Those Decrying Israel’s War on Gaza and US Support for that War as Genocide are Correct!

Anti-zionist statements are not anti-semitic

Two Star Chambers: Sen. Joe McCarthy, Army hearings, 1954 / Rep. Elise Stefanik, Education and Work Force Committee hearing, 2024

Less than two weeks into Israel’s massive bombing and artillery blitz on the captive territory of Gaza and its 2.3 million Palestinian residents, David Velasco, editor-in-chief of the US art magazine Artforum was fired following publication of letter in his puvlication (not by him) calling for Palestine’s liberation and “an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes.”

In firing Velasco from a job he had held for six years (and not even for what he’d written or assigned to a  writer, but for publishing a letter from a coalition of artists and arts groups!), the magazine’s publisher accused him of publishing controversial material supporting Palestinians in the current Israeli war on Hamas. 

Shortly after that outrage, Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of eLife, an academic science journal, was similarly sacked  In is case it was for his reposting on X (formerly Twitter) of a satyrical post from the Onion that called out Israel’s indifference to the killing of  Palestinian civilians. That is, it was not even something he wrote himself or even an action he took at work! 

The two firings were part of a wave of McCarthyite firings, suspensions, investigations and pressured resignations of journalists, public school teachers, university students, and  academics, including tenured professors, and even a couple of  university presidents, for statements or decisions on protest actions denouncing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank of for denouncing the disproportionate killing of civilians. The statements and decisions were deemed to be “anti-semitic,” a term that has come to be misused as much as “communist was misused in the ‘50s when it was applied to liberals, socialists, atheists, civil rights activists and anti-nuclear activists.

Ironically Eisen himself is Jewish, as are tens or hundreds of thousands of American Jews in organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace who have been protesting Israel’s almost total leveling of Gaza and the violent invasion that has killed over 27,000 Palestinians, 70% of whom have been women and children, in less than four months of all-out war. Even pro-Palestian Jewish organizations on campuses have been accused of being anti-semitic!

Now, however, the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a dramatic and ground-breaking preliminary order that had been bitterly fought by Israeli government attorneys, has accused Israel of acts of genocide. The order, akin to a court-ordered injunction, requires the nation that was founded in the wake of the German Holocaust that killed over 6 million Jews, Roma people, and Communists (in a Nazi campaign that led to coining of the term “genocide) to to describe the erasing of a people or part of a population of people)) to cease permitting acts of genocide and to punish those in Israel and its government from agitating for genocide of Palestinians. 

Given that interim order — the first action in the court case brought in late December by the nation of South Africa against Israel which will be tried over the next few years — it’s time to demand a halt to the attacks and persecution of those speaking the truth about Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians. All those who have been unjustifiably fired, harassed, investigated or criticized for their outspoken defense of Palestinians in the one-sided industrial-scale slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank by one of the world’s most modern and powerful militaries, the state of Israel, should be apologized to by their persecutors. Those who have been persecuted and hounded for  protesting or condemning Israeli atrocitiesdd should be made whole and be compensated for any damages.  

For far too long, any criticism of Israel’s zionist government policy of oppressing Palestinians in Israel and its captive territories, of IDF soldiers’ killing of actual or suspected stone-throwing adults and even children, of a policy encouraging the theft of Palestinian lands in the West Bank by Jewish “settlers,” of confining over two million Gazans in what amounts to an open-air concentration camp, and even of just correctly identifying Israel as an “apartheid state, ” has been called “anti-semitism.”  

It is not anti-semiticism. It is anti-zionism, a racist or tribal political ideology that declares Israel to be a religious state for Jews and where others, notably Palestinians, whether Muslim, Christian or atheist, to be second-class citizens if resident in the original Israel of 1948, or outsiders, if living in occupied Gaza or the West Bank. 

Those in the so-called democracy of the United States who have been denounced punished and hounded by authorities and the media for courageously exercising their First Amendment right of Freedom or Speech and Association in calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza and an end of US arms and diplomatic support to Israel (a genocidal act in itself), as well as for a return to a viable two-state solution to the 76-year displacement and oppression of Palestinians, deserve better. The ICJ’s initial order, issued on an urgent basis during its investigation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, has proven them correct.   

Enough of the self-serving equating of anti-zionism with anti-semitism!  There has been a long-time campaign, particularly in the US and Britain,conducted by the Israeli government, its US Embassy in Washington, and its agent in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), of actively sowing deliberate confusion. Enough parroting of that noxious conflation by government authorities and media pundits in the US of anti-zionist statements — so reminiscent of the the misuse of the term ‘communist” during the Cold War —, with anti-semitic statements.

Perhaps the two prominent college presidents recently forced out of their positions by public pressure from rich zionist donors to Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, deserved their fate. They simply didn’t have the courage to take a stand and insist that the questions they bobbled in a Congressional hearing were obvious rhetorical  traps, playing on that confusion. 

For example, U of Penn President Elizabeth Magill, who during a hearing in the House Committee on Education and the Work Force, was asked by Rep. Elise Stefanie (R-NY) whether students “calling for the genocide of the Jews in Israel” would be kicked out of the university, instead of saying it would ‘depend on the circumstances,’ should have simply said, “No one is calling for such a thing, and I’m not responding to hypothetical questions.” It was a perfect opportunity for Magill to say that the phrase Penn students were alleged to have been shouting, namely “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free!”  Is not a call for genocide, but rather a call for freedom and equality to all Palestinians everywhere they live, whether in the original boundaries of 1948 Israel or in the occupied territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Instead of grabbing the opportunity to school her inquisitor, Magill fudged her answer and was driven from office, (The black president of Harvard was ousted after a similarly weak response in the same hearing, after also being falsely accused of plagiarism in her academic papers and thesis for what were more sloppy attributions.) 

But aside from those two witch-hunt firings, other people of less prominence and newsworthiness, many who have been forthright in defending themselves against the charge of anti-semitism,  who are being punished for speaking out on the job, or even on social media, should be apologized to. Should they have any cases against them or investigations against them, these should be dropped and they should be offered their positions back if they have been improperly fired or suspended for speaking truth and exercising their freedom of speech. 

It should be noted that on two of the rulings by the 17-member  ICJ, which were decided by votes of 16-1 and 15-2, an Jewish Israeli judge, Aaron Barak, (endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), voted along with the rest of the majority. Judge Barak opposed a number of the court’s initial decisions but supported on the court’s orders for Israel to: 

   “Take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of [the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide] in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, in particular:

a) Killing members of the group

b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

c)deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

D) imposing measured intended to prevent births within the group.”

And also:

“The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above.’ 

So much for criticism of the Israeli government being an act of “anti-semitism”!

Politicians like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy rose to enormous power by smearing and pressing for the punishment or blacklisting of people for their political views because too many otherwise progressive citizens ducked their heads and refused to speak out.

In this new McCarthyist era — perhaps we should name it Stefanikism — we must all stand up and fearlessly denounce the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as well as the long history of oppression and apartheid endured by all Palestinians under Israeli rule. We must defy the smears of “anti-semitism” and speak the truth about the genocidal actions of both Israel and its arms-supplier and diplomatic enabler, the United States.