MAY 2024 ANTI-SEMITISM
The Shameful History of Anti-Zionist Jews
Nearly a century of excusing away the slaughter of their co-religionists
by Harvey Klehr and David Evanier
In the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal massacre of more than 1,200 people and imprisonment of 200 hostages in southern Israel on October 7, many American Jews and their friends have been shocked by the silence, or in other cases, implicit or vocal support for Hamas from humanitarian organizations and progressive individuals they assumed would condemn the wanton killings and beheadings of civilians and rape and sexual torture of women.
Even more disconcerting has been the presence of Jews among them. As the Internet exploded with anti-Semitic language and as physical assaults on Jews and Jewish institutions became commonplace, the phenomenon of Jews on the left prominently aligning themselves with open anti-Semites has evoked angst and despair in the mainstream Jewish community. It has also provided cover for anti-Semites eager to distance themselves from the charge that their hostility to Israel is in any way related to anti-Semitism.
Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and If Not Now have played prominent roles in demonstrations targeting Israel and its supporters in the United States. JVP casts its opposition to Zionism as a consequence of its love “for Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism.” It issued a statement on October 7 expressing regret about the loss of life on both sides. It added, however, that “Israeli apartheid and occupation—and United States complicity in that oppression—are the source of all this violence.” The statement made numerous demands on America and Israel, but none—including freeing the hostages—on Hamas.
That is the norm for JVP. It has frequently claimed that “the right to resist colonization is enshrined in international law,” a position that has led the organization to refer to itself as “the Jewish wing of the Palestinian solidarity movement” and to insist that Israel does not have a right to self-defense. One of its most prominent figures, queer theorist Judith Butler, who did condemn without qualification the violence committed by Hamas on October 7, still insisted, “It’s not an anti-Semitic attack, it was an attack against Israelis,” an “act of armed resistance.” JVP has also campaigned on behalf of terrorists convicted in Israel.
JVP sees anti-Semitism emanating only from the political right. It has refused to condemn Louis Farrakhan, defended the exclusion of Jewish lesbians from a woman’s march because they carried Israeli flags, defended Jeremy Corbyn from charges that he enabled anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party, and denounced Israeli tolerance for gays and lesbians as “pinkwashing.” While accusing Israel of genocide, it ignores the calls for genocide in the Hamas charter and the ethnic cleansing of Mizrachi Jews from Arab countries.
Jewish Voice for Peace stands in solidarity with those either indifferent to Jewish lives or actively hostile to them. It is remarkably insouciant about the consequences for Jews if Israel were to be replaced by a Palestinian-dominated state. Judith Butler, for example, has envisaged a single state inhabited by Jews and Palestinians who have surrendered their national identities in favor of binational identities, an indication of just how divorced from reality utopian fantasy can be. Others exalt a diasporic Judaism that supposedly has eschewed all attributes of power. A few even suggest that Israelis return to their native countries, indifferent to what awaits Jews who repatriate to Russia or Iran or Syria or Ethiopia.
Gabriel Winant, a professor at the University of Chicago and an editor of Dissent, a socialist magazine, cited McCarthyism to explain why there was unfair criticism of Hamas. Those who invoke the monstrous crimes against Israelis on October 7 and after—claims that Winant believes are “dubious”—“are participating, presumably without intent, in a new Red Scare…against all who defend the right of Palestinians to live and to live as equals.” Writing “as a Jew,” Winant advises his co-religionists that “the genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true.”
Winant fantasizes that Jews might use mourning rituals to disassociate themselves from Israel: “It is a high threshold—and right now, perhaps implausible—to imagine that every shiva might become an occasion to curse the state that has made Jews, of all people, into génocidaires. Nonetheless, it is the one that must be met by we Jews who wish to keep fidelity with the full meaning of ‘never again.’”
Thus, the Jewish determination not to stand by idly while Jews are massacred is transformed, by a man invoking his Judaism, into a call for Jews to abandon the state of Israel and refuse to mourn Jews massacred in a pogrom. And not only to abandon Israel, but to curse it and fight to destroy it.
Who are these people? What is motivating such thinking, such talk, such bile?
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It Can Happen Again, In Fact It Is
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Originally Posted by Kathianne
