Beneath its thoughtful veneer, Noah Feldman’s recent article in Time is just another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state, writes Steven Friedman.
Shut It Down For Palestine protest on Feb. 1 in Washington, D.C. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Steven Friedman
Africa is a Country
In today’s America, defenders of the indefensible don’t have to do much to convince people that they have something new and interesting to say.
This explains why Time Magazine gave Harvard law professor Noah Feldman space to write an analysis of anti-Semitism, which looks balanced and thoughtful but is yet more propaganda for the Israeli state and its actions. And why the article has attracted attention in cyberspace.
Like many liberal Zionists these days, Feldman seems confused. Not long after the Time article appeared, he wrote in The Washington Post about ideas in his new book on Jewish identity.
The article is far from perfect, but it does acknowledge that young American Jews have good reasons for rejecting the Israeli state. It also assumes that opposition to the state will become a fixture of American Jewish life and discusses how Jews who reject it may live out their Jewishness. All of this is only possible if rejecting the Israeli state is a legitimate choice.
But that is not what Feldman writes in Time. His article purports to discuss why anti-Semitism, and anti-Jewish racism, survive. But, stripped of its veneer, his analysis is yet another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.
And so, like others before him, he draws attention away from real hatred of Jews. He also unwittingly encourages it by associating an entire people, the Jews, with the actions of a violent state.
Old Tactic
This is not a new tactic. As my book Good Jew, Bad Jew shows, the Israeli state and its supporters have been using claims of anti-Semitism against critics of the state’s racism since the 1970s.
They do this by claiming that there is a “new anti-Semitism” that demonizes Jews by targeting the Israeli state, ignoring the obvious difference between a state — and the ideology that underpins it — and a people.
Western governments have jumped on the bandwagon: they eagerly shred core democratic values such as freedom of speech as they demonize the supposed racism of the Israeli state’s anti-racist critics.
Noah Feldman at Harvard University, July 2023. (Sanskrita3000, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Feldman seems to know that, despite its success, this tactic has been crude and often laughable. Many people accused of hating Jews are themselves Jewish.
What the targeted people are saying is obviously not racist; opposing nuclear energy was branded as anti-Jewish racism because it would strengthen the power of oil-owning Arab states.
Feldman has attracted attention because he tries to seem more tolerant and open to debate. But the difference between him and other muzzlers of anti-racism is one of style, not substance.
Unlike others who weaponize claims of anti-Semitism, Feldman acknowledges that, “It is not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel.” He warns against tarring all critics of the Israeli state with an anti-Semitic brush.
He adds:
“To deploy the charge of antisemitism for political reasons is morally wrong, undermining the horror of antisemitism itself. It is also likely to backfire, convincing critics of Israel that they are being unfairly silenced.”
He notes that:
“Like other criticisms of Israel, the accusation of genocide isn’t inherently antisemitic.”
Having established his democratic credentials, he spends a large part of the article doing precisely what he has criticized.
Consistent with his concern for public relations, Feldman never says critics of the Israeli state are anti-Semites. Instead, they “run the risk” of anti-Jewish racism or might “veer” into anti-Semitism. But this is a difference without a distinction. The intent is exactly the same as that of his “crude” predecessors, to silence critics of the state, particularly its Jewish opponents.
Repeating Smear Tactics
Feldman repeats most of the smear tactics of writers on the “new antisemitism.” Like them, he insists that anti-Semitism has shifted shape and is now directed at the Israeli state. Like them, he claims “well-meaning” people can be anti-Semitic without knowing they are.
Like them, he insists that the Jew-hatred of the right is no longer the core problem because “the most perniciously creative current in contemporary antisemitic thought is more likely to come from the left.” All this is as convenient to the Israeli state as it is devoid of substance.
As the British scholar of anti-Semitism, Anthony Lerman, points out in his recent book Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?, the claim that people who oppose a state are expressing racism to a people is a basic “category mistake.”
A state is not a person or a group of people and claiming that opposition to Israeli state racism is anti-Jewish is no different to the claim that opposing the apartheid state betrayed hatred of whites.
The claim that you can be an anti-Semite even if you don’t dislike Jews is a blank cheque to label all critics as racist when they are clearly not. The left is always a target of this propaganda because it calls out Israeli state racism; no left-winger has murdered people in synagogues simply because they were Jewish as a right-wing racist in the U.S. did, not that long ago.
