Israel’s Harshest Critics

 

Israel and its supporters have gone to enormous expense to promote the idea that if you criticize Israel, you are an antisemite. They recently persuaded the U.S. House of Representatives to declare “that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” 

 Numerous U.S. universities, to cite another example, have been extorted into suppressing pro-Palestinian views on their campuses under the threat of being charged with antisemitism.

There is no other country in the world whose government you can’t criticize without being accused of the vilest kind of cultural/religious hatred. You are free to criticize Saudi Arabi without being labelled anti-Muslem. You can question the government of India and nobody will say you must hate Hindus. You can disagree with Spain without being ostracized as an ignorant Catholic-hater.

Only Israel has succeeded in conflating honest criticism with irrational hatred.

 

But Israel’s harshest and most articulate critics have always been Jewish. Most of what I know about Israel and its criminal mistreatment of indigenous Palestinians is from Jewish writers. I have great admiration for many of them.

Here are five in particular, though many more could be named:

Amy Goodman is the host of the best widely available current events show, Democracy Now. That show, unlike any of the corporate news outlets, has consistently included the Palestinian point of view regarding the 75-year takeover of their lands.

Goodman’s maternal grandmother was an orthodox rabbi, and a paternal great grandfather was also a rabbi.  Goodman herself identifies as a “secular Jew” who was influenced by Jewish ethical, moral, and cultural principles. In an online profile, journalist Philip Eil wrote of Goodman:

For her, being Jewish means “a deep belief that ‘Never again’ means never should any group of people be oppressed like we saw in the Holocaust,” she said. Her Judaism also imbues her with “deep respect for everyone and everyone’s traditions… Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish.” A third Jewish principle? “Question everything.”

 

Norman Finkelstein is an extremely serious scholar who has devoted most of his life to examining the documentary history of the Israel-Palestine “conflict.” His mother survived both the Warsaw ghetto and the Majdenek Concentration Camp. His father survived the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz.

His books are not easy reads, but they rather relentlessly expose the many lies upon which the mythology of Israel depends. They are meticulously researched and documented. They include Beyond Hutzpah: On the Misuse of Antisemitism and the Abuse of History; Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict; and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.

Here is a typical observation of Finkelstein’s, from Beyond Hutzpah, which, bear in mind, appeared in 2005, nearly twenty years before the most recent so-called war:

“The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. 

Finkelstein is greatly despised by the Israel lobby. In 2007, Alan Dershowitz (of Epstein files fame), led a campaign to get Finkelstein fired from his faculty position at Depaul University. (Finkelstein’s Beyond Hutzpah had systematically pointed out numerous problems in Dershowitz’s book, The Case for Israel, resulting in a kind of feud between the two.)

Finkelstein’s tenure had been approved by The College of Humanities Personnel Committee by a vote of 5-0, and his department approved him by a 9-3 count. But the university president and board of trustees, under great pressure from Dershowitz and friends, decided he had to go.

Finkelstein, however, continues to be one of the great debunker's of Israel's victimhood narrative.

 

 Max Blumenthal is the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (more on which in a minute.) He is also the editor and a primary founder of the website “Grayzone,” which, according to Wikipedia, has been “described by many as fringe.” Which means, in other words, that he shares with Amy Goodman the “Question Everything” principle -- especially as that principle applies to the narratives of the U.S.-based Empire.

 Blumenthal’s book, Goliath, is a report from several extended visits he made to Israel over a four-year period starting in 2009. He cites dozens of ways, maybe hundreds, large and small, that Arabs living in Israel or in the Israeli occupied territories are dispossessed, humiliated, jailed, detained, tortured, and otherwise denied basic rights every day.

The result is a portrait of a country reminiscent of the American south during segregation or South Africa during Apartheid.

Note that Blumenthal’s book, like the above quote from Finkelstein, was published more than a decade before the Hamas attacks of October 2023.

