat “educate” Israeli girls on the dangers of interracial dating. One of their videos is called “Sleeping with the Enemy” and was co-produced with local police. In 2004 Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, called Arab and Jewish dating “an act of war.” Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman advocates the forced expulsion of the nation’s Arabs (“finishing the job”), a view supported by half the Jewish population.

A few years ago, the Israeli community of Moshav Yishi, whose motto was “The American Dream in Eretz Israel,” had a webpage that asked: “Looking for the American Dream in Eretz Yisrael? Two acre plots, farmland, reservoirs, and terrific views? Does an Arab-free environment sound appealing? Yishi is miles inside the Green Line and even further from the nearest Arab settlement.”

If Israel really is a democracy, says former Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Azmi Bishara, “I would call it a trivial democracy.”

And then there is the required submission of news articles to military censors; a law forbidding Arab Israelis from observing Nakba Day (commemorating the expulsion of 80% of Palestinians from their homes in 1948); and a different law penalizing Jewish supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. ACRI, the “Association for Civil Rights in Israel,” reports widespread discrimination, civil liberties violations, abrogation of treaties, mistreatment of asylum seekers, crackdowns on whistleblowers and journalists, and ongoing abuses in the Occupied Territories. ACRI’s December 2016 report laments: “This year, we unfortunately moved backwards.”

And this was Israel proper.

Then there are the territories that Israel occupies (West Bank) or dominates militarily (Gaza), which include about 4.5 million people under military control. Imagine if the United States occupied all of Mexico and Central America – and you can begin to fathom the scale of the Israeli occupation. Detentions in the West Bank don’t require warrants, and forty percent of all Palestinian men have been in prison. Land is stolen and homes bulldozed. Future ambassador David Friedman has a building with his name on it built on stolen land in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. Palestinians must travel through checkpoints like the one in Qalandia that, when I passed through in 2009, reminded me of how cattle are moved in stockyards.

With Two States dead, Republicans are now embracing Israel’s homegrown religious extremists, while Democrats continue to embrace a fairy-tale “democracy” that never was. And now the “Alt-Right’s” antisemites and white supremacists have joined the circus. Astonishingly, many of them are full-throated Zionists. After all, what’s not to love about a militaristic nation of ethnic and religious privilege, where government is mixed with religion, and half the citizens want to throw the “filthy Arabs” out?

It may be too late for Republicans, but Democrats had better figure out what democracy really means. At home and elsewhere.

Donald Trump’s nominee for American ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has long been a supporter of Israeli settlements. A building with his name on it sits in the West Bank town of Beit El, built on private Palestinian land in a settlement known for settler violence. Friedman supports the complete annexation of the West Bank and wants the United States to bless sixty years of settlements and abandon any pretense of pursuing a Two State solution.

With Democrats in disarray and Republicans ready to hand Israel anything it wants, it’s as good a time as any for Democrats to start planning for their post-Trump relationship to a little nation some either earnestly or bitterly call our 51st state. It’s also time for Democrats to abandon the illusion that, after so much land expropriated by Israel, a state for Palestinians is still possible. And when Democrats ultimately regain the White House the American-Israeli relationship is going to have to change.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, questioned whether Friedman would be working for Israel or for the United States: “Based on what he has said in the past, it seems as though he is very opinionated on Israeli issues, even though his role is to advance U.S. policies and interests and not the other way around.” Friedman has accused liberal American Jews (most of whom support Two States) of being “worse than Kapos” (Jewish collaborators with the Nazis). At the Saban Forum Friedman doubled-down on his invective.

As if to put a stamp of disapproval on Trump’s extremist nominee, this week the UN Security Council voted 14-0 (with a U.S. abstention) to condemn Israeli settlements as flagrant violations of international law. For the first time the United States did not automatically veto the resolution – a departure from the long-standing practice of shielding Israel from criticism. Israel was outraged and accused President Obama of orchestrating the vote, of rank antisemitism, and promised to hand over evidence of the “plot” to the next U.S. president.

