January 12, 2021

Defending Apartheid

by Lawrence Davidson
12 January 2021

In 2017 the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) issued a report on the conditions of Palestinians under Israeli rule. The report covered the situations of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and the subject population in the Occupied Territories. The report concluded “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”

Though U.S. and Israeli pressure managed to suppress the report, evidence for this charge of apartheid is clear-cut. More recently, the facts have been brought together in a succinct presentation by the noted journalist Jonathan Cook. In a 2018 issue of The Link, a publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding, he wrote an expose` entitled “Apartheid Israel.” Some of the particulars Cook looks at are citizenship inequality, nationality inequality, marriage inequality, legal inequality, and residential inequality. The predictable Palestinian struggle seeking equality and the end of apartheid is seen as a subversive movement by both Israel’s Jewish majority and its increasingly rightwing governments.

Of course, some Israeli Jews do understand that the country has a serious problem with racism. For instance, this comes through in the June 2020 Haaretz report that indicates that as “world sensitivity to racism and oppression” increases “historical injustice in Israel is … only getting worse.”

The “Nation-State” Law

One of the ways things are getting worse in Israel is through the enshrining of Zionist-inspired apartheid in law. On 18 July 2018 the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) enacted a “Nation-State” Law. It defines the State of Israel as the nation-state “of the Jewish people only.” In other words, only Jews can hold “nationality rights” in Israel.

MK (member of the Knesset) Yariv Levin dubbed the law “Zionism’s flagship bill … that will put Israel back on the right path. A country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” MK Amir Ohana, who chaired the special committee that shaped the bill, stated: “This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people.” The absurdity of this proposition is exposed by the fact that the Palestinian minority has been denied significant aspects of its human rights for over 70 years. As it turns out, the two categories of rights, national and human, have been interdependent ever since the development of the sovereign state.

Hannah Arendt’s Insight

Acting on the claim that one can separate out human rights, much less civil rights, from “national rights” has proven disastrous in the modern political era. Significantly, it was a brilliant Jewish intellectual, Hannah Arendt, who pointed this out following the horror of the Holocaust and on the occasion of the U.N. pronouncement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arendt pointed out that, in the era of the nation-state, rights are defined and enforced within state entities claiming sovereignty over both territory and population. If a state decides that for racial, ethnic, religious, or any other reason, that only one portion of its population is worthy of first-class citizenship, it can proceed to deny to all those who do not qualify any and all rights. This is, of course, what the Nazis did to the Jews, and more recently is reflected in how Myanmar treats its ethnic minorities, how China treats its Uyghur population, and Saudi Arabia discriminates against its Shia religious minority, and so.

The United Nations has proven unable to effectively challenge this perversion of sovereignty. Keep in mind that the United Nations is itself made up of nation-states which reserve the power to discriminate as a consequence of sovereignty. This has made it difficult for the U.N., as an organization, to enforce a “universal” and “inalienable” conception of rights. In truth, the only way to achieve universal rights is to replace the nation-state’s claim that its sovereignty allows it alone to grant rights—replace it with enforceable international law that assures equitable application of rights.

Israel’s High Court of Justice Defends Apartheid

Israel is now acting out the scenario Arendt identified. There were many complaints against the nation-state bill, coming not only from the Palestinian Arabs, but also from the Druze community and even elements of the Mizrachi Jewish population. Thus, on 22 December 2020, fully two and a half years after the passage of the bill, the High Court of Justice held a public review of the law.

Two sections of the law drew particular objection from those appearing before the court. First was the objection to the bill’s official designation of “Jewish settlement as a value that the state is obligated to promote.” Considering the fact that such settlements most often lead to eviction of Palestinians from their land and homes, and the steady segregation of populations based on ethnicity and religion, it can’t help but be seen as an important historical factor in Zionist apartheid. The second was the law’s purposeful demotion of Arabic—it will no longer be an official language of Israel. The implication here is that loss of recognition of the language spoken by the Palestinians, Druze, and at least the first generation of Mizrachi Jews is equivalent to their loss of equal social and political status with those who speak Hebrew.

Throughout the ensuing debate the eleven High Court judges could not, or would not, recognize that giving elite legal and social status in law to one group of religiously identified citizens must have detrimental legal consequences for other non-elite citizens and subjects. That it would was a point made by Attorney Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah—the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights.

The rejoinder of the judges made in reference to the emphasis on “Jewish settlement” was that “the fact that Jewish settlement is perceived as a national value does not mean that there should be no equal allocation and legitimate civil rights for others.” As observers noted, this reply is ahistorical. It simply ignores Israel’s history of “over 70 years of discrimination, in which hundreds of towns, cities, and villages were established for Jews while not a single new locale was built for Palestinian citizens. As if Palestinian land was not expropriated for constructing Jewish communities.”

The same obtuseness was displayed when it came to the demotion of the Arabic language. The judges just could not see why losing its status as an official language was so painful for Arabic speakers. They were not moved when one of the plaintiffs pointed out, “there is a violation of convention here. The rules of the game have changed. My language, at least formally, has maintained its status from the time of the Ottomans until the 20th Knesset. Language was the only collective right [afforded to] the indigenous minority in its homeland.”

