Zionism versus Judaism

From the start, political Zionists identified their program with Judaism the religion (despite their secularism, even atheism).

Also from the start, Jews -- including the most tradition-bound Jews -- vigorously disavowed that identification. They were shamed as self-hating traitors to "their people." As a consequence, many went silent and eventually acquiesced in the creation of Israel, the self-identified "Jewish state." Some even converted to Zionism.

So don't blame non-Jews for being unclear about the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

TGIF: Another Bogus Antisemitism Scare

I've been watching and thinking about the nationwide campus antiwar demonstrations in support of the suffering Palestinians of Gaza, and the appalling reaction to and "coverage" of those events. Something important needs to be addressed.

I won't be concerned here with the violence committed by anyone, including the police, or by lesser misconduct, such as occupying and damaging buildings and other violations of university rules. It's also irrelevant whether the demonstrations stand any chance of ending Israel's onslaught or ending U.S. and university complicity in it, or whether most of the pro-peace demonstrators share a libertarian orientation. (Not likely.) All that is for another time.

I want to examine the overwhelming depiction of the demonstrations as nothing more than rank antisemitism -- the blind hatred of all Jewish people because and only because they are -- by birth, blood, belief, or practice -- Jewish.

Are the demonstrations antisemitic and hence pro-Hamas, as Spiked magazine and many other observers claim? Are the protestors tapping into what CNN's Dana Bash called "a deep undercurrent of antisemitism"? (The smears know no bounds.)

To sort this out, I thought I might employ one of my areas of expertise. I spend a lot of time watching excellent British television police dramas. I consider myself a student of British detective techniques. (The Brits take their police dramas very seriously.)

Among other things, I've learned that if a crime is alleged to have been committed by a particular person, but you have no damning CCTV or credible witnesses, you begin your investigation by asking if the "person of interest" has a plausible motive for the offense. If not, the chances are good that the person is innocent. People act, which means they have motives.

That's what I want to do here regarding the campus demonstrations, which are on their face objections to Israel's bloody (not just in the British figurative sense) seven-month campaign against the Gaza Palestinians. That campaign has taken at least 34,000 lives, injured and starved countless other people, and destroyed so many homes, hospitals, universities, and other facilities vital to life.

So here's the detective's challenge: why would non-Jewish pro-peace demonstrators on college campuses across the country knowingly, intentionally alienate their clearly Jewish pro-peace co-demonstrators with whom they encamp all day every day, sharing meals, having teach-ins together, and participating in ecumenical outdoor religious events, like Passover seders? Why would antisemites want to do it?

Does that sound remotely plausible? Are the Jewish students idiots who don't recognize antisemitism when they're supposedly drowning in a sea of it? Are the antisemites able to threaten Jewish non-demonstrators and pro-Israel demonstrators while keeping it a secret from Jewish demonstrators standing next to them? That seems unlikely.

What do they take us for -- those pro-Israel alarmists, who see an existential threat to all Jewish people every day around every corner? They assume (or pretend to believe) that anti-Zionism -- that is, opposition to a Jewish supremacist state -- is the same as antisemitism. But a moment's reflection reveals that this is bunk -- no matter how many times Israel's partisans say so. On a variety of grounds, many Jewish people fundamentally oppose Israel as a Jewish state. They have since the time of Theodor Herzl, the reputed founder of Zionism.

As an aside, this is not the first time that America has been subjected to a false antisemitism scare. The boy has cried wolf falsely many times before. Whenever Israel lays waste to Gaza, a sudden spike in antisemitism is reported by the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, and their congressional spokesmen. Isn't that interesting? Or is it? Could it be that the Israel lobby weaponizes antisemitism to shut up anyone who would object to Israel's crimes against humanity?  (For a close look at this weaponization, see Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.)

Israel's partisans tell us that America's campuses today are indistinguishable from 1930s Nazi Berlin. Jewish students, they say, are routinely harassed, threatened, and assaulted. They can't walk safely to class. The Hitler Youth rule. Really? I can't recall newsreels from the Nazi years showing Jews and non-Jews peacefully celebrating the sabbath and Passover with open-air religious services and meals. Have you ever seen films from Nazi Germany in which Jewish Germans enthusiastically sported tee-shirts emblazoned with sayings like: "Jewish Voice for Peace," "Not in Our Name," "Jews for a Ceasefire Now," and "Jews for Freedom in Palestine." Maybe the memory is suppressed, but I'm pretty sure I haven't.

