In America today it is the Zionists' friend Donald Trump, who is the bastion of Anti-Semitism and White Supremacism
Phillip
Weiss of Mondoweiss has just penned
an article about a newly launched Zionist campaign to portray Bernie
Sanders as an anti-Semite. As Bernie rises in the polls, the Zionists are
becoming worried. They are hoping to replicate the success they had in Britain
with Jeremy Corbyn.
Let
us hope Bernie Sanders learns from Corbyn’s abysmal failure to understand
the campaign against him and what he was up against. One lesson is particularly
important.
Never ever apologise to these
malevolent McCarthyists. Their concern is not about anti-Semitism it is
about Israel. In their minds Israel is the ‘new
Jew’.[i]
If you apologise all it will prove is that they are right and you are
anti-Semitic.
You
may think that such a campaign is crazy. After all, Bernie is Jewish and if
elected he would be the first Jewish
President of the United States. I hate to disappoint you but today 'anti-Semitism' has little or nothing to do with Jews or anti-Jewish hatred. It’s about Zionism and
Israel.
There
was no greater opponent of racism than Jeremy Corbyn. Throughout his career he
had been a great friend of the oppressed. Even getting arrested fighting Apartheid in South Africa. He supported all manner of Jewish
causes. Even Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a right-wing Zionist and historian of
British Jewry, asked Is
Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic?[ii]
Alderman’s conclusion was that ‘the grounds for labelling him an anti-Semite
simply do not exist.’ However Geoffrey Alderman is that rare creature, an
honest Zionist.
By
way of contrast, the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, a
founder member of the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society[iii]
is Alderman’s opposite. Pollard, who led
the campaign against Corbyn, is a man who would stop at nothing and for whom no
depth was too low and no ditch was too deep when it came to defaming Corbyn.
The
Jewish Chronicle and the Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews waged a
virulent defamatory campaign to paint the hapless Corbyn as the next Oswald
Moseley, if not Hitler himself. In a letter
to his readers during the recent General Election campaign Pollard wrote that:‘Over the next six weeks we will discover if
the British public are prepared to put
an anti-Semite into Number Ten.’ [iv]
 |
| A hapless Corbyn never understood what had hit him |
Pollard
was joined on November 26th by the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who called
for a vote against the Labour Party.[i]
Mirvis, who trained as a rabbi at the Har Ezion Yeshiva at the Alon Shvut
settlement had no hesitation in working with racist far-Right settlers.[ii] Despite the plea
of Nina Morris-Evans in Ha’aretz and others, he chose to participate in the March
of the Flags on March 24 2017 on Jerusalem Day with settler youth whose
favourite chant was ‘Death to the Arabs’.[iii] Ephraim Mirvis grew up as part of the White Jewish
community in Apartheid South Africa. It is clear that Mirvis failed to learn
any lessons from the demise of Apartheid.
[i] Labour
antisemitism: Corbyn not fit for high office, says Chief Rabbi Mirvis, The
Times, 26 November 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-antisemitism-corbyn-not-fit-for-high-office-says-ephraim-mirvis-0thlclsns
[iii] Chief Rabbi and Lord
Sacks should not back this march, Jewish News, 25.5.17., https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/chief-rabbi-and-lord-sacks-should-not-back-this-march/
Corbyn never knew what hit him when he was accused of anti-Semitism. He resembled a rabbit, frozen in the headlights of a car. His only response to
the accusations were that he wasn’t personally anti-Semitic. He never seemed to
understand that when Zionists accuse someone of ‘anti-Semitism’ they don’t mean
hatred of Jews but opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state.
Instead Corbyn and advisers such as Seamus Milne did their best
to appease and please those who were intent on destroying them. What was tragic was that the more Corbyn did to please his detractors the more they
demanded of him. If Corbyn had converted to Judaism and promised to go on
Aliyah it is doubtful that that would have been enough.
Len
McLuskey, General Secretary of Britain’s biggest union UNITE, wrote
in Huff Post that ‘Corbyn Has Answered
Concerns On Anti-Semitism, But Jewish Community Leaders Are Refusing To Take
'Yes' For An Answer’.[viii]
Which was of course true. The Zionist leaders of British Jewry were interested
in only one thing and that was the head of Jeremy Corbyn. That was why, no matter whom he threw under
the bus - Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Peter Willsman, Marc Wadsworth,
Jackie Walker or myself – it was never enough. It was Corbyn’s own scalp which
the Zionist lobby wanted.
