Highlighting the new forum article in MERIP featuring Neve Gordon, Lynne Segal, Kristian Davis Bailey and Olivia Katbi Smith where Kristian Davis Bailey, co-founder of Black for Palestine, says:
‘It has often been sufficient for Israel’s defenders to merely allege antisemitism in order to marginalize advocates for justice in Palestine. This tactic has worked by representing anti-Jewish racism, and the Nazi Holocaust, as exceptional—hence non-comparable—phenomena. In this way, discussions of antisemitism have been largely separated from other forms of genocide, state-sanctioned violence and bigotry.
As a result, wide gaps have emerged between discussions of anti-Jewish racism, pogroms and genocide and discussions of the African slave trade, European colonial genocides in Africa, the Americas and Australia, as well as the Palestinian Nakba (when Zionist forces expelled the majority of indigenous Palestinians from historic Palestine in 1948) and the violence undertaken during the US-declared “war on terror” since 2001. The injustices inflicted upon Jews have become separated from these other histories, even though they often were intertwined. The exceptionalism of Jewish suffering in turn leads to the justification of Israel’s state violence against Palestinians. From this premise, Palestinians become subject to the particular terms and dynamics of Jewish history, rather than having the agency to narrate their own history in the context of anti-racism and anti-colonialism. The Palestinian struggle becomes annexed and subordinate to Jewish history.
Nonetheless, as the global interconnectedness of racism and colonialism has gained mainstream acceptance among academics and activists, these separations have become harder to maintain. When House Democrats attempted to censure Rep. Omar for her alleged use of antisemitic tropes, for example, activists forced the political establishment to concede that antisemitism is not wholly unique or separate from white supremacy or anti-Muslim bigotry and were compelled to pass a general condemnation of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry rather than a resolution specific to antisemitism.’
Jewish American progressives are falling for the oldest trick in the Zionist playbook: the conflation of Zionism with Judaism. The ultimate victims of this propaganda ploy are always Palestinians.
Sheldon’s Party
Last Sunday, Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) welcomed President of the United States, serial sexual harasser and inspiration to murderous white supremacists worldwide – Donald Trump – as a god.
Members of the audience brandished “Trump”-embroidered Kippahs, enthusiastically clapped at the President’s overt incitement against Rep. Ilhan Omar and swallowed whole his anti-Semitic reference to Benjamin Netanyahu as “your Prime Minister” – a clear suggestion of dual loyalty.
In an act comparable to the ancient Israelites’ worshipping of the Golden Calf, Senator Norm Coleman, who once called Trump: “A bigot. A misogynist. A fraud. A bully,” led a Passover Dayenu chant in which he replaced “God” with “Trump”.
Moses, where art thou?
Still, a drama unfolded during Trump’s speech. Ten members of If Not Now, a nonviolent American Jewish organization aimed at ending US support for the 1967 Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, stood up and chanted in protest: “Jews are here to say, occupation is a plague.”
10 young American Jews disrupted Trump’s speech at the National Jewish Republican Coalition (RJC) Pro-Israel Rally at the Venetian Ballroom in Las Vegas. As soon as Trump began to speak, they stood up and chanted, “Jews are here to say Occupation is a plague. Jews are here to say white nationalism is a plague,” a reference to the 10 plagues remembered in the upcoming Jewish holiday of Passover. They then sang the Hebrew song Olam Chesed Yibaneh, “We Will Build This World With Love” as they were removed from the auditorium.
The Twitterati ask the wrong questions
Progressive American Jewish Twitter was abuzz about Sheldon’s party and If Not Now’s intervention. Several examples:
Yonah Lieberman (@YonahLieberman): Going after both #Birthright and Trump in 24 hours has got the Jewish right using Nazi rhetoric to try and intimidate the new Jewish Future.
Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev): there [sic] is nothing as contemptible to me as a jewish [sic] fascist. Nothing as myopic, as malleable, as cruel and shosrtsighted [sic]
Rafael Shimunov (@RafaelShimunov): Between Sheldon Adelson putting Trump’s name on his kippa [sic], and the @RJC replacing God with Trump in one our holiest prayers as Jews, Republican Jews have officially ______________?
The responses to Shimunov’s quiz included: sold out, Gone meshugganah and embraced extremism, among others.
However, these progressive American Jews do not implicate the real culprit.
In spite of its name and best efforts, the RJC is not a Jewish organization, but a Zionist one. Its members are not “the Jewish right” or “Jewish fascists”, but simply “Zionists”.
Only Zionists would worship an anti-Semite like Trump in return for unconditional support of Israeli apartheid, much like the vast majority of Zionist Israelis who adore Trump within the supposed “Jewish state” itself.
It is not Republican Jews who have “sold out” or have suddenly “embraced extremism”, but Zionists since the very inception of the movement, well before the establishment of the state of Israel and until today. In logical confluence, Neo-Nazis have been inspired by Israel’s policies and the term “white Zionism” has been used to describe the emerging “alt-right” neo-fascistic movement, the very one Trump spearheads.
