The Anne Frank House Center says that, “Zionism is about the pursuit of an independent Jewish state.” That was accomplished in 1948, and affirmed in bloody wars in 1956, 1967, 1973 and in various attacks and battles since then. On October 7 the Zionist military apparatus, for all its impressiveness, failed because of hubris. Modern Jewish history didn’t start then. The post-World War I San Remo Conference of 1920 was the genesis for current dynamics, when the artificial boundaries of the Levant were created by the victorious Western empires.  

Zionism is abused as a social and religious cudgel by the Evangelical movement, and has become another tool of divisiveness for the American far-right. Evangelicals, not Jews, comprise a greater plurality of Israeli tourism now, as more American and European Jews reject this narrative of a “false idol,” in the words of author and activist Naomi Klein. She wrote in a recent ‘Street Seder Address’ published in The Guardian, that Zionism “is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide . . . . . a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.”

Netanyahu’s virulent Likud form of Zionism, which he has now allied with the openly racist and even genocidal Religious Zionism and Jewish Power blocs, has created an image of the movement that is anathema to many progressive and leftist activists, and it fuels anti-Semitism as less informed people on the right and left conflate this ruthless ultra-nationalism with Judaism. Just as marriages can run their course, leading to a necessary divorce, the time has come for Jews to divorce Zionism. Bibi has become a literal Pharaoh to Palestinians.  Klein adds, “From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.”

Democracy Now! Video: “Naomi Klein: Jews Must Raise Voices for Palestine, Oppose “False Idol of Zionism”

It’s important to remember that “Judaism and Zionism are two distinct terms often intertwined, in reality, they represent rather distinct concepts with different historical, cultural, and most importantly, political implications,” as noted in The Business Standard.  They add, “Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that continues to support the development and protection of the State of Israel. Zionism, at its core, can be understood as a manifestation of Jewish nationalism.”  Judaism is a religion, while Zionism is a political ideology.

 The original anti-Zionists were, “from fringe Orthodox sects and maintain that Israel can only be regained miraculously. They view the present state as a blasphemous human attempt to usurp God’s role, and many seek to dismantle the secular State of Israel. However, unlike many gentile anti­-Zionists, Jewish anti-Zionists usually firmly believe in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel, but only at the future time of redemption.”  Though the Neturei Karta were the most visible of observant anti-Zionists, most Haredim in Israel continue that tradition with their refusal to participate in the military or support the embattled state.

Klein asserts that the Zionist ideology, “. . .  is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children. Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child. . . . Including the love we have as a people for text and for education. . . .Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets.” She calls this “scholasticide,” which is parallel to the burning of libraries and synagogues by Nazis.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is one of many Western Jewish organizations that continues to promote the false idol narrative.  They argue that anti-Zionism means that Jews “do not have a right to self-determination — or that the Jewish people’s religious and historical connection to Israel is invalid.” The AJC also says that, “Calling for a Palestinian nation-state, while simultaneously advocating for an end to the Jewish nation-state is hypocritical at best, and potentially anti-Semitic.” The polemical problem is that the Jewish nation is a powerful “fact on the ground,” though threatened by hostile outside forces. Israel is a political reality. But Judaism and Zionism are also threatened internally by Bibi’s leadership record of self-destruction, as his primary aim is political self-preservation. Israel’s economy and security are also undermined by the refusal of the Haredim to support the state and serve in the military.

Not only can Israel remain secure without Zionism; it may become more secure, as the provocations towards Palestinians would cease. The Temple Sunday School narrative minimizes, euphemizes and marginalizes what Palestinians suffered in the Nabka, concurrent with Israeli independence. It’s time to correct that false narrative, and recognize that Zionism has run its course.

The outpouring of objection to American funding of the Israeli war machine is unprecedented in size and scope. In turn the size and scope of government efforts to quash these protests is also unprecedented, now becoming evocative of Kent State in 1970. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when anyone proposes placing National Guard troops on a US college campus. Doing so would be a provocation and incitement for escalation, and that game plan appears to be unfolding.

Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, have all been plagued by departures from their spiritual ethics into orgies of violence. We see this phenomenon in Bibi’s brand of imperial Zionism, Hamas’ and other extremist groups’ violent perversion of Islam, preferring an ideology of hate and misogyny, and the White Christian Nationalist movement in the US, fueled by Trump. The religions of Christianity and Islam have struggled to come to terms with secular modernity, and have seen powerful and violent movements during that struggle. Judaism has the spiritual Reform movement, but no corresponding social-political movement. Judaism came first and has an obligation to take the lead in creating a new paradigm, of a monotheistic, biblically-rooted tradition that nevertheless stands for tolerance and human rights for all. Jews must recognize that the shelf-life of Zionism has expired. Also important is that Judaism is a religion, not a form of ethno-nationalism, despite former President Trump’s attempts to dragoon all Jews into the effort to censor free speech over Palestinian human rights.