My policy is to assume good faith in my opponents, but it's tough in this case. I am confident that the alarmists do not believe their own words when they say that terrorists and Nazis control the universities.

So why do they say it? Because it distracts attention from Israel's unending massacre. The apologists' agenda is to support Israel no matter what and to explain away the palpable atrocities. It's also an attempt to continue America's shameful complicity.

If Israel and its supporters were truly concerned about antisemitism (rather than needing it to prevent assimilation and abandonment of Israel), they'd do some soul-searching. Israel identifies itself as the Jewish state and claims to represent “the Jewish people” -- not only Jewish Israelis but Jews everywhere whether they want it or not. Thus Israel’s long mistreatment of the Palestinians encourages, at least tacitly, the relatively few antisemites, who are eager to point to anything they can use to describe “the Jewish people” as bad actors. "The Jewish state equals the Jewish people" — that’s what they’ve been told by the pro-Israel side. It’s not true, but they're happy to believe it.

In other words, Israel’s definition of itself and its abuse of the Palestinians ratify the antisemites’ crazy ideas about the international conspiratorial malevolence and collective guilt of "the Jewish people." Antisemites are encouraged to ignore the overrepresentation of Jewish Americans in the ranks of Israel's opponents.

Israel and its supporters then aggravate matters by strategically equating odious antisemitism with honorable anti-Zionism. That in turn gives cover to the antisemites, who can hide in plain sight among the anti-Zionists.

That amounts to Israel's protection of antisemitism!

You’d think that would be a bad thing. And it is. So why do Israel’s leaders and supporters do it? Because all that matters is the tribal sanctuary, Israel.

Israel's Amazing Feat

Israel has accomplished quite a feat: its crimes against the people of Gaza are of such a large scale that they make Hamas's Oct. 7 crimes look small.

TGIF: Israel Humiliated

To more fully understand the ferocity of Israel's massacre of the people of the Gaza Strip, it's perhaps worth considering that on October 7, 2023, the reputedly invincible Israeli Defence Forces and intelligence services were made to look like fools caught sleeping on guard duty. While Hamas's murder, assault, and kidnapping of noncombatants must be strongly condemned, we should be able to see how humiliating that was for the Israeli government, which brags as much about its awesome power as it does about its allegedly unequaled moral stature.

Israel has blockaded Gaza for 20 years, although the "Jewish state" has controlled it since 1967. Even before that, Israel had committed massacres there in 1956 when Egypt controlled it as a result of the 1948 war. The Oct. 7 terrorists were likely too young to have known anything but life without a future in what had become the Gaza open-air prison. Theoretically and officially, Israel regulates all ingress and egress from the strip: people, food, medical supplies, energy, consumer and producer goods, and building materials. The policy is draconian, intended to keep the 2.3 million Palestinians, half of them children, quiet.

Even though long before Oct. 7 Israeli intelligence had evidence that Hamas was up to something, including training videos and a multipage plan of operation (discounted by the experts), the organization managed to blow 10 holes in the fortified fence and send through terrorists who attacked nearby military installations, permissible targets under international law, and impermissibly, kibbutzim and other civilian areas, including a music festival. Some of these locations had likely been the home areas of the grandparents of the fighters. A large percentage of Gazans are descendants of refugees, if not refugees themselves, whom Zionist militias expelled during the 1948 Nakba, or Palestinian catastrophe, an essential part of the program to create a "Jewish state."

As if the attacks of Oct. 7 were not humiliating enough, late-arriving Israeli forces on land and in the air killed some Israelis in vehicles and buildings either by mistake (with autonomous pilots sometimes relying on targeting information from people using WhatsApp) or according to the supposedly abandoned Hannibal Directive, under which the military prefers to kill Israeli hostages along with their abductors rather than have them taken as bargaining chips. Israeli forces also killed many Hamas fighters, but in some cases the Israelis did not know whom they were firing at.

