Israel’s Army, ‘the Most Moral Army in the World’ Beats Up and Hospitalises a Blind Palestinian

This is what Tom Watson, Owen Jones, Lansman, Luciana Berger & the JLM Defend When They Cry ‘Anti-Semitism’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO2ZRXAB8r0#action=share

Can you think of anything more despicable or disgusting than deliberately beating up someone who is blind, suffers from diabetes and undergoes kidney dialysis?  Yet this is what Israeli troops did to Munzer Mizhar.  All with utter impunity. Israeli troops are a law unto themselves. The chances that they will serve time or the family will be given compensation is zero.  Palestinians in the West Bank live under a military dictatorship and in an apartheid society.

Jeremy Corbyn has always supported Palestinian human rights even if he was fuzzy about Zionism, the movement for Jewish supremacy in Palestine which caused those human rights to be abused.  That is the sole reason why he has been attacked as ‘anti-Semitic’. Nothing he has ever said is remotely anti-Semitic.

All those – from Tom Watson, Jon Lansman, Owen Jones, Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger and Adam Langleben and of course Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement who cry ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party are equally as guilty as the soldiers who used brass knuckle dusters to hurt and injure a totally defenceless man.

It is because Israel’s supporters cannot defend its actions that they cry ‘anti-Semitism’. Most people understand this very well. The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is a ruling class campaign.  Most ordinary people are left completely unmoved by it.

Tom Watson, who has sung the settlers’ song Am Yisrael Chai (the people of Israel live which means the Palestinians die) has run with ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations.  To him they are a means of attacking the Left.

Unfortunately much of the Left has been too cowardly to call this out for what it is.  Whether it is Jon Lansman, for whom a harmless nutcase like David Icke and his lizards are more important than the Tommy Robinson or the so-called Alliance for Workers Liberty whose open letter to Jeremy Corbyn is nothing less than a signal that the AWL is in bed with the Labour Right.

But not only Lansman.  Owen Jones is equally guilty.  Jones has consorted with and spoken on the platforms of the Jewish Labour Movement, the British wing of the Israeli Labor Party. The ILP has supported every single Israeli war and even supported the deportation of Israel’s 40,000 African refugees because they are Black and not Jewish.

We know what Tom Watson and Diva Luciana Berger are about.  Anti-Semitism to them is merely a weapon to attack supporters of the Palestinians with but how to explain people like John McDonnell who should know better?

The beating up of a blind man by Israeli troops is not an aberration.  It is the product of a process of dehumanisation but this is the Israel of the JLM and LFI, Tom Watson, Owen Jones and Jon Lansman.

The purported concern of Watson and the Labour Right about racism is one long lie. Not once has Tom Watson, Berger or Ellman explained their support in 2014 for an Immigration Act which led to the deportation of hundreds of Black British people, the Windrush generation, back to the West Indies.

John Mann, describes Gypsies as a 'social problem' in his helpful booklet

Genuine racism is something that the Labour Right, obsessed with fake ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t even mention because they are up to their necks in it. In 2011 Labour MP Phil Woolas, a former Labour Immigration Minister, defended to the hilt by John Mann, was convicted of electoral fraud because he had lied about his Liberal Democrat opponent supporting Muslim immigrants.  His campaign was found to have deliberately tried to stir up ‘white anger’. When it comes to real genuine racism the Labour Right are past masters at inciting racial hatred.

Phil Woolas's racist leaflet

Even by the standards of Israel’s military this attack on a blind man is disgusting.  But when you think of cancer patients being turned back at the Gaza fence, Israel’s bombing of water purification plants, the invasion of hospitals, the bombing of UN schools with white phosphorous and of course the attaching of electrodes to the genitals of young children then there is quite a menu to choose from. All of it invisible to Tom Watson and his friends.

Racist Phil Woolas received support from John Mann and other fighters against 'antisemitism'

Yet this is what Lansman, Owen Jones, Watson and Berger are all signed up to.  Because according to the above named if you criticise Zionism, the ideology that created the Israeli state as an ethno-nationalist Jewish state then you are ‘anti-Semitic’.

