Jane Hirschmann of “Jews Say No!” Says “No!” to Israel’s Gaza Policy

In November 2008, the ceasefire ended—Israeli soldiers broke it in a cross-border raid killing six members of Hamas. In response, rockets were launched into Israel, so Israel, fortified with American weaponry, attacked the people of Gaza. Approximately 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed compared to 13 Israelis. Gaza was pulverized. Judge Richard Goldstone and his team reported there was no doubt that the people of Gaza were disproportionally affected.

Right after the invasion in Gaza I became one of the organizers of “Jews Say No!” in New York City. We wanted to make clear that the Israeli government did not speak in our name as they claimed. I began reading about the occupation, settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building of the separation wall, Jewish-only streets for Israeli settlers, special identity papers for Palestinian citizens of Israel—one step away from wearing a yellow star—and the other indignities endured by the people of Palestine on a daily basis. And I saw the total collusion by the US government—its unconditional support no matter what the Israeli government did, including giving them 30 billion dollars over a 10-year period for weaponry—F16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorus, Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in Bedouin encampments—used ruthlessly against the Palestinians. This was intolerable for me.

I understand the fears and frustrations of Israelis being fired upon by rockets and the resultant deaths and injuries. But what about the thousands of Palestinians being killed and whose homes, schools, hospitals, farms, mills, factories and infrastructure are being destroyed? What about a people living under a brutal occupation who are being denied the right to live with dignity in their own homeland? The siege and blockade of Gaza continue. The Israeli government controls the land, sea and air of this small area (25 miles long and roughly six miles wide) where 1.6 million people live.

Lightly edited extract from Counterpunch. Jane Hirschmann is a member of “Jews Say No!” in New York City and one of the national organizers of the US Boat to Gaza. Hirschmann has been active in anti-war efforts for the past four decades. She is a psychotherapist and the co-author of three books. More information about the The Audacity of Hope is available at www.ustogaza.org.

A Tale of Two Countries

Libya—a Rogue State

We found out last night that the British parliament is not a coalition of the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats, it includes the Labour Party. When it comes to warfare, the UK has only one party—the Gang of Three. The House of Commons voted by 557 to 13 to support the UN resolution 1973 on Libya. The thirteen MPs with the principle to vote against were:

John Baron (C: Basildon & Billericay), Graham Allen (L: Nottingham North), Ronnie Campbell (L: NBlyth Valley), Jeremy Corbyn (L: NIslington North), Barry Gardiner (L: NBrent North), Roger Godsiff (L: NBirmingham Hall Green), John McDonnell (L: NHayes and Harlington), Linda Riordan (L: NHalifax), Dennis Skinner (L: NBolsover), Mike Wood (L: NBatley and Spen), Katy Clark (L: NNorth Ayrshire and Arran), Yasmin Qureshi (L: NBolton South-East), Caroline Lucas (Green: Brighton Pavilion), Mark Durkan (SDLP: Foyle), Margaret Ritchie (SDLP: Down South).

The rest either abstained, showing they are good for nothing, or voted for yet another middle eastern war. These people have no excuse. They have seen what Blair and Bush did in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan, but they are so lacking in principle and dripping in opportunistic self satisfaction that they ignored what they know… for self advancement. They are not fit to be MPs. They are not fit to be in Parliament. Parliament requires an opposition or it is as much a dictatorship as Libya. What is the point of choosing a representative when all of them vote according to the script that suits the MP and not what the citizens they represent want.

These people have killed democracy as we know it. As we know it it is pointless, and it needs now to be re-thought. The present system is a careerist gravy train for crooks, who, on this vote, outnumber principled MPs 43 to 1. We cannot expect Parliament to reform itself, so we, the people, will have to reform it as we have had to do in the seventeenth century, and twice in the nineteenth century by revolution and the threat of revolution. Britons died on these occasions, and doubtless the same will again be true. To achieve fairness and justice ordinary people always die.

Will the French, Americans and Arabs be organizing a humanitarian “No Fly Zone” over the UK when our government turns the troops against its people? No chance! If anything, they will do the same as in Libya. The “No Fly Zone” over Libya is obviously… obviously… not a humanitarian venture.

Just how do you save people from being killed by bombing them? It is exactly the same in Afghanistan where even Karzai, the US stooge, now wants the US and its lapdogs out, after a series of mass murders of civilians, often by US drones. It shows the poltroonery of the US and its allies. They are doing their best to engage the enemy by robots in case they might get killed themselves, so they sent pilotless aircraft to target schools and weddings, anywhere where there seems to be a gathering of people on the assumption that it is a troop of rebels.

And to what purpose? How does an ordinary Briton or American benefit from this wanton brutality? We do not. A few people employed servicing the military will briefly enjoy secure employment, but the rest of us will have to pay for this adventure, as we paid for the previous ones, by job losses and tax hikes. The beneficiaries are the rich, not us. And, when we choose to rebel against our rich dictators, the rich will use the technology they are perfecting abroad against us.

Israel—a Rogue State

Perhaps something will come out of it. It is wishful thinking, but goes like this.