The Israeli media, unlike the American media, has reported extensively on this. For details, see the impressive and fair-minded Al Jazeera documentary October 7. It contains revealing videos from both sides and also covers the Israeli fabrications regarding mass rape and beheaded babies, as though the actual crimes weren't hideous enough.

Israel's mortification on Oct. 7 cannot be exaggerated. Israel has long prided itself not only on its offensive capabilities but on its power to deter attack, although that has been shown on occasion to have been overstated. But Oct. 7 pulverized that reputation. It also wrecked the hope that the Palestinians would acquiesce in being ignored as though they were invisible through the Abraham Accords, started by Trump and carried on by Biden. These are the actual and prospective corrupt deals involving the United States, Israel, and the dictatorial Gulf monarchies, the purpose of which is to buy "stability" in the region through Arab recognition of Israel via bribery, including U.S. weapons contracts and security guarantees. Who thought that would work? 

Israel and its supporters want the world to believe that Jewish people face an existential threat -- another Nazi genocide -- and that Israel is the only insurance against it. Biden believes it; he ridiculously implies that Jews are in danger in America. How wrong that is. Israel is the least safe place for Jewish people, but that's a consequence of how Zionists have treated the Palestinians from the start because they were not Jewish. There's a sick joke in the hollow claims that as tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are being killed, maimed, starved, and dispossessed, the real threat is to Jews, not only in Israel but in America! 

The presence of anti-Semitism is vastly exaggerated and thankfully confined to the fringes, The only thing that could change that is the premeditated conflation of anti-Zionism, entirely legitimate, with anti-Semitism, an effort that serves to innoculate Israel from proper criticism. By doing this, Israel and its supporters have diluted anti-Semitism and, inexcusably, made it seem less bad.

Finally, when Israel's defenders bring up Hamas's execrable anti-Semitic and genocidal charter, they should be reminded that for decades before the 1948 self-declared founding of Israel, Zionist leaders and settlers had talked about reclaiming and sanctifying the "Promised Land" for the "Chosen People"; supported the "transfer," by force if necessary, of the Palestinian Arabs (those non-Jewish people who for generations lived inexplicably in the "land without a people"); treated them with utter contempt to their faces (to the dismay of other Jews); expelled over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948; massacred hundreds of others and even poisoned their wells; destroyed some 500 villages to make way for Jewish towns, forests, and parks; attacked refugees in Gaza and Jordan, and militarily ruled the remaining Palestinian Arabs for the next two decades. Then came the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights through the 1967 war, with its attendant brutality and humiliation.

All of that preceded Hamas's emergence, which Israel encouraged, in the late 1980s. This does not justify Hamas's terrorism against noncombatants, but perspective advances comprehension -- if comprehension is deemed desirable.

But Hamas...

When Israel's defenders bring up Hamas's execrable anti-Semitic and genocidal charter, they should be reminded that for decades before the 1948 self-declared founding of Israel, Zionist leaders and settlers had talked about reclaiming and sanctifying the "Promised Land" for the "Chosen People"; supported the "transfer," by force if necessary, of the Palestinian Arabs (those non-Jewish people who for generations lived inexplicably in the "land without a people"); treated them with utter contempt to their faces (to the dismay other Jews); expelled over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948, the Nakba; massacred hundreds of others and even poisoned their wells; destroyed some 500 villages to make way for Jewish towns, forests, and parks; and militarily ruled the remaining Palestinian Arabs for the next two decades. Then came the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip through the 1967 war with its attendant brutality and humiliation.

All of that preceded Hamas's emergence in the late 1980s. This does not justify Hamas's horrendous violence against noncombatants, but perspective advances comprehension -- if comprehension is deemed desirable.

Netanyahu as Haman

The fable of Purim ends with the slaughter of over 75,000 non-Jewish Persians by the Jewish Persians after one official's (Haman's) plot to kill the Jews is exposed when the king is alerted by his Jewish wife. That's a mighty big conspiracy! God makes no appearance. An inspiring story for sure! The closest thing today to the villain, Haman, is Netanyahu and his team. Boo!

TGIF: Leave TikTok Alone

This is America, last I checked. Surely, the government would not force the sale of a social-media company or ban its app from the Google and Apple stores. Would it?

