The State of Israel has lost. That will be cold comfort to the people of Gaza who are suffering, starving, dying, and waiting for the IDF’s long-promised Rafah offensive. Still, six months into its bloody War on Gaza, the State of Israel not only can’t win, but it has surely lost much more than it could have ever hoped to gain when it responded to Hamas’s 7 October attacks with overwhelmingly disproportionate force.

I am not just talking about the impossibility of Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of “eradicating Hamas,” though that is part of it. It is, after all, hard to imagine how killing 35,000 people in Gaza will undermine Hamas’s claim that the State of Israel is a brutal oppressor. And one really must wonder if the IDF, with its vast numerical, technological, and material superiority on the land, air, and sea, is even capable of defeating an enemy that has kept them pinned down for six months.

What I am thinking about is everything that the State of Israel has already lost in this war. The world, and the State of Israel’s place within it, has changed irrevocably since October, and there is no possibility of any return to the status quo ante bellum.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was a foreign policy irritant, of course, something that came up in conversations and press conferences. Senator Elizabeth Warren had the gall to suggest that the United States should consider its own interests and maybe attach strings to arms sales to the State of Israel three years ago – including re-starting the peace process – and she was viciously attacked by gangs of rabid Zionists. After that, I was pretty sure that it would be a cold day in the Negev before any American political leader brought up that possibility again.

But then, Senator Charles Schumer, the ranking Senate Democrat, gave a speech two months ago in which he called for a ceasefire in Gaza and regime change in the State of Israel. There was the usual, and expected, Zionist push-back, of course, but significantly, it had lost its sting. While the response to Warren had been vituperative and frenzied, to Schumer it was indignant and… resigned?

I noted at the time that “this is exactly how Democrats test-market policy changes – who can forget when then-Vice President Biden endorsed marriage equality to test the water less than a week before President Barack Obama did twelve years ago.” I confess that there was an element of wishful thinking in this, but I was not really surprised when President Biden announced this week that his administration would pause shipments of offensive weapons to the State of Israel if Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu did not walk back his planned Rafah offensive.

I know that this is a lost of posturing; the United States has already supplied the IDF with enough munitions to obliterate Gaza several times over and, I am sure, Netanyahu is prepared to shake off the US president’s disapproval to go ahead with the slaughter of a few more Palestinians – at least for the sake of domestic consumption. It is highly unlikely that President Biden’s threat will have much of a material impact on Israeli military capacity, even if her carries through on it. And, of course, it spawned the usual croaking from the State of Israel’s toadies in the Democratic Party.

But the important thing is that he said it. The president spoke the heretofore unspeakable: the State of Israel does not have the US government’s blank check anymore – there are limits, and Netanyahu himself, if not the whole Israeli government has reached them.

Rhetoric is important because it defines what is politically possible. Until this week, limitations and even restrictions on US military aid to the State of Israel had been unthinkable, but now the president is thinking about it. Moreover, Biden drew an explicit line in the sand, which will show who is in charge of the US-Israeli relationship. If Netanyahu goes ahead with the Rafah offensive despite the warning, Biden will either have to find some way to stand tough, or hand his gift-wrapped baytsem to Donald Trump at the very start of the 2024 election season. I dislike the hyper-masculinity of American politics, but it is the reality.

Moreover, at a time when its sponsors in the Global North are already reevaluating their relationship with the State of Israel, it is clear that the next generations have already made up their minds. Two weeks ago, the College Democrats of America issued a statement demanding a ceasefire and enthusiastically supporting the campus protests, of which many of their members have taken part. “This past week, we witnessed heroic actions on the part of students around the country to protest and sit in for an end to the war in Palestine and the release of the hostages,” they declared.

It is difficult to think about Biden’s line in the sand without keeping this in mind. With an election in the offing, the College Democrats will be instrumental in the president’s reelection campaign, of course, but they also represent the future of the party. Even if that future is 15 or 20 years off, these youth leaders who are now energetically criticizing their own party’s policies, demanding peace, and serving notice that they will not tolerate Israeli aggression and war crimes will someday be the Democratic leaders, Members of Congress, Senators, and officials who make US policy.

