False equivalence: Nazi antisemitism and Palestinian anti-Jewish sentiment

And a reprint of an earlier post refuting Zionist apologia

Above: JVP demonstrators, including the author (center, old), occupying Grand Central Station in New York on October 27, 2023

I am in Baltimore attending the National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace. I thought this would be a good occasion to republish an essay I posted on May 13, 2024, very soon after I started publishing “Appointed Times.” As my audience has expanded, so may the readership of this “Guide to the Perplexed,” responding to a range of arguments used in Zionist hasbara.

Given the developments since that time, however, especially in the domestic politics of the U.S., I want to elaborate on a brief section at the end where I discuss the issue of “antisemitism” among Palestinians and their supporters. At the time I wrote the article, bad-faith charges of antisemitism were deployed against Palestinians and their supporters to defend Israeli policies; now they have been weaponized in an attempt to destroy liberal education in the United States. My sister Phyllis reports from our ancestral homeland of Lower Merion Township, right next to Philadelphia, that Republicans, who cannot win elections there, are now running for the school board as independents on a platform of fighting antisemitism.

Here is what I wrote in May 2024:

[The charge is that] Hamas and many other Palestinians oppose Israel because they are antisemitic. They have repeated memes of Holocaust denial, Jewish control of media, finance, and politics in the United States and Europe. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem allied himself and his movement with Hitler.

Some Palestinians have become antisemitic, but compare them to the Germans: the Jews of Germany made outstanding contributions to the country’s culture and society and were rewarded with genocide; Israel has destroyed the culture and society of the Palestinians, who have responded with resistance and, sometimes, terrorism and hatred. Peoples in conflict always risk developing hostile stereotypes of each other, as witnessed by the pervasive anti-Arab racism in Israel. The solution is ending the conflict, not perpetuating it.

As historian Rashid Khalidi observed, the Mufti did great damage to the Palestinian cause by seeking an alliance with Nazi Germany, but he was not the only leader of an anticolonial movement against Britain to seek the support of Britain’s adversary. Subhas Chandra Bose, president of the Indian National Congress, sought the Axis’ help against the British. Japan enabled him to build the Indian National Army that fought the British in southeast Asia. These may have been unwise decisions, but they did not make Indian Independence or Palestinian rights into fascist causes.

There is no denying that there has been some antisemitism among Palestinians and their supporters. As I noted, that is a byproduct of conflict, not its cause. After Pearl Harbor, a wave of anti-Japanese racism swept over the United States. Japanese citizens were interned in concentration camps. Does that mean that World War II was caused by anti-Japanese racism in the U.S., or that, rather than fight Japan and Nazi Germany, the U.S. should have focused on combatting its own hatred of Japanese and Germans?

The growth of anti-Jewish and even antisemitic sentiment in the Arab world in response to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was not only predictable but quite precisely predicted by a sympathetic Palestinian Arab observer soon after the first Zionist Congress, in 1899. Yousof Diya al-Khalidi, an Ottoman parliamentary deputy and former mayor of Jerusalem, who was Rashid Khalidi’s great-great grand uncle, tried to warn Theodore Herzl of precisely this danger.¹ He wrote:

The idea [of a Jewish State] in itself is entirely natural, beautiful, and just. Who could dispute the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country! And what a marvelous sight it would be if the Jews, gifted as they are, could once again form an independent, respected, happy nation that could render moral service to suffering humanity as in the past.

Unfortunately, the fates of nations are not ruled solely by abstract concepts, however pure or noble they may be. One must take into account reality, facts established by force, yes, by the brute force of circumstance. And the reality is that Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and, even more serious, it is inhabited by others besides the Jews. This reality, these established facts, this brute force of circumstance, . . . poses a real threat to the Jews of Turkey [the Ottoman Empire, then including most of the Arab World.]