Well, yes, it would,  could (perhaps), and might. A bill in Congress, backed by the government's nominal chief executive, could become law. The House of Representatives passed it last week by an overwhelming bipartisan majority -- despite valiant efforts by Rep. Thomas Massie,  R-KY, plus a few others -- and it is now before the Senate.

That bill would establish fuzzy criteria defining a "foreign adversary's" alleged influence through a social media platform. It is aimed, for now, at requiring TikTok, used by 170 million mostly younger Americans, to be sold to a government-approved American buyer within a specified period. If not sold, Americans would be forbidden to get the app. I guess the app would have to be disabled for those who have it already.

In other words, TikTok would be banned from America -- you know, just as China's communist government bans or interferes with social media over there. Knowing how the government works, we must presume that the bill's criteria will be applied to other cases later. It certainly would exist as a standing threat to the uncooperative.

The complaint against TikTok is that it's a subsidiary of ByteDance, a widely owned company subject to Chinese government influence or control, although this is disputed by TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean businessman with substantial roots in -- the United States. But let's assume the worst and see where that leads. After all, the Chinese government is no respecter of individual rights. If the U.S. government is eager to interfere with social media, why not the Chinese government?

TikTok worriers say that China could harvest data on Americans while feeding them self-serving democracy-subverting messages. It has reportedly been caught suppressing unflattering information. Not good, but of course, the U.S. government has done the same thing; a lawsuit about this, Murthy v. Missouri, is now before the Supreme Court. As many critics of the bill have pointed out, the Chinese don't need TikTok to acquire information that users readily give up to other platforms. It's already on the market. Moreover, nobody should expect the news from any one online source to be complete; as one grows, one should learn to consult a variety of sources for a fuller picture.

Matthew Petti of Reason is right: "Competition is the strongest force keeping the internet free. Whenever users find a topic banned on TikTok, they can escape to Twitter or Instagram to discuss the censored content. And when Twitter or Instagram enforce politically motivated censorship on a different topic, users can continue that discussion on TikTok."

Changing ownership or banishing TikTok would create a false sense of security. The problem of myopia would remain.

Moreover, as Matt Taibbi alerts us, the bill would give the executive branch "sweeping powers." He writes: "As written, any 'website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application' that is 'determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States' is covered.'"

Taibbi continues: "A 'foreign adversary controlled application,' in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone 'subject to the direction' of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough?"

By this time, shouldn't we expect the worst from letting legislators write the rules?

But those are not the only reasons for concern. According to Glenn Greenwald, the bill had been floating around for a few years but had not garnered enough support to get through Congress. That changed recently, according to Greenwald, citing articles in the Wall Street Journal, Economist, and Bari Weiss's Free Press. Why? As Greenwald documents, anxiety about TikTok took a quantum leap beginning on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians and Israel began retaliating against the people of the Gaza Strip.

What has this got to do with TikTok? you ask. Good question. Israel's defenders in the United States, such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, are upset that TikTok's young users are being exposed to what he calls anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic disinformation. "It's Al Jazeera on steroids," Greenblatt said on MSNBC. During a leaked phone call, he complained, "We have a TikTok problem," by which he means a generational problem. Younger people -- including younger Jewish people -- are appalled at what Israel's military is doing in Gaza. (To complicate things, it looks like TikTok and Instagram have suppressed pro-Palestinian information.)

Would an American-owned TikTok be easier to control? Experience says yes. Have a look at the Twitter Files, which document how American officials, Chinese-style, pressured social media to censor or suppress dissenting views on important matters such as the COVID-19 response and the 2020 election. A federal judge likened the government's efforts to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Do we want to become more like China?

A final word. Defenders of free speech should not argue that ill-intentioned disinformation and well-intentioned misinformation from any source can cause no harm, broadly defined. Of course, it can. The proper answer to this legitimate concern is that government-produced "safetyism," placing safety above every other value including freedom, will do more harm than good.

Celebrating the Gaza Onslaught: Is There No Shame?

To Israel's supporters: are you not ashamed when you see the videos that IDF soldiers make to celebrate the death, destruction, and humiliation they're inflicting on the people of Gaza? Some would call those soldiers "my people." We're talking about Abu Ghraib stuff here.

Something to Agree on?

