Zionists Are the Real Anti-Semites
In coopting Jewish identity to serve its oppressive ends, Israel and its Zionist supporters display far more anti-Semitism than leftist critics of "the only democracy in the Middle East."
Anyone who has so much as lightly criticized Israel in the past has at some point been labelled an anti-Semite. This is another example of the right’s tendency to engage in exactly the kind of tactics they accuse leftists of favoring, an ironic form of political correctness that takes on a darker character when used to justify oppression instead of inclusion. There are of course anti-Semitic critics of Israel (anti-Semitism is on the rise throughout the world, partly due to Israel’s association of itself with Jewish identity), but leftist criticism by definition precludes any connection with such an ideology of hate. The tendency of Zionists to accuse their opponents of anti-Semitism in an attempt to muddy the waters and consolidate the two very different sources of criticism devalues and increases the very real danger still faced by Jewish populations throughout the world and calls into question its justification for existing as a safe sanctuary for a persecuted people. The argument goes: given that Israel exists in order to protect its Jewish residents from further prejudice (and no other possible reason can exist), anyone criticizing not only the parameters of its existence but its subsequent actions undertaken for “security” must therefore be motivated by hatred.
The case of the most recent victim of this smear, the recently deceased Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is an especially vivid example of the general unwieldiness of the accusation. From Newsweek, about Alan Dershowitz’s reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s passing:
But Dershowitz, an attorney and Harvard law professor, took a moment during an interview on Fox News to decry such tributes.
"I hope you don't mind if I do this," he began. "The world is mourning Bishop Tutu, who just died the other day. Can I remind the world that although he did some good things, a lot of good things on apartheid, the man was a rampant anti-Semite and bigot?"
Dershowitz went on to claim that Tutu had minimized the Holocaust and "compared Israel to Nazi Germany."
He added: "When we're tearing down statues of Jefferson and Lincoln and Washington, let's not build statues to a deeply, deeply flawed man like Bishop Tutu. Let's make sure that history remembers both the goods he did and the awful, awful bads that he did as well."
Tutu was an outspoken critic of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians and endorsed the Palestinian-led boycott movement against Israel, but Dershowitz told Newsweek his remarks stemmed from Tutu's "criticism of Jews."
Setting aside the contradiction between Dershowitz’s claims that Tutu “compared Israel to Nazi Germany” and his subsequent insistence that his accusation was based on his comments about Jews rather than Israel (this false equivalence is a major part of the Zionist ideology), it is worth looking at the Archbishop’s actual words about Israel and the Jewish people as a test case. The first result from a Google search for his Holocaust remarks comes from the site of the questionably named Anti-Defamation League (one of the biggest users of the anti-Semitism smear), who calls his statement “shocking.” Tutu said:
The Jewish Holocaust, engineered and implemented primarily by Europeans, gave some ideologues within the Jewish and Christian community an excuse to implement plans that were in the making for at least 50 years, under the rubric of exceptional Jewish security. In this way began the immense oppression of the Palestinian people, who were not at all involved in the Holocaust. Not only is this group of people being oppressed more than the apartheid ideologues could ever dream about in South Africa, their very identity and history are being denied and obfuscated. What is worse, is that Europe and the USA are refusing to take responsibility for their actions with regard to both the Holocaust and the over-empowering of the Israelis, their disregard for the international conventions and regulatory framework of the nuclear industry and their continued oppression of the Palestinian people.
Nothing in Tutu’s words are prejudiced or inaccurate. The creation of the state of Israel was piecemeal and predated the Holocaust by decades, as Alison Weir writes in her immaculately-sourced 2014 book detailing the history of its creation, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of how the U.S. was Used to Create Israel. The real story of the creation and expansion of the state of Israel has little to do with persecution or security and much more to do with cynical political maneuvering, fundamentalist religious ideology, influence peddling, Western business interests, and preparation for the organized mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes (which included many vicious massacres and other abuses). Weir cites many direct quotes from primary sources and the memoirs of those involved directly in the mid-20th century machinations:
Israeli Historian Tom Segev writes, “Everyone wondered how the persecution of Jews in Germany would affect life in Palestine.” While papers predicted “loss and ruin beyond repair” and described a “dance of death” in Berlin, “they expected that ‘the hour of trouble and anguish’ would open unprecedented historical opportunities—specifically, increased immigration to Palestine. Ben-Gurion hoped the Nazis’ victory would become ‘a fertile force’ for Zionism.”
