Monthly Archives: September 2024

IAC National Summit 2024

Posted by on 2024-09-30 No comments
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The Israeli-American Council (IAC) is yet another node in a vast network of pro-Israel and Israel-linked organizations known as the Israel Lobby. As opposed to American Jewish groups which might embrace Zionism, the IAC is openly operated, and in apparent violation of FARA laws, by Israelis on US soil.

The IAC was created in 2007 by Israel’s Consul General, Ehud Danoch, and it immediately began recruiting dual (Israeli-American) nationals, primarily with backgrounds in American business. In 2013 the IAC obtained additional financial support from casino mogul and Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, as well as Hollywood producer/investor and Biden donor Haim Saban. In 2014 a third billionaire and convinced Zionist, Adam Milstein, was appointed its chairman.

To say the IAC’s politics are far-right is an understatement. On September 19, 2024 the IAC convened its three-day National Summit at the Washington DC Hilton, and it had all of the features of a MAGA Republican CPAC Hungary conference — militarists, authoritarians, enemies of civil liberties, propagandists, Christian Zionists, and even a wannabe dictator — two if we count Donald Trump’s surprise appearance at the event.

Kim Jong Un was unavailable

The DC Summit featured three days of workshops, among which the following were offered:

  • “Taking Antisemitism to Court” featured speakers from the Brandeis Center, the Lawfare Project, the National Jewish Advocacy Center, and IAC Action, which coordinates its efforts with right-wing Republicans.
  • “The IHRA Definition: A Tool for Fighting Antisemitism” hosted MAGA Republican legislators from Georgia, South Carolina, and Arkansas sharing tips with two Israelis from IAC for Action.
  • The “Civic Engagement” workshop was a hodge-podge of miscreants that included: Elise Stefanik, who represents Israel more reliably than her own Congressional district; Trump defender Alan Dershowitz; Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi of Falls Church, Virginia, son of Iran’s brutal Shah, who now supplements his CIA stipend by hitting the conference circuit; Shabbos Kestenbaum, who sued Harvard for not doing enough to shut down free speech; Christian Zionist actress Patricia Heaton; and several other nobodies from stage, screen, and television.
  • At “Head of the Snake: The Global Terror Network and Iran’s Leadership Role” Israeli defense analyst Yoav Limor moderated a discussion with: Elliot Abrams, war criminal, convicted felon, Gulf War cheerleader, and now one of Biden’s national security advisors; Victoria Coates, another warmongering American neocon and former National Security Advisor under Trump; and two Israeli terrorism “experts” — Boaz Ganor and Anat Berko.
  • “Tragic Awakening Documentary Film & Conversation” was a film screening by its director, Rabbi Raphael Stone, founder of the Clarion Project, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group because of its Islamophobic focus.
  • “The US-Israel Alliance Now and Tomorrow” was moderated by Israeli broadcast journalist Yuna Leibzon and included: Ofir Akunis, Likudnik and Israeli Consul General of New York; former Middle East envoy and “Israel’s Lawyer” Dennis Ross; former NSC advisor Victoria Coates; and Michael Oren, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.S.
  • And, finally, for those who needed to hear justifications for the carpet bombing of civilians, there was “Ethics in Combat and the Law of Armed Combat” featuring: Alon Ben David, who specializes in “International communications” at Bar-Ilan University; Colonel Richard Kemp of the Gatestone Institute, a far-right Islamophobic advocacy group founded by Nina Rosenwald and funded by billionaire megadonor Rebekah Mercer, whose more recognizable members include John Bolton, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, R. James Woolsey, Dutch fascist Geert Wilders, and Amir Taheri, who has repeatedly been accused of fabricating stories about Iran.

A partial list of participants

Assessing the Damage

Posted by on 2024-09-30 No comments

We are in the midst of another McCarthy era. Universities and public schools are under attack by organized witch hunts. Slanderous accusations of antisemitism are ending careers. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act is being weaponized by Zionist “lawfare” organizations. Protests against Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza (not to mention the West Bank and over half a dozen Middle East countries) are twisted as endorsements of terror. Conversely, condemnations of Israeli terror are twisted as antisemitism.

It is rare that we encounter a single story involving Israel and its strong-arm tactics with so many moving parts. It is even rarer that we encounter one in our own backyard. The following story illustrates just how the state of Israel and unregistered agents and lobbyists, coordinating with American Zionist organizations and MAGA Republicans, can marshal the resources of federal investigators, police agencies and prosecutors, to threaten an Ivy League university and take down its president, throw a school district into chaos, and manipulate politicians — all to suppress protests of Israel’s war crimes and to ruin its critics.

The Inciting Incident

In the early days of Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up a “die-in” at the Harvard Business School’s campus in Allson. Yoav Segev, a Jewish Harvard Business School student, was attempting to surveil the “die-in.” As Segev stepped awkwardly over the bodies of prostrate protesters attempting to film their faces, he raised suspicions he was trying to dox them. Corinne Shanahan, a Harvard Law School student, felt Segev was filming “in bad faith, either to intimidate or dox” the protesters.

Shouting “exit!” and “shame!” student safety monitors told Segev to stop and, after he refused to leave, half a dozen students blocked his camera with scarves and banners. This included Divinity School student Elom Tetty-Tamaklo, a safety monitor, and also Harvard Law Review editor Ibrahim Bharmal. In what now appears to have been clearly a set-up, Segev claimed he had been “assaulted” and two of the camera-blockers were soon arrested by an undercover Harvard campus police officer working on a federal task force. As an editorial in the Harvard Law Record points out, both Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal were trying to protect protesters from Segev. Somehow the safety of this segment of Harvard students has been forgotten.

It was Segev’s father Ilan who emailed the Harvard University police (HUPD) with the complaint. The elder Segev knew just whom to contact using intelligence from an unnamed source, and he provided HUPD with the identities of two students, informing HUPD that the son wanted to press charges. Out of more than half a dozen students the two Segevs could have accused of “assault,” the two chosen were both men of color. A letter of support from Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine asks “why Tettey-Tamaklo, who is Ghanaian, was singled out from the other protesters as a threat?” While racism was certainly one possibility, another become apparent when we learn that Tettey-Tamaklo was a co-founder of the campus group Harvard Graduate Students 4 Palestine. He was targeted because he was the leader of the pro-Palestinian group.

While Segev is only 26, he owns a tony condominium in Boston’s South End purchased for just over $1 million and now valued at $1.24 mil. His parents, as we will see, are extremely well-connected. Tetty-Tamaklo, on the other hand, was a proctor from a poor country who lived in student housing, receiving meals as part of his aid package. Ibrahim Bharmal had been a member of the Harvard Law Review — that is, until Harvard’s Chabad rabbi Hirshy Zarchi, Harvard megadonors Bill Ackman, Jonathan Neman, and David Duel, 94 Jewish alumni, and the Brandeis Center, a Zionist “lawfare” group, all showed up with pitchforks demanding the two students’ heads on spikes.