Oct. 30, 2018: President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visit the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in Pittsburgh to remember the victims of the mass shooting a few days before. (White House, Andrea Hanks)
Feldman is eager to show that opposition to the Israeli state is so clearly based on falsehoods that anyone who opposes it must be racist. Like all other attempts to defend the indefensible, his effort is full of holes and borders on the unintentionally comic.
Settler Colonialism
He insists that the Israeli state is not a settler-colonial enterprise. The theory of settler-colonialism, according to Feldman, is meant to explain countries whose colonists wanted to displace the local people, not exploit their labor. He insists this does not apply to the Israeli state because it was created by a U.N. resolution establishing a Jewish and Palestinian state.
This reads very much like an exercise in Spot the Deliberate Error, in both fact and logic.
Settler colonialism does not only describe states that tried to displace their indigenous people. It was also applied to apartheid South Africa, which tried to both displace and exploit the labor of black people. Nor is it clear why Feldman makes this point since the Israeli state is precisely the type of settler colony he says the theory is meant to explain: it is built on displacing Palestinians, not exploiting their labor.
His first attempt to explain this away commits a basic logical error. It assumes that what the U.N. decided is what the leadership of the Zionist movement that founded the state wanted. It wasn’t.
The U.N. might have hoped to establish two states living side by side but the Zionists went along with this only because they thought it was the best they could get at the time. Their aim was always to expand as much as they could, which they have been doing with vigor ever since.
The state’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, told his son in a 1937 letter that the Zionist movement would accept what became the U.N. proposal because:
“The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is … a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.”
Ben-Gurion publicly pronouncing the Declaration of the State of Israel, May 14 1948, Tel Aviv, Israel. (Wikimedia)
Feldman’s argument is a bit like insisting that South Africa’s apartheid leaders didn’t want to dominate black people because U.N. resolutions said they shouldn’t.
The displacement of Palestinians began, as Israeli historians showed long ago, immediately as the Israeli state was formed — a key goal of the war that the state fought at the time was to displace as many Palestinians as possible, producing the Naqba, or catastrophe, which Gaza’s residents are again experiencing.
The Naqba
Feldman knows all this and so he offers a lame account of the Naqba which does his argument no favors. He acknowledges that Palestinians did not, as Israeli state propaganda at the time claimed, leave on the instructions of “Arab states,” but were driven out:
“Instead of ending up in an independent Palestine as proposed by the U.N., those who had stayed in their homes found themselves living either in Israel or under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. Then, in the 1967 war, the West Bank and Gaza were conquered by Israel.”
It is unclear how any of this supports Feldman’s claim that the Israeli state did not want to displace Palestinians.
Convey of trucks and cars led by white U.N. jeeps travel through Gaza desert carrying Arab refugees from Gaza to Hebron, Transjordan, for repatriation, undated. (UN Photo)
Logical errors and factual omissions appear again when Feldman tries to show that only bigots would accuse the Israeli state of white supremacy. He writes that half of Israeli Jews are of European descent but that Europe did not consider Jews to be racially white.
The reality was more complicated. But, even if it was not, the fact that bigots thought Jews were not white does not mean the bigots were right. Similar prejudices were expressed about very white Irish people. Nor does it mean that these European Jews did not see themselves as white. My book argues that this is precisely how they saw themselves and that a Jewish state was meant to turn them into white Europeans.
Feldman adds that the other half of the state’s Jewish population, mainly Mizrahi or Eastern Jews, is not racially “white” so they can’t possibly be white supremacists.
But who is and who is not white is a product of society, not biology; people who have not been seen as white in some countries have “become white.” The Mizrahi may not hail from Europe but they identify with white Europeanness and so they tend to vote for parties that, in their view, express a white, European, identity.
This partly explains why the right-wing majority among Jewish Israelis expresses anti-black bigotry alongside its contempt for “Arabs.”
Identifying the Israeli state as a racist enterprise is not an anti-Semitic prejudice, it describes reality. Feldman’s liberal and “balanced” defense of the state is, at bottom, still a defense of racial domination. The difference lies only in the packaging. This makes it hardly surprising that his response to current events repeats the biases of the apologist mainstream from which he wants to distance himself.
Here, Feldman’s phony liberalism is again on view. Responding to the charge of genocide brought against the Israeli state at the International Court of Justice, he offers platitudes regretting the killing of Palestinians and statements by Israeli state power-holders promising to wipe them off the face of the earth.
