Shocker: ‘NYT’ forum on anti-Zionism tilts toward equating Zionism with racism

Our website is 10 years old last month and I’ve always said the New York Times could put us out of business if it would just do the obvious journalism of the Israel/Palestine question. Today the newspaper takes a step in that direction: it has published a forum (spurred by the California Regents blunder) on the question, “Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?”

It is a good thing to have the term “anti-Zionism” mainstreamed. Though in fact the title is wrong. Based on what follows, the forum should have been titled, “Is Zionism bigoted?”

That’s the shocking news, three of the five pieces are anti-Zionist or at least seek to create space for anti-Zionism. Two of them state that Zionism is racism.

It is a stunning thing to read Omar Zahzah’s piece in the forum. “Zionism Justifies Discrimination and Oppression.” I don’t think I’ve seen such a bald description of the Nakba and the right of return in any composition that the paper itself commissioned.

There are two Zionist pieces, by Daniel Gordis, an Israeli rightwinger, and Benjamin Gladstone, a Brown student who says the criticisms of Israel are disproportionate. (And: “Jews are as entitled to a self-liberation and self-empowerment movement as any other people…”)

The hits. Sherene Seikaly of UC Santa Barbara and Jadaliyya has these good observations in a piece titled “Anti-Zionism Can and Should Be Anti-Racism”:

Zionism is a national political movement that began in the late 19th century as a response to anti-Semitism. Zionism was neither the only Jewish response to anti-Semitism nor the most popular until the Nazi persecution of Jews began in the 1930s..

Palestinian self-determination is a crucial step in ending the logic of racialization and civilizational hierarchy that produced anti-Semitism and genocide. This logic measures Palestinian life as less valuable than Israeli life. To say otherwise is to suggest that standing up for Palestinian rights is somehow anti-Jewish. Critiquing this logic is a moral responsibility.

Lisa Goldman seeks to make space for anti-Zionism; and makes these pertinent statements:

The most important element is neither God nor religion but the Holocaust, with its heavy legacy of trans-generational trauma. The lesson of the genocide, many believe, is that Jews need a safe haven. A state of one’s own.

In America, even regular participants in synagogue life can profess atheism or strongly criticize Israel’s policies. But openly identifying as a non-Zionist is anathema to Jewish communal life.

(Though she justifies American Jewish anti-Zionism by saying there are Israeli Jewish anti-Zionists. I’ve never based my politics on some foreign country’s.)

Finally, Omar Zahzah’s piece. “Zionism Justifies Discrimination and Oppression.” Make way for Palestinians! A graduate student at UCLA, Zahzah begins by describing the establishment of Israel as a time of ethnic cleansing, and links to the Nakba page of the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

My relatives were among the Palestinians displaced. They did not deserve to be expelled from their homes, nor do any of the Palestinians who are still being uprooted because of Israeli government policies.

Anti-Zionism is a principled anti-racist position. The notion that there should be freedom and self-determination for Palestinians leads me to call on Israel to respect the United Nations mandated right of return for forcibly displaced refugees and their families. It is my conviction of equality that compels me to speak out against Israeli apartheid, with over 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel and render them second-class citizens…

Just as we speak out about other forms of racism, those of us who oppose the discriminatory practices of the Israeli state must likewise oppose Zionism as the modern ideology that justifies these practices.

The New York Times has been ravished by Zionists for years, from Judy Miller to David Brooks to Bill Kristol to Roger Cohen to Jodi Rudoren. This forum is another clear sign of the Zionist crisis, and of the mainstream inclusion of Palestinian solidarity voices. Zahzah is the clear leader in this forum. (Not long ago I wrote that the conflict won’t end until American Jews sign up to the statement, “Zionism is racism.” This forum suggests that I wasn’t smoking weed when I said so.)

 

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RE: “Finally, Omar Zahzah’s piece. “Zionism Justifies Discrimination and Oppression.” Make way for Palestinians!” — Sherene Seikaly is Palestinian…

Remember 2009-2011? During those years, the NYT took bold steps towards saying what had to be said, only to retreat into bigoted Jewish supremacism. Jodi Rudoren’s fawning portrayals of IDF generals ruling over a colonised population and her dismissals of Palestinians as “ho-hum” about the death of their children was the logical conclusion of the years that followed 2009-2011.

We may now see the temporary reverse of shoot-and-cry Zionism, only for it to re-emerge as Clinton enters the WH and breaths life into the dead ghost of the 2SS. The puppetshow must then be re-enacted, and the NYT knows what role it has to play in order to defend Jewish Apartheid.

Watch for the NYT to denounce any truthteller as a bigoted extremist for failing to be sufficienctly supportive of the Jewish Apartheid project in Israel.

In the long run, I am an optimist. But let us not exonerate the NYT for its staunch and consistent support of Zionism, even when it was obvious to everyone of the deep racism and brutal colonialism that was apparent to anyone on the ground. The NYT wasn’t oblivious, it was actively covering up the crime out of ideological reasons, it’s a heavily Jewish paper and Zionism is seeped in American-Jewish culture.

That institutional failure to rid itself of its racism has to be remembered and the NYT has to be held accountable. It never wavered on civil rights. It never trembled on Christian Apartheid in South Africa. So why did it defend Jewish Apartheid until the bitter end?

These questions are uncomfortable, yet they need to be asked, over and over again, until they come clean. It has blood on its hands and it must be held accountable for supporting a historical crime.

Thanks for this, Phil. I admire your persistent optimism. Cynicism takes none of the energy and requires none of the courage of optimism. And too, I think that on most matters of human justice, and in the long run, persistent optimism is the closest stance to realism.

Whether or not the authors are pro Israel or anti Israeli policies is not the point.The point is , the discussion is out in the open and rightly so.That it appears on such a historically pro Israel rag is a bonus.

Did anyone notice the “hasbara” talking points , populating the comments sections.That book must qualify for the best seller list.

Except that anti-Zionism is not a principled anti-racism position because the conflict isn’t a racial conflict, anti-Zionists do not condemn racism anywhere in the Middle East, and the fact that at a time when Iraqi Christians are being subjected to a genocide, and hundreds of thousands are dying in Syria, anti-Zionists are focused on Israel suggests that anti-racism is not what motivates anti-Zionists at all; what motivates them is support for a nationalist cause, and sometimes simple rejection of Jewish nationalism in the Middle East for the crime of being neither Muslim or Arab.