IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement
nopeace
Member
International banking cartels. This affects every American.
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EasyEJL
Never enough
Right, you are much more reliable than them :crackhead:
but you go on supporting suicide bombers and a GOVERNMENT who would broadcast that hideous rabbit **** as a childrens show teaching them to hate and want to kill. See where that gets you, and them.
nopeace
Member
I only go as far to say that Banks control this country. Aiming the blame at the families that own the banks is somewhat far fetched.
It is a scary thought however to think about one family controlling over half the wealth of the world. It's more like 300 Families that control these banks. Not one family. Then you get into Illuminati Freemason stuff, and that is just not anything worth debating about.
there isn't enough proof in this area to say anything. There is more basis for an argument that The FED is ripping us off by the minute and we should abolish it.
JFK wanted to return to the gold standard and he was made an example. Get rid of the FED and have a truly free country. The income tax is 'taxation with out representation".
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nopeace
Member
No. I don't support suicide bombers. I agreed that children programming was ridiculous.
I support freedom, and reserving the United States of America for the people of this Republic. True freedom is not gained by watching scripted news and believing you're getting the entire truth. Whoever owns the broadcasters decides what they will say. Until you realize that the news is not here to inform you, but instead to push a political agenda of another person, then you might start thinking for yourself.
Ironically, much of the world has grown disgust for Israel Zionist regime. Only here in the US did AIPAC do a number on the people.
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nopeace
Member
So then prove you're right about Israel.
Prove the rest of the world supports Israel?
Prove the UN Condemnations were a mistake?
Prove that 9/11 happened because we are "free and strong"
Prove the Amnesty International and UN accusations of using human shields are false?
Prove Hamas hides and shoots rockets from schools
Prove the Media is not ONE sided in he US
Prove that the Rockets from Hamas are FAR more devastating than, white phosphorus, tank shells, artillery shells, hellfire missiles, 500lb mk 82 bombs?
Prove that Hamas broke the cease fire first and Israel is acting in self defense.
Prove that the Palestinian people are not being abused and demoralized.
Prove every Medical Facility bombed was accident. All 59 cases.
Prove that UN Humanitarian Aid trucks were hit on purpose or UN Facilities hit on purpose?
Prove they accidentally shot the paramedics?
give me the number of people killed by rockets.
Then the number killed by Israel.
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EasyEJL
Never enough
The UN voted to give Israel that land. All the rest of this crap is due to the Arab nations refusing to accept that.
Easy. Any time that israel doesn't respond, or responds weakly what you see from hamas and other terrorist groups of palestinians is "their resolve is weak, its time to strike harder". So israel does what it does to keep that from happening. Is it what i would like to see happening? No, i'd like to see hamas keep its cease fire agreements and work towards actual peace.
Prove why it happened at all.
Who said they were? Its the same tactic the palestinians use.
Hamas fires rockets from civilian locations, regardless of what those locations are. Is it better if its from an apartment complex? There have been numerous reports, even in the most recent incidents that hamas fired them from NEAR a school, with palestinian's as eyewitness.
never said it wasn't
Who said they were?
Its happened enough times, which particular time do you mean? repeatedly hamas does this, or hamas operatives, or other terrorist groups. The mortars aren't marked as to who they came from, but hamas is supposed to be in control of their territory.
Never said that wasn't true, but they also voted in a terrorist group who did suicide bombing and makes childresn shows like the rabbit one. They are culpable to some extent on their own.
Prove it was purposeful all 59 cases
Prove it wasn't.
honestly I don't care. the number killed by israel is far larger. Does that mean that Israel should accept the mortar fire?
EasyEJL
Never enough
Prove that Hamas was ever not what the rest of the world considers a terrorist organization.
nopeace
Member
Some countries have recognized them as a genuine political party, while labeling the Militant wing a terrorist group,
I wonder what makes them a terrorist group and not a rebel or guerrilla type group?
EasyEJL
Never enough
The particular tactics they have used, including the suicide bombings and stuff like that TV show.
I don't say the Israelis have done no wrong, however being under constant threat of destruction by all the neighbors that surround you from the day of your inception as a government and still no signs of even acceptance of your right to exist 60 years later would probably leave me doing similar things to some extent. Maybe not quite identical response, but i would never let a mortar firing go unpunished either. And as in all conflicts, if its going to be me or them, it will be them.
nopeace
Member
Well suicide bombings have been renounced. The only excuse for these was an asymmetrical war, because one side has modern weapons and the other side has brainwashed religious zealots. That TV show is just horrendous. What the hell are these guys thinking? Do they not have a public relations person? Can they try to appear a little more peaceful?
My main argument with Israel is it's tactics of proportional punishment and collective punishment of the people.
While Hamas' only desperate way to strike deep into Israel is make shift rockets that are unguided, what else can they do? It's pathetic but that's what they're limited to.
Israel may want continuous conflict with Hamas because every time they provoke Hamas (Israel broke ceasefire in 08) they will respond pathetically and then Israel gives them a wallop that destroys a good portion of the people. Then Israel, who has the unwavering support of the US can act as freely and brutally as it wants. Over time, they will eventually eradicate what is left of the Pal. people. Until they leave the area. Plus they drive hatred even deeper by acting like this.
In my opinion Israel does not want peace at all. Only excuses to continue to attack Gaza.
I'm angered by the US not showing any type of remorse or will to be critical of Israel's tactics. This is bad for our relations in the region because American's will be seen as supporters of brutality at the hands of the Israelis. At some point US should step in and attempt to stop the civilian massacre or give an objective point of view. How are Iraqis gonna trust Americans when we are supporting an obvious one-sided massacre?
I am bothered by such total submission to Israel. Israel is not our ally, I don't think they even will fight side to side with our soldiers. If we attack Iran, Israel will not even bother to show up. Even though they are pushing for it heavily.
Plus they shouldn't get foreign aid from us, they got plenty of money.
They're not our allies in the "Global war on Terror" last time I checked they weren't really doing much of anything but watch the planes hit the towers in N.Y. and defending themselves.
We are their allies in the "war to save our asses". Until we realize that Israel has somewhat breeded Islamic Radical Terrorism by existing in the region. It's our support of them to blame and our actions in the area. If we had gained popular support of the people in the middle east they wouldn't hate us.
People need to stop aligning Christianity with anti-Islam. Religion should keep it self far from the corruptibility of Politics.
I support a two state deal. Give the Palestinians legitimate rights and a usable civil infrastructure. Allow them to control their own borders and move freely. Let them control their resources such as power, water and industry.
Have a Neutral 3rd party oversee this peace agreement.
Both sides should recognize in front of the world the crimes they have committed in good faith to each other.
Israel especially. Hamas should renounce terrorism completely. Organize a military/police force that doesn't resemble "gibberish-Type Islam crap" Uniforms, one standard Issue weapon etc.
Hamas must realize it cannot win. Peaceful protest is the only way to go, use English to protest. Stop burning flags,and dummies etc...
Israel has a right to exist, humans are humans. So by this measure the Palestinians also have a right to exist and be treated equally.
EasyEJL
Never enough
No, see if you are correct in the rest of what you are saying, the way the could strike deepest into Israel is to announce willingness to accept Israel as a nation with the formation of a 2 state region based on the original UN maps. It would prove that the Israeli's don't want peace if indeed they didn't, if they refused to move forward with negotiations. 2 states, plus jerusalem as a 3rd state, under a multinational control so that everyone can visit.
But they are more about teaching hate, and all the arab nations even do the same towards each other. It becomes a battle of who runs their country more horribly stone aged, and anyone who runs their country less stone age than you is a heretic and non-believer in Islam, where thereby you have the right to subjugate them.
And seriously, saying that they renounced suicide bombings, I mean come on, they renounced them after the elections didn't they? And like you can actually believe them anyhow, with all the other craziness.
nopeace
Member
Well if you take Islam out of the equation then there might be a real chance for peace.
lutherblsstt
Guest
You need a history lesson:
"British imperialism promoted the economic destabilization of the indigenous Palestinian economy. The Mandatory Government granted a privileged status to Jewish capital, awarding it 90% of the concessions in Palestine. This enabled the Zionists to gain control of the economic infrastructure (road projects, Dead Sea minerals, electricity, ports, etc.).
By 1935, Zionists controlled 872 of a total of 1,212 industrial firms in Palestine. Imports related to Zionist industries were exempted from taxes. Discriminatory work laws were passed against the Arab workforce resulting in large scale unemployment and a substandard existence for those who were able to find employment.
Loss of land and repression heightened Palestinian awareness of the fate intended for them and fueled a great uprising which lasted from 1936 to 1939.
The revolt assumed the form of civil disobedience and armed insurrection. Peasants left their villages to join fighting units which were formed in the mountains. Arab nationalists from Syria and Jordan soon entered the struggle.
A Royal Commission was established in 1937, under the direction of Lord Peel, to determine the causes of the 1936 revolt. The Peel Commission concluded that the two primary factors were Palestinian desire for national independence and Palestinian fear of the establishment of a Zionist colony on their land. The Peel Report analyzed a series of other factors with uncommon candor. These were:
The spread of the Arab nationalist spirit outside Palestine
Increasing Jewish immigration after 1933
The ability of the Zionists to dominate public opinion in Britain because of the tacit support of the government
Lack of Arab confidence in the good intentions of the British government
Palestinian fear of continued land purchases by Jews from absentee feudal
landowners who sold off their landholdings and evicted the Palestinian peasants who had worked the land
The evasiveness of the Mandatory government about its intentions regarding Palestinian sovereignty.
The national movement consisted of the urban bourgeoisie, feudal landowners, religious leaders and representatives of peasants and workers.
Its demands were:
An immediate stop to Zionist immigration
Cessation and prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Arab lands to Zionist colonists
The establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinians would have the controlling voice"
Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-1939 Revolt in Palestine
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
lutherblsstt
Guest
Actually the original source of the info was Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-1939 Revolt in Palestine .
Invalid Link Removed
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
No, you copied Ralph Schoenman. The part he references Kanafani is not in the text you quoted and is only reference for a small snippet. You are quoting the interpretation of Ralph Schoenmann as history which is comical at best.
lutherblsstt
Guest
Why is it comical? Oh I forgot,things that contradict your worldview are to be ridiculed and discarded,gotcha.
nopeace
Member
No evidence to counter your claim.
lutherblsstt
Guest
COMMON FALLACIES IN REASONING
Invalid Link Removed
"DAMNING THE SOURCE: (ad hominem, sometimes called the genetic fallacy) attempts to refute an argument by indicting the source of the argument, rather than the substance of the argument itself.
example: There is no reason to listen to the arguments of those who oppose school prayer, for they are the arguments of atheists!
example: The American Trial Lawyers Association favors of this piece of legislation, so you know it has to be bad for ordinary citizens."
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
Its comical because its nothing but an opinion of an admitted anti-American, activist. Its not unbiased nor is it comprehensive in its sources or viewpoint. Its an opinion piece, as it all your "facts". IF you actually call yourself a teacher yet quote Schoeman as a historial source then I feel sorry for your students.
So when you tell someone to get a history lesson, and you quote an activists opinion on history, its quite amusing.
"On the basis of a conspiracy theory of “Jewish financial capital”, Mahler speaks of the “secret government” by the “directors of the global economic and financial system.” Mahler, while certainly an extreme example, is not unique in his perspective. Leftists have embraced a similar worldview of Zionist control of banking and foreign policy.[7]"
[7] See Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman.
Sorry.... not history.
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
nopeace,
You couldn't look at this situation with an unbiased viewpoint if someone paid you.
Your bias and bigotry is well established.
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
I think you have described yourself to a T Luther.
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
Unlike Luther who will copy and paste opinion as historical fact (just read CDB in the other thread..its hilarious :lol: ), I will post a rather comprehensive opinion based on several historical sources as well as opinion. You can form your own conclusion but its a bit more comprehensive and unbiased than Ralph Schoenman and his conspiracy theories.
Preface
This article is a response to growing anti-Semitism in the left after the attacks on the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001. In the wake of the attacks I was distressed by the prevalence of anti-Jewish diatribes on a variety of websites and periodicals that were ostensibly devoted to progressive causes. To my dismay, leftists were advocating the wildest conspiracy theories that linked the Mossad and “the Jews” as the culprits behind 9-11. Unfortunately, leftists were displaying key elements of the “paranoid style” of American politics once prevalent on the extreme right. Richard Hofstadter writes:
…the fact that movements employing the paranoid style are not constant but come in successive episodic waves suggests that the paranoid disposition is mobilized into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action. Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric. [1]
While the most extreme rhetoric may be dismissed as “paranoid” I seek to display a deeper level of anti-Semitism in elements of the New Left, directly related to their ideological interpretation of past events and current phenomena. As Paul Berman states,
Everyone knows what the Nazism of the 1930s and 1940s was. But what was the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, in its motives, instincts, and goals, in its spirit? The decades come and go, and on that question no consensus has been achieved, none at all, not in Europe and not in America. [2]
Introduction: Why Have Jews Left the Radical Left?
