Mass Murderers Equate Anti-Zionism with Antisemitism
Weaponized
Zionist Big Lie:
A Cover for Israel/U.S. Genocide
Class Struggle Education Workers in protest at NYC Public Library, 9 November 2023, during national student walkout. (Internationalist photo)
By Charles Brover
The following article was written in May 2024.
U.S. politicians and Zionists have weaponized the charge of antisemitism with support from the Biden White House. They claim the cops storming peaceful campus protests are protecting Jewish students from the scourge of antisemitism. That is a Big Lie oft repeated. The real purpose of the campaign is not to fight antisemitism but to witch-hunt pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist students into silence. They have set up McCarthyite congressional committees with the aim of disciplining colleges they see as cultural well-springs of liberal and tolerant thought. The liberal group, Jewish Voices for Peace, for instance, has been thrown off campuses including Columbia. Many of these Jewish youth are responding to the best ethical teaching in their religious background.
The McCarthyite campaign rests on a false political syllogism: Israel is a Jewish state founded on Zionism; therefore, criticism of Zionist Israel is anti-Jewish, or as right-wingers like the New York Post would put it, “Jew hatred.” The liberal Zionist anti-Defamation League has propagated this Big Lie for decades to shield the Zionist state from legitimate criticism. The truth is that Israel is a state, not a representative of Jewish people. That Israel calls itself a Jewish state doesn’t make criticism of the Israeli state and Zionism anti-Jewish any more than criticism of the Saudi state renders the critic Islamophobic. A religiously defined Jewish state is necessarily an exclusionary state, just as is an Islamic state or a Christian state or a Hindu state. The idea of a Jewish State leads to the furtherance of legally sanctioned Jewish supremacy.
There is plenty of antisemitism in the U.S. and elsewhere, but historically in the U.S. it is almost exclusively the violent agenda of the Christian nationalist far right. Neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” and the next day killed Heather Heyer. A right-wing antisemite gunned down 11 Jewish worshippers in the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue. These were not anti-Zionists protesting genocide in Gaza. The swastikas defacing Jewish institutions are drawn by right-wing racist followers of Hitler’s “final solution.” They link their murderous antisemitism to their main target – black people in the U.S.
There is certainly a documented rise in antisemitism, as there is whenever Israel has gone to war. From its founding in 1948, the Zionist state has been based on driving out the Palestinian Arab population, claiming a mythical right to the land. Antisemites have welcomed the horrific images of Gaza’s destruction flashed on screens around the world. These live-streamed images of Zionist cruelty feed the legion of deranged antisemites. The fact is that Israel cannot keep Jews safe, and certainly not by obliterating the Palestinian people of Gaza, using U.S.-supplied 2,000-lb. bombs dropped from U.S.-supplied warplanes. The horrific genocide taking place before our eyes is carried out by the mass-murdering army of the Zionist state, but it would not be possible without the arms supplied by U.S. imperialism.
What Is Zionism?
Zionism is fundamentally a national movement to form and defend a Jewish state, not Jewish people. It is born of deep political pessimism in the possibility of overcoming the oppression of Jews and fueled by obscurantist religious mythology. Nineteenth-century Jewish activist and journalist Theodor Herzl is considered the godfather of the modern political Zionist movement. The early Zionist movement promoted immigration to Palestine, but until the Nazi Holocaust it represented only a slender margin of Jewish thought and opinion. Most Jews opposed the Zionist project from the start. They understood intuitively that Zionism would feed the widespread antisemitic claim that Jews didn’t belong where they were living outside of Israel. Furthermore, the majority of Jews tended to be social-democratic liberals; as social and economic outsiders, they were international in perspective. Many understood instinctively that nationalism was the source of their oppression.
The Zionist movement gained its foothold with the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis and their allies (including anti-communist Polish and Ukrainian nationalists) which seemed to confirm Zionism’s deepest pessimism about the enduring murderous intentions of Christian nations. After the Holocaust, immigration to Israel was turbocharged by the anti-Semitic refusal of the so-called democratic countries – including both the United States and Britain – to accept Jewish refugees. Socialist Jews opposed the Zionist founding of the Israeli state in 1948, based as it was on the dispossession and expulsion of masses of indigenous Palestinians. The nakbah or “catastrophe” turned more than 750,000 of indigenous Palestinian population into desperate refugees, many of whom fled into Gaza and surrounding areas where they have lived for decades in refugee camps of what even the United Nations calls the world largest open-air prison.
