How do you wrap your head around genocide? As one numb week follows another, our leaders blind themselves to massacre and famine.
Joe Biden can see no “compelling alternative to how Israel [wages] a war in these circumstances without doing grievous harm to civilians,” Aaron David Miller writes in the New York Times, excusing the president’s support for genocide. So, Israel isn’t being deliberately cruel and sadistic. The Times coverage would just have you believe they just have no choice– as Donald Johnson wrote in a letter to the paper. “There is no middle ground between what Israel is doing and Gandhian pacifism: They just had to use 2000 lb bombs in urban settings. They have to torture captives and cut off food.”
Miller and other liberal Zionists have adopted that stance, but they are having little influence on Democrats. Polls show that the American people favor giving humanitarian aid to Gaza in far greater numbers than they do giving military aid to Israel, and the progressive base of the Democratic Party has started a political “firestorm” over U.S. support for genocide. The Zionist group J Street postponed its 2024 conference, surely because its own rank and file are enraged by Israel.
James Carville said on MSNBC this week that if Biden loses, it’s Israel’s fault, because the catastrophe in Gaza is an issue “all across the country.”
“This Gaza stuff, this is not just a problem with some snot-nosed Ivy League people…This is a problem all across the country. And I hope the president and Blinken can get this thing calmed down because if it doesn’t get calmed down before the Democratic convention, it’s going to be a very ugly time in Chicago. I promise you that. No matter what happens, I know it’s a huge problem.”
Last week, Brad Sherman, the Israel-loving Congress member from Los Angeles, fought back, accusing “anti-Israel forces” of an “attempt to penetrate and muddy our national discourse.”
But a week later, Sherman was running through the Capitol as protesters from the antiwar group Code Pink held up bloodied hands before him.
Sherman accused them of antisemitism. “There’s blood on your hands for the genocide—you’re trying to kill every Jew.”
That is the chief refuge for Democrats who excuse Israel’s actions. To say that critics of genocide are motivated by antisemitism.
But even liberal media are giving a platform to progressive critics. “The United States is complicit in genocide,” Mehdi Hasan said this week on New York public radio, and when the host pushed back and said Hasan was not blaming Hamas, Hasan said of course he denounces Hamas, but his tax dollars are not going to support Hamas. He also pointed out the inevitable consequences of military occupation. “The oppressed will always rise against the oppressor.”
And in wonderful media news this week, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg withdrew from a speaking engagement in Kentucky after students questioned his record in the Israeli military nearly 40 years ago.
Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the University of Kentucky (UK) Wednesday, citing a last-minute schedule change, amidst concerns from students about his past as a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) prison guard and his views on Zionism…. “We were informed that students expressed concern as to why a former IDF prison guard would be speaking on democracy and journalism at an event celebrating the integration of UK. Students were told he withdrew to not cause harm on campus,” the representative [of a Palestinian solidarity group] stated.
The event was billed as “The Future of Journalism and the Health of Our Democracy.” That’s a little bit of accountability. The editor of the Atlantic is finally being called out for his service for Israel. The writer Yakov Hirsch repeatedly explained on our site that Netanyahu could not have maintained his faultless reputation in the U.S. mainstream without Goldberg fostering “hasbara culture.”
And bear in mind, that Goldberg used to brag about his military service. He wrote a whole memoir about it. Now, times are changing. And other editors who carried water for Israel will surely be called on to defend that work.
This process is just beginning. Zionists still have esteem in the U.S. discourse. The view that Israel supporters promote bigotry against Palestinians is still off-limits. Even as mainstream Jewish organizations assert that those who support Palestinian rights are bigoted against Jews.
“Israel supporters should be seen as on the same moral level as supporters of Bull Connor, but in the U.S. and Western mainstream you can only point to antisemitism— you can never point to anti-Palestinian racism on the Israel side,” Donald Johnson has written on our site.