(The Conversation) – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has signaled that Israel’s military will soon launch an invasion of Rafah, the city in the southern Gaza Strip. More than 1 million Palestinians, now on the verge of famine, have sought refuge there from their bombed-out cities farther north. Despite U.S. President Joe Biden’s warning against the move, Netanyahu appears, for now, undeterred from his aim to attack Rafah.

The attack is the latest chapter in Israel’s current battle to eliminate Hamas from Gaza.

But it’s also a reflection of an ideology, known as the “Iron Wall,” that has been part of Israeli political history since before the state’s founding in 1948. The Iron Wall has driven Netanyahu in his career leading Israel for two decades, culminating in the current deadly war that began with a massacre of Israelis and then turned into a humanitarian catastrophe for Gaza’s Palestinians.

Here is the history of that ideology:

A wall that can’t be breached

In 1923, Vladimir, later known as “Ze’ev,” Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist activist, published “On the Iron Wall,” an article in which he laid out his vision for the course that the Zionist movement should follow in order to realize its ultimate goal: the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine, at the time governed by the British.

Jabotinsky admonished the Zionist establishment for ignoring the Arab majority in Palestine and their political desires. He asserted the Zionist establishment held a fanciful belief that the technological progress and improved economic conditions that the Jews would supposedly bring to Palestine would endear them to the local Arab population.

Jabotinsky thought that belief was fundamentally wrong.

To Jabotinsky, the Arabs of Palestine, like any native population throughout history, would never accept another people’s national aspirations in their own homeland. Jabotinsky believed that Zionism, as a Jewish national movement, would have to combat the Arab national movement for control of the land.

“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,” he wrote.

Jabotinsky believed the Zionist movement should not waste its resources on Utopian economic and social dreams. Zionism’s sole focus should be on developing Jewish military force, a metaphorical Iron Wall, that would compel the Arabs to accept a Jewish state on their native land.

“Zionist colonisation … 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,” he wrote.

Jabotinsky’s heirs: Likud

In 1925, Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist movement, which would become the chief right-wing opposition party to the dominant Labor Party in the Zionist movement. It opposed Labor’s socialist economic vision and emphasized the focus on cultivating Jewish militarism.

In 1947, David Ben Gurion and the Zionist establishment accepted partition plans devised by the United Nations for Palestine, dividing it into independent Jewish and Palestinian Arab states. The Zionists’ goal in accepting the plan: to have the Jewish state founded on the basis of such international consensus and support.

Jabotinsky’s Revisionists opposed any territorial compromise, which meant they opposed any partition plan. They objected to the recognition of a non-Jewish political entity – an Arab state – within Palestine’s borders.

The Palestinian Arab state proposed by the U.N. partition plan was rejected by Arab leaders, and it never came into being.

In 1948, Israel declared its independence, which sparked a regional war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. During the war, which began immediately after the U.N. voted for partition and lasted until 1949, more than half the Palestinian residents of the land Israel claimed were expelled or fled.

At the war’s end, the historic territory of Palestine was divided, with about 80% claimed and governed by the new country of Israel. Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip.

In the new Israeli parliament, Jabotinsky’s heirs – in a party first called Herut and later Likud – were relegated to the opposition benches.

Old threat, new threat

In 1967, another war broke out between Israel and Arab neighbors Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It resulted in Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. Yitzhak Rabin led Israel’s military during that war, called the Six-Day War.

From 1948 until 1977, the more leftist-leaning Labor Party governed Israel. In 1977, Menachem Begin led the Likud to victory and established it as the dominant force in Israeli politics.

However in 1992, Rabin, as the leader of Labor, was elected as prime minister. With Israel emerging as both a military and economic force in those years, fueled by the new high-tech sector, he believed the country was no longer facing the threat of destruction from its neighbors. To Rabin, the younger generation of Israelis wanted to integrate into the global economy. Resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, he believed, would help Israel integrate into the global order.

In 1993, Rabin negotiated the Oslo Accords, a peace deal with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The two men shook hands in a symbol of the reconciliation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The agreement created a Palestinian authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as part of the pathway to the long-term goal of creating two countries, Israel and a Palestinian state, that would peacefully coexist.

That same year, Benjamin Netanyahu had become the leader of the Likud Party. The son of a prominent historian of Spanish Jewry, he viewed Jewish history as facing a repeating cycle of attempted destruction – from the Romans to the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis and the Arab world.

Netanyahu saw the Oslo peace process as the sort of territorial compromise Jabotinsky had warned about. To him, compromise would only invite conflict, and any show of weakness would spell doom.

The only answer to such a significant threat, Netanyahu has repeatedly argued, is a strong Jewish state that refuses any compromises, always identifying the mortal threat to the Jewish people and countering it with an overwhelming show of force.

No territorial compromise

Since the 1990s, Netanyahu’s primary focus has not been on the threat of the Palestinians, but rather that of Iran and its nuclear ambitions. But he has continued to say there can be no territorial compromise with the Palestinians. Just as Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state, Netanyahu refuses to accept the idea of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu believed that only through strength would the Palestinians accept Israel, a process that would be aided if more and more Arab states normalized relations with Israel, establishing diplomatic and other ties. That normalization reached new heights with the 2020 Abraham Accords, the bilateral agreements signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and between Israel and Bahrain. These agreements were the ultimate vindication of Netanyahu’s regional vision.