Prior to World War II, Jews were prevalent in the revolutionary movements of every European nation and the United States. From anarchism and socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to communism through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s Jews were in the vanguard. Their names are familiar: Marx, Berkman, Goldman, Trotsky, Volin, and many others who names remain unknown to even the most serious scholars of revolutionary history. Even Lenin admitted in 1917:
The Jews furnished a particularly high percentage (compared with the total Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement. And now, too, it should be noted to the credit of the Jews, they furnish a relatively high percentage of internationalists, compared with other nationalities. [3]
Secular Jewish identity, both within and outside the Jewish community was closely linked with these revolutionary movements. Indeed, a common epithet was “anarchist (or communist) Jew.” More recently, Daniel Rubin, a Communist Party USA spokesman and editor stated, “Jewish-Americans had long been considered one of the most progressive ethnic-religious groups in helping to build the labor movement, the old Socialist Party, the International Workers Order, the American Labor Party, and the Communist Party, USA.” [4]
After WWII, Jews were increasingly integrated into mainstream American society. While already established in academia, law, printing, and publishing, Jews attained political offices and other increasingly public positions. Jews were seen less and less as an “other” and in effect gained “white” status just as the Italians and Irish before them. Concurrent with this development was a shift in mainstream secular Jewish homes away from radicalism and towards liberalism. The apex of this phenomenon was the large Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights struggles occurring in the Southern United States.
However, in the past 40 years there has been a distinct shift in Jewish opinion—if one may even say such a thing exists—away from radical and progressive left movements. What happened? Are there any causal factors that spring to mind?
The easiest materialist answer is that Jews were benefactors of assimilation. The historian of the anarchist movement, Paul Avrich, slyly notes that anarchism as a movement and ideology was a victim of the “American Dream.” What he meant is the children of anarchist immigrants went off to college, pursued professional jobs, and became middle class. They, in turn, adopted the ideology of that class and forsake their parents’ anarchism as an anachronism. After the Holocaust many Jews became disillusioned with the utopian aspirations of proletarian socialist universalism and focused their energy on the reality of building the state of Israel. Indeed, Israel became the focal point for the Jewish community in the United States.
The establishment of the state of Israel was highly contentious. Within Israel, the most secular and left leaning truly believed Jews could exist in solidarity with the Arabs within Israel and neighboring Arab states. They advocated a “two people, one state” solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict i.e. integration. This was a distinct contrast to either South Africa or Rhodesia where racialist regimes were in power. At the other extreme, right wing religious Jews felt the land was theirs as mandated by God in the Torah. Right wing secularists claimed the land rightfully theirs as a result of political agreements and as reparations for the crimes committed against the Jewish people in the Holocaust.
Internationally, the establishment of Israel was variously viewed as the righting of a past wrong (European socialists), imperialism (the Soviet government) and a continuation of the crusades (Muslims). Americans by and large, supported Israel as a fledgling democracy with similar cultural values and in accordance with their own spiritual beliefs. [5]
It is my thesis that the widespread adoption of a synthesis of revolutionary New Left “third-worldist” ideology with elements of pan-Arab and black nationalism marginalized Jews and drove many of them away from the radical left. Another decisive factor was the rupturing of the Black-Jewish coalition that was a corner stone of the Civil Rights Movement. Arnold Foster and Benjamin Epstein note:
In the middle and late sixties, for some objective reasons (the agonizingly slow pace of economic improvement, the squalor of life in the ghetto, the apparent immutability of the welfare cycle) and for some subjective reasons (agitation by “black power” militants, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy), much of black America went through a turning inward of black interests and energy toward nationalism. The result was a break up of the civil rights coalition… [6]
The Soviet Position
During the heyday of the old left, nascent Zionism was seen as reactionary because it would worsen Jewish otherness by impeding their assimilation, distract Jews from the more worthy goal of revolution, and promote capitalism. The latter assumption came from Marx’s view that Jews were a crude people synonymous with the evils of profiteering. [7] Indeed the historical problem with Zionism for the left has not been the oppression of the Palestinians but Zionism’s perceived “reactionary role in diverting the Jewish masses from the class struggle in their respective countries.” [8]
Following in Marx’s rhetorical footsteps the Soviets defined Zionism as chauvinistic, bourgeois and reactionary (conservative) - but not racist, even though they claimed from time to time that Zionist leaders co-operated with the Nazis. In Rubin’s words, Zionism is “an extreme form of Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” [9]
The Soviet line was political Zionism—whose aim is the creation and perpetuation of a Jewish state—had its origins in the last decades of the 19th century, animated by the upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe which accompanied the rise of modern imperialism. Zionism had, in fact, developed in close relation to modern imperialism as did all forms of nationalism. While the Zionist case is usually viewed as exclusive, there are other nationalist movements who sought the support of rival imperialist powers in their struggle for independence. The relationship between the Indian Ghaddar movement and Germany is one example.
By the mid-20th century, Soviet propaganda identified Zionists as “the agents of US imperialism…in the Middle East.” [10] Functioning “to police the area in order to protect US corporate interests” and “preventing Arab peoples from achieving national liberation, and on liquidating [emphasis mine] the just rights of the Palestinians.” [11] Interesting choice of words from the originators of that particular term.
Dr. Hyman Lumer, a prominent spokesperson for the Communist Party, USA and editor of the official party ideological journal, Political Affairs believed there would eventually be no synagogues left in the Soviet Union:
Will this mean that the Soviet Jewish people have suffered cultural genocide? Not at all. What it will mean is that they, like other Soviet citizens, have advanced beyond adherence to religious superstition, that they no longer have any use for religious institutions and practices, that religious distinctions between Jews and non-Jews have vanished. [12]
After the 1967 War, Foster and Epstein note:
The Kremlin became what might be called the central switchboard of ‘permissible,’ government approved anti-Semitism, exporting its views to the Arabs, to its East European satellites, to Western Europe and to the United States—in the latter two instances under both its own auspices, including the Soviet embassies, missions, and news agencies abroad and those of its radical Left adherents and Arab propagandists. [13]
One particularly odious propagandist, Trofim Kichko published Zionism: Enemy of Youth (1972) in which he claimed “The killing of the young, not only goyim but also of the Jewish young, is preached in the Torah and was long practiced by the believers of Judaism, forerunners of the Zionists.” [14]
In another publication, Judaism and Zionism, he stated:
Judaism has always served the interests of the exploiting classes. In our times, it’s most reactionary expostulates have been taken up by the Zionists—the Jewish bourgeois nationalists. Judaism and Zionism have become the ideological foundations of the militaristic, semi-theocratic regime in Israel and it’s aggressive actions against the Arab people in the Near East. [15]
Kichiko’s virulent anti-Semitism is not surprising, he was Ukrainian Nazi sympathizer.
Lastly, at the same time, Kremlin policy sought to undermine the very survival of Israel by continuing to provide men, money and materiel—especially the latter—to the enemies of the Jewish state, including governments and terrorist groups. To be fair, the CPUSA and the USSR did not view Israel as a “settler state,” this perspective would develop among the organizations of the New Left. In fact, many Communists felt that hostilities would cease if Israel were kept within her pre-1967 borders. As Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay write:
[T]he conflict is seen not as that of a settler colonial state against the indigenous population it has uprooted; rather, it is considered to derive from the antagonism toward Israel of the neighboring Arab peoples (including the Palestinians of the West Bank) whose territories were occupied in 1966. [16]
[to be continued...]
[1] Richard Hofstadter. The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
[2] Paul Berman. “The Passion of Joschka Fischer.” The New Republic. August 27, 2001.
[3] V.I Lenin. Collected Works 23:250 in Daniel Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1987, 3.
[4] Daniel Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings, 4.
[5] This sentiment was not shared by all Americans. The extreme right John Birch Society viewed Israel as part of an international communist conspiracy. They also shared Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s opposition to Zionism, who expressed widespread “Christian resent[ment of] turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ.” See Stephen Witfield, “An anatomy of black anti-semitism,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought; Sept. 1994.
[6] Arnold Foster and Benjamin R. Epstein. The New Anti-Semitism. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1974, 9.
[7] See “On the Jewish Question” in The Marx Engels Reader.
[8] Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay. “Mid-East Perspectives from the American Left.” Journal of Palestine Studies. October 1974, Vol. 4, No. 1, 96.
[9] Daniel Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings, 9.
[10] See Daily World, October 10, 11, 17, 18, 20 and 23, 1973 and November 2 and 17, 1973.
[11] Hyman Lumer. Zionism: Its Role in World Politics. New York: International Publishers, 1973, 82.
[12] Lumer. Lenin on the Jewish Question. New York: International Publishers, 1974.
[13] Arnold Foster and Benjamin R. Epstein. The New Anti-Semitism, 222.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid, 227.
[16] Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay, 100.
Preface
This article is a response to growing anti-Semitism in the left after the attacks on the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001. In the wake of the attacks I was distressed by the prevalence of anti-Jewish diatribes on a variety of websites and periodicals that were ostensibly devoted to progressive causes. To my dismay, leftists were advocating the wildest conspiracy theories that linked the Mossad and “the Jews” as the culprits behind 9-11. Unfortunately, leftists were displaying key elements of the “paranoid style” of American politics once prevalent on the extreme right. Richard Hofstadter writes:
…the fact that movements employing the paranoid style are not constant but come in successive episodic waves suggests that the paranoid disposition is mobilized into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action. Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric. [1]
While the most extreme rhetoric may be dismissed as “paranoid” I seek to display a deeper level of anti-Semitism in elements of the New Left, directly related to their ideological interpretation of past events and current phenomena. As Paul Berman states,
Everyone knows what the Nazism of the 1930s and 1940s was. But what was the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, in its motives, instincts, and goals, in its spirit? The decades come and go, and on that question no consensus has been achieved, none at all, not in Europe and not in America. [2]
Introduction: Why Have Jews Left the Radical Left?
Prior to World War II, Jews were prevalent in the revolutionary movements of every European nation and the United States. From anarchism and socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to communism through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s Jews were in the vanguard. Their names are familiar: Marx, Berkman, Goldman, Trotsky, Volin, and many others who names remain unknown to even the most serious scholars of revolutionary history. Even Lenin admitted in 1917:
The Jews furnished a particularly high percentage (compared with the total Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement. And now, too, it should be noted to the credit of the Jews, they furnish a relatively high percentage of internationalists, compared with other nationalities. [3]
Secular Jewish identity, both within and outside the Jewish community was closely linked with these revolutionary movements. Indeed, a common epithet was “anarchist (or communist) Jew.” More recently, Daniel Rubin, a Communist Party USA spokesman and editor stated, “Jewish-Americans had long been considered one of the most progressive ethnic-religious groups in helping to build the labor movement, the old Socialist Party, the International Workers Order, the American Labor Party, and the Communist Party, USA.” [4]
After WWII, Jews were increasingly integrated into mainstream American society. While already established in academia, law, printing, and publishing, Jews attained political offices and other increasingly public positions. Jews were seen less and less as an “other” and in effect gained “white” status just as the Italians and Irish before them. Concurrent with this development was a shift in mainstream secular Jewish homes away from radicalism and towards liberalism. The apex of this phenomenon was the large Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights struggles occurring in the Southern United States.
However, in the past 40 years there has been a distinct shift in Jewish opinion—if one may even say such a thing exists—away from radical and progressive left movements. What happened? Are there any causal factors that spring to mind?
The easiest materialist answer is that Jews were benefactors of assimilation. The historian of the anarchist movement, Paul Avrich, slyly notes that anarchism as a movement and ideology was a victim of the “American Dream.” What he meant is the children of anarchist immigrants went off to college, pursued professional jobs, and became middle class. They, in turn, adopted the ideology of that class and forsake their parents’ anarchism as an anachronism. After the Holocaust many Jews became disillusioned with the utopian aspirations of proletarian socialist universalism and focused their energy on the reality of building the state of Israel. Indeed, Israel became the focal point for the Jewish community in the United States.
The establishment of the state of Israel was highly contentious. Within Israel, the most secular and left leaning truly believed Jews could exist in solidarity with the Arabs within Israel and neighboring Arab states. They advocated a “two people, one state” solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict i.e. integration. This was a distinct contrast to either South Africa or Rhodesia where racialist regimes were in power. At the other extreme, right wing religious Jews felt the land was theirs as mandated by God in the Torah. Right wing secularists claimed the land rightfully theirs as a result of political agreements and as reparations for the crimes committed against the Jewish people in the Holocaust.
Internationally, the establishment of Israel was variously viewed as the righting of a past wrong (European socialists), imperialism (the Soviet government) and a continuation of the crusades (Muslims). Americans by and large, supported Israel as a fledgling democracy with similar cultural values and in accordance with their own spiritual beliefs. [5]
It is my thesis that the widespread adoption of a synthesis of revolutionary New Left “third-worldist” ideology with elements of pan-Arab and black nationalism marginalized Jews and drove many of them away from the radical left. Another decisive factor was the rupturing of the Black-Jewish coalition that was a corner stone of the Civil Rights Movement. Arnold Foster and Benjamin Epstein note:
In the middle and late sixties, for some objective reasons (the agonizingly slow pace of economic improvement, the squalor of life in the ghetto, the apparent immutability of the welfare cycle) and for some subjective reasons (agitation by “black power” militants, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy), much of black America went through a turning inward of black interests and energy toward nationalism. The result was a break up of the civil rights coalition… [6]
The Soviet Position
During the heyday of the old left, nascent Zionism was seen as reactionary because it would worsen Jewish otherness by impeding their assimilation, distract Jews from the more worthy goal of revolution, and promote capitalism. The latter assumption came from Marx’s view that Jews were a crude people synonymous with the evils of profiteering. [7] Indeed the historical problem with Zionism for the left has not been the oppression of the Palestinians but Zionism’s perceived “reactionary role in diverting the Jewish masses from the class struggle in their respective countries.” [8]
Following in Marx’s rhetorical footsteps the Soviets defined Zionism as chauvinistic, bourgeois and reactionary (conservative) - but not racist, even though they claimed from time to time that Zionist leaders co-operated with the Nazis. In Rubin’s words, Zionism is “an extreme form of Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” [9]
The Soviet line was political Zionism—whose aim is the creation and perpetuation of a Jewish state—had its origins in the last decades of the 19th century, animated by the upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe which accompanied the rise of modern imperialism. Zionism had, in fact, developed in close relation to modern imperialism as did all forms of nationalism. While the Zionist case is usually viewed as exclusive, there are other nationalist movements who sought the support of rival imperialist powers in their struggle for independence. The relationship between the Indian Ghaddar movement and Germany is one example.
