Strange Days in America
I didn’t know I was a “Jew-hater” until I suggested in a comment that giving Bibi Netanyahu everything he wants (and then some) might not be the same as serving the national interests and security needs of the United States. Well, there, I said it. Maybe Bibi shouldn’t get all the bombs and weapons and support he wants, whenever he wants and whatever Israel does with them.
And for that, I became a “Jew-hater.” I guess because I wasn’t 100% subservient to Bibi.
These are strange days in America. Congress can’t jump to its collective feet quickly enough to applaud Bibi. Members of Congress proudly display Israeli flags outside their offices. Heck, a few members of Congress (notably Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania) aren’t happy unless they literally wrap the Israeli flag around their bodies.
What gives? What accounts for this madness?
Oh, I know some of the reasons. AIPAC. Christian evangelicals looking to the Second Coming. All the money ($100 million and more) Miriam Adelson gave to Donald Trump. All the profits to be made from weaponry and war. The corporate media, bought and paid for by billionaires. And so on. Yet something deeper, more insidious, seems to be at work here.
We used to have the “America, love it or leave it” crowd. Now we have the “Israel, love it—or else” crowd. In America!
Of course, ad hominem attacks like “Jew-hater” are meant to distract from real issues. People call you names when they can’t think of intelligent and persuasive ways of challenging your arguments. Yet this is America, after all, where much of our discourse (such as it is) consists of name-calling and other forms of insults and slander.
Honestly, I loved the response of another commenter to the “Jew-hater” epithet. The person simply typed: YAWN.
If you’re willing to think or write critically about Israel and the actions of its government and leaders, which indeed every American (and Israeli) should be, be prepared to be attacked as a Jew-hater, an anti-Semite, or worse. It comes with the territory. Even my Jewish friends who write critically are not immune. They, of course, are dismissed as “self-hating Jews.”
Fortunately, it appears most Americans today are onto the game that’s being played here. Progress, of a sort, even as Bibi continues to get everything he wants. Now Bibi says he’ll nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Did I say these are strange days?
Bracing Views 
There are a few lines I could select from your post as reference to kick off my comments, this one does nicely, “People call you names when they can’t think of intelligent and persuasive ways of challenging your arguments,” as it describes my experience in making, and getting responses to, online comments to articles and editorials appearing in the Boston Globe on matters Gaza, “antisemitism,” Israel, etc.
I have found it is impossible to have meaningful, informed, civil, “rules-based” discussion on such matters with these Israeli or Zionist apologist existents (I refuse to include these beings in the category of “people’), and this is a manifestation of a further, underlying truth. These are beings beyond-intoxicated, beyond-OUI, in their own sense of entitlement, of supremacy, of being “God’s chosen,” though not in the sense of privilege with accountability for “service, obedience, and holiness,” but in the sense of divine dispensation, license, and exemption.
To explain a bit further, whereas in the former sense of “accountability” the Jews throughout the millennia of their history have stood for humanity, culture, civilization, scholarship, community, social justice, obligation to other human beings, the life of the mind, inquiry into the relationship between mankind and God, in brief, life itself, the Israelis/Zionists, on the other hand in the latter sense of divine dispensation, in their approximate 128-year history, represent not so much the polar but the galactic opposite of all that – inhumanity and cruelty raised to entertainment levels, indifference to social injustice, close-mindedness to the nth degree, faux scholarship and manufactured history and myth, a transactional attitude toward relations with others and with the community-at-large , and a supremacist belief that God has granted them unique dispensation to pursue a self-aggrandizing particularism, all else be damned. It amounts to what Norman Finkelstein- anathema to the Israelis/Zionists for the truths he tells, and thus smeared as a “self-hating Jew – concisely states is a “death cult.”
To illustrate yet further, Zionists bear as much relationship to Jews as the alien beings in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (either the 1956 original or 1978 remake) do to human beings. A more recent analogy comes from the pathetic, disgraced ex-congressman George Santos, who claimed he was “Jew-ish.” Farcical as that is, it fits Israelis and Zionists perfectly.
