Zionists Weep Crocodile Tears
As Israel bombs Palestinian civilians in Gaza, ethnically cleanses Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and deliberately unleashes right wing mobs to terrorize Palestinians everywhere, the whole U.S. congressional establishment has united to condemn Israel’s critics.
Bipartisan Project: silencing critics of Israel
The entire Democratic leadership joined with the most rabidly racist sections of the Republican Party to slander congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s statements comparing Israel’s and the United States’ crimes with those of Hamas and the Taliban as anti-Semitic. The statement they issued on June 11th reads, in part: “Drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all.” (This is, in a sense, correct – it is horribly misleading to suggest that Hamas or the Taliban have committed atrocities anywhere close to on a par with the crimes of Israel and especially the United States.) The prevaricators and charlatans leveling these accusations against Omar–and anyone who dares to speak up for Palestinians—are not only accomplices to Israel’s crimes against humanity, but also abettors of antisemitism themselves.
The prevaricators and charlatans leveling these accusations against Omar–and anyone who dares to speak up for Palestinians—are not only accomplices to Israel’s crimes against humanity, but also abettors of antisemitism themselves.
The focus of the attacks on Omar of course has everything to do with the fact that she is a progressive, Black, Muslim woman with power. But the use of nonsensical charges of anti-Semitism to smear anti-Zionists, or even moderate defenders of Palestinian human rights, is nothing new. It is part of a broader strategy to distract and derail the movement for Palestinian liberation. Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party in the UK was sunk by charges of anti-Semitism, despite no evidence that Labour was more anti-Semitic than the rest of English society (in fact, it was probably less so).
Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are subjected constantly to charges of anti-Semitism due to their criticism of Israel and its relationship with the United States. Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein has been black balled from academia for decades for his anti-Zionism. The relentless hounding is not limited to politicians and public intellectuals. The Canary Mission publicly shares the personal information of any pro-Palestine activists it can find in order to smear them as anti-Semitic, encourage harassment, and limit their employment and academic opportunities. Their victims include not only professors and prominent organizers but also students involved in campus activism.
To date, the taboo on speaking out against Zionism has been effective, at least in the United States.[i] Until just this year, huge majorities of Americans would tell opinion pollsters they supported just about any atrocity Israel committed in the name of “self-defense.” But this most recent bout of naked ethnic cleansing and murder by the Israeli state and Zionist vigilantes has sparked a change. Record numbers of Americans blame Israel, rather than Palestinians, for the violence. This swing in American public opinion has sent the pro-Israel censors into a panic. They know that without the might of the American empire behind it, their settler-colonial project would crumble under the weight of Palestinian resistance overnight.
The mainstream press has been reporting an “explosion” of anti-Semitic incidents since the most recent acts of Israeli aggression. How authentic are these reports? To the extent that these claims bother with evidence, they usually rely on statistics from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL claims to be a strictly anti-discrimination group which monitors anti-Semitism and educates the public to prevent its spread. But they have baked anti-Zionism into the very definition of anti-Semitism.
The ADL's Dubious Metrics
The ADL uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which includes: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” This is not a standard applied to any other nation in history. Does the right of the oppressed Romani people to self-determination include a right to colonize Manhattan and evict its residents from their homes, as Israel has done to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? Obviously not.
And yet, according to the ADL, it is anti-Semitic to suggest that an indigenous Palestinian has a greater right to live in Palestine than a Jewish Brooklynite. The objection to Nazi comparisons is even more telling: Perhaps if Israel were not murdering Palestinian children with such regularity, the Zionists would not feel the need to preempt such comparisons.
More to the point, the most extreme Israeli Zionists have even begun to self-identify with Nazism as they seek to exterminate Palestinians in the same way the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews. These absurd standards mean that the ADL’s statistics include some genuinely hilarious reaches.