It should not be surprising, then, that Hamas’ horrific attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, took place just as Saudi Arabia was nearing normalization of relations with Israel. In a twisted manner, when the Saudis subsequently backed off the normalization plans, the attack reaffirmed Netanyahu’s broader vision: The Palestinian group that vowed to never recognize Israel made sure that Arab recognition of Israel would fail.

The Hamas attack gave Netanyahu an opportunity to reassert Israel’s – and Jabotinsky’s – Iron Wall.

The massive and wantonly destructive war that Netanyahu has led against Hamas and Gaza since that date is the Iron Wall in its most elemental manifestation: unleashing overwhelming force as a signal that no territorial compromise with the Arabs over historical Palestine is possible. Or, as Netanyahu has repeatedly said in recent weeks, there will be no ceasefire until there’s a complete Israeli victory.

Eran Kaplan, Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies, San Francisco State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Madrid and State College, Pa. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In a statement from March 12, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced the suspension of Professor Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, an internationally renowned Palestinian scholar and a faculty member in the Law School and School of Social Work. The drastic and unprecedented move came after Shalhoub talked in an extended podcast interview about the October 7 horrors and the ensuing devastating war and mass killings in Gaza. Two sentences that were taken out of context dominated the public conversation. First, “And of course, they will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, they will continue with million other lies every day with another story.” Second, “Only by abolishing Zionism, we can continue. This is what I see.” The public outrage, of course, ignored her comments, conveying sympathy to the victims of October 7. In fact, she said, “My reaction to the stories on October 7th was horrified…I will never allow anybody to touch a baby, to kidnap a child, to rape a woman”, adding, “all our lives, we fought for the dignity, for life, for the wholeness of a human and not the opposite.” 

In its statement, the Hebrew University rejected “all of the distorted the statements of Professor Kevorkian”. Emphasizing that the University “is proud of being an Israeli, public, and Zionist institution. As in the past, the heads of the university repeated their call for Professor Kevorkian to find another academic home that suits her position. In this stage, and in order to maintain a safe climate on campus for the benefit of our male and female students, the university decided to suspend her from teaching.” 

But what does it mean when a central institution of higher learning defines itself as Zionist? What does it mean for the non-Zionist or anti-Zionist faculty and students? What does it mean for the Palestinian national minority of seventeen percent that has been victimized by Zionism for years that this institution is Zionist and that any attempt to criticize this ideology faces the strongest possible reaction in the university toolbox? To be clear, Jewish professors have been able to criticize Zionism openly. As a state ideology, it is fair or even necessary to question the value and substance of this ideology. Few Jewish professors–to date– faced suspension or demands to find a new academic home for their critique of Zionisim. At the same time, faculty members at the Hebrew University who have been publicly defending war crimes and cheering on genocidal acts faced no disciplinary actions.

Democracy Now! Video: “”Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism”: Palestinian Prof on Her Suspension from Hebrew University”

Just recently, the International Court of Justice ruled that the allegations that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention are plausible. Too often, the commission of international crimes is made possible through aggressive attempts to silence dissent and punish dissenters. The suspension of Professor Shalhoub by the Hebrew University is only one example of the relentless efforts on the part of Israeli institutions to silence dissent, making the university itself complicit in the atrocities that are being committed in Gaza. The witch hunt against Professor Shalhoub did not start with the decision to suspend her. In fact, it reached unprecedented levels months ago after she signed and circulated a petition accusing Israel of committing genocide. The publication of an official letter by the university accusing her of incitement and sedition not only contravened basic tenets of academic liberty, but it also put her life in real danger, given the rising violence of extreme right-wing activists against Palestinians. If this could be done to an internationally renowned scholar, we can only imagine how easy it would be to intimidate and target junior Palestinian scholars and students. 

Needless to say, the establishment of the state of Israel and the ensuing Palestinian Nakba were marked with attempts to destroy the Palestinian cultural and intellectual life to disorient Palestinians who remained in their homeland. The crackdown on Palestinian academics and Palestinian students in Israeli universities is a continuation of this policy, and it aims at thwarting any attempt on the part of the Palestinian citizens to fight for their national collective rights. Using such coercive measures against the Palestinian intellectual community could have a devastating impact on the Palestinian citizens as a whole, who are already deprived of their right to self-determination under the Nation-State Law.

These disciplining attempts are prevalent in all public spaces. About the same time as the Hebrew University issued its statement, the Israeli Football Association announced it was going to put Bnei Sakhnin (the senior Palestinian football club in the Israeli premier league) in a disciplinary process because its fans cheered loudly during the playing of the national anthem, therefore, not honoring it. This, too, joins the effort to suppress and limit Palestinian voices.   

Israel has long imposed a regime of racial supremacy on Palestinians, the last months have proved that it is willing to escalate in its resort to coercive measures to maintain this regime and to eliminate any meaningful opposition to it. When leading academic institutions become the arm of the state in enforcing such policies, the international academic community should respond promptly and loudly.   