It is extremely unfortunate that
those who should have known better, not least Jewish Voice for Labour,
imagined to the end that this was about anti-Semitism. It was NEVER about anti-Semitism, which was
why arguing that ‘only’ 0.06% of members of the Labour Party had been accused
of anti-Semitism was irrelevant. Tom Watson had declared
that as long as there was one single ‘anti-Semite’ in the Labour Party the
campaign would go on.[ix]
The
obvious answer to Watson and others on the Labour Right who were so concerned
about ‘anti-Semitism’ was to ask them whether this also applied to other forms
of racism and if so, whether Watson, John Mann, Louise Ellman and Ruth Smeeth
would be handing in their resignations any time soon.
Watson,
Ellman and Mann had all supported the ‘hostile environment’ policy of the
Tories, which led to the Windrush
Scandal and the deportation of dozens of Black British citizens ‘back’ to
the West Indians.[x]
Why was it that only 6 Labour MPs, including Corbyn, McDonnell and Diane Abbot,
had
opposed the 2014 Immigration Act which made the ‘hostile environment’
policy law?[xi]
Now
the same is happening in the United States to Bernie Sanders. Of course Sanders
is not Corbyn. For one thing he is more intelligent. For another he is himself Jewish. But what started in Britain
has not stayed in Britain.
A
new group, Democrats
Against Anti-Semitism has been set up.[xii] Does this ring any bells? It seems as if the troll group Labour Against Anti-Semitism,
which was composed of anyone but Labour supporters, has migrated across the
Atlantic.
Democrats
Against Anti-Semitism inform
their audience that ‘Sanders may
be ethnically Jewish, but his rhetoric, voting history and associations have
not reflected the values of a friend of Jewish people…’
As Elli
Valley points
out even the term ‘ethnically Jewish’
is anti-Semitic implying Jews are a race, as anti-Semites have historically
asserted. Jews are not an ethnicity, race or tribe. The only difference between
Jews and non-Jews is their religion. There is no single Jewish culture.
DAS are
quite up
front about their agenda. It is all
about Israel, not hatred of Jews.
‘Speaking of anti-Israel
dogwhistling, Sanders himself, much like his comrades, has preached
anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and, at times, blatant anti-Semitic talking
points…’ [xiii]
 |
| Barri Weiss of the New York Times |
Supporters
include Bari Weiss, the
Jonathan Freedland of the New York Times and its Opinion Editor, although she
is somewhat more intelligent than Jonathan.
 |
| Boris Johnson's racist and antisemitic book |
There are a
number of striking parallels between the United States and Britain. In Britain the Zionist Establishment
concentrated their fire on Corbyn even though they were aware that it was Prime
Minister Boris Johnson who was the genuine racist and anti-Semite. Not only had
he called
Black people ‘picanninies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ but he had penned an
openly racist and anti-Semitic book 72
Virgins in 2004.
72 Virgins referred
to Arabs as having “hook noses” and “slanty eyes”,[xiv] described a mixed-race person as “coffee-coloured”
and others as “half-caste”. The term “Negroid” was also used.
It
described
a Jewish character as an ‘unethical
businessman with a large nose’, who exploits immigrant workers and black
women. Johnson described a Jewish character called Sammy Katz, as having a
“proud nose and curly hair.” He spoke of
‘some kind of fiddling of the figures by
the oligarchs who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no
time in pointing out, of Jewish origin).
What
was remarkable about the confected ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was that not one
anti-Semitic comment could be attributed to Corbyn. Imagine if he had made the comments quoted
above. Exactly
the same is true of Sanders.
Whilst
anonymous Internet Zionist groups like Democrats Against Anti-Semitism are set
up to attack a Jewish candidate, the President of the United States, Donald
Trump, is a vicious racist and anti-Semite who receives the plaudits of the Zionist
lobby. His former Strategic Advisor, Steve Bannon, the founder of the racist,
sexist and homophic Breitbart News was a guest of honour at the 2017 Zionist
Organisation of America annual gala dinner.[i]
[i] Anti-Semites feted
by Zionist Organization of America, Electronic Intifada, 15 November 2017, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/anti-semites-feted-zionist-organization-america
 |
| Hasidic Jews take selfies at Trump Rally |
Donald Trump's History of Anti-Semitism Which Zionism Ignores
Trump’s
election campaign for President in 2016 was the most anti-Semitic in American
history as Dana Millbank explained.[xvi]
Examples of his anti-Semitism included:
Ø
Tweeting
an image from an anti-Semitic message board with a
Star of David atop a pile of cash. Trump later objected to
his campaign’s decision to remove the image.
