Two eminent scholars of the Holocaust have written a passionate and engaging book on the dangers our democracy faces and what we must do to save it. It is essential reading.
In No. 5 Ben-Gurion says, "we have taken their country." That's different from "Ben-Gurion was right. No one should expect Palestinians to be Zionists." No one should expect Palestinians to lie down and accept the theft of their homeland and decades of oppression.
Yes, there are truly awful regimes in this world. And yes, the US supports some of them. In the case of Saudi Arabia, we sell them arms; they are the US's biggest arms customer. None of this is relevant. It is whataboutism, responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation, i.e., deflection, a form of 'Tu Quoque' argument. The problem with Israel is that for 76 years it has presented itself as the victim of the Nazi Holocaust, and, therefore, above reproach. When the truth finally emerged, Americans were justifiably outraged. This is not the case with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Yes, there is anti-Semitism in this world. It is a given. It is a bi-product of the Roman Catholic Church's dominance of Europe for a thousand years. There is xenophobia in every corner of the world. It is a fundamental human trait that has been handed down for thousands of years. But it is not the main reason for America's concern about Israel. The concern is Zionism which includes the theft of Palestine and the oppression of its people with the Bible as an excuse.
I enjoy reading the many complex analyses of the various peace attempts. What is never discussed is the Palestinian insistence on the right to return. It is true, Palestinian leaders have been corrupt. But Israel and the US have dictated who they will negotiate with. There has been duplicity on all sides. It's time for genuine negotiations that include the Palestinian right to return.
The Zionist creation of the state of Israel is based on several fantasies. One is that Palestine was unoccupied when the Jewish Europeans decided to migrate there. Another is that "God promised it to us." Another is that if Muslims become the majority in Israel-Palestine the Jews will have no safe place to live. Another is the Jewish right of self-determination when it means driving 750,000 Palestinians out of their homeland and taking it for themselves. The UN Declaration of Human Rights does not include that right.
It's not that the one-state solution is unrealistic. It's that it's hard to achieve. It requires both sides to give up their cherished fantasies and illusions, like victory and revenge, compromising their dreams like Zionism and nationalism, and figuring out how to live with each other in peace. It could take one or two hundred years to achieve. But the two-state solution will never provide lasting peace. And the other options, like genocide and ethnic cleansing, like starving two million people and murdering their children, are too horrid for the world to accept. The one-state solution is thinking the unthinkable, but it is the only road to peace.
I can’t speak for the whole world, but these are the reasons why I feel strongly about the plight of the Palestinians:
1. We have been lied to for 76 years. It was not until 1972 that I heard of Palestinians. Until then we were fed Israeli propaganda, such as Golda Meir saying, "There was no such thing as Palestinians." We were fed a relentless one-sided story like the movie Exodus. It’s time for the truth.
2. My government and tax dollars have supported and funded Israel for about 76 years. To the best of my knowledge the US government does not support or fund Darfur or the Tigray war. But we are complicit in the killing of thousands of Palestinians over the years. AIPAC has a disproportionate role in American foreign policy and politics.
3. Depending on how one defines war, there have been 7 wars between Israel and the Palestinians since 1987. The Oslo attempt at peace was absurdly one-sided and was rejected by the Palestinian people for good reasons. There has been no honest attempt at peace since 1995. No one even talks about it. A ceasefire is not peace. Revenge and victory will not bring peace.
4. The current plight of the Palestinians is they are denied full citizenship and equal rights in their own country. Some call this apartheid.
5. As David Ben-Gurion said: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
6. There is a 50-50 chance that there is no god, a small chance that if he (she) exists he has a “chosen people” and an even smaller chance that the chosen people are the Jews. The Bible is not a history book. It is a work of art; it has a rare beauty. But it is just a storybook. It is not a land grant or a real estate deed. Zionism is based on a story. It is a fantasy. At this point it is merely an unreal, fanciful justification for stealing another people’s country.
7. I keep hearing about the Nazi Holocaust. What have we learned from it? The Jewish people will not get revenge on the Nazis by slaughtering Palestinian children.
8. The one-state solution is the only path to peace. It is ignored by the mainstream press and the US government. It would mean Israel would lose its character as a Jewish state and the Palestinians would fail to achieve their national independence. It would mean that the two sides would have to compromise and learn to live together. It would be extremely hard to achieve. But South Africa, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all have similar issues between settlers and other population groups including indigenous people. These countries are not perfect. The US is hardly a model of equality and harmony. But we are not lobbing bombs and missiles at each other. If we can do it, Israel can do it.