By the mid-20th century, Soviet propaganda identified Zionists as “the agents of US imperialism…in the Middle East.” [10] Functioning “to police the area in order to protect US corporate interests” and “preventing Arab peoples from achieving national liberation, and on liquidating [emphasis mine] the just rights of the Palestinians.” [11] Interesting choice of words from the originators of that particular term.
Dr. Hyman Lumer, a prominent spokesperson for the Communist Party, USA and editor of the official party ideological journal, Political Affairs believed there would eventually be no synagogues left in the Soviet Union:
Will this mean that the Soviet Jewish people have suffered cultural genocide? Not at all. What it will mean is that they, like other Soviet citizens, have advanced beyond adherence to religious superstition, that they no longer have any use for religious institutions and practices, that religious distinctions between Jews and non-Jews have vanished. [12]
After the 1967 War, Foster and Epstein note:
The Kremlin became what might be called the central switchboard of ‘permissible,’ government approved anti-Semitism, exporting its views to the Arabs, to its East European satellites, to Western Europe and to the United States—in the latter two instances under both its own auspices, including the Soviet embassies, missions, and news agencies abroad and those of its radical Left adherents and Arab propagandists. [13]
One particularly odious propagandist, Trofim Kichko published Zionism: Enemy of Youth (1972) in which he claimed “The killing of the young, not only goyim but also of the Jewish young, is preached in the Torah and was long practiced by the believers of Judaism, forerunners of the Zionists.” [14]
In another publication, Judaism and Zionism, he stated:
Judaism has always served the interests of the exploiting classes. In our times, it’s most reactionary expostulates have been taken up by the Zionists—the Jewish bourgeois nationalists. Judaism and Zionism have become the ideological foundations of the militaristic, semi-theocratic regime in Israel and it’s aggressive actions against the Arab people in the Near East. [15]
Kichiko’s virulent anti-Semitism is not surprising, he was Ukrainian Nazi sympathizer.
Lastly, at the same time, Kremlin policy sought to undermine the very survival of Israel by continuing to provide men, money and materiel—especially the latter—to the enemies of the Jewish state, including governments and terrorist groups. To be fair, the CPUSA and the USSR did not view Israel as a “settler state,” this perspective would develop among the organizations of the New Left. In fact, many Communists felt that hostilities would cease if Israel were kept within her pre-1967 borders. As Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay write:
[T]he conflict is seen not as that of a settler colonial state against the indigenous population it has uprooted; rather, it is considered to derive from the antagonism toward Israel of the neighboring Arab peoples (including the Palestinians of the West Bank) whose territories were occupied in 1966. [16]
[to be continued...]
[1] Richard Hofstadter. The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
[2] Paul Berman. “The Passion of Joschka Fischer.” The New Republic. August 27, 2001.
[3] V.I Lenin. Collected Works 23:250 in Daniel Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1987, 3.
[4] Daniel Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings, 4.
[5] This sentiment was not shared by all Americans. The extreme right John Birch Society viewed Israel as part of an international communist conspiracy. They also shared Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s opposition to Zionism, who expressed widespread “Christian resent[ment of] turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ.” See Stephen Witfield, “An anatomy of black anti-semitism,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought; Sept. 1994.
[6] Arnold Foster and Benjamin R. Epstein. The New Anti-Semitism. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1974, 9.
[7] See “On the Jewish Question” in The Marx Engels Reader.
[8] Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay. “Mid-East Perspectives from the American Left.” Journal of Palestine Studies. October 1974, Vol. 4, No. 1, 96.
[9] Daniel Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings, 9.
[10] See Daily World, October 10, 11, 17, 18, 20 and 23, 1973 and November 2 and 17, 1973.
[11] Hyman Lumer. Zionism: Its Role in World Politics. New York: International Publishers, 1973, 82.
[12] Lumer. Lenin on the Jewish Question. New York: International Publishers, 1974.
[13] Arnold Foster and Benjamin R. Epstein. The New Anti-Semitism, 222.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid, 227.
[16] Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay, 100.
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
Leaving the Radical Left: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Response (Part 2)
The New Left
In 1972, Joe Stork, the editor of the left-wing Middle East Research and Information Report (MERIP), wrote it was “difficult to point to official positions and articulated decisions in assessing the subject” of Israel and Palestine as “the white New Left has had very little to Say about Palestine or Israel.” For Stork, “the New Left groups and personalities have been conspicuous by their absence in any activity against Israel or US Middle East policy.”[1]
Perhaps this was the case in 1972 when Stork claims to have surveyed available New Left Literature on the subject published subsequent to the 1967 War. Yet a more comprehensive article written by two members of MERIP would refute Stork’s claim a mere two years after Stork’s article was published.[2] Today we have access to a variety of newspapers, reports, manifestoes, books and broadsheets, that clearly articulate an anti-Israel—and at times anti-Semitic—bias.
Unlike the Soviets, the New Left embraced a Third Worldist form of “guerilla romanticism,” a worldview described in the following manner by Paul Berman:
ocial progress rested on a lie, a fear that prosperity was theft, and Western wealth was Third World exploitation; a fear that Western civilization comprised a system of manipulation designed to mislead its own people and everyone else-an iron cage cleverly designed to resemble the open air of freedom.[3]
The most extreme elements in the New Left declared that fascism—specifically Nazism—had never truly been defeated. In Europe and the United States, activists linked the actions of their respective governments to a “cleverly disguised, still flourishing Nazism.”[4]
The New Left embraced and synthesized various existing and moribund left tendencies including Marxism, anarchism, council-communism and so on. What most had in common was an uncritical and congratulatory stance—guerilla romanticism—towards the national liberation struggles occurring in the Third World. Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, all were viewed as interconnected struggles against imperialism. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) reflects this political ideology and strategy in one of its basic documents, “The Military Thinking of the Front:”
A basic condition for a true, radical revolution in our times is a revolutionary party, whose function is to orchestrate a national liberation war and lead it to victory. It is the party, with its sound perspective, that decides the strategy and tactics to be used in the battlefield…The great, global confrontation today is being played out by the exploitative imperialist camp and the Third World and Socialist camp. Only through an alliance with the liberation movements of Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Asia, Africa, and Latin America can the Palestinian and Arab national liberation movements resist the imperialist camp… On the basis of this international strategy, we shall be able to encircle Israel, Zionism and Imperialism, and recruit all global revolutionary forces to support us in the battle. [8] See the document in Rubinstein [ed.] (1971) pp. 3-69.
The PFLP statement is nearly identical to any one of a number of political pronouncements of the era. All one needs to do is pick up a copy of The Black Panther, Revolutionary Worker, the Militant, Workers Vanguard, or the numerous pamphlets and newspapers common among the New Left of that time.
Publication in two successive issues of The Militant (October 1970) of an official Al Fatah document calling for the dismantling of Israel an including a broad attack on the Jews of all countries. The manifesto, carried by the Trotskyist paper, said in part:
Jews contributed men, money and influence to make Israel a reality and to perpetuate the crimes committed against the Palestinians. The people of the Book…changed roles from oppressed to oppressor.[5]
George Novack, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote an article that expressing:
…at the present time there is a deadly symmetry between the attitudes of the Israelis towards the Arabs and that of the American Jews toward the Afro-Americans and their liberation struggle…the upper and middle ranges of American Jewry, comfortably ensconced in bourgeois America, some of them bankers, landlords, big and little businessmen, participate in the system of oppressing and exploiting the black masses, just as the Zionists have become oppressors of the Palestinians Arabs. Jewish teachers in New York, reluctant to give up their small privileges, resist the Afro-American demand for the control of the schools in their own communities.[6]
At a Socialist Workers Party convention held August 8 to 12, 1971 in Cleveland, Ohio, a report was presented preceding a party resolution against Zionism and the state of Israel. The report emphasized:
…the major task confronting American revolutionists remains that of educating the radicalizing youth about the real history of the Zionist movement and the revolutionary character of the Palestinian and Arab struggle for destruction of the state of Israel.[7]
It’s hard not to notice that the stated goal is not “ending occupation” or a “one-state solution” but destruction of Israel. Radical leftists were much more open about their intentions in the 1970s because they truly believed a revolutionary wave was sweeping the globe.
Beyond rhetoric, many revolutionary organizations in the United States and Europe provided material support for Palestinian groups engaged in armed struggle against Israel, or, in their words “the Zionist entity.” These groups included the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen, and the Red Army Fraction. The Palestinian groups engaged in terrorism that were supported by the left included the PFLP, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestine Liberation Front and Black September.[8]
Over time, the American radical left increasingly began to view the Jewish community and its institutions as part of the “Establishment”: an affluent, smug “liberal” obstacle to the growth of revolutionary consciousness. Indeed, Jewish voting patterns, attitudes, alliances—in short, the political behavior of Jews—had a decidedly liberal cast.
For New Left radicals, liberalism was the main obstacle to revolutionary victory. Liberalism was the force which sowed and perpetuated illusions that progress could be achieved steadily and peacefully through normal democratic processes. Liberalism, therefore, had to be rendered obsolete if society was to be polarized and revolutionary awareness replace the tolerant and optimistic attitudes that provide the cement of “the system.” Consensual domination or, “hegemony,” in the terminology of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, must be challenged. However, unlike Gramsci, the cadres would emerge from the lumpenproletariat.
Eschewing the Old Left’s emphasis on class and the Civil Right’s Movement emphasis on cross-cultural solidarity, the New Left embraced racial minorities—especially African Americans—as the groups with the most potential for achieving a revolutionary transformation of society.[9] Race was seen by the New Left as the most vulnerable aspect of American society at home and in foreign affairs the issue became the anti-imperialist struggle of the third world. Indeed, a single term, third world peoples, was coined to embrace the mass of humanity involved in both struggles. Again, over time, as the Jewish community was viewed as part of the liberal enemy at home, the Jewish nation, Israel, was cast in the same role abroad.[10]
Foster and Epstein note:
In this historical context the radical left chose to take sides against the Jews. It was not so much a matter of wanting to do battle with the Jewish community [or racism as with fascist anti-Semites--TNC] as it was a fixed determination to show the blacks, especially the most radical and nationalistic blacks, that in their struggles they could count on the total support of the revolutionary left.[11]
For most of the radical left, the backbone or heart of world capitalism was and remains the United States. To weaken and eventually destroy American influence in the world by battering it both at home and abroad is its most fundamental task and the prime requirement for the world victory of “socialism.”
To their credit, the New Left was not universally anti-Jewish. For example, when Daniel Cohn-Bendit was denounced as a “German Jew” by the leader of the French Communist Party, angry crowds of radical youths took to the streets chanting “We are all German Jews!” While at a right-wing rally one of the slogans was “Cohn-Bendit–to Dachau!”[12]
Arab Nationalism, Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
While undoubtedly stimulated by the modern Arab-Israel conflict, religious-based discrimination, harassment and murder have afflicted centuries-old Jewish communities in Muslim lands so severely in recent years that approximately 800,000 Jews from Arab lands have fled mostly to Israel, the lesser number elsewhere.
Anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab and Muslim world has been well documented and is beyond the scope of this paper. Even Rodinson (no friend of Israel) admits “The very day after the partition plan was announced, on November 30, 1947, at dawn, Arab attacks announced the Arab refusal to accept the Jewish state.” [13]
Many Arab political leaders viewed Zionism as Socialist and pro-Communist, and later as the “foster child” of Western Imperialism - but not as a racist movement. The turnaround seemed to happen in May 1964 with the first wording of the Palestinian National Charter - Article 19 of the [original] charter defines Zionism as “a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations and fascist in its means and aims.” The attempt to deny Jews the right of national determination and territorial independence accorded to all other peoples (and vigorously claimed by the Arabs for themselves) is a callous denial of 6,000 years of Jewish identity, more than a third of that time spent in involuntary exile.
Article 22 of the PLO Covenant explicitly liked Zionism with fascism.[14] Most on the New Left felt the condemnation was justified, given Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and territory seized during the 1967 war. They were either unaware or chose to ignore the fact that the Covenant was drafted and adopted in 1964 before Israel liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
If anti-Israel bias was not apparent in the UN’s it certainly became evident by 1975. David Greenberg describes a 1975 United Nations conference on women’s rights which issued a declaration that calling “for the elimination of ‘Zionism, apartheid, [and] racial discrimination.’” To the best of my knowledge, this conference is the genesis of the “Zionism is apartheid” trope.
Throughout the summer, Soviet, African, and Arab leaders maneuvered to oust Israel from the international body. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin led the charge, calling for the “extinction” of Israel. Echoing the language which would be repeated by Third World sycophants for decades to come, he urged Americans “to rid their society of the Zionists,” who controlled the media and banks. These were caustic, but unsurprising remarks for a man like Amin. That fact that Amin’s speech reportedly drew a standing ovation from the U.N. delegates is alarming and displays broadening support for the linkage between Zionism and racism beyond the left to include non-aligned, non-Muslim, nationalist regimes
Unlike Greenberg, Foster, and Epstein, Yochanan Manor delineates between Arab anti-Zionism and its leftist counterpart. For Manor, Arab anti-Zionism “derives from the conflict and the frustration of the Arabs in the light of the successes of the Zionist movement and their failures.” In Manor’s analysis, Arab nationalists appropriated Soviet and Eastern European anti-Zionist propaganda that aimed to find a scapegoat for various internal crises related to state socialism. As Manor writes, “sometimes the Soviets found it expedient to add an international dimension and present Zionism as an international conspiracy responsible for these internal crises.”