Sonia Boulos is an Associate Professor of international human rights law at Nebrija University and the Co-editor of Palestine/Israel Review

Lior Sternfeld is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University and the Associate Editor of Palestine/Israel Review

IMDB’s laconic description of Glazer’s masterpiece, based on a novel by Martin Amis, goes this way: “Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.” The film is an indictment of what Hannah Arendt called “The Banality of Evil.”

The British national Glazer, however, clearly has a difficulty with the Zionist Right, which has appropriated the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews as a primary plank in its platform of bestowing impunity on the Israeli government for whatever atrocity, whatever violation of international humanitarian law, whatever genocide its leaders wish to commit.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Glazer said,

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what we did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Here’s the clip:

ABC Video: THE ZONE OF INTEREST Accepts the Oscar for International Feature Film

Daniel Arkin at NBC writes, “Inside the Dolby Theatre, many in the audience could be seen cheering and applauding. Sandra Hüller, the German actor who portrayed Höss’ wife, Hedwig, appeared to be crying and put her hand to her chest.”

He adds, “Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef wore red pins on the Oscars red carpet symbolizing calls for a cease-fire.”

Glazer’s international platform (19.5 million people watched live) and his universalist sentiments posed a severe difficulty for the Zionist right wing. Glazer was saying that the Holocaust was an event in human history, not solely in Jewish history, and that its lesson is that dehumanization leads to atrocities and even genocide. In wartime Nazi Germany Jews were called “Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, vultures.” And then they were murdered in their millions by the National Socialist government.

Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals.”

Glazer is aware that the Hamas commandos who killed over 600 Israeli civilians on October 7, along with some 400 military personnel, also dehumanized those Jews, allowing them to mow down attendees at a music festival and left wing grandmothers at Kibbutz hamlets.

He was saying that this dehumanization, and its consequences in the casual murder of other human beings, clearly needs to be resisted. But how? How? is the existential question of the twenty-first century.

But for the current full-on fascist cabinet in Israel and its cheerleaders in the United States, the Holocaust and October 7 aren’t about universal values, they are about Jews and Zionism. They are antinomian in effect, justifying Israeli troops in committing any action, any crime. They are a get out of jail free card for Zionists. The Right denies that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, even though over 13,000 children have been killed in indiscriminate bombing and another 12,000 women noncombatants have been killed. How else, they ask, could you destroy Hamas? Even President Biden, however, has begun pointing out in public that there are other ways of targeting a small terrorist organization than killing tens of thousands of noncombatants.

Glazer also violated the tenets of the Zionist Right by saying that his film about the Holocaust is not about what people did in the 1940s but about what people do today. His clear implication is that the tactics the Israeli government is using in Gaza must be condemned for the same reason that the Holocaust must be condemned. These actions, while of entirely different scale, are atrocities that spring from a denial of our common humanity.

Glazer’s most controversial assertion was, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people.”

He was saying that the Zionist far right of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich had attempted to hijack the Jewish religion to which Glazer and some of his colleagues adhere, and that he rejects this appropriation.

This statement strikes at the core of Zionist nationalism, which insists that Judaism and Zionism are identical. Non-Zionist Jews from this point of view are traitors. Never mind that in opinion polling significant numbers of American Jews express discomfort with the right wing Zionism that has come to dominate Israeli politics.

Because Glazer’s brief, historic statement profoundly threatened the project of what some have called “Israelism,” a cult-like induction of people into the Zionism=Judaism and “Jews must support Bibi” complex of beliefs, some Zionists decided that he must be smeared and his reputation destroyed.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek deputy opinion editor, author of a book on how “woke” media is allegedly undermining democracy, and inveterate propagandist for the Israeli Right, presented a gross distortion of what Glazer said on X:

I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone's soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, "We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness."

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) March 11, 2024

Even X’s community comments eventually flagged the post as misleading, though it is actually a horrid lie, and it is hard to understand why anyone should ever again take seriously anything she says.

Her posting was widely reposted and paraphrased on the Zionist Right, in a disinformation campaign attempting to make it look as though Glazer were an apostate and had abandoned Jewish values rather than standing up for them.

An attempt was also made to push back against the red pins worn by numerous celebrities at the Oscars, symbolizing their call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza (which in polling the majority of Americans of both parties desire).

Foreign policy expert Matt Duss pointed to another disinformation campaign:

pic.twitter.com/h2KG6p0SW1

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) March 12, 2024

Another poster saw a pattern:

Lol.

You can watch the roll out of the propaganda in real time…

As a bunch of geographically dispersed accounts amazingly arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously. pic.twitter.com/tJk7NmfI7z

— Conor Hennessy (@typingduck) March 12, 2024

In fact, the red pins were distributed by ArtistsForCeasefire
who said, “The pin symbolises collective support for an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all of the hostages and for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza,”

Israeli propaganda, or Hasbara, as Duss points out, has reached the level of irrationality and of sheer crazy that characterizes QAnon conspiracies such as Pizzagate and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers.