Ø
Saying
“I don’t have
a message” for supporters
who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist, and Melania
Trump saying the writer “provoked” the threats.
Ø
Branding
his campaign with the “America First” slogan of the anti-Semitic pre-war
movement.
Ø
Alleging that “blood suckers” and “a global power
structure” including “international banks” are secretly plotting against
ordinary Americans.
Ø And, when urged by the
Anti-Defamation League to
stop using traditionally anti-Semitic tropes, repeats the tropes in an ad with
images of prominent Jews, including George Soros.
Ø Once in office, in addition to making common cause with the Nazis of
Charlottesville, who were ‘fine
people’ Trump stocked his administration with white nationalists like Bannon,
Steve
Miller and Sebastian
Gorka.
Trump has also hesitated
to condemn the rise of anti-Semitic threats, issued a Holocaust remembrance
statement without
mention of Jews; lamented the attempts
to silence Alex Jones, who
peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; and declared himself a “nationalist” having
made verbal attacks on “globalists,” particularly George Soros.[xvii]
In a speech on October 13 2016 Trump told
supporters that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to
plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty”. The Zionist Anti-Defamation
League issued the mildest
of rebukes urging Trump to “avoid
rhetoric and tropes that historically have been used against Jews.”
Trump’s
response to his critics was a final campaign advert
illustrated with images of prominent Jews: George
Soros (accompanied by the words “those
who control the levers of power”), Fed Chair Janet Yellen (with the words “global special interests”) and Goldman
Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (following the “global
power structure”). The ad said Hilary Clinton partners “with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”
Trump retweeted a message
from @WhiteGenocideTM,
phony crime statistics that originated with neo-Nazis and a quote from Benito Mussolini. His
campaign blamed an intern for tweeting an image of Nazi soldiers superimposed
on the American flag next to Trump’s likeness.
Breitbart News, the
alt-right website which was run by Trump’s previous campaign chief, Steve
Bannon, referred to Bill Kristol as a “renegade
Jew” and journalist Anne Applebaum as a “Polish, Jewish, American elitist.”
But it’s not simply crude anti-Semitic stereotypes that the Zionist attack
dogs going for Bernie Sanders are happy with. Trump also embraces the most anti-Semitic
wing of Zionism itself which holds that Jews owe a loyalty to Israel over and
above that of the United States.
That is why it is ironic that the IHRA
definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ states
that ‘Holding Jews
collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is
anti-Semitic. Obviously it is anti-Semitic to do so but it is Zionism which
purports to speak on behalf of all Jews, wherever they live. That is why Israel calls itself a ‘Jewish
state’. A state not just of its Jewish citizens but of all Jews.
In
August Trump told
reporters that ‘Jewish
people that vote for a Democrat – I think it shows either a total
lack of knowledge or great disloyalty. And who were they disloyal to? Israel. This prompted Conservative Republican
media pundit Ann Coulter to tweet`
“Could we start slowly by getting them”
– i.e. the Jews – “to like America?”
Trump has accused Jews
of not loving Israel enough. Imagine
that he were to accuse an American Muslim of not loving Pakistan enough! This should not be a surprise. ‘Dual Loyalty’
is inherent in Zionism which consciously seeks to alienate Jews from the
states they live in. In 2013 a questionnaire was distributed in
America asking Jewish respondents to indicate where their allegiance would lie in
case of an Israeli-U.S. crisis. It was sponsored by Israel’s Immigrant Absorption
and Foreign ministries and was only halted by Netanyahu when it received
unfavourable publicity.
These
socialist, gay-loving, abortion-advocating, Democrat-voting Jews of America (who)
are not real Jews. No way – they don’t even love Israel. But you do. You are
the genuine Chosen People of our era.
Trump and his non-Jewish Conservative supporters have taken upon
themselves the right to define who is a Jew based on their support of
Israel.
The
most ludicrous example of Trump’s redefinition of anti-Semitism was when he
told 4 Black Congresswomen to ‘go home’ accusing them of ‘anti-Semitism’ for having criticised Israel.
When Ilhan Omar
called on the US to use aid money to pressure the Israeli government to ensure "full rights to Palestinians Trump described
her as hating Israel and Jews. American Jews who voted Democrat were
‘disloyal or ignorant".[xviii]
According
to Trump Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian
American elected as a Congresswoman, ‘hates
Israel and all Jewish people. She is an anti-Semite. She and her 3 friends are
the new face of the Democrat Party. Live with it!’
Trump explained
that "Five years ago, the concept of
even talking about this ... even three years ago, of cutting off aid to Israel
because of two people who hate Israel and hate Jewish people... I can't believe
we're having this conversation."