Black Nationalism, Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
The association of Jews with the Civil Rights Movement is well documented. However, by the late 1960s, tensions and cracks were developing in the “black-Jewish coalition.” In addition to the notion of Jew as capitalist (described above) Benjamin Ginsberg notes the political tensions that existed in the coalition where Jews “were critically important to blacks when few other whites would help them.” Paradoxically, this made:
established black politicians vulnerable to attack by insurgent black political forces who could use anti-Semitic appeals as a way of charging that established blacks had sold out to whites and could not be trusted. The first major black politicians to successfully use this strategy were Malcolm X in the North, and Stokely Carmichael, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in the South.[15]
In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Howard Cruse asserted Jews were to blame for most of the major problems facing black intellectuals. He also expressed great hostility toward the establishment of the Jewish state.[16] Reminiscent of the arguments nativists had used against Catholics a century prior, Cruse questioned the loyalties of American Jews as agents of a foreign state. Thankfully, many African-American scholars responded with resounding disapproval. Reviewing the book in The Black Scholar of November 1969, editor Robert Chrisman wrote:
There is a vicious anti-Semitism throughout the work. When faced with complexity, Cruse finds the nearest scapegoat and furiously lashes his way out of the jam. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is the crisis of Harold Cruse more than it is anything else.
Black nationalists adopted anti-Semitic stances, viewing Jewish business owners as “exploiters” of poor black communities. That many Jews had once been a majority in many of these communities mattered little to black radicals. As small business owners, teachers, landlords, principals, as social workers and hospital personnel, Jews and unions were seen as blocking the path to “community control of the black community.”[17]
Stork claims separatist elements in the Black Power movement combined with an increasing internationalist “Third-Worldist” perspective “led to the formulation of anti-Zionist positions and sympathies.”[18] This is in keeping with a common trope of the time among anti-imperialists that African Americans in the United States—as a domestically colonized population—were in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement.
However, as would be the case in later years, the early source of information that blacks in the New Left were receiving was not from leftist organizations but nationalist ones. In Stork’s words,
The first expression came right after the June War, in the July 1967 issue of the newsletter of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC)…This was not leftist analysis, but reflected the only ready source of critical material, the Arab League.
The New Left
In 1972, Joe Stork, the editor of the left-wing Middle East Research and Information Report (MERIP), wrote it was “difficult to point to official positions and articulated decisions in assessing the subject” of Israel and Palestine as “the white New Left has had very little to Say about Palestine or Israel.” For Stork, “the New Left groups and personalities have been conspicuous by their absence in any activity against Israel or US Middle East policy.”[1]
Perhaps this was the case in 1972 when Stork claims to have surveyed available New Left Literature on the subject published subsequent to the 1967 War. Yet a more comprehensive article written by two members of MERIP would refute Stork’s claim a mere two years after Stork’s article was published.[2] Today we have access to a variety of newspapers, reports, manifestoes, books and broadsheets, that clearly articulate an anti-Israel—and at times anti-Semitic—bias.
Unlike the Soviets, the New Left embraced a Third Worldist form of “guerilla romanticism,” a worldview described in the following manner by Paul Berman:
The most extreme elements in the New Left declared that fascism—specifically Nazism—had never truly been defeated. In Europe and the United States, activists linked the actions of their respective governments to a “cleverly disguised, still flourishing Nazism.”[4]
The New Left embraced and synthesized various existing and moribund left tendencies including Marxism, anarchism, council-communism and so on. What most had in common was an uncritical and congratulatory stance—guerilla romanticism—towards the national liberation struggles occurring in the Third World. Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, all were viewed as interconnected struggles against imperialism. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) reflects this political ideology and strategy in one of its basic documents, “The Military Thinking of the Front:”
A basic condition for a true, radical revolution in our times is a revolutionary party, whose function is to orchestrate a national liberation war and lead it to victory. It is the party, with its sound perspective, that decides the strategy and tactics to be used in the battlefield…The great, global confrontation today is being played out by the exploitative imperialist camp and the Third World and Socialist camp. Only through an alliance with the liberation movements of Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Asia, Africa, and Latin America can the Palestinian and Arab national liberation movements resist the imperialist camp… On the basis of this international strategy, we shall be able to encircle Israel, Zionism and Imperialism, and recruit all global revolutionary forces to support us in the battle. [8] See the document in Rubinstein [ed.] (1971) pp. 3-69.
The PFLP statement is nearly identical to any one of a number of political pronouncements of the era. All one needs to do is pick up a copy of The Black Panther, Revolutionary Worker, the Militant, Workers Vanguard, or the numerous pamphlets and newspapers common among the New Left of that time.
Publication in two successive issues of The Militant (October 1970) of an official Al Fatah document calling for the dismantling of Israel an including a broad attack on the Jews of all countries. The manifesto, carried by the Trotskyist paper, said in part:
Jews contributed men, money and influence to make Israel a reality and to perpetuate the crimes committed against the Palestinians. The people of the Book…changed roles from oppressed to oppressor.[5]
George Novack, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote an article that expressing:
…at the present time there is a deadly symmetry between the attitudes of the Israelis towards the Arabs and that of the American Jews toward the Afro-Americans and their liberation struggle…the upper and middle ranges of American Jewry, comfortably ensconced in bourgeois America, some of them bankers, landlords, big and little businessmen, participate in the system of oppressing and exploiting the black masses, just as the Zionists have become oppressors of the Palestinians Arabs. Jewish teachers in New York, reluctant to give up their small privileges, resist the Afro-American demand for the control of the schools in their own communities.[6]
At a Socialist Workers Party convention held August 8 to 12, 1971 in Cleveland, Ohio, a report was presented preceding a party resolution against Zionism and the state of Israel. The report emphasized:
…the major task confronting American revolutionists remains that of educating the radicalizing youth about the real history of the Zionist movement and the revolutionary character of the Palestinian and Arab struggle for destruction of the state of Israel.[7]
It’s hard not to notice that the stated goal is not “ending occupation” or a “one-state solution” but destruction of Israel. Radical leftists were much more open about their intentions in the 1970s because they truly believed a revolutionary wave was sweeping the globe.
Beyond rhetoric, many revolutionary organizations in the United States and Europe provided material support for Palestinian groups engaged in armed struggle against Israel, or, in their words “the Zionist entity.” These groups included the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen, and the Red Army Fraction. The Palestinian groups engaged in terrorism that were supported by the left included the PFLP, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestine Liberation Front and Black September.[8]
Over time, the American radical left increasingly began to view the Jewish community and its institutions as part of the “Establishment”: an affluent, smug “liberal” obstacle to the growth of revolutionary consciousness. Indeed, Jewish voting patterns, attitudes, alliances—in short, the political behavior of Jews—had a decidedly liberal cast.
For New Left radicals, liberalism was the main obstacle to revolutionary victory. Liberalism was the force which sowed and perpetuated illusions that progress could be achieved steadily and peacefully through normal democratic processes. Liberalism, therefore, had to be rendered obsolete if society was to be polarized and revolutionary awareness replace the tolerant and optimistic attitudes that provide the cement of “the system.” Consensual domination or, “hegemony,” in the terminology of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, must be challenged. However, unlike Gramsci, the cadres would emerge from the lumpenproletariat.
Eschewing the Old Left’s emphasis on class and the Civil Right’s Movement emphasis on cross-cultural solidarity, the New Left embraced racial minorities—especially African Americans—as the groups with the most potential for achieving a revolutionary transformation of society.[9] Race was seen by the New Left as the most vulnerable aspect of American society at home and in foreign affairs the issue became the anti-imperialist struggle of the third world. Indeed, a single term, third world peoples, was coined to embrace the mass of humanity involved in both struggles. Again, over time, as the Jewish community was viewed as part of the liberal enemy at home, the Jewish nation, Israel, was cast in the same role abroad.[10]
Foster and Epstein note:
In this historical context the radical left chose to take sides against the Jews. It was not so much a matter of wanting to do battle with the Jewish community [or racism as with fascist anti-Semites--TNC] as it was a fixed determination to show the blacks, especially the most radical and nationalistic blacks, that in their struggles they could count on the total support of the revolutionary left.[11]
For most of the radical left, the backbone or heart of world capitalism was and remains the United States. To weaken and eventually destroy American influence in the world by battering it both at home and abroad is its most fundamental task and the prime requirement for the world victory of “socialism.”
To their credit, the New Left was not universally anti-Jewish. For example, when Daniel Cohn-Bendit was denounced as a “German Jew” by the leader of the French Communist Party, angry crowds of radical youths took to the streets chanting “We are all German Jews!” While at a right-wing rally one of the slogans was “Cohn-Bendit–to Dachau!”[12]
Arab Nationalism, Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
While undoubtedly stimulated by the modern Arab-Israel conflict, religious-based discrimination, harassment and murder have afflicted centuries-old Jewish communities in Muslim lands so severely in recent years that approximately 800,000 Jews from Arab lands have fled mostly to Israel, the lesser number elsewhere.
Anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab and Muslim world has been well documented and is beyond the scope of this paper. Even Rodinson (no friend of Israel) admits “The very day after the partition plan was announced, on November 30, 1947, at dawn, Arab attacks announced the Arab refusal to accept the Jewish state.” [13]
Many Arab political leaders viewed Zionism as Socialist and pro-Communist, and later as the “foster child” of Western Imperialism - but not as a racist movement. The turnaround seemed to happen in May 1964 with the first wording of the Palestinian National Charter - Article 19 of the [original] charter defines Zionism as “a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations and fascist in its means and aims.” The attempt to deny Jews the right of national determination and territorial independence accorded to all other peoples (and vigorously claimed by the Arabs for themselves) is a callous denial of 6,000 years of Jewish identity, more than a third of that time spent in involuntary exile.
Article 22 of the PLO Covenant explicitly liked Zionism with fascism.[14] Most on the New Left felt the condemnation was justified, given Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and territory seized during the 1967 war. They were either unaware or chose to ignore the fact that the Covenant was drafted and adopted in 1964 before Israel liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
If anti-Israel bias was not apparent in the UN’s it certainly became evident by 1975. David Greenberg describes a 1975 United Nations conference on women’s rights which issued a declaration that calling “for the elimination of ‘Zionism, apartheid, [and] racial discrimination.’” To the best of my knowledge, this conference is the genesis of the “Zionism is apartheid” trope.
Throughout the summer, Soviet, African, and Arab leaders maneuvered to oust Israel from the international body. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin led the charge, calling for the “extinction” of Israel. Echoing the language which would be repeated by Third World sycophants for decades to come, he urged Americans “to rid their society of the Zionists,” who controlled the media and banks. These were caustic, but unsurprising remarks for a man like Amin. That fact that Amin’s speech reportedly drew a standing ovation from the U.N. delegates is alarming and displays broadening support for the linkage between Zionism and racism beyond the left to include non-aligned, non-Muslim, nationalist regimes
Unlike Greenberg, Foster, and Epstein, Yochanan Manor delineates between Arab anti-Zionism and its leftist counterpart. For Manor, Arab anti-Zionism “derives from the conflict and the frustration of the Arabs in the light of the successes of the Zionist movement and their failures.” In Manor’s analysis, Arab nationalists appropriated Soviet and Eastern European anti-Zionist propaganda that aimed to find a scapegoat for various internal crises related to state socialism. As Manor writes, “sometimes the Soviets found it expedient to add an international dimension and present Zionism as an international conspiracy responsible for these internal crises.”
Black Nationalism, Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
The association of Jews with the Civil Rights Movement is well documented. However, by the late 1960s, tensions and cracks were developing in the “black-Jewish coalition.” In addition to the notion of Jew as capitalist (described above) Benjamin Ginsberg notes the political tensions that existed in the coalition where Jews “were critically important to blacks when few other whites would help them.” Paradoxically, this made:
established black politicians vulnerable to attack by insurgent black political forces who could use anti-Semitic appeals as a way of charging that established blacks had sold out to whites and could not be trusted. The first major black politicians to successfully use this strategy were Malcolm X in the North, and Stokely Carmichael, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in the South.[15]
In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Howard Cruse asserted Jews were to blame for most of the major problems facing black intellectuals. He also expressed great hostility toward the establishment of the Jewish state.[16] Reminiscent of the arguments nativists had used against Catholics a century prior, Cruse questioned the loyalties of American Jews as agents of a foreign state. Thankfully, many African-American scholars responded with resounding disapproval. Reviewing the book in The Black Scholar of November 1969, editor Robert Chrisman wrote:
There is a vicious anti-Semitism throughout the work. When faced with complexity, Cruse finds the nearest scapegoat and furiously lashes his way out of the jam. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is the crisis of Harold Cruse more than it is anything else.
Black nationalists adopted anti-Semitic stances, viewing Jewish business owners as “exploiters” of poor black communities. That many Jews had once been a majority in many of these communities mattered little to black radicals. As small business owners, teachers, landlords, principals, as social workers and hospital personnel, Jews and unions were seen as blocking the path to “community control of the black community.”[17]
Stork claims separatist elements in the Black Power movement combined with an increasing internationalist “Third-Worldist” perspective “led to the formulation of anti-Zionist positions and sympathies.”[18] This is in keeping with a common trope of the time among anti-imperialists that African Americans in the United States—as a domestically colonized population—were in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement.
