Let’s have a frank talk about Israeli oppression and antisemitism
The dam is breaking.
It has been seven years since Operation Protective Edge — the obscenity in which Israel’s merciless bombardment of Gaza killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, more than 500 of them children.
Frankly, they have been seven lean years in which progress in that struggle seemed demoralizingly difficult: more of the same slow, steady ethnic cleansing, discrimination and oppression of Palestinians wherever they live in the Land between the River and the Sea – more discriminatory laws like the Basic Jewish Nation State law; unequal provision of water, education, health and other public resources; expanding Jewish-only settlements; more Palestinian evictions and home demolitions; more killing and maiming of unarmed Palestinian protesters; ever-increasing right-wing politics and comfort with this matrix of control in Israel; and continued financial, moral, religious and cultural support for the oppression in and by the United States and established elements of the American Jewish and evangelical Christian communities.
Perhaps most demoralizing of all was the continuing capture and control of the narrative – the “Occupation of the American Mind” — by Israeli hasbara that has mischaracterized the facts on the ground over there for my entire lifetime and resulted in the marginalization and silencing of Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices by the mainstream media, the Israel lobby, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the cacophony of “pro-Israel” supporters who together have made Palestinians out to be terrorists and their Israeli oppressors victims; when in fact, the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance. It has been a remarkable feat of propaganda and narrative control to carry out these crimes against humanity and slowly but inexorably Judaicizing the Land, pretending to be yearning for a two-state solution while deliberately taking steps to kill any prospect of it. The hasbara has seemed as impenetrable as the Apartheid system it supports.
But starting early this year, the narrative dam started to crack. B’Tselem issued its “Apartheid” report, followed by the Human Rights Watch report to the same effect. By the time of its publication, the New York Times, newly-woke, with a new Jerusalem bureau chief and apparently new editorial policies about Israel-Palestine, put the A-word on page 1. Other mainstream media followed the Times’s lead. Then there was sympathetic coverage of the home evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and the Israeli provocations in and around Al Aqsa. When Netanyahu’s “Wag the Dog” war against Gaza promised a repeat of Protective Edge, this time Israel’s brutal, disproportionate destruction of civilian lives and property was covered and laid bare, forcing the Biden Administration to rouse itself to push for a ceasefire earlier than the Israeli Government wanted. This thankfully limited Palestinian deaths to “only” 65 kids rather than 500. And two days ago, on the front page of the Times, I saw something I have never seen in more than 60 years of reading the paper, and never thought I would see: in addition to the two Israeli children killed by Hamas rockets, 62 faces of the Palestinian children – some as young as six months, two, four and five years — slaughtered by Israeli warplanes and munitions, some of which were made right here in America and purchased by Israel with our Benjamins, knowing part of it will inevitably be used just as it was. And inside was a two-page spread not only describing these children and their dreams and nightmares but also reporting that they were killed “when Israeli warplanes hit homes and residential neighborhoods, [where] the number of children at risk is extraordinary. Sometimes nearly entire households disappear with a single blast.” In other words, the Israelis knew what they were doing when they killed scores of innocent children, like the hundreds they killed seven years ago.
And it is not just the reporting. The opinion pages have opened to Palestinians and their advocates. Just this week Times readers read a rip-roaring column by Palestinian human rights lawyer Diane Buttu, while Peter Beinart, of all people — a critic of Zionism — is now an occasional columnist for the Times, most recently writing in favor of the right of return for Palestinians! While Nicholas Kristof, who for decades has taken on the cause of human rights victims the world over but maintained a both-sides-have-their-complaints posture toward Palestinians, wrote two columns earlier this month suggesting that there might be better uses for the $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel every year, and that the “unshakable” alliance between Israel and U.S. might properly be shaking since Israel “systematically discriminates against Palestinians in the occupied territories and seems to think it can indefinitely control them and grab their land and water without giving them voting rights.”
This break in the dam at the Times – and at NBC, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central and elsewhere – has potentially huge implications for the struggle if the river waters released continue to run free, and I believe they will, thanks to forces as disparate as former President Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump demonstrated how important it is to the very maintenance of democratic government for the news media to report the true facts, rather than what two sides say about it. Our collective ability to distinguish truth from hasbara has atrophied, and that has not only disadvantaged Palestinians, but also the weak and marginalized in our own society. BLM and the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, against police racism, violence and impunity, have highlighted parallels between the racism and caste in Israel Palestine and here at home. Influencers like Trevor Noah and John Oliver now have more freedom to report or comment candidly on the brutality of Israeli Apartheid and the suffering humanity of Palestinians, and more will follow, here and around the globe. More Palestinian voices will be heard in the mainstream media. More American and other Christians will overcome their reluctance to criticize the Apartheid conditions that have caused the Christian population of the Holy Land to decline from 11% to less than 1% — a reluctance born of centuries of antisemitism and a disinclination to offend their Jewish brothers and sisters. As the trauma of the Holocaust and the conflation of Judaism with Israel diminishes, more Jews will overcome their tribal instincts and instead honor their democratic principles and Jewish religious and moral precepts that make a shonda of the edifice of Jewish supremacy upon which the Jewish State is built.