The cultural divide between Jews and non-Jews in Israel/Palestine that has been evolving into apartheid since before 1948 reached a tragic legal climax in the decision-making of these eleven judges. They confirmed in law a process that condemns non-Jews to a legal no-man’s-land. As the Druze lawyer told the court, “There is not a word on minority rights; it is a badge of shame for the State of Israel. … It is doubtful whether Jewish students who are educated on this law will be willing to accept Arab citizens at all in the future.”

“The Desired Reality”

Why were the eleven Israeli High Court judges so obtuse? Perhaps it is because they have been acculturated to see Zionist Israel as an exceptional place—a justification unto itself. As Yariv Levin described it above, Israel is “a country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” This exclusiveness is the raison d’être of the Zionist project—it is its ultimate “noble” goal. For those within the exclusive Zionist tent, assigning the term apartheid to their accomplishment is to judge a special case by supposedly non-applicable generic rules. To persist in doing so is regarded as a sign of anti-Semitism rather than facing the facts.

This situation has been addressed by the Haaretz journalist Amira Haas. Haas is “the daughter of Holocaust survivors and resides in Ramallah, where she is the only Jewish Israeli journalist living in the West Bank.” She was in the United States in June 2019 and gave an interview to Mari Cohen for the publication Jewish Currents.

Haas explains the current situation this way: “The current reality is actually one state, which is an apartheid state. This means there are two separate laws: one for Palestinians and one for Israeli Jews. The Palestinian population is subdivided into groups and subgroups like the nonwhite population of [former apartheid] South Africa. They’re disconnected from each other. They are treated differently by Israel, while Israeli Jews live in the entire country, like one people, with full rights.”

The apartheid nature of Israel is a developmental plan of the state. Haas explains that Israel’s main goal is “to get more land, and to manipulate the Palestinian demography. … You see that this is really a plan. [Israeli leaders] sit and they think about how to implement it, and what regulations will achieve this goal. … One by one, step by step.” And, one has to conclude after seventy years that Israeli apartheid is sustainable because most of the world’s governments accept it. That, of course, could change, but there is no sign that it will in the near future.

It is also sustainable because it is what Israeli Jews want. “For Israel, this is the desired reality: that Palestinians live in their enclaves, deprived of any ability to develop their economy, and that the world gives them donations so that they can sustain themselves. And that’s it. There is no desire on the part of Israel to reach a different reality. There has been a kind of an illusion among Jews [in the diaspora] that Israel wants a solution. But [Israeli Jews] don’t see that this is a problem.”

Can it get worse? Yes, it can. Religious fanaticism can make it worse. Haas goes on to explain, “The question is, will the Israeli messianic religious right-wing segment of the population that has gained a lot of power in Israeli politics—will it succeed in accomplishing its aims: the mass expulsion of Palestinians and annexation of the great majority of the West Bank? It’s not enough for them to have Palestinians living in enclaves. They want more.”

It is this overall attitude that explains the ability of Israeli Jews to feel little or no obligation to help Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to maintain their health care systems or provide Covid-19 vaccinations. The act of official segregation has not diminished Israeli control, only any acceptance of Israeli responsibility.

Conclusion

History is full of tragic irony. At the end of the 19th century Germany was considered one of the most civilized nations on the planet. One world war and a Great Depression later, many Germans were electing Nazis and gearing up for the Holocaust. Up until the mid-20th century, the Jewish people were considered peace-loving and a reservoir of brilliant minds. One Holocaust later, many of them, both survivors and those in the diaspora, had joined a Zionist movement determined to create a racist warrior state.

Over time we become products of our local environment. That environment narrows our range of thought and choice. When the environment changes, those who endure change with it, not always for the best. The Holocaust traumatized its survivors, and some of them went on to produce “a nation-state for the Jewish people.” They might have pulled this off benignly if they had done so on some unpopulated planet. However, they chose Palestine in an allusion to biblical Israel—a disingenuous choice given that most Zionists were atheists. Palestine was not an unpopulated place, and thus, today, over 20 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish.

The fact that Palestinians have no nationality rights means, historically, that their possession of any other sort of rights is precarious. They are like the Jews in any number of anti-Semitic historical circumstances—a fact that seems to have escaped our modern-day Hebrews.

It didn’t have to be this way. As a species we have a very wide range of experience, and with the proper historical awareness we can broaden out our current decision-making beyond the dictates of our local environment. In fact, after World War II some Jews tried to do just this. Even through the trauma of the Holocaust, they could see that the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine meant war with the indigenous population. Their own sense of the Jewish past told them that there were alternatives. These people were known as “cultural Zionists,” and they sought a democratic, equalitarian Palestine as a shared, multicultural home that guaranteed the protection and continuing development of Jewish cultural heritage, alongside those of Muslims and Christians. Palestine could have become a “spiritual” home for the Jews, with generous though controlled immigration opportunities. It was a possible peaceful route to Jewish recovery after the Holocaust.

