Anti-Zionism

The Antisemitic Trojan Horse inside our gates.

This May, amid conflict between Israel and Palestine, the hashtag #HitlerWasRight trended on Twitter.  According to the Anti-Defamation League over 17,000 iterations of the phrase were tweeted in a matter of days while eliciting no reaction from the typically censorious tech giant.  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, regularly calls for the elimination of the Israeli state with no punitive action from Twitter.  Last year, while Twitter were actively suppressing the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden citing disinformation the Ayatollah raised doubts over the occurrence of the Holocaust.  Commenting on this, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, said that someone’s Holocaust denial - an event that killed 6,000,000 Jews alone - does not register as misinformation.  Twitter aren’t alone in their inaction on social media.  The ADL reports that Facebook has refused to remove several antisemitic posts that were brought in front of their oversight board - one of which promotes Joseph Goebbels penned anti-Jewish propaganda.  This oversight board was created to make a determination on Donald Trump’s social media future after the events of January 6th.  The commission has upheld Facebook’s original indefinite suspension of the oft-Nazi-slandered 45th President of the United States while allowing actual Nazi propaganda to be distributed on its site.  While Hamas and the Israel Defense Force were exchanging ramparts in the middle of May Americans witnessed a spike of antisemitic occurrences across the nation.  Again, according to the ADL, antisemitic incidents increased from 131 to 193 in one week alone.  Jews had explosives thrown at them in New York at an Anti-Israel demonstration while a 29-year-old Jewish man was assaulted by a gang of men for the crime of wearing a kippah in public.  These are just a handful of violent assaults American Jews have endured in the last few weeks.  Yet unlike last year when my newsfeed - undoubtedly yours too - was overrun with black squares, and statements condemning racism and hate speech from individuals and corporations alike is alarmingly dissimilar now.  Those same actors, the ones that were eager to display their moral superiority and their unwavering castigation of the bigots among us, have gone silent confirming a disturbing reality we should all be aware of at this point.  Ours is a society that tolerates antisemitism.  

This latest string of antisemitism is a continuation of violence observed across America in the past several years.  As I’ve discussed before Jews remain the most frequented target of hate crimes in this country.  It comes as no surprise that many of these attacks are perpetrated by those on the far right, however it is the left that are responsible for the persistent accepted antisemitism we’re witnessing currently.  The West has a long history of persecuting Jewry.  From the Roman and Russian Empires to the Third Reich in Germany; right wing authoritarian governments have committed countless atrocities against the Jewish people, but these actions are widely condemned in America.  It’s the antisemitism rooted in leftist philosophy that has gone under the radar in the West that is rearing its head yet again.  Karl Marx formerly ushered antisemitism into leftist doctrine in his essay ‘The Jewish Question’ where he asserted material wealth was the worldly God and religion of the Jew.  In this essay Marx made capitalism - by his estimation the root of all injustice in the world - inexorable from Jewishness.  Marxist organization Black Lives Matter, following the doctrine of critical theory, makes a similar connection.  - James Lindsay’s article on New Discourses Critical Race Theory's Jewish Problem expertly identifies the ideology’s crux of the Jewish minority, the Jew’s ‘whiteness’, and their position on the intersectional hierarchy. - The USSR proscribed the use of Hebrew, and practicing Judaism from society. Statism has never been fond of religion for the religious have no extant need for the state.  Along with providing a military, critical infrastructure, etc., the state seeks to institute community, and morality.  Religious communities have no need for the latter as they’ve already been established by a higher power.  Statism requires the worship, and dependence of its citizenry declaring itself a golden calf yet the religious have no need for a false idol. Therefore, the state cannot tolerate religion.  Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s has been a tenable solution for generations, but now Caesar wants it all. For example, last April New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio specficially threatened the Jewish community when he publicly ordered the NYPD to arrest those who were attending a funeral of the late Rabbi Mertz. The left has consistently buried its antisemitism under policy positions; anti-capitalism, statism, and anti-zionism.  Anti-zionism is the chief vector of transmission for anti-Jewish sentiment in 21st century America.  This trojan horse has been entrenched well within academia, the political left, and the mainstream media for decades convincing their constituents there is a meaningful distinction between the two ideologies.  There isn’t; anti-zionism is fundamentally antisemitic.  

Mayor Bill de Blasio @NYCMayor

My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.