This is how the struggle against South African Apartheid was won. The realization by enough people here and around the world that the Israeli oppression of Palestinians is not right and can no longer be tolerated will ultimately be reflected in the policies of their governments, and the BDS which Palestinians have yearned for, and for which their supporters like Jewish Voice for Peace, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, American Muslims for Palestine, and Students for Justice in Palestine have advocated, will gain more adherents. Israel and AIPAC fear that prospect far more than Hamas rockets,
Just this week we saw the first evidence that the next seven years may be fat ones that bear fruit. The Dail, the Irish Parliament, voted unanimously to condemn Israel’s ongoing settlement expansion as “de facto annexation” of Palestinian territory. That is 160 elected representatives, all voting to make Ireland the first European nation to officially condemn Israel. The Irish foreign minister stated that we are at “a point where we need to be honest about what is actually happening on the ground.”
That has always been the battle: to break through the disinformation, the falsehoods, and to get the world, America, and the Jewish people to focus honestly on the true facts of Palestinian life on the ground under Jewish rule. How threatening this initial breakthrough is to those opposed to such discussion is obvious from their responses, like Abe Foxman’s calling the Times’s placement on the front page of photos of dead Palestinian as well as Israeli children an antisemitic “blood libel” and announcing he is cancelling his subscription which, like mine, goes back 65 years.
A prime obstacle to the honest discussion of the Palestinian plight we seek has been the misuse of antisemitism as a weapon against Palestinians and their advocates, Jewish and Gentile. It is therefore critical, as we go forward, to have an honest discussion about antisemitism, what it is, what it is not, and what needs to be done to minimize it.
Real antisemitism is hideous. It is hostility or prejudice against Jews because they are Jews. When a Jewish man is confronted, challenged or physically attacked on the street because he wears a yarmulke, or payos, he is being confronted, challenged or attacked by an antisemite. The attacker does not know whether the Jew is a supporter or critic of Israeli policy, whether he is a Zionist, a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist, or whether he has supported or spoken out against Israeli policies or the oppression of Palestinians. Real antisemitism, or Jewphobia, is as vicious as Islamophobia, homophobia, or any of the other discrimination or hatreds of members of a group because they are members of that group. This is to be abhorred and opposed wherever we find it. All physical assaults, whether against persons or property, are crimes and should be prosecuted.
But we Jews have a responsibility to talk honestly about antisemitism, and the roots and causes of the seeming rise in it today. First, we must acknowledge that members of our tribe have used it as a weapon to tamp down and silence critics of Israel and its policies on Palestinians. Those of us who publicly criticize Israeli policies as unjust and intolerable are not antisemites, but the fear of being labelled as such has silenced many of all faiths who have been troubled by the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Like the boy who cried wolf, those who affix the antisemitism label to these critics for tactical purposes may find that the benefits diminish as the cry “antisemite” loses its sting as well as society’s response to it. This may already be starting to happen, and the practice of defending Israeli policies and attacking Israeli critics with the antisemite label should cease forthwith. Let’s confine our fire to real antisemites, many of whom are Israel’s strongest supporters.
There is another aspect of the antisemitism discussion that needs more honest reflection. When we discuss what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, or as some prefer, the “conflict,” we always characterize it as a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. We say “Israeli policy toward the Palestinians,” or “Israeli oppression of or discrimination against the Palestinians.” I have done it myself in this column repeatedly to illustrate the practice, as you can see from the paragraphs above.
But if we are going to speak the truth, frankly, without fear or favor, we have to acknowledge that 20% of Israelis within the Green Line are Palestinian. They are not in conflict with Palestinians. They are not discriminating against Palestinians. They are not oppressing Palestinians. It is, I am sorry to say, Israeli Jews who are the perpetrators of the oppression. The Israeli government is, by preference and design, a Jewish government. Its actions have the overwhelming support of the Jews who have constructed and maintained their “democracy” for themselves. It is a government and nation of, by and for Jews. If there was any doubt about it, the adoption of the Basic Jewish Nation State Law recently made that crystal clear. It made Jewish supremacy the Basic Law – the Supreme Law – of the Land, deliberately, unapologetically, for all the world to see. As Netanyahu said at its passage,
This is our state — the Jewish state. In recent years, there have been some who have attempted to put this in doubt, to undercut the core of our being. Today, we made it law: This is our nation, language, and flag.
The Palestinian oppression is therefore a Jewish shonda. And were it not for the fear that speaking the truth might stoke hostility toward Jews among the oppressed or those who feel allied with the oppressed, that oppression would more properly be described not as an Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but as a Jewish oppression of Palestinians, especially since for so long it has had the overwhelming financial, political, cultural moral and religious support of world Jewry.
I say this as one of the growing number of fervent Jewish objectors to it. With my advocacy of Palestinian liberation, I do what I can to separate myself from this shonda and to reject the claim of Israeli politicians to speak and act in the name of the Jewish people everywhere. But it is and has always been foreseeable, as we lawyers say, that Palestinians and their allies would naturally perceive their oppressors to be Jews, writ large, there and round the world.
When you are killing and maiming Palestinians, ethnically cleansing and depriving them of their rights and dignity, annihilating them culturally if not physically, it is quite rich to demand that they maintain the presence of mind, moral decency and nuance to confine their anger to those Jews actively oppressing them, and those Jews who actively facilitate, finance and support the oppression. Yet most Palestinians I have met, in the West Bank as well as the United States, have retained that decency and nuance. That is to their grace and our benefit. It is, however, a lot to ask, and it is a grace that may not last while the Israeli knee remains on the Palestinian neck.
Accordingly, the best way to minimize antisemitic attacks going forward is to acknowledge the Apartheid crimes against humanity imposed on the Palestinians, to end those crimes as soon as possible, and to provide adequate reparations and reconstruction to the victims.
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/lets-have-a-frank-talk-about-israeli-oppression-and-antisemitism/
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