1.Yes, there has been much Israeli propaganda. But no factional political environment is immune from promoting propaganda in service of its cause. It goes with the territory.
2. Yes, the US provides tremendous support to Israel, economic, military, and the provision of political cover in the UN. That support did not amplify until after 1967. Before that, France was Israel's major supporter.
You are right, the US does not fund the Sudan or Ethiopia to wage war. However, please consider that we do provide Egypt with two billions dollars a year. Egypt remains a brutal dictatorship, wherein I suspect persons such as yourself, voicing criticism of the government, would be imprisoned without trial for long periods and routinely tortured. We have given the Saudis more than 50 billion dollars in arms over the past six years or so. Here is an autocracy in which there is absolutely no freedom of religion, women are treated like children, there is no right to dissent, the Shiite minority is subject to discrimination, in which decapitation is a favored method of execution for crimes that offend the government. We have thrown billions of dollars down the sinkhole that is Pakistan, an extraordinarily violence-ridden society, rampant with honor killings, and those who question Islam can find themselves on death row.
Where is the outrage? The oppression in these countries is supported by American tax dollars also. When it comes to Israel there is a notorious double standard, that is morally unacceptable, and again, reflects a strange fascination with Jews. To put it bluntly Steve, despite Israel's abuses, there is no excuse for antisemitism and I just see too much of it in these protests.
3. Here I disagree. The Palestinians did not get everything they wanted in joint negotiations. But if they had stuck to a two-state framework after Oslo, they would have gotten much that they have now and would have had a baseline to move ahead and expand their interests. At Taba, Ehud Barack was willing to give East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, a major Israeli concession. PM Olmert went even further in negotiations. These were rejected by the Palestinians. A tragic reality for the Palestinians is that they have had awful and terribly corrupt leadership.
4. Palestinian Israelis are citizens of Israel, albeit second-class citizens. The West Bank is a divided situation. I agree, parts of it under Israeli military control are indeed an apartheid situation. In other sections, Palestinians have more autonomy but are still subject to Israeli military oversight with the assistance of joint Palestinians patrols. I have been militantly opposed to the occupation from its beginning. It is cruel and humiliating. With regard to Israeli interests, it is a cancer that is corrupting Israel's political and moral character. Gaza, though technically not occupied. had been confined since 2007. This situation needs to end.
5. Ben-Gurion was right. No one should expect Palestinians to be Zionists. An example of antipropagannda, No?
6. While the yearning for Jerusalem has its origins in ancient times, very few Jews migrated there through the ages despite being oppressed, and despite expulsion from Spain, England, France, and elsewhere. The modern Zionist movement owes its origins to 19th century nationalism as manifested by Germany, Italy and elsewhere, as empires split apart, and not Biblical precepts. It was also impelled by the relentless discrimination that Jews experienced especially in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I would ask that you appreciate the extraordinary persecution that Jews have experienced over the past 1,500 years. Throughout their history, Jews have been at the mercy of the host countries in which they resided, demeaned especially in Christian nations, as accursed infidels and without political or military power. The creation of Israel was effectuated in order to allow Jews self-protection in the face of virulent and persistent antisemitic persecution. This is not a fantasy. Israel is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people in accordance with the human rights principle of self-determination. If we can accept 50 Muslim-dominant states, scores of Christian-dominant countries and a Hindu-dominant India, the world should be able to accept a at least a single Jewish state, especially after almost two millennia of unprecedented persecution. The making of a fetish out of Zionist, as I mentioned before, lamentably speaks to endurance of "the Jewish problem," which, from the standpoint of basic morality, should have faded long ago.
7. Of course the decimation of Jews during the Holocaust does not justify taking revenge on the Palestinians. But there is a broader way to interpret the founding of Israel. After WWII, the Jews for the most part were not disposed to taking revenge on the Germans who sent 6 million to their deaths. Rather, those who came to what was then British Palestinian, mostly because virtually no nation would take them in and they had nowhere else to go, chose to sublimate the impulse toward revenge and turn it into building a new nation. Despite the negative global press Israel receives, in many ways, it is a remarkable achievement.
8. I don't see that a one-state solution is at all realistic. There is simply no reason why Israel would give up its own country to find Jews a minority in the nation they have built. I wish the two-state solution were more realistic, and a tragedy of October 7th is that Israelis are less trusting now of a two-state solution than before. But I believe the situation is not totally hopeless. The global community has put it back on the agenda and it has the support of the moderate Arab states. But, in truth, I am far from optimistic.
