You could not get a better picture of Zionism than from two recent events. Israel bombed a consulate in a foreign country – Syria – killing top Iranian military officers, among others, and Israel supporters in the U.S. forced the cancelation of the valedictorian address at the University of Southern California because the speaker opposes Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Today Zionism threatens political freedom in the United States and international order.
These actions are consistent. They are expressions of a maximalist ideology that operates on a global level to support the Israeli regime. That ideology, of course, is Zionism, the belief that Jews need a state in order to be safe. Today Zionism threatens political freedom in the United States and international order. It threatens the political tradition of liberalism in the United States by compelling Democratic politicians to pay for more bombs to advance a genocide.
After 150 years of struggle and practice, it is plain that Zionism is dedicated to the neverending subjugation of Palestinians, who resist their persecution.
There is only one way to fight this ideology. Those who oppose it must explain the truth to Americans: Zionism is racist. Its supporters must be called out and cornered and discredited—as adherents of a Jim Crow ideology.
There is only one way to fight this ideology. Those who oppose it must explain the truth to Americans: Zionism is racist.
I have always said that I might have been a Zionist in an earlier age. Zionism was a perfectly understandable ideology in light of European oppression of Jews. Jews left Europe as refugees, not supremacists. If Zionism had focused only on Jewish safety it might be a tolerable ideology today.
But from the beginning maximalist Zionists won out. They wanted more land with fewer Palestinians. For at least 75 years now this is the Zionist credo, and they repeatedly used terrorism to achieve that goal.
–In the 1920s the socialist leader Chaim Arlosoroff sought to advance ideas of national coexistence with Palestinians. He was murdered on the beach in Tel Aviv in 1933 by Zionist militias that later produced the highest officials in Israel.
–In 1949 a U.N. diplomat, Folke Bernadotte, who had saved thousands of Jews from Nazis during the war, sought to advance plans to keep Jerusalem an international city, as designated by the UN Partition plan. He was assassinated in Jerusalem by a Zionist gang that – again – later produced the highest officials in Israel.
–In the 1990s a Labor Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, declared that Israel would only have peace if it returned land to Palestinians so as to allow them to have sovereignty. Rabin was murdered by a rightwinger who enjoys deep political support to this day.
These murders arose from a consistent program: Israeli leaders have again and again told us that they will not accept a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state.
Because of Israel’s defiance on that score and because of Israel’s consecration of higher Jewish rights in the nation-state law in 2018, human rights groups worldwide have stated that Israel is an apartheid state.
Zionists have one answer to those charges — it’s antisemitism, you just hate Jews. (No, we hate segregationists.)
Israel has used overwhelming violence to quash resistance. It has repeatedly massacred Palestinians, and in Gaza, in the last six months has indiscriminately killed tens of thousands of women and children, and aid workers. Any sensible person understands that this onslaught will only foster radical resistance.
I don’t support violence against civilians. It is why I have been outspoken against Hamas’s October 7 attacks, and the dehumanization that occurs on both sides in a war.
But clearly Zionism is the root problem. Zionism destroys every good thing in its path. It is an ideology that treats Palestinians as lesser, in their own land. It brought religious nationalism to the Middle East and destabilized a region long before ISIS. It attacks villages so as to solidify “the Jewish majority,” and even the liberal wing rationalizes its actions. (“My father…. was a terrorist,” says Jeremy Ben Ami of J Street – an organization started to oppose Zionist settlements that has achieved nothing for that agenda in 15 years.)
Today Zionism is undermining American freedom. Zionists and sympathizers in the U.S. government pushed the Iraq war that destroyed Arab cities and the American image too. Zionist sympathizers are today justifying a genocide and denying the famine in Gaza– and getting Biden to sign off. The Zionist lobby has corrupted our elections, canceled free speech on a routine basis, wrecked the American Jewish community, and compromised some of the best minds of my generation (including Jewish writers in whom I have observed the tragic loss).
There is only one way to defeat Zionism. It must be indicted and described, as the racist antithesis of everything the American experiment has achieved. Its support must be harried, hectored, and starved. It must be defeated in the United States, in Congress, and at the University of Southern California. We will win, because we must.
“But from the beginning maximalist Zionists won out. They wanted more land with fewer Palestinians. For at least 75 years now this is the Zionist credo, and they repeatedly used terrorism to achieve that goal.”