Of course the Turks and Arabs are generally well disposed toward your coreligionists. Nonetheless, there are some fanatics among them who, as among all other nations, even the most civilized, are also not free of the feeling of racial hatred. Moreover, there are some fanatic Christians in Palestine, especially among the Orthodox and the Catholics, who think Palestine should belong only to them and are therefore very jealous of the advances made by the Jews in their ancestral country. They never miss an opportunity to whip up hatred of the Jews among the Muslims. There is reason to fear a popular movement against your coreligionists, who have suffered for so many centuries, and which would be fatal for them. Even with the best intentions in the world, the Turkish government would find it hard to suppress it. It is this only too possible eventuality that places the pen in my hand to write you.

For the sake of the security of the Jews in Turkey, the Zionist movement in the geographical sense must end.

---

American anti-Japanese racism, though it fed on previously existing anti-Asian racism, became institutionalized in response to Pearl Harbor and even permeated the media and popular culture. Antisemitism among Palestinians and their supporters is a natural, if misguided, response to Israel’s Jewish supremacist state and decades of ethnic cleansing, land theft, occupation and killing, culminating in the genocide in Gaza.

It has been an article of faith and consensus among Jews that antisemitism is never caused by the behavior of Jews. That made sense when Jews were a stateless minority in many states. Now that the self-proclaimed Jewish State has the most developed tools of coercion, from AI- based surveillance to nuclear weapons, it cannot escape responsibility for its own acts by attributing opposition to baseless bigotry. Antisemitism is no more the basis for Palestinian resistance to Israel than the fight against antisemitism is the reason for the Trump regime’s assault on higher education.

A Guide to the Perplexed

Responding to Israeli Apologia

MAY 13, 2024

In the current debate sparked by Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel and Israel’s resultant offensive in Gaza, defenders of Israel repeat a limited number of arguments. This guide summarizes some of those arguments and suggests how to respond.

Zionism was a response to Jewish oppression, not the product of greed or imperial goals; therefore, it could not be colonialist.

The Zionist movement was a response to European antisemitism that could realize its goals only through cooperating with colonialist great powers. The Zionist movement sought to provide security and dignity to the Jewish people by founding a Jewish state in Palestine. Building a state in a land inhabited by others required allying with a great power that would dismantle the greatest obstacle to Zionism’s plans, the Ottoman empire, and then ignore the views of the inhabitants of Palestine. In a May 1918 letter to Lord Balfour, Chaim Weitzman, then President of the Zionist Organization, exhibited typical colonialist condescension when he advocated concealing the real purpose of the Balfour Declaration from the Arabs of Palestine. He deployed demeaning and racist stereotypes of Arabs (“they are superficially intelligent” and “respect only force”) to conjure solidarity with the colonialists on whom he depended. Denial that Zionism is a colonialist project is relatively recent. Early Zionists, such as Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, and Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the radical nationalist who founded the Revisionist Zionist movement that is a direct ancestor of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, frankly identified Zionism as part of colonialism and strategized how to gain the support of colonial great powers. The retroactive attempt to deny that Zionism is colonialism started only after colonialism became stigmatized as a form of oppression.

Zionism used only peaceful and legal means to acquire land for Jewish settlement.

The British mandate for Palestine, without which Israel would not exist, was part of the colonialist carve-up of the Middle East after World War I, from the Sykes-Picot agreement to the treaty of Lausanne, which created new states and allocated mandates over some of them to colonial powers. Historian David Fromkin called it “the peace to end all peace.” The British mandate for Palestine, which affirmed the British policy of establishing a “National Home” for the Jewish people in Palestine, was a component part of the whole. The "mandate” was an attempt to give British colonial rule in Palestine a legal veneer. Only the rule of the British opened the door for Jewish “colonists,” the term used by both Herzl and Jabotinsky. Zionist immigrants who arrived in Palestine both before and after the British Mandate formed the political-military nucleus of a state in formation, which was subsequently founded on violent ethnic cleansing – the Nakba. The history of what happened in 1948 is clear and well established. There is voluminous research documenting it, largely based on Israeli archives. Major figures in Netanyahu’s cabinet are calling for a “Second Nakba” rather than denying the first.

In 1950, the Israeli Knesset passed the Absentee Property Act, which confiscated without compensation all the property of approximately 750,000 refugees, whom Israel did not allow to return. Since 1967 the State of Israel, in violation of international law, has continued to use the Absentee Property Act to confiscate Palestinian property in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the occupied territories. This regime of confiscation, not peaceful and legal purchase, has been the main mechanism by which Israel and its citizens acquired land.