Historians have documented that Zionists sabotaged efforts to find safe havens for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in order to convince the world that Jews could only be safe in a Jewish state. (page 29)
The passing of the partition resolution in November 1947 triggered the violence that State Department and Pentagon analysts had predicted and for which Zionists had been preparing. There were at least 33 massacres of Palestinian villages, half of them before a single Arab army joined the conflict. Zionist forces were better equipped and had more men under arms than their opponents and by the end of Israel’s “War of Independence” over 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were ruthlessly expelled. Zionists had succeeded in the first half of their goal: Israel, the self-described Jewish State, had come into existence.
…
One Palestinian woman testified that a man shot her nine-month-pregnant sister and then cut her stomach open with a butcher knife.
One of the better-documented massacres occurred in a small, neutral Palestinian village called Deir Yassin in April 1948 - before any Arab armies had joined the war. A Swiss Red Cross representative was one of the first to arrive on the scene, where he found 254 dead, including 145 women, 35 of them pregnant. (page 58-59)
However, certain right-wing Zionists had sought this army [a “Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews,” an Allies-created Jewish militia that would join the fight against the Nazis] even before the Nazi holocaust began, and some analysts argue it was a plan with a mixed agenda. Historian William Rubinstein writes, “It is rather difficult to believe that Bergson’s implausible proposal did not have far more to do with creating the nucleus of a Jewish Palestinian force, to be used against the British and the Arabs, then with saving Europe’s Jews from the Nazis.”
One supporter, best-selling author Pierre van Paassen, resigned when he learned that various Delegation-spawned “committees” to save Jews were all being run by the same small group, and that they were tied to horrific terrorist actions in Palestine.
He declared that he did not believe they had the means or intention to truly save Jews from the Nazis, writing: “To speak bluntly, that ‘Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe’ is a hoax, in my judgment a very cruel hoax perpetrated on the American public, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.” (page 65)
If the Archbishop’s remarks could be considered anti-Semitic for “minimizing” the Holocaust, then what must the ADL consider actual Zionists, who not only used Jewish identity to forward a self-serving political goal, but actually sacrificed Jewish lives in order to drum up sympathy for the creation of Israel? Chris McGreal writes in The Guardian that it was the effectiveness and weight of Tutu’s criticism of Israel that angered Zionists, not his innocent and harmless references to the Jewish people:
Dershowitz accused Tutu of minimising the Holocaust and of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany – an extreme interpretation of the former archbishop’s statements that takes some convolutions to reach.
But Tutu’s real crime in the eyes of Israel’s most unrelenting supporters was to liken its rule over the Palestinians to apartheid and then refuse to back off in the face of an onslaught of abuse. On his visits to Israel and Palestine, Tutu would have immediately recognised echoes of his homeland in the forced removals, the house demolitions, the humiliations of checkpoints and systems of control on movement, the confiscation of land for Jewish settlements, and the confining of Palestinians to blobs of territory, reminiscent of the Bantustan black homelands. Above all he saw one people controlling another who, like black South Africans until 1994, had little say in their governance.
Tutu was not alone in his view. Former US president Jimmy Carter drew similarly vitriolic accusations from Dershowitz and others when he published his bestselling book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in 2006. But Tutu was harder to attack. He not only had the authority of a Nobel peace prize awarded for his courageous stand against white rule in South Africa but he knew apartheid when he saw it.
Nearly two decades ago Tutu told a conference in Boston: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
A few years later he was even more direct. “I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed,” he wrote in 2014 in a call for the Presbyterian general assembly in the US to back sanctions against Israel.
The formation of Israel was not about protecting Jews, and its subsequent apartheid policies, encouragement of settler encroachment and violence, and economic warfare against Palestinians are not being undertaken with the goal of protecting its citizens. In 2019, then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this fact plain: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but is “only of the Jewish people.” This statement, combined with a history of racism and oppression, refute the idea that all facets of Israel’s existence are necessary for the protection of the Jewish people. In order for Israel to claim otherwise, its adherents would need to show that its actions were motivated by self-defense: whatever the regrettable circumstances of its creation, now that the state of Israel exists and identifies itself as the equivalent of the Jewish people, questioning its right to self-defense would surely be an act of anti-Semitism.