Zionism, the movement to create a Jewish state, has always contained an eliminationist thrust and the fascistic and outright fascist elements so visible today in Gaza and the West Bank. In the year of its founding in 1948, Albert Einstein and 26 other prominent Jewish intellectuals and leaders published a letter in the New York Times (4 December 1948), warning:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the Freedom Party [Menachem Begin’s Herut], a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was created out of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization.”
 |
| Hard-line Zionist militia of Irgun and Herut carried out massacre of Deir Yassin on April 8, 1948, slaughtering the population. Genocide in Gaza is Deir Yassin massacre writ large. (Photo: IDF Archive) |
The Irgun was guilty of many atrocities, including the horrendous April 1948 massacre of the entire population of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. The Likud party of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the lineal descendent of the Irgun and Herut, while the destruction of Gaza is Deir Yassin writ large.
It would be a mistake to think that the genocidal impulse we see playing out today in Gaza belongs only to its most outspoken fascist leaders such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Belezel Smotrich. The fundamental denial of Palestinian humanity is mainstream Zionist ideology. From the outset Zionists held the idea that Palestine was not inhabited by Palestinians but by disparate Arabs with no legitimate claim to their towns, villages, and farms. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s ‘founding father’ and first Prime Minister, formulated the Zionist demand, at the Biltmore Conference of 600 Jewish leaders in 1942, for the future State of Israel, “not as a Jewish state in Palestine but as Palestine as a Jewish state.” Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister, who helped establish the Labor Party, was probably among the more liberal of Israel’s Zionist leaders. Her contribution to the Palestinian question was “there is no such thing as Palestinians.”
Although fundamentally a nationalist movement, the Zionist project also promoted theocratic elements that continue to influence Israel policy. The theocrats wrap their ultra-nationalism and racism in a biblical myth that their god had granted ancient Hebrews an eternal lease on all the real estate from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. For such religious zealots the non-Jews who live in this “promised land,” some of whose ancestors lived there going back more than a thousand years, are just impediments to god’s will. For a selection of bloodcurdling quotes from leading Jewish supremacist rabbis about how non-Jews have no rights and no mercy should be shown to Palestinians, see Henry Lesnick, “The Road to Genocide: The Moral Foundations of the Zionist State” (2024) at academia.edu.
Thus, from the outset Zionism contained the kernel of Jewish supremacy. Unfortunately, in a society where at least half the population is non-religious, this founding myth continues to generate a “god-given” pretext for Israeli domination of the Occupied Territories and the denial of the rights of its non-Jewish Palestinian inhabitants. This myth is also promoted by fanatic U.S. Zionists, and not least by U.S. Christian nationalists.
Serious scholars of genocide have analyzed the criteria for genocide and found the Israeli state guilty. After the atrocious indiscriminate terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, the Israeli government declared its genocidal intention. Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed” (Times of Israel, 9 October 2023). Other fascistic members of Israel’s current cabinet have called the Palestinians, “animals,” and promised to flatten Gaza. Netanyahu referenced the biblical myth of the wholesale slaughter of the Amalikite tribe: “…remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy book – we do remember: now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to the them. Do not spare them. Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep.”
 |
| Destruction of Khan Younis, Gaza, after Israeli troops pulled out, on April 8, 2024, the 76th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre. (Photo: AFP) |
The Gaza siege is clearly a joint military and political operation by Israel and the United States. The Democratic Biden administration feigns concern about civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza. They are unhappy about their diplomatic international isolation and embarrassed by the images of genocide flooding television and computer screens worldwide, so they pretend they are trying to restrain the Netanyahu government. Biden even used the words, “indiscriminate bombing.” How cynical are the fake tears of Biden and Secretary of State Blinken as they continue to pump more lethal weaponry to the Israeli military.
Zionism today is a mix of nationalist expansionism and murderous religious fundamentalism. There is tension between these camps, but there is agreement on the denial of Palestinian rights. This lash-up is reflected in Israel’s current “war cabinet” and its annexationist policies on the West Bank and Gaza.[1] The dehumanization of Palestinians is concomitant with a military mobilization for genocide. Anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab hatred has been cultivated for decades in Israel, and given religious authority by a steady stream of anti-Palestinian loathing from a pantheon of reactionary rabbis.
