Weekly Briefing: The sudden urgency of isolating a pariah state

In the last week, even Western supporters have had enough of Israeli genocide. Biden has said Stop. So have Nancy Pelosi and Jan Schakowsky and Richard Haass. American Jewish organizations that always supported Israel are at each others’ throats over Israeli actions, which is earning Israel “pariah status” to the detriment of “world Jewry.” Even Republicans say 33,000 civilians killed are too many. Fareed Zakaria ventures that bringing famine to 1 million people is “counterproductive” to Israel’s interests.

There may be at last cuts to Israeli aid, the U.S. made bombs that are maiming and killing thousands of Palestinian children.

We got there first– my community of leftists/realists/Palestinian solidarity activists long ago called for actions to stop Israel. We supported boycott, divestment and sanctions. And we were called antisemitic for wanting to curb Israeli violence, including by J Street. It’s worth reviewing why we acted so as to understand how long these unbearable conditions have prevailed.

We began by touring the occupation and seeing for ourselves the cruel Israeli tactics towards a subject population. We saw indiscriminate barrages that cut down children and families. We saw the maiming of demonstrators. We saw apartheid before our eyes, worse than the South African version– a truth that got me fired, a truth since documented by countless human rights organizations.

Years before the murder of American aid worker Jacob Flickinger in Gaza brought worldwide outrage this week, we condemned the murder of Rachel Corrie, who was trying to save Palestinian homes in Gaza from arbitrary destruction by an occupying force in 2003.

We saw Israel for what it is and declares itself to be: a Jewish nationalist state that treats Palestinians as lesser. Jonathan Pollak related that he asked his air force commander if he would bomb an apartment building in Tel Aviv if a terrorist were harbored there, and the commander said Of course not, there are Jews there – and on that simple principle Pollak refused to fly bombing missions. But this is the military principle Israel is employing in Gaza. No Palestinian is innocent, because so many support Hamas. Economics minister Nir Barkat said so on MSNBC, 70 to 80 percent of Palestinian civilians are not innocent.

We witnessed the enormity of collective punishment. Often I think of the time a Jewish colleague stood at Qalandiya crossing – the industrial complex that serves to separate the prosperous Israeli state from the masses of Palestinians in the West Bank, and said it was worse than Auschwitz—in the sense that Jews who knew about Auschwitz were perpetrating it.

There is no great virtue in being first. You are a vanguard. You are the activist grassroots. But the world must come round. You have an obligation to bear witness so as to convince others. This website tries to do that.

Now the world is seeing the Israel we saw, and I welcome the company of other critics. The Forward editor Jodi Rudoren Rudoren says Israel’s military occupation must end for the sake of world Jewry. Yesterday NPR show On the Media highlighted the generations of injustice toward Palestinian refugees who were kicked out of their homes. They should support BDS to give those refugees a voice and end the occupation.

World powers tolerated Israel’s occupation when it was patently criminal for cold pragmatic reasons. Because the alternative was too tumultuous to countenance in their view. Or because the Israel lobby could fuck up your career if you spoke up. The wise men always said the situation was “unsustainable” — because of course no people could accept being under the boot for generation after generation — but they wouldn’t lift a finger to stop it, because Palestinians don’t count. Well, now Gaza looks like the surface of the moon, as a Democratic congressional candidate said in Pennsylvania. 33,000 dead, 2/3 of them women and children – what is enough? And still Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL says that to wear a keffiyeh is like wearing a Swastika, and the panel on MSNBC doesn’t push back.  

There are three lies the establishment is now telling about Palestine to justify not isolating Israel:

1, If Netanyahu were gone Israel would behave differently. This is patently false. (Aaron David Miller says so in The New Yorker, Mairav Zonszein says so at Foreign Policy). If you are running an apartheid society, and the subject population resists, then you become rightwing and militarist. Israeli society since October 7 is “galvanized by anger, hate and fear,” says Mitchell Plitnick.

2, We have to get back to preserving the path to a two-state solution. Preserving the path to a far-off, never-to-get-here two-state solution, including the normalization deals with Arab monarchies, is what unleashed the atrocities of October 7. We have to get to human dignity and equal rights, no matter the political boundaries. We have to call out anti-Palestinian racism in the U.S. discourse.

3, The Hamas atrocities of October 7 are unique and a cause for war. They were not unique, they were inevitable as the slave revolts of the 1830s in the U.S. They will happen again so long as Jewish supremacy is the law for Palestinians. Those who say Israel lives in a bad neighborhood rife with Islamist militants should consider the role of militant Jewish nationalism in creating that neighborhood.

There is little virtue to being first. There were always great activists before us, and there will be great activists after too. Now the Israeli genocide has stirred the consciousness of millions in the West. Let’s welcome their engagement. Human rights is a great cause that will define global society for generations to come. We need the participation of all people of conscience.