The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Bernie Sanders is likely to be every
bit as ugly as that against Jeremy Corbyn, especially if he continues his
present progress in the polls.
Below are two articles on a subject I will return
to. Trump’s recent Executive Order which
treats Jews not as a religious group but a national/racial community. Criticising the State of Israel will
potentially be seen as anti-Semitic and subject to prosecution under civil
rights legislation.
False claims of national origin play into the goals
of the Christian and Israeli right.
| December
21, 2019, 11:34 AM
Hasidic Jews shoot selfies under a banner that reads: "Uman Loves
Trump", prior to the annual Rosh Hashanah celebration on September 9, 2018
in Uman, Ukraine. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
When U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar made the controversial claim, “I want to talk about the political
influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a
foreign country,” she was criticized
by many for invoking an old anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty to the United
States and Israel.
The then-mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, replied in the Atlantic,
“Representative Omar is repeating
some of the ugliest stereotypes about Jews—tropes that have been unleashed by
anti-Semites throughout history. She is casting Jewish Americans as the other,
suggesting a dual loyalty that calls our devotion to America into question.”
Omar’s own explanation was that she had not intended to characterize
Jews as a group but was objecting to the pressure put upon elected
representatives like her to display loyalty to another country, Israel. That
wasn’t good enough for Emanuel, who claimed,
“In embracing [this trope], Omar
is associating herself with calamities from the Spanish Inquisition to the
Russian pogroms to the Holocaust. That’s not historical company that any
American should want to keep.”
But one of Omar’s loudest critics keeps that same company. In April, in
a speech delivered in Las Vegas to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump
referred to Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, as “your prime minister.” He addressed American Jews as if they were
Israelis, closing the historical and conceptual gap between them. Trump warned
that a Democratic victory in 2020 “would
cripple our country and very well could leave Israel out there all by
yourselves.”
Trump’s “you” made a
presumption about Jewish loyalty. Although rebuked
by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, Trump
continues to harp on the same themes. He revived another anti-Semitic trope of
Jewish obsession with profit by telling an assembled Jewish audience that
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax would not
gain their support, and that Jews should “be
my biggest supporters because you’ll be out of business in about 15 minutes.”
The Executive Order on Combating
Anti-Semitism, issued by Trump on Dec. 11, follows in part from this
sequence of remarks. It both seeks to put the slur of dual loyalty into law and
attempts to appeal to Jews and to combat anti-Semitism on campuses by denying
the vast history of Jewish cultures, practices, and forms of belonging that
precede the emergence of the State of Israel and continue to proliferate
outside of that framework for understanding Jewish life.
The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,
introduced in 2018, stalled in Congress for reasons well articulated
by the American Civil Liberties Union: It threatened to chill academic
environments, suppress critical thought, and mandate political positions that
ought to be openly contested. The president’s order has effectively leapt over
that stalemate. Viewpoints that fail to conform to foreign policy and histories
of Jewish life that do not comport with biblical forms of state legitimation
will become fugitive forms of knowledge, suspected or accused of anti-Semitism.
As others
have written, this order poses a direct threat to the study of Palestinian
and Jewish social and political history, culture, and forms of belonging, as
well as potentially suppressing activism and public speech in favor of
Palestinian freedoms and rights as well as dissident Jewish views on Israel.
This order, however, does something even more insidious: It seeks to
regulate the very idea of who is Jewish by either assuming a national
affiliation with the State of Israel or testing the lack of that affiliation.
This order, however, does something even more insidious: It seeks to
regulate the very idea of who is Jewish by either assuming a national
affiliation with the State of Israel or testing the lack of that affiliation.
The “real” Jew, in the order’s framing, not only supports Israel but
also belongs to Israel as one belongs to a nation, and the “false” Jew is
critical of Israel or finds their Jewish values and practices outside of the
Zionist framework.
The order seeks to close the gap between Jews who are U.S. citizens and
Israeli Jews, at the expense of Palestinian citizens of Israel and those left
stateless. The manifest aim of the executive order is to include anti-Semitism
as a civil rights violation so that it can be prosecuted in the same way that
discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin already are.
Considered as a religion, Jews are only protected by laws that prohibit
discrimination on the basis of religion. And
though the order recognizes that religion is one way to define a Jew, it seeks
to set national belonging as another. Under the terms of the order, no
matter where Jews reside in the diaspora, they are held to have a common
national origin.