That Zionism is necessarily an eliminationist ideology is more clearly visible today. The current government in Israel is its most right-wing in its history and contains some genuine racists, fascists and theocrats. But the assault on Gaza and the intensified settler violence in the West Bank is mainstream Israeli policy. The fascists in its government are the sign of just how far right that policy has evolved over the decades of occupation. It would be wrong to fail to understand that it is not just Netanyahu of Likud, heir to the fascistic wing of Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and his most right-wing ministers running some kind of rogue operation. The ever-increasing oppression of Palestinians, including the current genocide in Gaza and the state-backed pogroms in the West Bank, are the policies of mainstream Zionism – the result of 56 years of occupation and 17 years of blockade in Gaza.
Zionism and “the Jewish Question”
The historic irony and tragedy of the Jewish people is that right-wing nationalism has been the source of the oppression of Jews. Yet Zionism invented and propagates the dangerously false idea that the Jewish people can find safety from oppression only in its own right-wing nationalism. The most unspeakably horrific genocide of the modern era was carried out in the name of nationalism in the world’s most culturally advanced and educated bourgeois society. The apparent paradox is captured in the iconic image of the Nazi death camp guard reading Goethe.
Isaac Deutscher the great Marxist biographer of Trotsky and anti-Zionist Jewish intellectual, remarked that the tragedy of the Jewish people was that they discovered nationalism after it no longer served any progressive purpose. In this observation Deutscher was following the analysis of the masterful Trotskyist historian of Jewish experience, Abram Leon, who died in the Nazis’ Auschwitz extermination camp. Unlike Zionist historians who present Jewish history as unrelieved and relentless oppression, Abram Leon records that Jews actually played an essential economic role in medieval and Roman societies, and lived in relative peace in the Ottoman Middle East. Leon explained that “Jews lived within the pores of medieval society” and had an indispensable secular function. But Jews, traditionally petty bourgeois and artisan, were “wedged between the anvil of decaying feudalism and the hammer of rotting capitalism.” They were the natural enemies of domestic petty-bourgeois competitors. As Leon explains, “Placed between two fires, the Jews were exposed to the hostility of the petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry who sought to find a place for themselves at the expense of Jews.”[2]
Zionism tried to find a solution in the heart of their essential problem: nationalism and capitalism. “Whereas the national movement is the product of the ascending period of capitalism, Zionism is the product of the imperialist era,” Leon argued. “The Jewish tragedy of the twentieth century is a direct consequence of the decline of capitalism.” The Jewish bourgeoisie tried to create a national state, to assure itself of the objective framework for the development of productive forces, precisely in the period when the condition for such a development had long since disappeared. Therefore, in a divided colonial world, Zionism came into collision with Arab nationalism. “Zionism” writes Leon, “wishes to resolve the Jewish question without destroying capitalism which is the principal source of the suffering of the Jews.”
Now Israel is in the throes of genocidal revenge and fury. But it has over the years also produced political opposition. There are some brave Israelis who struggle along with Palestinians for their rights and to end occupation. But such principled opposition is marginalized today after October 7. Even before the Hamas attack when hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest against Netanyahu and the ultra-religious right, Palestinian rights were not on the agenda, including the rights of Palestinians living in their midst in Israel. On the contrary, any protesters who carried Palestinian flags were excluded.
Marxist revolutionaries are the most intransigent fighters against antisemitism and every form of racism and bigotry including Zionist hatred and oppression of Palestinians. That fight for decency and democratic equality can be won only as part of the struggle to overcome the capitalist system of exploitation, racism and war – the class struggle for socialist revolution.■
[1] See “The mainstream Zionist militarists Benny Gantz and General Gadi Eisenkot joined a “war cabinet” together with Netanyahu in the earliest days of the war in October 2023, accompanied by the fascists Gvir and Smotrich in a parallel “security cabinet.” Both Ganz and Eisenkot are former chiefs of staff of the Israeli armed forces, and responsible for killing thousands of Palestinians on their own account. Gantz and Eisenkot left the war cabinet in mid-June 2024, after which it was dissolved.
[2] Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1942).