Tony Greenstein

Without Saying a Word, Israeli Troops Beat Up a Blind Man in His Bed

Gideon Levy

Israeli soldiers invaded the home of a Palestinian family at night, and battered a man in the face in front of his wife and children. He’s 47, blind and on dialysis, and his toes have been amputated because of diabetes

Gideon Levy and Alex Levac

Feb 28, 2019 10:51 PM

He’s lying on the living room sofa, next to the gas stove, trying to warm his broken body. When we visited him this week, he had just returned from the hospital and was worn out from the dialysis treatment he has been undergoing three times a week for the 11 years since his kidneys stopped functioning, as a consequence of severe diabetes.

Before that, 15 years ago, he started to lose his sight, and for the past few years he has been completely blind. Also, over the course of the last six years, he has gradually had to have toes amputated, operation after operation. His face is sallow from the dialysis.

Theresa May - the author of the hostile environment policy which led to the deportation of Black Britons

Physically shattered, he lies there, barely able to move. He needs help getting up; he’s incapable of doing anything on his own. Every few months, he travels to Jordan for the catheterization of the blood vessels in his legs, which are becoming blocked.

So yes, Munzer Mizhar, 47, is a very sick man. Still, last week, that didn’t stop Israeli soldiers from pummeling him mercilessly, even after the neighbors had warned them that he was sick. Nor was his wife, an eyewitness to the attack, able to prevent the abuse of her husband despite her shouts that he was blind, too.

Momentum's racist dictator Jon Lansman has fought the trivial trope about the Rothschilds whilst ignoring state racism that New Labour sponsored

Nothing helped. The fists landed on his face – the blue marks are still visible, particularly below his dead eyes, now blood-red. He also has wounds on his shoulders and both hands – from his attempts to ward off the brutal assault.

It all happened while he was in his bed after 4 A.M. on February 20.

A medical technician, Mizhar was employed in a laboratory belonging to the Palestinian Authority but had to take early retirement because of his deteriorating health. He speaks good English. He and his wife Iman have four sons, the oldest 18 and triplets of 16. Iman, who is 45, has cancer, for which she’s treated at Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, and in Jordan.

Her condition is good. She joined the conversation in their house this week but grew pale as it proceeded and had to lie down several times, eyes closed, tears welling up. The trauma of her husband’s beating is still vivid, painful and hard for her to bear, perhaps even more than for him. Family members say she cowers in fright whenever the horrors of that night are recalled. They live in a well-kept home in the town of Dawha near Bethlehem.

That Wednesday, Munzer was awakened at about 4:45 A.M. by the sound of footsteps in the house. He woke his wife. He thought that maybe his sons were wandering about in the dark.

His wife opened her eyes and screamed. He didn’t understand what was going on. At first they thought burglars had broken in. But Iman saw shadowy figures who had entered their room, while red laser beams sliced through the darkness toward their bed.

The specters moved without sound. Later it would emerge that the troops had silently broken down the door. After an instant, Iman realized that the intruders were soldiers. They were masked, five or six of them in the bedroom, aiming their rifles at the couple. More troops waited outside.

Iman got out of the bed, her hair exposed to the eyes of the men who had invaded her room – a very sensitive matter for them, which Munzer refers to with pain. One soldier approached the bed and without a word punched Munzer in the face. Munzer is convinced that the assailant wore brass knuckles. His face began to bleed, with a lot of blood streaming from his nose, as well as from the wounds on his hands, which ultimately failed to protect his face. He saw nothing, of course.

The West Bank town of Dawha, near Bethlehem. Alex Levac

Iman, standing next to the bed, went on shouting, but the soldiers blocked her from defending her husband. She tried to explain that he was blind and sick, but it was useless. Probably none of the soldiers understood Arabic. The soldier held Munzer’s head with one hand and hit him relentlessly with the other, she says. The others just stood there. The beating went on for at least five minutes.

A light in the bathroom scattered a little light into the room. Outside it was still dark, and the soldiers didn’t turn on the lights inside. Maybe that’s why they didn’t notice that the person being abused was helpless, blind and sick. Munzer asked the soldiers who they were. He got no reply. Iman told them she wanted to talk with the officer in charge. No one responded. Finally the blows ceased.

Iman sat Munzer up in the bed. He asked her where the children were. Then she helped him get up and led him toward a chair in the room. At first the soldiers wouldn’t allow Munzer, his face streaked with blood, to sit down. They didn’t ask him to identify himself and didn’t say who they were looking for.