That is why we increasingly have to consider what comes out of AIPAC, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and other Zionist organizations as QZionism, a form of information pollution.

Bibi’s war crimes have fueled an explosion in global Antisemitism on the Left, while Donald Trump stokes it from the right. Most of the world, including many Jews; don’t distinguish between Zionism as a mutated political philosophy from Judaism, the religion. Now the American material and financial support of the Israeli war machine is deeply hurting President Joe Biden’s re-election bid. The US has enabled Israel since it supplanted Great Britain and France as Israel’s protectors after the failed 1956 Suez invasion. The unwillingness of the US to divorce itself from Israel, and many Jews to divorce Judaism from Zionism, is strengthening Antisemitism. It is also inadvertently helping Trump’s bid to re-take the presidency.

Antisemitism has been a social disease for about 2,024 years, if not longer. In the wake of Trump’s presidency and metastasizing political movement, it is globally stronger and more visible than any time since WWII. His leadership has empowered not only Fascists in the US, but authoritarian dictators and movement globally. Most destructive is how Trump and Bibi have cross-promoted one another’s quest for fascist dictatorships.

At the same time, Jewish Americans have been subjected to the “Great Replacement” Conspiracy Theory. Some on the MAGA far right have adopted it. At Charlottesville, pro-Trump Neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not Replace us.”

As Juan Cole wrote recently, “In 2021, [Rep. Elise] Stefanik began taking up the talking points of the Great Replacement Theory. It holds that wealthy Jewish businessmen are bringing in immigrants from the Global South to replace white workers, since the immigrants will work more cheaply. Stefanik perhaps did not utter the phrase, but she appealed to all the dog whistles of this odious theory. Marianna Sotomayor noted last year at the Washington Post that Stefanik put out campaign ads saying, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION . . . Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Guess who the “radical Democrats” might be, to which she refers? Could they possibly be people such as, oh, I don’t know, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and other Jewish American legislators who have worked for immigration reform?”

Antisemitism has also become a 3^rd Rail in American politics, with many elected officials intimidated from weighing in either way. That’s the case in the City of Oakland, where I live. The Mayor’s Office, City Administrator, HR Division and City Council members have all ignored a week’s worth of inquiries, requesting to discuss the visible rise of Antisemitism in City government and the Oakland Unified School District. Dozens of Jewish families have withdrawn their children in response to hostility. Some people on the fringe left, including public employees in Oakland are arguing that, “the October 7 attack was a ‘false flag’ staged by Israel – likely with help from the Americans — to justify genocide in Gaza.” This is a gross characterization born out of willful ignorance.

The new Antisemitism from the left may actually be more dangerous than the traditional, garden-variety brand, embraced by the far-far right. October 7 denial is more dangerous than Holocaust denial, which has fueled Antisemitism on the extreme right for decades. Cyber-Well, a non-profit devoted to countering Antisemitism online cautioned, “Whereas Holocaust denial at its height was limited to fringe academic circles and extremist hate groups who gained a limited following through traditional media, conferences, and papers, today social media platforms provide an algorithmically enhanced stage to disseminate the Antisemitic narrative of October 7 denial directly into the mainstream from a select few influential accounts.” The denialist POV is ignorant about some very important things: 1.) Hamas is NOT Islam and indeed committed atrocious war crimes that violate Islam’s Shari’a code. 2.) Zionism is NOT Judaism, but a mutant ideology that strayed far from its secular, agrarian ideals under a series of corrupt politicians. The Gaza War crimes are afoul of Halacha (Jewish law), as Hamas is of Shari’a.

Democracy Now! “New Film Examines American Jews’ Growing Rejection of Israel’s Occupation”

Counterintuitively, the compulsion for unquestioned American support for Israel is now driven more by US Evangelicals than Jews, as more Jews turn away from Zionism. To many Jews, the Temple Sunday School myth that Israel MUST be a central focus of Judaism is invalid. Since October 7, more Jews than ever have stopped supporting Israel. Anti-zionism, as the concept has evolved, does not mean dismantling the State of Israel, but demanding a Palestinian State alongside it. Zionism began as a non-nationalist, secular agrarian movement, without any rhetoric about Jewish Nationalism or fulfilling Biblical prophecy.

October 7 denialism is not so different from January 6 denialism. One promotes and advocates violence against the US government, and the other violently marginalizes a vital sector of the American population – Jews in this case. The ugliness of this false narrative resulted in an atmosphere of unfettered anti-Jewish sentiments, clothed in objections to Israel.

I’ve openly taken Israel to task for its gross war crimes since the late 1970’s, and I have formally dissociated myself from Zionism. So I am making this critique from a progressive POV.

Reasonable objectors were shouted down and verbally abused at a recent City Council meeting.

The “false flag” promoted by leftists denies some very obvious war crimes, which have been well-documented in Hamas and Israeli videos, plus independent media outlets. As for validating the horrors inflicted on Israeli women, it’s been well documented, but is somehow ignored even by groups devoted to protecting women. Oakland and all municipalities in the Bay Area make it a priority to protect women, promote women’s safety and services. We can expect city employees to show the same concern for Jewish lives. Decrying the atrocities of the Gaza campaign and standing for Palestinian rights are worthy causes that are cheapened by denying the basic facts of the horrific terrorist attack launched by Hamas militants on October 7.