There is no clear historical evidence of that national origin, and even
if there were, it does not follow that modern states should be based on
biblical lore. By assuming that Jews are bound together by belonging originally
to the biblical “nation of Israel” and that this nation is continuous with the
present State of Israel, it enters the Bible into a contemporary definition of
the nation-state and nationality. This move nods toward those evangelicals who
want biblical authority to guide foreign policy and who have long seen the
state of Israel as a necessary fulfilment of prophecy, and it also portrays the
biblical nation of Israel as actualized in the present in the State of Israel.
Generations of thinkers have wrestled with forms of Jewish belonging and
affiliation—secular, religious, post-national—but the Trump administration
bypasses the complexity of Jewish history and debates with a spurious claim of
national origin, backed up by biblical authority. This biblical claim is one of
the founding justifications for the State of Israel, and for the expansion of
its borders—the same claims that dispossessed more than 700,000 Palestinians of
their land in 1948 and that deprive over 4 million of them of their rights
today. No surprise, then, that this executive order will strengthen efforts to
suppress Palestinian advocacy efforts on campuses and throughout the public
sphere.
Who has reduced Judaism to this? Where are the rabbis? The Bundists,
who sought a socialist form of Jewish belonging? The Mizrahim, Jews
of Arab descent who lived alongside Muslims? This claim not only binds all
Jews together in this biblically established national origin but also
establishes the State of Israel, conceived as the fulfillment of that biblical
notion, as the continuation of the original or defining embodiment of Jewish
life and its true representative. This definition implies that all Jews truly
belong to the State of Israel, whether or not we have ever been its citizens;
further, the State of Israel is held up as the true and only representative of
the Jewish people.
Under this framework, Jews do not quite belong in the United States, as
has always been the contention of the evangelical anti-Semites or the neo-Nazis
who describe themselves
as “white Zionists.”
In this framing, Jewish loyalty must belong to Israel first—rendering
them second-class citizens elsewhere.
Many histories disappear in this telling: Jews who refused to go to
Israel or who were sent back from its borders, communist and socialist and
anarchist Jews, universalists, secularists, Bundists. The argument of the
Talmudist Daniel Boyarin that the Jewish people should be understood as an expressly
diasporic nation is not acceptable in a Judaism framed this way. The myriad
transnational histories of the Jewish people do not finally converge in a
so-called return to a state of Israel. These crossings and migrations, and the
communities they created, meticulously traced by historians and geographers, are
effaced by this crude welding together of biblical past and with the
anti-democratic nation-state.
Anyone who now criticizes the State of Israel, defined as the
representative national unity of the Jewish people, is now framed as
criticizing the Jews and engaging in anti-Semitism. Criticize the State of
Israel and you criticize the nation of the Jews, and since Jews are now
a nationality represented by the State of Israel, you may now face charges of
anti-Semitism under the Civil Rights Act. The circle closes, sacrificing
critical speech and thought, freedom of expression, the understanding of Jewish
history and culture in its diversity outside the framework of biblical and
political Zionism, and the rights of assembly and expression that should be accorded
to public advocacy for Palestinians.
Those who claim that Jews are not legitimately or adequately represented
by the State of Israel, or who hold that Jewish values are in fact antithetical
to the policies of the Israeli state, fail to conform to these standards of
Jewish identity and can more easily be accused of disloyalty. A litmus test has
been established. Omar’s supposed accusations of dual loyalty are precisely
what is now prescribed by the executive order.
Critically, this order coincides with the far-right politics of Israel
itself, legitimatized and endorsed by the Trump administration. The Israeli
government has long invoked biblical claims to legitimate land theft. It
continues now in the effort to declare legal all settlements on the West Bank, reaffirmed
by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as U.S. policy on Nov. 18, and in
Netanyahu’s proposal to annex
the West Bank, for which he uses the biblical name Judea and Samaria. Although
the executive order invokes national origin as a different basis of
discrimination against Jews than religious belief, it proceeds to enshrine a
specific religious belief in law that has been mobilized for political purposes
as a defining feature of an entire people.
The executive order also repeats and solidifies the basic tenets of
what’s known as the nation-state law, adopted by the State of Israel in July
2018. The nation-state law asserts “Jewish
settlement as a national value” and affirms that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of
Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Israeli nationality was previously
separated from religious criteria, but now the state describes itself as a
“Jewish collectivity” that bears the sole right to political self-determination
within its borders. The more than 20 percent of Israeli citizens of Palestinian
origin are now officially second-class citizens. Indeed, the nation-state law
explicitly rules out the principle and practice of Palestinian
self-determination, thus destroying the basis for an independent Palestinian
state or for the possibility of a shared form of governance between Israelis
and Palestinians. It sets up Palestinians as second-class citizens who will be
disadvantaged when making any claim of discrimination and licenses the
silencing of Palestinian advocacy on campuses and in the public sphere more
generally.