Before this his eldest son, Talal, had awoken and heard his parents shouting that there were burglars in the house. Then, from the doorway, he saw his father bleeding. His brothers also woke up. The soldiers refused to let them enter their parents’ room and ordered them to raise their hands. One of the sons was overcome with dizziness and fell to the floor.

The soldiers were in the house for about 20 minutes. They didn’t search for anything. None of them thought to offer the wounded Munzer medical attention. Munzer says the worst thing is that a blind person doesn’t know when the next blow is coming.

Why did they hit him?

“You don’t know why?” his sister Maysoun, a bitter smile on her lips, asks us. “I’m afraid to talk because you’re Jews. They beat us all. The occupation beats us all. We are under occupation. This isn’t the first time they beat someone for no reason, and it’s not the last. What’s new about it is that this time they beat a blind person.”

One of the boys suggests a different explanation: Maybe they struck his father because he has a beard? True, not a full beard, but still a small beard that raises suspicion.

Munzer Mizhar with his wife, Iman, and his sister, at home in the West Bank town of Dawha. Alex Levac

Maysoun is concerned that now her brother won’t be allowed to travel to Jordan in June for his regular medical treatments. We tried to reassure her – after all, he didn’t do anything.

In any case, back on that Wednesday morning, the soldiers ordered the four boys to get on their knees, faces pressed to the floor, and not to move. Then they left the house.

Munzer was taken to Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala. Since the event, he has suffered from pains in his jaw and has difficulty eating solid food. To see him lying on the sofa totally helpless, trying to find a comfortable position, the remnants of his feet bandaged, occasionally closing his eyes, is to understand what the soldiers wrought.

The next day the family learned that the soldiers had been looking for Fadi Hilweh, 20, who’s wanted by the army and the Shin Bet security service, though it’s not clear why. He lives on the floor above. The soldiers went there first, and when they didn’t find him, a Shin Bet agent known as “Capt. Nidal” ordered Hilweh’s mother to contact him and have him come home.

In the meantime, the soldiers went downstairs to the Mizhars. The neighbors say that they too warned the soldiers that Munzer was blind and sick, but no one was interested. Munzer wants to know why they didn’t knock on the door instead of invading the house. He would have opened the door and they could have seen for themselves that Hilweh wasn’t there.

Hilweh eventually came home and was arrested. Did the soldiers think that Munzer was the wanted person, so they beat him? Even in the dark, no one could mistake a sick, blind man of 47 for a 20-year-old. “Maybe they thought [the wanted man] was Munzer, and maybe they’re just violent criminals,” Maysoun says. Musa Abu Hashhash, a field researcher for the B’Tselem human rights group, says quietly, “This is the most shocking case I’ve ever documented.”

The IDF Spokesman’s Office made the following statement to Haaretz: “During an operation to apprehend a wanted individual in Bethlehem, information was received that the wanted person was inside a particular building, and a search was undertaken there. During the search, a Palestinian woman tried to prevent one of the fighters from reaching a Palestinian man in the room that the fighter wanted to inspect. The fighter tried to check the Palestinian man, who reacted by grabbing at his body and his weapon, and shouted and acted disruptively. The fighter pushed the Palestinian aggressively, trying to get him under control, and as a result the man was injured. At this stage the fighter realized that the man was blind, and was not the wanted person, and tried to calm him down while allowing the man’s wife to attend to him immediately. The incident was investigated and appropriate conclusions were drawn.”

Iman has been in a state of depression and constant fear since that night. The boys ask whether the soldiers will come back. The family has added an extra lock to the front door. Munzer can only focus on his illness and his pain. He wakes up each every night imagining that he hears footsteps in the dark. He’s certain that the soldiers are returning to give him another thrashing.

From Alice Walker’s Color Purple to David Icke’s Shape Shifting Lizards

Susan Abulhawa’s toleration of anti-Semitism only helps the enemies of Palestine

 A controversy has broken out over an interview that Alice Walker, famous for the Pulitzer prize winning The Color Purple, did for the New York Times. In a written interview Alice Walker: By the Book, on the 13^th December, Alice responded to the question ‘What books are on your nightstand?’ by saying that one such book was “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke.

‘In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.’

When Black people and Palestinians start making excuses for anti-Semitism it has but one effect. It confirms the Zionist argument that Palestinian opposition to Israeli settler colonialism is motivated not by outrage at Israel’s behaviour but by hatred of Jews.