Jews cannot be colonialists because they are indigenous to Palestine. The Jewish people originated in Palestine, and some Jews have always lived there.

This is a word game, not serious history. The two thousand-year old history of Jewish origins has created historical memories and claims but cannot establish the right to rule over a different population today. Genetic studies show that Jewish communities from different parts of the diaspora have varying amounts of genetic material indicating origins in the Levant, but such scientific results cannot establish rights. According to history and tradition, the Jewish people originated in ancient history in the territories of today’s Palestine, coinciding with the aspirational borders of the “Land of Israel.” For over two thousand years, even before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., a majority of the Jewish people have lived outside Palestine, in the Diaspora. Small communities of Jews of various origins remained or were established in Palestine, especially in the four “holy cities” of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. These communities never claimed the right to rule Palestine.

The Jews who founded the State of Israel immigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. That the Jewish people as a collectivity originated in ancient Palestine does not alter the fact that the contemporary State of Israel was founded by Jews who immigrated to Palestine from elsewhere. Under international law historical attachment or memory does not confer a right to establish a state in a territory without the consent of the people who live there, especially if it is carried out through the force of arms under the shield of a colonial occupation and entails the ongoing expulsion of that people from their land and homes. In Gaza it is happening again before the eyes of the whole world.

Religious Zionists claim that God promised the Land of Israel to Abraham and his descendants. The claims that God gave the land to Abraham and his rightful heirs and that the Jewish people of today, as defined by the Orthodox rabbinate and the State of Israel, are those rightful heirs, are based on religious faith that have no standing in international law. At most they establish a sentimental and religious attachment, which cannot justify overriding rights based on empirically verifiable possession.

The Jews are a historically oppressed people not an oppressor people. Treating the Jewish state as oppressive or colonial requires the denial of Jewish history.

Since at least the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Jews have been oppressed and persecuted in many parts of their diaspora, especially in areas where Christianity was the dominant religion. This culminated in the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Those facts, however, do not mean that the Jewish people have an unchanging essence as an oppressed people, any more than the Jewish state’s oppression of Palestinians make the Jewish people an oppressor nation. Whether Jews, or any other group, are oppressed or oppressors is a function of their actions and roles under specific circumstances and can change with those circumstances. Whether the State of Israel (not the Jewish people) is oppressing Palestinians is an empirical question, and the treatment of Jews in other places and times is irrelevant to the answer.

Protesters against Israel are wrong to call it a racist white supremacist state. This charge is the imposition of an American lens on a different reality. While the initial Zionists who established the State of Israel were of immediate European origin, a majority of Jewish Israelis now trace their origins to Arab countries, Iran, Central Asia, Ethiopia, or elsewhere outside of Europe.

Israel is not a white supremacist state. It is a Jewish supremacist state. In the U.S. Jews were coded as white under racist laws, and they are still considered white, except by some antisemites. Some Americans have indeed imposed a U.S. framework of analysis on Israel and Palestine by calling Jews in Israel “white.” That is neither right nor wrong; it is irrelevant. Whiteness is a political and cultural construct, not a biological reality, and it is not a category that shapes relations between Israelis and Palestinians. Arguing that many Israeli Jews are “nonwhite” is just as irrelevant as arguing that others are white. Ethnic Supremacy does not depend on distinctions of skin color. It is an institutionalized denial of human equality whatever the nature of the difference it privileges. A recent manifestation of Jewish Supremacy in Israel is the Nation-State Law, which provides that only Jews have national rights between the River and the Sea, which makes political solution of the conflict impossible by outlawing any national rights for the Palestinians.