The lynch mob

Both Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal face charges of Assault and Battery and Violations of Civil Rights. Although the cases against them are weak and have not yet been dismissed by Suffolk County DA Kevin Hayden, neither Tetty-Tamaklo nor Bharmal have court dates, much less convictions. Rejecting any presumption of innocence, Harvard punished the two without hearings anyway. Zionist attack groups further “punished” the two with character assassination. Someone set up a libelous webpage using Tettey-Tamaklo’s identity, and both are being doxxed by Canary Mission, a particularly repulsive Zionist attack group funded by deep pocketed donors, including the late Sheldon Adelson and Adam Milstein. Harvard quickly bowed to the well-orchestrated attack campaign, evicting Tetty-Tamaklo from his university housing. And after megadonor Bill Ackman demanded to know, “How does this man remain Editor of the Harvard Law Review?” Ibrahim Bharmal’s bio was yanked from the Harvard Law website. But still the Defenders of Israel weren’t done with their enemies.

The mob takes down a president

With the university scrambling to appease its attackers, donors like Bill Ackerman, long critical of both the Harvard Trustees and its President, as well as Zionist and MAGA organizations, demanded President Claudine Gay’s head — and those of the Trustees. On December 5th, 2023 Virginia Foxx (R-NC) launched her McCarthyite Congressional hearings at which a grandstanding Elise Stefanik (R-NY) outdid herself defending Israel while haranguing Gay and assaulting free speech and freedom of association. It was a shameful display of deference to a repressive, foreign regime.

Unfortunately, Gay’s spineless defense of student Constitutional rights and academic freedom at Harvard was nearly as shameful. Even Gay’s apologies and assurances were not enough to assuage the MAGA and Zionist zealots. After a month of “deeply personal and sustained attacks [that have] played out in […] the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls” the beleaguered university president had had enough. On January 2nd Gay stepped down.

An extremely weak case

Those who have seen footage of the Segev incident are hard-pressed to recognize anything resembling an assault. Adrian Walker writes in the Globe, “As someone who has covered crime in Suffolk County for decades, I’ll just say this: I can’t remember a weaker assault case. Not only does this case not clear the bar for prosecution, it doesn’t even approach it. Assault by scarf? Please stop it.” Thomas Nolan, a former Boston Police lieutenant, commented: “I didn’t see anything in the video that I would characterize as an assault and battery … or anything remotely approaching a civil rights violation.”

Barbara J. Dougan, legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Massachusetts, found the politically-motivated prosecution of the two troubling: “As a lawyer who has represented the victims of hate crimes for 25 years, I view the way this incident is being handled as highly unusual. In my experience, police departments are unwilling, despite the victim’s wishes, to bring charges for incidents that don’t clearly rise to the level of a crime. […] I trust that Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden will take a good, hard look at the facts of this case when deciding whether to prosecute.”

More on the Segevs

But the story gets more interesting. Not merely another Jewish student at a school that is 25% Jewish, Segev junior is a student member of Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education (JAFE), part of a pro-Israel “lawfare” group, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB). LDB has filed dozens of legal complaints of alleged “antisemitism” against universities and school districts all over the U.S. based on purported violations of Title VI protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sniffing for antisemitism is exactly what LDB does. It is reasonable to assume Segev was operating as an operative of LDB the day of his confrontation with protesters.

LDB was created by Kenneth L. Marcus, Donald Trump’s former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. Not related to a similarly-named university, LDB has been at its game a long time and was party to the lawsuit which ultimately dismantled affirmative action admissions. Besides opposing affirmative action and launching a tsunami of Title VI lawsuits, LDF and JAFE also work to pressure universities to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

LDB’s interests overlap considerably with those of MAGA Republicans who, like Zionists, are fierce foes of DEI and affirmative action and reject any suggestion that the U.S. is or ever was a settler-colonial state. The nation’s 30 million Christian Zionists also see Israel as a model for a Christian Nationalist renewal in the U.S. Zionist and MAGA interests also converge in opposing anti-colonialist Middle Eastern studies programs and the faculty who teach courses on, critique, or even discuss settler colonialism with their students. Christian Zionists promote the IHRA definition, which will eventually result in arrests and punishment if fully weaponized. Maybe they’re just thinking ahead to the day when criticizing Christian Nationalism will result in similar repression.

Within MAGA World the accusations of “antisemitism” have been increasingly adopted and weaponized by grandstanders like Elise Stefanik, who libeled Segev’s “assailants,” and Mitt Romney, Harvard class of 1974, who signed a letter painting a melodramatic picture of “Jewish students [who] have locked themselves in dorm rooms across your campuses afraid for their own safety.” The fact that a Jewish student like Segev could feel safe enough — if not entitled — to wade through a field of protesters knowing he wouldn’t actually be harmed undercuts such rightwing talking points.

All of the chaos created by reckless and slanderous accusations is ultimately to the advantage of the Israeli government, which makes young Segev’s family background all the more interesting.

Segev’s father Ilan is a former Israeli diplomat who transitioned to American investment manager at Morgan-Stanley, where he manages portfolios sizable enough to attract the occasional lawsuit. Segev senior is founding Co-Chair of and donor to the Israeli-American Council of Boston, a member of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN), whose leadership overlaps somewhat with the ICA’s. Segev donates to a variety of Boston-area institutions, including: the Jewish Community Day School, where he is a Director; the [former] Kehilla Schecter Academy, where he was also a Director; the Landmark School, a secular school for autistic children; and Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where he is on the Board of Overseers. Segev held diplomatic posts in Qatar and served as Israel’s Vice Consul in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2001 Segev visited Wake Forest University to deliver the Foreign Ministry’s message that Palestinians are entirely responsible for their own occupation, their loss of territory, and the many racist laws they are subject to.

Segev’s mother Shiri (Shira) is also a former diplomat with the Israeli Foreign Ministry and is now a financial compliance officer at Omniguide. She serves on the Boston Jewish Community Day School’s Board; like her husband is also a member of the Israeli-American Council; a trustee of the Gann Academy, a Jewish day school; Educating for Excellence, a pro-Israel education group; the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, where she is a director. Owing to their wealth and connections, the Segevs have a lot of friends in very high places.

IAC and ICAN

The Israeli-American Council (IAC) to which both parents belong is yet another node in a vast network of pro-Israel and Israel-linked organizations known as the Israel Lobby. As opposed to American Jewish groups which might embrace Zionism, the IAC is openly operated, and in apparent violation of FARA laws, by Israelis on US soil.

The IAC was created in 2007 by Israel’s Consul General, Ehud Danoch, and it immediately began recruiting dual (Israeli-American) nationals, primarily with backgrounds in American business. In 2013 the IAC obtained additional financial support from casino mogul and Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, as well as Hollywood producer/investor and Biden donor Haim Saban. In 2014 a third billionaire and dedicated Zionist, Adam Milstein, was appointed its chairman.