Since all these MPs think it proper to support the bombing of nations that they claim a humanitarian reason for doing, they ought now to be willing to support the bombing of Israel, a rogue state which has different laws for Jews and Arabs among its own citizenry, and frequently raids Gaza, a small patch of land packed with millions of Arabs who are not Israeli citizens. Israel’s “democratic” authorities have even revoked the residency permit of the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem. Despite efforts by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the British Foreign Secretary and the British ambassador, the Israelis have not relented.

After maintaining a deafening silence about Israel’s atrocities against civilians, Britain suddenly wants a “day of reckoning” for war criminals—as long as they are Libyan.

Stuart Littlewood

The UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, promised retribution for Gaddafi’s crimes, and to refer Libya to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court:

That sends a clear message to all involved, in the regime and any other groups that if they commit crimes and atrocities there will be a day of reckoning for them.

Crimes will not go unpunished and will not be forgotten. There will be a day of reckoning and the reach of international justice is long.

British diplomats expressed the ConDem coalition’s policy as taking whatever steps were necessary…

…to ensure that those responsible for the awful human rights violations that are currently occurring in Libya are held to account… [because] we are appalled by the levels of violence… [so] The United Kingdom will do everything we can to make sure those responsible in the Libyan regime are held accountable for their actions…

Why then did we not hear this highly principled, humanitarian Foreign Secretary call for a reckoning with the Israeli regime? It murdered 1400 of Gaza’s civilians, including hundreds of children, two years ago, at Christmas! Besides the murder, the attacks left thousands maimed and myriads homeless, having to live in rubble. One UN resolution was sufficient for the bombing of Libya, but very many UN resolutions have been passed regarding Israeli oppression of Palestinians with absolutely no response at all from these humanitarian leaders of ours.

HMS York instantly appeared unloading medical supplies for the Benghazi Medical Centre, donated by the Swedish government, but nothing was available to assist when Gaza was under attack from Israeli bombers, or when Israeli soldiers acted as pirates on the high seas hijacking a Turkish ship carrying similar humanitarian aid to Gazans who are oppressed, humiliated, and impoverished every day by Israeli attacks.

Instead of seeking justice for Israeli crimes the Foreign Office is trying to change international law to let the Israeli criminals who authorized and justified them, like Tzipi Livni, Avigdor Lieberman, Ehud Barak and Binyamin Netanyahu, to move freely in the west.

Prominent Zionist Jews, who are knee jerk supporters of Israel, whatever atrocities they commit, are among the supporters of western political parties, and western leaders pander to these Zionists because they will finance them. David Cameron told a Jewish dinner, according to the Jerusalem Post:

With me you have a prime minister whose belief in Israel is indestructible… I will always be a strong defender of the Jewish people. I will always be an advocate for the State of Israel.

Cameron promises to support the Zionist state of Israel “always”—whatever crimes it commits! And then he cynically equates “the Jewish people” with Israel, so is it any wonder that some people do the same and attack Jews wherever they are for the crimes of Zionist Israel? Anti-Semitic attacks are on the increase, the Chief Rabbi of the UK tells us, as if it should be surprising when so many of them are Zionists—Jewish fascists! But all Jews are not Zionists, and all Jews do not support the racialist attitude of Israel, including some Israeli Jews.

Western uncritical support of Zionism is why Israel gets away with what Gaddafi cannot, why anti-Semitism is increasing, and why also the megarich oil sheiks of the Arabian peninsula can oppress their own people without a word of criticism from western leaders like Hague, Cameron, Obama and Clinton, all of whom get more two faced and slimy by the second. If you are an Arab rebel make sure you choose who you are rebelling against. If it is Gaddafi—OK, you are a democrat. If the king of Saudi Arabia—bad news, you are a terrorist.

War is a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.

Paul Valery

Invading foreign countries is for the benefit of a narrow class of megarich people, who like to steal other people’s assets and benefit from war bucks whatever else happens.

True Messianic Jews Oppose Zionism!

Rabbi Moses Jakubowicz has a short article on the website, True Torah Jews against Zionism entitled “Judaism is a Religion—Not a Race”. Throughout history, whoever joined the Jewish religion was called a Jew, no matter what his race, and whoever abandoned the Holy Torah was not considered a Jew. In fact, the biggest names in Jewish history were converts or descendants of converts—King David, Zipporah, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Meir, Shmaya and Avtalyon. Jewish people suffered many a time from fanatically religious governments who expelled or killed whoever refused to adhere to their religious belief, during the Middle Ages. Judaism is therefore a religion, not a race.

Now, Jewish people suffer from the world’s misunderstanding of the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. It is Zionists, for their own political and financial advantage, who have made Jews into a race. They have also changed the Torah, a book of divine law which teaches fairness, peace and piety, into propaganda for their political goals, and their claim to Palestine, helping to foment antisemitism, which is their intention. Jew hating drives Jews to Israel!

When Bush visited Israel, in 2008, several rabbis of the extremist Zionist settler community wrote asking the US President not to put any pressure on the Israeli leadership to yield land concessions to the Palestinian Authority. Yet, this is land Zionist Jews took from the Palestinians in the first place. They explained that he would be asking Israel to make concessions to terrorists while the US itself had announced a war on terror! Yet, Jewish terrorists, like those responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel, drove out the Arabs so that the land would be free for grabbing by the Zionists, allegedly with biblical authority.