For his effort, Blumenthal was roundly excoriated by Israel supporters. Writing in Observer.com, Rabbi Shmealy Boteach got right to it:

“Max is quite simply one of the most biased, anti-Semitic, terrorist-defending, Israel-has-no-right-to-exist haters out there.”

On a visit to Germany, Blumenthal was similarly labeled antisemitic by German parliamentarian Volker Beck. Blumenthal’s response speaks directly to the point that apologizing for Israel should not be required for membership in the Jewish religion.

As long as Judaism is conflated with Zionism, a pro-Israel gentile like Volker Beck can declare himself in so many words more Jewish than I am, and I can be essentially de-Judaized; my Jewish identity can be negated, simply because I’ve defined it outside the frontiers of Israeli nationalism and to some extent, against Zionism.

 

Amy Kaplan was a highly respected scholar of American Studies at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. Her 2018 book, Our Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, examines certain mythologies common to both the U.S. and Israel. Among them are the following:

 (1) the myth of a mostly empty wilderness whose indigenous savages need to be removed to make way for a far more superior race and civilization.

 (2) the myth of what Kaplan calls “the invincible victim,” by which a group  envisions itself as a plucky underdog even as it violently rolls over weaker enemies and becomes enormously powerful.

(3) the mythology of the Christian Zionist movement built around selected passages from the Old Testament and Book of Revelation. Kaplan asserts that evangelical Christianity played an important role in shaping American culture, starting with the puritanical teachings of the leaders of the New England colonies. It helped justify, among other things, the removal of indigenous people.

Similarly, today, says Kaplan:

evangelical Christians have become fervent political supporters of Israel, and many of them have looked to Israel both as the setting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and as the primary actor in hastening that event.

As one of her cases in point, Kaplan examines the 1958 novel Exodus, by Leon Uris, and the film version of the same title starring Paul Newman. Both were hugely popular and, Kaplan argues, contributed greatly to the mythologies mentioned above.

She points out that the Palestinians in Exodus are portrayed much like American “Indians” were once portrayed as they were being displaced. Savage and ignorant, they stand in the way of human progress.  Kaplan cites one example, where a character in Exodus, named Kitty, ruminates on some Palestinian children:

How pathetic [Kitty thought] the dirty little Arab children were beside the robust [Israeli] youngsters of Gan Dafna. How futile their lives seemed in contrast…. There seemed to be no laughter or songs or games or purpose among the Arab children. It was a static existence – a new generation born on an eternal caravan in an endless desert.

In other words, as Kaplan says, the Arabs in Exodus are “the antithesis of enlightenment.” They “bear the major responsibility for their own destruction, as though their backwardness inevitably caused them to give way before progress.”

Ilan Pappe is best known for his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which he shows that, contrary to popular Israeli mythology, the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was a deliberate, carefully planned project by Israeli leaders and militias.

Pappe was born and grew up in Israel. His parents had fled there from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. "My mother had seven sisters, and only three survived [the Holocaust]" Pappe once said. "There were similar stories on my father's side.” And his parents, Pappe continued,

 “… saw Palestine and, later, the state of Israel as a safe haven. And that's the part of me that can't totally condemn Zionism. Had it not been for the Zionist movement, my parents and many like them would not have escaped.”

"I've never underestimated those achievements, Pappe said. However:

…my parents could never see that setting up a Jewish state was done by dispossessing Palestinians. They turned a blind eye, in the same way that many Germans did in the 30s and 40s.

 

Like other Israeli critics, Pappe has been vilified by Israel supporters. In one typical review, conservative writer David Pryce-Jones called Pappe “"an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for".

Others

The five people described above are just a small sample of Israel’s Jewish critics. For anyone interested, here are a few others, with links to an example of their work:

Medea Benjamin

Gideon Levy

Peter Beinert

Ariel Gold

Naomi Klein

Katie Halper

Albert Einstein           

Gabor Mate

Primo Levi

Noam Chomsky

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