To say the IAC’s politics are far-right is an understatement. On September 19, 2024 the IAC convened its three-day National Summit at the Washington DC Hilton, and it had all of the features of a MAGA Republican CPAC Hungary conference — militarists, authoritarians, enemies of civil liberties, propagandists, Christian Zionists, and even a wannabe dictator — two if we count Donald Trump’s surprise appearance at the event. For a closer look at the conference, click here.

There are now between 200,000 and as many as one million people with Israeli citizenship living in the U.S. In the Boston are there are some 30,000. As an organization for Israeli expats, IAC shares much of its membership, some of its leadership, and — owing to its ongoing connections to the Foreign Ministry and IDF — it shares Israeli government objectives with other Israeli-American groups such as the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) and its sister group, the Israel-American Civic Education Institute (both headed by lobbyist Dillon Hosier). All three target American educational institutions and cultivate friends within MAGA World. For example, ICAN Massachusetts recently endorsed Steven Howitt, arguably the most right-wing representative on Beacon Hill.

ICAN and ICA have gone all out in attacking the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which supports a ceasefire and voted to develop materials that can be used for teaching the Israel-Palestine conflict. Joined at the hip in unsavory ways, MAGA World and the pro-Israel media both went into simultaneous attack mode.

Fox News commentator Kassy Akiva (Dillon) of the Daily Wire published an attack on Ricardo Rosa, who had been tasked with developing the MTA curriculum, and this was followed up by a press release from Steven Howitt, issued in the name of the Massachusetts House and Senate Republican Caucus. The Times of Israel and Canary Mission then attacked the MTA. Parents Defending Education and JNS, the Jewish News Syndicate, piled on, accusing the MTA of rank antisemitism, putting targets on both Rosa and Newton City Councilor BIll Humphrey, whose only crime was failing to fall in line by condemning the MTA. The Jewish News Service, the MAGA Patriot Post, and other far-right sites followed suit. It was quite the team effort by Israelis, the Israel lobby, and the American far right. Rosa showed me the death threats recorded on his phone.

One important objective of the Israeli-American Council — and the Israeli Foreign Ministry that created it — is shaping perceptions of Israel and Zionism within American educational institutions. In June 2016 the IAC hosted a meeting at its Newton headquarters, chaired by Ilan Segev, to which Mayor Setti Warren was invited. The Forward describes Newton, a city 30% Jewish, as “one of the most Jewish cities in the United States.” Ignoring how ludicrous such allegations are, Segev charged Newton’s schools with “sweeping antisemitism under the rug,” while Charles Jacobs, a notorious Islamophobe who led opposition to the construction of the Islamic Center of New England (since built), claimed the Newton schools were using maps of Palestine created by the PLO. For both Israel and its MAGA friends, talking points don’t have to be true. it’s all about manufacturing outrage.

Thomas Karns

Returning to the thread of the “assault” at Harvard we now meet Thomas F. Karns Jr., the campus cop who arrested Tetty-Tamaklo and Bharmal. Karns is a former Boca Raton police officer and Gulf War veteran. In 2019 he was briefly suspended for calling a Black colleague a “f—t n—r.” His LinkedIn page lists extensive training in computer forensics and provides references from at least one federal prosecutor. Karns set up Veritas ex Machina Consulting LLC in Marblehead MA in 2015. His organizational filing states the purpose was “digital forensic consulting and computer incident handling.” Karns’s LLC was dissolved by court order in 2019.

In 2008, in a strange echo of the 2023 incident, Karns arrested two Massachusetts residents during campus protests against Israel’s Cast Lead operation in Gaza. Karns was then wearing a track suit, not a police uniform, filming protesters. He later admitted he was “conducting plain clothes surveillance on a demonstration.” Karns illegally arrested the two for simply documenting his surveillance of pro-Palestinian protesters, not for committing an actual crime. In 2020 Karns was again seen monitoring Black Lives Matter protesters after George Floyd’s murder; his suspension for racist behavior the previous year seemed relevant to the Harvard Crimson.

A 2012 paper by the Massachusetts ACLU documented the practice of policing dissent in New England. The Boston Police Department routinely collaborates in federal task forces, violating the Constitutional rights and civil liberties of those it spies upon, just like the [private] Harvard University police. Although Harvard denied that Karns was operating as part of a federal task force, Massachusetts ACLU Legal Director John Reinstein pushed back: “They claim they don’t have a political surveillance ‘unit,’ but they do have a guy who goes out and takes pictures of people in peaceful demonstrations…” According to an article by Mike Damiano in the Globe, Karns testified in sworn testimony in another case that he was there as part of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Brigitte Karns

Brigitte Karns (Thomas Karns’s wife) is a Marblehead teacher and a fitness instructor at the JCC North Shore. She owns a registered “educational enrichment” company. It turns out that Karns is also deeply involved in pro-Israel advocacy — just like the Segevs, with both the Israeli-American Council and the Israeli-American Civic Action Network. When criticism of Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza surfaced at Karn’s school, she was so outraged that her first impulse was to shut down opposing views: “As you know, my parents are Holocaust survivors and most of my family lives in Israel and what you’re saying is incorrect. You need to stop.”

Karn’s wrath seemed focused on three fellow teachers, members of her school’s DEI committee. Karns’s simmering gripes surfaced at a June 10, 2024 webinar organized by a “who’s who” of far right Zionist organizations: ICAN, Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism (a front for ICAN), CAMERA Educational Institute, Christians and Jews United for Israel (CUFI), StandWithUs K-12 Educator Network, the “anti-woke” Combat Antisemitism Movement – and of course the Consulate General of Israel to New England.

On June 20, 2024, at a meeting again sponsored by the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) Brigitte Karns went after her fellow Marblehead teachers, specifically targeting Candice Sliney: “Marblehead has been knowingly supporting a hostile work environment of some of the Jewish teachers and students. The Marblehead Education Association is using intimidation tactics to silence Jews and then the administration is perpetuating antisemitic and anti-Israel ideology by remaining silent.”

Sliney — who is a member of the Marblehead Task Force Against Discrimination, which partners with the ADL to train students and teachers to fight antisemitism and discrimination — was astounded by Karn’s allegations: “Every single accusation was a lie. She has attacked my character, endangered my family and put my career at risk, with zero evidence.” Sliney urged the School Committee to hire an independent investigator. Voices from the community fortunately came to Sliney’s defense.

But Karns wasn’t finished with her colleagues. She went on testify to the psychic trauma of having to listen to fellow teachers condemn Israel’s war on Gaza: “This anti-Zionist interaction has left me feeling unwelcome and isolated at work. The encounter pierced deeply, shaking my trust in the place I work and with whom I work with. The silence from the administration and the union amplified my feelings of isolation. It’s like a double blow, being marginalized by a colleague and then having administration ignore my feelings and concerns.”

