Jewish anti-Zionists have been gnashing their teeth in uncontrollable grimacing these past years in reaction to the IHRA’s (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism.
The definition includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, that Israel’s existence is a racist endeavor, comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, or aiding the harming of Jews in the name of an extremist view of religion.
Those elements negate most of the essentials of Palestinianism, especially the version promoted by Hamas.
Psychotherapist Mark Golden, from Newton, Massachusetts, published a column in The Boston Globe on February 13 positing that criticizing Israel is not being antisemitic. Moreover, as a Jew, Golden asserted he is “offended when legitimate critiques of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza are branded as antisemitic.”
He fears he may be silenced. All, of course, depends on the criticism’s content.
Jewish anti-Zionists
A decade ago, Richard Landes wrote that “forms of Jewish self-criticism need to be understood” as they can cross over “into pathology” when shared by Jew-haters and deniers of Jewish national identity who “would use it to promote demonizing and scapegoating narratives.”
And that is what has happened.
Golden’s column is in harmony with the recent “Stop the Ethnic Cleansing” advertisement published in The New York Times, which displayed the names of 350 rabbis and a few actors and public figures. According to the Vatican News, the ad was financed by progressive donors affiliated with the In Our Name Campaign.
This collective of Jewish philanthropists seeks to raise $10 million for organizations that support efforts to “build self-determination in Palestine.”
Their signatures were nowhere to be seen on a similar advert in 2005 when more than 8000 Jews, including corpses, were ethnically cleansed from Gaza. Nor will you see their signatures on petitions protesting a planned ethnic cleansing of 725,000 Jews from Judea & Samaria and post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhoods.
And despite the claim of IfNotNow, that “as Jews for Shared Safety, we know our history demands that we take a stand against ethnic cleansing – wherever it happens,” their stand is only about the location of any “cleansing.”
At present, we are witnessing the anti-Zionist Jew, occupied by Palestine, who asserts he is the better, more knowledgeable, more ethical Jew. This Jewish anti-Zionism was evident at Columbia University this past week.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) had invited students to join a “Tu Bishvat teach-in and seder” to learn about “greenwashing in occupied Palestine,” the tactic of misleading people to assume operations are environmentally friendly but concealing their harmful results.
What they are doing is literally turning Judaism and Jewish culture, customs, and practices upside down to wash their own anti-Zionism. The 15th of Shvat, a date fixed in the Talmud, to mark the new agricultural cycle for the purpose of biblical tithes, a commandment based on the sanctity of the Land of Israel, is upturned and disordered to serve the cause of pro-Palestinianism.
Moreover, this date, which serves a religious purpose in Jewish agriculture in determining the age of a fruit-bearing tree, is enlisted to prop up a group of people who have burned the trees and fields planted by Jews over decades. During the 1936 Arab disturbances, the Jewish National Fund composed a special Yizkor prayer for “chopped down trees.”
How ridiculous are their actions? We need only recall that during the 16th century in Safed, the kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Luria instituted the first Tu Bishvat seder, tasting all the fruit growing in Israel at the time. Were he and his disciples “settler-colonialists”?
We can recall other inversions employed by the new Jewish anti-Zionists, such as the 2018 saying of Kaddish for Gazans killed fighting Israel at England’s Parliament by the Na’amod movement; the “Jewish-Palestinian Freedom Seder” ceremony held by the anti-Zionist IfNotNow movement, in which “Next year in Jerusalem” is declared; and there was the “Tisha B’Av Fast,” for which Rabbi Mónica Gomery, of the T’ruah movement, composed a prayer “to be read preceding or following the sounding of the shofar” (which is not sounded on that day).
Jewish rituals and customs become putty in impure hands. The chutzpah of the Jewish anti-Zionists to take elements of Jewish ritual, prayers, and ceremonies and employ them, with so much in-your-face affront, in a corrupt fashion is immeasurable immorality. And therein lies the antisemitism.
Coming back to psychotherapist Golden, to his thinking, “Zionism was promoted without any concerns for the potential negative impact on the Palestinian people.” In America, he asserts support for Israel became “almost synonymous with being Jewish.”
Of course, for Golden and fellow travelers, Abraham heading off to Moriah, the children of Israel marching across the desert to the Land of Israel, the words of Psalm 137 of the exiles in Babylon sitting and weeping when they remembered Zion, and the subsequent 2500 years of returning and yearning since then are inconsequential and somehow non-Jewish.
That the returnees to Zion of the 19th and 20th centuries needed to literally purchase back their national homeland while constantly offering compromises is ignored.
Golden discovered that “Jewish self-determination” has become “associated with colonial oppression,” including accusations of “apartheid-like policies, land confiscation, and the abuse of Palestinians” that began to take hold.
Criticism of Israel, especially during this Gaza campaign, “seems more justified than ever,” he wrote. What these anti-Zionists ignore is a simple matter: Are these claims true? Furthermore, are these claims equally applied to the Arabs on the other side of the conflict?
Could Arabs have been the actual settler-colonialists, coming out of the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh century to conquer large swaths of territory, including Judea, then ruled by Roman-cum-Byzantine imperialist occupiers?
It is Golden’s wish that legitimate criticism of Israel be separated from allegations of antisemitism, used “as a tool to silence dissent,” which, he believes, is the “real danger.” Alas, his views are the real danger.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.