Israel’s total war on Gaza, following Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Oct. 7, has roiled higher education in the United States. The atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel two months ago have reverberated on many U.S. campuses, deeply traumatizing many Jewish students. But so too has Israel’s massive military response in Gaza, which has been equally shocking to Palestinian-American, Arab American and Muslim American students, among many others.

In the heated atmosphere prevailing since then, questions have arisen about the limits to free speech in the classroom, among student and faculty organizations, and on the social media accounts of university members, from professors to administrators. Often, these charged debates reflect the advent of significant numbers of minority students on university campuses, some from the post-1965 immigration wave, who view the Israel-Palestine conflict very differently than the white majority on many campuses, as a recent Gallup poll demonstrates. These controversies also reflect the efforts of special interest groups and outside organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to discipline campus speech and brand some of it as support for terrorism.

Some of these campaigns have attempted to silence Palestinian-Americans and their perspectives outright. In October, Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis ordered all public universities in the state to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on their campus. The move came after the organization issued a “toolkit” for understanding the context of the Oct. 7 attacks, in which they characterized Hamas as a resistance organization. The SJP insisted that its student members are part of the resistance, not merely in solidarity with it. DeSantis’s order immediately provoked threats of civil lawsuits that would personally name university officials participating in the shutdown. Emma Camp at Reason magazine reported that as a result, the Chancellor of the University of Florida system, Ray Rodrigues, announced that he was backing off any action against SJP, though he did hold out the possibility that the university would require the group to pledge nonviolence and disassociate itself from Hamas. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group, immediately pointed out that that requirement would also be unconstitutional.

Photo by Merch HÜSEY on Unsplash

But that did not stop the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law from taking up DeSantis’s program, writing a letter to university presidents pressuring them to close down SJP chapters on the grounds that the group gave material assistance to terrorism (a charge the letter does not substantiate). Under U.S. law, “material assistance” involves training, expert advice or assistance, service and personnel. Given that the SJP is not hosting training camps for Hamas fighters or actively advising the organization on tactics, the letter is nonsensical and, in a just world, would be found libelous.

And while ceasefire rallies composed of Palestinians and other supporters, including  Jews, have aspirationally chanted “from the river to the sea,” Netanyahu, his cabinet, and religious zealots have been actualizing just such a reality through actions taken and statements made on behalf of the Jewish state. It is an insidious, catastrophic irony, generally ignored by the US press.

After all, in a barely noticed presentation to the UN General Assembly on September 22, Netanyahu displayed a map of the Middle East from “from the river to the sea.” Israel, on the map was expanded to include all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. In his remarks that day, Netanyahu referred to the “New Middle East,” which included diplomatic relations with Arab countries, but belittled Palestinians as only 2% of the Arab world. Netanyahu made it clear that Israel need not make peace with the Palestinians if Israel were increasingly recognized by Arab nations.  He spoke of peace with Palestinians only as patronizing lip service.

Netanyahu asserted that there could be peace without acknowledging the rights of Palestinians. Indeed, he boasted:

For years, my approach to peace was rejected by the so-called experts. Well, they were wrong.

Under their approach, we didn’t forge a single peace treaty for a quarter century.

Yet in 2020, under the approach that I advocated, we tried something different, and in no time we achieved a remarkable breakthrough. We achieved four peace treaties working with the United States. Israel forged four peace agreements in four months with four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Obviously, he spoke in a self-congratulatory bluster a few days too soon, just shortly before the brutal Hamas massacre of October 7.

Netanyahu’s goal was and is to establish peace with Arab counties (including Saudi Arabia, negotiations which are now on hold), while ether killing off or exiling the residents of the Gaza strip. Meanwhile, the right-wing and religious block are using the IDF to protect settlers while they attack and kill Palestinians, (around 200 since October 7) forcibly removing them from their homes, and cutting down their olive orchards  in the West Bank. The next step would be seizing the occupied territory completely and fully incorporating it governmentally into Israel, with the Jordan River being the new eastern border of the State. Also, Netanyahu wants to return the rubble of Gaza to Israeli control (although, he claims, only temporarily).

As I noted in a commentary for Informed Comment on November 6,”Netanyahu [recently] referred to a biblical old testament passage that called for the killing of every Amalekite, as reported on November 3rd in Mother Jones:

“There are more than 23,000 verses in the Old Testament. The ones Netanyahu turned to, as Israeli forces launched their ground invasion in Gaza, are among its most violent—and have a long history of being used by Jews on the far right to justify killing Palestinians.

As others quickly pointed out, God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

The message was clear that he was equating all Gazans, – and likely all Palestinians – with the fate of the Amalekites. He wasn’t just targeting Hamas. It was a call to arms for his religious party supporters and a dog whistle to American Christian Zionists.

Netanyahu touts peace with Saudi Arabia, issues ‘nuclear’ threat to Iran | Al Jazeera Newsfeed

How was the promise of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords thwarted, and how did we spiral down into the current crisis?