It’s really a shame that our fantasies of forcing everyone we interact with to adopt our own views and refrain from uttering contradictory ones can’t be realized, but at some point we need to pop out of it and accept reality.

Following Karns’s allegations, the Marblehead Current reported that the Marblehead Schools had been forced to conduct an “antisemitism” probe — at taxpayer expense. Schools superintendent John Robidoux signed an agreement specifying that “the district shall pay Kurker Paget at a rate of $360 per hour for the services of any partner of the firm and $160 per hour for the services of the firm’s paralegals, billed in six-minute increments. MPS will incur fees for the time Kurker Paget staff spend traveling in connection with the investigation.”

The Current also reported that the Marblehead schools did receive a number of letters accusing the schools of doing little to protect Jewish students. But most were identical, generated by a computerized form, and began with, “I am emailing you to show my support for the Jewish teachers that have experienced antisemitic/anti-Israel incidents in the Marblehead schools…”

Assessing the damage

To date, a handful of zealots, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Israel lobby, and its MAGA fellow-travelers, all working together, have managed to take down a university president, ruined the lives of two human rights advocates and at least one teacher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in hearings and needless studies, subverted free speech in universities and public schools, marshaled the powers of Congress, the FBI, the police, and the courts against Americans and those protected under our laws — and they’ve done it all without a single shred of oversight or regulation.

New York Mayor Eric Adams is politically finished as a consequence of acting as an unregistered agent for the government of Turkey. Robert Menendez’s career is over after acting as Egypt’s. Paul Manafort went to prison after acting as an agent for Ukraine. All of these men violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act in one way or another. And all of them were Americans. Yet somehow none of this applies to the Segevs and the “Israeli-American” and pro-Israel organizations running amok over the American political landscape.

In 2018 M.J. Rosenberg — who worked for AIPAC himself at one point — argued that AIPAC and lobby groups like it ought to be required to register under FARA laws. Rosenberg described the mind-bending loophole that allows such groups to function as agents for Israel (and apparently only Israel). If a similar loophole had been in place in the Fifties allowing Americans to act as agents for the Soviet Union, perhaps Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (no relation) could have avoided the electric chair.

The conclusion Rosenberg drew in 2018 is as relevant as ever today:

“No, AIPAC is not a ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. It’s the Netanyahu lobby and our laws should treat it as such […] As for the thousands of Americans gathered in Washington this weekend, they need to know one thing: They are not supporting the dream of a secure, democratic Israel at peace with its neighbors and the world. They are, unwittingly, supporting a right-wing political agenda that is placing Israel in ever-deeper peril and, frankly, jeopardizing its very existence.”

Judith Butler’s ‘Parting Ways’

Posted by on 2024-09-25 No comments

Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231146111

In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Judith Butler makes the case that Judaism and Zionism represent vastly different world views. Butler’s readers are more likely to be liberal and progressive secular Jews, but no doubt readers also include both political and religious Zionists. Because Butler does not address the Zionists directly, as Shaul Magid does in The Necessity of Exile, they may be scandalized by the critical studies approach drawing on a variety of Jewish scholars, postwar philosophers, German-Jewish thinkers, and Palestinian writers. Nevertheless, Butler addresses Jewish ethics as well as Zionism’s use of state violence and its newfound messianism.

After Israel’s 2008 Operation Cast Lead, Butler sought to debunk the claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, proposing that Judaism is in fact opposed to injustice, state violence, expulsion, dispossession; and that in all its traditions — secular, socialist and religious — Judaism is dedicated to social justice and social equality. And if that case could be made, “it would be a painful irony indeed if the Jewish struggle for social justice were itself cast as anti-Jewish.”

Thus Butler sets out to show “that there are bona fide Jewish but imperative Jewish traditions that oppose state violence and modes of colonial expulsion and containment [,…] affirming a different Jewishness than the one in whose name the Israeli state claims to speak.”

To do this Butler needs to show that resistance to Zionism is itself a Jewish value, that Zionism’s illiberal exceptionalist lens must be replaced by a democratic universalist, and Jewish, lens. And, to overcome the objection that Zionism’s violence is only reactive and not intrinsic, it must also be demonstrated that a critique of state violence, which Israel uses to repress Palestinians, is not only inherent in Jewish values but that Zionism is not inherent in Judaism or in Jewishness. It’s a tall order.

Butler’s main task, like Magid’s, is to rescue Jewishness and Judaism from Zionism and to rescue Judaism from the grip of a Zionist framing:

“It continues to surprise me that many people believe that to claim one’s Jewishness is to claim Zionism or believe that every person who attends a synagogue is necessarily Zionist. Equally concerning is the number of people who think they must now disavow Jewishness because they cannot accept the policies of the State of Israel. If Zionism continues to control the meaning of Jewishness, then there can be no Jewish critique of Israel and no acknowledgment of those of Jewish descent or formation who call into question the right of the State of Israel to speak for Jewish values or, indeed, the Jewish people. Although it is surely possible to derive certain principles of equality, justice, and cohabitation from Jewish resources, broadly construed, how can one do this without thereby making those very values Jewish and so effacing or devaluing other modes of valuation that belong to other religious and cultural traditions and practices?”

In deriving first principles from an ethical or religious tradition, Butler asks if Jewish sources can be reinterpreted anew and if non-Jewish sources can ever be used to illustrate Jewish values.

One would think that these arguments would depend on firmly establishing that even Jewish sources regard Zionism’s qualities as alien to Judaism. And they do. But Jewish values such as cohabitation with the “other,” equality, and justice can be applied universally. Jewish experiences, such as dispersion and exile, may have particularist but also universal meanings. Certainly both Jews and Palestinians have experienced both. Butler acknowledges that universal concepts may not always hold precisely the same meaning for all parties. Even Jews are famously heterogenous. Everyone, Butler argues, perhaps Jews especially, must contend with the notion of the “other,” with alterity.

Ultimately, Butler elects “to depart from a[n entirely] Jewish-centered framework for thinking about the problem of Zionism and to locate Jewishness in the moment of its encounter with the non-Jewish, in the dispersing of the self that follows from that encounter.” These encounters are far-ranging, and if one does not have a solid background (which I don’t) in critical theory they will find themselves treading water instead of swimming happily along. Nevertheless, Butler’s book offers some useful framings to consider Zionism’s hijacking of Judaism.

Butler begins their meditations with an insight from Edward Said, who noted that Moses the Egyptian, Judaism’s founder, is recognizable as both a Jew and an Arab. The moment we begin to grapple with these opposing identities, we are engaging, in Butler’s terms, with alterity. Said makes the point that the only thing that really distinguishes Moses as a Jew is receiving the tablets at Sinai. The two peoples he embodies have much more in common — chiefly, their refugee status, both in scripture and in the modern historical record.