In a futile gesture, Secretary of State John Kerry announced he’d use his remaining time to present a vision for a Two State solution, while an angry Netanyahu promised to step up the rate of settlement which has continued unabated since 1967. But even before the UN vote Israel was preparing to legalize almost 4,000 outposts in the West Bank. None of this should have surprised anyone. Last April Israeli Housing Minister Uri Ariel announced that the Two State solution was in its “dying throes” and that by 2019 Israel will have expanded settlements by 50%. But international criticism is not going away anytime soon. Aaccording to the Geneva Conventions seizing land from an occupied people is a war crime.

And yet hope persists. Irrationally.

In Israel 56% of secular Jews support a Two State solution with Palestinian demilitarization, but only 35% of religious Jews and 39% of Palestinians approve of the plan. Here in the U.S. only 39% of Americans support a Two State solution while 77% of American Jews do. American Jewish views on the occupation and on Two States have long been divided – generally between Orthodox and other Jewish traditions. Republicans and hard-line supporters of Israeli settlements are furious with liberal American Jews for breaking with Israel and acknowledging the violations of international law.

Israel, which does less trade with the U.S. than Switzerland, is not a NATO member and has never participated in a U.S.-led military coalition, yet this tiny country is nevertheless the beneficiary of considerable favor and largesse. Israel has received $124 billion to-date from the United States, and just received another $38 billion. Both Republicans and Democrats go out of their way to defend Israel’s interests – even censoring U.S. citizens. A recent Senate bill tried to block criticism of Israel on college campuses and New York governor Andrew Cuomo set up a blacklist of those supporting boycott and divestment campaigns to apply economic pressure on Israel.

To many Republican politicians Israel is not merely another nation but the birthplace of Christ. And for Evangelicals Israel is not just a modern state – it’s the Judea and Samaria of the Old Testament. Thus, David Friedman’s settlement in Beit El is not simply in the “West Bank” – but “Samaria.” Besides appealing to American religious sensibilities, Israel’s considerable lobby operates more freely than those of other nations which must register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This double standard may be partly due to the bipartisan sentiment that “there can be no daylight” (or conflict of interest) between our foreign policy and Israel’s – a tired and dangerous formulation.

But clearly no such “daylight” exists between Israel and David Friedman, who often says “we” when referring to Israel and has close ties to the Yesha Council of Settlements. Because Friedman, in virtually every sense, is an Israeli settler.

There was a time when the U.S. separated its interests from Israel’s. Michal Doran, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described Eisenhower’s reaction to Israel’s involvement in the Suez crisis: “In 1956, Britain, France and Israel launched coordinated invasions of Egypt. To say that Eisenhower disapproved would be an understatement. He directed at his allies a level of hostility typically reserved for worst enemies. After demanding that the attacking forces evacuate Egypt immediately, he imposed crippling economic sanctions on France and Britain. Against Israel, he threatened sanctions while engaging in bare-knuckle diplomacy.”

Yet. with the exception of Republican shutdowns of the U.S. government, there has never been a suspension of military aid to Israel or thought of witholding its get-out-of-trouble vetoes in the UN Security Council. Even Jimmy Carter, a critic of Israeli settlements for over 30 years, never used aid to Israel as a carrot or a stick. Progressive Democrats have been demanding even-handed leadership from their party on this issue, but centrist Democrats have instead thrown buckets of military aid at Israel and a few bucks at an unelected and despised figurehead in the West Bank. Like Republican Evangelicals, AIPAC Democrats have always been happy to maintain the status quo. And Israel has been grateful for all the time the charade has bought – for expropriating more land.

But Friedman has a point. The Two State solution has been dead for years. American presidents have come and gone, each happily mouthing the words “Two States” – but none has ever advocated for a Palestinian state as zealously as for Israel’s.

Perhaps now, with Trump about to be sworn in, Democrats will recognize the unsustainability and depravity of a 60-year occupation. Perhaps, with Trump now running the circus, Democrats and even a few Republicans will have to acknowledge that, paradoxically, many anti-Semites are actually quite pro-Israel. From both David Friedman’s and Steve Bannon’s perspective – what’s not to love about a militaristic nation of ethnic and religious privilege, where government is mixed with religion, and half the citizens want to throw the “dirty Arabs” out?

