#anti-zionism

ldr@diaspora.koehn.com

Where Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism Collide

#palestinians #genocide #jews #antisemitism #anti-zionism #opinion

March 11, 2024

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist

Every time I write, as I did last week, that I don’t think anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic, I get emails from Jewish readers that are angry, disappointed or sometimes simply baffled. “Israel is the political entity through which the Jewish people exercises its natural right of self-determination and control over its own fate,” said one typical recent message. “How is singling out the Jewish people to deprive it of those rights not antisemitic?”

To answer this question fully would take more than a single column, but I want to make a brief attempt, because lately, in reaction to the grotesque suffering in Gaza, two ugly, intertwined trends are gaining steam. Well-intentioned opponents of Jewish nationalism, some Jewish themselves, are being falsely smeared as antisemites. At the same time, antisemitism is cloaking itself in anti-Zionism, with people spitting out the word “Zionist” when they really seem to mean “Jew.”

My own views on Zionism are ambivalent and conflicted. I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport. I think the idea of Israel as a colonial entity that will eventually be dismantled is a malign fantasy — most Jewish Israelis don’t have anywhere else to go — but I also recognize that the country’s creation can’t be disentangled from the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Yes, as Zionists often point out, Palestinians were far from the only people made refugees as maps were redrawn in the wake of World War II. After Israel’s creation, more Jews were uprooted from Arab and Muslim countries than Arabs expelled from their homes in historic Palestine. It is not Israel’s fault that some of its neighbors kept displaced Palestinians as stateless refugees rather than integrating them as full citizens. But I could never blame a Palestinian for thinking it obscenely unfair that I have a right to “return” to a country to which I have no family connection, while Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 do not.

I also understand why many Jews, the survivors of millenniums of attempts to destroy them as a people, put their need for national self-determination above other, competing values. But one needn’t hate Jews to make a different moral calculus.

Right now, the relentless growth of settlements in the West Bank has created a one-state reality on the ground, although one in which people have very different rights and freedoms depending on their ethnic and religious background. There are people of good will who think the way out of this insupportable situation lies in the fight for equal democratic rights in a single state for everyone living in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality,” Peter Beinart wrote in Jewish Currents in 2020.


Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opinion/antisemitism-vs-anti-zionism.html

david_lazarus@pluspora.com

It's time to sanction Israel for bombing Gaza; among many other atrocities
#RecklessPolitics #Israel #Anti-Zionism #Gaza #Sanction #Palestinians #Avaaz #Petition

"Dear friends,

We're on the brink of a full scale war in Israel and Palestine.

31 Palestinian children have already been killed. Mothers dead. Hundreds injured.

The tensions are escalating. Fast.

It's all rooted in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and decades of violent oppression of the Palestinian people, which Human Rights Watch just concluded amounts to “crimes against humanity.”

This is where it all began, and this is where it must end.

Possibly the only way to stop this horrific cycle of Israel’s violent displacement of Palestinians from their homes, daily punishment of innocent families, Hamas firing rockets, and Israel bombing Gaza is to make the economic cost of this conflict too high to bear.

It’s what helped end apartheid in South Africa, and it can end apartheid here.

We've just hit 2 million signatures. Join our call in one click to sanction Israel for breaking international law and committing crimes against humanity, and let's make this a turning point.

Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organisations in the world, and B’tselem, one of the most respected Israeli human rights organisations, both recently concluded that Israel is committing crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people.

Meanwhile, extremist Israeli settlers march in the streets chanting “Death to Arabs”, and have burned thousands of olive trees that many Palestinians rely on to survive. Once again the bombs are falling on the open-air prison that is Gaza , and Israel is under rocket attack -- something has to change to end this vicious downward spiral.

Imposing sanctions is not about demonising Israelis. Extremists and corrupt leaders on both sides benefit from the status quo. But there is no question that the Israeli government, with one of the strongest militaries in the world, is the actor with maximum power on the ground. Israel controls the land, air, water, food, and even the freedom of movement of ALL Palestinians. For 70 years, it has been punishing, evicting and discriminating against millions of Palestinians whose lives it controls.

The Israeli government believes it has a green light to continue committing these crimes, crushing Palestinians with impunity -- because it believes governments will not impose sanctions. Let’s prove them wrong by turning this petition into a massive people’s movement that no decision maker can ignore.

This is a last resort. Virtually every other tool has been tried, for decades, to stop Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. Targeted sanctions, covering things like Israeli blood diamonds, a boycott on arms sales (Israel sells weapons to some of the world's most brutal regimes) as well tech and cultural sanctions (like banning Israel from sporting events), may be the first step in bringing freedom to Palestine and peace to the region.

With hope and determination,

Fadi, Marie, Christoph, Mo, Nax, John, Risalat, and the entire Avaaz team"

Palestinian Rights Matter - Sanction Israel!