Outwardly it’s difficult to distinguish Mizrachi Jews from Arabs. It’s hardly a surprise that Jews (including many Ashkenazim) and Arabs share much of the same DNA. Now, many centuries after Sinai, having joined a world of nation-states, the real difference between contemporary Israeli Jews and Palestinians boils down to who has the power to deploy violence against the other to maintain its claim of exclusive ownership of a contested piece of land.

While critical studies certainly have their challenges, they are also remarkably capable of identifying central issues. In Zionism’s case it is institutional violence toward the “other.”

The weaponization of “alterity” and its counterpoint in the [non-militarized] idea of “cohabitation” are thus flip sides of a major theme of Butler’s book, whose first two chapters largely focus on Emmanual Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Rashi’s discussions of how Jews relate to non-Jews, and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence.

Butler demonstrates that Judaism itself, Jewish scholars like Levinas, and sages like Rashi have long grappled with the ethics of the “other.” Contrary to Judaism, Zionism cannot see — in fact, refuses to recognize — the humanity of the “other,” valuing only survival, relying on state violence and operating by the law of the jungle.

Although Butler themself does not quote Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, this foundational document expresses Zionism’s almost sociopathic “survival-over-morality” in terms that ought to make any religious scholar shudder:

“We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality.”

Zionism’s fundamental absence of morality was echoed recently in a statement by Israel’s Kahanist National Security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir:

“My right, my wife’s right, my children’s right to travel on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than Arabs’ freedom of movement. Sorry, Mohammad, but that’s the reality, that’s the truth.”

I had thought I was up to the challenge of reading Parting Ways because I had previously read several of the works of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, which Butler uses as departure points. I thought I might be able to keep up. And even though I had also read the Kafka mentioned and Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I had never read Benjamin’s famously obscure meditation on violence, which also treats divine violence and wades into messianism. Despite a better than average chance of understanding Butler’s many eclectic references, some of the chapters were still a very tough slog.

It pains me when Zionists claim that their beloved Apartheid state and the twisted, amoral ideology that undergirds it are central to Judaism. There may once have been a Kingdom of Israel (actually two, which only lasted 125 years) but that Israel is clearly not the same as today’s ethno-state, despite the fantasies of Kahanists, hilltop setters and Christian Zionists.

So I don’t mean to slam Butler’s overall thesis at all, because I agree with it. But this slim volume makes something relatively straightforward unnecessarily complex. I also found the book physically painful to read because the font size is 8 or 9 points. There are far more approachable dissections of why Judaism and Zionism are not only completely separate but stand absolutely in opposition to one another.

We could start with the Talmud, for one. There is nothing in the Talmud’s 63 tractates that describes the contemporary state of Israel now run by fascists, Kahanists, and religious lunatics. Look at the Talmud’s laws of war to see how Israel has violated virtually every stricture. Or look to the pre-state Zionists for their objections to contemporary Zionism, discussed in Chapter 6 of Parting Ways.

Even before Israel’s founding, many of the early Zionists like Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Judah Magnes quickly distanced themselves from the ethnic cleansing and fascism that had become inevitabilities of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism embraced at the 1942 Biltmore Zionist Conference. Their argument was that stealing from and murdering Arabs would create an unsustainable, racist state and violate every tenet of Jewish ethics.

And, really. How could Zionists have proceeded to steal an entire land from its indigenous people in spite of such easily-foreseen consequences? Because Zionism has no morality, no concern for the “other,” no respect for universal values. Even after there was no longer a Nazi threat to Jewish life, Zionism continued on its trajectory of genocide and dispossession of Palestinians.

Today finding Jews critical of Zionism is not very difficult. There are hundreds of Jewish organizations, even some within Judaism itself, that are critical of Zionism. If you’re looking for a contemporary, theoretical critique, check out the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which numbers a respectable share of Jewish intellectuals. Visit https://criticalzionismstudies.org/ and their podcast.

In the final analysis, recognizing the differences between Judaism and Zionism requires no esoteric meditation. Zionism, with its attendant, even logically consequential, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression, is diametrically opposed to Judaism’s Tzedek, tzedek tirdof! (Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue!). And Zionism most surely contradicts Hillel’s dictum: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary.”

The Two State Lie

Posted by on 2024-09-24 No comments

After years of illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank, the only thing left of the “Two State Solution” is as a prop for liberal politicians and liberal Zionists to point at while doing nothing to advance any now clearly impossible partition plan.

The charitable or gullible may view these liberals as idealistic dreamers, but realists will recognize them for what they are — purveyors of an obvious, damnable lie. In truth, Israel and its colonial enablers will permit only an exclusively Jewish state — and this has always meant the inevitable mass-murder or expulsion of a people who will never renounce their claims on their own land.

Even when the opportunity has presented itself to create or move forward the idea of a Palestinian state – even a rump state or a disconnected set of cantons or reservations — the United States has rejected or vetoed the idea, pointing to its other gaslighting prop — the equally dead and pickled Oslo Accords — as the “only game in town,” as George Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell used to call it.

Oslo may be long-dead but it is still the straw man that US presidents and their Western allies recite while demanding that Palestinians negotiate directly with Israel — as if such were negotiations between states on equal footing. But since Israel has physically destroyed literally every Palestinian government (and that includes assassinating its leaders and negotiators), only the toothless, highly unpopular Palestinian Authority remains, and it has absolutely no mandate to negotiate with anyone.

Meanwhile, no American president has ever made any effort to hold Israel to account for its illegal settlements, actively worked for two states, or even presented a vision for one. That’s because for decades it has been impossible (not to mention embarrassing) to look at a map of the West Bank and explain to anyone with a straight face how a Palestinian state could ever be cobbled together from the tiny crumbs still left on the table. So when I hear liberal stalwarts like Elizabeth Warren mumbling “two states” I want to demand that she show me her detailed plan. Or shut the hell up.

As reasonable as a demand that the thief return the property he stole, or the home invader vacate the home he invaded, or that damages (criminal or civil) must be paid to a victim, no Western nation with its own sordid history of slaughter and displacement of indigenous people will will ever impose this sort of justice on a fellow settler-colonial state. When you think about it, this is nothing more than professional courtesy between rogue states.

But now, after 75 years of injustice and now an exceptionally well-documented genocide, the world is screaming for a solution to be found. Israel’s solution is to double down on every technique that created its Apartheid state in the first place — massacres and ethnic cleansing. The Zionist state remains committed to “thinning” the Palestinian population — as if it were a herd of animals, stealing even more land, and devising ever more creative schemes to push Palestinians into the Sinai, Jordan, or Egypt. But a previously inattentive world has been paying attention, and now Israel’s many crimes have justifiably made it a pariah.