Just as with pursuit of realizing an Eretz – Ersatz? – Israel, so too are we confronted by beings who cannot be deterred from establishing an Israeli- or Zionist-centered solar system. It is no coincidence that Noa Tishby – Israeli model, actress, singer, Israel advocate/promoter, media figure – is the bestselling author of “Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth,” which should more properly be retitled as “Israel: A Simple(ton’s) Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country in the Known Universe.” That’s what they believe about themselves.
Where does this come from? It goes back to Theodor Herzl and the other founders of Zionism, who realized they needed a creation myth, as do all nationalist movements. Realizing however that actual recorded history would neither support nor meet their needs, they resorted to Biblical history, not much amenable to scholarly history, but fertile grounds for ideology and mythology. And so the rationale for Israel was laid, safely beyond the reach of critical analysis.
And this freedom-from-fact self-satisfying fantasy persists to the present, as Ilan Pappé has noted in “Ten Myths About Israel,” “According to a letter sent by the education ministry in 2014 to all schools in Israel: ‘the Bible provides the cultural infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land is anchored.’”
This is extends beyond the classroom and is further illustrated by Netanyahu himself in a press conference on Oct. 7, 2023, “Remember what Amalek did to you. We remember and we fight… Our heroic soldiers have one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy and ensure our existence in our land. . .”
Who the hell (aside from Israelis) has ever heard of the Amaleks before then?
In an attempt to draw out these fact-contemptuous apologists appearing in the Globe and elsewhere, to get some idea of their connection to the reality-based universe, I have repeatedly asked them “please reply whether you believe such prominent, highly regarded, Jewish intellectuals, scholars, academics, authors and professionals as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Avi Shlaim, Jeffrey Sachs, Gideon Levy, Miko Peled, Max Blumenthal, among others are self-hating Jews, or antisemites, or Jew haters, or all the above.”
To say they haven’t heard of them (most likely a lie) means disqualification from any intelligent, meaningful discussion concerning Gaza, Palestine, or Israel, having some knowledge of who they are, what they have to say through their body of work, is a de rigueur as knowing something about the Constitution in discussing the protections it extends to us all.
To answer “No” then the apologists must either challenge the likes of Chomsky on their intellectual level (good luck with that) or accept what they have to say, which thus invalidates any apology for Israel.
To answer “Yes” means they reject intellectual and scholastic inquiry and can only resort to petty ad hominems in challenging the work of these esteemed minds. I have yet to get an answer to the question, despite it’s being posed multiple times. Checkmate. For all intents and purposes, the Israeli educational/indoctrination system has led to this:
Teacher: “Who can tell me how much 2 + 2 is?”
Aaron [student]: “I can, I can, it’s ‘Israel’”
Teacher: “Very good, Aaron! Come up here so I put a star (of David) on your forehead!”
In closing (finally) and ominously, from another Globe entry:
“Israel will do what it has to do in order to continue living in the indigenous, ancestral birthplace of the Jewish people. If that means war, then so be it.”
There are not two sentences more emblematic of the Israeli/Zionist sense of entitlement, ruthlessness, recklessness, self-justification, self-delusion, heedlessness, aggrandizement, and disregard for any boundaries – whether social, cultural, political, philosophical, religious, humanitarian, ethical, whatever – to be found.
A concise, 3-minute synopsis of the above can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcW3eOaivLA
LikeLike
Well said XK and thank you.
LikeLike
Thank you, Bustabout, I wasn’t sure it was so much exegesis as exhalation, I guess I got a vote for the former…
LikeLike
It is phenomenal that in the land once of liberty and justice for all, any American can be proud to “stand with Israel” since ethnic supremacy is the antithesis of liberty and justice for all. To stand with Israel should be shameful, but the country has been captured by Zionism to the extent that it has taken the nearing two year outright slaughter of Gazans and leveling of Gaza to get America to start waking up.
The tide is turning but I am afraid it is too late to save the Palestinians from the genocide that Netanyahu is so eager to continue.
I just drew up a new sign that I will display starting tomorrow on the street. It reads: “Zionism is the Executioner of Liberty and Justice for All. As Palestinians Die, so does America”
LikeLike