Of course the Zionists have leaped upon this. Zionist opposition to the anti-Semitism of people like Louis Farrahkan is not motivated by genuine outrage at his racism but by their own racism. When the Anti-Defamation League, a group that worked with the South Africa Secret Police BOSS and sends US Police for training Israel denounces Farrakhan we can smell the racist hypocrisy a mile off. [See Lenni Brenner, When Israel Was Apartheid’s Open Ally].

Anti-Semitism amongst Black people in the US is reflective racism. It is equivalent to the Jewish reaction to non-Jews and anti-Semites in Russia and Poland which was often chauvinist. When the ADL home in on Louis Farrahkan and ignores Trump, Bannon, Orban and all the other genuinely anti-Semitic white supremacists we can  be sure that what motivates them is not anti-Semitism but support for Zionism.

Nonetheless the apologetics of Alice Walker are deeply depressing. Walker is a brilliant novelist and anyone who has read her tale of racism, abuse and misogyny cannot help but be moved. 

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

I don’t know what other planets Icke has visite but what is clear is that he is anti-Semitic. Icke isn’t dangerous in the way that the supporters of Tommy Robinson are or the supporters of Zionism are. He is more mad than bad. He believes that an inter-dimensional race of reptilian creatures control the world. His books, the Robots Rebellion and And the truth shall set you free endorse the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is incomprehensible that Alice Walker has chosen to endorse Ike.

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

Isaac Stanley Baker describes the book in the Washington Post thus;

“And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” which draws on the infamous anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” includes this judgment: “I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.” The Nazi extermination, he wrote, was “coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite.”

It is therefore doubly regrettable that Alice Walker, instead of reassessing what she said, dug herself further into a hole. On her own website she defends Icke, as a fellow victim of censorship and denies that he is an anti-Semite even though he holds that Jews in effect organised their own destruction. How would Alice Walker have described someone who said that Africans were responsible for the slave trade? The fact that some Africans collaborated with the slave traders and some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis does not therefore mean that either the Slave Trade or the Holocaust was a consequence of their victims’ actions. Alice Walker wrote:

‘I find Icke’s work to be very important to humanity’s conversation, especially at this time.  I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish.  I do believe he is brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask, and to speak his own understanding of the truth wherever it might lead.  Many attempts have been made to censor and silence him.  As a woman, and a person of color, as a writer who has been criticized and banned myself, I support his right to share his own thoughts.

Walker compares the ‘attempt to smear’ Icke with the attacks on her and supporters of BDS. It is a confused melange.

But if we can ignore the racist ravings and ramblings of her Zionist critics, whose attacks on Walker are motivated only by their own racism the same cannot be said of her Black Jewish critics.  One such is Nylah Burton in Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me. Nylah writes about the poem It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud.

Reactions to Alice Walker's comments

It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.

Nylah describes how hostility to others can be blinding to oneself yet ‘it seems that Walker has willingly allowed herself to be blinded. “ She describes ‘Our (Frightful) Duty’ as

‘a terribly written poem filled with terrible things. It oozes deep paranoia, defensiveness, and rage. In every single way, it’s ugly.

The “poem” utterly fails as poetry. It isn’t lyrical. Its lines and stanzas are choppy and graceless. Each stanza seems to end with an aggressive exhale, the kind that a person expels when they finish purging the awful thoughts that consume them. In some places, it reads like a rambling lecture delivered by a tenured professor who isn’t afraid to offend her students anymore. At other times, it reads like a Breitbart article with line breaks. There is no artistry here, but there is plenty of trauma.

The most significant stanza is where Walker writes:

For the study of Israel, of Gaza, of Palestine,

Of the bombed out cities of the Middle East,

Of the creeping Palestination

Of our police, streets, and prisons

In America,

Of war in general,

It is our duty, I believe, to study The Talmud.

It is within this book that,

I believe, we will find answers

To some of the questions

That most perplex us.

Yet she couldn’t be more wrong.  The Talmud explains nothing. Attacks on the Jews in Europe often used selective quotes from the Talmud, a book of disputation and interpretation in just the same way as Zionist and Islamaphobes attack Muslim using the Quoran.

