Jew World Order

Even as support for Palestine grudgingly enters into popular consciousness in the West, the racist dehumanization of Palestinians continues to undermine meaningful support. The most obvious example of this is the repeated attempts at policing the tone and rhetoric of support for Palestine — and associated apologies when the arbitrary line is crossed. 

For example, Mark Ruffalo has apologized for comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to “genocide,” implying that strong rhetoric could incite violence against Jews. In a similar vein, Bernie Sanders has implied that accusing Israel of apartheid — like several of his Congressional colleagues, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, most South African leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and U.N. Special Rapporteur and former ICJ Judge John Dugard have done — could result in incitement against Jews. In the past, songwriter and composer and supporter of Palestine Roger Waters apologized for suggesting that Zionist mega-donor Sheldon Adelson was acting as a “puppet master” for Donald Trump, because Jews operating as puppet masters is an antisemitic trope — even as Trump himself used similar rhetoric to describe relationships between Republicans and Adelson. Likewise, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar apologized for her factually valid critique of the Israel lobby’s efforts to buy support in Congress after Zionists — including some “liberal” ones — suggested that her comments were antisemitic tropes. 

Multiple commentators, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, have gone out of the way to distance their support for Palestine from various violent clashes that have taken place in the country, apparently between supporters and opponents of Israeli violence, because the supporters themselves or other commentators claimed that the attacks were racially motivated hate crimes against Jews rather than politically motivated clashes. In New York, Palestinian and Arab communities have rejected that narrative, claiming that right-wing Jewish figures threw the first punches; this is consistent with what has taken place in France, where Jewish Defense League terrorists have attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators and then falsely suggested that the demonstrators were attacking them or Jewish places of worship, prompting French police to shut down protests. Similarly, pro-Israel lobbyists have previously staged disruptions of Palestine solidarity efforts and then claimed they or others were removed, protested, or otherwise opposed for being Jewish. In some of these efforts, Jewish religious communities that were falsely implicated in these clashes by Zionists were forced to issue public statements of clarification simply to avoid being dragged into political disputes.

One would think, from the nature and tone of these apologies, tone-policing efforts, and acts of distancing, that it is supporters of Palestine that are trying to defend a racist apartheid regime that keeps millions of people locked away while slowly stealing what remains of their land with a standing army based on explicitly racist and sectarian justifications. 

Many of these apologies, tone-policing efforts, and acts of distancing should not sound completely unfamiliar. Virtually every racial justice movement faces some sort of clampdown from establishment figures — including those who may be sympathetic — on the apparent grounds that strong support for victims of racial violence constitutes a sort of reverse discrimination, so much so that the apologizers will see or predict reverse racial violence even when there is little or no evidence for such acts taking place. 

These apologies are not just unnecessary. They are harmful and constitute a form of racism. It is Israel and its supporters — not liberal celebrities, dissenting members of Congress, leftist and/or Muslim protesters, and student activist groups — that are responsible for not only carrying out a racial war of aggression against stateless refugees who are locked under its brutal and illegal rule, but of attempting to involve Jewish Diaspora communities in that racial war through lobbying efforts and crushing internal Jewish community dissent. Reasonable descriptions of Israeli government conduct and lobbying do not become “incitement,” stereotyping, canards, etc. simply because Israel’s loud Jewish supporters have fused their own conduct with that of the wider Jewish community. Israel and its supporters — and they alone — bear moral culpability for dragging Jews, Westerners, and others into their racial war. 

But not according to those who insist on apologizing. According to them, using strong rhetoric about Israel’s violence — even if it is an accurate description of Israeli policy — could result in violence against Jews. Likewise, any violence involving Palestinians and Jews can be reduced to racially-motivated violence against Jews on accusation alone — even when the Jews involved admit to being involved in pro-Israel activism and where they may have been the instigator rather than the victim. 

Such a situation would be impossible without racial discrimination. The tone-policers and apologizers believe that those who are slowly coming to the realization that Palestinians are actual people should restrain their own empathy for those who are besieged, bombed, killed, displaced, banished, and terrorized because supporters of Zionism refuse to restrain their chauvinism. Without Zionist chauvinism, there would be no way for anyone to meaningfully associate the Jewish community in the Diaspora with Israel’s barbarism. To the contrary, it is continued U.S. Jewish community support for Israel — including efforts to attack Jewish community dissent on Israel — that lends credibility to the notion that Jews in the West bear responsibility for Israel’s violence. 

Similarly, were it not for cheap stereotypes, it would be impossible to conclude, without evidence, that mobs of Arab and Muslim men attacked Jewish bystanders for no reason other than irrational prejudice. Indeed, some descriptions of clashes between Jewish Defense League extremists and Palestinian protesters in New York were described as antisemitic simply because they took place near various Jewish community institutions — indistinguishable from vile rhetoric portraying the Muslim community as terrorist sympathizers when some of its members tried to build an Islamic Center near the site of the World Trade Center. 

Supporters of Palestinian rights — particularly those with a very public following — would be wise to consider the harm they are causing when they go out of their way to associate speech and assembly supportive of Palestine with anti-Jewish violence, particularly when such accusations are based on nothing more than claims of such association by Israel or its supporters. Those apologies are not sensitivity to racism. They are racist.

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