I’m just tired. The Israeli War on Gaza has dragged on and on, and there is no reasonable end in sight. The State of Israel seems utterly resistant to diplomatic pressure due, in large part, to the Waffle House policies of it’s main sponsor, the United States. I have little doubt that, when President Biden voices his discomfort at the State of Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, he is expressing his real horror about the war. He has made threats to cut the Netanyahu regime off but has never followed through; he feels conflicted about balancing his desire to see a ceasefire and an end to the war, motivated both by political calculation a genuine aversion to all the killing.*
So, Benjamin Netanyahu knows that he can blow past every one of Biden’s “red lines” without ever losing US support. For now, at least, Biden’s talk is just talk and, even if many – and maybe most – of the State of Israel’s international sponsors are reaching the point where they just won’t play anymore, the United States is really the only one that counts. Netanyahu knows that, as long as Biden dithers, saying one thing while doing another, he can wind-out the war until a more amenable president is in the White House. The Israeli prime minister has no doubt that Donald Trump will be the next US president, and nor do I. Netanyahu must be sure that the new administration will not only refrain from lecturing his government, but that it will gleefully participate in the extermination of Palestinians.
At this point, it really does seem that the war will simply go on and, as it does, the opposition to it will become increasingly frustrated, desperate, and, yes, strident. I find myself thinking that I can continue to comment, analyze, and maybe offer some comfort to my friends, colleagues, and strangers who are standing up and speaking out against the slaughter. The continuing, nigh endless drumbeat of killing is depressing, and it is hard to maintain my resolve as it goes on – but I can do it. What I find harder to withstand is the unthinking antisemitism that masquerades as anti-Zionism or anti-colonial critique casually deployed by some people on the left, and blithely, or thoughtlessly shared by some of my social media friends.
It should not need to be repeated that criticism of the State of Israel, of its policies and its treatment of the Palestinian people, of Zionism and the Zionist movement, are not antisemitism. Yet, it does. So, it is worth making that point again and again. The only way that such criticism can be construed as antisemitic is by equating the State of Israel and Zionism with the Jewish people – which is, in fact, what the State of Israel and Maximalist Zionists do. The fact that many of the people most critical of the State of Israel are Jews reveals the absurdity of this Zionist claim.
However, that does not mean that some critics of the State of Israel are not antisemites, even if their criticism, anti-Zionism, and support for Palestinian autonomy and human rights is not a priori antisemitic. Indeed, if anything opposition to the War on Gaza and the to the State of Israel has provided a vehicle for some people on the left to express their hatred of Jews. Their antisemitism is just what people in the marketing world call a “value-add.” It turns out that even shitty people can support worthy causes, but their support of these causes does not cancel out their shittiness.
And there is a lot of shittiness out there. The State of Israel claims to be the “Jewish State,” and that it is the geopolitical agent of the Jewish people, so for those people who are already predisposed to hate Jews, and also hate the State of Israel find it easy to conflate the two. While anti-Zionist politics do not demand antisemitism, it has nonetheless opened the door to a whole flood of Jew-hate that has always been there, seething under the surface of our civilized society.
So, I have endured a lot of antisemitism lately, from hot takes on the question of Jewish indigeneity to the Levant, to conspiracy theories about how the “Jewish Lobby” influences American politics and a cabal of “Zionist billionaires” control the media, to commentaries about how “the Jews” are collectively beholden to some kind of atavistic tribal superstition. Just yesterday, I read a blog post by Caitlin Johnstone about how the State of Israel is a “fake country” because Israelis don’t have an authentic connect to the land like “real” and “natural communities.” Johnstone said “Israelis,” but meant “Jews,” deploying almost note-for-note the old tribal nationalist libel that drove Blut und Boden antisemitism in the 19th century and its culmination in the Holocaust.
I understand that there are a lot of people out there who hate Jews, and always have; antisemitism is deeply ingrained in Euro-American culture and exists equally on the left and on the right, where it serves the interests of the State of Israel in US politics. I expect it, and I can deal with it, even if I do not believe that antisemitism can ever be erased from our culture.
What I cannot tolerate is how these ideas, couched in the language of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Zionism are inevitably amplified and repeated by otherwise well-meaning social media friends who uncritically share antisemitic content. While I have little doubt that they share things like Johnstone’s toxic screed because it seems like a plausible critique of Zionism and the State of Israel, but without really thinking through its rhetoric and implications, it is nonetheless distressing. What do I do, let it slide?