However, as would be the case in later years, the early source of information that blacks in the New Left were receiving was not from leftist organizations but nationalist ones. In Stork’s words,
The first expression came right after the June War, in the July 1967 issue of the newsletter of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC)…This was not leftist analysis, but reflected the only ready source of critical material, the Arab League.
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
The material contained a graphic depiction of a hand with the Star of David holding nooses around the necks of Egypt’s General Nasser and United States boxing sensation Mohammad Ali but “none of this was remotely anti-Semitic” to Stork. The next major fiasco was the New Politics Convention in Chicago in September 1967 where the black caucus “laid a set of non-negotiable demands before the rest of the convention, one of which called for condemnation of the ‘Imperialistic Zionist War’” leading to the walkout of some white individuals, but not groups.[19] According to Stork, these two events were alone responsible for “a new liberal orthodoxy asserting the ‘anti-Semitism’” of black separatists and radicals.
Again citing Stork:
The coincidence of two separate events—the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the emergence of the Black Power movement in the US—did most to break up the pro-Zionist consensus in America which had hitherto included the left. Within the black movement, this took the form of increased identification with Arabs as oppressed Third World people.
This was the worldview of internationalists like Malcolm X and Pan-African separatists. A perspective shared by Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay:
Coinciding with the development of an anti-imperialist upsurge within the United States concerning the US role in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere, the June 1967 War in the Middle East helped to undermine the US left’s myths about Israel.[20]
Moving outside the left, the Nation of Islam (NOI) has a long history of anti-Semitism. Through the Final Call newspaper, NOI leaders refer to Jews as “blood suckers” of the black community. In contrast to the message of established black organizations that emphasized integration and coalition building with whites, the Nation of Islam under Elijah Mohammed argued for black separatism and against collaboration with those he dismissed as “white devils.”
While it is clear that Malcolm X and the NOI held anti-Semitic views, what about anti-Zionism? In one speech, Malcolm declared:
The Jews with the help of Christians in America and Europe, drove our Muslim brothers out of their homeland, where they had been settled for centuries and took over the land for themselves. This every Muslim resents . . . In America, the Jews sap the very life-blood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of Israel, its armies, and its continued aggression against our brothers in the East. This every Black Man resents.
Malcolm X’s combination of black nationalism and a proto-internationalist ideological perspective transcended Pan-Africanism. Of course Malcolm X was not the first African-American nationalist to adopt anti-Semitic rhetoric. But, he was the pioneer when it came to connecting anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Ginsberg argues by:
attacking Israel and the Jews, Malcolm was, in effect, attacking his more established rivals for power within the black community who were closely tied to Jewish contributors and who were, as a result, forced to maintain a supportive posture toward Israel. This was now excoriated by Malcolm as behavior utterly inappropriate for a true leader of the African-American people.[21]
Secular cultural nationalists adopted similar rhetoric. The decomposition of positive attitudes toward Jews came in 1967 with the Six-Day War, which provoked SNCC’s Newsletter to condemn Israel for “massacres” inflicted upon the Arab population. Anti-Zionism, barely known until then in the African-American community, dovetailed with the criticism that SNCC’s program director leveled against Jewish rapacity.
SNCC’s stance was hardly unique, since Israel’s stunning military victory and occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank had the effect of undermining its international support elsewhere and especially among the left. While this writer has not been able to substantiate his claims, Ginsberg attests that NOI toughs assaulted SNCC field offices in the South, “to intimidate Jewish workers” and “to embarrass their black coworkers for relying upon the leadership of Jews.”
Outside of radical circles, relations remained strong. For example, for years the leaders of established black organizations signed Bayard Rustin’s annual Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee (BASIC) statement.[22] Rustin, through the A. Philip Randolph Institute, also did an amazing amount of organizing on behalf of Soviet Jewish dissidents who wanted to immigrate to Israel.
When the UN General Assembly UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring, “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”[23] Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, wrote a letter to the New York Times (November 5):
I am appalled at the grotesque attempt to equate Zionism and racism in the draft resolution…Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, seeking exactly what other national movements seek: statehood and self-determination. The attack upon Zionism amounts to the grossest form of anti-Semitism, since it is clear that the term Zionism is used by its opponents as a code word for Judaism and Jews.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also supported Israel.
A sense of identification with the Third World was reinforced by the benefits that African Americans could obtain from a Third World alliance. While Third World forces can offer little material help to African Americans, they can offer them a sense of power and association with the world’s majority, as well as status and legitimacy on the international scene as representatives of anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist groups in the United States. As Jim Sleeper has observed, some blacks are drawn to the international left, “not least for the very non-nationalist reason that here, at last, they find whites who treat them as people of importance.”
Delegations of African Americans attend international conferences, visit Third World capitals, and so forth. In these contexts, opposition to Israel and Zionism is universal. Very often African Americans participate in the drafting of resolutions condemning what are presented as the morally equivalent evils of racism, imperialism, Zionism, and apartheid.[24] Generally, Middle-Eastern delegations expect Africans and African Americans to support resolutions in opposition to Zionism in exchange for their support for resolutions opposing apartheid and racism in the United States.
It is surprising that Black Nationalists—many of whom are ardent supporters of Marcus Garvey and his ideas regarding repatriation—would be against the establishment of a Jewish state. Many Jews could not understand why Black nationalists should see their common bonds with a fellow diasporic people, longing for a national homeland in their historical and spiritual birthplace. After all, Jews were victims of Roman imperialism. Their state was demolished and they were driven to the four corners of the earth. Surely Black Nationalists could empathize with this situation. Also, African Americans have drawn parallels between their situation in the United States and the Jews’ struggles for freedom when they were slaves in Egypt to show Jewish Americans have often become involved in the black cause through their interest in social issues and association with liberal politics.
However, during the 1960s and 1970s, proponents of black community control of schools and education increasingly found themselves at loggerheads with city administrators and teachers’ unions. In an especially bitter battle over the Oceanhill-Brownsville school in Brooklyn, threats, intimidation, and physical violence was used against Jewish teachers. Ginsberg notes,
In their struggles against the Jews, organizations of black teachers and their allies made frequent use of anti-Semitic slogans, pamphlets, and epithets designed to frighten and intimidate Jewish teachers and principals and to encourage them to give up their positions - often in poor black neighborhoods where they already felt threatened and vulnerable. As early as the 1960s, groups like the Afro-American Teacher’s Association, an organization formed in 1964 to represent black teachers in Brooklyn, asserted, We are witnessing today in New York City a phenomenon that spells death for the minds and souls of our black children. It is the systematic coming of age of the Jews who dominate and control the educational bureaucracy of the New York public school system . . . In short, our children are being mentally poisoned.[25]
The New Left clearly sided with the clamors for community control. Declaring the strike “racist,” the CP-USA’s Hyman Lumer maintained that the strike was “directed against the Black and Puerto Rican peoples seeking to obtain some semblance of decent education in the ghettos through community control of the schools.”[26] What Lumer fails to mention is that the Ford Foundation funded these “grassroots” efforts.
[to be continued]
[1] Strok, 65.
[2] Karen Farsoun, Samih Farsoun, and Alex Ajay. “Mid-East Perspectives from the American Left.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974), 94-119.
[3] Berman, “The Passion of Joschka Fischer.”
[4] Berman
[5] “Al Fatah: Towards a Democratic Sate in Palestine,” October 9, 1970. in Foster and Epstein, 130.
[6] Foster and Epstein, 137.
[7] Foster and Epstein, 128.
[8] Black September committed its most dramatic terrorist attack, code-named Ikrit and Biram, at the Munich Olympics. Just before dawn on the morning of July 18, 1972, eight Black September terrorists slipped into the Olympic Village, forced their way into the apartment occupied by the Israelis and killed a weight lifter and a coach in the process. In a botched rescue attempt by West German police, all nine Israeli athletes were killed, as were five terrorists.
[9] ibid
[10] Foster and Epstein, 11.
[11] Foster and Epstein, 10.
[12] Berman
[13] Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, 72
[14] Article 22:
Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-a-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberation of their homeland.
[15] Ginsberg, 166.
[16] Foster and Epstein, 216.
[17] Foster and Epstein, 10.
[18] Joe Stork. “The American New Left and Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), 66.
[19] Stork, 67.
[20] Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay. “Mid-East Perspectives from the American Left” p. 95.
[21] Ginsbeg, 167.
[22] Ginsberg, 169.
[23] Hyman Lumer. “Zionism: Is It Racist?” Daily World, November 29, 1975 in Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings, 192.
[24] Zionism and Racism in Tripoli: Proceedings of an International Symposium. International Organization for the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, 1979.
[25] Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1993
[26] Hyman Lumer. Zionism: Its Role in World Politics in Rubin,14:1.
Again citing Stork:
The coincidence of two separate events—the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the emergence of the Black Power movement in the US—did most to break up the pro-Zionist consensus in America which had hitherto included the left. Within the black movement, this took the form of increased identification with Arabs as oppressed Third World people.
This was the worldview of internationalists like Malcolm X and Pan-African separatists. A perspective shared by Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay:
Coinciding with the development of an anti-imperialist upsurge within the United States concerning the US role in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere, the June 1967 War in the Middle East helped to undermine the US left’s myths about Israel.[20]
Moving outside the left, the Nation of Islam (NOI) has a long history of anti-Semitism. Through the Final Call newspaper, NOI leaders refer to Jews as “blood suckers” of the black community. In contrast to the message of established black organizations that emphasized integration and coalition building with whites, the Nation of Islam under Elijah Mohammed argued for black separatism and against collaboration with those he dismissed as “white devils.”
While it is clear that Malcolm X and the NOI held anti-Semitic views, what about anti-Zionism? In one speech, Malcolm declared:
The Jews with the help of Christians in America and Europe, drove our Muslim brothers out of their homeland, where they had been settled for centuries and took over the land for themselves. This every Muslim resents . . . In America, the Jews sap the very life-blood of the so-called Negroes to maintain the state of Israel, its armies, and its continued aggression against our brothers in the East. This every Black Man resents.
Malcolm X’s combination of black nationalism and a proto-internationalist ideological perspective transcended Pan-Africanism. Of course Malcolm X was not the first African-American nationalist to adopt anti-Semitic rhetoric. But, he was the pioneer when it came to connecting anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Ginsberg argues by:
attacking Israel and the Jews, Malcolm was, in effect, attacking his more established rivals for power within the black community who were closely tied to Jewish contributors and who were, as a result, forced to maintain a supportive posture toward Israel. This was now excoriated by Malcolm as behavior utterly inappropriate for a true leader of the African-American people.[21]
Secular cultural nationalists adopted similar rhetoric. The decomposition of positive attitudes toward Jews came in 1967 with the Six-Day War, which provoked SNCC’s Newsletter to condemn Israel for “massacres” inflicted upon the Arab population. Anti-Zionism, barely known until then in the African-American community, dovetailed with the criticism that SNCC’s program director leveled against Jewish rapacity.
SNCC’s stance was hardly unique, since Israel’s stunning military victory and occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank had the effect of undermining its international support elsewhere and especially among the left. While this writer has not been able to substantiate his claims, Ginsberg attests that NOI toughs assaulted SNCC field offices in the South, “to intimidate Jewish workers” and “to embarrass their black coworkers for relying upon the leadership of Jews.”
Outside of radical circles, relations remained strong. For example, for years the leaders of established black organizations signed Bayard Rustin’s annual Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee (BASIC) statement.[22] Rustin, through the A. Philip Randolph Institute, also did an amazing amount of organizing on behalf of Soviet Jewish dissidents who wanted to immigrate to Israel.
When the UN General Assembly UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring, “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”[23] Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, wrote a letter to the New York Times (November 5):
I am appalled at the grotesque attempt to equate Zionism and racism in the draft resolution…Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, seeking exactly what other national movements seek: statehood and self-determination. The attack upon Zionism amounts to the grossest form of anti-Semitism, since it is clear that the term Zionism is used by its opponents as a code word for Judaism and Jews.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also supported Israel.
A sense of identification with the Third World was reinforced by the benefits that African Americans could obtain from a Third World alliance. While Third World forces can offer little material help to African Americans, they can offer them a sense of power and association with the world’s majority, as well as status and legitimacy on the international scene as representatives of anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist groups in the United States. As Jim Sleeper has observed, some blacks are drawn to the international left, “not least for the very non-nationalist reason that here, at last, they find whites who treat them as people of importance.”
Delegations of African Americans attend international conferences, visit Third World capitals, and so forth. In these contexts, opposition to Israel and Zionism is universal. Very often African Americans participate in the drafting of resolutions condemning what are presented as the morally equivalent evils of racism, imperialism, Zionism, and apartheid.[24] Generally, Middle-Eastern delegations expect Africans and African Americans to support resolutions in opposition to Zionism in exchange for their support for resolutions opposing apartheid and racism in the United States.
It is surprising that Black Nationalists—many of whom are ardent supporters of Marcus Garvey and his ideas regarding repatriation—would be against the establishment of a Jewish state. Many Jews could not understand why Black nationalists should see their common bonds with a fellow diasporic people, longing for a national homeland in their historical and spiritual birthplace. After all, Jews were victims of Roman imperialism. Their state was demolished and they were driven to the four corners of the earth. Surely Black Nationalists could empathize with this situation. Also, African Americans have drawn parallels between their situation in the United States and the Jews’ struggles for freedom when they were slaves in Egypt to show Jewish Americans have often become involved in the black cause through their interest in social issues and association with liberal politics.