Can't we all at least agree that this was an extremely clumsy sentence from Academy Award-winning Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer that invited misinterpretation?

Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.

I assume he meant that they repudiate (why would this British guy say "refute"?) Israel's hijacking both Judaism and the memory of Hitler's victims in a cause that has produced such horrible consequences for both the Israelis and Palestinians.

TGIF: Is Israel Crazy?

Has Israel gone mad? Or has it always been mad? What is the country thinking?

The collective nouns seem reasonable in light of the widespread support in that country for the Israeli government's appalling military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip for the last five months. How can Israel -- and its outside supporters -- cheer on the bombings (compliments of coerced Americans), the ground attacks, the mass starvation, the terror, and the rest of the crimes that we witness every day? The death toll is pushing 31,000, most of them infants, children, women, and old men, not fighters. So many more have been disabled for life. Gazans -- including newborns -- lack food, good water, medical services and equipment, and drugs, including anesthesia. The humanitarian aid is a small fraction of what they need. So many have been driven from their homes, to which they'll never return because the buildings have been destroyed.

And there's no end in sight! Will it take the murder of the last Gazan for it to stop? For clear-eyed observers watching helplessly from afar, it is heartbreaking. We cannot even stop the Biden administration from sending bombs, bullets, and spare parts to Israel -- without which this could not go on.

Those are human beings in Gaza, for heaven's sake! Stop the carnage!

Coming to Palestine Now an Audiobook!

My book Coming to Palestine is now an audiobook. You can listen to it on YouTube. The audiobook is also here. HT: Jorge Besada.

An Anti-Semite's Idea?

Did anti-Semites think this up? Let's put the wretched survivors of the Nazi Judeocide where their presence will necessarily disrupt a predominantly Arab-Muslim population by 1) encroaching on land the Palestinians and their ancestors have lived on for many generations and 2) setting up a new nation-state dedicated only to the world's Jewish people and in which non-Jews at best would be second-class citizens.

That's what the Jewish anti-Zionists asked from the start.

Palestine and Israel: What's It All About?

Current events aside, the fundamental reason to favor the Palestinian cause over the Zionist project is not that the Israelis are Western and the Palestinians are not. That's knee-jerk woke "decolonial" claptrap, which does the Palestinians no favors. There's nothing inherently wrong with being Western, just as there's nothing inherently right with being Eastern, Southern, or whatever. Regions are neither virtuous nor vicious. From time immemorial, non-Westerners have been as brutal, domineering, and interested in slave-holding/trading as Westerners. Slavery was the uncontroversial norm for millennia everywhere -- including in the pre-Columbian West. It still exists in Asia. So the non-West gets no points on that count. On the other hand, the ultimately successful antislavery campaign arose in the West in the 19th century, not somewhere else. You don't hear much about that. Kudos to the British and the founders of the North American antislavery societies. 

No, the fundamental reason to side with the Palestinian cause is that the right to private property in land is legitimate. Sorry, socialists. For the most part, Palestinians had their land taken by force, as Zionist leader and first Israeli president David Ben-Gurion acknowledged. Today's troubles flow from that.

TGIF: Without the State, Who'd Drag Us into Other People's Wars?

This article was posted shortly before the International Court of Justice ruled provisionally that Israel's Gaza military operation can plausibly be described as acts outlawed by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The ICJ ordered Israel to take all actions possible to prevent the acts forbidden by the convention. But the court did not order a ceasefire. A full ruling will come later. The complaint against Israel had been filed by the Republic of South Africa.

What’s more off-putting than seeing U.S. government officials and their spokesmen trying to wriggle out of embarrassing questions about American support for Israel’s continuing atrocities against the people of the Gaza Strip? That's the location of just the latest conflict into which we Americans have been dragged by our caring rulers without our consent. The previous one, in Ukraine, is still going on, though largely forgotten. Isn't the state a wonderful thing? 

