This Has Gone Far Enough: Why Israel Must Exist Always

Let’s Get a Couple Things Straight Right Off the Bat

I DO NOT “hate Palestinians.” I’m an ardent supporter of their rights and an ardent opponent of Netanyahu (although he’s pretty hot :)–he who is always scowling and frowning–government’s policies vis a vis the Palestinian people. But there are just some facts of the present and history that you can’t ignore. Yes, even in the age of the Internet and “fake news,” there is still truth. So what is true is

Just as we don’t–or shouldn’t–hold Chinese people responsible for some of China’s distasteful policies, nor British-American people for theirs–we must not hold all Jews, or even Israelis, culpable for the Israeli government’s policies.

Another dear friend of mine who is Jewish, pointed out to me recently that “from the River to the Sea” was a term coined by the president of Syria in 1966, Salah Jadid in advance of the massacre he planned of Jewish Israelis in an upcoming attack on their country. She also told me something I never knew, which is that Jordan has a Bedouin-led government ruling over a majority Palestinian population. Those Palestinians rose up against said government in 1970, only to be mercilessly squashed by the Jordanian-Bedouin government. No one talks about that. Again, if you only point out Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, you are an anti-Semite…”full stop,” as this dear friend of mine said to me.

A dear, old BFF of mine (not naming her bc she’s Jewish and I don’t want to her to experience any backlash) saw this HORRIFIC flier on some Instagram account. Here is my response. I’m red in the face and hyperventilating, shoulders hunched as I write this.

“1. Anti-Zionism: We are anti-Zionists. Zionism is a settler-colonialst white-supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people.” Zionism is NOT a “settler-colonialist white supremacist ideology based on the dispossession and genocide of the Palestinian people.” To say so this borderline psychotic. Have these people read, “The Jewish State,” by Theodr Herzl, considered the founding document of Zionism? I have. I own it. It says nothing about “the dispossession and genocide of the Palestinian people.” As another dear, Jewish friend wrote recently:

“I am getting a little tired of the intellectually lazy application of the concept of ‘white colonialism’ to the State of Israel. While I abhor Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and oppression of its Palestinian residents, in contravention to the original intent of the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, the slapdash description of the State of Israel as a white colonialist enterprise reflects a gross misunderstanding of history and of the very important concept of colonialism.” According to the Antiracist Praxis subject guide, developed by American University’s Information Literacy Committee, ‘colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin.’” [See below for more]

Founders

Related: Another article on my love affair with the Jewish people.

Herzle was a handsome, bearded, extremely intelligent man. “The Jewish State” was published in 1846, after Jews had been banished from their homeland in what is now Israel. They spent the next hundreds of years, wandering from country to country, land to land, looking for a home. They were ostracized, killed, demonized, confined to ghettos every where they went. Both Ashkenazim (European Jews) and Sephardim (Middle Eastern Jews).

“2. Right of Return: We uphold the right of displaced Palestinians to return to their homes and lands. We believe in the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.” Now these anti-Semites are borrowing language from Zionism? So disrespectful and mocking. I DO NOT—and most Jews, including Israeli Jews—support Netanyahu’s policies toward Palestinians. I know a lot of Jews/Israelis. Do the authors of this sickening flier know any? You believe in the “liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.” Full-on Nazi language. And to borrow the term “Right of Return,” originally a Zionist phrase–just so disrespectful.

Herzl himself wrote in The Jewish State: “The artificial means heretofore employed to overcome the troubles of the Jews have been either too petty–such as attempts at colonization–or attempts to convert Jews into peasants in their present homes.”

Why the Holocaust Happened In Germany

In his book, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened In Germany, author John Weiss writes in a chapter titled, “The Rise of Populist Anti-Semitism”: “Marr [Willhelm, author of The Victory of the Jews over the Germans”]…exhorted his readers not to blame the destructive behavior of the Jews on their religion or refusal to assimilate. Corrupt by blood, the Jews of necessity made war ‘on all ideals’ and ‘transformed everything into merchandise.'” I always think of Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass, in Novemeber of 1938, when Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and business and the streets were littered with broken glass. It was considered the beginning of the takeover of Nazism. It reminds me of the bulldozing of Palestinian homes in Gaza, but that’s Netanyahu’s policy. The vast majority of Jews the world-over oppose this and other anti-Palestinian policies.