However, during the 1960s and 1970s, proponents of black community control of schools and education increasingly found themselves at loggerheads with city administrators and teachers’ unions. In an especially bitter battle over the Oceanhill-Brownsville school in Brooklyn, threats, intimidation, and physical violence was used against Jewish teachers. Ginsberg notes,
In their struggles against the Jews, organizations of black teachers and their allies made frequent use of anti-Semitic slogans, pamphlets, and epithets designed to frighten and intimidate Jewish teachers and principals and to encourage them to give up their positions - often in poor black neighborhoods where they already felt threatened and vulnerable. As early as the 1960s, groups like the Afro-American Teacher’s Association, an organization formed in 1964 to represent black teachers in Brooklyn, asserted, We are witnessing today in New York City a phenomenon that spells death for the minds and souls of our black children. It is the systematic coming of age of the Jews who dominate and control the educational bureaucracy of the New York public school system . . . In short, our children are being mentally poisoned.[25]
The New Left clearly sided with the clamors for community control. Declaring the strike “racist,” the CP-USA’s Hyman Lumer maintained that the strike was “directed against the Black and Puerto Rican peoples seeking to obtain some semblance of decent education in the ghettos through community control of the schools.”[26] What Lumer fails to mention is that the Ford Foundation funded these “grassroots” efforts.
[to be continued]
[1] Strok, 65.
[2] Karen Farsoun, Samih Farsoun, and Alex Ajay. “Mid-East Perspectives from the American Left.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974), 94-119.
[3] Berman, “The Passion of Joschka Fischer.”
[4] Berman
[5] “Al Fatah: Towards a Democratic Sate in Palestine,” October 9, 1970. in Foster and Epstein, 130.
[6] Foster and Epstein, 137.
[7] Foster and Epstein, 128.
[8] Black September committed its most dramatic terrorist attack, code-named Ikrit and Biram, at the Munich Olympics. Just before dawn on the morning of July 18, 1972, eight Black September terrorists slipped into the Olympic Village, forced their way into the apartment occupied by the Israelis and killed a weight lifter and a coach in the process. In a botched rescue attempt by West German police, all nine Israeli athletes were killed, as were five terrorists.
[9] ibid
[10] Foster and Epstein, 11.
[11] Foster and Epstein, 10.
[12] Berman
[13] Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, 72
[14] Article 22:
Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-a-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberation of their homeland.
[15] Ginsberg, 166.
[16] Foster and Epstein, 216.
[17] Foster and Epstein, 10.
[18] Joe Stork. “The American New Left and Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), 66.
[19] Stork, 67.
[20] Farsoun, Farsoun, and Ajay. “Mid-East Perspectives from the American Left” p. 95.
[21] Ginsbeg, 167.
[22] Ginsberg, 169.
[23] Hyman Lumer. “Zionism: Is It Racist?” Daily World, November 29, 1975 in Rubin, Anti-Semitism and Zionism: Selected Marxist Writings, 192.
[24] Zionism and Racism in Tripoli: Proceedings of an International Symposium. International Organization for the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, 1979.
[25] Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1993
[26] Hyman Lumer. Zionism: Its Role in World Politics in Rubin,14:1.
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
Leaving the Radical Left: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Response (Part Three, Draft 1)
Leaving the Left: Israel and the American Dream
The Holy Land had long been the Jewish national homeland for more than a thousand years until the Jews had been expelled by Rome in the first century CE. Jews around the world had prayed, hoped, and dreamed to return to Zion throughout nearly two thousand years of dispersion. Anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s drove modest numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, which was then a desolate corner of the Turkish Empire. Jewish development of the country in turn attracted Arab immigrants in search of employment opportunities.
In the midst of World War I, as British troops advanced on Turkish positions in the Levant, the young Zionist movement, seeking international support for the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, persuaded London to issue the Balfour Declaration, which pledged that England would facilitate the creation of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land. After the British won Palestine from the Turks, the League of Nations, in 1920 officially conferred the Palestine Mandate upon England, entrusting it with the development of the country until its residents were capable of self-development. The British, convinced that the Arabs were not politically or culturally ready for democratic self-rule, hunkered down for a long stay in a territory that they perceived as vital to England’s strategic interests in the Mediterranean.[1]
The last truly independent Jewish State in Palestine ended in 63 B.C. when Pompey became master of Jerusalem; the last gasps of the Jewish nation in Palestine date from the revolt of Bar Kochba in 135 A.D.[2] Rodinson exhibits a callousness typical of the left when he writes, “today as in the past—as already in the Roman period and even earlier, in Persian times—the majority of Jews freely chose the Diaspora.”[3] Jews did not freely choose to leave their homeland and live in the countries of Europe as second-class citizens, victims of pogroms and the Holocaust.
The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 did not have a tremendous impact on the radical left, that would come in 1967 (see part two). What about for Jews? To generalize, many ultra-orthodox Jews were critical of the secular Zionist movement and Israel. Most radical Jews (anarchists, communists, etc.) criticized Zionism as nationalism. But the vast majority of Jews, religious and secular, were united in their support of the new state. Israel greatly contributed to a notion of Jewish nationality or peoplehood. The series of wars fought by Israel further solidified this support, providing convincing evidence that Israel was surrounded by neighbors who were dedicated to the state’s destruction.
In addition to the importance of Israel, during the post WWII era, increasing public, political, and economic opportunities for Jews meant integration into mainstream American life. This had a tremendously negative impact on the membership of many Old Left organizations. Membership in these groups, unions and parties was largely familial. However, as the opportunities to attend colleges and universities (the G.I. Bill, creation of community college system, etc.) expanded and more people entered the middle-class. Opportunity and the fulfillment of the American Dream arguably did more damage to Old Left radicalism than the general anti-communist efforts lumped under the term “McCarthyism.” Lastly, many Jews who participated in the struggle for black civil rights felt marginalized and at times demonized as the movement lurched toward Black Power, Black Nationalism, and Afro-centrism.
In addition to societal and structural shifts, during the 1960s, student political groups became increasing militant and radicalism bloomed on the left (Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society) and the right (John Birch Society, Young Americans for Freedom). Then there were the disturbances riots. Between 1965 and 1969, 329 significant racial disturbances took place in 257 cities, resulting in nearly 300 deaths, 8,000 injuries, 60,000 arrests, and property losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Radical organizations routinely sided against the police and other forces of law-and-order, thereby marginalizing themselves from an American public critical of the War in Vietnam but supportive of American institutions.
By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, most American Jews, like most Americans, were so far removed from the goals and aspirations of radical political organizations these organizations again underwent a severe decline in membership. Palestinian terrorism (and leftist support of it) during this period also undoubtedly drove some Jews out of the radical left.
Some veteran activists remained involved in “the movement” and organizations continued to hold meetings and demonstrations (most notably against nuclear weapons and U.S. intervention in Latin America) but it would not be until the rise of the “anti-golobalization” movement in the early 1990s that radical political organizations would again occupy the imagination of the media and anyone who was willing to listen.
I first got politically involved through organizations critiquing IMF/World Bank structural adjustment in the developing world. This was my introduction to activism and it remained a central part of my involvement for a decade. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, I was shocked at the level of anti-Semitism expressed by those in the movement. Radicalism, extremism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are all intertwined.
Conclusion: Identity and Ideology
It has often been asserted by left authors (for example, Noam Chomsky) that the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a tenuous one. Chomsky asserts that the linkage is a device used by Zionists to squash dissent. Yet the linkage would not be possible—or at least would be much more difficult—if there was no past or current demonstration of anti-Semitism among Israel’s opponents. Simply stated, while it is absolutely true that all anti-Zionists are not Jew hating bigots, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic in intent.
Few would equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. The most ardent Zionists are often the state’s harshest critics. Even Foster and Epstein admit:
Of course one can be unsympathetic to or oppose Israel’s position on specific issues without being anti-Jewish…But gratuitous and illegitimate assaults on Israel—whether they contain true anti-Semitism or betray a gross insensitivity to the profound meaning of Israel to Jews everywhere—provoke Jewish anger and awaken ancient Jewish anxieties.(4
Furthermore, Chomsky is well aware that socialism has merged with nationalism in the past to create both revolutionary populism and fascism. Extreme leftists often move to the extreme right. Mussolini is one example and Horst Mahler is another. Mahler was the ideological brain of the ultra-leftist Red Army Fraction during the 1970s. Today he is attorney for the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and a holocaust revisionist who revels in anti-Semitic rants at his website.[5]
Mahler’s ideas articulate another connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In the “Discovery of God instead of Jewish Hatred” Mahler writes, “This consciousness of being chosen by Yaweh allows the Jews to conceive of themselves as a Nation…the Jews — as Jews — can never be a nation.” [6]
On the basis of a conspiracy theory of “Jewish financial capital”, Mahler speaks of the “secret government” by the “directors of the global economic and financial system.” Mahler, while certainly an extreme example, is not unique in his perspective. Leftists have embraced a similar worldview of Zionist control of banking and foreign policy.[7]
Most leftists take umbrage when their anti-Zionist extremism is deemed anti-Semitism. But evidence of anti-Semitism is not restricted to advocacy of the destruction of Israel. Domestic anti-Zionist political discourse has been clearly anti-Jewish. Anti-Zionists have willingly collaborated with overt anti-Semites and shared some of their anti-Jewish purposes. Representative Cynthia McKinney (now Green Party candidate for U.S. president), for example, was advised by members of the Nation of Islam, a virulently anti-Jewish organization with a far from progressive history.
The radical left, with its emphasis on internationalism, forces Jews to choose between a socialist/leftist identity and a Jewish identity. Political Scientist Katherine Hite notes identity is the outcome of an “extremely deliberative conflictive process individuals undergo to define their ideologies and political roles.” Political identity emerges from a dynamic interplay between the psychological make-up of individuals, their embeddedness in particular political and social structures and institutions, and the major political experiences of their lives, which together influence their political ideologies and roles. As Zionism is held to be a legitimate movement for self-determination by the vast majority of Jews and as racism, colonialism, and fascism by the vast majority of radical organizations it is surprising that more Jews are not leaving the left.
[1] Foster and Epstein, 37. Lumer. Zionism: Its Role in World Politics in Rubin,145.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rodinson, 79.
[4] Foster and Epstein, 17
[5] German Lecture Series: Final Solution of the Jewish Question, “Discovery of God instead of Jewish Hatred” by Horst Mahler Keinmachnow, 25 March 200.
[6] “Since the rise of the Money System, the tribes of Israel have always known how to emerge as the victors from both sides of the wars which they have financed, although they have never fought.” Invalid Link Removed. Zionism and the Arabs. p. 2-3.
[7] See Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman.
Leaving the Left: Israel and the American Dream
The Holy Land had long been the Jewish national homeland for more than a thousand years until the Jews had been expelled by Rome in the first century CE. Jews around the world had prayed, hoped, and dreamed to return to Zion throughout nearly two thousand years of dispersion. Anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s drove modest numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, which was then a desolate corner of the Turkish Empire. Jewish development of the country in turn attracted Arab immigrants in search of employment opportunities.
In the midst of World War I, as British troops advanced on Turkish positions in the Levant, the young Zionist movement, seeking international support for the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, persuaded London to issue the Balfour Declaration, which pledged that England would facilitate the creation of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land. After the British won Palestine from the Turks, the League of Nations, in 1920 officially conferred the Palestine Mandate upon England, entrusting it with the development of the country until its residents were capable of self-development. The British, convinced that the Arabs were not politically or culturally ready for democratic self-rule, hunkered down for a long stay in a territory that they perceived as vital to England’s strategic interests in the Mediterranean.[1]
The last truly independent Jewish State in Palestine ended in 63 B.C. when Pompey became master of Jerusalem; the last gasps of the Jewish nation in Palestine date from the revolt of Bar Kochba in 135 A.D.[2] Rodinson exhibits a callousness typical of the left when he writes, “today as in the past—as already in the Roman period and even earlier, in Persian times—the majority of Jews freely chose the Diaspora.”[3] Jews did not freely choose to leave their homeland and live in the countries of Europe as second-class citizens, victims of pogroms and the Holocaust.
The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 did not have a tremendous impact on the radical left, that would come in 1967 (see part two). What about for Jews? To generalize, many ultra-orthodox Jews were critical of the secular Zionist movement and Israel. Most radical Jews (anarchists, communists, etc.) criticized Zionism as nationalism. But the vast majority of Jews, religious and secular, were united in their support of the new state. Israel greatly contributed to a notion of Jewish nationality or peoplehood. The series of wars fought by Israel further solidified this support, providing convincing evidence that Israel was surrounded by neighbors who were dedicated to the state’s destruction.
In addition to the importance of Israel, during the post WWII era, increasing public, political, and economic opportunities for Jews meant integration into mainstream American life. This had a tremendously negative impact on the membership of many Old Left organizations. Membership in these groups, unions and parties was largely familial. However, as the opportunities to attend colleges and universities (the G.I. Bill, creation of community college system, etc.) expanded and more people entered the middle-class. Opportunity and the fulfillment of the American Dream arguably did more damage to Old Left radicalism than the general anti-communist efforts lumped under the term “McCarthyism.” Lastly, many Jews who participated in the struggle for black civil rights felt marginalized and at times demonized as the movement lurched toward Black Power, Black Nationalism, and Afro-centrism.