To be a Zionist in the most basic sense is to believe that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination.  If the last few thousand years of history have taught us anything it is that this is utterly necessary to secure the future of the Jew and the Jewish people.  Anti-zionism is not merely critical of the state of Israel or the Israeli government; it rejects Israel’s right to exist.  However, it is a reality that Israel does exist.  To call for the destruction of Israel - as many on the American left have - is to ensure the elimination of the Jewish presence in the Middle East; a place that not only is the ancestral home of the Jewish people but has been populated by Jews for over two thousand years uninterrupted.  To dissolve the sovereignty of Israel would be to hand over the fate of the Jews to their neighbors such as Hamas, the governing body of Gaza, who has declared since their inception that their aim is to eradicate the world of the Jew.  When Israel uprooted their settlements and left Gaza in the mid-2000s in an effort to placate the terrorist organization, Hamas advanced into the territory, razed the buildings, greenhouses, and infrastructure Israel had left, and immediately began launching missiles from the Strip.  Hamas routinely establishes their bases of operation in civilian areas - schools, apartment buildings, and hospitals - as they launch rockets indiscriminately into Israel.  They have no regard for Israeli lives, or the Palestinian lives they endanger by their military encampments.  In fact, during the recent barrage of attacks, many hundred of their own rockets fell short landing in their own territory killing Palestinians.  A recent Washington Post article unironically suggested that Israel’s missile intercept system the Iron Dome was responsible for prolonging and perpetuating the Israel-Gaza conflict, a defense mechanism that has saved innumerable Israeli lives in just one month.  Hamas fired over 3000 missiles into Israeli civilian occupied territory in May, and the Iron Dome succeeded in neutralizing 90% of them.  It is the most perverse of opinions to suggest a sovereign nation should not protect its citizens.  Additionally, the Washington Post - Democracy Dies in Darkness - notably did not characterize Hamas as terrorist organization even though the United States, and the European Union recognizes it as such.  Congresswoman Ilhan Omar condemned Israel’s retaliation as an act of terrorism along with other members of ‘the squad’.  Again, if the state of Israel is unable to protect its citizens the result will be the elimination of the Jew at the hands of the likes of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the regime of Iran (who continues to fund terrorism all over the globe), or a host of other hostile nations in the region.  The absurdity of calling for the dismantling of Israel is akin to a South Park episode where Cartman’s Mom inquiries Planned Parenthood for an abortion of her 8-year-old son. This type of anti-zionist rhetoric is misinformed, misleading, and destructive in the most literal sense.

Zionism is not imperialism, and Israelis are not colonists.  The notion that the Jewish occupation of Israel is a result of Western imperialism is fundamentally flawed, and wholly ignorant of thousands of years of history.  Not only did the Jewish people scratch their indelible mark on the territory in ancient times, they never left.  Through expulsions, slavery, and subjugation there has been a constant Jewish presence in what throughout history was known as Judea.  Israelites, a diversion from the Canaanites of the same time period, occupied Judea as early as 1200 B.C.  The first non-Hebrew reference of  the land of Israel and its people is by an Egyptian pharaoh in the Iron Age.  King David ruled in Jerusalem in the 1st millennia B.C.  The Maccabean revolt that lead to the rededication of the Second Temple was a revolution against Greek oppression 150 years before Christ.  The first known use of the word Palestine was by Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century B.C., but the Roman Empire only began addressing it as such in the 2nd century A.D. - this is commonly believed to be an attempt to dissociate the Jews from their ancestral homeland.  All of this is to say that the Jewish people had established a homeland, a cultural identity, and were independent, conquered, and liberated again, long before an inchoate Islam was founded in the 600s A.D. when Gabriel first visited Muhammed. Shortly after, Judea was conquered by the Islamic Empire.  Jews were allowed to worship in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount for a short time before it was made illegal - a law that would remain well into the Ottoman Empire’s reign.  The Christian crusades of the Middle Ages saw Jews continue to live in subjugation where they were sold into slavery, and massacred while few communities were left largely untouched by the crusaders.  After Christian rule the country alternated under different Egyptian Muslim dynasties until the Ottoman Empire established its presence in the area in the 1500s.  The Ottomans would rule this area until their defeat at the end of World War 1 subjecting Jews to displacement, religious taxes, and general contempt from the state.  This brings us to the Aliyahs of modernity.  Aliyah - meaning ‘to ascend’ - is the migration of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.  The First Aliyah in the late 1800s marked a period of Jewish emigration from Europe escaping pogroms and a growing antisemitism.  The zionist movement was founded in the 1890s by journalist Theodor Herzl.  Herzl had the revelation that was at once divine, and pragmatic; that in order to secure the future of Jewry in the world a Jewish nation-state must be created.  Naturally, it was the Land of Israel that was chosen.  It was then that the Zionist movement began in earnest, and ultimately led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.  One would think that when a people who have suffered centuries of widespread diaspora, oppression, and genocide have emerged from the depths of extremist regimes to establish a bastion of democracy in an ostensibly hostile environment that it would be celebrated worldwide.  Or, at least in America - what was the new promised land not only for the Jews but for any oppressed people seeking solace - where for the last 400 years despite the sin of mankind we have been pursuing the fulfillment of our charter documents.  Do the American left suffer from some ‘appeared age’ telling of the world’s history regarding the Americas?  Is the American left incapable of comprehending a people’s story of suffering and overcoming prior to 1492 or 1619 - as the preeminent subject of the zeitgeist would suggest?  Or, do the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans serve as blinders limiting Americans’ comprehension to only that which is central in their purview?  Or, finally, is it American egocentrism that compels the left to imbue the Israeli-Arab conflict with critical theory’s lens of ‘whiteness’ and people of color?  Surely, the left would rejoice unequivocally if any number of native tribes of the Americas were to reclaim their homeland and restate their sovereignty.  Should the Uyghur Muslims of China’s Xinjiang province repudiate Chinese authority and recover their ancestral territory would their success be venerated as it would deserve?  In the most generous of terms the perversion of the history of the Jewish people with the Land of Israel is ignorant and irresponsible, but when one is tasked with accuracy it must be condemned as antisemitic in nature.