More on the Instagram Image

Of course, it’s red, green, and black, the colors of the Palestinian flag. Get some originality, Instagram account!

3. Right to Resist.” To say “we believe in the right of Palestinian right to engage in any forms of resistance against the Zionist occupation.” Any form of resistance—really? A thinly-veiled support of Hamas terrorism.

4. “Our commitment to Palestinian liberation entails the rejection of all forms of imperialism. We believe it is the duty of those living within the U.S. settler-colonial empire to resist all manifestations of colonial and imperialist powers.” Uh-huh. But you only speak out against Israel.

5. “Collective liberation from all forms of oppression: We stand in solidarity with all oppressed people. We do not tolerate any forms of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, anti-Blackness, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, ableism, and classism.” You stand in solidarity with Jews? I don’t see any proof of that.

“Our struggles are and will always be connected. No one is free until we’re all free.” How very Kum-Ba-Yah.

The Rhetoric of Propaganda

In his book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, rhetorician and author Jacques Ellul writes, “After one has, over the years, excited the masses, flung them into adventures, fed their hopes and their hatreds, opened the gates of action to them, and assured them that all their actions were justified, it is difficult to make them re-enter the ranks, to integrate them into the normal framework of politics and economics.” In almost all cases then, once an anti-Semite, always an anti-Semite. I must say, however, that an early episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” featured virulent Neo-Nazis spewing all kinds of hate. They re-appeared in an episode on the last season of the show, reformed, apologetic, ashamed, and even tearful and trembling, at their of their past behavior. Also, a former neo-Nazi, Christian Piccolini, runs an organization called Life After Hate. He also penned a memoir called White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Virulent Hate Movement–and How I Got Out, according to NPR.org. So there’s always hope!

And: A limerick about one of my favorite people, Delegate Eric Ebersole (D-44).

Sadly, even if we know the tactics of Classical/Medieval/Renaissance rhetoric, how language is used to gain our adherence to a certain point of view, said tactics still work on us.

An Ethno-Religious Community

As DNA-analysis has progressed rapidly in recent years, we can all have our DNA analyzed and find out who are ancestors are and how they migrated over thousands of years over the globe. Jews are an ethno-religious community with clear DNA markers, both Ashkenazim (European Jews) and Sephardim (Middle Eastern Jews). I know it’s not a popular belief, as it seems eugenicist and creating a hierarchy of races and ethnicities, but I believe Jews have…well, let’s just say I wouldn’t mind some.

Love Me Some Palestinians

And What About..?

Right now, 67,ooo Israelis live on kibbutzim. Though they are not explicity Marxist, clearly the kibbutz philosophy stemmed partially from Karl Marx’s (a Jew!) development of what we know call Marxism. Kibbutzim are also beautiful to behold, often symmetrically designed, with halls and areas for childcare, education, etc.

The Two Remaining Semitic Races

Peer Groups and Books

“People care about what others think across all different age groups—and that influences how much they value different ideas and behaviors,” says Dr. Emily Falk at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how social networks affect decision making. This is called social, or peer, influence,” reads an article, “The Powers of Peers: Who Influences Your Health,” on the website of the National Institute of Health published in 2021.

This same friend’s sister teaches–and not about the Middle East or its history–at Columbia University and has been threatened with violence by students there simply because she is Jewish.

The human animal these days has always been and is certainly now, in the Internet era, notoriously unwilling to read a book. Books are where all the truth, “the soul of the whole Past Time,” as philosopher and writer Thomas Carlyle once said. It was etched on the front of McKledin Library when I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland at College Park. And believe me, as someone who is finally pursuing my dream of writing for television (and getting published in a myriad of contexts lately): No one. Reads. Anything.

