Philosophy Now Forum

Is anti-Zionism by definition antisemitism?

[Today’s NYTs]

The brutal shedding of Jewish blood on Oct. 7, followed by Israel’s relentless military assault on Gaza, has brought a fraught question to the fore in a moment of surging bigotry and domestic political gamesmanship: Is anti-Zionism by definition antisemitism?

The question deeply divided congressional Democrats this week when Republican leaders, seeking to drive a wedge between American Jews and the political party that three-quarters of them call their own, put it to a vote in the House. It has shaken the country’s campuses and reverberated in its city streets, where pro-Palestinian protesters bellow chants calling for Palestine to be free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

It surfaced in Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, said, “If you don’t think Israel has a right to exist, that is antisemitic.” The following night, lighting the national menorah behind the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, warned, “When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or identity, and when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is antisemitism.”

Zionism as a concept was once clearly understood: the belief that Jews, who have endured persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land of their ancestors. The word still evokes joyful pride among many Jews in the state of Israel, which was established 75 years ago and repeatedly defended itself against attacks from Arab neighbors that aimed to annihilate it.

If anti-Zionism a century ago meant opposing the international effort to set up a Jewish state in what was then a British-controlled territory called Palestine, it now suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews. That, many Jews in Israel and the diaspora say, is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.

Yet some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state. That effort animates an Israeli government bent on settling ever more parts of the West Bank that some Israelis, as well as the United States and other Western powers, had proposed as a separate state for the Palestinian people. Expanding those settlements, to Israel’s critics, conjures images of “settler colonialists” and apartheid-style oppressors.

Walker wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:43 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:33 pm... the new moniker "accelafine", who mysteriously jouned the same moment that VT was banned.

Huh? I can't imagine what she possibly could have said to get banned that she hasn't said before.

Oh yes... And Walker. I forgot to add him to the list of those that post in ignorance of basic facts

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:39 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:33 pm Then we have the monumental ignorance of Vegetarian Taxidermy now going under the new moniker "accelafine", who mysteriously jouned the same moment that VT was banned.

I appreciate the investigative journalism you've done, I wouldn't have noticed that if you didn't tell us - not sarcastically, I'm serious, I feel like my tone is coming across sarcastically and I don't mean that. I'm genuinely glad you're sharing that.

Why did vt get banned? It takes a lot to get banned here, she must have done something particularly unsavoury.

I think persistent accusations of "Nazi", but you would have to ask the Mod.

This moderator who claims to be a sculptor should change his name to comedian. I mean, how many fucking accounts has he had?
He incites people to commit suicide (which is actually illegal btw) just because they expose his complete lack of an argument yet still manages to keep posting without getting banned and continues to abuse everyone he interacts with. Extraordinary, but sort of pathetic too. A nasty little megalomaniac.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:48 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:39 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:33 pm Then we have the monumental ignorance of Vegetarian Taxidermy now going under the new moniker "accelafine", who mysteriously jouned the same moment that VT was banned.

I appreciate the investigative journalism you've done, I wouldn't have noticed that if you didn't tell us - not sarcastically, I'm serious, I feel like my tone is coming across sarcastically and I don't mean that. I'm genuinely glad you're sharing that.

Why did vt get banned? It takes a lot to get banned here, she must have done something particularly unsavoury.

I think persistent accusations of "Nazi", but you would have to ask the Mod.

Seems like a weird place to draw the line to me, but interesting nonetheless. Fair enough.

Could one be an actual nazi and continue to post here with that being explicitly known?

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:33 pm Then we have the monumental ignorance of Vegetarian Taxidermy now going under the new moniker "accelafine", who mysteriously jouned the same moment that VT was banned. Her ignorance was of the fact that Netanyahu has been happliy funding Hamas for some time.

These people are not arguing from the facts, but just spewing their prejudice.

It was a pre-emptive name change, because VT posted up to the 14th and accelafine started on the 4th. Not saying your wrong, but there's overlap. How does one find out someone is banned?

accelafine wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 1:23 pm his complete lack of an argument

If true this would make you mirror images.

This was actually a pretty interesting experiment to watch, many of you have been chatting with VT for years yet almost none of you recognized her when she made a new nick.