Theoretically, it's illegal for the U.S. government to give weapons to governments that will use them to violate people's rights. But that is exactly what the U.S. government has done for Israel over many decades. Hence the U.S. government's bobbing and weaving over Israel's unambiguous war crimes. Our "public servants" have to evade. What else can they do? They can’t acknowledge that Israel's policy is to systematically kill, maim, and starve large numbers of innocent noncombatants and to destroy their homes and society. Still, those officials can’t deny it outright either because, given what we mere citizens can easily learn from a variety of credible sources online, they would look like the know-nothing damn fools they are. So they subtly acknowledge the crimes by politely suggesting that Israel try not to kill so many noncombatants, even as they insist Israel's army remains the most moral army in the world. (Here is a video summary of the horrors that the U.S. government is abetting in Gaza.)

Why should Americans be forced to underwrite this nightmare for Gazans or other foreign conflicts? It certainly doesn't protect Americans -- on the contrary. (See 9/11.)  What makes it worse is that the forced assistance is crucial to the aggression. Israel could not continue to destroy Gaza if the U.S. government stopped sending ammunition, population-annihilating bombs, and spare parts. We Americans make the massive war crimes possible.

And it could get worse by bringing more direct U.S. intervention. The U.S. government is bombing Yemen -- without a congressional declaration of war. (Not that it would make the bombing better.) The U.S. military is also striking Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq because they have hit U.S. forces. But why are U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq? Why is Iran a player in Iraq? Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. 

Even though we haven't consented to any of this -- individually, I mean, not by majority vote -- it's a shameful mark on the country. No doubt, some aggrieved people, who perhaps have lost children and parents in the onslaught, want vengeance. Like Osama bin Laden, they think the American people control U.S. foreign policy. Who can blame them for thinking that? American rulers, by bragging about democracy, say that all the time. It's absurd, but that fallacy is not confined to jihadists. American and Israeli politicians annihilate people for acts they did not commit or consent to.

This all adds up to a strong indictment against government per se. What other organization can steal our money and use it to help destroy other societies in our name without consent? Embroiling us in foreign conflicts is one of the government's tools, with many benefits to the political class and its clients. Although people with bad intentions will be attracted to that power, interventionism will be tragically misguided even when well-intended, as perhaps it often is. The interventionists can never really know what they are doing. Unintended consequences will abound, and optimistic predictions will quickly turn sour. No constitution could permanently curb, much less abolish that power because every constitution will have to be interpreted. Who do you think will do the interpreting?

What can conscientious objectors do? Stopping traffic at rush hour doesn’t work. Closing down railway terminals and sitting in at government offices are no better. Your meager one vote is impotent. In the short term, I see no way out. Over the long term? Try to convince enough people that we can't afford government either monetarily or morally.

TGIF: Smells Like Genocide

If it looks like genocide, sounds like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it's genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The Republic of South Africa filed the complaint, which is ironic because Israel was a staunch ally of South Africa's former apartheid regime.

The official complaint is welcome, but thanks to social media, each of us already has ample evidence from a large variety of sources showing Israel's assault on the Gazans. Just watch the abundant video evidence that has accumulated since October 7, when Hamas fighters and perhaps other Gazans committed unspeakable atrocities against Israeli civilians after breaking through the fence that has kept them in an open-air prison for many years.

Since that horrible day, the Israeli Defense Force has brutally and indiscriminately pounded the 2.3 million people, about half of whom are children, who live in that 25x5-mile, densely populated strip. The conservatively estimated death toll -- there must be many victims under the rubble -- now stands at over 23,000, about half of whom are kids. Hundreds of thousands of residences have been destroyed or damaged. People have been displaced. Infrastructure and medical facilities have been rendered inoperable. Gaza resembles nearly Hiroshima after the U.S. government dropped the atomic bomb.

Moreover, one need not advocate strictly limited government (or no government at all) to be appalled at the U.S. government's complicity in that genocide, a word I do not use casually and have, I think, never written before.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted after the Nazi nightmare, formally defines as genocide several "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." (My emphasis.) Those acts are:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Israel argues that it is not killing Gazans indiscriminately because they are members of a particular ethnic or religious group; rather it tries to minimize collateral damage while rooting out lethal Hamas and its infrastructure. But is that credible? So many babies, toddlers, elderly, and seriously ill have been killed or maimed, so many homes, hospitals, and sanitation facilities destroyed.