This is not the case, and examples of Israel’s more recent brutality abound. One such instance occurred in 2010, when the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was intercepted by Israeli military forces in international waters as several boats attempted to cross Israel’s questionably legal, humanitarian crisis-inducing blockade of the Gaza Strip to bring supplies and humanitarian aid to millions of suffering Gazans. The blockade was an example of collective punishment, a method of crackdown favored by apartheid regimes. On one of the boats (the Mavi Marmara), nine activists were killed after they resisted the military’s attack. Members of the Israeli government called the blockade and interception justified, arguing that it was done in self-defense. This is Israel’s “War on Terror” justification: it is constantly under attack from what it calls existential threats (from Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, or al Qaeda, to which it initially alleged several of the protesters belonged) much like the ethereal threat of terrorism justified anything the Bush and Obama administrations wished to do. This alleged constant threat is used to justify everything from territorial expansion to collective punishment to violence against civilians, with Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Oren even comparing the raid to the fight against Nazi Germany. Echoing this, Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz that the Israeli public quickly accepted the self-defense rationalization: “The troops slid from helicopters into a violent crowd, which attacked them with sticks. It’s no wonder the troops opened fire in self-defense.”
This wording is curious, and immediately begs the question: even accepting that the crowd was immediately and preemptively violent toward the soldiers (itself a piece of propaganda), is it possible to practice self-defense while descending armed and aggressively from a military helicopter onto a civilian boat in international waters (firing live rounds before even boarding the ship)? Harel clarifies, bemoaning the fact that Israel should have examined alternatives and instead “walked straight into the trap that the flotilla organizers set,” as if the plan all along was to sacrifice passengers to harm Israel’s image. From The Christian Science Monitor’s dissection of videos depicting the event:
Despite these videos, Stephen Walt of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs says it will be difficult for Israel to paint itself as a victim. "When well-armed commandos board a vessel by force, they shouldn’t be surprised if they are met with resistance," he says. "The fact that there was resistance in no way exonerates the Israeli forces from what they did."
"It was simply foolish to have attacked the flotilla in international waters and with such a trigger-happy approach," Mr. Walt says. "They almost certainly did not intend to kill 10 to 20 people, but they clearly acted in a way that made that happen relatively quickly."
In response, the Free Gaza Movement tweeted: "Israeli spin. Video showing weapons on board to be sling shots and marbles. Injured are more likely the passengers since no faces are seen." Another tweet from the Free Gaza Movement read: "Israel cannot confiscate every bit of footage, every piece of tape. They cannot tape our mouths shut as we tell the story of their attack."
More perniciously, the assumption that the organizers expected possible violence and were therefore at fault for any violence that occurred can be twisted into the necessary rhetorical component to justify any massacre: if the protestors knew they could be harmed, then any harm suffered must be their fault. This viewpoint was made explicit by the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand, who said “I want to stress that all casualties are the responsibility of the organizers of the flotilla. The flotilla was warned in advance that they won't be allowed to continue their trip; however, they insisted on trying to break the blockade.”
Whether the protestors could or should have known that the likely result would be victimization at the hands of the IDF, the eventual realization of that outcome is not morally justified. A shopkeeper may warn his customers that the punishment for shoplifting is death, but this would not entitle them to make good on those threats when a shoplifter attempts to make off with a pack of gum. The commandos were neither forces of nature nor wild animals; they remained human throughout the operation. The ensuing violence is the fault of neither the protestors nor the organizers (unless they misled the protestors about the level of danger they faced), but that of the IDF. Indeed, the known likelihood of violence is worse for them, because it shows that the violent raid was pre-planned and deliberate. They can no longer plead manslaughter, because here is the evidence of malice aforethought (and their subsequent abuse of the detained protestors and destruction of footage of the incident does not help their case). Years later, the Israeli government would agree to pay $6 million to Turkish victims of the raid. Another humanitarian aid boat by the name of Marianne was later intercepted in 2014, during which the IDF used tasers against the unarmed protesters. Millions of people in Gaza continue to suffer and die.
Autopsy results have revealed that nine activists on the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of thirty times at close range, several from behind. Is it possible to have defensively shot someone four times in the head? Is it possible to have defensively shot a civilian in the back? Self-defense takes many forms, but none of them resemble the sort of executions described independently by the ship’s passengers. Yet the commando who shot six of the nine protesters was rewarded with consideration for a medal of valor, and this failure to punish the preemptive, gratuitous violence of its forces is nothing new for Israel; its compulsory military service is also effective at stifling dissent and ensuring that all its citizens are fully bloodstained and tarnished by the government’s warlike nature.
It is in fact the Palestinians who are practicing self-defense by resisting the decades-long bloody encroachments by the Israeli state. The self-defense rationale for maintaining the blockade and prohibiting the flotilla from breaking it is in this sense also wanting: a humanitarian crisis persists in Gaza largely due to the blockade, despite Israel’s denial of this fact. The flotilla’s mission was unquestionably a just one, an attempt to alleviate the vast suffering engendered by an unreasonable embargo on construction materials, foodstuffs, and even toys (the cruelty is the point), in addition to decades of economic oppression in the name of expansion and racism (as of 2007, three quarters of Jewish Israeli youths considered Arabs “unclean”).