And here’s one more piece of evidence that Israel wants more land with fewer Palestinians, from David Shulmans recent piece in the New York Review of Books:
We have wasted several blood-soaked decades on the obscene dream of annexing the territories and expelling the Palestinian population there. Israel steadfastly refused to make peace on the basis of the Saudi Initiative of 2002, unanimously endorsed by the Arab League, which could and should have led to a normalization of Israel’s relations with much of the Arab-Islamic world. The Saudi Initiative, also called the Arab Peace Initiative, offered an end to the Arab–Israeli conflict if Israel would withdraw from all the occupied territories (with minor territorial adjustments to be negotiated), a settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem on the basis of UN Resolution 194, and the creation of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem….The Palestinian Authority accepted the plan immediately, as did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with its fifty-seven member states. (It describes itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world.”) There was never a good reason to reject that plan as the starting point for negotiations on final status—that is, peace. Instead, the right-wing governments of Ariel Sharon and later Netanyahu have done whatever they could to undermine the plan (this includes Netanyahu’s persistent funding for Hamas, via Qatar, as a way to divide Gaza from the West Bank, thus precluding the possibility of a Palestinian state). It’s not so hard to prevent peace from breaking out.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/05/09/israel-the-way-out-david-shulman/
A few days ago, I came across two quotations from Margaret Thatcher on the subject of Israel:
1981 “If we are not going to live by a system of international law, we are going to live by international anarchy, and hen no people anywhere in the world are safe.”
1988 “[Israelis should] live within secure borders, giving the Palestinian people their legitimate aspirations, because you cannot demand for yourself what you deny to other people.”
She represented a constituency in north-west London that had a large Jewish electorate. She was also a close friend of the then UK Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, and those two quotes reflect his thinking. She was no supporter of the Israeli prime ministers she dealt with back then: she knew well that they – like the IRA she fought hard against – had killed British soldiers in their terrorist days.
“There is only one way to defeat Zionism….Its support must be harried, hectored, and starved.“
_________________________________________________________
There is a second, way to prevail over the expansionists objectives of Greater Israel. One that has a reasonable chance to lead to a future worth having.
Weiss delineated the twin pillars of Zionism, security for Jews and the Greater Israel vision. Herein is an opportunity to advance liberation by bridging with Jews prioritizing security and co-existence thereby marginalizing/isolating the expansionists.
Also, a consensus for equality as an end game would reset the table.
King David Hotel bombing
The King David Hotel in Jerusalem, were bombed in a terrorist attack[2][3] on July 22, 1946, by the militant right-wing[4]Zionist underground organization Irgun during the Jewish insurgency.[5][6][7] 91 people of various nationalities were killed, including Arabs, Britons and Jews, and 46 were injured
“The leaders of Haganah opposed the idea initially.[15] On July 1, 1946, Moshe Sneh, chief of the Haganah General Headquarters, sent a letter to the then leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, which instructed him to “carry out the operation at the ‘chick'”, code for the King David Hotel.[note 1] Despite this approval for the project, repeated delays in executing the operation were requested by the Haganah, in response to changes unfolding in the political situation. The plan was finalized between Amichai Paglin (Irgun alias ‘Gidi’), Chief of Operations of the Irgun, and Itzhak Sadeh, commander of the Palmach.[9]
In the plan, Irgun men, disguised as Arabs, except for Gideon, the leader, who would be dressed as one of the hotel’s distinctive Sudanese waiters, would enter the building through a basement service entrance carrying the explosives concealed in milk cans. The cans were to be placed by the main columns supporting the wing where the majority of the offices used by the British authorities were located.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
One critique at a time: the characterization of the murder of Arlosoroff is to say the least eccentric. Although the murder remains a mystery, those who attribute it to right wing Zionists cite the Transfer Agreement (between the Zionist Yishuv and the Nazi regime in Berlin) as the source of the animus. That is what Arlosoroff is famous for, rather than his visions of peace with the Palestinians. (The Transfer Agreement in fact was pivotal in the increase of Jewish (German Jewish in this case) immigration to Palestine which was the main source of the Arab Revolt of 1936, the pivotal event in the eventual defeat of the Palestinians a decade later in 1948.)