AND YET American politicians are still on board with Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and continued annexation. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have suggested that Israel “bounce the rubble,” drop atomic bombs, or “finish the job” — echoing genocidal calls openly and increasingly advanced by members of Israel’s Knesset and its public. The Democratic president, a self-described “Zionist,” generously funds the ongoing genocide, has placed boots on the ground and boats in the Gulf. His National Security Advisor and Secretary of State shamelessly lie about the scale and scope of Israel’s war crimes.

Democratic Party politicians avert their eyes from the victims of Israel’s genocide, and couldn’t bring themselves to allow a Muslim congresswoman to address their national convention (while allowing two Israelis the platform). They vote with Republicans to criminalize protests, vote for new laws to muzzle speech critical of Zionism or opposition to Israeli policies — all while continuing to hide behind Oslo and the fictive Two State Solution. And while the Democratic majority is too well bred to openly cheer for genocide like their Republican brethren, they still do everything they can to sustain the “lethal” slaughter.

Zionists interpret the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call to exterminate all the Jews. I doubt they actually believe this propagandistic “interpretation” any more than I do because Israel’s ruling party actually uses a similar formulation in its own platform. What is true, however, is that throughout all the territory it controls Israel — and no other people — maintains an actual One State ethnocracy by extreme violence. Again, literally from the river to the sea. This single state includes 5.5 million Palestinian subjects in areas occupied by Israel and Israel’s 9.1 million citizens, totaling 14.6 million souls.

Of this total population 7.2 million – a slight minority – are Jewish. But Israel’s One State Jewish minority is even smaller because up to a million Israelis don’t actually live in Israel and many of the Russian olim were admitted under an amended 1970 Law of Return which permitted non-Jews to immigrate (specifically to offset Arab demographics). So when you also factor in the Palestinian diaspora — between 6 million and 7 million people displaced by the 1948 Nakba — Jews represent only a third of the total number of people who have claims to Palestine.

This, together with the racist, repressive, even neofascist, nature of the Israeli state, perfectly justifies classifying Israel as an Apartheid state. As a state for only a fraction of its “subjects,” Israel maintains the status quo only through violence and terror, and it can’t even do this on its own.

As its colonial era Mandate expired, Britain turned over its military and colonial infrastructure to the Jewish Company, not the majority Palestinian population it had occupied. Since its founding, Israel has depended on hundreds of billions of dollars of American subsidies to its military, defense, tech, and energy programs. Billions of dollars in funding came from North American Zionist organizations, notably the private Jewish Federations and large donors. Like a failing tech startup, the Zionist state only exists by pumping more and more money into it. In the long run it is unsustainable.

France made Israel the nuclear power it is today. Russia armed it in its early years. Americans can’t have national healthcare, but between 15-20% of Israel’s defense budget is paid for by American taxpayers. In any other financial arena where expenses are properly scrutinized, from business to government to non-profits, throwing wads of cash at a recurring disaster is the very definition of insanity.

By at least 1990, with hope for a Palestinian state all but dead, it was obvious that a different version of the One State solution — not exclusively Jewish — would be necessary to end the madness of Zionism’s ruthless control over all of Palestine. Though different, several of these plans end exclusive Zionist control over Palestine by giving Palestinians a long-denied voice and exactly the same rights as Jews — security, respect for personal property, freedom of movement, a political voice, and the right of refugees to return to their communities.

Taxonomy of One State solutions

In 2005 Tamar Hermann, a liberal Zionist Israeli political scientist who now works at the Israel Democracy Institute, looked at the structure of four different One State solutions:

  1. a “unitary state” that denies the non-dominant nationality any rights, redress, or power
  2. a system that grants the non-dominant group [some] individual rights but no collective political rights or power
  3. a classical liberal democracy in which no nationality has special or collective political rights and where the relationship of citizen to state is not mediated by ethnic or religious membership
  4. a “parity-based” bi-national framework in which each nationality becomes a collective political unit and is accorded equal status and power regardless of size
  5. a “consociational” bi-national arrangement which recognizes ethno-national rights within “cantons” (preserving one aspect of the “two state” solution) while permitting freedom of movement and property ownership for both nationalities within all of Palestine

Although it’s a bit dated, Hermann’s taxonomy provided both a useful outline and an analysis of how Israel has systematically opposed both one- and two-state solutions. Note that Option #1 is the current reality, and the only reality acceptable to Israel and its Western enablers. Note also that various options that would address injustices toward Palestinians have been systematically rejected by elements of the Israeli Left, Right, and Center.

Early Jewish Bi-nationalism

As Hermann writes, Zionism ignored and discounted both Arab existence and resistance to displacement:

“For many devoted Zionists, it came as a severe blow to realise that implementing the dream of the Zionist movement – the ingathering of the Jews in the land of their forefathers and the building of a national home for the Jewish people – bluntly interfered with the life of the Arab community in the same land. Although warnings in this regard were expressed as early as 1907–08 (Epstein 1907/1908), awareness of the hostility that massive Jewish immigration created among the Arabs was minimal.”

But there were plenty of Jews who recognized the flaw in Zionism:

A small minority, however, rejected these strategies as early as the 1920s, denouncing them as immoral for disrespecting the national rights of the Palestinians and for putting the Jews and Arabs on a collision course. Instead, this minority position advocated a bi-national arrangement. Thus, in 1925 the Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) group was formed with the aim of promoting Jewish–Arab understanding and co-operation.

The members of Brit Shalom, some of them prominent figures in the political or academic establishment, believed that the domination of one people by another would lead to severe friction and, eventually, war. At least in its early days, Brit Shalom’s bi-nationalism could be described as optimistic: it was meant to forestall the conflict before it ripened. Switzerland and Finland were the examples of successful bi-nationalism that encouraged Brit Shalom. In practical terms, the group advocated creating a legislative council based on Jewish–Arab parity, which would run the affairs of a bi-national state in which the two peoples would enjoy equal rights irrespective of their relative size at any given time.

The “Disturbances”

The wave of violent Arab riots against the Jews in 1929, known as the ‘disturbances’, were a severe blow to the group [my note: and should have been to the Zionists as well] since they suggested that time was running out faster than they expected. Brit Shalom warned that these ‘occurrences’ were not a sporadic, transitory phenomenon but the beginning of a national liberation struggle that would only get fiercer if not properly handled. Nevertheless, as noted, the chances for bi-nationalism to be adopted when other, more ‘natural’ options have not yet been tried, and failed, are slim.

Indeed, Brit Shalom was harshly attacked by the mainstream and accused of defeatism. The fact that they spoke their minds while the murdered Jews were not yet buried infuriated their rivals even further, and the Zionist establishment denounced them as either pathologically naive or traitors. It is important to note that the bi-national advocacy of Brit Shalom and its successors in the pre-state days was not echoed on the Arab side. Given their numerical superiority, the Palestinians rejected a parity-based regime.