Israel is not an apartheid state. Israel’s basic law grants equal rights to all citizens. There are Palestinian Arab members of the Knesset, the judiciary, and the army.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, while subject to systematic discrimination, have many rights that black South Africans were denied under apartheid. But all apartheid states need not be identical; they need only meet the definition of apartheid. Any publication of the State of Israel contains maps that accurately show the whole territory ruled by the State of Israel as one unit, from the River to the Sea. In this one-state reality there are several groups subject to different legal regimes: Israeli Jewish citizens of Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians inhabiting the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel considers to be the Jewish territories of Samaria and Judea. Jerusalem Arabs and residents of the Golan Heights have separate statuses.

In the West Bank there is a pure apartheid regime. No one in the government of Israel even bothers to repeat the claim that the occupation regime is a temporary measure pending a settlement, which is obviously fictional after 57 years. Israeli settlers in the occupied territories have full rights as citizens – indeed they receive preferential treatment -- but Palestinians living in those territories are excluded from citizenship of the state that rules them. They are subject to military law. There are separate residential areas and roads for the two groups. Jewish settlers have the right to possess and use arms, which they do, frequently. They can travel freely on their Israeli passports, whereas Palestinians are subject to a complex set of controls of their movements, more draconian than the South African “pass” system. Palestinians are subject to arbitrary arrest and torture, and they are regularly killed by Israeli Jews (army or settlers) with impunity. That meets the textbook definition of apartheid.

Charging Israel with genocide is false. In Gaza Israel’s goal is self-defense, even if it is carried out with disproportionate means. The population of Palestinian Arabs has continued to increase under Israeli rule. This accusation of genocide is a blood libel aimed at denying the unique victimization that Jews suffered in the Holocaust.

Antisemites may charge Israel with genocide in bad faith. They may deny or minimize the Holocaust, accuse all Jews of guilt, or say that events in Gaza show that Jews control the U.S., or many other racist things. That Jews were the victims of genocide, and that refuge from persecution for Jews is a founding principle of Israel, are irrelevant to the question of whether Israel is committing genocide right now. That does not make the charge false or an example of “the new antisemitism,” as Noah Feldman claims.

Feldman writes that “Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas, even if found to involve killing disproportionate number of civilians, do not turn Israel into a genocidal actor comparable to the Nazis or the Hutu regime in Rwanda. The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.” Feldman also observes, however: “The rhetoric of some individual Israeli government officials cited by South Africa [in its case before the International court of Justice] is particularly appalling, both in its dehumanizing character and in referring to Palestinians as Amalekites, a group whom the God of the Bible called on the ancient Israelites to ‘erase.’” Feldman fails to mention that the “individual government official” who cited Amalek was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose intentions are the best indicators of the state’s. Nor does he analyze the repeated use of the Amalek meme in reference to Palestinians, which goes back at least to 1980, when it was cited in an article entitled “The Commandment (mitzvah) of Genocide in the Torah,” by Israel Hess, the rabbi of Bar Ilan University.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is not identical to what the Nazis or the Hutu supremacists did, nor does it have to be to qualify as genocide under the Convention. The Nazis and Hutu supremacists aimed, respectively, to kill all Jews and all Tutsis, plus many others. The Genocide convention defines the crime as intentionally destroying a group “in whole or in part.” The acts of killing, starving, and depriving a group of medical care with intent to force its members to leave their country have nothing to do with “self-defense,” but they are elements or precursors of genocide. Genocide does not have to be completed before one identifies it or acts to stop it. The Genocide Convention was intended to prevent genocide, not just retroactively condemn it.

There is a “double standard”: serious abuses by many states have not generated the international condemnation that Israel’s offensive in Gaza has. As a result of antisemitism, Israel is singled out for a unique level of condemnation.

Demanding equal impunity for Israel’s violations of human rights and humanitarian law is not a solution to the problem of antisemitism. Most of today’s international standards were adopted after the Holocaust in order to prevent recurrence of such events. Honoring the memory of the Holocaust means strengthening, not weakening those standards. Failing to hold Israel accountable would show that, rather than double standards, there are no standards at all.

The claim that Israel is a “colonial-settler state” is based on a fallacious and dangerous concept that is the product of ignorant political correctness at U. S. universities. The Jews who came to Israel were fleeing oppression, not seeking to oppress others.