Israel’s history can be summed up by this false application of self-defense. It acquired territory in wars which, although allegedly defensive in nature, had been expansionist since its creation. It is also not in the nature of its defense forces to act morally, as proved the Goldstone Report and countless other subsequent developments (for example, the IDF used human shields throughout its existence, then appealed a supreme court ruling against their use in 2005). In Operation Cast Lead, a 2008 IDF mobilization in the Gaza Strip in which 100 times more Palestinians died than Israelis, it was revealed that IDF soldiers were told to open fire on rescuers:
"Rules of Engagement: Open fire also upon rescue," was handwritten in Hebrew on a sheet of paper found in one of the Palestinian homes the Israel Defense Forces took over during Operation Cast Lead. A reservist officer who did not take part in the Gaza offensive believes that the note is part of orders a low-level commander wrote before giving his soldiers their daily briefing.
One of the main themes in news reports during the Gaza operation, and which appears in many testimonies, is that IDF soldiers shot at Palestinian and Red Cross rescuers, making it impossible to evacuate the wounded and dead. As a result, an unknown number of Palestinians bled to death as others cowered in their homes for days without medical treatment, waiting to be rescued.
The bodies of the dead lay outside the homes or on roadsides for days, sometimes as long as two weeks. Haaretz has reported a number of such cases, some of them as they happened. The document found in the house provides written proof that IDF commanders ordered their troops to shoot at rescuers.
There are two rational tests for determining whether an action can be considered self-defense:
Is there an alternative to violence? If violence is unnecessary to ameliorate the risk, and this can be reasonably assumed to be known by the party under attack, then any violence cannot be described as necessary, but rather gratuitous.
Does the violent action ameliorate the risk? It is important to note that the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel pass this test, because they resist a violent action (collective punishment or in the case of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s own ceasefire violation) and the Gazans have no other choice to fight back. The rocket attacks also alert the rest of the world to the Gazans’ desperate situation; that the rest of the world does not care enough to intercede with justified force against the blockade reduces the rockets’ effectiveness at ameliorating the threat and invites further oppression, but this is not the fault of the Gazans—it is the fault of the watchers who do nothing to help and instead facilitate Israel’s butchery.
In the same way that foreknowledge of possible violence did not justify that which was inflicted on the flotilla protesters, the many disproportionate reprisals and collective punishments meted out upon the Gazans are not justified by earlier Israeli warnings, despite the common knowledge that even a few rockets fired into Israel can bring down butchery on the level of Cast Lead or the more recent 2021 war also started by Israel. This is especially true for the rocket attacks, which were often being undertaken only sporadically and by splinter groups, neither by Hamas nor any other representative of the people. If we are to take the Zionists at their word and equate Israel with Judaism, then the millions of victims it has created would by definition become anti-Semites. Similarly, observers in other countries who see what Israel has done but lack the education or discernment to rise above its propaganda fully would doubtlessly be convinced that “Jews,” rather than a subset of Israeli Jews specifically, are behind the oppression. Indeed, anti-Semitism in the world has only risen as Israel has become more secure, more powerful, more influential, and more racist. Only the keenest observers know that despite its claims, Israel and the Jewish people are distinct—there in fact many Jews in Israel and abroad who stridently oppose Israel’s apartheid policies, though it could be argued that they are all self-hating or blinkered in some other way (though this assumption is so broad as to be useless, as it could apply to anyone anywhere for any reason). The world is not populated by keen observers, and this sad fact is only going to become more apparent in the future. The move to associate Israel with the Jewish people must be vehemently opposed.
There is nothing in Israel’s history that could be considered self-defense, and it is not anti-Semitic to point this out—its actions are instead motivated by expansionism, avarice, racism, religious fundamentalism (nothing unique to Judaism), and paranoia. It may seem unnecessary or patronizing to engage with such lazy, facile accusations (Dershowitz himself is notably disgraced), but they are both startlingly common and highly-placed in American politics (AIPAC and the well-known powerfully connected Israel lobby). Israel and its defenders are another part of the clown-like, deliberately overexaggerated conservative movement in American politics which cares little about consistency or truth, only about loudly and ignorantly shutting down debate. When questions are asked and the answers examined, rightist movements inevitably lose, and accusations of anti-Semitism are a quick way to prevent further discussion and a surprisingly effective one among cowardly Democrats. The response to these accusations shouldn’t be an attempt to prove that one is not in actuality anti-Semitic (a negative being impossible to prove) but to point out that the greatest enemy of the Jewish people, behind only Nazis, is the state of Israel.