An Open Letter to Anti-Israel Jews
If you would deny your own people the same right that you would fight for on behalf of others, well, that is an act of self-sabotage that is more of a you problem than an Israel problem.
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A few hundred presumably Jewish Americans protested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to U.S. Congress on Wednesday.
Some of them wore shirts that said: “not in our name.” Imagine how self-centered you have to be to think that the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war is in your name.
They could be rallying with shirts saying “not in our name” for the massacring, sexual assaulting, beheading, mutilating, maiming, torturing, and kidnapping innocent Jews (and others) on October 7th.
They could be shouting for the release of the remaining 130 or so abductees who were dragged out of their homes and into Gaza, including a 10-month-old baby and the elderly.
They could be roaring through our cities, demanding liberation from Hamas’ corrupt, oppressive dictatorship over Gaza, and they could marching with millions of like-minded Jews calling for the Palestinians to accept a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Indeed, Israel has made peace with every country that has wanted it.)
They could be doing all these things.
But they are not.
Instead, they are “protesting” a democratically elected leader from the only country in the Middle East and North Africa that would protect their rights of free speech and peaceful protest, no less a country that would give them instant refuge should things go south for Jewish Americans.
Make no mistake: It is not that Israel should be void of criticism for certain positions or policies. Every country should be. Rather, it is the double standard when, for example, these Jews wear shirts with the words “Jews say stop arming Israel” while remaining quiet about all the other countries to which the United States has sold arms — including Qatar, Turkey, Chad, and Russia.
And they think that “protesting” Netanyahu will somehow shield them from antisemitism which is alive and kicking across the United States, on both the Right and the Left — a new kind of Jew-hatred in which “human rights” and “liberation” are used as masks to hide double standards and discrimination against Israel and the Jews.
The word “Zionism” has been turned upside down to the point of mockery and horror, synonymous with all Jewish perversions invented by antisemitism: lying, blood libel, conspiracy, racism, “apartheid,” and ethnic cleansing.
But many anti-Israel Jews do not know how to differentiate between so-called “anti-Zionism” and antisemitism. They think that protesting a Right-wing Israeli politician will make them “look good” in the eyes of leftists who are equally as antisemitic as anyone on the Right.
In this vein, I will defer to a post I recently saw on Instagram, which said:
When they came for the conservative Jews, I said, “I’m not a conservative!”
When they came for the religious Jews, I said, “I’m not religious!”
When they came for the Israeli Jews, I said, “I’m not Israeli!”
When they came for the Zionist Jews, I said, “I’m not a Zionist!”
When they came for the liberal Jews, I said, “I’m not really a liberal!”
When they came for the progressive Jews, I asked, “Why? I stayed in every lane you told me to.”
“Thank you,” they said. “But you’re still a Jew.”
The Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jews were the first to realize this. Once upon a time, they had relatively respectable and enjoyable lives in Middle Eastern and North African countries — much like today’s Jews in Europe, North and South America, South Africa, and Australia.
More recently, French Jews had a rude awakening in Paris and other parts of France, hence their mass emigration, and the British Jews are now at the very start of this process. It is only a matter of time before other Jews — Canadian Jews, American Jews, Latin American Jews, South American Jews, Australian Jews, and South African Jews — will experience this rude awakening as well.
Naturally, many Jews will shrug this off, feeling untouchable in their middle-to-upperclass lifestyles, where they are part of mainstream society and well-assimilated. In liberal democracies, some Jews who are Ashkenazi (of European origin) or simply “white-looking” have tried to blend in as “White people,” with the privileges that so-called White people enjoy.
By doing so, these Jews have made it exponentially harder to examine historical antisemitism or the ways in which antisemitism still plays out. Without this examination, there is a shroud of ignorance and invisibility around antisemitism.
If Jews do not understand or recognize this phenomenon, not only is the possibility great of it reoccurring and worsening, but Jewish anxiety and vulnerability will be perpetuated.
Hence the rise of political Zionism in the 1800s and the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, both of which arose out of a very literal response to thousands of years of Jewish anxiety and vulnerability, culminating in the Holocaust. Hence the belief that Jews have a moral right and historic need for self-determination in our indigenous homeland.