But without new leadership at the DNC, I wouldn’t pin too many hopes on the Democratic Party. As an article in the lefty Jewish Forward magazine put it, Democrats have a Haim Saban problem. Saban, the American-Israeli movie mogul who brought us the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, was Hillary Clinton’s top donor, a man even Breitbart News describes as an Islamophobe. Saban himself puts it this way: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

The Democratic Party has wrestled with its cozy relationship to AIPAC in each of the last two conventions. Although Democrats say they are worried that David Friedman will move the American embassy to Jerusalem, in 2012 the DNC attempted to push through a motion to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. An undemocratic roll was called by Antonio Villaraigosa, and the voice votes caught the DNC by surprise. AIPAC had “vetted” the motion – had actually written the text. In 2016 the issue of the occupation of Palestine came up again. Clinton supporter Robert Wexler insisted that Democrats could not afford to mention the “O” word (“occupation”) if a Two State solution could be salvaged. Sanders supporter James Zogby pushed back, pointing out that everyone knows the occupation exists. Both sides also disagreed whether Democrats should support the BDS movement. Ultimately the DNC adopted wording that made AIPAC (and Clinton) happy.

So when the UN Security Council took its vote this week, the US abstention was quite the exception. And now Democrats find themselves accused of being Islamist-Leftists who love Shariah and hate Jews. But Obama’s abstention was a desperate, and ultimately futile, “Hail Mary” to save the Two State illusion.

Decades of “peace” negotiations under Democratic presidents tell us that “Two States” was always more an act than a plan of action – at least the part involving a Palestinian state. We can only assume now that another four years of extreme coddling under Trump will permit Israel to turn the rest of East Jerusalem and huge swaths of the West Bank into even more American-style suburbs – like Ma’ale Adumim with its mall and ACE Hardware.

But after that? What then?

In nine years Jews will be a minority (48%) in Israel-Palestine, which will make continued Jewish domination more difficult and unjustifiable. Within a few decades of this demographic shift, Theodor Herzl’s experiment will very likely come to an anti-climactic end.

* * *

Further reading

We’ve seen an uptick in attacks on minorities recently, especially following the election. At a time when Muslims have really been taking it on the chin the Senate tried to push through the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016,” an innocuous-sounding bill. But this legislation would have turned universities into censors by threatening “federal funding at colleges and universities where political speech against Israel occurs,” an expert on anti-Semitism and extremism wrote.

The bill would have required the Department of Education to alter the meaning of anti-Semitism to include “demonizing Israel” or “judging Israel by a double standard.” This new definition was adopted by the State Department under Hillary Clinton but was originally conceived in 2004 by Natan Sharansky, the founder of Israel’s Ba’Aliyah (immigration) party. Free speech advocates including the ACLU object to the political manipulation of a concept that has been around since 1879 – well before Israel was established.

While the bill’s supporters claim it was simply intended to shield Jewish students from hate, it was really just another attempt to censor debate over Israeli settlements and shut down the Boycott and Divestment (BDS) movement on college campuses, particularly student calls for university trustees to divest of Irael-related portfolios. With such legislation even progressive Jewish groups like JStreet-U, which is critical of Israeli policy without advocating BDS, and Jewish Voice for Peace, which does support BDS, could be subject to loss of their First Amendment rights.

According to Sharansky’s “3D Test” anti-Semitism is no longer simply the demonization of Jews. In fact, he doesn’t even bother to include this well-understood aspect in his definition. For Sharansky anti-Semitism is (1) demonization of the state of Israel; (2) holding double standards regarding the state of Israel; and (3) deligitimization = denying the right of the state of Israel to exist.

According to Sharansky “demonization” of Israel refers to unfair or exaggerated comparisons of Palestinian and Jewish suffering, or comparing Israel’s crimes with the Nazis. For Sharansky (and now the U.S. State Department) “deligitimization” refers to critics who refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Recognition of nations is a political function and one state can choose to recognize another any way it chooses.