Magnes

Detroit Jewish Chronicle, October 3, 1941 calling Magnes a “Quisling”

The “Ihud” (Union)

Apart from Brit Shalom, however, the group most identified with it is Ihud (Union), which was led by Martin Buber and Judah Magnes and was active from the early 1940s till the establishment of the state, though it continued its activities until the mid-1960s. Ihud was established in 1942, almost a decade after Brit Shalom had expired.

By that time the conflict was already an undeniable and very violent reality. Moreover, Ihud operated against the background of World War II and the catastrophe of European Jewry. Its members believed that bi-nationalism offered the only way of saving both the Jewish community in Palestine and the survivors of the Holocaust. They did not deny the Jewish people’s special attachment to the Land of Israel but maintained that together with the Arabs living in Palestine they must develop the country without one side imposing its will on the other.

In their submission to the Anglo-American Commission (1946), Magnes and Buber, who represented Ihud, argued, in stark contrast to the position presented by the Zionist establishment, that since both Jews and Arabs had a national claim to Palestine, it could neither be an Arab state nor a Jewish one. They also rejected the partition option, saying it was impractical and a ‘moral defeat for everyone concerned’. Instead, they recommended that a bi-national state be formed in which Jews and Arabs would share power. According to this parity-based model, Jews and Arabs would have equal representation in a democratically elected legislative council, and the head of state would be appointed by the United Nations Organisation, with each community exercising autonomy in cultural matters.

Zionism’s conflict with Jewish values apparent

Indeed, the bi-nationalism of Brit Shalom and Ihud had a strongly moralistic aspect. They saw it as a natural derivation of the Jewish tradition of antimilitarism – the victory of the spirit over the flesh. At the same time, they promoted bi-nationalism as the only practical solution that might be acceptable to both sides.

A brief appearance by Israeli Bi-nationalists

The tiny camp of today’s (2005) Israeli bi-nationalists can be divided into two subgroups. First there are those, mostly belonging to the radical, non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist Left, who favor this model per se. Second are those who would prefer a different scenario but have concluded that the existing geopolitical and demographic realities dictate bi-nationalism.

The bi-national idea was already raised by a few Israelis in the 1970s, and again, strongly but by very few, soon after the launching of the Oslo process. Political activists of the radical Left, such as Michael Warschawski of the Alternative Information Centre and others, warned against the pitfalls of the Oslo paradigm, claiming that the Palestinian state to be established in this framework could not be viable but would only be a Bantustan-type entity.

For this they mainly blamed the expansionist Zionist ideology and the Israeli government, while also criticising the Palestinian Authority’s impotence and inability to defend its people’s interests: ‘If Arafat had not accepted the conditions laid out at Oslo, this miserable agreement might have remained a mere position paper (Ben Efrat 1997; see also Pape 1999, Warschawski 2001). These activists called for the adoption of the PLO’s ‘secular-democratic state’ model, which they referred to as bi-national in essence. However, theirs was a cry in the wilderness; it was heard, if at all, only within small circles of the Left and was mainly understood in the context of the internal rivalries between the Zionist and non-Zionist components of the peace camp.

Until very recently, however, bi-nationalism was not a significant (albeit highly contested) option in the Israeli repertoire of possible solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian strife. Thus, when in the summer of 2003 the weekly supplement of the Haaretz daily published a lengthy interview with two public figures, Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi, in which both expressed their support for a bi-national, Israeli–Palestinian state, many within and outside Israel were taken by surprise. In this pathbreaking interview Hanegbi, a well- known figure of the radical Left, admitted to his initial support for the Oslo process (Shavit 2003).

Yet as time passed and the process seemed to be leading nowhere, he came to view Oslo as a mistake – a diversion of everyone’s attention to Israel’s rhetoric rather than its deeds, namely, the ongoing settlement expansion. Therefore, dwelling on sweet memories of his childhood in Mandatory Jerusalem amid Jewish–Arab harmony and coexistence, Hanegbi asserted that Israel was unable to free itself from its expansionist mentality since ‘it is tied, hands and feet, to its core ideology of dispossession and original mode of action’. His conclusion was that: ‘Only binational cooperation can save us. Only this can transform us from foreigners in our land to locals, to natives’.

More on the debate

Benvenisti, the second interviewee in this scandal-stirring article, is also a nonconformist but comes from the heart of the Israeli establishment. Having warned prophetically for years that the ever-growing settlement project was becoming irreversible, his shift to bi-nationalism reflects much frustration and pain: Israelis, like the Afrikaners in South Africa, should realise that the present discriminatory regime ought to be dismantled, since it has failed to impose its hegemony over the dominated collective, and replaced it with a regime of individual and collective equality. Like Hanegbi, Benvenisti also admits to making a mistake in the past – in his case, defining the Israeli– Palestinian struggle as a national one when the correct definition, he now acknowledges, is that of a struggle between natives and settlers/colonisers, resulting from the atavistic hatred of those who feel dispossessed by foreigners.

Separation, then, is no longer an option, and the entire Land of Israel should be regarded as a single geopolitical entity (Shavit 2003). Although in this interview Benvenisti did not describe the details of the bi-national arrangement he suggested, he mentioned some combination of a horizontal sharing of powers on a parity basis and a vertical (territorial) one, a federalist structure that would include the entire land west of the Jordan River and be divided into several ethnic cantons.

In an article published a few months later, however, Benvenisti advocated the consociational model, ‘which recognizes the collective ethnonational rights and enables cooperation in the government at the national level while guaranteeing well-defined political rights for minorities’ (Benvenisti 2003). He views such an arrangement as based on a cantonal division under a federal umbrella. Such an arrangement, he states, also enables maintaining ‘soft’ borders and constructive ambiguity, which facilitates handling symbolic issues such as Jerusalem and even the refugees and the settlers (ibid.). He also states his pessimistic bottom line: ‘I am not happy with what I have just suggested. . . . We are not going to have peace here. Even if there is some binational arrangement, it can only manage the conflict. At its outskirts, however, violence will always prevail’ (Shavit: 10–14, 2003).