The reasons I have participated on this forum -- on the Christianity thread and now mostly on threads dealing with Israel politics and world-events -- is entirely personal. I have my own purposes and objectives. On a personal level, and somewhat recently, I feel I have made a sort of breakthrough. I have come to realize -- here I speak as an American -- that the issue of Israel and what Christian Zionism and Jewish and Israeli manipulation of Christian Zionism has brought about in the US is extremely and in my view thoroughly destructive. It seems, I gather, to those like Eisenhower and Truman after WW2 that immediate recognition and support of Israel was the proper 'moral choice'. And for quite some time I defended a pro-Israel and Zionist narrative with a similar zealousness with which I now oppose the same. This leads me to wonder about the frailty and flexibility of our moral grounding but this is another question.

It may interest those who bother to read here that even though I defended Israel I did so through an odd intellectual manoeuvre. It was clear to me that there was no coherent justification for a people, the Jews, exiled for 2,000 years from that land, to justify morally or politically their claim to recover and reconquer that land and displace (and kill off) the Palestinian inhabitants. So what method (manoeuvre, strategy) was required? A defense of the Power Principle. Essential Machiavellianism.

That webpage centers on the psychological aspect, but I refer more to the political or the business and military aspect of Machiavellianism. It is a sort of doctrine in which power does what power needs to in order to secure its objectives, and then uses rhetorical skill and tactics of intellectual manipulation to justify its actions and *explain* them to the populations whose assent it must have to hold what power attained. There are many ways to approach an understanding of this: advertising, public relations, "spin", but at the core of it there is the most relevant part: that to engage in it requires self-deception. Or perhaps what I mean is obscuration of what one knows, or feels, to be true. In other words since it is not possible to tell the real truth (about some power-machination) openly and directly, you have to dress it up through rhetorical subterfuge so that it appears to be *right and correct* and therefore justifiable.

There is really a great deal that one could say about this issue but my objective here is to focus exclusively on the influence of the so-called Israel Lobby in a concerted manipulation of the State (US) and a mass deception of the people that resulted in 30 years of war on the Middle East. I strongly feel that a large percentage of this was for the benefit of the state of Israel and this, naturally, points to excessive Israeli and Jewish (Neocon) power within the halls of the American power structure. But here is the most important point: you are not allowed to see what you see; you are not allowed to state what it is that you see; and you are not allowed to challenge the policies that result through the influence of the Israel Lobby. The problem, or a problem, is the deep identification most Jews have with the Israeli state. It is next to impossible to reason with someone who actually believes that their existential continuation depends on the state of Israel.

There is no doubt (in my mind) that Israel was founded by *settler-occupier colonialists* whose initial acts can only be described as *injustices* -- that is if we are grounded in a modern ethical and moral position. Hence the only way to justify what is not justifiable is through elaborate trickery, rhetorical manipulation, and as it turns out *the art of lying*. And if one does see clearly that the original actions were of this sort, but yet one chooses to hold to and defend the Power Principle, one at that point has a difficult row to hoe. Can it be done? Yes, I think it can, but I am unsure if we will like the results. The fact is that right now this is the situation we are in.

For this reason, and to understand what I am trying to explain and the position I hold to, you would have to have at least understood the moral gist opened up in this conversation: Brianna Joy Gray interviews Miko Peled (Israeli pro-Palestinian activist).

And then to have looked into and understood the deeply weird and profoundly troubling issue of the influence of Christian Zionism.

Does Miko Peled really imagine that the State of Israel will incorporate a greater number of ethnic Arabs into a democratic Israeli state in a way comparable to what South Africa did 1994? Just try to imagine the social, political and religious upheavals that this would involve! It is, I might propose, impossible and unrealistic to even think in such terms. Or is it?

While I believe that I can understand Miko Peled's choice to oppose racism and apartheid -- and indeed this is what his position boils down to -- there are additional meanings that extend from this. If that is your view of what should happen in Israel, and if it is your view that what happened in South Africa as *right and good*, then in fact you are advocating for the destruction of everything that we define as *our identity*. You will eo ipso support politics that undermine social and political identifications. You will advocate for a State that you join for reasons of accepting "propositions" (as in Lincoln's definition of a *propositional nation*) but not on the basis of ethnic or cultural identity. You will, essentially, advocate for the remodeling of modern states along the lines of our own ultra-liberal ideology. I bring this up because all over Europe, and perhaps in other parts of the world, there are factions of activists who oppose ultra-liberalism and seek to reestablish national and cultural identifications, not to do away with them.

