Do you think Zionism is a form of anti Semitism ?
Yes I do, let’s delve right into it.
The Biden administration unveiled the "first-ever US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism" in May 2023. Though it examines some of the worst instances of antisemitism in American history, it highlights instances where "Jewish students and educators" who "are targeted for derision and exclusion on college campuses, often because of their real or perceived views about the State of Israel."
It continues:
"When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or their identity, when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism. And that is unacceptable."
If true, this would constitute a significant concern. However, the statement ignores two significant issues: firstly, it ignores the real history and experiences of Jewish students and educators who have been subjected to ridicule and exclusion on college campuses by proponents of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who label them as "self-hating Jews" or as Jews who "are abetting the antisemites" due to their criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian rights.
The harassment of Jewish students and instructors has persisted for over two decades on university campuses, significantly exceeding the duration of the alleged targeting of those who advocate for Israel.
The second point is that American supporters of Israel uniquely highlight its Jewishness, labeling its wars, policies, and military accomplishments as "Jewish." If opponents of Israel were to use this label, they would hardly escape the charge of antisemitism.
The Biden ''strategy'' completely overlooks the Jewish students and educators targeted for their criticisms of Israel. It exclusively addresses individuals who "feel they pay a social cost if they support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state" and never the Jewish students "who feel they pay a social cost" for opposing or criticizing the existence of Israel.
Proponents of Israel have persistently targeted Jewish professors, as well as non-Jewish ones, who critique Israel, labeling them as "self-hating." Some are dismayed by the presence of "an even larger quantity of self-hating Jews" among those whom they accuse of antisemitism for endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
Israel's prime minister has labeled Zionist rabbis who criticize Israeli policy as "self-hating," just as he has labeled prominent White House aides who ardently support Israel as "self-hating" for advocating a "freeze" on illegal settlement construction in the occupied territories.
The Israeli government has been using the concept of equating Jewish criticism of Israel with "Jewish self-hatred" for at least fifty years.
During a 1972 summit of the American Jewish Congress in Israel, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban explained the strategy:
"The distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new antisemitism."
If non-Jewish critics of Israel were condemned as antisemites, then two Jewish critics from the United States—academic Noam Chomsky and journalist I.F. Stone—suffered from a complex of "guilt about Jewish survival." According to Eban, their values and ideology—meaning their anti-colonialism and anti-racism—''are in conflict and collision with our own world of Jewish values."
Eban's equation of Israeli colonial and racist policies with Jewish tradition would rightly be denounced as antisemitic if articulated by a non-Israeli official, as it implicates all Jews in the actions and ideals of Israel, for which the Israeli state alone should be held accountable. Eban's insidious campaign to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism has now become a conventional narrative. Jonathan Greenblatt, the current leader of the US Anti-Defamation League, frequently reiterates this.
The claim that all American Jews endorse Israel or that such support is fundamental to their Jewish identity makes it difficult to disentangle from antisemitic stereotypes. Jewish identity is multidimensional in terms of religion, ethnicity, geography, culture, and economics.
American Jews have opposed equating Jewish identity with Zionist ideology since the inception of Zionism and more vigorously after the foundation of the Israeli settler colony.
In 1949, American Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal published an article in Reader's Digest entitled "Israel’s Flag is Not Mine." In 1950, Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee, signed an agreement with David Ben-Gurion (born David Grün) to elucidate issues overlooked by antisemitic proponents of Israel. In the agreement, Ben-Gurion declared that American Jews were full citizens of the United States and owed their loyalty solely to it:
"They owe no political allegiance to Israel."
Blaustein asserted that the US constituted a "Diaspora" rather than an "exile" and elucidated that the State of Israel did not officially represent Diaspora Jews globally. Blaustein emphasized that Israel could never serve as a sanctuary for American Jews.
Blaustein asserted that even if the United States were to abandon its democratic principles and American Jews were to "live in a world in which it would be possible to be driven by persecution from America," such a world, Blaustein insisted, "would not be a safe world for Israel either."
Biden's strategy, rather than upholding the rights of Jewish students and educators to differ from Israel, challenge its self-arrogated claim to speak for all Jews, and critique its colonial and racist policies, Biden’s strategy contradicts tradition and instead accuses them and other critics of Israeli colonialism and racism of harassing Israel's supporters.
Numerous instances exist when Israel is uniquely highlighted by its proponents because of its Jewishness, while Palestinian victims and their advocates are charged with opposing Israel based on its Jewishness rather than its colonial and racist practices.
The Canadian-American billionaire publisher Mortimer Zuckerman has alleged that Israel is unable to achieve peace with the Palestinians due to their possession of "a virulent jihadist hatred of Jews and the Jewish state." This issue is also overlooked by the Biden strategy.
Proponents of Israel, such as American scholar Daniel J. Elazar, argue that Israel "was founded to rest upon Jewish values," a statement that controversially equates the colonial principles of the Israeli state with Judaism and Jewish identity. However, he is not alone. American Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who subsequently directed the President's Commission on the Holocaust, believed that God himself supported Israel in warfare due to his love for the Jewish people and to atone for His perceived failure to protect them from Hitler.
Following Israel's triumph in the 1967 war, Greenberg linked the destiny of global Jewry, encompassing American Jews, to that of Israel. He proclaimed:
"In Europe [God] had failed to do His task... the failure to come through in June [1967] would have been an even more decisive destruction of the covenant."