I feel that I am legitimizing these ideas if I keep my counsel and don’t speak out, yet, more often than I would like, doing so is to bring a hail of censure down onto my head. Just today, I asked a friend-of-a-friend to please refrain from describing Zionism as “a species of Nazism.” Not only was it factually and conceptually incorrect but, as bad as Zionism might be, equating it to National Socialism is a form of antisemitic Holocaust denial. There might have been a time when my friend’s friend might have conceded the point, but now that antisemitism and equating the State of Israel with Nazi Germany have become both commonplace and pervasive, they denounced me as a purveyor of “Zionist lies.”
So, I am tired. I have no illusions that this awful war will end any time soon, and the longer it lasts, the more normal these antisemitic narratives and libels will become. And I feel impotent; so many people who hate the State of Israel also hate Jews like me, and many others seem to think little of it.
At this point, I am resigned to the normalization of antisemitism on the right and left that has been authorized, in part, by the State of Israel’s own weaponization of antisemitism, which has left it evacuated of all its enormity, and by the pervasive, subterranean Jew-hate that just never went away.
I am tired.
9 June 2024
***
I am trying to wrap my head around the rescue of the four Israeli hostages held by Hamas. As most of you know, I have no love or respect for Hamas. It is a violent, intolerant, misogynistic, antidemocratic, theocratic extremist movement, and I resist the impulse to exoticize and romanticize “resistance.” (We can discuss this at greater length at another time.)
So, I regard the capture and detention of hostages by Hamas terrorists as an atrocity. It certainly is not an atrocity equivalent to the actions of the State of Israel in Gaza and against the Palestinian people, but it is an atrocity all the same. It is possible for two things to be immoral without being equal. I recognize that nuance, which rarely exists in social media, let alone Facebook, can be difficult to grasp. The Allied saturation bombing of German cities and the Shoah and Porajmos were both immoral without being equal.
Consequently, the safe return of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas is a matter of serious concern for me. I believe that the best way to effect this outcome is a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement that will bring about their release. On the other hand, the return of four people from brutal captivity is something that I can celebrate.
However, this “rescue” was only accomplished as part of an Israeli offensive against the Palestinian people in Gaza and at the cost of almost 300 Palestinian lives. Moreover, it is clear that the safety of the hostages is not, in fact, one of the current Israeli government’s priorities – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said as much – so this whole operation has the stink of window-dressing about it; an effort to deflect reasonable and legitimate criticism of the Netanyahu regime’s brutal policies in what it hopes will be welcomed as a feel-good story.
So, I cannot celebrate. Rather, I find myself asking “who gains by this (apart from the hostages themselves and their families)?” and “is the going rate for one Israeli now 70 or 75 Palestinian lives?”
9 June 2024
***
I read Caitlin Johnstone’s blog post “Everything About Israel is Fake,” and I had one question: Is this meant to be satire? Because it skates very close to, and then well into the 19th century volkisch narrative of antisemitism: “Those Jews are not a real people like us Germans/Hungarians/Russians/etc. because they do not have authentic ties to the land.” This is one of the things that worries me as some (by no means all) anti-Zionists pull out hoary antisemitic tropes as if they are genuine insights and otherwise well-meaning people share these hot takes without considering their context, history, and implications.
It isn’t satire, of course. Johnson is one of those atavistic Jew-haters who have taken advantage of the moment to spew their antisemitic bile with its stench disguised with the perfume of anti-imperialism. It makes me nauseous.
8 June 2024
***
How can any Jew in the Diaspora look at the footage of this year’s Jerusalem Day Flag March and believe that the State of Israel embodies anything other than hate and domination? Both the Holiday and the march date back to the 1967 War, when the State of Israel launched a surprise attack against its Arab neighbors in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The official Israeli story is that it was a preemptive strike against hostile Arab neighbors that were just about to invade. The fact that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were caught unawares and unprepared to the extent that they were routed by Israeli forces in less than a week suggests, in fact, that they were not planning an invasion, and the Six Day War was simply an Israeli war of aggression.
After only three days of fighting, on 7 June 1967, the State of Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan joined a group of soldiers at the Western Wall – the ancient retaining wall of Herod’s Second Temple – for an impromptu religious service, producing one of the defining photo-ops of the war. A few days later, once Jordanian troops withdrew across the Jordan River, leaving Jerusalem and the West Bank to Israeli occupation, Israeli civilians spontaneously flooded into the Old City; it was 14 June, 6 Sivan in the Hebrew calendar, the first day of Shavuos, one of the most important Jewish pilgrimage festival. “They came in a colorful flow, beginning before sunrise, in a pilgrimage every bit as festive as the origins of Shavuoth,” James Feron reported on the front page of the New York Times. “They came from Galilean villages in the north and from the sunbaked towns of the Negev.”