So let me return to an issue that has been somewhat vital in my own case: the support I have shown for the French state and French culture to recover and empower its *cultural identifications* and to oppose or block or even turn away (i.e. deport) the Arabs who simply by practicing being themselves, and who do not wish to become French and become *incorporated* into French society, and indeed who are blocked from doing so by those with strong French identity who Miko Peled would necessarily define as *racist* or *culturally chauvinist* and any number of bad words implying immorality -- if I now oppose my own position by opposing Israeli-Jewish identification I will, basically, have to adopt a whole other one in relation to al states and nations.

How curious then that to oppose *supremacism* in one state or nation -- by that I mean the justifiable domination of one group with all its cultural identifications held to by traditionalism -- that you advocate (ultimatley) for the undermining of all identifications upon which distinctions are based.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 1:58 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:33 pm Then we have the monumental ignorance of Vegetarian Taxidermy now going under the new moniker "accelafine", who mysteriously jouned the same moment that VT was banned. Her ignorance was of the fact that Netanyahu has been happliy funding Hamas for some time.

These people are not arguing from the facts, but just spewing their prejudice.

It was a pre-emptive name change, because VT posted up to the 14th and accelafine started on the 4th. Not saying your wrong, but there's overlap. How does one find out someone is banned?

I think VT had had a previous warning and so preemepted her ban since, I image, she found it impossible to act reasonably?

I do not think that she gives a fart about Israel or Gaza, but it's a negative response to anything she finds on the Forum that she considers "woke". Its some sort of obsession.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 2:27 pm The reasons I have participated on this forum -- on the Christianity thread and now mostly on threads dealing with Israel politics and world-events -- is entirely personal. I have my own purposes and objectives. On a personal level, and somewhat recently, I feel I have made a sort of breakthrough. I have come to realize -- here I speak as an American -- that the issue of Israel and what Christian Zionism and Jewish and Israeli manipulation of Christian Zionism has brought about in the US is extremely and in my view thoroughly destructive. It seems, I gather, to those like Eisenhower and Truman after WW2 that immediate recognition and support of Israel was the proper 'moral choice'. And for quite some time I defended a pro-Israel and Zionist narrative with a similar zealousness with which I now oppose the same. This leads me to wonder about the frailty and flexibility of our moral grounding but this is another question.

I think many people have made this transition.
From a willing support of a decimated people given a "homeland" combined with postive media coverage of the wars in '67 and again in '74, I waved on the Isreali troops like every one else, and growing negative media coverage of Arab especially around the time of the OPEC Oil crisis. Israle's image was in stark contrast to the "dirty Arab".
As one grows up and understands he imperial arrogance of the Balfour Agrement and the Sykes/Pichot forces an objective look at the actual situation, and never before hearing of the "Nakba". And once you imagine what it would have been like to the people "displaced" (to use a euphemism), by the foundation of Israel. The you learn about the terrorists who founded the state in '48.
Questions obviously arise.

It may interest those who bother to read here that even though I defended Israel I did so through an odd intellectual manoeuvre. It was clear to me that there was no coherent justification for a people, the Jews, exiled for 2,000 years from that land, to justify morally or politically their claim to recover and reconquer that land and displace (and kill off) the Palestinian inhabitants. So what method (manoeuvre, strategy) was required? A defense of the Power Principle. Essential Machiavellianism.

Growing up in the world means take a step back and questioning the endemic assumptions that are taken for granted. GIve Israel back to the Jews? Of course.... wait a minute now. So let's return the map to the condition it was at the time of Hadrian? What could go wrong?
How absurd a document of the Balfour Decaration. And it is not essentially racist?

That webpage centers on the psychological aspect, but I refer more to the political or the business and military aspect of Machiavellianism. It is a sort of doctrine in which power does what power needs to in order to secure its objectives, and then uses rhetorical skill and tactics of intellectual manipulation to justify its actions and *explain* them to the populations whose assent it must have to hold what power attained. There are many ways to approach an understanding of this: advertising, public relations, "spin", but at the core of it there is the most relevant part: that to engage in it requires self-deception. Or perhaps what I mean is obscuration of what one knows, or feels, to be true. In other words since it is not possible to tell the real truth (about some power-machination) openly and directly, you have to dress it up through rhetorical subterfuge so that it appears to be *right and correct* and therefore justifiable.