Israel’s borders are contested by Palestinians, and land that Israel seized in Lebanon and Syria is also disputed. Neverthess, all U.N. members fully recognize Israel, and even the three with land disputes give Israel limited recognition. Israel, however, insists on being recognized specifically as a Jewish state. No nation seriously intends to erase Israel from a map – especially one with nukes. What Israel wants is the international seal of approval for Zionism.

Unfortunately for Israel, the world’s experience with Germany soured everyone on 19th Century ethno-nationalism. Zionism – any kind of ethno-nationalism – is incompabile with a pluralistic democracy. Israel’s occupation of 4.5 million Palestinians is brutal. Palestinians need their own state but Israel has effectively placed them in reservations or bantustans. This can’t g on. BDS is one way to exert a little economic pressure.

But this is a political discussion – one we should be free to have, on a street corner or a campus. Few Americans want the United States to become a Christian theocracy (I hope I’m right about this), and there are many Saudis, Pakistanis, and Iranians opposed to religious law in their own countries. Americans aren’t stingy with criticisms of Saudi justice and Americans have plenty to say about Cuba, China, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. It’s hard to see how Israel is being held to a different standard.

But whether Natan Sharansky or the government of Israel object to criticism. It’s a right to criticize a foreign country – or even one’s own – regardless of criteria. One doesn’t even need facts – like Republicans on climate change.

The injustice of Israel’s occupation is what the BDS movement hammers away at – martial law, settlements, selective application of laws, thirty-foot separation walls, private roads for settlers, checkpoints, settler violence, water theft, destruction of olive trees, night raids without warrants, prison sentences without trial, press censorship, gag laws for Israeli dissidents, “Judaizing” of both the West Bank and Arab communites in Israel proper. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documents a lot of it.

But a double standard does exist. Just not the one Mr. Sharansky wants to talk about.

Israel is not a western democracy in any recognizable sense. Democracies don’t maintain martial law for half a century over an ethnic and religious minority corraled into reservations. Democracies don’t legislate religious and racial laws that advantage members of a single group. We’d have a stroke if full legal rights in Germany were extended only to blond-haired, blue-eyed people in the year 2016.

Israel’s 1951 Law of Return permitted Jews (defined as having a Jewish mother) from any land to “return” to Israel, while millions of Palestinians have been permanently locked out of homes their parents lived in. As distasteful as it is to admit, eliminating Palestians by recognizing only Jewish blood is effectively a racial law. But the Law of Return was amended in 1971 to make it possible for non-Jewish relatives of immigrants to join their families in Israel, so the amendment took on an additional racial cast since mainly Ashkenazim (European Jews) were added to Israel’s population. Imagine if Britain offered automatic citizenship (along with settlement benefits) only to Anglicans and Episcopalians from any country (plus their blue-eyed descendants regardless of religion). We would wonder what kind of democracy it was.

And this is the real double standard – that Israel gets a pass for thumbing its nose at democratic norms.

Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner thinks he knows why Israel bothers western critics so much: “Western liberals – not to mention Israeli liberals – whose greatest moral outrage is reserved for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians have nothing to apologize for. It’s a natural reaction, an inevitable one. As with apartheid South Africa, Vietnam, European colonialism and other examples from the West’s history, the occupation enflames leftists in a way that other, greater tyrannies in the world don’t, simply because this tyranny – the last of its kind still standing – is being perpetrated by their own side.”

Derfner has a point, but even with greater tyrranies I’m entitled to a little extra outrage over Israel. After all, I’m paying taxes to my “own side” to help Israel prolong the suffering of stateless Palestinians. I’m not providing aid to Assad to kill residents of Aleppo. And the hypocrisy of the double standard from my “own side” disturbs me the most because the link between foreign policy and domestic policy has implications which affect me personally. If politicians overlook war crimes in Israel, they’ll also overlook the abuse of civilians by police domestically.

Meanwhile, Israel has quite the enabler in the United States. American politicians pretend that Israel does not have nuclear weapons while other countries are punished if they spin up a centrifuge. When Israel kills American citizens our own government does nothing. Israel receives massive aid packages every year – ones like no other nation on earth receives. Double standards.

