Once again, anyone who dares to criticize Israel’s brutal colonization is slapped with the label of “anti-Semitic,” thanks to the ever-vigilant Zionist lobby, especially active in the U.S. and U.K. It’s the same cynical playbook: conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism to shut down any opposition, all while ignoring the carnage in Gaza. And let’s not forget Israel’s so-called “democracy” that perpetuates ethnic cleansing under the convenient excuse of self-defense, putting Jews worldwide at greater risk. But, naturally, the West obediently toes the line, petrified of the lobby’s well-honed smear tactics.
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For the second time in the last decade, accusations of anti-Semitism have struck high-profile politicians, turning them into pariahs.
In 2018, it was Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader who defended Palestinian rights without ever questioning Israel’s existence. Today, it’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the largest left-wing party in France, politically demolished during the Gaza war for supporting Palestinians and warning against all forms of racism, whether Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. Mélenchon is seen as more threatening than Marine Le Pen. Jacques Attali, a former advisor to Socialist President Mitterrand, accused him of “symbolic genocide” after the August 24 synagogue attack in La Grande-Motte in southern France.
The defamation is automatic, like a reflex. It’s brutal and can destroy political ambitions. It is backed by the power of mainstream newspapers, TV talk shows, and the political and economic establishment. The language of the defamers is repetitive—if one can even call it language when formulas and adjectives are compulsively repeated without explanation. It’s the propagandistic lexicon (hasbara in Hebrew) of one of the most powerful and ancient pressure groups: the Israeli Zionist lobby.
What happens in Gaza doesn’t matter: more than 41,000 dead, mostly women and children. It’s long ceased to be a reprisal. The increasingly widespread protests in Israel—by hostages’ relatives, unions, newspapers like Haaretz—and in European and American universities don’t matter either. Zionism as a colonial project is faltering, but the financially influential lobby doesn’t care. If you oppose Tel Aviv’s policies, defend the Palestinians, and demand an end to arms shipments to Israel, then you’re anti-Zionist, and therefore automatically anti-Semitic, and thus indifferent to the genocide suffered by Jews in the 20th century: this is the recurring syllogism, the lobby’s weapon. The immense power exerted by Israeli pressure groups, especially in the United States, is hard to dispute. It’s one of many Israeli truths that are never acknowledged, always opaque.
The state’s designation is opaque, defined as Jewish even though more than 25 percent of its population is non-Jewish (Arab-Palestinian Muslims and Christians, non-Arab Christians, Druze, Bedouins, etc.). The formula describing Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East” is opaque because democracy doesn’t align with colonial occupation or the siege of Palestinians. Israel’s military strength is opaque, as it has had nuclear weapons since the 1960s without ever admitting it. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, Tel Aviv once threatened to use nuclear weapons during the 1973 Yom Kippur War (The Samson Option, 1991).
But the most opaque of all is the existence of an extremely wealthy and active Zionist lobby—especially in the U.S. and the U.K.—that has supported Israel’s colonization policies since the state’s inception, and that now backs the latest attempt to empty Palestine of its inhabitants. Some say Netanyahu is flattening Gaza and attacking the West Bank solely to stay in power, without a plan for the future. Almost a year has passed since the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, and a clarification is needed. It’s true that Netanyahu fears losing power, but he does have a plan: ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
The Zionist lobby has long-standing institutions in the United States and Britain, with branches everywhere. It influences and monitors newspapers, and finances friendly politicians. It regularly denounces rising anti-Semitism, mixing true anti-Semitism with opposition to Israel’s wars. Various pressure groups operate in European countries, including the NGO Elnet (European Leadership Network).
It’s sometimes called the Jewish lobby, but it has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s about Zionism, a political current within Judaism that, after many internal conflicts, ended up perverting the religion. Zionism emerged in the second half of the 19th century and culminated in the founding texts and actions of Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann. For political Zionism, Judaism is not a religion but a nation, a militarized state built in Palestine with a slogan that was necessarily belligerent because it falsified reality: Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land,” given by God to the Jews forever. According to the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom I interviewed in 1991, Israel was falling prey to a “tendentiously fascist nationalism.” It’s no surprise that Netanyahu and his racist ministers today ally themselves with far-right movements in Europe and the U.S.
Not all Jews approved of redefining their religion as a nation and state. Some were aware that Palestine was not uninhabited, and some understood that the absolute loyalty to the Israeli state imposed by the Zionist current exposed diaspora Jews to suspicions of dual loyalty.
To understand this fusion of religion and militarized state, one must read Ilan Pappe’s latest book (Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 2024). The historian continues the work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on the lobby (2007), tracing Zionism’s origins to the second half of the 19th century, and highlights the role of evangelical messianic sects in the United States as key promoters of the Zionist movement. The guiding idea of millenarian Zionism is that Israel has a divine right to capture all of Palestine. If this plan is realized, the Messiah will come or return. This united Jewish and Christian Zionists in the 19th century, but there was a dangerous catch: for Christian Zionists, the Messiah’s arrival depends on Jews eventually converting en masse to Christianity.
Colonial Zionism is now in trouble. “Not in my name” is written on the banners of Jews protesting against the new Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic) that Netanyahu’s government is inflicting on Gaza, as it did in 1948. And as it has been inflicting on the West Bank since August 28.
Nevertheless, Western governments accept the equation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, fearing the lobby’s defamation and manipulation. Almost all have adopted the “working definition” of anti-Semitism introduced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016 (the so-called IHRA Definition, which is not legally binding). Among the examples listed are anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel. The Conte II government aligned with this in January 2020.
Under these conditions, it’s difficult to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. The only certainty is that Israel’s policy not only empties Palestine and creates increasingly fierce generations of resisters, not only renders the appeal for “two peoples, two states” futile, but also endangers Jews worldwide. In the long run, it could lead to Israel’s collapse.
Il Fatto Quotidiano, September 4, 2024
Title: “Meanwhile, in Hell…”
Devil: “Well… I’d say we need to prepare a nice spot for Netanyahu…”
Hitler: “Ah no! I don’t want the Jew here!”