American democracy is certainly endangered. We may be threatened with authoritarianism, but our democracy mostly died several decades ago, replaced by a plutocracy that corrupts Congress, the White House, and now the Supreme Court.
The college students who are protesting the war in Gaza are engaged in the last remnant of the democracy we have left. They are risking their own safety to protest the murder of 34,000 Palestinians, including 14,000 innocent children. They are demanding that their colleges divest themselves of investments in Israel and companies supplying its weapons, and they oppose the United States’ support for one side in the conflict, including the latest decision to send nine billion taxpayers’ dollars to support the murders.
The establishment has unleashed violent censorship against the protests. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is attacking US elected officials who have taken positions contrary to AIPAC’s wishes with heavily funded primary challenges. Pundits are accusing the students of antisemitism when there are few violent confrontations and many of the protestors are Jewish. There is also significant Islamophobia and violence against the protestors.
Israel and its apologists call Israel the Jewish state. Many protestors are denouncing Zionism, not Judaism. Naomi Klein, Jewish Canadian author, calls Zionism a false idol:
October 7 was a retaliation against Zionist Israeli-imposed Palestinian closures begun in 1991 and an illegal blockade since 2007. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. It recognizes that peace will come when the Zionist fantasy and the Bible storybook fantasies are behind us. Peace will come when both sides abandon the need for revenge and victory. The one-state solution is the only peaceful resolution.
I am thankful, Steve, for your continuing interest. While I agree with you on certain points, I depart on others. I concur that the US has long been other than a democracy. It is rather an oligarchy controlled by the barons of corporate capitalism whereby the autonomy of individual persons has badly eroded. We are all cogs now, a reality that escapes the consciousness of most, as people pursue their individual survival.
I certainly reject the notion, however, that there is, therefore, no difference between Trump and Biden, a position sometimes held by those on the extreme Left. A Biden regime, at least, will preserve the constitutional space to enable dissent on the ground. A second Trump administration very well may not, and will destroy our constitutional framework, despite its infirmities and corruption.
If you conclude that the current protesters on behalf of the victims of Gaza are the last remnant of democracy, I don't see why one should not include the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which were probably the largest demonstrations in US history, or the women's marches shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 elections. I also see the revival of the union movement as one of the few positive signs of the restoration of democracy as I understand it.
I draw demonstratively different conclusions about the protests on college campuses, including my own Columbia. While I have been involved in more protests than I can remember, I cannot lend myself to these, however critical I am of Israel's excesses. While many who partake I am sure are not antisemites, my conclusion is that these demonstrations cannot be disentangled from antisemtism, which I believe is more present than you aver.
Naomi Klein is entitled to her opinion about Zionism. I have other opinions. Zionism has meant many things, from the creation of a Jewish homeland, which would enable the flourishing of Jewish culture, to an expansion state, which I stridently oppose. Zionism emerged in the late 19th century out of the matrix that gave rise to other forms of nationalism. While I support Vietnamese nationalism and Kurdish nationalism, I believe that it is unjustified to deny Jews the same right to self-determination, especially as a people that has experienced humiliation, oppression, and mass murder as the guests of others and left to their mercies as a powerless minority. This issue is close to me and not an abstraction. Relatives of mine were shoved into Hitler's gas chambers and my father, born in Ukraine, witnessed pogroms in his village as a child and was scarred for the rest of his life by those early encounters.
Israel is judged by double standards that apply to no other country. It has been censured 45 times by the UN Human Rights Council, as many times as all other nations combined. Over a million people have fled the killings in Darfur, yet where is the world's condemnation? Up to 600,000 people have been killed in the Tigray war in Ethiopia in the past three years and rape is rampant, yet where is the international rage, let alone attention? Are Gazan lives really worth more than those Ethiopians or Darfurians? None of this is to excuse Israel for its sins, But I can't escape the conclusion that the world has an unhealthy fascination with Jews. While the world can accept 50 Muslim-dominant states, few of which have any form of democracy, the world seems to have a special problem with a single Jewish state , of which 20 percent happen to be Palestinians. Again, the double standard is a moral outrage.
Joe,
In No. 5 Ben-Gurion says, "we have taken their country." That's different from "Ben-Gurion was right. No one should expect Palestinians to be Zionists." No one should expect Palestinians to lie down and accept the theft of their homeland and decades of oppression.