Whatever one might think of this alternative, it was never seriously considered by those “political” Zionists convinced by persistent anti-Semitism that the survival of the Jews could only come through having their own nation-state. This path combined an evolving Jewish nationalism with a racist exclusiveness (the “chosen people” claim) that also ran through Jewish history. Zionists ignored that part of their historical reality, and today’s Apartheid Israel, along with its insistence that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous, is the result. As you sow, so shall you reap.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

December 27, 2019

Sanders After Corbyn: The Jewish Question

by Andrew Levine

Drawing By Nathaniel St. Clair

The hordes of Democratic Party pundits, anti-Trump Republicans, and former national security state functionaries who supply CNN and MSNBC with endless streams of jibber-jabber, along with their counterparts at The New York Times and Washington Post, are pulling out all the stops — trying to convince Democrats that only a “moderate” can defeat Donald Trump.

They speak for the dead center, and they are dead wrong.

They do have a ready audience, however; in part because apologists for the Democratic Party have been fairly successful at passing blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 onto everything other than her corporate and Wall Street friendly politics. Running against Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s politics epitomized moderation.

Alarmingly many potential Democratic voters just don’t get it. The Democratic Party’s leaders and publicists have seen to that; they peddle their snake oil well.

The hard truth, though, is that the “centrist” politics they promote helped get us to where we now are.

 Try convincing the targets of their propaganda operations otherwise, however; it isn’t easy.

That the next, long overdue recession continues to tarry does not help matters.

Neither has the election that the British Labor Party lost so ignominiously a few weeks ago. Its consequences will be dire — over there. Back here, they could be as inconsequential as elections in any of several economically or militarily more formidable US allies in Europe or the Far East. That would be not particularly consequential at all. But this will not be the case; they will matter a great deal.

UK elections matter more than those in other countries – in part because we have a longstanding “special relationship” with the Brits that we don’t have with, say, the French or the Germans or the Japanese, and because we are accustomed to thinking that “the English-speaking peoples” as Churchill called them — Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders — are somehow joined at the hip.

In the final analysis, though, if the UK under Boris Johnson diminishes itself further by leaving the EU, or even if it self-destructs by causing Scotland or Northern Ireland to break away, Americans will have little reason to take notice.

Corporate media, however, are doing all they can to make Americans notice enough to draw the wrong lesson from Labor’s electoral debacle. Their barely hidden objective is to convince potential Sanders or Warren voters in this Spring’s caucuses and primaries that promising “pie in the sky,” as they claim the Labor Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership did – in other words, promoting genuinely, not merely cosmetic, departures from the status quo — is an all but certain path to defeat.
Knowledgeable commentators who are not too blatantly in the thrall of Tory or Blairite ideology tell a different story. They explain how it was not Labor’s socialist (or social democratic) agenda that did the party in, but divisions within it over Brexit, and power struggles between the party’s left wing and its functional equivalents of mainstream Democrats. They tell us that Corbyn, a bona fide socialist and anti-imperialist, could have played his hand better, but that, in the end, he was defeated by circumstances largely beyond his control.

Brexit was the main culprit; it divided the Labor Party, just as it divided the UK generally. The ancien régime’s defenders took take full advantage of the fallout from the Brexit vote, something Corbyn was unable to do.

Moderates, in and out of Labor’s ambit, had it in for Corbyn for many of the same reasons that their counterparts in the United States have it in for Sanders and Warren. The election gave them an opportunity to act on their class-interest based animosity.

Like George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president in 1972, Corbyn is an estimable figure whose candidacy was supported by large segments of his party’s base, but who was effectively undermined by his party’s establishment and by the media that serve it.

Does this bode ill for progressives on this side of the ocean? Are these latest British elections relevant at all?

Tip O’Neil, the Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987, famously declared: “all politics is local.” This is, at best, a gross exaggeration; politics, especially at the national level, is national too.

It can also be, or appear to be, international. Thus, Britain and the United States sometimes seem to march in tandem, Britain leading the way.

Margaret Thatcher begat Ronald Reagan, and New Labor begat Clintonism. More recently, the UK’s Brexit vote was followed by Trump’s election.

Sometimes, the far greater power, the United States, manages to take the lead. Thus, now that the dust from the Brexit vote has settled, the UK has a Trump of its own. Johnson is better educated than Trump, more worldly and smarter, but he is every bit as cartoonish and vile.

It is therefore understandable that Corbyn’s shellacking would be on peoples’ minds, especially at a time when, with nationalism and illiberalism everywhere on the rise, much of the world seems hellbent on taking a great leap backwards.

Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of this sad turn of events, but thanks in part to the bad example he sets, as president of what is still the world’s only superpower, authoritarian politics is taking hold the world over – in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, India, Hungary, Poland, and the Philippines, among others. Too bad for the people who live in those places that these are countries in which liberal norms are notoriously less secure than in the US or the UK.

If all politics really were local, illiberal backsliding could be more easily isolated, minimizing the harm. But politics is not nearly local enough. And since efforts to derail progressive initiatives in the United States have, if anything, intensified of late, and since it is widely believed that the British election is of at least some relevance to American leftists pondering how best to proceed, it is of paramount importance to learn whatever constructive lessons we can from what happened to Corbyn and the Labor Left.

Forces intent on maintaining the old regime in the UK besmirched Corbyn, preposterously but nevertheless with some success. If and when their American counterparts adapt their methods, it is urgent that their efforts be resisted with all the militance we can muster.