According to the sales pitch for Tommy Robinson’s Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam ‘Islam is a religion of war and conquest, ... right up until thousands of innocent Americans were wiped out on 9/11.’

Today in Israel racist rabbis such as Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur in Torat Hamelech use the Talmud to justify the right of Jews to murder non-Jews, yeah even their infants and suckling babes. Israel’s bloodthirsty Military Rabbinate likewise use the Talmud and the Torah to justify the slaughter and rape of Palestinians.  No doubt a similar exercise could be mounted with respect to the New Testament. It was Christians not Muslims who perpetrated the Holocaust.

But the point to make is that Israel’s murderous barbarities are not caused by the Talmud anymore than the Holocaust was a product of the New Testament or ISIS was the product of the Quoran.  Murderers often resort to religious texts to excuse their deeds but the same texts also exhort us to love thy neighbour as thy self.

Alice Walker and David Icke

We can of course expect the Zionists to denounce Alice Walker as an ‘anti-Semite’.  Although what Alice has done has provided fuel for the Zionist fire, we can disregard their criticisms of her as the ravings of hypocrites and racists. What is however more painful is the criticism from fellow anti-racists and friends and in this category I put the Israeli educationalist Nurit Peled-Elhanan. In A Letter From Nurit Peled- Elhanan, activist, educator, and friend from Israel and a Poem, she expressed her sorrow at what Alice had written:

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Dear Alice,

I read your poem and the criticism of it and I must react.

The people who torture and kill Palestinian have never studied the Talmud. It is not studied in Israeli state schools. And no one can read it on their own. The ones who study it are the ultra-orthodox Jews such as the pro-Palestinian Neturei Karta in NY.

The quotes (whether true or false) are surely partial and do not characterize this 12 volume work (thousand pages in every volume) whose writing ended thousands of years ago.

The Talmud is not a prescriptive book. It is an endless interpretation of the Torah, always adapting the Torah to present times so that people can live by it. Ethiopian Jews never studied it and lived by the Torah as is.

In these volumes you read discussion and polemics between different sages about every tiny aspect of human life. And the discussions are brought as they happened, more or less because it was all discussed orally.

But the main thing is that each such discussion ends with: “and so they disagreed” and people would choose the interpretation they wanted. Every argument that is brought is immediately countered by an opposite argument and the discussion that ensued. It is always open ended.

In my time we learned a bit of it and I loved it, because it is Logic, like reading Plato. Today schools don’t teach it anymore.

So in order to know what is in the Talmud – which none of the non-orthodox Israelis or Jews know – you have to read at least a whole chapter, pros and cons etc.

One of the most discussed subjects in the Talmud as in the Torah is the treatment of foreigners, workers, slaves etc. Extremely human and enlightening.

I don’t want you to be trapped in superficial propaganda of ignorant people. And again: the reason for the ruthlessness and violence towards Palestinians is not to be found in ancient writings but in Modern ones. It is Modernity and European Enlightenment that brought slavery, colonialism, Fascism and Totalitarianism, national movements such as Zionism and the way to treat people as superfluous. Auschwitz was not prescribed in any ancient scripture, neither is Israeli colonialism.

Much love

Nurit

To which Alice replied:

Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

***

Dear Nurit,

Thank you, Sister Nurit, for not letting go of my hand, while informing me of your views, which I welcome and respect. Though we may have areas still to discuss, and perhaps always will, given the differences in our backgrounds and cultures, my own grip is as strong.

Can you get my website: alicewalkersgarden.com where you are?  If so, please read the entire poem.  Also read a later poem, below, “Conscious Earthlings.” About the necessity of separating “Jews” from Zionist Nazis. I am including it here.

Also, would you mind if I published your letter to help with the discussion, which seems to be, from what I hear, more about shouting. I am open to continuing our dialogue, if you are.

Love,

Alice

This controversy has not been helped by Palestinian writer and novelist Susan Abulhawa, author of Mornings in Jenin who in the guise of supporting Alice has stumbled in with hobnail boots trampling all in her path. Her In defence of Alice Walker argues that Abulhalwa ‘Alice Walker's real 'offence' is not anti-Semitism; it is her unwavering support for the Palestinian cause.’

Alice Walker and Palestinian Women

Yes that probably is what motivates some, but by no means all, of the criticism of Alice Walker, but whose fault is that? Undoubtedly Alice Walker has been viciously attacked for her support for the Palestinians and that includes the routine cry that she is ‘anti-Semitic’. 