The publication of the interview with Benvenisti and Hanegbi by a major Israeli newspaper brought strong aftershocks, including many letters to the editor and opinion columns in the printed and electronic press. Paradoxically, for reasons to be explained below, the most negative reactions came not from the Right but from the Centre and moderate Left, both supporting one or another version of the two-state solution. For example, Yosef Gorni, a mainstream Zionist historian, fiercely attacked Benvenisti, who is also a historian along with his other professional activities:

As Benvenisti knows very well, this approach [bi-nationalism] is a complete non sequitur. . . . This is essentially because of the national spirit and history of the Jews and the Arabs. Both peoples find it very difficult to have minorities in their midst. . . . Furthermore, this idea also has a deplorable moral aspect, as it is unthinkable to legitimate such collective discrimination, by which all other peoples of the region, besides the Jews, will be entitled to a national state of their own. (Gorni 2003)

Another mainstream critic (Shacham 2003) fiercely attacks Hanegbi: ‘better not to bamboozle us with some bi-national phrasing when what one actually means is a regular state, with a majority and a minority, with the majority defining the rights of the minority’ (ibid.). His criticism of Benvenisti is no gentler: ‘The use of the phrase ”bi-national paradigm”, which sounds so intelligent, cannot compensate for the total lack of thinking on how such a state can be established and function’ (ibid.). Shlomo Avineri, a prominent political scientist and former director-general of the Foreign Ministry, states categorically: ‘A binational state? There is no such thing. Simply put: nowhere in the world has a conflict between two national movements been resolved by squeezing two national movements, holding each other’s throats, into the boiling pot of a binational state’ (Avineri 2003). Clearly alluding to Benve- nisti, he continues:

What happened to them [i.e. the advocates of bi-nationalism who were not part of the radical Left but came from the mainstream] was that they simply collapsed in the face of the Palestinians’ determination and resistance and their readiness to sacrifice themselves, reaching the conclusion that Zionism can never win and hence should be given up altogether.

Interestingly enough, there is also some opposition to the Hanegbi and Benvenisti-style bi-nationalism on the radical Left, the traditional (albeit tiny) support base in Israel for the PLO-style, secular-democratic bi-national state. These voices maintain that dividing the entire country into cantons a la Benvenisti has a misleading ring of plausibility. Israel boasts a First World economy, while the Palestinian-populated areas belong to the Second or even Third World. In such a situation, where the Jewish cantons are ‘haves’ and the Arab ones ‘have-nots’, the chances of real equality under the new federal or other framework are practically nil. Yet the question is idle, the argument goes, because there is no apparatus for realising this concept anyway; there is nothing to motivate Israel, which has brought Arafat to his knees and divided the Palestinian national movement, to enter into such an adventure (e.g. Ben Efrat 1997).

As noted, the Right’s criticism of the ‘new school’ bi-nationalists was surprisingly mild, apparently because any plan that implies retaining the Land of Israel as a single unit is appealing – with some amendments – to supporters of that principle. Thus, in November 2003 the Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) Council released its own ‘bi-national’ plan as the solution for the conflict. It divides the entire historic Land of Israel into ten cantons, each of which would have cultural autonomy, with their boundaries delineated according to the ethno-national composition of the population in the specific region. These cantons would come under a federal umbrella.

However, according to this plan’s principle of division, only two of the cantons would be Palestinian, thereby guaranteeing a Jewish majority in parliament (Eid 2003). The right-wing activist and journalist Israel Harel proposed another bi- national model: ‘We should take the Arabs on both sides of the Green Line as one body and the Jews on both sides as one body, and give the Arabs Jordanian citizenship and the Jews Israeli citizenship’ (Harel, in Susser 2003). There are, however, moderate right-wingers who fear that if such positions are embraced, the bi-national reality may impose itself on the land and destroy the settler community from within.

Thus Yair Sheleg, a journalist living in a settlement yet writing in Haaretz (which is left-of-center on Israeli–Palestinian relations), urged his fellow settlers to agree to the two-state solution before it was too late. With their powerful opposition to evacuating even the smallest, most isolated outpost, Sheleg argues, the settlers have created a balance of deterrence with the government. Sheleg urges the settlers to stop pressuring the government and concludes: ‘In specific moments of their life, individuals often agree to undergo painful operations, including amputating this or another organ of their body so as to save their life. The same level of responsibility such individuals take regarding their private life could be expected from those who aspire to be in the leadership position regarding the good of the nation.

Glimmers of One State

In 2004, frustrated with an Oslo process that was going nowhere, with Israel still occupying Gaza and beginning to wall off Jerusalem, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alta) – who would shortly be succeeded by Hamas’s Ismail Haniyah – threatened that if there was no real progress in negotiations Palestinians would call for one binational state.

The United States, smack in the middle of a Middle East war of its own making, placed its heavy thumb on the scales, acting as the biased peace broker it has always been. Elliott Abrams, soon to become a convicted felon and an accused war criminal, was part of the American delegation tasked with making sure Israel would prevail. US Secretary Colin Powell “categorically” rejected a one state solution and demanded that Palestinians “wrest authority” from President Yasir Arafat. For its part, Israel rejected any sort of a Palestinian state.

And prevail Israel did. The 2006 elections which swept Fatah from power and ushered in Hamas were a consequence of Israeli intransigence and American connivance. The US and Israel had no idea at the time that anointing (and later funding) Hamas would eventually blow up in their faces so spectacularly.

Thus, rather than “Palestinians never failing to miss an opportunity” for peace, peace in Palestine has been systematically subverted by Israel and the colonial powers (notably the US) that created it. These parties have worked tirelessly, always behind the scenes, to scuttle any sort of just solution or compromise that would allow two peoples to live in peace on the land one party stole.

Apology

Posted by on 2024-09-21 No comments

My last post addressed two letters in the New Bedford Guide concerning Zionism. One clearly defended it, while another by my friend Betty Ussach only sounded like it. I have known Betty for many years, worked with her on social justice issues, and, while I may not have been the only person to misread her intentions, I should have given her much more credit for what should have been read as a principled objection to Israel’s violence in Gaza, not the opposite. Another letter she published in the New York Daily News leaves no doubt as to where she stands. Betty, again, I’m really sorry.

While I am apologizing, the New Bedford Guide did eventually publish my response. As uncomfortable as the issue may be for some to confront, covering vital public discussions that have otherwise been banished from the local papers is an important function of the press. Anyone who, even belatedly or reluctantly, publishes unpopular views on the war in Gaza or Zionism is doing an important public service. I hope the NB Guide will keep it up because the other local news outlets aren’t.

While to some people Gaza may be somebody else’s war — a topic made radioactive because of cynical accusations of “antisemitism” or something having nothing to do with our national priorities — without American bombs, naval fleets, intelligence sharing, missile defense systems, vetoes at the UN, and cumulatively hundreds of billions of dollars of military aid to Israel, neither Israel’s Apartheid system nor their genocidal war on Palestinians would be possible. And everybody knows it — most of all the vast Israel lobby.

At some “Walter Cronkite moment” in the future, with almost every international body condemning the war and Israel’s Apartheid system, Americans are going to finally realize that pumping billions after billions to prop up a nationalist supremacist state is simply throwing bad money after bad.

Anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism

Posted by on 2024-09-19 No comments

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

September 17, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zionism’s genocidal fantasies

Posted by on 2024-09-09 No comments

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

Podcasters represent the Zionist mainstream

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

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

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

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

America’s antisemitism czar with two sociopaths

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

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

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Meningher working on Netanyahu’s campaigns

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

The Times of Israel’s founder attacks liberal news outlets

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

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

Turns out, genocide is a mainstream Zionist sentiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lying about genocide

Posted by on 2024-09-03 No comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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