The nation-state law also affirms
“Jewish settlement as a national value.”
The boundaries of the State of Israel are imagined as eventually matching the
geographical entirety of biblical Palestine, thus making occupation permanent
and suspending the basic rights of Palestinians for not just their lands but to
shape their own political futures. Just as Trump’s definition of the Jews as
bound by national origin invokes a biblical mandate translated into settler
expansion, so the nation-state law proclaims Israel as the original and
potential state of all Jewish people, provided they comply with both rabbinic
and political standards. Just as the Jews are now defined as a nation by Trump,
so the nation of Israel establishes itself as the representative of all Jews.
The effort to patrol and censor Palestinian advocacy on U.S. campuses is
now strengthened by the order’s acceptance of the definition of anti-Semitism
formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which includes
as examples the “targeting of the State
of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” and “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by
claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” As
these criteria become adopted by courts and government agencies, universities,
backed by the U.S. Department of Education, can more easily make draconian
decisions about suppressing campus groups such as Students for Justice in
Palestine or Jewish Voice for Peace, and about cutting programs that include
teaching and scholarship from any number of perspectives that do not conform to
the definitions and perspectives now enforced by U.S. domestic and foreign
policy.
Will grounded knowledge on the Middle East based on evidence and subject
to peer review still receive funding if it fails to mimic and enforce U.S.
foreign policy? Can we know the history of Palestine or the history of the Jews
under such conditions? Can Palestinians still openly call for their rights and
their political freedoms, or will their desire for freedom and equality be
forever punished by the crude and twisted allegation of anti-Semitism? The
threat of censorship now clearly looms.
The executive order is a cruel exploitation and abuse of the charge of
anti-Semitism in a world in which actual xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism
are on the rise. The solid ground for both knowledge and politics is now
slipping as Trump enshrines anti-Semitism, ignorance, and injustice into law.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of
Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley. Her next book, The Force of Nonviolence, is
forthcoming from Verso.
Trump
First, Jews Later
Israeli
government officials are helping to normalize the violent anti-Semitism of the
Christian right.
BY MAIRAV ZONSZEIN
| NOVEMBER 6,
2018, 4:06 AM
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu speaks with U.S. President Donald Trump prior to the president's
departure from Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on May 23, 2017. (KOBI GIDEON/GPO VIA
GETTY IMAGES)
When U.S. President
Donald Trump arrived in Pittsburgh last week following the single deadliest
attack on Jews in American history, Pittsburgh’s mayor and elected officials
refused to meet him. The only public official to greet him was the Israeli
ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer—an American and former Republican
Party operative who became an Israeli citizen and close confidant of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Presenting Israel’s
talking points, Dermer equated the anti-Semitic massacre with
left-wing campus boycotts of Israel and made a point of defending Trump in the
face of charges that the president’s inflammatory campaign rhetoric amounted to
incitement. Even the former Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman—who has always stood by the Israeli
establishment—denounced the Netanyahu government’s decision
to stand in solidarity with Trump.
Dermer’s baseless and harmful moral equivalency attests to the
deep-rooted ideological and political bond between Israel and the Christian
right in the United States and Europe—a bond that willingly overlooks and
downplays white nationalism and Christian anti-Semitism in exchange for the
promotion of Israeli political interests and dominance in the Middle East.
What Pittsburgh
cemented is just how far the Israeli leadership is willing to go to protect its
nationalist interests, even at the expense of condoning explicit forms of
anti-Semitism that are couched in a form of white Christian supremacism hostile
to immigrants and people of color, especially Muslims—a form of Trumpian
xenophobia that fits the Israeli government’s worldview like a glove.
The former American
Jewish Congress head Henry Siegman, who was born in Germany in 1930, told Israeli Minister of Education Naftali
Bennett in New York days after the attack that he knows about a thing or two
about anti-Semitism, adding, “It is not
very wise of you coming to tell us that this is not your problem just because
he’s helping Israel.”
Israel has never tried
to hide its alliance with the Christian right. Netanyahu welcomed Trump as
president despite anti-Semitic tropes in his election campaign and provided a decidedly
overdue and muted response to neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in
Charlottesville last year. Unlike in France, where Netanyahu has repeatedly
called for French Jews to leave for Israel in the wake of terrorist attacks,
there was no such call after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. The message seems to be that keeping diaspora Jews safe comes
second to fawning over Trump.