I have even asked some friends to read a comedy sketch, SNL-style, I’ve written that was 4 script pages. Not one of them has read it or said anything to me about it years later. People need to get books by reputable writers and historians, etc. on this topic. You can’t trust most of what is on the Internet, plain and simple.

Also: A paean to the first man I was in love with.

Continued from above quote:

Here are a few factors that complicate the “Israel as white colonial enterprise” narrative:

1. The origins of the Jewish people, and the site of the ancient, independent Jewish commonwealths, were in the territory currently encompassed by the State of Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Jewish calendar, early literary tradition, language, and earliest historical references are all rooted in these geographic areas.
2. There have always been thousands of indigenous Jews living in the territory currently encompassed by the State of Israel and the West Bank, including during the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and British colonial periods. These indigenous Jews and their descendants are not white and European.
3. Beginning in 1882, and continuing for a century, European and Arab nationalist movements expelled or destroyed by other means the majority of Jewish communities on the European, Asian, and African continents (including Jewish communities indigenous to what is today the West Bank; in 1929, for example, centuries of Jewish habitation in Hebron ended with the massacre of many of its residents by their Muslim neighbors). Few countries were willing to settle the survivors and refugees of these expulsions and massacres, many of whom had no choice but to flee to Palestine or, post-1948, the State of Israel, whose legal system allowed for the immigration of anyone who fit the definition of a Jew under the Nazi’s Nuremberg laws.
4. A majority of the State of Israel’s Jewish population emigrated within the last four generations from North Africa and the Middle East. By definition, therefore, a majority of Israeli Jews are not “white and European.”

So to anyone who believes that Israel is a “white colonialist enterprise,” I would ask the following questions:

1. What is the “country of origin” with which Jews maintain “political allegiance,” and to which we should return once a Palestinian state is established “from the river to the sea,” as so many uninformed college students like to scream at campus rallies? Or is the implication that all of the Jews between the river (Jordan) and sea (Mediterranean) should simply be liquidated (murdered) to make way for a Palestinian state?
2. Where should my Jewish friend, whose family has been in Israel for eight generations (after moving from Egypt), go? How many generations in a place confers indigenous status? Should he and his parents and children move “back” to Egypt where they no longer speak the language or have family or commercial ties?
3. Where should the approximately 150,000 Jews who were expelled by the Iraqi government in 1951, and their hundreds of thousands of descendants, go? “Back” to Iraq? How about the Jews of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran… or how about survivors of the Holocaust? Should they go “back” to countries to which they have no personal ties? “Back” to countries that legally prohibited them from living as full citizens with rights equal to their Christian and Muslim counterparts? (You’ll note, for example, that many of the Jewish surnames cited in the NY Times article below about the Israeli town of Ofakim, devastated by Hamas on October 7, are actually Arabic; many of the town’s Jewish founders were refugees from Arab countries. Again, not white, not European.)

There is no country to which Israeli Jews can “return” because they were never fully part of those societies. There is a reason that Jews who live outside of Israel have always been described as part of a “diaspora” (in English) and “in exile” (in Hebrew, בגלות). Our language developed in the Land of Israel, our formative literature was written there, our calendar developed there, we pray in that direction, our ancient cities are there… it IS our “country of origin.” And for some of us, we have always physically lived there, even when it was ruled by some other, actual colonial ruler, like the Romans, Ottomans, or British (people who were able to return to their own homelands).

But practically speaking, seven million Jews aren’t going to disappear between the “river and the sea” anytime soon. So maybe, instead of chanting ridiculous, genocidal slogans, people can be part of the solution: advocating for two states, for two people, living in peaceful coexistence… both of which have deep historical roots in the land. It is time for a safe, secure State of Israel, and a safe, secure State of Palestine next door, in the territory now known as the West Bank. Let’s please dispense with the lazy, pseudo-intellectualism, and faux-progressivism, and try to make some real, long-term change.”