In addition to societal and structural shifts, during the 1960s, student political groups became increasing militant and radicalism bloomed on the left (Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society) and the right (John Birch Society, Young Americans for Freedom). Then there were the disturbances riots. Between 1965 and 1969, 329 significant racial disturbances took place in 257 cities, resulting in nearly 300 deaths, 8,000 injuries, 60,000 arrests, and property losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Radical organizations routinely sided against the police and other forces of law-and-order, thereby marginalizing themselves from an American public critical of the War in Vietnam but supportive of American institutions.
By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, most American Jews, like most Americans, were so far removed from the goals and aspirations of radical political organizations these organizations again underwent a severe decline in membership. Palestinian terrorism (and leftist support of it) during this period also undoubtedly drove some Jews out of the radical left.
Some veteran activists remained involved in “the movement” and organizations continued to hold meetings and demonstrations (most notably against nuclear weapons and U.S. intervention in Latin America) but it would not be until the rise of the “anti-golobalization” movement in the early 1990s that radical political organizations would again occupy the imagination of the media and anyone who was willing to listen.
I first got politically involved through organizations critiquing IMF/World Bank structural adjustment in the developing world. This was my introduction to activism and it remained a central part of my involvement for a decade. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, I was shocked at the level of anti-Semitism expressed by those in the movement. Radicalism, extremism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are all intertwined.
Conclusion: Identity and Ideology
It has often been asserted by left authors (for example, Noam Chomsky) that the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a tenuous one. Chomsky asserts that the linkage is a device used by Zionists to squash dissent. Yet the linkage would not be possible—or at least would be much more difficult—if there was no past or current demonstration of anti-Semitism among Israel’s opponents. Simply stated, while it is absolutely true that all anti-Zionists are not Jew hating bigots, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic in intent.
Few would equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. The most ardent Zionists are often the state’s harshest critics. Even Foster and Epstein admit:
Of course one can be unsympathetic to or oppose Israel’s position on specific issues without being anti-Jewish…But gratuitous and illegitimate assaults on Israel—whether they contain true anti-Semitism or betray a gross insensitivity to the profound meaning of Israel to Jews everywhere—provoke Jewish anger and awaken ancient Jewish anxieties.(4
Furthermore, Chomsky is well aware that socialism has merged with nationalism in the past to create both revolutionary populism and fascism. Extreme leftists often move to the extreme right. Mussolini is one example and Horst Mahler is another. Mahler was the ideological brain of the ultra-leftist Red Army Fraction during the 1970s. Today he is attorney for the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and a holocaust revisionist who revels in anti-Semitic rants at his website.[5]
Mahler’s ideas articulate another connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In the “Discovery of God instead of Jewish Hatred” Mahler writes, “This consciousness of being chosen by Yaweh allows the Jews to conceive of themselves as a Nation…the Jews — as Jews — can never be a nation.” [6]
On the basis of a conspiracy theory of “Jewish financial capital”, Mahler speaks of the “secret government” by the “directors of the global economic and financial system.” Mahler, while certainly an extreme example, is not unique in his perspective. Leftists have embraced a similar worldview of Zionist control of banking and foreign policy.[7]
Most leftists take umbrage when their anti-Zionist extremism is deemed anti-Semitism. But evidence of anti-Semitism is not restricted to advocacy of the destruction of Israel. Domestic anti-Zionist political discourse has been clearly anti-Jewish. Anti-Zionists have willingly collaborated with overt anti-Semites and shared some of their anti-Jewish purposes. Representative Cynthia McKinney (now Green Party candidate for U.S. president), for example, was advised by members of the Nation of Islam, a virulently anti-Jewish organization with a far from progressive history.
The radical left, with its emphasis on internationalism, forces Jews to choose between a socialist/leftist identity and a Jewish identity. Political Scientist Katherine Hite notes identity is the outcome of an “extremely deliberative conflictive process individuals undergo to define their ideologies and political roles.” Political identity emerges from a dynamic interplay between the psychological make-up of individuals, their embeddedness in particular political and social structures and institutions, and the major political experiences of their lives, which together influence their political ideologies and roles. As Zionism is held to be a legitimate movement for self-determination by the vast majority of Jews and as racism, colonialism, and fascism by the vast majority of radical organizations it is surprising that more Jews are not leaving the left.
[1] Foster and Epstein, 37. Lumer. Zionism: Its Role in World Politics in Rubin,145.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rodinson, 79.
[4] Foster and Epstein, 17
[5] German Lecture Series: Final Solution of the Jewish Question, “Discovery of God instead of Jewish Hatred” by Horst Mahler Keinmachnow, 25 March 200.
[6] “Since the rise of the Money System, the tribes of Israel have always known how to emerge as the victors from both sides of the wars which they have financed, although they have never fought.” Invalid Link Removed. Zionism and the Arabs. p. 2-3.
[7] See Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman.
lutherblsstt
Guest
Anti Zionism is not Anti Semitism by Rabbi Ahron Cohen
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lutherblsstt
Guest
“Israelis like to believe, and tell the world, that they are running an ‘enlightened’ or ‘benign’ occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world has seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation and manipulation.”
Israeli historian, Benny Morris, “Righteous Victims.”
“In American coverage of the recent Camp David meetings, the American press obediently followed the Israeli and US government spin that while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made courageous concessions for peace, Palestinian unwillingness to compromise caused the meeting to fail.
“Never mind that Barak’s ‘courageous concessions’ consisted of allowing the Palestinians to have joint administrative responsibility over a couple of remote Arab neighborhoods of Arab East Jerusalem — pathetic crumbs tossed on the floor which Arafat was expected to gratefully pick up.” American Jewish reporter, Eduardo Cohen, from “What Americans Need to Know — But Probably Won’t Be Told — To understand Palestinian Rage” from Palestine Media Watch, Invalid Link Removed
Martin Buber on what Zionism should have been
"The first fact is that at the time when we entered into an alliance (an alliance, I admit, that was not well defined) with a European state and we provided that state with a claim to rule over Palestine, we made no attempt to reach an agreement with the Arabs of this land regarding the basis and conditions for the continuation of Jewish settlement.
This negative approach caused those Arabs who thought about and were concerned about the future of their people to see us increasingly not as a group which desired to live in cooperation with their people but as something in the nature of uninvited guests and agents of foreign interests (at the time I explicitly pointed out this fact).
"The second fact is that we took hold of the key economic positions in the country without compensating the Arab population, that is to say without allowing their capital and their labor a share in our economic activity. Paying the large landowners for purchases made or paying compensation to tenants on the land is not the same as compensating a people. As a result, many of the more thoughtful Arabs viewed the advance of Jewish settlement as a kind of plot designed to dispossess future generations of their people of the land necessary for their existence and development.
Only by means of a comprehensive and vigorous economic policy aimed at organizing and developing common interests would it have been possible to contend with this view and its inevitable consequences. This we did not do.
"The third fact is that when a possibility arose that the Mandate would soon be terminated, not only did we not propose to the Arab population of the country that a joint Jewish Arab administration be set up in its place, we went ahead and demanded rule over the whole country (the Biltmore program) as a fitting political sequel to the gains we had already made. By this step, we with our own hands provided our enemies in the Arab camp with aid and comfort of the most valuable sort - the support of public opinion - without which the military attack launched against us would not have been possible. For it now appears to the Arab populace that in carrying on the activities we have been engaged in for years, in acquiring land and in working and developing the land, we were systematically laying the ground work for gaining control of the whole country."
Martin Buber, quoted in "A Land of Two Peoples" ed. Mendes-Flohr
Israeli historian, Benny Morris, “Righteous Victims.”
“In American coverage of the recent Camp David meetings, the American press obediently followed the Israeli and US government spin that while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made courageous concessions for peace, Palestinian unwillingness to compromise caused the meeting to fail.
“Never mind that Barak’s ‘courageous concessions’ consisted of allowing the Palestinians to have joint administrative responsibility over a couple of remote Arab neighborhoods of Arab East Jerusalem — pathetic crumbs tossed on the floor which Arafat was expected to gratefully pick up.” American Jewish reporter, Eduardo Cohen, from “What Americans Need to Know — But Probably Won’t Be Told — To understand Palestinian Rage” from Palestine Media Watch, Invalid Link Removed
Martin Buber on what Zionism should have been
"The first fact is that at the time when we entered into an alliance (an alliance, I admit, that was not well defined) with a European state and we provided that state with a claim to rule over Palestine, we made no attempt to reach an agreement with the Arabs of this land regarding the basis and conditions for the continuation of Jewish settlement.
This negative approach caused those Arabs who thought about and were concerned about the future of their people to see us increasingly not as a group which desired to live in cooperation with their people but as something in the nature of uninvited guests and agents of foreign interests (at the time I explicitly pointed out this fact).
"The second fact is that we took hold of the key economic positions in the country without compensating the Arab population, that is to say without allowing their capital and their labor a share in our economic activity. Paying the large landowners for purchases made or paying compensation to tenants on the land is not the same as compensating a people. As a result, many of the more thoughtful Arabs viewed the advance of Jewish settlement as a kind of plot designed to dispossess future generations of their people of the land necessary for their existence and development.
Only by means of a comprehensive and vigorous economic policy aimed at organizing and developing common interests would it have been possible to contend with this view and its inevitable consequences. This we did not do.
"The third fact is that when a possibility arose that the Mandate would soon be terminated, not only did we not propose to the Arab population of the country that a joint Jewish Arab administration be set up in its place, we went ahead and demanded rule over the whole country (the Biltmore program) as a fitting political sequel to the gains we had already made. By this step, we with our own hands provided our enemies in the Arab camp with aid and comfort of the most valuable sort - the support of public opinion - without which the military attack launched against us would not have been possible. For it now appears to the Arab populace that in carrying on the activities we have been engaged in for years, in acquiring land and in working and developing the land, we were systematically laying the ground work for gaining control of the whole country."
Martin Buber, quoted in "A Land of Two Peoples" ed. Mendes-Flohr
lutherblsstt
Guest
I noticed there was a reference to Mearsheimer and Walt's "The Israel Lobby" in your post,well here is something for those who actually like to look deeper than just taking criticism at face value.
'The Israel lobby - The influence of AIPAC on US Foreign Policy
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An episode of the Dutch documentary program "Tegenlicht" about the Israel lobby in the USA.
This documentary (April 2007) was created as a result of the controversy created by Mearsheimer and Walt's "The Israel Lobby" article.
Featuring interviews with Mearsheimer, geostrategist Lawrence Wikerson, Richard Perle, historian and critic Tony Judt, John Hagee, former Congressman Earl Hilliard, Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, Michael Massing and Daniel Levy. 'Tegenlicht' ('Backlight') is a program from the Dutch VPRO public television.
English elucidation at the VPRO website: Invalid Link Removed
'The Israel lobby - The influence of AIPAC on US Foreign Policy
Invalid Link Removed
An episode of the Dutch documentary program "Tegenlicht" about the Israel lobby in the USA.
This documentary (April 2007) was created as a result of the controversy created by Mearsheimer and Walt's "The Israel Lobby" article.
Featuring interviews with Mearsheimer, geostrategist Lawrence Wikerson, Richard Perle, historian and critic Tony Judt, John Hagee, former Congressman Earl Hilliard, Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, Michael Massing and Daniel Levy. 'Tegenlicht' ('Backlight') is a program from the Dutch VPRO public television.
English elucidation at the VPRO website: Invalid Link Removed
Dwight Schrute
I am faster than 80% of all snakes
Thanks Luther. If you actually read the article, it describes you perfectly and covers that topic. I guess you don't read what other people post. That would explain a lot.
"Conclusion: Identity and Ideology
It has often been asserted by left authors (for example, Noam Chomsky) that the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a tenuous one. Chomsky asserts that the linkage is a device used by Zionists to squash dissent. Yet the linkage would not be possible—or at least would be much more difficult—if there was no past or current demonstration of anti-Semitism among Israel’s opponents. Simply stated, while it is absolutely true that all anti-Zionists are not Jew hating bigots, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic in intent.
Few would equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. The most ardent Zionists are often the state’s harshest critics. Even Foster and Epstein admit:
Of course one can be unsympathetic to or oppose Israel’s position on specific issues without being anti-Jewish…But gratuitous and illegitimate assaults on Israel—whether they contain true anti-Semitism or betray a gross insensitivity to the profound meaning of Israel to Jews everywhere—provoke Jewish anger and awaken ancient Jewish anxieties. 4"
[4] Foster and Epstein, 17
Of course they would respond. Doesn't make it true. Its called opinion Luther. You might differentiate that from "fact" at one point....especially since you are a teacher.
lutherblsstt
Guest
Final post on this:
I once had a discussion with Arab academics. They were Western educated, and you could hold open conversations with them about their regimes. However, when it came to the topic of Israel, lots of the common sense disappeared, and much turned in to hatred. That was very sad.
However, one rational argument was made by them, which deals with what you highlight. So ... not question of "these people are bad", but rational question as to why Israel was established in a country that did not ask for it or approve of it, rather than Britain or the US to volunteer that Israel should have been given a country inside Britain or the US.
Of course, historians may come up with closer links to the Jewish people being linked to this or that area or to Jerusalem, then when Israel would have been established in, let's say, Wales or Nebraska.
While my above paragraph may initially sound as a caricature, I do think that in all fairness the question here is rarely discussed in depth.
Arabs often argue that if Israel would not have been established in an Arab country, that they would have had no problem with Israel. I cannot answer that. I lack sufficient expertise in this area to examine the merit of such a statement and back it up with evidence. However, I think that it is worthwhile simply to do the exercise to imagine for a moment if that were true.