Last year, addressing the annual conference of Christians
United for Israel—the largest U.S. pro-Israel lobbying group—Netanyahu said the
country has “no better friends on earth.”
Netanyahu went on to rabble-rouse the crowd with his Huntingtonian rhetoric:
“It’s a struggle of civilizations. It’s a struggle of free societies
against the forces of militant Islam,”
he said.
“They want to conquer the Middle East, they want to destroy the State of
Israel, and then they want to conquer the world.”
Christian
Zionists—specifically evangelicals—support Jewish ethnonationalism and the
implementation of a Greater Israel devoid of Arabs because they believe the
return of Jews to the Holy Land will bring about the End of Days, when Jesus
restores a divine kingdom in which all Jews either perish or become Christians.
This is an inherently anti-Semitic theological position, but Israel has long
dismissed it in favor of political support. And it didn’t begin with Netanyahu.
Menachem
Begin, Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983, was the first Israeli leader
to openly endorse the support of the Christian right in America and he did so for obvious political reasons. In the fall of 1981,
after Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq and its anti-PLO campaign
in Lebanon, Begin faced criticism from U.S. Christian groups. The National
Council of Churches had called on Reagan to stop arms shipments to
Israel.
Begin made the
strategic decision to tap into the religious right, which he presciently
realized was a burgeoning power base in the United States. Begin formalized his
relationship with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, then the head of the Moral Majority,
by declaring the organization’s members devoted
friends of Israel, with an explicit nod to the fact that it was putting aside
anti-Semitic undertones. As Begin said at the time: “There are some who object to this. But if a man or group will stretch
out his hand and say, ‘I am a friend of Israel,’ I will say, ‘Israel has very
strong enemies and needs friends.’”
That logic has guided
Israel’s foreign policy in Europe as well in recent years. While Israel relies
on the billions in aid it receives from Washington annually, the same cannot be
said for Netanyahu’s alliance with far-right leaders in Europe.
In July, Netanyahu welcomed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to
Israel, despite his Fidesz party’s notoriously anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and
anti-gay platform.
Netanyahu also turned a blind eye to the fact that Orban has praised Nazi ally Miklos Horthy as an “exceptional statesman” and that he ran
his last election campaign on an explicitly anti-Semitic platform targeting
George Soros. This campaign recently produced tangible gains: Soros’s Open
Society Foundations, which promotes democratic causes, was forced out of Hungary earlier this year, and
just last month the U.S.-accredited Central European University that Soros
founded in Budapest announced it would also be forced to leave. Across the Atlantic, a
Trump-loving extremist sent pipe bombs to the 88-year-old philanthropist.
Israel’s Foreign
Ministry has not only backed Orban’s attacks on Soros, but it also
has peddled its own incitement and conspiracy theories against Soros for funding Israeli
anti-occupation and human rights groups. In February, Netanyahu accused Soros and the New Israel Fund of
funding a campaign against Israel’s plan to deport African asylum-seekers—a
very similar charge to Trump’s baseless accusation that Soros is behind the
caravan of migrants from Central America. Other figures who have vilified Soros
include former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and Netanyahu’s son Yair,
who posted an anti-Semitic meme of Soros last year, which won praise from Duke and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.
Support
for Israel also allows white supremacists to make the claim that they are
immune from anti-Semitism.
This was clearly on display last week when Iowa Rep. Steve King—a
Republican who has openly endorsed Nazi sympathizers and white
supremacists in the United States, Canada, and Europe—lashed out at a
constituent who likened his racist rhetoric to that of the Pittsburgh shooter, responding, “It is not tolerable to accuse me of being associated with that guy who
shot 11 people in Pittsburgh. I am a person who has supported Israel since the
beginning.”
Netanyahu has not only
demonstrated that anti-Semitism is tolerable if it means garnering support for
Israel; he went a step further and dabbled in Holocaust revisionism when he
signed an agreement with Poland earlier this year that effectively absolves the
country of its role in the extermination of its Jewish population during World
War II, despite ample evidence of passive and active collaboration. In a rare
move, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum condemned the agreement.
While Israel may have
much to gain geopolitically from disregarding threats posed by Christian
anti-Semitism and white supremacy—and branding anti-Semitism as an exclusively
Islamic phenomenon instead—this has had disastrous results in the United
States.
As Brookings
Institution senior fellow Daniel Byman recently pointed out in Foreign Policy,
the Pittsburgh shooting was a terrorist act:
“It is hard to imagine
armed Islamic State supporters marching through town singing the praises of
Islamic law while the government claims it has no power to act due to the First
and Second Amendments.”