Yes, there are truly awful regimes in this world. And yes, the US supports some of them. In the case of Saudi Arabia, we sell them arms; they are the US's biggest arms customer. None of this is relevant. It is whataboutism, responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation, i.e., deflection, a form of 'Tu Quoque' argument. The problem with Israel is that for 76 years it has presented itself as the victim of the Nazi Holocaust, and, therefore, above reproach. When the truth finally emerged, Americans were justifiably outraged. This is not the case with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Yes, there is anti-Semitism in this world. It is a given. It is a bi-product of the Roman Catholic Church's dominance of Europe for a thousand years. There is xenophobia in every corner of the world. It is a fundamental human trait that has been handed down for thousands of years. But it is not the main reason for America's concern about Israel. The concern is Zionism which includes the theft of Palestine and the oppression of its people with the Bible as an excuse.
I enjoy reading the many complex analyses of the various peace attempts. What is never discussed is the Palestinian insistence on the right to return. It is true, Palestinian leaders have been corrupt. But Israel and the US have dictated who they will negotiate with. There has been duplicity on all sides. It's time for genuine negotiations that include the Palestinian right to return.
The Zionist creation of the state of Israel is based on several fantasies. One is that Palestine was unoccupied when the Jewish Europeans decided to migrate there. Another is that "God promised it to us." Another is that if Muslims become the majority in Israel-Palestine the Jews will have no safe place to live. Another is the Jewish right of self-determination when it means driving 750,000 Palestinians out of their homeland and taking it for themselves. The UN Declaration of Human Rights does not include that right.
It's not that the one-state solution is unrealistic. It's that it's hard to achieve. It requires both sides to give up their cherished fantasies and illusions, like victory and revenge, compromising their dreams like Zionism and nationalism, and figuring out how to live with each other in peace. It could take one or two hundred years to achieve. But the two-state solution will never provide lasting peace. And the other options, like genocide and ethnic cleansing, like starving two million people and murdering their children, are too horrid for the world to accept. The one-state solution is thinking the unthinkable, but it is the only road to peace.
Thank you, Joe. I enjoy hearing from you.
I can’t speak for the whole world, but these are the reasons why I feel strongly about the plight of the Palestinians:
1. We have been lied to for 76 years. It was not until 1972 that I heard of Palestinians. Until then we were fed Israeli propaganda, such as Golda Meir saying, "There was no such thing as Palestinians." We were fed a relentless one-sided story like the movie Exodus. It’s time for the truth.
2. My government and tax dollars have supported and funded Israel for about 76 years. To the best of my knowledge the US government does not support or fund Darfur or the Tigray war. But we are complicit in the killing of thousands of Palestinians over the years. AIPAC has a disproportionate role in American foreign policy and politics.
3. Depending on how one defines war, there have been 7 wars between Israel and the Palestinians since 1987. The Oslo attempt at peace was absurdly one-sided and was rejected by the Palestinian people for good reasons. There has been no honest attempt at peace since 1995. No one even talks about it. A ceasefire is not peace. Revenge and victory will not bring peace.
4. The current plight of the Palestinians is they are denied full citizenship and equal rights in their own country. Some call this apartheid.
5. As David Ben-Gurion said: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
6. There is a 50-50 chance that there is no god, a small chance that if he (she) exists he has a “chosen people” and an even smaller chance that the chosen people are the Jews. The Bible is not a history book. It is a work of art; it has a rare beauty. But it is just a storybook. It is not a land grant or a real estate deed. Zionism is based on a story. It is a fantasy. At this point it is merely an unreal, fanciful justification for stealing another people’s country.
7. I keep hearing about the Nazi Holocaust. What have we learned from it? The Jewish people will not get revenge on the Nazis by slaughtering Palestinian children.
8. The one-state solution is the only path to peace. It is ignored by the mainstream press and the US government. It would mean Israel would lose its character as a Jewish state and the Palestinians would fail to achieve their national independence. It would mean that the two sides would have to compromise and learn to live together. It would be extremely hard to achieve. But South Africa, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all have similar issues between settlers and other population groups including indigenous people. These countries are not perfect. The US is hardly a model of equality and harmony. But we are not lobbing bombs and missiles at each other. If we can do it, Israel can do it.
Enough is enough. The world wants peace.
1.Yes, there has been much Israeli propaganda. But no factional political environment is immune from promoting propaganda in service of its cause. It goes with the territory.
