The question of whether an author’s historical claim to stand with Israel makes them a Zionist and a fascist was posed in an online forum, as Israel violates Biden’s Red Line and begins the assault on the refugees of Rafah, reverse face of the question of whether protest against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians constitutes antisemitism and hate speech. Among the first objections to these questions was that an author’s ideology has nothing to do with their work rather than emerging from it, of which we in the group are all members of a fandom.
Here is my reply:
Actually a very relevant and complex question. Why must one peoples Return mean anothers Exile? Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Netanyahu and his settler regime and apologists would like everyone, especially their own citizens, to conflate being Israeli with being Jewish, and to use fear to centralize power to a carceral state of force and control and legitimize their authority as necessary to security. But none those things are true, and security is an illusion.
The idea of Israel as an empire of tyranny and terror is antithetical to an Israel founded to protect Jewish peoples from tyranny and terror. The Netanyahu regime and the Occupation which long precedes it are subversions of Zion as a refuge for the powerless, the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and also a dark mirror of Judaism as the work of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world.
Marx began Das Capital with an eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem and the limitless possibilities of a humankind free from the profit motive as an analogy of Original Sin, and free from its praxis as the reduction of human relations to cash exchange. There are far more such possible futures of becoming human together through love rather than fear, more than we can now imagine.
Friends, everything the enemy says is a lie; never let them define the terms of debate or the rules of the game.
Fascisms of blood, faith, and soil now rule most of our world, and to this I say Never Again! Regardless of whose name those who wish to enslave us claim to act as a strategy of our subjugation and dehumanization.
No matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of being human, of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As I wrote in my post of December 11 2023, What is Hate Speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who Decides What Is Permitted, and How Shall We Enforce Limits On Each Other’s Freedoms? Case of the Repression of Dissent By Universities Beholden to Special Interest Money; Free speech ends where hate and violence begin; and dehumanization is criminal incitement to violence.
Yes, but what is hate speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who decides what is permitted, and how shall we enforce limits on each other’s freedoms?
Such questions about our fundamental rules of how to be human together are now being fought out on university campuses throughout our nation and the world, which pit student mass protests against the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza against repression of dissent by authority both within education systems and between institutions of education and those of the state, and often shaped by the special interest money which has been allowed to define the terms of the debate.
In large part the world has accepted the state of Israel’s claim that criticism of its use of force inclusive of vast war crimes in Gaza is anti-semitism. There are two problems with this; first, Palestinians and Israelis are both semites, one people divided by history as faith, ethnicity, and national identity weaponized in service to power. Second, this falsification is deployed globally by the state of Israel to both defend and subjugate the Jewish diaspora by enforcing identification of being Jewish with the state of Israel, which also deflects questioning of its brutal colonial-Apartheid settler regime.
We must beware those who claim to speak and act in our name, and most especially commit unforgiveable acts to make us complicit in their crimes, for this is a strategy of fascist tyranny.
Netanyahu’s settler regime, founded on conquest and theft of indigenous people’s lands as manifest destiny authorized by God in imitation of our own Conquest of the Native Americans, the state of Israel institutionalized as a military society designed as a refuge for and avenger of Jews, and the whole Zionist ideology of identitarian politics and a nation of one faith and one blood, remains today the world’s most extreme and dangerous fascist successor state to the Nazis.
But this need not remain so. Israel would very much like to convince her own citizens and all of us that to be a Jew is to be a member and figure of the state of Israel, and that to call out and oppose the state of Israel for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza is to be guilty of hate crime against Jewish people, but this is a lie, and one of many.
So we come to this final question; how do we oppose state tyranny and terror without confusing and conflating a state with the people it claims to speak and act for? How answer division with solidarity?
Netanyahu has incited anti Jewish hate as well as anti Israeli horror at his atrocities and war crimes. When a state demonizes itself before the world, it is the diasporic population of those it claims to act in service of as legitimation of power who suffer first. This is a primary strategy of fascism; making those in whose name it claims to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. But the use of force obeys Newtons Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce and resistance. The crimes of Israel have reawakened a slumbering monster and put every Jewish person and community at risk. We must now bring regime change, peace, and democracy to Israel or witness the return of the global Fourth Reich and its policies of Judenfrei. Save the Jews; bring down the Israeli state.
Herein we may find guidance in Jean Genet’s restatement of Nietzsche’s principle of how those who hunt monsters become monsters themselves in the use of violence to enforce authorized identities and ideas of virtue; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
Yesterday we witnessed a ray of light pierce the immense darkness of our moment, in twin events of fracture on both of the primary fronts of the Gaza War; in the Israeli regime of tyranny and terror and in America’s complicity in the atrocities and crimes against humanity of our colony and proxy state. On the Israeli front, Benny Gantz threatens to leave the coalition government which would bring it down unless Netanyahu stops the genocide, and on the American front Biden for the first time in the history of the American-Israel partnership aligns us with the principle of our universal human rights inclusive of Palestinians as fellow human beings in an empathetic speech which defines goals of peace and equality in the region and reveals that he is working on solutions rather than obstructing them and abetting the atrocities of Israel, something I wish he would have communicated with us all on October 7.
To clarify, Biden personally, our government, and our nation will forever bear a measure of responsibility for how the immense arsenal we provided Israel has been used, regardless of what may happen next. For these crimes against humanity both Netanyahu and Biden among many others belong in the same court as Milosevic. Nothing in this must divert our gaze from the future and the possibilities for change which Biden and Gantz have now offered us. In both Israel and America, we now have agents of change speaking not merely of ceasefire, but also of our future and solutions which might allow us to emerge from the legacies of our history.
America and Israel have been partners in a Faustian bargain; in its wake we believed the Holocaust proved that only power is real and has meaning, embraced the seduction of power to be the arbiter of virtue, and with the centralization of power to authority forged carceral states of force and control and of imperial conquest and dominion.
But now the tide begins to turn.
As Biden said in his historic Morehouse College speech; “It’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That’s why I’ve called for an immediate ceasefire to stop the fighting, bring the hostages home, and I’ve been working on a deal as we speak.”
“This is one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world. There’s nothing easy about it. I know it angers and frustrates many of you, including my family, but most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well.”
Tyranny blinks, and we must seize the moment. As Edwin Markham wrote in Preparedness;
“For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear—
When you are the hammer, strike. “
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; let us use ours not to dehumanize and enslave others, but to restore our humanity and to liberate each other. As the lyrics of the beautiful elegiac song in the series Wednesday goes, nothing else matters.
Nothing Else Matters, by Apocalyptica from the original Metallica song, as featured on the Netflix series Wednesday https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=apocalyptica+nothing+else+matters&&mid=AA266605DF9D958B4054AA266605DF9D958B4054&&FORM=VRDGAR
Biden’s Morehouse College commencement speech
Israeli minister vows to quit war cabinet if PM fails to agree new Gaza plan:
Benny Gantz’s threat to withdraw his opposition party from coalition calls into question future of government
The Observer view: it’s up to Israel’s allies to persuade Netanyahu to stop standing in the way of peace
‘Smoke and chaos’: a snapshot of Gaza – in pictures
“I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I do believe in revenge.”
Wednesday brings a Reckoning to systems of oppression, historical injustice and falsification, and the tyranny of theocratic-patriarchal authority
Torch of Liberty 
Leave a comment