Yet crucially, Zionist collaboration with anti-Semites and white supremacists crosses the aisle. For it was a Democrat, liberal Zionist Jew – Batya Ungar-Sargon of The Forward – who instigated the fallacious smear campaign against Rep. Ilhan Omar which she then used as a marketing tool to fundraise under the guise of a Jewish vanguard against anti-Semitism.
The conflation of Zionism with Judaism serves to distract from the plight of Palestinians by focusing on a manufactured crisis within the “Jewish community”, downplaying the role of empire and other capitalist supporters of the Zionist project. The distinction between “Jewish” and “Zionist” here is crucial, and one only needs to glance across the pond at the United Kingdom to learn why.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has consistently shown solidarity with Palestinians and conveyed criticism toward Israeli apartheid in tune with socialist ideals, has been hypocritically vilified by Zionists for supposedly tolerating and even inspiring “anti-Semitism” within the Labour Party.
The campaign against Corbyn relies on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) highly controversial and flawed definition of anti-Semitism which in its examples, erroneously and opportunistically conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
What’s more, Jewish party members who support Corbyn and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, such as Jackie Walker, have been abused, suspended and even expelled. Meanwhile, Ella Rose, who was featured in the Al Jazeera documentary ‘The Lobby’ threatening Jackie Walker with physical violence is still a member and was recently elected by the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) as its new “Network officer”.
Much like Ungar-Sargon’s The Forward claim of progressive Judaism yet real loyalty to Zionism, the UK Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) is supposedly affiliated with the UK Labour party supporting “labour values”, yet it is truly a liberal Zionist organization.
It does not require its members to be either Jewish or from the Labour Party, yet has recently passed a no confidence motion of Jeremy Corbyn based on discredited charges of “anti-Semitism”.
The Question
The focus must remain on Zionist criminality. And the only relevant dilemma for progressive American Jews remains – are you a Zionist or an anti-Zionist? As veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy recently wrote: “If you remain a Zionist, you can no longer be of the left; if you’re of the left, you can no longer be a Zionist.”
All those who claim to care about Palestinians, including progressive Jews and organizations such as If Not Now who in their broad umbrella avoid implicating Zionism or directly supporting BDS cannot continue to claim left wing universalist values while simultaneously serving as the “liberal” wing of the apartheid Zionist regime.
Only a consistent and unapologetic anti-Zionist framework is effective and congruent with leftist values.
Parading round the racist spoils,
white settler man groomed
to ignore bantustans,
compassion erased by genocide,
each word sung an arrow of malice
shot by the oppressor into
the hearts of the oppressed,
here is a cave wherein
light does not reach.
November 2017
Shallow Cave decides to play apartheid because he doesn’t like lists, and it’s all about him and his feelings of being silenced and bullied, never mind the cries of oppressed Palestinian people for justice and rights and several generations of colonial bullying by their zionist oppressors. With bitter irony, Cave will now be added by the Israeli hasbara machine to its list of artists which it uses as ammunition to continue its brutalisation and deprivation of Palestinians.
In his press conference statement, Cave complained about feeling cowardly for not playing Israel sooner, yet it is truly the coward’s path to side with power against those who are being crushed by it. Cave exposes his own white settler ideological origins.
“It’s no secret that Israel systematically uses performances by artists to normalise its racist, discriminatory system that oppresses me, my loved ones and every Palestinian.” Palestinian musician Rima Nasir calls on Nick Cave to support the boycott of apartheid Israel, or he’ll be used as a stick by the Israeli regime to beat the oppressed.
Dear @nickcave Are you seeing the refugee camps? The apartheid wall? The illegal colonies stealing land? Can you see besieged Gaza? Why won’t you hear #Palestinians? https://twitter.com/DPAI1/status/931869972854341632
Is @nickcave taking a guided tour with a key ‘Brand Israel’ tourism agency, with a guide who just happens to have been a paratrooper on “the front lines” of major military assaults? https://twitter.com/BFW_IL/status/931853247299678208
“Your claim that somehow we have the ability, or the will to silence you is fallacious, and it rings careless in the face of the fact that Palestinian culture and heritage, along with its people, has been undergoing Israel’s erasure for the past seven decades. So successful was this erasure, that you neglected to mention Palestinians in your own statement, as if they aren’t the reason you felt you had to make the statement in the first place. As if they don’t exist.”
In response, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (a founding organization in the BDS Movement) has released a new statement. “Nick Cave’s performances in Tel Aviv and recent statement are a propaganda gift to Israeli apartheid,” they write. “We thank Nick Cave for making one thing abundantly clear—playing Tel Aviv is never simply about music. It is a political and moral decision to stand with the oppressor against the oppressed.” The independent initiative Artists for Palestine UK also issued a statement to Pitchfork, saying, “Artists for Palestine UK thinks it is Palestinians who are daily humiliated and silenced. It regrets that in a land of injustice, Nick Cave is giving comfort to the unjust.”