***

Of the many candidates still vying to be the Democrats’ nominee for president, the billionaires and the moderates ought to be ruled out from the get-go. This is not the place to rehearse the many reasons why; but see my last piece, “Enough Absurdity; Time to Get Smart.” It is different with Sanders and Warren. Either one would be OK, though, in my view, Sanders would be a whole lot better.

He is more authentically left-wing, more Corbyn-like, as it were. If, and only if, the emerging Democratic Left plays its cards right, being like Corbyn is the very opposite of a recipe for defeat.
A Sanders candidacy would wean workers away from the Trump fold – not by advancing kinder gentler versions of the neoliberal policies that made Trump inevitable, but by undoing the conditions that made Trump and Trumpism possible.

Doing so would have a salutary effect on the entire body politic, even in the short run. In the slightly longer run, a Sanders presidency would help roust that great sleeping giant, the American working class, from its soft-on-moderates slumber, setting it free it to resume its historic mission. For remaking the world in ways that are ecologically sound, just, and fit for human habitation, we cannot currently do better than that.

I have three misgivings, however. Even taken together, they do not, in my view, make Warren the better choice, but they are worth reflecting upon and dealing with.

The first is that the time is past due for a woman to be elected president. The main reason why this is important, I think, is so that we can get beyond the point where it is important.

Others, of course, would disagree; they think that electing a woman is important, perhaps even all important, in its own right.

That was certainly the view of many Clinton supporters in 2016. At this point, though, even many of them realize that, despite all their brouhaha about “the glass ceiling” three years ago, the country is, and long has been, “ready” for a woman president. It is finally dawning, even on those who want a woman elected most, that, as James Carville, Clintonite extraordinaire, might put it: “it’s the politics, stupid.”

By that measure, Warren is not at all bad; Sanders, however, is a whole lot better.

My second misgiving has to do with age. This is a problem for Biden too, of course, and also for Trump, though, in his case, all the valences change – enough to allow finding comfort in the thought that as long as there are strokes, all is not lost.

Both Sanders and Warren are in their seventies, but he is roughly two presidential terms older than she. Clearly, at this point, they both have all their marbles and then some. But, as the saying goes, old age is not for sissies; anything can happen.

It is surely of some relevance that, for doing what needs to be done and what they both want to do, eight years, much less four, are not nearly enough; and that, going by the odds, Warren has a better chance than Sanders of still being in top form in eight or even four years’ time.

Being older than Warren and younger than Sanders, and approaching the point where friends and acquaintances are at least as likely to be dead or out of commission as still in their prime, the pertinence of this consideration is something of which I cannot help but be aware, and upon which I can speak with some authority.

Being every bit as Chosen as Sanders, I have some authority on that too, and I also cannot help but be aware of the Jewish Question. Hence, my third misgiving: it is that nominating him might not be, as we say, good for the Jews.

Before Trump, I used to think that in the United States, being Jewish was of no political consequence whatever. How could it be when, for example, Sheldon Adelson, a character straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, could be all buddy buddy with some of the vilest Republican crackers in all creation, seemingly without objection or even notice from anybody?

Needless to say, it is perilous to be black or brown or Muslim in America; but Jews, it seemed, were safe. I was so sure of this that it didn’t even bother me that my fellow tribesman, Stephen Miller, Trump’s favorite hate monger, evidently thinks so too. It is practically axiomatic that anything that Miller believes is untrue.

It was different, of course, in places like Ukraine, the Democrats’ new favorite country, where old school fascism – and therefore classical anti-Semitism — though repressed within the Soviet Union, never quite expired.

Thus, when Communism imploded, it rose again there and elsewhere in eastern and central Europe, when, with the help of American meddlers, anti-Russian governments were established and took hold all along Russia’s borders.

But even with Steve Bannon and others of his ilk empowered during the Trump campaign, I never thought that anything like that could happen here – not, anyway, before Charlottesville.

Obviously, I was wrong. Long before the day of infamy when Trump and his trophy bride descended that gilded Trump Tower escalator, the Donald was busily kicking over rocks where the ancient demons had been lying dormant and out of sight.

Then, with him in the White House, those demons came back to life and flourished. And so, by now, we might as well be back in the 1930s, but for one salient difference: that there is a state of Israel now, and real anti-Semites love it. This doesn’t diminish the intensity of their hatred of Jews, but it does affect how they express it.

The Trump-induced resurrection of anti-Semitism coincides with and feeds into a developing crisis of legitimacy that threatens support for Israel and for Zionist politics generally. Trump did not bring this crisis on; it has been taking shape for decades. But by handing the most noxious Zionists the moral equivalent of a blank check, Trump and Jared Kushner, his settler-movement loving son-in-law, have effectively licensed them to act out in any way that they think will help their cause.

In enlightened secular circles, Jewish and otherwise, support for a culturally Jewish, Hebrew-speaking homeland for Jews, after centuries of persecution in Europe and especially after the Nazi genocide, continues to resonate.

Nevertheless, the idea that Israel can rightfully be an ethnocratic settler state no longer quite cuts it in the twenty-first century. Neither does the idea that the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine fulfills a “promise” that a God few still believe in made to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, characters who probably never existed at all, and who are almost certainly not direct ancestors of Jews alive today.

It doesn’t help either that what was once deemed “a light unto the nations” has become an international pariah state.

