I have to ask what would happen if Washington simply stopped making “emergency weapon sales” to the State of Israel. Would Israelis suddenly find themselves in peril? Would the IDF suddenly grind to a halt? Or, would it just become that much more difficult for the State of Israel to prosecute its brutal war against Gaza, maybe forcing some Israeli leaders to reconsider their country’s open-ended campaign of destruction and, perhaps, start thinking about a ceasefire. As long as the State of Israel has unlimited resources to wage an unlimited war, it will go on.

That thought, which I posted in social media earlier this week, has been troubling me as the hours click down to the end of 2023. The change in the calendar at New Year’s is an arbitrary marker. The first day of 2024 will not be much different after all than the last day of 2023, and certainly not a whole year different, as the new year might suggest. If we still wrote cheques, then there might be that momentary confusion when writing out the rent cheque, and there will be a few weeks of marveling at how the date 2024 just looks different than 2023, but we’ll get over it.

The myth of the New Year in fact mystifies the reality that time, as Steve Miller sang in 1976, keeps on slipping into the future. That is a gloomy thought as this year of violence and war comes to an end, and it is hard to avoid despair with no end in sight. More than 21,000 Palestinians are now dead, and the State of Israel shows no inclination to stop despite growing global condemnation.

***
The bottom line is this: The War on Gaza must end. I think that I have been attracted to kaiju (monster) movies lately because the destruction of entire cities by an enormous, nuclear-powered, aquatic lizard makes more sense to me than the utter devastation of Gaza by a modern army. The utter mindlessness of Godzilla, in which he devastates Tokyo, San Francisco, and any other city, as he is driven by nothing more than survival instincts contains more reason than the deliberate destruction and death in Gaza.

Zionists can say all they want that the IDF is there to “destroy” Hamas, but they never say what they mean. Is the plan to track down every single Hamas member, whether they are terrorists or public officials, and summarily execute them? Is the plan, as some Israeli officials have said, to so utterly devastate Gaza so that Hamas will lose the will to fight? That was the logic behind the RAF bombing of Germany, the German blitz on Britain, and the saturation bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia. How did that work out?

Maybe we should just take Itamar Ben Gvir at his word and accept that he is simply saying the quiet parts out loud, and that the whole point of this is nothing less than the obliteration of Palestinian life in Gaza. That this is intentional, and not incidental genocide – planned and executed from Day 1.

What do my remaining Zionist friends say to that? Can they still delude themselves that this is merely self-defense? Especially when the entire world is speaking against the slaughter, even if the United States continues to mince its diplomatic words. Does any real Zionist, someone committed to the survival and welfare of the State of Israel really welcome that now-inevitable moment when Israelis are a pariah people, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and regarded as a community of murderers? Think about that frisson of horror that everyone in the world still feels at the mere mention of Serbia and Serbian nationalism today, and multiply that my one hundred. Is this what Zionists really want for the State of Israel?

In the kaiju movies, the monsters are redeemed and forgiven because they act without malice, they are driven by instinct and fear – a product of our human hubris, no less. They do not seek to destroy for destruction’s sake. But almost three months in the War on Gaza, can we really say the same about the State of Israel? Is this what Zionists and Israelis want?

***

With regard to the controversy over the cartoon in the Buffalo News that depicted President Biden losing sleep because of a dripping sink with faucets shaped like the Star of David: I have never regarded the Star of David as a particularly JEWISH symbol but, rather, as a Zionist symbol, so I don’t regard this cartoon as particularly antisemitic, though it is very likely anti-Zionist (which, I imagine, is the point).

Despite what many people think, the Star of David has not been a pervasive symbol of Judaism or of Jewish life for much of our history. While the six-pointed star does appear in a handful of Second Temple Period inscriptions in the Levant, it is unclear whether these inscriptions are meant to signify anything specifically Jewish, or whether they are merely ornamental.

The Hebrew name for the six-pointed star is “Mogen David,” which means “the Shield of David,” but the association of the star with the shield – and thus with King David and Jewish sovereignty – is very likely an innovation of the post-Second Temple Period. The Star of David was frequently used in medieval Kabbalistic literature,* but it was probably borrowed from Islamic Sufi sources. As a Jewish symbol, it did make sporadic appearances in Ashkenazi iconography in the middle ages and early modern period, most notably on banners created to signify Jewish sovereignty in the ghettos of Prague and Vienna.

