What Result Will Be Enough For Israel's Supporters?
In light of the mass graves found in Gaza and the violence used against student protests for justice in Gaza, the question begs an answer.
I was on vacation for a week, watching my wife’s best friend (and a good friend to me in her own right) get married in Guatemala. That was an entirely separate post, but as I returned and caught up on news here at home, I was struck by the absolute disconnect between the rhetoric about anti-Gaza War protests and what was actually happening. The repeated violence utilized against students who have been acting quite peacefully is grotesque—Marisa Kabas over at The Handbasket has written far more eloquently on this issue than I can—and I urge everyone to read her piece.
As pictured above, last week Ohio State University was the scene of police snipers deployed atop the student union building, an act so wildly out of proportion I thought I’d stumbled into a TARDIS and been spit out in 1969. At the University of Texas, media recording the violent arrests of nonviolent students were themselves assaulted and arrested by the same Texas state troopers that couldn’t be bothered to stop a single gunman in Uvalde two years ago. Atlanta police brutalized an Emory University professor for asking a question, and has charged her with assault of an officer when the whole world saw the opposite occur. Columbia University, an epicenter of protestors vs. the police, has repeatedly called in the NYPD to break up Palestinian protests, and today they are moving to suspend anyone partaking in the pro-Palestinian encampment, stomping on the free speech rights of its students.
Action against the pro-Zionist protestors outside Columbia’s gates, meanwhile, who’ve behaved in ugly fashion, expressing wishes that the females be raped and telling them to all go camp in Gaza, well, it hasn’t happened. Shai Davidai, a self-aggrandizing professor at Columbia who served in the IDF (unbiased, right?), has successfully driven the media narrative tarring the antiwar protests as anti-Semitic, helped by celebrities like Debra Messing. Davidai’s use of the word “kapo(s)” to describe the hundreds of Jewish protestors supporting an end to the Gaza War went curiously unmentioned by media, despite its extremely ugly history as an insult in the Jewish community.
These conflicts continue to hold the majority of media attention while a much more disturbing story unfolded in Gaza. The United Nations reports that mass graves unearthed outside hospitals in northern Gaza showed bodies had their hands bound. In other cases, heads were reportedly missing from bodies who’d been shot in the chest. The IDF claims it had nothing to do with this, but given the proclivity of their own soldiers to post videos showing abusive behavior, and their repeated commission of war crimes by targeting families of suspected Hamas members, it’s hard to give credence to what they say anymore. They lie often and they lie repeatedly.
So, this begs the question: when will enough be enough for Americans supporting Israel? What end result will satisfy them?
The chief spokesperson for Bring Them Home Now, the group of family members whose loved ones are still being held by Hamas (or, given the IDF’s insane approach to this war, likely dead in a pile of rubble), resigned recently. What made Haim Rubenstein’s departure noteworthy is his claim that the far-right Israeli government, led by the criminally (literally and metaphorically) evil Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected a deal to receive every hostage back from Hamas in return for an end to the Gaza operation. That led to the post in the photo above, where the families again expressed their desire for an end to the violence in return for the return of all hostages. Netanyahu has continued to wage war on the Palestinian people, not just in Gaza, but across. the. West Bank. That has also gone largely unnoticed by our myopic American media.
The very loud pro-Zionist community claims this is all about the safe return of the hostages, but as pointed out above, that was apparently offered by Hamas and refused by the Netanyahu government. When you start looking at their social media accounts (and this includes Jewish friends I grew up with, who still say they are liberals, but are reposting Elise Stefanik wayyyyy too much these days), it tells a different story, one that seems very removed from concerns about the hostages. They share far-right settler videos that proclaim Palestinians aren’t a people, then cry out that the antiwar student protestors are domestic terrorists, Hamas lovers, and Jew haters—a claim that is not getting enough pushback given how many Jews are part of the antiwar groups.
Despite the antiwar demonstrations being the only group to have violence deployed against it by university police or city/state police, these people insist that all of the risk is upon the pro-Israel Jews on these campuses. Violence has not been deployed against any pro-Israeli demonstrators. Jews were not barred from Columbia’s campus—a former IDF soldier turned professor (Davidai) with fifty-plus student complaints pending against him was barred from campus. To top it all off, they use Netanyahu’s formulation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The disconnect is real, and their claims do not match up to their actions.
So, I ask again, what do they actually want? Is this really about the hostages anymore, or does it go further than that? It is very difficult to look at all of this and not believe that the end goal of Israel’s supporters, Jewish and Christian, is the eradication of anything Palestinian. All of these posts circulating in the pro-Israel community are directly equating Palestinian support with terrorism, with anti-Semitism.
Palestinians are killed by Israel in obscene numbers through the unceasing bombing of Gaza and military operations in the West Bank as well. Palestinian homes and land are illegally seized by vigilante settlers backed by the firepower of the IDF, with no legal recourse—in fact, the law dictates that if a Palestinian returns to a home that settlers destroyed, the Palestinian cannot repair the damage without forfeiting it. They must accept it “as is.” What is really akin to Nazi Germany here, as the people who post these things claim? A few college kids who veered into anti-Semitism (which, it hasn’t been said enough, the rest of the protestors rapidly speak out against)? Virulent racists who try to co-opt the protests, stirring up hate, and capturing media attention? Or is the Jewish ethnostate, which is what Israel is by any definition, that is abusing the world’s forbearance from memories of the Holocaust to enact laws and execute policies as reprehensible as the Nuremberg Laws promulgated by the Nazis against Jews ninety years ago?
These people conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism despite the many Jews who do not believe in the state of Israel’s legitimacy any longer. I know that simplistic explanations are what so many long for; this is not simple, though. Many Jews refuse to be defined by Israel—they want to be citizens of this country or wherever they live, and they reject the idea that their loyalty should to be to Israel above all else. Are they anti-Semitic, or do they understand that Israeli policy is the face of Zionism now, and that policy should be treated as apartheid-era South Africa was? Forty-two years ago, Labour Party Jews looked to America to sanction Israel for its settlement policies, which are far, far worse now than they were in 1982. Max Frankel, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote about those in two supportive op-eds for the New York Times, where he was the editor.
Roughly two thousand years after the Romans scattered the ancient Israelites to the four winds, the same is happening to Palestinians today. Their people, their culture, their identity, all are being brutally put down. They are being declared nonexistent as a race by government officials. They have been stripped of legal protections. They are being bombed, shot, and herded into shrinking areas of land, told that it will keep them safe, and then they are killed in these alleged safe zones. Am I anti-Semitic for pointing out the barbarity of such things, or do I, too, hate Jews, which is the end logic of the arguments the pro-Zionist crowd put forth. Whether they like it or not, though, Israel’s Jewish identity cannot be a shield for its crimes.
The world has an ugly tendency to stand by when genocides are committed against minorities. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims, Rwanda, the Turkish genocide of Armenians (which, inexplicably, is still treated as controversial to recognize!), and now, Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. That is not right. It is not just. Those of us who have a conscience, we demand an answer: what will be enough to satisfy these people?