The State of Israel has lost them just as it squandered the international good will it received on 7 October 2023, and just as erstwhile sponsors and allies have signaled that they have had enough. And, even in the absurdly-unlikely event that Netanyahu succeeds in his goal of “eliminating Hamas,” there will be no going back. Israelis will face the uncertain future of pariahs with the mark of Cain – the accusation of genocide – on their foreheads, abandoned by the benefactors that made their security and prosperity at all possible.

The State of Israel has lost its war.

12 May 2024

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The problem with talking about antisemitism is that, thanks to the efforts of the State of Israel and Zionists, it is a completely vacant term, utterly void of meaning. That means that it can be filled with meanings that have nothing to do with the history of antisemitism as a historian like I might understand. For example, because it no longer means “animus and bias against Jews and their exclusion from cultural citizenship,” it can be filled with new meanings, like “criticism of the State of Israel, opposition to its policies, and advocacy of Palestinian human rights and political autonomy,” which have absolutely nothing to do with actual Jews and the history of antisemitism. Thus, by this rhetorical alchemy, demonstrations against the State of Israel and demands for a ceasefire are prima facie antisemitism, while the Christian Nationalist agenda, narratives of Jewish non-citizenship, and even the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are not antisemitism.

It’s a neat trick, and it only took the Zionist collaboration with Christian Nationalists and redhat neototalitarians to make it possible.

11 May 2024

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Benjamin Netanyahu referred to pro-Palestinian “riots” on American campuses in recent comments, saying that all the “broken glass” in university buildings was reminiscent of Kristallnacht. Apart from the cynical (and frankly antisemitic) mobilization of a Holocaust equation, these comments make me think: Do Israelis, and even diaspora Zionists REALLY believe that the pro-Palestine peace encampments and occupations have been scenes of unrestrained violence? Riots? Apart from oppressive police measures and attacks by off-campus Zionist counter-protesters (as documented by UCLA Hillel), the campus demonstrations have been almost entirely peaceful.

Yet, here is the prime minister of the State of Israel, the would-be Kohen Gadol of the Jewish people, “saying a thing which is not” as the Houyhnhnms would put it. And I imagine that the vast majority of Israelis, whose knowledge of the world comes from a very narrow set of information sources, and the docile, bovine Zionist herd who seem to believe whatever their leaders tell them, actually believe with their whole hears that there are raging riots on American college and university campuses.

American carnage, as it were.

11 May 2024

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The canard that critiquing, or even doubting the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel is somehow unacceptable and a species of antisemitism is extremely revealing. This kind of thinking proposes that either the State of Israel alone or all states are naturally occurring entities, whose existence cannot be gainsaid. If it is the former, then the State of Israel is and should be treated as a “special case,” and this is exactly what Zionists firmly deny. In that case, implicit in the claim that the State of Israel is and should be beyond criticism is the notion that all states are and should be beyond criticism.

This bears consideration. Setting aside (at least for the moment) the fact that states have appear and disappeared in many forms throughout history, are not necessary forms of human organization, and therefore clearly not naturally occurring, the canard does reveal something about its advocates. Specifically, they are deeply invested in violence and a kind of Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes as the normal condition of humanity.

Historically, states emerged and consolidated primarily through violence, as a means for one social grouping or another to exert exclusive control over land and resources. The Roman state, for example, grew from the predations of one group of Latins in Latium against its neighbors, the Oscans, the Sabines, etc. to control cattle, land, and women. As their power grew and came into conflict with other tribes, proto-states, and states (like the Etruscans), Rome established itself as a state through violence and genocide.

The same can be said of many, if not most, contemporary states. Louis Althusser asks us, perhaps a little simplistically, to consider the role of violence in the functioning of the state apparatus as a “machine of repression” meant to extort surplus value from the working class. The threat of the state’s exercise of its monopoly on violence is always present in the event that softer, ideological forces are insufficient disciplinary forces – so the violence is always there.