What made the Star of David a recognizable “universal Jewish” symbol was its adoption by the Zionist movement after 1897 as a Zionist symbol. It makes sense, in a way, that a movement which aspired to arrogate Jewish sovereignty and which promoted itself as the secular heir of the Davidic line would appropriate a symbol with those associations. We know that, from the first sketches in his journals, Theodor Herzl Imagined the six-pointed star as the symbol of the movement he founded.

The only thing that made this a universal Jewish symbol, however, was Zionism’s ultimately successful effort to capture and colonize Jewish life. With the blue-and-white Israeli flag on the bima of almost every synagogue in the world after 1948, the association of Judaism with Zionism became nigh unavoidable.† It is important to be clear here, however, that one can only claim that a Zionist symbol is a universal Jewish symbol if one accepts that Zionism and the State of Israel is coextensive with Jewish life and the People of Israel. This is, of course, the ideological premise of Zionism, which thus claims that any criticism of Zionism and the State of Israel is ipso facto antisemitic.

And that is the bind, carefully constructed by Zionist and Israeli propaganda, that the Buffalo News cartoonist find themselves in. Yet, the equation of Zionism with Judaism – the notion that all Jews, by virtue of being Jews, owe their allegiance to the State of Israel, regardless of where they live and hold citizenship – is itself an antisemitic canard that deploys and promotes the myth of tribalistic Jewish groupthink. Thus, the accusation that the Buffalo News cartoon is antisemitic is, itself, antisemitic.

Ever since my defection from Zionism in 1982, I have flatly rejected the use of a Zionist symbol – the Mogen David – as a Jewish symbol.‡ It can be no other way if one denies the equation of Zionism with Judaism. Yet, I do recognize the value of symbols and, for the last four decades, the symbol that I have chosen to use to represent Judaism and Jewish culture is the seven-branched menorah.

Significantly, the menorah has been the most pervasive and universal Jewish symbol since the days of the Temple. It has appeared ubiquitously in engravings and illustrations – as a specifically and unequivocal Jewish symbol – since at least the first century BCE. The menorah has appeared everywhere in Jewish life AS the defining Jewish symbol, in the earliest Jewish manuscripts and illuminations, in colophons, in mosaics and seder plates and, when the Roman Emperor Titus chose a symbol to signify “Iudea capta” on his triumphal arch, he chose the image of his legions carrying the Temple menorah into captivity.

As the controversy over the Buffalo News cartoon demonstrates, symbols are important. But it is equally important to be absolutely clear about what these symbols mean, and the violence that we do to the Jewish people when we uncritically accept the antisemitic Zionist canard that Zionist symbols and Jewish symbols are one and the same.

—

* The kabbalah is a body of mystical Jewish practice and literature dating back to about the 10th century.

† This process was not instantaneous. The adoption of Zionist symbols in Jewish religious and cultural spaces proceeded slowly at first, only reaching something close to universality after 1967.

‡ By the time that I was growing up, Zionism had become hegemonic in Diaspora Jewish life. To be raised Jewish was to uncritically accept the centrality of the State of Israel in Jewish life. Thus, a rejection of Zionism was (and still is) an ideological act not dissimilar to defection.

***

I have seen a considerable amount of commentary that demonizes the Jewish Holocaust survivors who came as refugees to Mandatory Palestine before 1948 and, especially, to the State of Israel after 1948. These people numbered about 600,000-700,000 people. Many anti-Zionists condemn these refugees as settlers in a colonial enterprise. While it is true that Zionist organizations and, after 1948, the State of Israel deployed the term “settler,” and that Zionists regarded their project as a colonial one, the rhetoric equates Zionist colonialism (which was explicitly modeled on freelance colonies like Nueva Germania and Y Wladfa) with the colonial projects undertaken by European powers like Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, etc. in the Americas, Asia, and Africa starting in the late-15th century. In effect, it is saying that Zionism was (and is) an empire on the order of the British and French empires. Not only does this flattened-rhetoric mystify the real historical complexities of Zionism (certainly, before 1948), but the equation with European empires suggests that then Zionist movement was (and is) a shadowy world power (shadow, because it was not a nation-state) on the order of the great empires. This is dancing very close, and sometimes into, antisemitic theories of an international Zionist/Jewish conspiracy.