South Africa's 84-page application to the ICJ is a well-documented comprehensive paper and bill of indictment against the state of Israel's conduct. In great detail and with much background, it enumerates both the Israeli government's genocidal actions and the many public statements made by Israeli civilian and military officials that declare in no uncertain terms their intention to do what is defined as genocide under the international convention.  Israel is a signatory to that convention, as is the United States.

At this stage, South Africa is requesting an immediate provisional order for a cessation of Israel's onslaught while the merits of its case are considered.

South Africa's application states:

South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ..., whether as a matter of law or morality. [My emphasis.]

Note the condemnation of Hamas for its atrocities. It goes on:

The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.... The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

This threat to the Palestinians has not passed, says the application, so a provisional cease-and-desist order is imperative right now:

...Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those acts include killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group. Repeated statements by Israeli State representatives, including at the highest levels, by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, and Minister of Defence, express genocidal intent. That intent is also properly to be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, having regard inter alia to Israel’s failure to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine. It is also clear from the nature, scope and extent of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza, which have involved the sustained bombardment over more than 11 weeks of one of the most densely populated places in the world, forcing the evacuation of 1.9 million people or 85% of the population of Gaza from their homes and herding them into ever smaller areas, without adequate shelter, in which they continue to be attacked, killed and harmed.

As of the filing in late December,

Israel has now killed in excess of 21,110 named Palestinians, including over 7,729 children — with over 7,780 others missing, presumed dead under the rubble — and has injured over 55,243 other Palestinians, causing them severe bodily and mental harm. Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes, alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.

And no end is in sight. The Israeli government has said the attack will go on for months, even a year. The Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, said on television that "every school, every mosque, and every second house has an access to a tunnel...and of course ammunition." When asked if that meant all of Gaza should be destroyed, she responded, "Do you have another solution how to destroy the underground tunnel city?"

That was just the latest in the many official Israeli statements -- from the prime minister and president on down -- indicating that the target of the onslaught is the entire population of Gaza, whether by bombing or by systematic deprivation of food, water, fuel, and medical supplies. (Even ambulances have been attacked.) Those statements are documented in the South African application because they demonstrate the Israeli government's genocidal intention. As a South African representative told the ICJ on Thursday, "The evidence of genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible."

This death, injury, starvation, dehydration, and utter destruction of homes and infrastructure is perpetrated by a nation whose most devout supporters worldwide believe it has a holy mission to be a "light to nations." (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, and 60:3) Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rallied his troops by invoking the biblical story of the divinely commanded Israeli destruction of the Amalekite men, women, and children. Before the ICJ, Israel tried to explain that invocation by fully quoting Netanyahu, who told the troops, "The IDF is the most moral army in the world, and IDF does everything to avoid harming the uninvolved...." But the Israeli leaders have indicated repeatedly that no Gazans are uninvolved.

While the application was filed against Israel, the U.S. government -- for obvious reasons -- should not regard itself as off the hook: the genocide convention also prohibits "complicity in genocide." Moreover, a complaint has been filed in another court, the International Criminal Court, against President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for their role in helping Israel. Moreover, the prohibitions in the genocide convention have counterparts in U.S. law.

The Biden administration opposes South Africa's application, though it admits it has not investigated the matter. Revealingly perhaps, an Israeli government spokesman dismissed South Africa as an "advocate for the devil."

Discussing Gaza on Kibbe on Liberty

Matt Kibbe and I talked about the emergency in Gaza on his podcast. Watch here.

Conversation on Israeli Genocide

I discussed matters related to Israel's genocidal attack on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip with Saifedean Ammous. The podcast is here.

Appearance on the Scott Horton Show

Scott Horton and I talked about issues related to the Israel-Palestine conflict on his show recently. You can listen here.

TGIF: Ahad Ha'Am's Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism

Ukrainian-born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), whose pen name was Ahad Ha'Am (Hebrew for one of the people), was a proponent of Spiritual, or Cultural, Zionism, which made him a rival to Theodor Herzl and Political Zionism, the movement dedicated to creating a nation-state in Palestine for all Jewish people worldwide. Ahad Ha'Am remains relevant to understanding the roots of the conflict in Palestine and Israel that has cost so many innocent lives. Hans Kohn, a Bohemian-born American writer, shed light on Ahad Ha'Am's thinking about the "Arab problem" for Herzl's movement in "Zion and the Jewish National Idea," published in Menorah Journal, Autumn-Winter 1958. (The journal ceased publication in 1962.) Here's part of what Kohn wrote. Pay close attention to the quotes from Ahad Ha'Am:

In 1891 Ahad Ha-'Am laid his finger on the problem which, for practical and ethical reasons alike, was the fundamental though neglected problem of Zionism in Palestine -- the Arab problem. To the eyes of most Zionists, the land of their forefathers appeared empty, waiting for the return of the dispersed descendants as if history had stood still for two thousand years. From 1891 on Ahad Ha-'Am stressed that Palestine was not only a small land but not an empty one... He pointed out that there was little untilled soil in Palestine, except for stony hills and sand dunes. He warned that the Jewish settlers must under no circumstances arouse the wrath of the natives by ugly actions; must meet them rather in the friendly spirit of respect. "Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the Diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in freedom, and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." That was written in 1891 when the Zionist settlers formed a tiny minority in Palestine. "We think," Ahad Ha-'Am warned, "that the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening around. This is, however, a great error."

This error unfortunately has persisted ever since. Ahad Ha-'Am did not cease to warn against it, not only for the sake of the Arabs but for the sake of Judaism and Zion. He remained faithful to his ethical standards to the end. Twenty years later, on July 9, 1911, he wrote to a friend in Jaffa: "As to the war against the Jews in Palestine, I am a spectator from afar with an aching heart, particularly because of the want of insight and understanding shown on our side to an extreme degree. As a matter of fact, it was evident twenty years ago that the day would come when Arabs would stand up against us." He complained bitterly that the Zionists were unwilling to understand the people of the land to which they came and had learned neither its language or its spirit....

In a letter of November 18, 1913 to Moshe Smilansky, a pioneer settler in Palestine, Ahad Ha-'Am had protested against another form of nationalist boycott proclaimed by the Zionist labor movement in Palestine against the employment of Arab labor, a racial boycott: "Apart from the political danger, I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to men of another people; and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: If it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve 'at the end of time' power in Eretz Israel? If this be the 'Messiah,' I do not wish to see him coming."

Ahad Ha-'Am was in the prophetic tradition not only because he subjected the doings of his own people to ethical standards. He also foresaw, when very few realized it, the ethical dangers threatening Zion.

Ahad Ha-'Am returned to the Arab problem in another letter to Smilansky, written in February, 1914. Smilansky had been bitterly attacked by Palestinian Zionists because he had drawn attention to the Arab problem. Ahad Ha-'Am tried to comfort him by pointing out that the Zionists had not yet awakened to reality. "Therefore they wax angry toward those who remind them that there is still another people in Eretz Israel that has been living there and does not intend at all to leave its place. In the future, when this illusion will have been torn from their hearts and they will look with open eyes upon the reality as it is, they will certainly understand how important this question is and how great is our duty to work for its solution."

...In 1920 (three years after the Balfour Declaration) Ahad Ha-'Am warned against exaggerated Zionist hopes. "The Arab people," he wrote, "regarded by us as nonexistent ever since the beginning of the colonization of Palestine, heard [of the Zionist expectations and plans] and believed that the Jews were coming to drive them from their soil and deal with them at their own will." Such an attitude on the part of his own people seemed to Ahad Ha-'Am unthinkable. In his interpretation of the Balfour Declaration he stressed that the historical right of the Jews in Palestine "does not affect the right of the other inhabitants who are entitled to invoke the right of actual dwelling and their work in the country for many generations. For them, too, the country is a national home, and they have a right to develop national forces to the extent of their ability. This situation makes Palestine the common land of several peoples, each of whom wishes to build its national home there. In such circumstances it is no longer possible that the national home of one of them could be total.... If you build your house in an empty space but in a place where there are also other homes and inhabitants, you are an unrestricted master only inside your own house. Outside the door all the inhabitants are partners, and the management of the whole has to be directed in agreement with the interests of them all."

How different things would have been if the Political Zionists had paid heed to Ahad Ha'am.

Anti-Zionism Is NOT Anti-Semitism

 

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro says what needs to be said -- and he said it two years ago, before the clowns in Congress (Thomas Massey and a few others excepted) decreed otherwise. I have nothing to add.