A few years ago, I called an Israeli woman a racist. She was the mother of one of my kids’ friends, and she would say things like, “Well, he only got into that elite school because they had a quota to fill.” Or “those people” do things differently, as she crinkled her nose.
We were talking about an idea I had to look at demographic data on who got cast in the performing arts high school our kids went to. She was very much against that, fearing it would harm her children. To be fair, the other women in the group we were with didn’t like that idea for the same reason.
What set me off was that this woman asserted that she understood what Black people went through because, a) she is Jewish, and b) she has a queer daughter.
I - who am Jewish and queer - was appalled by that.
It’s not a competition.
But my reaction wasn’t about that one, highly ignorant statement. It was a culmination of many racist comments I had heard over a couple of years. I finally hit my limit. And I yelled that she was a racist.
And this is when things got interesting. She told me she was pretty new to the U.S. and didn’t understand how racism worked.
And I thought, “How do you not understand how racism works? You’re from Israel.”
But I didn’t say that, because it was clear to me that this woman honestly felt that racism was about Black people and white people, and that it only existed in the U.S. She didn’t see that racism is about power, and it is as prevalent in places like India - and Israel - as it is in the U.S.
The other mothers were furious at me for calling her a racist. To them, calling someone a racist was worse than actually being one.
Then this week, I read this piece about a Palestinian boy who was arrested and jailed because someone said he was throwing rocks. He was never charged with anything. Just put in jail. That’s enough of an outrage. But when he and his peers were let out of prison in exchange for Israeli hostages, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told police and prison wardens: “My instructions are clear. There are to be no expressions of joy,” among prisoners who are released. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.”
Gee, that’s not racist at all.
Yum.. Ad Hominems!
In the last couple of months, I’ve seen people posting on social media that all Palestinians are evil and deserve to die. They are setting up straw men to brand as antisemitic anyone who points out Israel’s abuse of power over the last couple of decades. More recently, their ad hominem attacks have been that criticizing Israel is supporting brutal rape and murder.
The October 7 attacks were horrid and unspeakably violent. They are, yet again, a demonstration of the worst of humanity. As the details of rapes and torture are confirmed by forensics, I am sick to my stomach. These women, men, and girls were at a concert, or sleeping in their beds. I force myself to read their stories, just as I force myself to read the stories of 9/11 victims and survivors. Just as I read the stories of, watched documentaries about, and saw the pictures of the Holocaust.
We need to know. We are all better off knowing.
But agreeing that October 7 was inhuman does not mean that killing thousands of innocent people in retaliation is not inhuman.
I feel like October 7 was a wake-up call to Israel (and the U.S.), much like 9/11 was a wake-up call. Or should have been. The U.S. has had blood on its hands since its inception - before, really. As has Israel.
One of the pieces of Israeli history I learned growing up was the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. By Jews. The King David was the headquarters of the British colonial government. Ninety-one people were killed. The attacking group, Irgun - which was led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin - wanted the British to get out, and give them the land, despite the fact that more non-Jewish people lived on that land. The Irgun were terrorists. Or revolutionaries. Depends on who is writing the history.
In Hebrew school, my teachers told me this with pride.
Resolution and the Roots of Zionism
One of the things that I’ve been struggling to put into words is how coercive today’s charges of antisemitism seem to be. The Anti-Defamation League clearly says “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
In other words, to the ADL, Zionism = Judaism.
I’ve never agreed with that. Any more than I agree that criticizing Trump is being unAmerican.
But that exact point was enshrined into Congressional history this week with House Resolution 894, which condemns antisemitism, and then specifically ties Jewish people to Israel.
The difference between me and the House Republicans - Jewish and Christian Zionists - who presented and approved this resolution, is that they see Israel and worldwide Jewry as one, and vociferously condemn antisemitic attacks. I see Israel and worldwide Jewry as separate - and I also condemn antisemitic attacks, which are attacks against Jews, not attacks against Israel.
“The Nation’s” Dave Zirin calls this resolution “unserious, inane, and dangerous.”
Zirin notes that New York Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler agrees. He opposed the resolution, pointing out that the people who wrote it “carefully avoided mentioning any of the obvious instances of antisemitism coming from their own leaders,” like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Loren Boebert. He also noted that “the resolution implicitly compares some peaceful protesters with the January 6th rioters and insurrectionists.
“More problematically,” Zirin quotes Nadler, “the resolution suggests that ALL anti-Zionism… is antisemitism. That is either intellectually disingenuous or just factually wrong.… the authors, if they were at all familiar with Jewish history and culture, should know about Jewish anti-Zionism that was and is expressly NOT anti-Semitic.”