“Colonial-settler state” is a social scientific category, not a term of abuse. Colonial-settler states derive from processes in which a colonial power sponsors or protects the immigration into a territory of foreigners who forcibly displace the native population and establish their own state. During the 500 and more years of European colonial hegemony most but not all of these settlers were European. The League of Nations mandate for Palestine granted to the U.K. was a form of colonial rule that contained a provision requiring Britain to encourage Jewish immigration. When Britain encountered Palestinian Arab resistance that it could not quell by force alone in the 1936-39 Arab revolt, it placed curbs on Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine just when refugees from Nazism needed refuge the most. With utmost hypocrisy, the U.K (like the U.S.) continued to refuse entry to its own country to the refugees from Nazism who for lack of alternatives were trying to enter Palestine. The Jewish colonists in Palestine then revolted against their colonial patron, as did the Americans of the thirteen colonies, the Southern Rhodesians, and some of the French in Algeria, when the interest of the colonial power differed from that of the colonists.

Among the massive scholarly literature on Israel as a colonial settler-state the magisterial work of the French-Jewish Arabist Maxime Rodinson stands out. In June 1967 he penned a contribution to a special edition on the Israeli-Arab conflict of Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Temps Modernes. Rodinson’s contribution was entitled “Israël: État Colonial?,” translated as “Israel: a Colonial Settler-State?” Sartre had arranged the contributions in two sections, pro-Israel and pro-Arab, but he judged that Rodinson’s work transcended those categories and gave his essay a space of its own.

Rodinson shows how Israel is a colonial-settler state, though different in its origin from other such states. He does not collapse Israel into a vacuous category but situates it in real history. He does not employ what S. Sebag Montefiore has called the “decolonization narrative,” according to which the colonists must leave Palestine to its rightful indigenous owners. Rodinson observes, sadly, that the same causes that make some people into anti-colonialists make others into colonialists. That is the result of their circumstances, not their moral character. There is no contradiction between a factual analysis of Israel as a colonial-settler state, and the recognition that Israel is a reality, and that Israelis are a genuine nation.

Hamas and many other Palestinians oppose Israel because they are antisemitic. They have repeated memes of Holocaust denial, Jewish control of media, finance, and politics in the United States and Europe. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem allied himself and his movement with Hitler.

Some Palestinians have become antisemitic, but compare them to the Germans: the Jews of Germany made outstanding contributions to the country’s culture and society and were rewarded with genocide; Israel has destroyed the culture and society of the Palestinians, who have responded with resistance and, sometimes, terrorism and hatred. Peoples in conflict always risk developing hostile stereotypes of each other, as witnessed by the pervasive anti-Arab racism in Israel. The solution is ending the conflict, not perpetuating it.

As historian Rashid Khalidi observed, the Mufti did great damage to the Palestinian cause by seeking an alliance with Nazi Germany, but he was not the only leader of an anticolonial movement against Britain to seek the support of Britain’s adversary. Subhas Chandra Bose, president of the Indian National Congress, sought the Axis’ help against the British. Japan enabled him to build the Indian National Army that fought the British in southeast Asia. These may have been unwise decisions, but they did not make Indian Independence or Palestinian rights into fascist causes.

Israel has won every war the Arabs launched against it. The Palestinians should accept their defeat. The Palestinian refugees should be settled in other countries, as millions of other refugees, including Jews, have been.

Under international law, refugees have the right to return to their homes or at least receive compensation. It is their choice whether they choose to be resettled elsewhere. Regardless of the outcome in Gaza, the establishment of the State of Israel and its recognition by the international community constituted a defeat of Palestinian national aspirations. Rodinson proposes that rather than repeatedly humiliating Palestinians and distorting their history; instead of telling them how soundly and rightly they have been beaten, how grateful they should be to be beaten by a democracy, and how their defense of their homes and country is the result of their antisemitism; it would be better to offer them compensation for the wrongs inflicted on them within a political arrangement that permits them to live in dignity, as equals of the Jewish Israelis with whom they share the land.

1. I helped Rashid Khalidi obtain a copy of the original handwritten letter in French from Herzl’s papers on the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. He discussed it in his book, The One Hundred Years War on Palestine. The translation above is mine.