There was an apocalyptic ecstasy in what seemed to be the culmination of a messianic narrative, and it fundamentally transformed both the tone and content Israeli and Diaspora Zionist politics. One can detect a shift in Zionist discourse at that moment from the purely national and secular – a project to build a homeland and to “make the desert bloom” – to the religious and messianic. Shuli Nathan released a recording of Naomi Shermer’s song “Jerusalem of Gold” only three weeks before the war. Shermer heard of the capture of the Old City as she was performing to a group of off-duty IDF paratroopers on 7 June and improvised a new verse with the words “We have returned… to the market and to the market-place, a shofar calls out on the Temple Mount.”
The military victory of 1967 in the Old City was recast as redemption and the spiritual fulfilment of prophecy. The following year, the Israeli government made Jerusalem Day, marking the capture of the Old City one week before Shavuos, a national holiday. Shortly thereafter, the Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel declared that was a religious holiday and mandated a special prayer. Jerusalem Day never really caught on in the rest of the Jewish world, but “Jerusalem of Gold” entered the liturgy of many Diaspora congregations as a hymn, and the holiday became the focal point of the religious Zionist year.
Once the Arab market that Shermer mentioned in her song had been cleared, and its shopkeepers evicted to make way for the grand plaza before the Western Wall that would become the entrance to the State of Israel’s greatest tourist attraction, the Palestinian neighborhood around it became the focal point of an annual festival of Zionist supremacy.
The Flag March began in 1968 as a small, mobile partly organized by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, a fanatical anti-Muslim, Jewish suprematist Haredi Zionist for a few dozen of his followers. As the power of messianic religious Zionism grew in the State of Israel, however, so did the march. This year, it attracted more than 50,000 people and, over time, its once-festive atmosphere became increasingly confrontational. Make no mistake, however, it had always been a festival of confrontation.
Like the Apprentice Boys March in Derry in Northern Ireland, which commemorates the Protestant resistance to King James II in 1688. and the march organized by the National Socialist Party of America through the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, IL in 1977, the Flag March is meant, above all, as a demonstration of domination. Its route passes through the last Palestinian neighborhoods in the Old City, and past the site of the shuk that had been razed for Jewish tourists in order to make the point: “We rule here.” It is a demonstration not merely of ownership, but domination over the Palestinians who can trace their ancestral connection to that specific location for unbroken centuries.
Itamar Ben Gvir put it succinctly: The Jerusalem Day Flag March had one goal: To send a message to Gaza and to all Palestinians. “Jerusalem is ours,” he declared. “Damascus Gate is ours. Temple Mount is ours.”
It almost goes without saying that such demonstrations exist for violence. They are meant not only to enact domination and to remind a subject people of their place in the hierarchy, but also to provoke a response. In Skokie, the American Brownshirts marched unopposed, but in Derry, after centuries of provocation, the Catholic residents of the Bogside finally pushed back against the Protestant Unionists marching through their neighborhood. The Battle of the Bogside inaugurated a new phase of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Apprentice Boys went home satisfied.
And so it was this week in Jerusalem. Only the marchers did not wait for provocation; they went on the attack almost immediately, incited by a hatred of all things Palestinian – indeed all things non-Israeli – produced by the bloodlust of war and the screed of their leaders like Ben Gvir. From the very beginning, the march was not about patriotic pride, if it ever really was, but vengeance. As I read the coverage and watched the footage, it reminded me of nothing so much as those good Christian Crusaders who, unwilling to wait to murder “infidels” in the Holy Land, turned on the ones close at hand and massacred the Jews of Mainz, Metz, York, and dozens of other cities in Europe.
The Jerusalem Day rampage was the clearest possible evidence that, for Israelis, the enemy is not just Hamas – this is no defensive war – their enemies are all Palestinians, in the Occupied Territories and in even in the places, like the Old City of Jerusalem, that they claim is an integral part of the their country, and anyone – Jew and Gentile alike – who stand in their way. The Jerusalem Day Flag March revealed the true face of Zionism and the State of Israel: flushed red, eyes bulging with rage, and slavering for murder.
How any Diaspora Jew can look on that face and imagine that the country they claim as the homeland embodies anything else is a mystery. Maybe some will wake up, but how many others will just pretend that they didn’t see it?
5 June 2024
***
* I chose the word “aversion,” since it seems more than mere antipathy and less than real revulsion.