“We cannot make progress on this issue if the extreme racism of the pro-genocide side is never discussed. People have to be able to say that any group, whether white southerners or South Africans or Nation of Islam members or Christian evangelical Zionists or Germans or, yes, Jewish supporters of Israel, can be racists. They can make racism central to their ideology. But Zionist racism is still a taboo subject, automatically branded as antisemitic, because fundamentally Palestinians are seen as lesser.”
Progressives are actively taking on that discrimination. Please join that effort!
Thanks for reading,
Phil Weiss
“Former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni was asked by Amy Goodman in a 2002 interview: “Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called antisemitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?”
She replied “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the US] people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic.”
There is an “Israel, my country right or wrong” attitude and “they’re not ready to hear criticism,” she said. Antisemitism, the Holocaust and “the suffering of the Jewish people” are exploited to “justify everything we do to the Palestinians,” Aloni said.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zjaSlP2OxE
James Carville said on MSNBC this week that if Biden loses, it’s Israel’s fault, because the catastrophe in Gaza is an issue “all across the country.”
Carville has got to know Israel and fanatic West Bank settlers support Trump; settlers working around the clock stealing Palestinian land, dragging-out mobile homes, getting ready for when Trump returns……nobody cares if BIDEN loses; 100% Zionist US punching bag for Netanyahu.
The latest tactic I’m seeing in the media to flip the script and justify the genocide in Gaza, is to shift the blame back onto the Palestinians and any critics of Israel by asking the loaded question, “What else is Israel supposed to do?”
I noticed it being deployed and trialed by the likes of Dan Abrams and a few others over the last couple of months. David Brooks just effectively repeated these words and sentiments almost verbatim in a NY Times opinion piece.
It’s classic deflection and misdirection, because the answer is quite simple. Don’t commit war crimes and genocide.
They’re purposefully asking the wrong question, because they are asking their audience of non-Israelis what Israelis should be doing, when they know that Israelis are going to do whatever the fuck they want, because they are a sovereign nation. The question they should be asking of their non-Israeli audience is, “What should we in the US be doing?”
They don’t ask that question because the answer is also quite simple. Don’t enable or be complicit in war crimes and genocide carried out by Israel.
Instead they hide the ball in a non sequitur wrapped in a question that has already been answered by the subject in question, but projected onto a third party. Instead asking them to render a solution to an issue they are not party to, don’t support, and have absolute no direct influence or control over. Thus shifting the burden onto everyone and anyone but Israel, the US, and themselves. Then using any response critical of, or not fully supporting Israel as de facto support for Hamas, whom they also don’t support and have absolutely no direct influence or control over.
Which is why Medhi Hassan’s response is so apt. We don’t ask about or support what Hamas should or shouldn’t do, because they aren’t using our tax dollars and weapons to slaughter innocent civilians by the thousands. Like Israel, Hamas is simply doing what it thinks it should do, and yet again the question we should be asking in terms of Hamas is the same we should be asking of Israel, “What should we in the US be doing?”
People’s fear of being labelled anti-Semitic is real and is ruthlessly exploited by Israel’s supporters. Losing that fear is a vital first step.
When Criticizing Israel Wasn’t Anti-SemiticMarch 22, 2024
Just two decades ago the difference between anti-semitism and criticism of Israel was clear enough for even a U.S. secretary of state to say so, writes Joe Lauria.
“At a conference in Berlin about anti-semitism in 2004, then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the following: “It is not antisemitic to criticize the policies of the state of Israel.”
Nearly 20 years later, on Dec. 5, 2023 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by 311 to 14 votes equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.
The resolution says: “Resolved, That the House of Representatives … clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
The Republican-sponsored measure was backed by every Republican in the House except one, as well as by 95 Democrats. But 92 Democrats voted “Present.”
They were urged to do so in a floor speech by Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, who represents a Brooklyn district with many anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews. The New York Times reported:
The charge of “anti-semitism”, long liberally thrown around to shield Israel from criticism, has reached new depths of absurdity. Since Oct. 7, virtually anyone daring to criticize Israel now is called a Hamas supporter and a terrorist, as the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. dared call the secretary general.” ‘
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/22/when-criticizing-israel-wasnt-anti-semitic/