He then declares that, despite all this, the Israeli state’s actions are not genocidal because its “military campaign has been conducted pursuant to Israel’s interpretation of the international laws of war.” Since there are many interpretations of this law, he suggests, its interpretation is as good as any other.
Denouncing Hamas
The Israeli state is allowed to use severe violence, he adds, because it is responding to the evil of Hamas which, like the rest of the Israeli state’s supporters club, he treats as the American mainstream once treated communism: as something to be denounced, not understood.
Hamas, he writes, is anti-Semitic. “During the Hamas attack, terrorists intentionally murdered children and raped women.” Its charter “calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.” Despite these obvious sins “…the accusation of genocide is being made against Israel.”
For lovers of English literature, this recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which an attempt by the main character to cloak colonialism in civilizing clothing collapses into the appalling demand that the African “brutes” be exterminated. The liberal mask is removed to reveal the real face of the colonizer and its apologist.
Feldman offers no evidence for his claims against Hamas. The charter he denounces was written many years ago and Hamas has discarded it. Even if it still existed, an Ivy League professor of law should know the difference between defeating a state and attacking a people.
Harvard law professors should also know the legal principle that accusations of criminal behavior must be backed by evidence. The claim that children were murdered has been dropped even by most who made it while the rape claims are yet to be backed by evidence that would pass muster in a court.
Nor is there any mention of the context of the Hamas acts. Nothing about a decade and a half-long blockade of Gaza, nothing about overturning Hamas’ election victory, and absolutely nothing at all about Hamas’ multiple offers of a long-term ceasefire which were rebuffed by the Israeli state and its American patrons. While none of this justifies killing civilians, a serious jurist would take it into account before reaching a verdict.
But serious jurists also do not decide the outcome of court cases until they have heard the arguments of both sides. Yet Feldman’s law training does not deter him from declaring the outcome of the ICJ case before the substance of the proceedings has begun. His claim that a state can’t be guilty of genocide if it claims that it is applying international law gives a handy excuse to apologists for racial violence everywhere.
These failures to apply basic legal principles are no surprise. His article shows that Feldman is a cheerleader first, a jurist third. Like many in the Western academy, his scholarship gives priority to the demands of power, that of the Israeli state and of its chief backer.
Near the beginning of his article, Feldman describes himself as “a proud citizen of the freest country in the world, in which Jews have been safer than in any other country in history.”
The rest of us might wonder whether a country in which police are regularly accused of killing black men because they are black or where strenuous efforts are made in some states to deny racial minorities the vote, or where academics are afraid to speak their minds about Gaza for fear of punishment is free at all.
South African Jews may also wonder why Jews in the U.S. who are murdered in synagogues are safer than those of us in this and many other countries who have thankfully been spared that fate.
But, in America’s mainstream, evidence matters as little as legal principle. All that matters is to defend the West and its allies from the hordes who are yet to reach its level of arrogance.
Despite his supposed nuance, this Harvard law professor is a loyal servant of that project. And so he becomes yet another voice that makes the fight against anti-Jewish racism a little more difficult by turning a very real hatred into an excuse for the violence of a state.
Steven Friedman is a research professor in politics at the University of Johannesburg. His most recent book is Good Jew, Bad Jew (2023).
This articles is from Africa is a Country.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The harassment of and verbal/physical attacks against Jews, and Palestinians, living here in Canada and America is inexcusable; indeed, it pisses me off. Many are multigenerational citizens, many are diaspora, and they all definitely deserve to be treated humanely.
A Canadian columnist with The Globe and Mail wrote how during a post-10/7 concert at Vancouver’s Hollywood Theatre, “a band member said something about a free Palestine. This, according to attendee Hanah Van Borek, led to a few shouts from the audience: ‘F— the Jews!’ It was clearly audible in her area of the crowd, a person who was with her confirms, but nobody around them shut this down. There were some cheers of support, though. ‘My whole body went into shock,’ says Ms. Van Borek, who is Jewish.
“Ms. Van Borek left the venue and explained why to security staff. She says a worker encouraged her to go back inside and reassured her she was safe. ‘Nobody will be able to tell that you’re Jewish,’ he said, according to Ms. Van Borek. (Oy.) She did return to the show, but Ms. Van Borek was — and is — rattled. She supports the band’s right to make political statements. It was the shouts from this group — and the silence around them — that were alarming.”
