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More than nine months after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports that concluded Israel was committing genocide – and more than a month since key Israeli human rights groups asserted the same – the American political establishment remains in rigid denial while horrors continue nonstop in Gaza. Virtually all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress still support massive US arms shipments to Israel, so they certainly can’t admit that the weaponry is making genocide possible.
Central to rationales for arming Israel is the claim that it is the nation of “the Jewish people”.
When the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spoke via video to a conference in Jerusalem three months ago, he declared: “There can be no nuanced separation of hatred of Israel and hatred of the Jewish people.” Rubio added: “Those who call for the destruction of Israel are calling for the destruction of the Jewish people.” Last month, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, reinforced the same message while visiting Israel, where he reportedly said that the West Bank is “the rightful property of the Jewish people”.
Such rhetoric – equating Israel with all Jews and Israel’s future with theirs – is an effort to sanctify Israel and shield it from criticism by brandishing the charge of antisemitism.
Fusing Israel with “the Jewish people” is a key propaganda technique. The fact that it’s so ubiquitous makes it no less ridiculous, or dangerous. A comment attributed to Voltaire applies: “As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.”
And atrocities continue with no end in sight. Israel has persisted with methodical – and clearly intentional – killing of Palestinian civilians not only with bombs, missiles and bullets but also with starvation as a weapon of war. Blockage or extreme constriction of humanitarian aid has been the norm. All summer, Israel has ignored the United Nations warning issued in June that food intake in Gaza had dropped far below “survival” level. By then, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross said conditions there had become worse than “hell on earth”.
Ironically, the country that we’re told is the ultimate target of antisemitism is now, in reality, the world’s most powerful cause of antisemitism. By insisting that it is the embodiment of Jews all over the world, the state of Israel seeks to associate Jews everywhere with its systematic war crimes and genocide in Gaza along with deadly ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Israeli government, esteemed by a dwindling number of Americans, conflates itself with Judaism and “the Jewish people” in a marketing pattern so familiar that it blends into the wallpaper of media echo chambers. The crux of pro-Israel messaging is to promote a set of false equations: Israel = Jews. Support for Israel = support for Jews. Denunciations of Israel = antisemitism. And a functional subtext of those equations is this one: Israeli government = impunity.
During the 1980s, when activists in the United States and elsewhere targeted apartheid South Africa with non-violent campaigns for boycotts, divestment and sanctions, those actions did not provoke charges of being anti-white. In this century, the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has targeted Israel, a country condemned as an apartheid state by one human rights organization after another after another – and BDS supporters, even if Jewish, routinely face accusations of antisemitism. In Congress, the accusers include many liberal Democrats. The American Jewish Committee is one of many sizable groups that have long been flatly declaring that “BDS is antisemitic”.
Six decades ago, as a child going to Hebrew school, I couldn’t have imagined that the Jewish faith and reverence for Israel would become so manipulated. When I asked neighbors to put coins into a blue-and-white can so more trees could be planted in Israel, little did I know that the Israeli government would relentlessly kill, maim and terrorize Palestinian civilians in the name of protecting Jews. Nor did I have any inkling that the dignity and spirituality of Judaism would be twisted and desecrated by Israel with policies of genocide.
One of Israel’s Basic Laws, enacted in 2018, says: “the State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people,” adding: “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” This is codification of standard assertions from the Israeli government and its ardent boosters doing all they can to hijack Judaism – claiming to speak for the world’s Jews, whether they like it or not.
Increasingly, they don’t. Polling shows major opposition to core Israeli policies among Jewish people in the US.
All too often, US government officials amplify the senseless trope that Israel is the guarantor of safety for Jews worldwide. Speaking at a Hanukkah party at the White House in December 2023, former president Joe Biden said: “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe.” The remarkable assertion, which met with loud applause and cheers, was hardly a one-off. Three months earlier, Biden had said: “Were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee.”
The US Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, writes in his new book Antisemitism in America: “There is a special and almost indescribable pride that comes from knowing, despite all the horrors, that after two millennia of wandering the desert, the Jewish people would finally return home.” It’s a classic conceit of claiming to speak for “the Jewish people” and insisting that Israel is their actual homeland – no matter where they live on the planet.
The biggest Jewish organizations in the US automatically extol the Israeli government, regardless of what it does. And, as Peter Beinart wrote this year: “American Jewish leaders don’t just insist on Israel’s right to exist. They insist on its right to exist as a Jewish state. They cling to the idea that it can be both Jewish and democratic despite the basic contradiction between legal supremacy for one ethno-religious group and the democratic principle of equality under the law.”
More insidious is the unspoken assumption that, after all is said and done, Jewish lives are intrinsically much more valuable than other lives in general and Palestinian lives in particular, while Israel’s destiny is transcendent. It’s a mindset that Beinart decries in his new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: “No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite … Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians replaces Judaism’s universal God – who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people – with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap.”
Such worshipping of Israel fuels the pernicious concept that “the Jewish people” are synonymous with Israel. Any such claim can only be destructive, especially with Israel shamelessly engaged in ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide.
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Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.
