Anti-Zionism = Racism

The narrative that is increasingly employed by both Islam and its Liberal-Left allies is one that defines the war between Israel and the Palestinians solely in terms of cliché and cant.  In a theologically inspired act of genius the yolk of original sin is transferred to Israel and her supporters. A religious war and a war between opposing civilizations is portrayed as a colonial war waged by Israel against Palestinians who are defined as the indigenous people of a narrow geographic area designated by Israel’s borders only.  According to this narrative, Israel was partitioned by the UN against the will of the majority of the people living there. Evidence to the contrary is considered unimportant to the web of deceit with which the lie is constructed.

This is how a new mythology is built.  The new tradition continues, as long as ‘we’ conflate Palestinians and Arabs into some monolithic entity we disenfranchise the Palestinians.  Jews are relentlessly stripped of any identity save the one that damns them.  Jews are not a legitimate entity and as long as we conflate Israelis with Jews we ‘Zionists’ are able to maintain the ‘fantasy’ that ‘The Jews’ need a country to call their own.   Palestinians may be Jewish but cannot be defined as such because any oppression Jews suffer is the result of natural human conflict (which of course, by construction is their fault) as opposed to being religiously inspired Arab / Muslim racism which would then justify self-determination.  And the Jew, by his or her existence, is damned.  Arabs, as a racial entity, may immigrate to Palestine and by marrying they become indigenous; no religious group has a right to self-determination, therefore no Jew may immigrate to Israel, thus safeguarding ‘Palestinian’ (i.e. non-Jewish) identity and majority rule.  To hermetically seal the whole, Palestinian ethnic cleansing of Jews becomes a local matter of no relevance to history other than being (an understandable) act of revenge for their current suffering.

Religion has no place in national identity. But the pièce de résistance is the fundamentalist Islamic argument that the Koran and the Hadith (the body of traditional sayings and legends associated with Mohammed and his followers) are sacrosanct and therefore unalterable.  Simply stated this means that irrespective of the extensive incitement that both bodies of work encourage there may be no discussion or debate about their egregious cultural legitimacy, nor their centrality to Arab or Palestinian society.

What is debilitating is that this tolerance of bigotry is no more than western sanctioned fascism. The Nazis ascended to power because few were willing to fight them. Today, the extreme left and their allies have learned the lessons of the Nazi ascent to power and employ similar tactics against anyone with whom they disagree. In universities and in public life Jews are being marginalized if they fail to express self-hatred or if they refuse to disenfranchise themselves as Jews.

Israel has failed to actively promote a discourse that will defend its own actions. It has left the Diaspora defenseless against a juggernaut of hate.

In Britain, holding passionate beliefs has created a legally valid excuse for violent confrontation against Jews and their supporters in the universities and Israeli companies across the UK. And it has encouraged a climate of fear and as a by-product become an economically profitable exercise for universities who attract extremists to their campuses.  It is far too common an antisemitic tactic that Jews and their Christian supporters are accused of being part of a sinister cabal actively working to undermine the majority. This is brutally hammered home in order to discourage them from exercising a democratic right to express their legitimate political or ethical concerns.   In this way Britain’s University Student Union was uniquely able to justify its rejection of the currently accepted worldwide definition of antisemitism.

When physical intimidation is not presently possible, at every opportunity these same people will create an avalanche of threats and hate-filled talk-backs via the social media.  The irony is that these same people are the most active in abusing human rights and actively encouraging genocide and ethnic cleansing. From around the world ‘anti-Israel’ activists do so, in the name of Palestine.  They experience no shame in employing tactics that in another era would have labelled them as Nazis.  For the extremist, the ends always justify the means.

Boycott campaigns are today primarily dependent on the dissemination of lies and the intimidation of anyone or any organization with whom they disagree.

Perhaps most hateful is that many Israelis are central to this campaign, having been radicalized in Israeli universities that gave them and continues to give them carte blanche to express themselves however they wish to do so.  One hundred flowers may bloom but not in the poisoned atmosphere of lies and half-truths presented as fact; complexity simplified to the point of inanity and puerile vindictiveness.  Paradoxically these same anti-Israel activists often teach the next generation of activists and Israeli scholars.

There is a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism but for a campaign to be effectively deployed against the latter they conflate it with the former in order to encourage the widest possible buy-in to their agenda. Because of the breadth of their membership that agenda is as likely to be extermination of the Jews as it is, the end of Israel.  Because of this, and the inability of the secular alliance to either detach themselves from or criticize the Islamic agenda, it is not possible to separate the anti-Zionist from the anti-Semite.