I have long been, and still am, publicly critical of what I see as clear maltreatment, to put it mildly, of the general Palestinian populace by the Israeli government and security/defense agencies — and, with few exceptions, the Western mainstream news-media’s seemingly intentional tokenistic (non)coverage of it.
By doing so, that media, whether they realize it or not, have done a disservice to its own reputation and the Israeli/Jewish people themselves [the road to hell, after all, is also paved with good intentions]. Not as widely criticized thus publicized as the violence are the considerable fossil fuel reserves beneath long-held Palestinian land that are a plausible motivator for war.
Perhaps mostly because I have no Jewish heritage thus experience, I still never expected the level of anti-Semitic attacks in the West since the initial Hamas attack against Israelis. For one thing, the Jewish people in Israel and especially around the world must not be collectively vilified, let alone physically attacked, for the acts of Israel’s government and military, however one feels about the latter’s brutality in Gaza.
It’s blatantly wrong for them to be mistreated, if not terrorized, as though they were responsible for what is happening there. And it should be needless to say that Western-world Palestinians and Muslims similarly must not be collectively blamed and attacked for the acts of Hamas violence in Israel or Islamic extremist attacks outside the Middle East.
There seems to have been much latent animosity towards Jewish people in general, perhaps in part based on erroneous and disproven stereotypes thus completely unmerited. Also, incredible insensitivity was publicly shown towards Jews freshly mourning the 10/7 victims, especially when considering that young Israelis and Jews elsewhere may not be accustomed to such relatively large-scale carnage (at least not as much as is seen in other parts of the Middle East) in post-9/11 times.
But also concerning about all of the highly publicized two-way partisan exchanges of fury is: what will some or many young non-Israeli Jewish and Palestinian children living abroad think and feel if/when they hear such misdirected vile hatred towards their fundamental identity? Scary is the real possibility that such public outpour of blind hatred may lead some young children to feel very misplaced shame in their heritage.
Furthermore, especially with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, one can observe widespread ideological/political partisanship via news and commentary. The external [i.e. outside of Israel and even the Middle East] politics of polarization, perhaps in part for its own sake, can get quite disturbing.
Within social media the angry and thoughtless two-dimensional views are especially amplified, including the majority posted by non-Jews and non-Palestinians.
While the conflict can and does arouse a spectator sport effect or mentality, many contemptible news trolls residing outside the region actively decide which ‘side’ they hate less thus ‘support’ via politicized commentary posts. I anticipate many actually keep track of the bloody match by checking the day’s-end death-toll score, however very lopsided those numbers.
Activists, scholars, intellectuals and everyone else MUST eschew this stupid fear of being branded an anti-Semite for speaking the truth about Zionist supremacy, Zionist sadism and Zionist land-grabbing.
They must eschew this stupid fear of being branded anti-Semitic — in fact nowadays they should probably wear it as a badge of honor — when they consistently point out the overwhelmingly dominant role pro-Israel psychos play in Hollywood mass media and news media.
The lives of the entire world could ultimately be at stake. The Zionists’ wet dream is for Washington to wage a massive war against Tehran, Tehran’s a solid ally of China and Russia. You do the math.
Without doubt, growing Western indifference towards the mass starvation and slaughter of helpless Palestinian civilians will only further inflame long-held Middle Eastern anger towards us. Some countries’ actual provision, mostly by the U.S., of highly effective weapons used in Israel’s onslaught will likely turn that anger into lasting hatred that’s always seeking eye-for-an-eye redress.
Yet, the mainstream news-media I consume daily, even the otherwise progressive outlets, are giving the daily Gazan death and suffering noticeably less coverage.
Meanwhile, with each news report of the daily Palestinian death toll from unrelenting Israeli bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally, including present Ukraine, ever since I began regularly consuming news products in 1988.
Still, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this nor that it’s willfully callous.
It has long seemed to me as a news consumer that the value of a life abroad is typically perceived according to the abundance and duration of protracted conditions under which it suffers, especially during wartime; and this effect can be exacerbated when there’s also racial contrast between the news consumer and news subject. Therefore, when that life is lost, even violently, it can and often enough does receive less coverage.
“….antisemitism was enshrined as a special category of racism, with special rights and benefits.”
— Jit
Well done! Thanks for this.