2. Yes, the US provides tremendous support to Israel, economic, military, and the provision of political cover in the UN. That support did not amplify until after 1967. Before that, France was Israel's major supporter.
You are right, the US does not fund the Sudan or Ethiopia to wage war. However, please consider that we do provide Egypt with two billions dollars a year. Egypt remains a brutal dictatorship, wherein I suspect persons such as yourself, voicing criticism of the government, would be imprisoned without trial for long periods and routinely tortured. We have given the Saudis more than 50 billion dollars in arms over the past six years or so. Here is an autocracy in which there is absolutely no freedom of religion, women are treated like children, there is no right to dissent, the Shiite minority is subject to discrimination, in which decapitation is a favored method of execution for crimes that offend the government. We have thrown billions of dollars down the sinkhole that is Pakistan, an extraordinarily violence-ridden society, rampant with honor killings, and those who question Islam can find themselves on death row.
Where is the outrage? The oppression in these countries is supported by American tax dollars also. When it comes to Israel there is a notorious double standard, that is morally unacceptable, and again, reflects a strange fascination with Jews. To put it bluntly Steve, despite Israel's abuses, there is no excuse for antisemitism and I just see too much of it in these protests.
3. Here I disagree. The Palestinians did not get everything they wanted in joint negotiations. But if they had stuck to a two-state framework after Oslo, they would have gotten much that they have now and would have had a baseline to move ahead and expand their interests. At Taba, Ehud Barack was willing to give East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, a major Israeli concession. PM Olmert went even further in negotiations. These were rejected by the Palestinians. A tragic reality for the Palestinians is that they have had awful and terribly corrupt leadership.
4. Palestinian Israelis are citizens of Israel, albeit second-class citizens. The West Bank is a divided situation. I agree, parts of it under Israeli military control are indeed an apartheid situation. In other sections, Palestinians have more autonomy but are still subject to Israeli military oversight with the assistance of joint Palestinians patrols. I have been militantly opposed to the occupation from its beginning. It is cruel and humiliating. With regard to Israeli interests, it is a cancer that is corrupting Israel's political and moral character. Gaza, though technically not occupied. had been confined since 2007. This situation needs to end.
5. Ben-Gurion was right. No one should expect Palestinians to be Zionists. An example of antipropagannda, No?
6. While the yearning for Jerusalem has its origins in ancient times, very few Jews migrated there through the ages despite being oppressed, and despite expulsion from Spain, England, France, and elsewhere. The modern Zionist movement owes its origins to 19th century nationalism as manifested by Germany, Italy and elsewhere, as empires split apart, and not Biblical precepts. It was also impelled by the relentless discrimination that Jews experienced especially in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I would ask that you appreciate the extraordinary persecution that Jews have experienced over the past 1,500 years. Throughout their history, Jews have been at the mercy of the host countries in which they resided, demeaned especially in Christian nations, as accursed infidels and without political or military power. The creation of Israel was effectuated in order to allow Jews self-protection in the face of virulent and persistent antisemitic persecution. This is not a fantasy. Israel is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people in accordance with the human rights principle of self-determination. If we can accept 50 Muslim-dominant states, scores of Christian-dominant countries and a Hindu-dominant India, the world should be able to accept a at least a single Jewish state, especially after almost two millennia of unprecedented persecution. The making of a fetish out of Zionist, as I mentioned before, lamentably speaks to endurance of "the Jewish problem," which, from the standpoint of basic morality, should have faded long ago.
7. Of course the decimation of Jews during the Holocaust does not justify taking revenge on the Palestinians. But there is a broader way to interpret the founding of Israel. After WWII, the Jews for the most part were not disposed to taking revenge on the Germans who sent 6 million to their deaths. Rather, those who came to what was then British Palestinian, mostly because virtually no nation would take them in and they had nowhere else to go, chose to sublimate the impulse toward revenge and turn it into building a new nation. Despite the negative global press Israel receives, in many ways, it is a remarkable achievement.
8. I don't see that a one-state solution is at all realistic. There is simply no reason why Israel would give up its own country to find Jews a minority in the nation they have built. I wish the two-state solution were more realistic, and a tragedy of October 7th is that Israelis are less trusting now of a two-state solution than before. But I believe the situation is not totally hopeless. The global community has put it back on the agenda and it has the support of the moderate Arab states. But, in truth, I am far from optimistic.
The world wants peace. I do too.