I am no Althusser scholar, and I am not quite sure how far I would be willing to run with this, but violence is always present at the inception of states, as a means of establishing the disciplinary boundaries of the social group, and at their dissolution, as those boundaries collapse. As a historian, I can see unspeakable violence in the processes of state consolidation from Qin China, to the United States, modern Europe, Mughal India, and every other state. Obtaining hegemonic consent takes time and requires the deployment of state institutions like courts and schools, so its predicate is always violence. Violence always follows the erosion of hegemonic consent as the state disappears.

I am reminded that Rabbi Simlai said that “Torah begins with chesed (benevolence and love) and ends with chesed,” and it seems that the state begins in violence and ends in violence – and sustains itself with the threat of violence. In that sense, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to say that the state, all states, are so dependent on violence that the state is violence.

So, by insisting that the State of Israel must be beyond criticism, either as the “special case” that Zionists disingenuously deny that it is, or as a general case, because it is somehow illegitimate to critique or doubt the legitimacy of any state, the canard demands that we simply accept violence as the natural order. This, I imagine, is why pointing to the carnage in Gaza, which has claimed almost 35,000 Palestinian lives and displaced millions in an orgy of unspeakable violence, does nothing to move Zionists or their statist supporters in the United States. They believe in and embrace violence. If the State of Israel is slaughtering children, then that is just what states do.

9 May 2024

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It needs to be repeated over, and over again, that we must listen to the voices from the campuses, rather that the gutter media whose only goal is to profit from sensational stories of violent confrontation and crisis, and the government and community leaders eager to score cheap political points. This statement from the UCLA branch of Hillel International is ample evidence of that. It comes from the campus green itself, and it deserves our attention.

Every Jewish college student in the US and Canada knows Hillel International. Founded in 1923 at UIUC, it has become the largest Jewish students’ organization in the world, with branches at more than 800 colleges and universities. I often attended events at Hillel when I was a student, and frequently stood in the minyan when that was the only worship option available. In graduate school, I relied on Hillel for matzo and pesadike sustenance when I spent days in the library working on my dissertation.

So, make no mistake: Hillel is important to Jewish student life.

It is a pro-Israel organization, as many such groups are, becoming explicitly Zionist in the years following 1967. And, in the last few decades, it has embraced the kind of hard-line, Maximalist Zionism that has become so characteristic of American Jewish communal institutions. The national organization of Hillel International (despite the name, Hillel is very much a US-dominated organization) has, in fact, been one of the leading promoters of the myth of “campus antisemitism” and the anti-Palestinian libel.

… Which is why this statement, from the UCLA campus itself, is so important to read. UCLA Hillel’s letter nods in the direction of its parent organization’s accusations of “horrifying antisemitism exhibited by protestors,” for which there is scant evidence unless one accepts the canard that anti-Zionism and criticism of the policies of the State of Israel are prima facie antisemitism. I have no reason to believe that the student leaders of UCLA Hillel do not accept it. What is more important, however, is their characterization of the “violence” at the encampment:

“The truth is that a largely peaceful, pro-Palestinian encampment was attacked by an angry, violent mob comprised of fringe members of the off-campus Jewish community last night. They do not represent the estimated 3,000 Jewish Bruins at UCLA, yet those are precisely the people who will have to live with the reverberations of their aggressive actions.”

This account, by eyewitnesses with no reason to sympathize with the student protestors’ cause completely contradicts the official story. The violence to which the police and university officials brutally responded came from outside the encampment, and not from within it. There are, in fact, “outside agitators,” but they are the Zionist thugs and their redhat white nationalist allies, and not “terrorist sympathizers” imported from some terrorist demimonde of the Orientalist imagination.

Unlike its parent organization, the entirety of the Official Jewish Community, the bovine suburban Zionists who cannot tolerate dissent to their Golden Calf, and the politicians lining up to extract political capital by kowtowing to the Netantyahu Gang and its anti-intellectual neo-totalitarian sponsors, UCLA Hillel wants nothing more or less than respect for their student colleagues’ free speech. And its message to the wider Jewish Community could not be more emphatic:

“We can not have a clearer ask for the off-campus Jewish community: stay off our campus. Do not fund any actions on campus. Do not protest on campus. Your actions are harming Jewish students.”

If you want to know what is happening on campuses, ask the people who are on the campuses.

6 May 2024

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