“The article is far from perfect, but it does acknowledge that young American Jews have good reasons for rejecting the Israeli state.”
To bear witness to history, I know from personal experience that “young American Jews” become middle-aged overnight, and old pretty quickly.
I was 13 when the 7-Day War was fought. At that time, we Gentiles, those who were left-minded, were assured that “the young Jews are going to fix” Israel and Palestine. Today, I am 70 and still waiting for them, although the I-P debate did introduce the keffiyeh as a fashion statement.
The great benefit the U.S. elites get from Israel isn’t only from projecting American hegemony in the Middle East/West Asia, they also use it as a good old reliable tactic to destroy solidarity on the Left. The Zionist issue almost single-handedly broke up the New Left, led as it was by so many [young] American Jews.
Today, it is the candidacy of RFKJ, an accomplished attorney, who is undeniably outside the two parties, understands the CIA & Co., who believes in diplomacy, opposes regulatory capture, would reign in corporate monopolies, and redirect spending, which will fall victim to the 75-year failure to “fix” I-P.
I believe RFKJ’s position on I-P is awful; but I also believe he would be better for the country than either Biden or Trump. I also cannot imagine the Palestinians any worse off under Kennedy than the other two.
RFKJ did not create the America where you have to kiss Israel’s a**, early and often, to be elected president, and therefore I cannot fault him for acknowledging that reality, no more than acknowledging the Law of Gravity.
Palestines are SEMITES.
ERGO the greatest antisemites are the zionists occupying Palestine and murdering the genuine Semites for the past 76 years.
It’s true that, while some peoples have been brutally victimized throughout history a disproportionately large number of times, the victims of one place and time can and sometimes do become the victimizers of another place and time. People should avoid believing, let alone claiming, that they/we are not capable of committing an atrocity, even if relentlessly pushed.
Contrary to what is claimed or felt by many of us, deep down there’s a potential monster in each of us that, under the just-right circumstances, can be unleashed; and maybe even more so when convinced that God is on our side.
Since people started to speak, words were changing meaning, usages etc., so we can understand, say, Shakespeare only with copious explanations. So it is less than surprising that the meaning of “anti-Semitism” changed. Of course, there exists paleo-anti-Semites who detest Jews and Arabs alike, but that seems to be a dying breed.
However, as the words has new meaning, old claims are not true. These days, eating pencils will not put lead (metal) in the stomach, even though pencils have leads (mostly graphite and no lead). By the same token, what makes (new) anti-Semistism evil, justifying penalties of various sorts?
Just this week, I observed numerous posts on Twitter claiming that Russian elections are not legitimate, farce indeed, because Putin was elected (perhaps one in hundred of those posts claimed irregularities). And many of those complained about Russians standing in long queues in front of embassies, consulates etc. to vote, presumably on Putin, and concluded that all Russians are wicked, and all the people in those queues should be deported. Opposition to the policies and conduct of Russian state easily leads to to suppression of all Russian, especially where it is easy, i.e. in the West. Or not easy enough, as many posters claim.
Now compare to what happens to Israel and Jews. It is like Russians experience pneumonia with a collapsed lung, and Jews having some sniffles. But those sniffles are caused by (new) anti-Semitism, and pneumonia, by state policies replete with assorted repressions, including massive confiscation redolent of III Reich. However, there is no word for it, and no worries about it.
The way things are going, it will be like in Turkey where some Kyrgyz and Uighurs were beaten up because of their looks and rumors that Chinese force Muslim to eat pork. People will holler (or worse) on Oriental looking pedestrians that they ruin their children with Tik-tok or other imagined atrocities. But no word for it, and scant worries.
So there are two distiguished characteristics of (new) anti-Semitism and other types of prejudice: mildness and lack of state support. Try to write about it the Time Magazine.
The trouble with Bebe is that he believes himself to be Lord of The Universe. Of course, how many Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust—–and where was God then?
I have no idea why Biden supports this strange man who has the face of a liar and the intent of a murderer, but Biden does say one thing and then the Netanyahu action is beyond cruelty. Blowing up children, bombing apartment houses, and pretty much shooting anything that moves.
The Israeli army seems to delight in surprise attack upon Palestinians who are not causing harm to anyone. That last attack of blowing up those 5 boys to smithereens was appalling. But then Biden going along with all of this is even more appalling. “Every dog has its day, “is an old saying—and I for one, will be happy when that BiBi dog is done.