How could any right-thinking person, Gentile or Jew, not think of it that way – after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living within Israel proper, the imposition of an Apartheid regime over Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel during the Six Day War, and the increasing awareness of the fact that Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally recognized borders are, for all intents and purposes, second-class citizens?

The Holocaust has had to become Israel’s legitimization myth – not in the sense that it didn’t happen, obviously it did, but in the way that Zionists have come to use it to justify subsequent wrong-doing.

There is, after all, only so much legitimacy that can be squeezed out of the horrific suffering of European Jews during the Nazi period, especially inasmuch as the World War II era is rapidly becoming an historical memory of no more immediate relevance to current thinking than, say, the Civil War period or World War I.

It doesn’t help either, with memories of Apartheid South Africa still in peoples’ minds, that Israel’s vaunted democracy has always been a Herrenvolk affair, a democracy for a master race, or that the Herrenvolk is again becoming a minority in the land it rules – not quite to the same extent that white South Africans were when they were running the show there, but to a considerable extent even so.

For decades, it was comparatively easy, psychologically, for liberal Zionists to live with the contradictory notion of a state that is both Jewish and democratic, when they know full well that whatever else a democratic state may be, it is a state of its people, of an undifferentiated citizenry, not of a particular religious or national group.

This contradiction has become increasingly difficult to gloss over in recent years. It is especially troubling that the Israeli occupation of the territories it seized more than half a century ago, in the Six Day War. is still going on, and that there is no end in sight.

Israel’s defenders have been trying for decades to confound anti-Zionism and all but the mildest criticisms of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism. Fortunately, but also remarkably in view of all the effort they have expended, they have had only limited success.

Lately, though, determined to restore the waning legitimacy of the Zionist idea, they have intensified their efforts, doing all they can to turn what had been a comparatively harmless logical howler, calling two very different things one and the same, into a pernicious ideological fetish.

And so now, they call even longstanding opponents of racism in all its forms anti-Semites. In Corbyn’s case, the charge, leveled straightforwardly, would be too implausible for anyone expecting to be taken seriously to claim. His enemies therefore charged with something slightly different – being soft on anti-Semitism within the party he leads.

Of course, the anti-Semitism his detractors had in mind was not anti-Semitism at all, but anti-Zionism. Inasmuch as Corbyn has been an anti-imperialist solidarity activist his entire life, and therefore a proponent of justice for Palestinians, this “charge” actually does have some basis in fact. The facts in question, however, are grounds for praise, not condemnation.

To be sure, anti-Zionism can and sometimes does morph into genuine anti-Semitism. If anything like that actually went on in Labor Party circles, it ought to have been dealt with aggressively and expeditiously by the party’s leader. Thus, if Corbyn was guilty of anything, it was of not handling such situations as aggressively or as promptly as he should have.

This is not at all the same thing as condoning them. Even in a world of “alternative facts,” that charge cannot be sustained.

Nobody really knows how much, if at all, the smear campaign directed at Corbyn contributed to Labor’s defeat; this is not the sort of thing that can be measured precisely or in uncontroversial ways. It very likely did do some harm, however. To the extent that it did, British Zionists have a lot to answer for.

Because they do, because their efforts on behalf of Boris Johnson – a bona fide racist, Islamophobe, and anti-Semite — succeeded at least somewhat, we can predict, with considerable confidence, that if Democrats run Sanders, a comparable smear campaign will be attempted against him.

It will be a case of “monkey see, monkey do.” And it will encourage real anti-Semites to strut their stuff in ways that will likely give even Stephen Miller cause for concern.

If Warren shows that she too has a decency streak and a backbone, she could be a potential victim as well. Unlike, say, Biden or Cory Booker or, for that matter, any of the other moderates, including the Boy Wonder, Mayor Pete, Warren may have it in her to do the right thing.

Up to this point, however, she has given Zionists little cause to after her. To her credit, she has resisted AIPAC’s advances. But so far, her politics has seemed to stop at the water’s edge.

Sanders is a different story. He is no Corbyn, but he has spoken out in solidarity with Palestinians, even when he could have more easily remained silent.

It is not hard to find reasons to fault his positions on Israel-Palestine over the years but, this side of “the squad” and a few others, he is as good as any Democrat at the national level gets.

Of equal or greater importance, he is helping, as he did with socialism, to change the national conversation – not as much as it needs to be changed, but to an extent that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago.

As it becomes increasingly difficult for corporate media to treat the Sanders campaign as if it weren’t happening, we should therefore expect that, before long, we will soon be hearing a lot about “self-hating Jews” and other nonsense that not long ago seemed, like anti-Semitism itself, to have gone extinct, but that has now revived as defenders and beneficiaries of the old order feel increasingly anxious and insecure.

This is what must be fought against — this time, though, with more boldness and strategic acumen than Corbyn and his allies were able to muster.

Evading the problem, say by nominating someone not Jewish – someone other than Sanders — is no way to deal with it; far better to bring the problem to a head and then to confront it head on.

At this point, evasion may not even be an option. Had Sanders been the candidate in 2016, before the Trump effect fully took hold, being a Jewish socialist would probably have been a good deal less disabling than having a Kenyan father was for Obama in 2008.