The New York Review of Books, in a historical footnote, recalled:

“Enough” is the word that Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister, stressed in his remarkable speech of September 1993 at the signing of the imperfect, but promising, Oslo Accords.

“We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough…. We are today giving peace a chance and saying to you and saying again to you: Enough…”

Yasser Arafat shook hands with Rabin and recognized the possibility of reconciliation: “The battle for peace is the most difficult battle of our lives. It deserves our utmost efforts because the land of peace… yearns for a just and comprehensive peace.”

Rabin, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1994, recognized the impossibility of security without peace: “There is only one radical means of sanctifying human lives. Not armored plating, or tanks, or planes, or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is peace.”

Rabin was assassinated in 1995 after a Tel Aviv rally attended by an estimated 100,000 Israelis in which he led the crowd in advocating for a peaceful end to the intractable blood feud between Israelis and Palestinians. His killer was a right-wing Likudnik opposed to the peace process. Some Israelis thought Netanyahu inspired the assassination.

That assassination ushered in a rabid right-wing movement toward widespread expansion into the Occupied West Bank illegally according to International law, nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers on Arab land in the West Bank, and more than 200,000 Jewish settlers displacing Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

For those in doubt, consider some of just a few of the comments from Netanyahu’s political partners:

In mid-October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” His comments appeared to erase the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which underpins International Humanitarian Law. Equating innocent civilians with combatants is a common move among terrorists such as members of al-Qaeda.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for his part, said, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”

Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter told an interviewer, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”

Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant added more incendiary rhetoric to the attack on Gazans, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said shortly after the Hamas slaughter in Israel.“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he added on October 9.

Israel’s Heritage Minister, Amihai Eliyahu, recently announced that dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza was an option in the current Israeli offensive. Netanyahu disavowed the possibility, but did not fire Eliyahu, just suspended him from cabinet meetings. Eliyahu’s sentiments were echoed by Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv wrote, “I urge you to do everything and use Doomsday weapons fearlessly against our enemies.” She added, “It’s time to kiss doomsday. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza. … without mercy! without mercy!”

According to Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams,

“Nissim Vaturi, the far-right deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, raised eyebrows and ire … after asserting on social media that Israel’s war on Gaza—which has killed and maimed over 40,000 people and displaced around 70% of the population—is “too humane.” “We are too humane,” he declared, “Burn Gaza now, no less!”

Likud Party stalwart Galit Distel Atbaryan, said of the energy unleashed among Israelis by the October 7 atrocities, “Invest that energy in one thing: Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth.”

Last week, two Israeli legislators, in the Wall Street Journal, called on Western nations to take in Palestinians from Gaza to reduce the population in Gaza who are being pummeled by the Israeli onslaught and denial of basic necessities, including food, water and functioning hospitals. In short, other nations should help expel Gazans by offering them a refuge, a “strategy” also supported by Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

But don’t just judge the Netanyahu bigots by their words, judge them by their actions. It could have taken a far different course rather than the years of unending “mowing the lawn” bloodshed.

These actions add up to steps Israel is taking to govern from the Jordan River to the sea (the west of  Israel lies on the Mediterranean coast.). It is not aspirational; it is happening in plain sight. ]]> https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/confessions-zionist-slaughter.html Tue, 14 Nov 2023 05:49:41 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=215390 Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – I grieve for the people of Israel and Palestine, both of whom are being abused and terrorized by their own governments and leadership. Hamas is not a legitimate government, and is not Islam. Zionism is not Judaism. Hamas and the Israeli government have used their own people’s lives as pawns in a gross political game.  By razing Gaza as badly as Dresden in WWII, the Israeli government quickly burned through any diplomatic and global sympathy it had gained from the Hamas murders of 1,200 innocent Israelis and kidnapping 240 more. As a result of the war crimes of an explicitly Zionist state, Jews all over the world face unprecedented moral quandaries.

            Seeing videos of hundreds of innocent, peaceful Israelis brutally murdered, kidnapped and worse at a music festival was horrifying. Knowing that Hamas committed similar crimes against humanity at 21 other sites that day is beyond infuriating and heartbreaking. It makes anybody want to fight back hard. But political capital can be gained by some measure of restraint, and Bibi knows no such thing. It’s no less maddening and infuriating to see Bibi’s government retaliate with ten times the force, committing mass murders from 20,000 feet of ten times the number of women, children and noncombatant men killed by armed thugs on October 7. Seeing hundreds of thousands of destitute people trudging through the streets of Gaza with no place to go makes me weep. Knowing that their suffering is caused by a gross and sanctimonious perversion of Jewish ideals makes it all the more maddening.