Without doubt Israel is America’s favorite nation and is the beneficiary of a double standard – not because it has stood with the US in Afghanistan or Iraq like its NATO allies, but because many American politicians are evangelicals, for whom this little country is not just another nation – but the birthplace of Christ. For them Israel is not even Israel as a modern state. For evangelicals it’s a Biblical Disneyland. Israel’s substantial lobby operates as if represented domestic interests, while lobbyists for other nations have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. More double standards.

Yet is it a double standard to point out that maybe – just maybe – there should be a little daylight between our foreign policy and Israel’s – that our interests are not identical? This tired formulation (“no daylight”) is used repeatedly by politicians for no other country. And it’s just not true.

As he was leaving the presidency, George Washington offered a few pieces of advice – “honesty is the best policy” was one. But Washington also had something to say about permitting double standards for a favorite nation:

“… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter… It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions … and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity…”

No one in modern times could say it any better.

One State Solution

Most of the organizations which comprise the formal Israel Lobby, including AIPAC, WINEP, and ZOA, promote policies which are virtually identical to the Likud’s One State platform, which states that there will never be a Palestinian homeland west of Jordan. Look on a map to see what that means. AIPAC has enjoyed bipartisan support for years, even as both the GOP and DNC neglected the creation of a Palestinian state and lavished many billions of dollars on Israel. Besides formal lobbyists, there are also several American Zionist organizations that fund settlements and, in so doing, undermine the Two State solution.

• American Israel Education Foundation
• American Israel Public Affairs Committee
• Friends of the Israel Defense Forces
• Jewish Federations of North America
• Jewish National Fund
• JINSA | Securing America, Strengthening Israel
• Republican Jewish Coalition
• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
• Zionist Organization of America

No-State Solution

There’s no arguing with the fact that America has a lot of anti-Semites. This week the neo-Nazi friends of Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon are planning an armed march to terrorize Jewish families and businesses of Whitefish, Montana. For most of us, however, like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who was referring to pornography, we know anti-Semitism when we see it.

But Israel managed a linguistic coup by extending the definition of anti-Semitism to include any criticism of Israel. Organizations that once fought and illuminated hatred of Jews now find themselves spending a lot of time enmeshed in Israeli foreign and domestic policy. They claim to support the Two State solution but argue that only because of anti-Semitism and recalcitrance do Palestinians have “no state” and deserve none for the time being – until Israel’s “security” needs are satisfied.

• AJC: Global Jewish Advocacy
• American Jewish Congress
• Anti-Defamation League
• Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
• Jewish Council for Public Affairs

Two-State Solution

The majority of American Jews want a Two State solution and it’s not hard to see why. The One State solution means either (1) expelling all Arabs (something Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman has advocated and which half of Israelis support); (2) depriving Palestinians of a state, civil laws and rights, squeezing them into reservations or bantustans, and subjecting them to endless checkpoints; or (3) inviting Palestinians into the Israeli state. Israel has backed itself into a corner with decades of “annexation” and there’s hardly anything left for Palestinians. Occupation is all it knows. Israel could also embrace (4) the American “Indian reservation” model and unilaterally declare encircled “cantons” a “Palestinian” homeland. I fear this option would satisfy most Americans because – it seems to have worked nicely for us.

American Jews and progressive Israelis see both the moral danger and the self-destructive effect of leaving nothing for Palestinians. Consequently many American Jewish organizations support the Two State Solution:

• Adalah
• Ameinu – Liberal Values, Progressive Israel | Progressive Zionism
• American Council for Judaism
• Americans for Peace Now
• Breaking the Silence
• B’Tselem | The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• IfNotNow
• Israel Policy Forum
• J Street: The Political Home for Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace Americans
• Jewish Voice for Peace
• Jews For Racial & Economic Justice
• Jews Say No: Not In OurName!
• Jews United For Justice | ThinkJewishly. Act Locally.
• National Jewish Democratic Council
• Partners for Progressive Israel
• T’ruah
• Workmen’s Circle