Alice Walker is a good example of how false accusations of anti-Semitism actually create anti-Semitism. In what must be rank as one of the most fatuous analogies Abulhalwa compares the reaction to Alice Walker’s comments to that of Israeli Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour whom the Israelis gaoled for 5 months for writing a poem:

I am reminded of Dareen Tatour, who was imprisoned by Israel for a poem she posted on Facebook, on the fanciful claim it called for violence against Jews; and Gunter Grass, whom Israel banned and lobbied to have his Nobel Prize in Literature rescinded because he wrote a poem arguing that Germany should stop supplying Israel with nuclear submarines. Even the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s greatest poet, was denounced as the equivalent of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The Board of DYR still lists Lea Tsemel and Ilan Pappe

Unfortunately Abulhawa has kept company with some pretty dodgy people previously and it was only in 2014 with their attack on BDS that she parted company with the Board of Deir Yassin Remembered. DYR, which was formed about 10 years previously, had been taken over by a right-wing American Professor Daniel MacGowan together with an anti-Semitic Israeli/Swedish fascist Israel Shamir and a British holocaust denier Paul Eisen. Its original purpose was to build a memorial to the village of Deir Yassin in Palestine, where a terrible massacre of up to 254 people had occurred in April 1948, as a means of ‘encouraging’ the Palestinians to flee from their homes.

DYR had originally included people like Jeff Halper, Ilan Pappe and Lea Tsemel, all of them Israeli anti-Zionists.  One by one they all resigned from DYR. Yet if you go to the web page today you will still find some of them listed as members. As Halper remarked, “The Deir Yassin Remembered board is like Hotel California, you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave).” See, Jinjirrie, BDS Attacked by the Deir Yassin Remembered

Below is a very moving article by a Black Jewish American, Nylah Burton, about her feelings concerning what Alice Walker has written.

Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me

The Intelligencer, 26.12.18.

By Nylah Burton

Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/The New York Times/Redux

When I first read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I leaned into every word, inhaling Celie’s tragic and triumphant story. In Celie, I felt the presence and pain of my female family members brought up in rural Alabama. In Walker’s unflinching descriptions of misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia, and incest, I saw an open accounting of issues buried deep within the larger southern black community — and within my own family.

Above all, I was drawn into The Color Purple because it was haunted by ghosts — the ghosts of Alice Walker’s past. Eloquently and bravely, she was able to confront generational trauma by telling a universal tale that still felt faithful to her own story. And it was Walker’s ability to throw open the shutters and allow her ghosts — our ghosts — into her writing that made it so revelatory. It cemented her standing as an acclaimed novelist, a civil-rights icon, and a formidable thought leader in the field of black feminism.

That changed abruptly two weeks ago, after the New York Times invited Walker to list her favorite books in its weekly “By the Book” column. She took the opportunity to promote David Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which contains some of the most hateful anti-Semitic lies ever to be printed between covers. As excerpted in the Washington Post, Icke’s book alleged that a “small Jewish clique” had created the Russian Revolution and both World Wars, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust to boot. Icke has also accused Jews (among others) of being alien lizard people. After a week of criticism, Walker doubled down in her assessment of Icke’s indefensible work, calling him “brave” and dismissing charges of anti-Semitism as an attack on the pro-Palestinian cause.

It’s chilling to think that such an acclaimed novelist could regard Icke’s work as “a curious person’s dream come true,” but it turned out that Walker’s endorsement wasn’t an isolated deviation. Readers soon unearthed her poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud,” published on her website in 2017, which confirmed that Walker had been indulging in virulent anti-Semitism, and that it permeated not just her thinking but her work.

The ghosts in The Color Purple helped me to better understand my own identity and the suppressed history of my ancestors — a journey I’m constantly engaged in as a black Jewish woman. But the ghosts in “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty” leave me with more questions than answers. How did Walker’s curiosity curdle into paranoia? How was her commitment to improving the human condition twisted into support for genocide apologists? How could the artist who helped America to better understand black women use her writing to promote the oppression of another group?