            It’s also maddening to realize the gross hubris and arrogance of the Israeli intelligence and Army, which dispensed with sentry border guards in favor of an electronic system, which was so easily destroyed by Hamas while they were sleeping. I was shocked to learn there were no actual eyes, ears and guns at those entry points, after my experiences traveling throughout a heavily militarized Middle East and Israel many years ago. Though I’m an American Jew, I had to establish my bona fides not only before entering Israel at the notorious Rafah gate, but also before entering some places I expected a more cordial welcome. My two days at a conference in 1980 (right after Camp David) in Nazareth elicited noticeable security monitoring to make me feel watched. The security officials seem to have monitored tourists more efficiently forty years ago than the Netanyahu government monitored Gaza’s main gates last October. It appears that it had sent some forces to help squatters on the West Bank, over-confident that Hamas in Gaza was content to play Israel’s policeman on the Strip.

Embed from Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 13: U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks at a news conference calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the U.S. Capitol building on November 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. House Democrats held the news conference alongside rabbis with the activist group Jewish Voices for Peace. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).

The UN and much of the global public square have not always been a friendly place for Israel, but not because most of the world hates Jews. After all, we earned a lot of global affection and support for surviving the Holocaust. Critics of this rain of death from the skies don’t hate Jews. They hate what Israel has been doing to innocent Palestinian civilians since 1948, and more recently the juggernaut of bombardments in Gaza. Is there a more profane definition of “overkill” than ensuring that ten or twenty Palestinians die for every Israel Jew who is killed?

Zionism is not Judaism and any assertion to the contrary by Israeli propagandists only tars Jews with the brush of the Likud-led government’s war crimes. Most American Jews of the younger generation are uncomfortable with what Zionism has become. Whatever the original virtues of Zionism as a way for persecuted Jews of the Pale to assert their self-worth, it has now mutated into a quest to humiliate and dominate another people. Zionism became increasingly cruel under the Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, more so under Ariel Sharon, and more even destructively radical under Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi). Yes, Zionism was always exclusionary to encourage Jewish immigration (aliyah), but extremists have transformed it into a sick, cruel ideology that impelled the arrogant, imperial atrocities committed by Israeli governments led by those three. It’s as though Bibi and Donald Trump both fulfill their parties’ ultimate fantasies for a cruel, dystopian, Fascist agenda. The devolution quickly escalated under Bibi, just as the Republican Party has quickly devolved under Trump.

They hate the predations of the far-far right wing Israeli settlers who embrace Biblical myth as a valid historical record, as if it carries the weight of modern diplomacy and valid treaties. Modern Middle Eastern diplomacy began after WWI at the 1920 Sam Remo Conference in Italy, and the law of occupation is enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, not in ancient texts. That’s how most of the world sees it. Recent Israeli governments have empowered the illegal squatters to commit even more atrocities against Palestinian people, property, schools, farms, and water and food supplies.

I consider myself to be a good, UN-Orthodox Jew, and see no need to change. I accept my lifelong unpopularity with Republican Jews where I’ve lived, who tend to dominate the synagogues and social agencies of many American cities. They were the class seduced by Reaganomics, and they see no need to change either. (Familiarity breeds contempt at times.)  Still, a great majority of Jewish Americans are fiercely progressive, forcefully calling out the sins of the Israeli military and Republican Party. We oppose the self-annihilating tendencies of Jewish Republicans who abandoned the progressive agenda and moved increasingly to the far-far right under the Bush boys,  and Donald Trump, who realizes all the dystopian elements of the Republican fantasy model after the Bush’s and Reagan just weren’t mean enough.

PIX 11 News from 2 weeks ago: “Jewish peace activists hold sit-in protest at Grand Central to demand ceasefire in Israel-Hamas conf”

            No one cannibalizes their own like Republicans and especially Jewish Republicans. Before and during the founding of Israel, many deeply observant Orthodox Jews fiercely opposed the creation of Israel, and some still do. They view the creation of a political entity in the Biblical homeland as a disruption to the arrival of the Messiah. They too are anti-Zionist, but out of different motivation. We are not a monolith.

            Despite what I am about to say, I don’t argue for abandoning the medical and humanitarian needs of people living in Israel in a time of war. The majority of them hate their government, as most Americans hate Trump. These atrocities are not in their name either. I argue for a more thoughtful Israeli government, invested in a solution that will solve Palestinian statelessness and thereby provide security for Jews. That outcome is unlikely to be achieved by the lawless and authoritarian Netanyahu government, which is wedded to destroying the courts to remain in power.

Through more than 40 years of my commitment to academic study of Israel and Palestine, I avoided calling myself an “anti-Zionist.” Given the discrimination, pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust that Jews faced at the hands of European white nationalism of the Fascist era, it was hard not to thrill at the realization of a long-held dream of Jews to return to the “Promised Land.” This began as a formal political movement with the 1^st Zionist Congress in Basle in 1896. It became a quadrennial conference, and Jewish immigration to Palestine began in increasingly larger waves. Many Jews like me styled themselves Zionists, who nevertheless objected to the notorious Israeli “military excesses.” (A euphemism for cold-blooded, systemic murder and piracy.) But as a Jew, I’ve never been more opposed to what Zionism has become. The massive overkill and atrocities in Gaza led by Bibi since October 7 and the relentless attacks on Palestinian people and properties in Occupied Palestine of the West Bank by right-wing settlers have driven me firmly to the anti-Zionist camp.