Their “antisemitism tracker” includes the following alleged anti-Semitic incidents:
At an anti-Israel protest, in Birmingham, a demonstrator held a sign that read: “Zionism = Racism”; At an anti-Israel protest, a demonstrator held a sign demonizing Zionists that read, in part, “being pro-Zionist makes you pro-genocide & pro-apartheid”; During an anti-Israel rally in San Francisco, protestors chanted, “Rise up, don't back down, no Zionism in our town.” This is tantamount to a call for Zionists to be excluded from the community; At a rally in Houston included signs that read, “One Holocaust doesn’t justify another,” and “Zionist media lies.”; During a rally, a pro-Palestinian activist told the crowd: “As Muslims, as Arabs, we condemn ISIS because they operate under the guise of Islam…Zionists are likewise fucking terrorists because they operate under the guise of Judaism. They’re not Jewish.”; Protestors in Brooklyn projected onto a building the message “Zionism is terrorism.”
These are not even the most ridiculous examples available. Recently, political pundit Eve Barlow published an article in the Jewish Zionist magazine Tablet claiming that she was a victim of a “social media pogrom,” after her defense of Israeli atrocities in Gaza sparked a torrent of Tweets mockingly referring to her as “Eve Fartlow.” The hypocrisy of this comparison is astonishing. To compare such acts of horrific violence perpetrated across generations to a harmless Twitter gag leveled against a public figure makes a mockery not only of the thousands of Jewish victims of pogroms, but of the ongoing pogroms perpetrated by Zionists against Palestinians.[ii] This is only the most egregious example of the moral panic around anti-Semitism being stoked by Israel’s apologists in order to cover for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Barlow and the hacks at the ADL don’t care if advancing such accusations forces them to contort themselves into preposterous positions. They understand that they don’t actually have to be convincing. They just have to muddy the waters enough that most people–who are only dimly aware of the history of Palestine and Zionism anyways—are too confused or unsure to take a side against the U.S.-Israel imperialist alliance.
The issue is very simple when one examines the enormous and ongoing death toll and refugee crisis that has befallen Palestinians since the Zionist project first began in Palestine. But if every time the death of Palestinian civilians is reported, it is followed with an admonishment not to blame Israel lest American Jews feel unsafe, or righteous moralizing against the Palestinians’ desperate, “terrorist” attempts to fight back, it can be made to appear complicated. And complicated works just fine for the Zionists, because if the people are unsure, the machinery of the state will continue to grind away in the same way it has since before Israel’s founding in 1948.
The cynicism of these cries of antisemitism are revealed by the company the Zionists keep. One of the founding fathers of the modern Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, predicted that “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”
Zionist Bedfellows
From Richard Spencer to Marjory “Jewish Space Lazer” Taylor Green, anti-Semites have embraced Israel wholeheartedly as the kind of ethno-state which they can aspire to. Outside the US, far right governments from Brazil to Hungary, and now even the Arab Gulf monarchies have embraced Israel as an ally. Anti-Semites are happy to support the genocide of Palestinians if it means they will have (what they see as) a dumping ground for their own Jewish population. In turn, Israel and its supporters are happy to overlook discrimination and violence against Jews if it means that garnering support for further settlements and expansion.
To the extent that there has been a real increase in anti-Semitic violence, there is no evidence that it is linked to pro-Palestinian sentiment. In fact, antisemitism is demographically associated with the most pro-Israel sections of the population (older and less educated). A much more plausible explanation is that anti-Semitism tends to track with economic downturns, such as the one we are experiencing now due to Covid-19. But it’s worth wondering: are Jews really made safer by constantly equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism—and thereby implicitly equating Jews themselves with the horrifically violent state of Israel?
The last word on this question should belong to the brilliant Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein:
My late father was in Auschwitz concentration camp, my late mother was in Majdanek concentration camp. Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it's precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings, that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians, and I consider nothing more despicable, than to use their suffering and their martyrdom to try to justify the torture, the brutalization, the demolition of homes, that Israel is daily commits against the Palestinians… So I refuse any longer to be intimidated or browbeaten by the tears. If you had any heart in you, you'd be crying for the Palestinians!
Notes
[i] According to the Oxford Dictionary, Zionism is “a movement for (originally) the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel. It was established as a political organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, and was later led by Chaim Weizmann.”
[ii] Pogroms are acts of mob violence, usually against Jews. The Jewish virtual library has great resources on their history. See: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pogroms-2
Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.