In her essay, “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,” Walker writes that “an extreme negative emotion held against other human beings for reasons they do not control can be blinding. Blindness about other human beings, especially for a writer, is equivalent to death.” Lately it seems that Walker has willingly allowed herself to be blinded. “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty” is a terribly written poem filled with terrible things. It oozes deep paranoia, defensiveness, and rage. In every single way, it’s ugly.

The “poem” utterly fails as poetry. It isn’t lyrical. Its lines and stanzas are choppy and graceless. Each stanza seems to end with an aggressive exhale, the kind that a person expels when they finish purging the awful thoughts that consume them. In some places, it reads like a rambling lecture delivered by a tenured professor who isn’t afraid to offend her students anymore. At other times, it reads like a Breitbart article with line breaks. There is no artistry here, but there is plenty of trauma.

Walker writes that we must examine the “root” of our broken world. For her, the rabbinical commentaries in the Talmud are this root. She claims that the Talmud has provided justification for Jews making slaves of goyim (non-Jews), which world history proves to be untrue. She also claims that the Talmud permits the rape of young boys and 3-year-olds, which is a misinterpretation often used to justify anti-Semitism. Walker is unequivocally wrong about the root of the world’s evil. But how should we begin to search for the root of Walker’s hatred? What ghosts lurk within her stanzas?

I have a deep abiding love for black women and all that we do. Because of that love, I feel betrayed by Walker, and like all scorned lovers, I find myself consumed with a need to understand why. Guided by a singular question (What the fuck happened?), I spent Christmas buried in her writings, trying to understand how Walker could turn on women like me.

The opening of the poem speaks of a male friend, a “Jewish soul,” who accused Walker of anti-Semitism because she didn’t support the state of Israel. Walker refers to this anonymous friend with a great deal of intimacy; charged with anti-Semitism, she herself reacts like a lover betrayed. When she mentions the house that they shared in Mississippi — “where black people often assumed he was a racist” — it becomes clear that she is referring to her ex-husband.

In 1967, Alice Walker married a young Jewish civil-rights lawyer named Mel Leventhal. Their interracial marriage — the first such legal union in the state of Mississippi — was still illegal in Walker’s home state of Georgia at the time. Leventhal’s mother was also deeply opposed to the union, and his other family members didn’t allow Alice to attend family events. “Leaving no question about how she felt about her son’s marriage to a shvartse (a pejorative Yiddish term for a black person), Miriam Leventhal sat shiva for her son, mourning him as dead,” Evelyn White writes in Alice Walker: A Life. A source who knows the family told me that Mel preferred to ignore rather than confront his family’s bigotry. This caused Walker to feel increasingly isolated and resentful. The marriage ended in 1976, after the pair had one daughter together, named Rebecca.

From left: Mel Leventhal, Rebecca Walker, and Alice Walker, 1970. Photo: CSU Archives/Everett Collection

When writing of Mel in her essays, Walker links him inextricably to his Jewishness, as well as his occupation as a lawyer. Even when they are not arguing (frequently, according to her) about the abuses against Palestinians, each mention of him is some variation on  “white Jewish lawyer husband.” Perhaps Walker is combining those disparate words — each a piece of his identity, yet each reductive — to make sense of his contradictions: How could he fight for the dignity of black people while allowing his white family to deny dignity to his wife and daughter? How could he be white, and yet not fully welcomed by white gentiles in Mississippi? How could he crusade for justice at home and dismiss her concern for Palestinians abroad?

I loathe the misogynist assumption that a woman’s faults must be the direct result of a man’s actions, but I find myself incapable of separating Walker’s fraught marriage from her hatred of Judaism. She doesn’t separate the two either. In her 2014 book, The Cushion in the Road, Walker writes about meeting an elderly Palestinian woman in the Occupied Territories. The woman accepted a gift from Walker, and then bestowed a blessing upon her, “May God protect you from the Jews,” to which Walker responded, “It’s too late, I already married one.”

It’s telling that Walker feels she should reference her marital strife in such a context, even as a joke. In both this comment and in her poem, she seems incapable of reconciling the conflicts inherent to Leventhal’s identity — conflicts that put a strain on their marriage. Instead of accepting that white Jews can both oppress and be oppressed, Walker leaps to blaming all Jews (and  the Talmud) for all oppression.