But that was then; the consequences of Trumpian rule are an unavoidable fact of life now. There is no turning the other cheek, no taking refuge in noxious Zionist nostrums; fighting back is the only way to deal with the real anti-Semitism Trump and Kushner and the others have let loose upon the fragile body politic of America today. It is the only way to deal with all things Trumpian.

Anti-anti-Semites, in this historical moment, therefore have a twofold task: first to assure that Democrats nominate a candidate who is worthy of being a target of a smear campaign, and then to see to it that he (or maybe she) not only prevails over it, but also exposes it for the reactionary nonsense it is.

More articles by:Andrew Levine

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

YIDDISH, HEBREW, JEWISH, PALESTINE, ISRAEL, ANTI-SEMITISM, BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS

This whole series of topics has no beginning, no middle, and certainly no end, largely due to the antics of the USA, the UK, France, and many other countries around the world.

Let's start with Yiddish, because that is something I have had a lifelong (92 and counting) involvement with and still think it is one of the most interesting languages to know something about.

My biggest regret is that those around me who spoke Yiddish, were involved with it and were interested in it are all long dead.

The following article appeared in the Saturday Age supplement "Spectrum" on 1 March 2019:

Yiddish concert embraces 'the lost language in all of us'

As the Jewish language awakens, a group of local musicians is putting poetry to song.

By Rachelle Unreich

March 1, 2019 — 11.00am

You could say Yiddish is having its moment, which is odd for a language that originated among Ashkenazi Jews some time in the 11th century.

In Shtisel, an award-winning TV show about the ultra-religious Jewish community in Israel, characters speak a mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish, which is largely old Germanic dialect. An all-Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof is currently playing off-Broadway, and later this year, Carnegie Hall will put on From Shtetl to Stage, celebrating old and new Yiddish culture.



From left, Evelyn Krape, Simon Starr and Galit Klas in the library at Kadimah Yiddish Theatre. Credit:CHRISTOPHER HOPKINS

Melbourne is no slacker in the Yiddish arena, boasting the largest number of Yiddish speakers in Australia. It's also home to Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, the team behind the production Play Me A Poem. At the National Theatre for one night, it will feature well-known musicians and composers such as Deborah Conway, Lior, Willy Zygier and Josh Abrahams creating original songs on stage to Yiddish poetry.

Kadimah's co-artistic director, Evelyn Krape, is on a mission to re-energise interest in Yiddish, which is sometimes referred to as a dying language, mainly because of its dwindling numbers: it was once spoken by more than 10 million Jews around the world but after the Holocaust, this fell to an estimated 1.5 million. Krape's aim is "to establish Yiddish as a thriving and dynamic cultural source," and she recalls being validated by non-Jewish actor Rob Menzies when their paths crossed at a play reading. "He said, 'Yiddish is the lost language in all of us'."

It's true that audiences around the world have been responding to Yiddish performances. A Yiddish-language production of Waiting for Godot opened up a Samuel Beckett festival in Ireland in 2014, and appeared in New York again recently. Composer Josh Abrahams (Addicted to Bass) performed Yiddish songs with the band Yid! at WOMADelaide last year. "The heat was incredible," he recalls, "yet thousands of people were giving the horah [an Israeli group dance] a red hot go. It was amazing."

In Play Me A Poem, musicians will put Yiddish poetry to unlikely tunes. Abrahams' song is reminiscent of Laurie Anderson, while reggae, jazz and Afro-Brazilian vibes will also be in the line-up. Simon Starr, musician and founder of the band Yid!, is expecting "an emotional response". He believes people who think of Yiddish as an old-fashioned language will be unprepared for how avant-garde some of the chosen poetry and lyrics are, despite some being written early last century.

"It is still pretty radical for today," Starr says. "Even if someone isn't connected to it ethnically, it's still deep and passionate and provocative. There are audacious commentaries on the Bible and current affairs, and also heartfelt, harrowing tales of suffering and longing and separation that mirror the migration patterns that were both a result of persecution and economic aspirations. It's a very rich source of material."

For this show there will be surtitles, so that audiences aren't merely listening to an orchestral piece but will have an understanding of the lyrics. "What's really fascinating is to see these amazingly modern responses to what are largely pre-Holocaust poems," says Krape, who co-directs. "We want to say to the audience: Listen – you'll hopefully be knocked off your feet. You might think this is old, but it's not old-fashioned."

Although many in the audience won't be familiar with Yiddish, others will have heard it spoken by an older generation at home. "I don't know what's going on in the ether," says Krape, "but it feels like people are searching for connections to community and heritage, in a way that is heymish [the Yiddish word for warm/ homey], but is [also] dynamic, innovative and contemporary." Krape's parents and grandparents spoke Yiddish, but she only came to it as an adult, and now attends classes in Brunswick.

In Melbourne, there's a thriving community of Yiddish learning: preschool and primary school Sholem Aleichem teaches Yiddish as a second language (and also as a VCE subject), while Monash University offers it at tertiary level.

Kadimah's artistic director, Galit Klas (who is also the show's initiator and co-director), was a Monash student, and was so inspired that she ultimately performed in and directed several Yiddish productions (singing in Yiddish Divas and writing The Ghetto Cabaret). "It really sparks something in their insides for the Jewish audience; it's like this lost missing piece," she says.

And it's also fulfilling for those who find modern music lacking. "Popular music has become horrendously manufactured," says Starr. "There's barely any trace of humanity in there, because instruments and voices have been so treated electronically. There's little human feeling left; it's music by algorithm.

"I think people still respond to well-played, live music that is played with the right intention. It's just people sharing real stories, and I can't imagine that ever going out of fashion. People will respond to that heartfelt live performance, and the next level is when the content has another layer or resonance for them."

That layer might not just come from being Jewish. Yiddish, it seems, has taken on a new life in modern times; TV viewers incorporate some of the vernacular from watching shows such as Girls or Seinfeld, as words like schmooze, shvitz and kvetch make their way into everyday language.

Starr says the thing he finds fascinating about Yiddish poetry is that "the themes are quite universal and humanist". In New York, he says, Yiddish "has become the hipster language of lesbians, because it's an outsider language and it's their little secret."

Non-Jews, such as US actor Shane Baker, have made a living out of mastering Yiddish. Although raised as an Episcopalian in Kansas City, Baker was hooked after seeing a Marx Brothers film, and is now a poster boy for Yiddish theatre.

Klas says Yiddish "doesn't feel dead to me at all".

"There's a challenge for all of us [in Play Me A Poem] in that we're working in a language that we don't know very well. But it also gives you an extra lens with which to see the world and to create art. I don't know if it's given me a huge insight into my Jewish identity, but it's made me more proud."

Play Me A Poem is at The National Theatre on March 3. nationaltheatre.org.au

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The above article from Spectrum does not give the historical perspective on why Yiddish has diminished over the years.

There is only one main reason - the zionists who wanted to develop a "homeland" for Jews in Palestine wanted to remove themselves from the reminders of their origins in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world where Yiddish was the spoken language. The zionists who managed to steal the country from the Palestinians made a conscious decision to say that Hebrew was the biblical language of the Jews and therefore it needed to be the language of the "new" country being established in Palestine to be called Israel.

And so Hebrew was born as the language of the zionists who established this "new" country and Yiddish spoken there was frowned upon to the extent that it has gradually died out.

Yiddish remained a spoken language amongst Jews in the United States of America, particularly in the ghettos of New York and was also very much a language Jews spoke in Buenos Aires in Argentina. South African Jews were, in the main from Eastern Europe and their language was Yiddish.

The following is an extract from Pakn Treger, magazine of the Yiddish Book Center, and is written by Aaron Lansky for the Fall 2018 issue, part of issue number 77. Their address is:1021 West Street, Amherst, MA01002, USA

The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978. He was a Yiddish writer.

This is what he said when he went to Stockholm to accept his prize:

"The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language," he said in Yiddish. And he concluded with words that can be read now as prophecy:

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and cabalists - rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. And neither,  I suspect, has Isaac Bashevis Singer.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This next article is from the same Saturday Age Spectrum as the previous article on Yiddish - 1 March 2019:

Antisemitism review: Deborah Lipstadt offers a guide for the perplexed

By Geoffrey Brahm Levey

February 21, 2019 — 3.06pm

SOCIETY
Antisemitism: Here and Now
​Deborah Lipstadt
​
Every serious discussion of antisemitism includes this joke: an antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary. Attributed to British political thinker Sir Isaiah Berlin, the joke is wise as well as witty. Given the Jews' calamitous history, an ideological or pathological form of Jew-hatred can't simply be about not liking Jews or even treating them harshly. It must be a prejudice with no rational basis. Although often applied to any occurrence of hostility or discrimination against Jews, antisemitism originally entailed a conviction that the Jews are inherently evil. The word "anti-Semitism" was coined only in the late-19th century but has since been applied to Jew-hatred throughout history.

Vandalized tombs with tagged swastikas are pictured in the Jewish cemetery of Quatzenheim, in eastern France, on Tuesday, February 19, 2019.Credit:Jean-Francois Badias

Berlin's definition of an antisemite appears on page 14 of Deborah Lipstadt's new book, Antisemitism: Here and Now. A Holocaust historian at Emory University in Atlanta, Lipstadt attained prominence after David Irving sued her in a British court in 1996 for describing him as a "Holocaust denier". She and her publisher famously won that case, as portrayed in the 2016 film, Denial. The present book is not a history but a reckoning with antisemitism in its current guises and contortions. (Lipstadt rejects the old spelling of "anti-Semitism" as it wrongly implies that the opposition is to "Semitism" rather than to the Jews, as was always intended).

Alas, more than 70 years after the Nazis' quest to exterminate the Jews of Europe, cases still abound in which Jews are variously slain, vilified, excluded, or threatened because they are Jews. In October last year, for example, a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue claimed the lives of 11 congregants and wounded seven others. There have been murderous attacks on Jews also in France and Brussels in recent years. In Britain, graffiti with messages such "Adolf Hitler was right" and "death to all Jews" has appeared in its cities.




Antisemitism. By Deborah Lipstadt.

Closer to home, Jews have been targeted and intimidated on Sydney public transport and while walking in Bondi. Earlier this month, more than 20 swastika symbols were daubed overnight around the Bondi area. Security guards are standard at Jewish schools and synagogues in Western societies. As Lipstadt observes, if anything, the bigots are growing more confident.

