Anti-Zionist rhetoric: Loud but fundamentally flawed - opinion

There are some very angry people who are in a rage and who are involved in being very unfavorable to Israel and Zionism, lately. It’s the trend of anti-Israelism.

IfNotNow has publicized that it “is happy to support In Our Name,” a new group engaged in a fundraising campaign that rejects US military funding going to Israel’s military operations against terrorists while pooh-poohing that these actions by Israel could be “in the name of ‘Jewish safety.’” They wish to invest their “resources, in our name as Jews, in supporting Palestinian communities to thrive with freedom, dignity, and self-determination.” 

In the first 72 hours of its existence, IfNotNow claims to have raised $45,000. I do not know if they have a financial oversight committee but one can only hope that this Palestine Children’s Relief Fund effort will succeed where no other funder of activities for Palestine has not – which is to prevent charity monies seeping off in direct or indirect support for terror.

Arie M. Dubnov is chair of Israel Studies and director of the Middle East Program at George Washington University, which was endowed by Susie Gelman’s foundation. Incidentally, or not, her daughter is the infamous Rachel who has been a major funder of the Palestinian Youth Movement and other anti-Zionists. Dubnov’s current book research project, tentatively titled “Dreamers of the Third Empire/Temple,” examines ties between Zionist and British imperial thinkers. 

Discourse manipulation

Dubnov recently published an article in Haaretz suggesting that right-wing academics are “manipulating the discourse” in the “debate over US Jewish identity” and thus are forcing academics “to display loyalty to Israel – or stay silent.”

He is convinced that the allegation that there is sweeping “persecution of Jews and Israelis” on American campuses “is distorted and serves the gutter politics of the contemporary Right.”

And to include one non-Jew, for diversity, the Fontaines D.C. are an Irish post-punk band. Member “Curley” Carlos O’Connell plays guitar. They won the Album Award at the Rolling Stone UK Awards 2024 on November 28 with Romance. In his short appreciation of thanks, Curley managed but to mumble, “I’m just gonna say: Free Palestine. Free Palestine, free Palestine. F*** Netanyahu and f*** Zionism. Free Palestine.” 

They are all so angry.

WE ARE seeing and hearing a crescendo of anti-Jewish-disguised-as-anti-Zionist fervor that purports to being opposed to actions supposedly taken by Israel. Those actions, committed in its defense, following an invasion of a portion of its territory and the slaughter, torture, rape, and hostage-taking of its citizens, residents, and visitors, have been twisted to fit a new definition, pushed by Amnesty International, of genocide. 

It is not only Western liberals who have turned on the Jews. What can explain Omer Bartov, Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, calling Israel’s Gaza military campaign a “genocide operation”? In a counter-balance, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that, while he might not agree with how Israel is conducting its war against Hamas in Gaza, what is happening in the enclave does not amount to genocide.

Why do educated Jews turn so against their own people while an Italian Catholic sees the same matter with a totally different clarity? Why do university officials and educators adopt such radical attitudes as what Zahava Feldstein, a post-graduate doctoral candidate, was told by a Stanford University dean: “Zionists are the in-group upon which white supremacy depends.”

Feldstein was developing a curriculum for Jewish high school students. The dean suggested that Feldstein “frame Zionism for them as a white supremacist project.”

Of course, when the owner-publisher of Haaretz insists that there exists an apartheid regime in Israel and lets slip that the Arab terrorists are basically “freedom fighters,” one begins to grasp that there is an echo of times past as when Nicolas Donin denounced the Talmud in the 13th century to Pope Gregory IX. That resulted in the 1242 burning of the thousands of holy tomes in Paris.

The other side is organizing. They have been doing so for a while, as can be gleaned from this admission now of a British academic, forced to remain anonymous:

“Ever since the late 1960s, higher education in the West has been infiltrated by a steady stream of nefarious actors, who claim victimhood and make allegations of ‘Islamophobia’ on the one hand and spout racist hate speech against Jews on the other.”

Higher education has been replaced by lower education, an example of which is Genocide Bad, a forthcoming book by Sim Kern (she is a “they”). It “confronts Zionist propaganda head-on” with notes on Palestine, Jewish history, and collective liberation, a “collection of 10 unapologetic essays.” It is 200 pages long. A younger generation is being spoon-fed lies, misrepresentations, and insidious insanity.

As Norman Goda, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, has pointed out in a Quillette podcast, the charge that Israel is perpetrating a genocide is culturally rooted, springing “from antisemitic tropes of Jewish bloody-mindedness, Cold War politics, settler-colonial academic theory, and the melding of international law with political activism.”

NGO Monitor has documented this slide into irrational despising of Jews who insist we are a nation, possessing a national identity with a historical heritage over 3,000 years old. It is a Jewish legacy of religion, culture, literature, community customs and an actual historical record attested to by those we engaged with, for good or for worse.

An early 2022 Amnesty International embargoed draft report declared that Israel’s “system of apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948” – as if Israel’s very existence is an original sin. At the time, US Amnesty International director Paul O’Brien said, “We are opposed to the idea… that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people.” 

No other state, and certainly no Islamic nation, is similarly treated. We Jews aren’t permitted to be like other humans. The angry anti-Zionists will yet be very sorry.

The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.