We can debate whether we are a religion, an ethnicity, a people, or a collective, but this debate is a distraction.
We can imagine going back in time and sitting in a 19th-century European coffee shop, debating whether or not we should immigrate to the Land of Israel to help build a modern-day Jewish state.
We can also dream of returning to a world where we exclusively traveled from one continent to another by ship, but I have no desire to do either.
The Jewish world changed for the better with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 — and that is a matter of fact.
Does the Jews’ right of self-determination clash with the Palestinians’ same right? No, it does not. The Palestinians have had plenty of opportunities throughout the last several decades to achieve self-determination, but it appears what they actually desire is not self-determination, but to prevent the Jews from living in peace with ours.
Has the Jewish state acted imperfectly in its 76-year history? Absolutely. Israel is a deeply imperfect country, just as all countries are, the United States notwithstanding — yet I do not see these “anti-Zionist” Jews protesting every time the U.S. president makes a speech.
And I sure as hell do not remember anyone protesting in Washington, D.C. during the 1990s when U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration invited Yasser Arafat (a notorious terrorist) to the White House 13 times, more times than any other foreign visitor.
Regardless, if you would deny your own people the same right that you would fight for on behalf of others, well, that is an act of self-sabotage that is more of a you problem than an Israel problem.
Like your activism for civil rights or for underprivileged communities, so too should follow your activism for Israel and Zionism.
At its core, Zionism has always been about the liberation of the Jewish People, who lived under millennia of exile, oppression, and (actual) genocide.
Zionism led to the greatest anti-imperialist, decolonization project on planet Earth.
Zionism produced a unique form of multiculturalism stemming from European, Middle Eastern, Arab, North African, and Western influences.
Zionism’s righteous resistance began in the 1800s against the Ottomans, then the British, and now a Palestinian society — backed by nefarious actors like Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood — that, in many ways, is better at Jew-hating than were the Nazis.
Zionism created one of the few countries in the Middle East and North Africa where Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Bahai, and other religions can truly co-exist in peace.
Zionism manufactured a profoundly humanitarian society, in which Israelis and Israeli organizations routinely offer all types of support to places across the world plagued by conflict and disaster.
Zionism enabled tremendous contributions to a variety of fields, from medicine and agriculture, to technology and archaeology, while accumulating the world’s most museums, engineers, scientists, startups, and R&D investment per capita.
Or, as Dr. Einat Wilf, an author and leftist Israeli politician, put it: “Zionism is a progressive cause that had the misfortune of success. As such, it is maligned for its very success in self-transforming victims into sovereigns, now cast as ‘privilege.’ But isn’t the very goal of ‘progress’ in ‘progressive’ to move away from victim to self-possessed?”1
There are those who say that criticisms of Israel are signs of disloyalty. I disagree. Israelis criticize their own government more than anyone else. The difference is that most Israelis understand there is a time and place to criticize — as well as to unite. And we must never lose sight of our actual enemies, no matter how much we disagree with our fellow Jews.
The other option is to go volunteer with Hamas in Gaza. I’ve heard they are lovely there.
Einat Wilf on X
I remember antisemitic incidents directed against me in the UK, when I was a young man in school and later working.
I personally crucified Christ. Jews have all the money (we came from a lower middle class family and were always penny pinching so....)
Jews control the media/the government/ the world...
"I can smell a Jew a mile away" - a comment made to me by a customer in a shop I was working in whose sense of smell apparently wasn't working just then.
So, in 1973, third day of the October war, I made Aliyah to Israel and can recall over the years having arguments with Jews from abroad who insisted that antisemitism is something of the past while I claimed that it will always be with us - even if hidden. Well, as present events show - it isn't. How I wish I had been wrong way back then.
But I wasn't and it has returned big time. The only hope is Israel, a strong Israel, a democratic Israel. Sure, it has its faults - but it is the only country in the world that will take the self-hating Jews in with open arms when the crunch comes - and it will.
And now the liberal Jews in America are supporting an anti Israel candidate for president. Just as they support the migrants from places that hate them, these liberals, fail to look out for their own self interests in the name of progressivism.