More importantly, the demonization of Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel displays the kind of inhumanity to which simplistic political and nationalist thinking always leads. One might ask where these refugees – there were about 1.5 million displaced survivors after 1945, mostly in DP camps, out of a pre-Holocaust Jewish population of about 7.5 million – should have gone? Do we only care about the welfare of refugees in our own time, and when they are not Jews? These are important questions to ask, and I would exhort those of you who demonize the refugees of 1945-1952 ask them.

History is complex. There is never a single cause for things, and there are rarely, if ever, any good choices. Justice is imperfect and, even though many people – both Zionists and anti-Zionists – wish to inhabit a universe where right and wrong, good and evil, are objective, metaphysical categories, the study of history reveals that this is never the case. One might argue that many of the decisions made just after 1945 were shortsighted, uninformed, freighted with prejudices, or just plain wrong. One can certainly say that many of these bequeathed us with the seeds of an intractable, bloody conflict.

But do not demonize the refugees of 1945-1952, who had just survived an atrocity on a scale never before seen in human history, who had nothing, who had lost everything, and had no place to go. If you can’t follow this basic rule of common decency, then please just go away.

***

I just wrote this in a PM to a FB friend. It is about this idea of the moral Amidah, an act of standing up (and, often standing out) to sanctify life. I think of this in very Jewish terms, as a way that we can DO Jewish in the face of Zionism. (Though, of course, one does not have to be a Jew to stand up in this way, it is a way for us who are part of Am Yisroel to instantiate our Jewishness.):

“Bad things happen when we don’t stand up. And even if bad things happen, anyway, it is in the standing up that we sanctify life and honor our obligation to God, humanity, truth, decency, or whatever you feel an obligation to. One does no honor to anyone or anything by backing down. I am gratified that I have been able to offer some inspiration. My fellow Jews – and others – who also stand up are a great inspiration to me.”

Let’s keep standing up and inspiring each other.

***

I am well-aware that there have, historically, been many different strands of Zionism, from Ahad Ha-Am’s cultural Zionism, to Bernard Lazare’s non-territorial Zionism, to Hovei Zion, to Labor Zionism, to Revisionist Zionism. However, the Zionist taxonomy has narrowed considerably in the last 75 years; the ideas of Lazare and Ahad Ha-Am are no longer available options, and the differences between the Labor Zionism of Mapai and the Haganah and the Revisionist Zionism of Likud/Herut and the Irgun were never really more than a question of style.

Today’s Zionism is very much the heir of Vladimir Jabotinsky, no matter how much liberal Jews want to believe that Labor Zionism was the “kinder and gentler” variety, and that it has any traction anymore in Israeli political culture. The Labor Party, one of the last torchbearers of Labor Zionism has four seats in the Knesset (the State of Israel’s parliament) and Meretz won a whole 3,800 votes in the last election.

When we speak of Zionism today, we are speaking of a political ideology that explicitly repudiates any possibility of coexistence with Palestinian Arabs. Revisionist Zionism was predicated, from the very beginning, on ethnic cleansing, although Jabotinsky and his followers preferred the term “population transfer.” In the State of Israel, this Zionism proclaims what the Germans called the Sonderweg: The State of Israel is the sole historical embodiment of the Jewish people, its historical agent, and nothing can be permitted to stand in the way of its glorious Manifest Destiny.

In the Diaspora, this Zionism proclaims that no Jew has any value outside of this destiny and that, to be Jewish at all, one must be utterly and unquestioningly committed to it. I am sure that a great many Diaspora Zionists are appalled at the slaughter in Gaza, but that they believe they have a moral obligation to suppress their nausea over the killing – indeed, to suppress their very humanity – in the service of the Zionist project.

My hope is that we can convince at least some of them that they are wrong and that, when they suppress their humanity, they suppress that thing that is necessary to be a Jew.