More to the point, Christian Zionism IS expressly antisemitic. Christian Zionism is based on an end-times theology, which says that Christ will return to earth when Israel is populated by Jews, most of whom will convert to Christianity. Those who don’t will spend eternity in hell.
In other words, people like current House Speaker Mike Johnson believe Jews are only good as stepping stones to the apotheosis of their Christian faith. And then we’ll die.
That may, in fact, have been the point of Zionim to begin with.
Tel Aviv University professor Anita Shapira - whom Haaretz calls “the quintessential historian of the Zionist movement” - notes in her book, “The History of Zionism,” that the idea of “Jews returning to their ancient homeland as the first step to world redemption, seems to have originated among a specific group of evangelical English Protestants that flourished in England in the 1840s; they passed this notion on to Jewish circles.”
Most Jews at the time rejected this idea. But as we’ve seen, if you turn something into a slogan - “Next year in Jerusalem”; “Hillary is a crook” - it gains traction in future generations, truth be damned.
I can criticize Netanyahu. I can speak out against the quadrupling of settlers in the West Bank since an Israeli, right-wing religious extremist assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, putting an end to the Olso Accords peace agreement that had just been negotiated. And I can still support the right of the state of Israel to exist.
These are not mutually exclusive ideas.
Zirin puts a finer point on this.
“We must stand against condemning anti-Zionism as antisemitism, because it will only feed the existing hate against the Jewish community, much of which is already afraid. Netanyahu has devoted his life to binding the fate of all Jews to the furtherance of the Israeli state. This is rank antisemitism: the assumption that to be Jewish is to support Israel’s crimes. To be clear: Anyone who attempts to fasten a 5,000-year-old religion to a 150-year-old colonial project is guilty of antisemitism.”
Damn.
Further Reading
Some things I’ve been reading that might be of interest.
The Gaza Diaries are a fascinating, apolitical look at day-to-day life under siege, published in The Guardian almost since the start of the attacks.
On November 30, Slate’s amazing Supreme Court and Law reporter, Dahlia Lithwick, invited other prominent Jewish lawyers and journalists to write a piece condemning feminists for not speaking out against the rapes used as a weapon of war on October 7. I don’t fully agree with this premise. I feel like there was lot going on in the days after October 7, and the world’s focus was on the mounting death toll in Gaza by the time the details of the rapes came out, just before Thanksgiving. Still, it’s worth a read.
In the space of one hour last week, I read about the antisemitic protest in front of a falafel shop in Philadelphia. Because Jewish chefs are to be held responsible for Israeli politics?
And then I read about doctors and nurses in Gaza who were forced to leave premature babies behind in a NICU, because the IDF warned that the hospital was going to be bombed. The IDF also promised NICU medical personnel that someone would come for the premies, who could not survive without oxygen. No one came for them. And during the cease-fire, one journalist found their corpses decomposing.
According to social media and Arab press, an IDF sniper shot and killed Hadia Nassar outside her front door in Gaza. Nassar was a 79-year-old Palestinian woman who went viral a couple of months ago by saying she was older than Israel, and still remembers when it was her land.
And a couple of videos went viral on TikTok this week that are, at best, callous.
One was of Israeli soldiers riding bikes in Gaza. Bikes that were too small for them. Bikes they “found” in the rubble of bombed-out apartment buildings. Bikes that belonged to children, who are either now dead under the rubble or crowded into some complex in South Gaza trying to find food. I get that these guys are under pressure and need to let off steam, but what’s most galling about this is that the soldiers are laughing. Riding the bikes of children who were no longer there to ride them. And one of their fellow soldiers thought it was so funny, they taped it and put it on social media.
The other is this soldier “playing” a guitar he happened to find in Gaza. He’s not playing. He doesn’t know how. And he is clearly mocking whomever it is that owns the guitar, but had to leave it behind.
I find this incredibly disgusting. And it only hurts both Israel and the U.S.
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Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif. Ce sont les mêmes idéaux.
Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples. On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune : le judaïsme.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait : «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv . . . Nous socialistes nationaux est venu à libéré Paris, nous ne l'avons pas détruit.
Aucun pays ne mène sa propre course dans cette invasion parce qu’il s’agit d’un programme politique dirigé par l’ONU et piloté par les Juifs et leurs marionnettes (les politiciens). La plupart des gens ne savent tout simplement pas ou ne comprennent pas qu’il s’agit d’un programme politique. Cependant, certains parviennent à comprendre que les politiciens travaillent délibérément à importer des musulmans et à remplacer des gens, mais c'est tout, ils sont comme un ordinateur qui ne peut pas fonctionner parce que le programme ne le permet pas.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire