Now then, let me articulate the history of this conflict. I shall hereafter refer to the land of Palestine, by which I mean a geographic term denoting the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, equivalent to the borders of the British Mandate of Palestine.
For centuries, European Jews were the victims of racism, legal subordination, expulsions, and pogroms. Without warning, the anti-semitic populations of European countries, especially in Eastern Europe, would suddenly rape, torture, expropriate, and murder local Jewish populations. Kings and politicians across Europe used Jews as scapegoats, blaming them for everything from economic stagnation and alcoholism to plagues and military defeats. Jews had a distinct identity and many Jews refused to assimilate into the surrounding culture. Simultaneously, many Jews who tried to assimilate found that the local populations would not allow them to assimilate. Jews across Europe had dual identities, identifying both as Jews and as members of the nation they lived in. Were international Jews a distinct nationality, and if they were, what was to be their fate in a world of nation-states? This question is better known as the “Jewish Question.”
The early twentieth century was an age of nationalisms. Many of the peoples who had lived for centuries under the rule of foreign empires developed a national consciousness. This nationalism aimed at separating their people and the land they lived on, in many cases for hundreds of years, from the sovereignty of the empire which ruled them. Nationalism also aimed at uniting the disunited states and tribes of a people into one nation-state strong enough to stand up to the foreign empire. President Woodrow Wilson called this idea the “self-determination of peoples.” Let the Serbians rule Serbia, let the Poles rule Poland, let the Indians rule India, and so on.
Many Jews looked upon these nationalist movements with envy, and saw within them the antidote to anti-semitism. Zionism is the idea that the Jews around the world should form their own Jewish nation. Zionists argued that Jews had a distinct and cohesive cultural identity all around the world. They argued that Jews must also unite and form a nation-state if they will ever be able to determine their own fate, to revive Jewish culture, and to save themselves from anti-semitic terror.
Not all Jews were Zionists. In fact, most Jews thought the Zionists were crazy. They reasoned: Why should we leave our homes where we are happy? Yes, there is antisemitism, but much less so than anytime before. The liberal age is the most tolerant age for Jews that ever existed, and the nations of Western Europe are headed in the right direction. Jews in Britain felt a stronger identity with Britain than with Jews from Russia. Many Western Jews hated Jews from Eastern Europe, and looked down on them as lower class, uneducated peasants who embarrassed the Jewish people. The Zionist claim that all Jews formed a monolithic international nationality seemed absurd. Moreover, where would this nation be?
Zionists had no land upon which to build a nation-state. Worldwide Jews consisted primarily of urban populations and nomadic farmers in Eastern Europe. Some Zionists considered buying up land in South America or Africa, but the Zionists quickly determined that Palestine, the land of the Biblical kingdom of Israel, was their destination. Certain religious nuts, including many Christians around the world, became Zionists convinced that the Messiah would come, or come again, when the Jews reoccupied the land of Israel. The problem was, there were already hundreds of thousands of people living in Palestine. If the Zionists wanted to create a Jewish nation in Palestine, they would have to destroy the Palestinian nation, legally if possible, and violently if necessary. Otherwise, the Zionists would have to accept a binational state where the Jews did not control their own destiny, but lived under the auspices of an Arab kingdom which held sovereignty over them or shared sovereignty with them. The Zionists were not interested in sharing sovereignty.
The intentions of the Zionist movement were, from the beginning, to establish not merely a homeland, but a Jewish state, in Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, one of the most preeminent Zionists in the world, proclaimed that the goal of Zionism was “to make Palestine as Jewish as England was English.” The Zionists of Palestine and around the world would never accept any state in Palestine unless either the Jews had secured a comfortable majority or that state would be under the undemocratic control of the Jewish minority. Peace with Arabs could only ever mean one thing: Arab submission to the Zionist demands. For the Arabs to oppose the Zionist demands of unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine, of the dispossession of the native Arabs of their lands, and of the erection of a racial caste system with the Jewish minority in the driver’s seat, was construed as anti-semitism and as a threat of genocide against the Jews. As far as the Zionists were concerned, Palestine was already their land by divine and/or racial right and the Arabs could only exist there at the mercy of their new Jewish masters. The Jews came to Palestine with racist arrogance, imperial intentions, modern military equipment, and foreign capital to take over that land. Any opposition to this program on the part of the Arabs was perceived as an act of aggression. The meaning of peace with Israel is: lack of opposition to Zionism. But Zionism is a program nobody can accept without also accepting the notions of ethno-nationalism, imperialism, socialism, militarism, and religious zealotry.
So what is Zionism? Zionism is ethno-nationalism for Jews. The cornerstone of Zionism is the belief that Jews are a superior race whose rights transcend the ordinary rights of other people. It is the belief that the racial and/or religious claims of the Jewish people to the land of Palestine are stronger than the objective property rights of the Palestinian Arabs, be they Muslim, Christian, or Jew, to that same land. It is the belief that the ordinary notions of international law and property rights do not apply to the state of Israel as they apply to other nations and peoples. It is the belief that the Jews are under a constant threat of antisemitism, that another Holocaust is just around the corner, and therefore any threat to the state of Israel is a threat to the lives and civil rights of all Jews throughout the world. It is the belief that in their heart of hearts, gentiles can never really accept the Jews as equals in either national, cultural, or fraternal terms. Zionism is the rejection of assimilationism. It is the belief that Jews can never become Americans, or Englishmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, but that every Jew is a Jew first and a Jew forever. It is the belief that Jews are a nationality unto themselves, scattered throughout the world, and that all Jews must have an opinion on Israeli matters and a stake in Israeli ambitions, regardless of how fervently they reject Zionism or condemn the Israeli state. Zionism is an ideology which emerged from the radical politics of interwar Europe, and is a brother-ideology of Bolshevism and National Socialism.
The American idea is profoundly anti-Zionist. We in America are committed to the notion that any person, regardless of religion, race, creed, or origin, ought to be treated as an individual equal before the law with all other individuals. We believe that the word “Jew” should have no political significance. We believe that human rights derive from neither divine nor racial sources, but from the objective laws of nature. We believe that all men should have the basic legal protection of their common rights to life, liberty, and property, and that everything else in life is a private matter separate from the political sphere. That is why Jews can come to America and be fully American and fully Jewish. Jews in America are safer, freer, happier, more prosperous, and have a richer religious life than Jews anywhere else on Earth, including Israel. That is not because the Jews of America have selfishly excluded themselves from the other ethnicities in the United States and protected their cultural differences, but because they have assimilated to the American way of life, and we have assimilated them. Jews in America do not have to sacrifice their Judaism in order to be Americans, nor are they forced to join a military, or to be associated with other Jews against their will, in order to have their civil liberties protected. Jews and non Jews live in America as brothers, friends, compatriots, neighbors, and coworkers, and Jews enjoy equal political freedoms, and are subject to the same legal restrictions, as every other American. We have, unlike the Communists, the European nationalists, or the Zionists in Israel, solved the Jewish question without killing a single person or violating anyone’s rights or liberties.
But the other solutions to the Jewish question require by their very nature the adoption of psychotic and radical political programs. Whether the other nations of the world resolved the Jewish question by means of the abolition of all nationalities and distinctions between peoples, which we call Communism, or by means of the homogenization of their national populations through means of Jewish oppression, deportation, and genocide, which the Nazis called “the final solution of the Jewish Question” and the Spaniards called “inquisition,” or by means of the establishment of a Jewish state at the cost of native Palestinians, all three alternative answers to the Jewish Question involved and still involve mass psychosis, oppression, and genocide. Nazi Germany was destroyed in 1945, and the Bolsheviks purged their radical Jewish partisans in the post-war period. Alone among the three, the nation of Israel lives on. The Nation of Israel is born of the same psychotic forces which created Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and Israel today represents a great threat to world peace because of the radical nature of its founding ideology.
If the Israelis were of any other race, and had they followed any other religion, the reaction of the Arabs would have been similar. If a group of Arab Muslims had done to the Palestinians what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians, both the Palestinians and the other Middle Eastern states would have reacted with equal hostility. We know this because it has happened. Look at how the Palestinians and other Arabs have treated the Turks, the British, the French, the Jordanians, the Americans, and the Lebanese when they have threatened Arab autonomy. The problem with Israel is not who the Israelis are, but what they have done. That Israelis are Jews is entirely irrelevant. Nobody cares that Israel is Jewish. We care that the Israeli government is a militant, aggressive, expansionist, ethno-nationalist government which treats other countries and races as inferior and as deserving fewer rights. The critics of Israel do not criticize the Jewishness of Israelis, we criticize the fact that they live in houses that their military stole from the native people. Those Palestinians still have the keys and the deeds to the houses they were ethnically cleansed from seventy years ago. Not only this, but the Israelis continue their crime by actively settling the West Bank and removing even more Palestinians from their homes. The Israelis do not allow any civilized means of resolving the conflict because they know that the verdict of a just court will find them guilty of their crimes. The requirement to give justice and equal rights to the Palestinians would require the abandonment of the idea of a Jewish state. The statement “I am a Palestinian” is, in and of itself, a threat to the Zionist idea.
Certain Jews, who have nominated themselves to represent all Jews around the world, are unable to comprehend that nobody cares that they’re Jewish. Just because your world revolves around your identity and victim complex does not mean other people are as obsessed with you or your God as you are, and it does not mean that other people have to sacrifice their rights or their lives in order to mollify your feelings. The feeling that the Jews of Israel live on the verge of a Holocaust is only a feeling. From the moment the first Zionists set foot in Palestine, they were the most armed and militant people in the region, and probably on Earth. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s portrayal of Jews as helpless, desperate, and weak victims living on the edge of extermination is simply not true. Israelis have been by far the strongest, scariest, and most militarily competent soldiers on Earth since the 1920s. Since the 1920s, the Israelis have been by far the strongest military power in the region. Far from a David fighting Goliath, at any point between 1948 and today Israel had more military power than every other country in the Middle East. Israel has, on several occasions, defeated large coalitions of Arab states alone. Israel also has stronger alliances, economic power, technical skill, and military professionalism than any other Middle Eastern country.
Yet Jewish Zionists deeply feel that, if the Jewish state did not exist, the Jews of Israel or even all the Jews on earth would come under threat of annihilation. To them, any threat to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is viewed as anti-semitic and even genocidal. They take all fundamental criticism of Israel as a personal and emotional threat to their safety. The problem is, that their definition of a “threat to the Jewish state” is so wide as to include any condemnation of Israelis. The suggestion that Palestinians have rights, or even that Palestinians exist at all, is considered by them to be an anti-semitic threat to execute another Holocaust. That is why with Israel we have the eccentric phenomenon of a country actively committing war crimes which honestly believes it is committing war crimes in self-defense. As the Israelis commit a genocide, they complain that they are the victims of genocide. As they invade another country, they complain that they are being invaded.
Thus, any suggestion that the Israelis do not have the right to treat non-Jews in any way they wish, or that they do not have a right to have whatever borders they wish, or that Jews do not have a right to resolve the conflict with violence, or that Arabs do have a right to use violence in self-defense, is regarded as tantamount to stuffing Jews into trains at Treblinka. Certain American Jews, like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, feel emotionally and existentially attacked at the level of their basic human identity when another even claims that Israel prefers violence and war to peace without a unified Jewish state (including obviously non-Israeli territories like the West Bank and the Golan Heights). They resort to Nazi similes faster than lightning. They think that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would amount to a Czech withdrawal from the Sudetenland. The truth is that it is Israel in the position of Germany after it had already annexed Czechoslovakia and the Palestinians in the position of the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Israel would rather annex the West Bank than have peace with the Arabs. Everybody prefers achieving their ends by peaceful means rather than by military means. If the Palestinians felt that they could achieve their ends peacefully, they would not use violence. Neither the Israelis nor the Arabs view violence as an end in itself. The question is not whether Israelis or Palestinians want peace or want war. Under different circumstances, all people would prefer war to peace or peace to war. The question is: what peace and what war? We would all prefer if the Israelis and Palestinians resorted to peaceful, lawful, and just means of settling their conflicts. But the Israelis refuse to give peaceful methods of resolution to the Palestinians or the Arabs more broadly. The Israeli demands are simply unreasonable. The Israelis prefer the status quo to a peace which would require them to surrender their stolen property. What the Palestinians mean by peace is peace between equals. What the Israelis mean by peace is submission.
Anti-Zionism and anti-semitism are different things. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism, or opposition to the settlement of Palestine by Jews for the purpose of creating a Jewish state. Anti-semitism is the hatred of Jews because they are Jews. Anti-semitism certainly exists in the world, and its existence is a scourge that I, and almost all people in America, despise. The word “anti-semite” has been devalued in recent years just as the words “racism,” “sexism,” and “bigotry” have been devalued for political gain. By lumping in real anti-semites with normal people who have reasonable criticisms (be they well- or ill-founded) of Israel without reference to Jews as people, Zionists achieve the short-run political gain of slightly dirtying their opponents by associating them with ugly people while creating the long-run political loss of greatly sanitizing anti-semites by associating them with clean people.
Ironically, it is the Zionists who act anti-semitically by asserting that Jews as people should be associated with the Israeli government and vice-versa. Many of Israel’s harshest critics are Jews, probably because Jews have a shield against the charge of anti-semitism. Yet, even Jewish anti-Zionists like Max Blumenthal, Norman Finkelstein, and Dave Smith have been accused of being “self-hating Jews” by Zionists. The idea that Jews, on account of their “race,” have a special obligation to care about, much less support, the Israeli government gives anti-semites justification in associating the worst actions of Israel with world Jewry. The answer is not that anti-semites are correct about a Jewish conspiracy, but that the identification of Jews as a people with the government of Israel is unjustified.
The United States has, on many occasions, gone to war with (or otherwise had interests contrary to the interests of) countries from which a substantial minority of our immigrants hailed. The United States has been in conflict against Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Ireland (by allying with Britain in World War One), Mexico, and many other countries. It is normal for Italian Americans to feel differently about fighting a war against their kinsmen than other Americans feel about fighting Italy. It is easy for a minority to convince itself that what is best for their national homeland happens to be what is best for the United States, too. However, the United States must be vigilant not to show bias in diplomatic affairs on account of the special interests of one particular minority in the country, and instead to do what is in the national interest of the United States as a whole. At the same time, such minorities who, on account of race or nationality, may appear to have biases against the national interest, must be free of suspicion until evidence suggests that they have undermined America’s interest in favor of their ethnic homeland.
In the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Israelis have committed countless ruthless terrorist attacks, war crimes, flagrant violations of international law, and a dishonest foreign policy. Israeli leaders are proud that they commit war crimes. At least six Israeli prime ministers have personally committed atrocities, terrorist attacks, war crimes, or aggressive wars of conquest which in a just world would have them tried at the Hague and executed. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu are all war criminals who would be executed for war crimes and terrorism under international law if international law applied to Israel.
Many people seem to believe that the conflict is one-sided and that the Arabs are brutes whereas the Israelis are good liberals with good intentions. This is simply false. Israel has committed many war crimes, provocations, and atrocities, celebrated them, and then promoted the war criminals to lead their army and their government. In fact, Israeli atrocities are too numerous to ever name them all with justice, because the sun would swallow the solar system before the speaker finished reading the list. But to prove to Americans that the Israelis have a history of terrorism and war crimes, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
Here is a list of Israeli atrocities, assassinations, terrorist attacks, war crimes, and provocations: the assassination of Lord Moyne, the assassination of Count Bernadotte, the sinking of the SS Patria, the massacre of Deir Yassin, the liquidation of Haifa, the Lydda massacre, the al-Dawayima massacre, the Nakba, the Qibya Massacre, Operation Kinneret, the Lavon Affair, the attempt to annex the Sinai peninsula in a war of conquest in 1956, the Samu incident, the attack of the USS Liberty, the murder of Ahmed Bouchikhi, the colonization of occupied territories in the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan heights, the illegal invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the attempt to spark Civil War in Lebanon, the arming of Maronite terrorists, the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the murder of Palestinian children during the first Intifada, the destruction of Jenin 2002, Operation Cast Lead, the sniping of unarmed protestors during the 2018 Great March of Return, and the bombing of hospitals and UN sanctuaries in the current retaliation war. This is not even one percent of the war crimes Israel has committed. The Zionists and their British allies have murdered tens of thousands and ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the course of the Zionist project.
The problem is not that war crimes happen. The problem is that Israel deliberately orders its armed forces to commit war crimes and the Israeli public valorizes and rewards terrorists. The Israeli government and military acts with systematic disregard for civilian casualties. Ariel Sharon once told his soldiers, “whoever kills a terrorist gets a bottle of Champagne, whoever takes prisoners gets a bottle of soda.” In the US military, that statement alone would be the end of his military career. Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir, for example, are all literal murderers, terrorists, and psychopaths who are just as evil as the worst war criminals of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Electing Ariel Sharon prime minister is akin to the United States electing William Calley, the perpetrator of the May Lai Massacre, President of the United States, and then demanding that the Vietnamese negotiate with him to make peace. Asking the Palestinians to negotiate with the Israeli government is just as absurd as asking the Israelis to negotiate with Hamas. The Israeli government is every bit as much of a terrorist organization as Hamas and Fatah. Ariel Sharon was every bit as evil as Yasser Arafat.