The American Jewish author Elie Wiesel aligned himself so closely with Israeli colonization that in 1967 he proclaimed all who resist Israel and want to reclaim their rights as enemies of the Jewish people as a whole:
"American Jews now understand that Nasser's war is not directed solely against the Jewish state, but against the Jewish people."
In the 1973 war, when Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories captured by Israel to liberate them, Wiesel wrote of being, for the first time in his adult life, "afraid that the nightmare may start all over again." For Jews, he said, "the world has remained unchanged... indifferent to our fate."
Other American proponents of Israel, such as Jewish literary critic Irving Howe, insisted that those who do not support Israel hate Jews. Israel’s international isolation, he declared, was:
"sour apothegm: in the warmest of hearts there’s a cold spot for the Jews."
The acknowledgment of Israel's policies as "Jewish" or as measures taken in defense of the Jewish populace transcends its American Jewish advocates. Numerous American Christian fundamentalists support Israel precisely because it is Jewish.
The Zionist conquest of Palestinian lands was characterized by the recently deceased pro-Israel Christian fundamentalist leader Pat Robertson as "a miracle of God." He declared:
"The remarkable victories of Jewish armies against overwhelming odds in successive battles in 1948, and 1967, and 1973 are clearly miracles of God."
Robertson characterized Israeli military invasions as integral to God's plan for the Jewish people and portrayed Israeli accomplishments as Jewish achievements:
"The technological marvels of Israeli industry, the military prowess, the bounty of Israeli agriculture, the fruits and flowers and abundance of the land are a testimony to God's watchful care over this new nation and the genius of this people."
The Biden strategy appears unaware that praising Israeli atrocities and wars as "Jewish" achievements is no different from condemning them as "Jewish" crimes. Both assertions are egregiously antisemitic.
The new Biden "strategy" includes the US government's effort to persist in combating antisemitism both internationally and in global forums, particularly measures aimed at delegitimizing the State of Israel. This encompasses:
"An unshakeable commitment to the State of Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, and its security. In addition, we recognise and celebrate the deep historical, religious, cultural, and other ties many American Jews and other Americans have to Israel."
Statements like these again generalize about all American Jews by disregarding those who possess neither profound nor superficial ties to Israel, or whose ties to Israel compel them not to support its claims about Jews or its policies towards Palestinians. Instead of addressing antisemitism, such a coupling of American Jews with Israel reinforces the perspectives of Zionist Jews and US Christian and Evangelical groups on Jews, which many American Jews oppose.
Gallup polls indicate that most American Protestants who endorse Israel do so due to its identity as a "Jewish" state. This is applicable to both the average citizen and evangelical or fundamentalist Christian presidents in the United States. In 1977, Jimmy Carter, in opposition to Blaustein's 1950 agreement with Ben-Gurion, insisted that "our Jewish citizens" – without any qualifications – "have this deep commitment to Israel", which partly justified Carter’s shocking statement that:
"I would rather commit suicide than hurt Israel."
Former President Bill Clinton stated:
"The truth is that the only time my wife and I ever came to Israel before today was 13 years ago with my pastor on a religious mission."
Clinton added:
"We visited the holy sites. I relived the history of the Bible, of your Scriptures and mine. And I formed a bond with my pastor."
Subsequently, when the pastor's health deteriorated, he warned Clinton: "If you abandon Israel, God will never forgive you," and "it is God's will that Israel, the biblical home of the people of Israel, continue forever and ever." These evangelical Christian allegiances to Israel may appease numerous Zionists, but not all American Jews.
Barack Obama, expressing his unwavering love for Israel, recognized that Israel did not embody the Israeli people—Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians—but rather, contrary to Blaustein’s agreement with Ben-Gurion, represented the "Jewish people" worldwide. Obama stated:
"I am secure and confident about how deeply I care about Israel and the Jewish people."
When German-American Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt, a critical proponent of Israel, was accused of not "loving" the Jewish people, in contrast to Obama, she declared that she did not love anyone, stating:
"I love only my friends."
Biden also asserted, "If I were a Jew, I would be a Zionist," implying that American Jews who do not identify as Zionists are at fault. He added:
"My father pointed out to me that I did not have to be a Jew to be a Zionist."
Ironically, individuals—both Jewish and non-Jewish—who insist that Israeli colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous peoples are unrelated to Jewish identity and that the appropriation of land is not an intrinsic Jewish characteristic are swiftly labeled as "self-hating" and "antisemitic" by those who maintain that Israel's identity and all its policies and actions are fundamentally Jewish.
Today, a growing contingent of American Jews attempts to dissociate from Israel, its Jewish supremacist regime, and its colonial crimes. As they are targeted for their political positions by pro-Israel lobbies and smeared as "self-hating," it seems an inopportune moment for the Biden administration to defend American Jewish supporters of Israel at the expense of American Jewish critics.
Biden's strategy, akin to those of Clinton, Carter, and Obama, as well as the Bush dynasty, is to advocate for American Jewish supporters of Israel while marginalizing its American Jewish critics, thereby conveying a reprehensible and hateful message.
The extensive condemnation of Israel as an apartheid state by the Western human rights sector should have prompted Biden to reconsider.
Biden's new strategy to combat antisemitism appears to suggest that Israel's Jewish supremacy is integral to Jewish identity, or more offensively, that Israeli colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous populations are inherent to Jewishness. We can interpret this aspect of his plan as a declaration of war, not only against American Jews who criticize Israel, but also against non-Jews who do the same.
Jewish opponents of Zionism have condemned it for over a century as an antisemitic ideology, repeatedly asserting that antisemitism represents the pinnacle of Zionism. Biden's strategy reaffirms this principle once more.