The above is only the first piece of the cake. Fact is, Israel WAS established where it is, and now exist and people now have history in that geographical area; it is an autonomous state.
It seems that a large part of the central discussion then revolves about the two conflicting views: 1. historic existence of Israel for over 60 years requires tolerance and acceptance for their people, and 2. An Arab country was illegally invaded and by tolerating the existence of Israel on Arab soil a precedent is set to turn an illegal situation into a legal situation.
No doubt this situation is enormously complicated, and one of being stuck in a rut. While polarizing rhetoric is to be expected from someone like the Iran President, it does remain remarkable that nontotalitarian Western countries and their politicians keep silent about this argument.
From the Iran President we can expect that, but while the correct accusation that he often incites hatred seems to be the only argument brought in by the West, the question can be raised why the West does not properly discuss and refute the one argument he raises that does have some context to it.
At least the UK and the US could show accountability for their role. Whether that would in anyway satisfy the Arab world, I do not know, but the refusal to show such accountability most certainly does not, and the victim of that lack of accountability simply to get serious dialogue started, are both Palestinians and Israeli people.
The situation as it exists is a polarized situation with both Israel and the Arab world digging in its heels. The mere suggestion of restoring geographical situation to before something existed, is absurd.
Under the same pretence Babylon and Mesopotamia should then be restored, as should Prussia. We know from history that such endeavors are usually the nationalist views of warmongers, and restoration of such historic areas is often fantasistic. Those original people and their language may not even exist anymore, and neither does the culture.
Israel exists and should be accepted and recognized, but that does not mean there should not be any dialogue about what went wrong, as well as what lead to the role and outcome of the US and Britain, as well as a question of accountability.
jpcf
Member
Hi interesting post but let me tell you that the situation for the people who live in Israel is very difficult, i know because my grandmother lives in Rohovert near Tel Aviv so i can tell you that if you lived there maybe you would think very differently because one thing is quoting and hearing news and the other thing is living the real thing; all of the days you wake up you think that your house could be destroyed be an al kazzam rocket you could be in a bus or a train and maybe it will blow or in a mall or a restaurant and next thing you know your family and friends are dead. So i think is easy for you to say all that against Israel and the IDF but once again i can tell that these people only want to hurt you because you are a Jew ohhh and i can tell you that i was on the IDF tzanahim 32 brigade i was in there on december and you are wayyyy wrong.
peace lutherblsst
peace lutherblsst
nopeace
Member
Have you taken into consideration WHY they fire those rockets? I think your opinion would change if you have seen what the IDF has done to those people. there are currently 1300 soldier who refuse to serve because they know it is nothing but war crimes.
jpcf
Member
Yes insteresting videos everybody has a point of view...
So basically you are saying that it is okay to fire the rockets to innocent population and not to engage in battle with the army or other goverment agencies??
Is it okay to bomb a school or bus station or a mall ? and not the army??
They fire those rockets because they hate everybody who does not support their cause, they fire those rockets because they cannot face the idf and if you ask me i will serve Israel till the day i die i have been there so i know what i am talking about.
So basically you are saying that it is okay to fire the rockets to innocent population and not to engage in battle with the army or other goverment agencies??
Is it okay to bomb a school or bus station or a mall ? and not the army??
They fire those rockets because they hate everybody who does not support their cause, they fire those rockets because they cannot face the idf and if you ask me i will serve Israel till the day i die i have been there so i know what i am talking about.
nopeace
Member
It's not okay.
If you understand the kind of oppression and humanitarian crisis they face you will understand why they fight. The IDF is not any better than hamas when it comes to civilians, they target them like anybody else.
Bottom line is, the US is the only supporter of Israel even after the world has condemned their actions. See both sides of a conflict not just the AIPAC-controlled media in the US.
nopeace
Member
If you are going to argue for one side at least consider the otherside. When you view the conflict you will gross violations against human rights. A very oppresive regime and a violent army. Of all the 87 suicide bombers 84 had a family killed or permanently disfigured by the IDF, so ask why is this conflict happening? Stop assuming one side is right, because BOTH are wrong. Start seeing a conflict that is 60 years old. Palestinians come in all religions, Muslim, Christian and Jew (in some cases) and people fail to realize that it's people that are being slaughtered, most American's love the notion of slaughtering Muslims by the thousands down to even the children, but there are Christians among them who are being oppressed.
AIPAC loves to appeal to the brainwashed evangelicals, and even some christian factions have denounced Israel and it's zionist regime. Look at our news and the opinion of the rest of the world. People attach their christian faith to this, but how can you support some of the crimes Israel is committing? Bombing a school with white phosphorous and burning 38 people mostly children alive? And injuring another 200? After they were clearly told it was a UN safehouse? At what point do some of Israel's actions become unacceptable by the same measure we hold Hamas' actions unacceptable?
jpcf
Member
ok i can only argue for one side: Israel because the other side wants me and my family dead. You can research the other way and see the damage that Hamas terrorists have done in Israel, i think they are ruthless and vile against every human being including us and eu citizens that think that they are fighting for freedom.
I live my life in peace if not treathend by others, you see things from far away but here right in the center life is very different is almost unforgivable so for you is very easy to critize everybody but sometimes you have to fight for you and your loved ones basic survival you might call it. also if you check the news really deep you will find that the UN school you are talking about is really a safehouse a Hamas safehouse and army personel were attacked from that school.
1300 soldiers i really dont know but nobody said war is pretty so to each it's own.
Do you know what is the pettion of Israel for the returining of Palestininans land??
And the conflict goes way beyond that Search and you will find that Israelites were murdered and kicked out of the land by Palestinians and Persians way back
I live my life in peace if not treathend by others, you see things from far away but here right in the center life is very different is almost unforgivable so for you is very easy to critize everybody but sometimes you have to fight for you and your loved ones basic survival you might call it. also if you check the news really deep you will find that the UN school you are talking about is really a safehouse a Hamas safehouse and army personel were attacked from that school.
1300 soldiers i really dont know but nobody said war is pretty so to each it's own.
Do you know what is the pettion of Israel for the returining of Palestininans land??
And the conflict goes way beyond that Search and you will find that Israelites were murdered and kicked out of the land by Palestinians and Persians way back
nopeace
Member
Well if you argue in a historical context then the Native Americans should recieve all the entire US.
No it wasn't a safehouse. The UN said there were no terrorist there. 38 people were burned alive mostly children.
You don't see the point in my argument. Jews/Christians/Muslim all coexisted their till the Zionist movement began.
In 2008 Israel broke the cease fire (fact) then Hamas fired rockets then Israel began a massive air strike campaign. So does Israel provoke Hamas to cause widespread collective punishment?
To a certain extent Israel has a right to defend itself, but how far is it going to pretend to be a victim while the world only a sees an aggressor? Without the MASSIVE lobbying in the United States, Israel could not get away with the crimes they are committing.
You have to consider that one side has NO freedom. One side has NO medical aid. One side has NO clean water. One side has NO food. Now consider all that the Israel has? If you were not on the side of displaced palestinians would you not want to fight to be free?
Is Hamas vile? yes. Suicide bombs civilians, and fires un-explosive rockets.
Is the IDF any better? NO. Missile strikes, flachete shells, white phosphorus shells, human shields, denies medical care and humanitarian aid to civilians.
Explain how Hamas is waaayyy more evil? IDF and Hamas = Trash
In the US only one side of the story gets told, to the rest of the world the whole story gets told. If it were up to me, the US would be FAR better off not supporting Israel at all. Our support for them is what got us attacked (secondly foreign policy in M.E.). Israel does nothing but suck resources out of the US without repaying anything, it's astounding how much they receive in funding for absolutely nothing. Free tax payer cash.
jpcf
Member
Mayne not a safehouse but army personel were atacked from there, UN please, UN serves no one whats the UN doing for South Corea and other small countries None zero nada.
Jews Christians and Muslims coexited where??
Yeah maybe as long as the Jews had no power but once the Jews got a country and an army things change for the others. And yes the zionist movement change a lot of things but not every Jew is a zionist in fact theres a small amount of zionists but the zionist ideals are being used as an excuse for blaming the Jews for everything.
How do you know for a fact that Israel broke the cease fire CNN BBC other news or do you live in Israel maybe your relatives or a friend ??
I think that the lobbying goes both ways : Wich of the countries in the middle east does not want US to be erased of the earth maybe Kwait all the other ones are enemys so who needs presence and support there??
Yeah Israel has lot of things because we dont spend our lives thinking how to destroy our neighbor and spend all the resources trying to do that.
un-explosive rockets?? Sometimes because the people that make those rockets are so blind by hate that they can weld right.
Again missile strikes? yes, flachete shells, white phosphorus shells, human shields? yes there were a lot of human shields but put by Hamas women and children and pu there to support Hamas as a victim of the evil IDF on the media(Who sacifices women and children to gain support from the media?) white phosphorus? maybe. Denied humanitarian care yes for some hours till some operations ended. Humanitarian aid?? Who offer to pay for the damges you or Israel?
Idf and Hamas = Trash i think thats your opinion but who am i to judge the situation? I am Idf reservist my family and friends live in Israel, my grandmother neighborhood is halfway destroyed by "un-explosive rockets", on ther other hand you can see all the "show" from the living room of your hose thousand miles away.
Suporting Israel is wath got US attacked ? I dont think that support is the reason why US got attacked. Hatred - Jihad those are reasons and dont forget that the US taught Bin Laden its tactics he was taught by the best. Do you think that if US stops all support Al qaeda is going to dissapear?? Do you think if US agrees to do whatever Al qaeda wants they shall end al terrorists acts??
Suck resources?? Us choose to give that support nobody can strongarm US.
Repaying anything?? Who is the tip of the spear.
You can blame the goverment for supporting Israel but in the end who vote for the goverment?? YOU so if you dont agree with that support: write your congressman.
Peace
Jews Christians and Muslims coexited where??
Yeah maybe as long as the Jews had no power but once the Jews got a country and an army things change for the others. And yes the zionist movement change a lot of things but not every Jew is a zionist in fact theres a small amount of zionists but the zionist ideals are being used as an excuse for blaming the Jews for everything.
How do you know for a fact that Israel broke the cease fire CNN BBC other news or do you live in Israel maybe your relatives or a friend ??
I think that the lobbying goes both ways : Wich of the countries in the middle east does not want US to be erased of the earth maybe Kwait all the other ones are enemys so who needs presence and support there??
Yeah Israel has lot of things because we dont spend our lives thinking how to destroy our neighbor and spend all the resources trying to do that.
un-explosive rockets?? Sometimes because the people that make those rockets are so blind by hate that they can weld right.
Again missile strikes? yes, flachete shells, white phosphorus shells, human shields? yes there were a lot of human shields but put by Hamas women and children and pu there to support Hamas as a victim of the evil IDF on the media(Who sacifices women and children to gain support from the media?) white phosphorus? maybe. Denied humanitarian care yes for some hours till some operations ended. Humanitarian aid?? Who offer to pay for the damges you or Israel?
Idf and Hamas = Trash i think thats your opinion but who am i to judge the situation? I am Idf reservist my family and friends live in Israel, my grandmother neighborhood is halfway destroyed by "un-explosive rockets", on ther other hand you can see all the "show" from the living room of your hose thousand miles away.
Suporting Israel is wath got US attacked ? I dont think that support is the reason why US got attacked. Hatred - Jihad those are reasons and dont forget that the US taught Bin Laden its tactics he was taught by the best. Do you think that if US stops all support Al qaeda is going to dissapear?? Do you think if US agrees to do whatever Al qaeda wants they shall end al terrorists acts??
Suck resources?? Us choose to give that support nobody can strongarm US.
Repaying anything?? Who is the tip of the spear.
You can blame the goverment for supporting Israel but in the end who vote for the goverment?? YOU so if you dont agree with that support: write your congressman.
Peace
roids1
Banned
It is Hamas that strikes first everytime and then uses civilians as human shields and pawns for propaganda purposes. Unfortunately, there is no gentle handed way to engage an enemy who is dedicated to your destruction and follows absolutely no rules of engagement whatsoever, other than seeking maximum death and destruction with every strike.
The Israelis don't target civilians the way the arabs do. They just don't pull back when the cowardly terrorists try to hide in the civilian population, nor should they.
The Israelis don't target civilians the way the arabs do. They just don't pull back when the cowardly terrorists try to hide in the civilian population, nor should they.
lutherblsstt
Guest
You contradict yourself,first you say "Unfortunately, there is no gentle handed way to engage an enemy who is dedicated to your destruction and follows absolutely no rules of engagement whatsoever, other than seeking maximum death and destruction with every strike. "
then you contradict that with this "The Israelis don't target civilians the way the arabs do"
Which is it?
jpcf
Member
I think that he meant by :"Unfortunately, there is no gentle handed way to engage an enemy who is dedicated to your destruction and follows absolutely no rules of engagement whatsoever, other than seeking maximum death and destruction with every strike" is that with your actions you will seek death and destruction for your enemy, in order to save your life and other people's lives and by enemy he meant enemy= person who is engaging you into battle, not civil unarmed population.
Peace
Peace
lutherblsstt
Guest
Well thanks for your interpretation but I am looking forward to him explaining the contradictions in his post.
roids1
Banned
When the Israelis hit civilians, it is unintended collateral damage. When the arabs hit civilians, it is deliberate. You know this or you're only kidding yourself.
BTW, isn't Farfour cute! Wonderful cuture isn't it?
www .youtube.com /watch?v= TrieBhaGgHM&feature=related