The current situation is complicated by two factors. First, Western Jews (in general) now enjoy a privileged status. Highly educated, socioeconomically successful, and politically influential, they are perceived by some less fortunate and marginalised as part of the dominant white majority. Second, there are the vexed issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict and of controversial Israeli government policies. Much of Antisemitism: Here and Now is devoted to discussing cases thrown up by these twin associations.

The book is written as an exchange of letters between Lipstadt and a whip-smart Jewish student, Abigail, and a non-Jewish law colleague, Joe, at her university. The format allows these fictional interlocutors to variously voice their confusion, outrage, and internal conflicts about episodes of apparent antisemitism on campus and in the wider world. Lipstadt responds sagely as a kind of guide to the perplexed.

The discussion begins by distinguishing different types of antisemite. There is the extremist who is upfront about his or her thirst for the Jews' demise. There is the "dinner party antisemite" who wouldn't dream of physically harming Jews but wants to exclude them from their golf or country club. There is the "clueless antisemite" who remarks to her Jewish friend that she, of all people, should be able to spot a bargain. And then there are the "antisemitic enablers", who, while not antisemites themselves, encourage the antisemitism of others.

Here, Lipstadt points her finger at both President Donald Trump, on the right, and British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, on the left. Trump has cultivated not only nationalist but also nativist sentiment. He defended the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, for example, even after one of them drove a truck through the counter-protesters. During his presidential campaign he retweeted an image of Hilary Clinton alongside a Jewish star embossed with the accusation of monied corruption. One of his ads showed three prominent American Jews with commentary about "global special interests" that "control the levers of power in Washington".
Corbyn has a history of arch criticism of Israel but also of supporting blatant antisemites. Last year, video emerged of him speaking at a Palestinian Return Centre event in 2013 in which he suggested that "Zionists" do not understand English irony despite living in the country all their lives, a comment that has not helped him shake the accusation that he himself is an antisemite. Lipstadt marshals compelling cases against both politicians as "enablers", while noting that Corbyn's disposition appears to be sincere whereas Trump's appears to be cynically directed at energising his electoral base.

The book further explores such issues as the difference between antisemitism and racism, antisemitism within the Islamic world, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the "toxification of Israel", and the new hostility towards Jews within progressive movements and on campus. Lipstadt wisely cautions against an attitude of Jewish victimhood. She also criticises Jewish organisations that respond to the BDS by seeking to "boycott the boycotters" or which, like canarymission.org, seek to intimidate Pro-Palestinian professors and activists by compiling public dossiers on them.

Antisemitism is antisemitism regardless of the status of its targets. The Pittsburgh synagogue victims are no less murdered for having been visibly white and comfortably middle class. And the lazy equation of "wealthy and white" with domination overlooks the prominent involvement of Jews in progressive movements including the civil rights movement and feminism.

Less satisfactory is Lipstadt's treatment of the Israel factor. She is wrong to claim that questioning Israel's right to exist is axiomatically antisemitic. To demand only Israel's disestablishment among the family of nations, many of which are guilty of systematic abuses, is clearly discriminatory. However, one can hold that it was a mistake for a Jewish state to be established in Palestine without remotely being antisemitic. Even the founding father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, initially campaigned to place the Jewish homeland in East Africa.

Criticism of Israel as a Jewish state is dismissed too quickly. Lipstadt counters that other democracies have official state religions. True, but the issue is whether and how the state religion is used in the distribution of individuals' rights, opportunities and overall treatment. It should be of concern that national fronts in Europe and alt-right figures in the United States laud Israel as an ethno-democracy while peddling antisemitism at home.
The 2018 Global Anti-Semitism Report found that "70 per cent of anti-Jewish attacks were anti-Israel in nature". Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians provokes brutal and intemperate politics elsewhere in reaction. It is also the case that Israel-bashing attracts and provides cover for genuine antisemites. The attempt to call this out has been hampered by the legacy of Israeli politicians and Jewish leaders responding to any criticism of Israel with the charge of antisemitism.

Often, non-Jews who are concerned about the Palestinians' situation invoke traditional antisemitic tropes without realising it or intending to do so. A current example is the controversy that has ensnared US Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, who suggested in tweets that American support for Israel is "all about the Benjamins" (referring to Benjamin Franklin on the $100 note) and the Israel lobby bribing politicians. The tweets sparked an uproar, a rebuke from House Leader Nancy Pelosi, and ultimately Omar's contrite apology. But as Peter Beinhart noted in The Forward, those who are quick to condemn this clumsy verbal bigotry are deathly silent about the tangible bigotry that Palestinians in the West Bank face daily courtesy of Israeli law and policy.

Although most diasporic Jews do not hold Israeli citizenship, a central plank of Zionism is the unity of the Jewish people. Many Jews in and outside of Israel have protested "not in our name" regarding Israeli government policies. Many more believe that this has nothing to do with them, not unlike ordinary Muslims who believe they shouldn't have to answer for the actions of Islamic militants. And many support or defer to Israeli government actions.

The book closes with Lipstadt counselling Joe not to be afraid, as a non-Jew, to call Israel out when he believes it has crossed a line. Sage advice for Jews as well.

Geoffrey Brahm Levey is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New South Wales.