Israel is not an apartheid state.  This label is a popular one, yet one that is wholly inaccurate.  The presence of borders marking two or more distinct societies does not an apartheid make.  Arabs represent 20% of the Israeli population, are afforded the same bundle of human rights as the rest of the population, and are represented in Knesset - parliament - and serve on the Supreme Court.  This is in sharp contrast to the rest of the Middle East where many of the states are now judenrein.  It’s important to clarify that historically Jews lived well outside of the modern borders of the state of Israel.  When Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip in 2005 in an effort to appease Hamas, the terrorist outfit was subsequently elected as the governing body of the region.  Despite this, and the continued attacks on Israeli territory, Israel has continued to provide water, and electric utilities to the region.  The epithet of apartheid is used as a cudgel against the state perpetuating anti-Israel beliefs.  It’s not that holding wrongheaded beliefs are antisemitic in nature it’s the irreverence for reality the left must hold in order to cast Israel as the bad actor in the region.  The Chicago Dyke March, an event that previously had announced no one participating in the march would be allowed to brandish the Star of David, has released a promotional image for this year’s event.  It shows an illustration of a woman burning an Israeli flag in one hand and an American flag in the other underneath the text ABOLITION NOW.  This isn’t an anomaly in the LGBTQ community. Anti-Israel sentiment is rife during Pride demonstrations even though LGBTQ rights are recognized as fundamental human rights in Israel.  Same-sex couples can get married in Tel Aviv, same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children, and same-sex sexual activity is not criminalized.  The same can’t be said for Israel’s neighbors.  In Palestine, while same-sex sexual activity isn’t illegal, the LGBTQ community’s human rights are not protected by the government.  In Gaza, homosexual activity is illegal and carries long sentences.  Honor killings are common in the region, and aren’t exactly discouraged.  Antisemitism across the left is continuously bolstered by the ignorant parroting of these beliefs by groups such as Black Lives Matter, or the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement across college campuses, and it’s incessant lies like these that yield tolerance, if not promotion, of antisemitism across America today.  

In Bari Weiss’s How To Fight Anti-Semitism, she includes this quote from the French poet Baudelaire: “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does exist.” Here, Bari adeptly identifies the card up anti-zionism’s sleeve, and the threat it poses. The democratic West is not imposing its colonial will through the proxy of Israel in the Middle East, and the political philosophies that govern Israel are not attributed to enlightenment values alone; the concepts of liberty, individualism, and equality before God are intrinsic to Judaism, and stretch back as far as David and Solomon.  The State of Israel is not an aberration; it is the restoration of a sovereign people in the most limited sense, and the rendering of a promise made by God millennia ago at its grandest.  Antisemitism, as with any prejudice, is no new phenomenon in America, and it isn’t unlike other prejudices in its nature.  In part American antisemitism is deeply rooted in a hatred for the Jewish people, but ignorance stokes the flame in equal measure.  The latter of these may seem benign enough, but it is the precursor for, and is more pervasive than the former. This is why It is incumbent upon America, as a free and sovereign people, to drive out prejudice amongst our ranks wherever it is uncovered, and to promote truth and freedom for any people that desire them.  We must not allow those who wish to see Israel destroyed to hide behind language such as apartheid, abolition, or anti-zionism that only obfuscates their intentions, and the genocidal repercussions their policy suggestions could affect.  If zionism is the manifestation of the most basic desire of self-determination, then without it Judaism and Israel cannot exist.  And if the concept of self-determination continues to be treated as abhorrent and belied as oppressive, then neither will America.