Walker writes in the poem of trying to educate the “Jewish soul” on the topics of “dignity,” “justice,” “honor,” and “peace.” She sets off each of these words with quotation marks, casting doubt on whether Jews are capable of learning these values. Walker is quite proud of her subsequent epiphany, insinuating that those (like her younger self) who believe that any Jew can desire peace, justice, and honor know “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Walker’s fights with Leventhal are not the only ghosts in this poem. There is also Rebecca Walker, Alice’s daughter. Rebecca and Alice haven’t spoken in many years, and Rebecca has publicly denounced her mother for being neglectful during Rebecca’s childhood. “I came very low down in her priorities,” Rebecca wrote in 2008, “after work, political integrity, self-fulfillment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.”

While Rebecca never addressed her mother’s anti-Semitism, she is known for publicly embracing her Jewish identity, most notably in her book Black, White, and Jewish. How must Rebecca be feeling right now? How would it feel to have the whole world discussing your mother’s hatred of your Jewish soul, your religious texts, your heritage?

As a black Jewish woman, I find the white Jewish community’s focus on black anti-Semitism hypocritical and distracting. Its negative impact is often exaggerated, and dwelling on it is counterproductive to racial justice and solidarity. But in an attempt to show compassion toward black people — especially black women — I sometimes find myself burying my own opinions about it at the expense of my soul. Recently, I was at an event where someone implied that Jews were naturally more conniving and exploitative. I shut down the conversation, but I wanted to flip the table in anger. What does that do to the soul of the black Jewish woman, who is often rejected by both the white Jewish community and — more rarely — by the sisters who are supposed to understand her?

In an interview for the PBS documentary “Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth,” Walker said she was hurt and confused by her estrangement with her daughter. “You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul,” she said. “But, as (author) Tillie Olsen told me, ‘You have your own children and do the best you can until they are able to get out in the world. And then the world takes over.’”

In the poem, Walker invokes her maternal status as a source of her authority over all of humanity. She refers to herself as an “elder” who went to Palestine to “do my job / of keeping tabs / on Earth’s children.” It’s a particularly defensive stanza in an already-paranoid poem. I feel that she is trying to convince herself that she has done her job as an actual mother. Her claim on the “Earth’s children” reads like a deflection from the one child she has, who is surely bothered by her mother’s hatred of Jews like herself.

Another source of the poem’s purported authority is age. Walker tells us that we will understand the evils of the Talmud as we get older. “We must go back / as grown-ups now, / Not as the gullible children we once were … It is our duty, I believe, to study the Talmud.” But Walker isn’t talking to us. It feels like a plea to her child. A plea for what? Understanding? Forgiveness? Permission?

I can understand Walker’s trauma: I live much of it. But I cannot understand how she could write such awful things. I understand that Walker experienced virulent anti-blackness from many in the white Jewish community — as I have — but I don’t understand how she could spin that off into a hateful conspiracy. I don’t understand why this poem was written. But I do understand that everything about it paints a picture of heartbreak. I see a person who has made terrible mistakes, and who is desperately trying to run away from them. I may not be able to forgive or excuse, but it is my frightful duty — as a black Jewish woman — to try to understand.

I spoke to a black Jewish woman who said that Alice Walker’s anti-Semitic “trolling” needed to be called out, but also that Walker was “a monster of [the white Jewish community’s] own making.” She warned that a failure to address such racism would push more people — notably, Jews of color — to this extreme. I believe this; I’ve already reported on the ways that racism was pushing black Jews away from the community. The impact of this dynamic on Walker’s work is supported by her description of her writing process in the essay “From an Interview”:

“All of my poems … are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair … Poems — even happy ones — emerge from an accumulation of sadness … I become aware that I am controlled by [the poems], not the other way around. I realize that when I am writing poetry, I am so high as to feel invisible, and in that condition it is possible to write almost anything.”

Still, I wonder how Walker could put the burden of her trauma onto us — black Jewish women. What is her responsibility to her daughter, and what is my responsibility to Alice Walker? Many of my black and Jewish friends refuse to even judge her. Perhaps it is I who know nothing, nothing at all.

I know that I will not cancel Alice Walker. I can’t erase the incredible work she created. I will continue to read The Color Purple and her other works. But I will never be able to rid myself of the ghost of this poem. It would be irresponsible and self-hating of me to do so. I will read and teach Walker’s work with love, but this poem will always be there, fluttering in the wind like a torn-out page of the Talmud.