There is really a great deal that one could say about this issue but my objective here is to focus exclusively on the influence of the so-called Israel Lobby in a concerted manipulation of the State (US) and a mass deception of the people that resulted in 30 years of war on the Middle East. I strongly feel that a large percentage of this was for the benefit of the state of Israel and this, naturally, points to excessive Israeli and Jewish (Neocon) power within the halls of the American power structure. But here is the most important point: you are not allowed to see what you see; you are not allowed to state what it is that you see; and you are not allowed to challenge the policies that result through the influence of the Israel Lobby. The problem, or a problem, is the deep identification most Jews have with the Israeli state. It is next to impossible to reason with someone who actually believes that their existential continuation depends on the state of Israel.

There is no doubt (in my mind) that Israel was founded by *settler-occupier colonialists* whose initial acts can only be described as *injustices* -- that is if we are grounded in a modern ethical and moral position. Hence the only way to justify what is not justifiable is through elaborate trickery, rhetorical manipulation, and as it turns out *the art of lying*. And if one does see clearly that the original actions were of this sort, but yet one chooses to hold to and defend the Power Principle, one at that point has a difficult row to hoe. Can it be done? Yes, I think it can, but I am unsure if we will like the results. The fact is that right now this is the situation we are in.

For this reason, and to understand what I am trying to explain and the position I hold to, you would have to have at least understood the moral gist opened up in this conversation: Brianna Joy Gray interviews Miko Peled (Israeli pro-Palestinian activist).

And then to have looked into and understood the deeply weird and profoundly troubling issue of the influence of Christian Zionism.

Does Miko Peled really imagine that the State of Israel will incorporate a greater number of ethnic Arabs into a democratic Israeli state in a way comparable to what South Africa did 1994? Just try to imagine the social, political and religious upheavals that this would involve! It is, I might propose, impossible and unrealistic to even think in such terms. Or is it?

While I believe that I can understand Miko Peled's choice to oppose racism and apartheid -- and indeed this is what his position boils down to -- there are additional meanings that extend from this. If that is your view of what should happen in Israel, and if it is your view that what happened in South Africa as *right and good*, then in fact you are advocating for the destruction of everything that we define as *our identity*. You will eo ipso support politics that undermine social and political identifications. You will advocate for a State that you join for reasons of accepting "propositions" (as in Lincoln's definition of a *propositional nation*) but not on the basis of ethnic or cultural identity. You will, essentially, advocate for the remodeling of modern states along the lines of our own ultra-liberal ideology. I bring this up because all over Europe, and perhaps in other parts of the world, there are factions of activists who oppose ultra-liberalism and seek to reestablish national and cultural identifications, not to do away with them.

So let me return to an issue that has been somewhat vital in my own case: the support I have shown for the French state and French culture to recover and empower its *cultural identifications* and to oppose or block or even turn away (i.e. deport) the Arabs who simply by practicing being themselves, and who do not wish to become French and become *incorporated* into French society, and indeed who are blocked from doing so by those with strong French identity who Miko Peled would necessarily define as *racist* or *culturally chauvinist* and any number of bad words implying immorality.

How curious then that to oppose *supremacism* in one state or nation -- by that I mean the justifiable domination of one group with all its cultural identifications held to by traditionalism -- that you advocate (ultimatley) for the undermining of all identifications upon which distinctions are based.

A good and thoughtful post.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 2:45 pm GIve Israel back to the Jews? Of course.... wait a minute now. So let's return the map to the condition it was at the time of Hadrian? What could go wrong?
How absurd a document of the Balfour Decaration. And it is not essentially racist?

While I fundamentally agree with this, it also sort of becomes hard to consider because it's too late to undo it. How would you undo this terrible injustice?

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 2:53 pm While I fundamentally agree with this, it also sort of becomes hard to consider because it's too late to undo it. How would you undo this terrible injustice?

It is interesting to make a comparison between the world-level zealousness to democratize the South African state, and the degree to which no similar mood or zealousness exists today or is even conceived in respect to Israel.

Here is Biden years ago railing against South Africa.

The argument being made today is that Israel is non-different, at least in some senses which are notable, from South Africa.