Since 9/11, the United
States has both ignored the domestic threats posted by white supremacists and failed to confront white supremacists within
the law enforcement community.
According to a recent
report in the New York Times,
“White supremacists and other far-right
extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other
category of domestic extremist.” And according to the Anti-Defamation League, 71 percent of extremist-related fatalities in the United
States between 2008 and 2017 can be traced to members of the far-right or
white-supremacist movements. Islamic
extremists were responsible for just 26 percent.
The 11 people murdered
in Pittsburgh were not targeted just for being Jewish, but also for being
identified with a pro-immigration, pro-refugee, liberal worldview that is
anathema to Trump’s nativism, which peddles in classic
anti-Semitic tropes. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek argued last year,
“In the antisemitic
imagination, the ‘Jew’ is the invisible master who secretly pulls the strings,
which is why Muslim immigrants are not today’s Jews … nobody claims they
secretly pull the strings—if one sees in their ‘invasion of Europe’ a secret
plot, then Jews have to be behind it.”
The toxic combination
of Israel’s alliance with the Christian right and Trump’s racist and xenophobic
rhetoric has led to a reality in which, just 70 years after the Holocaust,
Israel is excusing and normalizing the sort of violent anti-Semitism that it so
often reminds the world is the reason why a Jewish state exists.
Mairav
Zonszein is a
journalist who splits her time between the United States and Israel. She has
written for the Washington Post,
the New York Times and +972
magazine. Twitter: @MairavZ
See also
Trump’s
Pitch to Israelis and Evangelicals: Make America Hate (Jews) Again
[i] The New Jew-Hatred:
Right and Left, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/new-jew-hatred-right-left/
Commentary, December 2017.
[ii] The Spectator 8 May
2019 https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/05/is-jeremy-corbyn-really-anti-semitic/
[iii] The crocodile tears
of Stephen Pollard, Jewish Voices for Labour 4 August 2018, https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/the-crocodile-tears-of-stephen-pollard/
[iv] Stephen Pollard, The
Editor’s Letter, 31 October 2019, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yIyL467xI-Mea1LyqkEnR7pmU_G2IWfb/view
[v] Labour antisemitism:
Corbyn not fit for high office, says Chief Rabbi Mirvis, The Times, 26 November
2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-antisemitism-corbyn-not-fit-for-high-office-says-ephraim-mirvis-0thlclsns
[vii] Chief Rabbi and Lord
Sacks should not back this march, Jewish News, 25.5.17., https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/chief-rabbi-and-lord-sacks-should-not-back-this-march/
[viii] Corbyn Has Answered
Concerns On Anti-Semitism, But Jewish Community Leaders Are Refusing To Take
'Yes' For An Answer, Huff Post, 16 August 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/anti-semitism-labour_uk_5b7573dee4b0df9b093ccbc6?guccounter=2
[ix] Labour supporter
exposes Tom Watson's anti-Corbyn sabotage in a heated phone-call, 2 March 2019,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=kMxyewuQITk&feature=emb_logo
[x] Chased into
'self-deportation': the most disturbing Windrush case so far, The Guardian 14 September
2019, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/14/scale-misery-devastating-inside-story-reporting-windrush-scandal
[xi] Just 6 Labour MPs
voted against the 2014 Immigration Act that caused the Windrush Scandal – no
prizes for guessing who they were, The London Economic, https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/just-6-labour-mps-voted-against-the-2014-immigration-act-that-caused-the-windrush-scandal-no-prizes-for-guessing-who-they-were/19/04/
[xiv] https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/11/28/boris-johnson-novel-2004-seventy-two-virgins-racist-misogynistic-homophobic/,
Boris Johnson’s resurfaced novel contains horrific ‘racist, misogynistic,
homophobic’ references, Pink News, 28 November 2019.
[xv] Anti-Semites feted by
Zionist Organization of America, Electronic Intifada, 15 November 2017, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/anti-semites-feted-zionist-organization-america
[xvi] Anti-Semitism
is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody, https://tinyurl.com/na99wfp Washington Post, 7 November 2016 and Trump’s
America is not a safe place for Jews, 28 October 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y7svgpc4
[xvii] President Trump’s ignorant attack on
George Soros, Washington Post, 5 October 2018, https://tinyurl.com/sfeapwq
[xviii] Jews Who Vote Democrat
Are Disloyal or Ignorant, Trump Says, Ha’aretz 20 August 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-jews-who-vote-democrat-are-disloyal-or-ignorant-trump-says-1.7726405
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