American democracy is certainly endangered. We may be threatened with authoritarianism, but our democracy mostly died several decades ago, replaced by a plutocracy that corrupts Congress, the White House, and now the Supreme Court.
The college students who are protesting the war in Gaza are engaged in the last remnant of the democracy we have left. They are risking their own safety to protest the murder of 34,000 Palestinians, including 14,000 innocent children. They are demanding that their colleges divest themselves of investments in Israel and companies supplying its weapons, and they oppose the United States’ support for one side in the conflict, including the latest decision to send nine billion taxpayers’ dollars to support the murders.
The establishment has unleashed violent censorship against the protests. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is attacking US elected officials who have taken positions contrary to AIPAC’s wishes with heavily funded primary challenges. Pundits are accusing the students of antisemitism when there are few violent confrontations and many of the protestors are Jewish. There is also significant Islamophobia and violence against the protestors.
Israel and its apologists call Israel the Jewish state. Many protestors are denouncing Zionism, not Judaism. Naomi Klein, Jewish Canadian author, calls Zionism a false idol:
“Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.” --- Naomi Klein, “We need an exodus from Zionism,” The Guardian, Apr 24, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/zionism-seder-protest-new-york-gaza-israel#:~:text=Zionism%20has%20brought%20us%20to,commandments%3A%20thou%20shalt%20not%20kill.
October 7 was a retaliation against Zionist Israeli-imposed Palestinian closures begun in 1991 and an illegal blockade since 2007. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. It recognizes that peace will come when the Zionist fantasy and the Bible storybook fantasies are behind us. Peace will come when both sides abandon the need for revenge and victory. The one-state solution is the only peaceful resolution.
I am thankful, Steve, for your continuing interest. While I agree with you on certain points, I depart on others. I concur that the US has long been other than a democracy. It is rather an oligarchy controlled by the barons of corporate capitalism whereby the autonomy of individual persons has badly eroded. We are all cogs now, a reality that escapes the consciousness of most, as people pursue their individual survival.
I certainly reject the notion, however, that there is, therefore, no difference between Trump and Biden, a position sometimes held by those on the extreme Left. A Biden regime, at least, will preserve the constitutional space to enable dissent on the ground. A second Trump administration very well may not, and will destroy our constitutional framework, despite its infirmities and corruption.
If you conclude that the current protesters on behalf of the victims of Gaza are the last remnant of democracy, I don't see why one should not include the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which were probably the largest demonstrations in US history, or the women's marches shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 elections. I also see the revival of the union movement as one of the few positive signs of the restoration of democracy as I understand it.
I draw demonstratively different conclusions about the protests on college campuses, including my own Columbia. While I have been involved in more protests than I can remember, I cannot lend myself to these, however critical I am of Israel's excesses. While many who partake I am sure are not antisemites, my conclusion is that these demonstrations cannot be disentangled from antisemtism, which I believe is more present than you aver.
Naomi Klein is entitled to her opinion about Zionism. I have other opinions. Zionism has meant many things, from the creation of a Jewish homeland, which would enable the flourishing of Jewish culture, to an expansion state, which I stridently oppose. Zionism emerged in the late 19th century out of the matrix that gave rise to other forms of nationalism. While I support Vietnamese nationalism and Kurdish nationalism, I believe that it is unjustified to deny Jews the same right to self-determination, especially as a people that has experienced humiliation, oppression, and mass murder as the guests of others and left to their mercies as a powerless minority. This issue is close to me and not an abstraction. Relatives of mine were shoved into Hitler's gas chambers and my father, born in Ukraine, witnessed pogroms in his village as a child and was scarred for the rest of his life by those early encounters.
Israel is judged by double standards that apply to no other country. It has been censured 45 times by the UN Human Rights Council, as many times as all other nations combined. Over a million people have fled the killings in Darfur, yet where is the world's condemnation? Up to 600,000 people have been killed in the Tigray war in Ethiopia in the past three years and rape is rampant, yet where is the international rage, let alone attention? Are Gazan lives really worth more than those Ethiopians or Darfurians? None of this is to excuse Israel for its sins, But I can't escape the conclusion that the world has an unhealthy fascination with Jews. While the world can accept 50 Muslim-dominant states, few of which have any form of democracy, the world seems to have a special problem with a single Jewish state , of which 20 percent happen to be Palestinians. Again, the double standard is a moral outrage.
A powerful and important article.
Many thanks, Jean. Yes, we can't say enough on the threats wrought by D. Trump. This book expresses our condition very eloquently.