“He insists this does not apply to the Israeli state because it was created by a U.N. resolution establishing a Jewish and Palestinian state.”
This is one of Israel’s founding myths, that Israel was created by the U.N.’s Partition Plan. In fact, the Partition Plan was only a recommendation of the General Assembly to the Security Council. It was never adopted by the Security Council because it would have been a straight-forward violation of the right of the citizens of the British Mandate Territory of Palestine to self-determination. UNGA Res 181-II (The General Assembly “Requests that
( a) The Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its implementation[.]”), hXXps://documents.un.org/doc/resolution/gen/nr0/038/88/pdf/nr003888.pdf?token=TcVpKXD1KzCqnY62rj&fe=true
That the citizens of the Mandate Territory all held that right in common, not a Jewish subset, was made plain by the International Court of Justice:
“States have consistently emphasized that respect for the territorial integrity of a non-self-governing territory is a key element of the exercise of the right to self-determination under international law. The Court considers that the peoples of non-self-governing territories are entitled to exercise their right to self-determination in relation to their territory as a whole, the integrity of which must be respected by the administering Power. It follows that any detachment by the administering Power of part of a non-self-governing territory, unless based on the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned, is contrary to the right to self-determination.”
Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, International Court of Justice (25 February 2019), pg. 38, hXXps://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/169/169-20190225-01-00-EN.pdf; see also V. Gudeleviciute, Does the Principle of Self-Determination Prevail over the Principle of Territorial Integrity?, 2:2 Int. J. Baltic Law (2005), pp. 57-58, hXXps://www.tamilnet.com/img/publish/2009/10/Gudeleviciute.pdf. (“This language clearly covers merger and secession but the right to decide belongs to the whole population of a particular territorial unit. However, it is a very pragmatic view of the international community for preventing disorder because under a “speedy decolonization” it is almost impossible to consider every opinion of every ethnic group: who wants to unite with whom and who wants to secede. … The principle of self-determination prevails only under the condition that the term “a people” means the entire population of non-self-governing territory”).
Israel was created by violent conquest at the hands of criminal paramilitary gangs who took not only the territory allotted in the Partition Plan, but quite a bit more. It was created illegally, in derogation of the Palestinian right of self-determination. Whatever legitimacy the state has came later through recognition by other nations. But just as the change of facts on the ground in the Chagos Archipelago did not work to the benefit of the U.K. and U.S., Israel’s government is still illegal. What is needed legally is a plebiscite so that all of the citizens of Palestine can choose their own form of government.
It bears notice is that this is the Palestinian’s right, not the right of the U.S. government to impose a two-state solution.
At this point in the history of Western so called civilization, academic credentials mean very little in terms of credibility. In some specific disciplines, it almost seems to be a handicap to receive a classical education. I don’t want to come across as anti-education, but there appears to be an inherent imperialist colonial bias that comes with that classical education unless one is clever enough to resist it. I’m sure this is no accident. Speaking of Harvard and other Ivy League schools most especially.
It is worth noting that the imaginary holiday that created a religion of antisemitism is upon us. The western empire of Roman may have weaponized a stolen monotheism simply for an occupation and resistance to it. That has then gone on to many genocides across the planet unparalleled in historical scope as a religious empire as a fellow traveler with numerous western empires now united under NATO craving full spectrum dominance in an age that must outgrown such profit motives for human civilization to survive. Other monotheistic version soon sprouted to be weaponized in Afghanistan, the middle east in general and the Ukraine between orthodoxies.
The new antisemitism is defined as anything said or thought that’s critical of Bibi or any of his policies.
Really good!
I agree with the author, but have a little language nitpick. Sorry to be boringly semantic.
“liberal Zionist”? Depending on how the word “liberal” is defined nowadays, this is term is simply oxymoronic. A kinder, gentler genocidal racist?
I would think that a Zionist would be defined something like: right-wing, ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, pro-war, advocating policies that violate international law and basic decency, and racist. (implicit belief that the indigenous population of Palestine are inferior and must submit to Israeli Jews)
If the new definition of political liberal (in the US sense of the word) is to be a member of the so-called Democratic Party, warmonger-imperialist, supporter of genocide, racist advocate of Zionism (while sporting a rainbow bumper sticker and a BLM lawn-sign) then I apologize to the author, the term is used quite correctly.
Zionism IS, by definition, anti-semitism