These Zionist rabbis compared the US President to Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, respectively the Babylonian king and the Roman general who became emperor of Rome, each of whom destroyed Jerusalem, implying that Bush would be doing the same. They ended:

You must surely remember that America does not benefit from causing damage, Heaven forbid, to the Jewish people and its land. If you help the wholeness of our holy land, we promise you and your country endless blessings.

These Zionist “rabbis” think they are God, trading his blessings for land, like beads to a savage. Rabbi Jakubowicz accused the authors of this letter of being rabbis in name only. They presumed to speak in the name of the Jewish religion, but the world must not allow itself to be fooled. They were “politicians and militants advancing their own agenda, for which they are distorting the Holy Torah and by doing so they are jeopardizing the Jewish people in the entire world as the Zionists did in the Second World War”.

Zionists desperately drum up support for Israel in the US, and try to convince Jews that they should be in Israel fighting to evict the Arabs. The pressure against Iran regarding their alleged nuclear weapons program is orchestrated by US Zionists and Israel, just as there was an orchestrated campaign of lies against Iraq, on the grounds of WMD which were never found. They simply did not exist, and the weapons inspectors had said they did not, and needed only a short while more to prove it conclusively. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful, and has made several proposals regarding it that would be acceptable to any reasonable power.

Despite the pressure and propaganda, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have emigrated to other countries with no plans to return. “Jews against Zionism” says the Zionist Absorption Ministry, once famous for bringing millions of Jews to the State of Israel and providing them with housing and employment, has said that around 20,000 Israelis emigrate each year. 650,000 Israelis live abroad, 450,000 in North America. The Ministry is struggling unsuccessfully to recover these expatriates.

All these former Zionists have admitted their mistake in setting up the state of Israel contrary to what observant Jews consider God’s will. These true Jews think it was a grave error to want to anticipate God’s plan and try to force God’s redemption before its time. The Zionists ought to hear the prophet Yirmiyahu, who says in the name of God:

They have left Me, the source of fresh water, to dig themselves broken pits that will not hold water.

Yirmiyahu, Jeremy 2:13

Only when God is ready will Jews see the fulfilment of the verse:

And those redeemed by God will return and come to Zion with song, with eternal happiness on their heads.

Yishaya 35:10

The objection of true Jews to Zionism is twofold:

1. Zionism, by advocating a political and military end to the Jewish exile, denies the divine basis of the Jewish Diaspora. Jews are in exile because God decreed it, and may emerge from exile solely by divine redemption. All human efforts to alter this divine command must end in failure and bloodshed. History repeatedly bears out this teaching.
2. Zionism has created a pseudo-Judaism with nationalism being a new secular foundation of Jewish identity, not God and his law. So, Zionism and Israel have persistently tried, by persuasion and coercion, to replace a divine and Torah centered understanding of Jewishness with an armed material militancy.

No reasonable and intelligent Jew—and Jewish culture has always produced plenty of people meeting these criteria—would want to stay in Israel for a second, if they were not fanatical Zionists, utterly indoctrinated by them, or feel trapped in a lobster pot. Jews are citizens of the world, and have always been. Israelis should be proud to be Diaspora Jews, like their ancestors, millions of whom died for the right to free thought, benefiting the whole world. Proper Jews, the true Jews of the Torah, still looked forward to the messianic age, when Jerusalem would be “a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7). Zionists should abandon the false and ungodly state of Israel—at least until the the Jewish Messiah has announced his presence!

Israelis and Antisemitism

We read from Martin Sugarman in the UK Independent that the European Union and the British Parliamentary Committee on antisemitism have defined antisemitism as “including conflating or comparing Israelis or the Israeli government with Nazis, portraying Palestinians fallaciously as victims of a Holocaust or genocide, like the Jews, and juxtaposing images of the Holocaust alongside images of Palestinians killed or injured in wars with Israel”.

So, we have a definition of antisemitism that effectively prevents legitimate criticism, and representation of Israelis as carrying out illegal acts, like those of the Nazis, and indeed differing from them only on their scale—whence the only justification of the word “fallaciously”—though not on any scale of human decency. Yet that is what the Israelis have done and continue to do to the Palestinians, and so anyone supporting the Palestinians with justified criticism and visual examples of their treatment by Israelis is antisemitic! Such a definition of antisemitism is absurd, and ought to be withdrawn, if indeed Sugarman is right.

The races described by the word “semite” include the Arabs, but probably not Israelis, who seem mainly now to be Slavs. It means that to be truly antisemitic, to be opposed to Semites, is oppressing Arabs, who are the mass of Semites alive today. The Zionists in Israel are therefore being antisemitic, probably more so than anyone who opposes Israel’s conduct.

An example of the injustice of this definition of antisemitism is given by Maggie Foyer. Her Arab friend Bilal is in hospital with a fractured spine and skull after being attacked on his land by Zionist Israelis. They took his land for Jewish settlement. He will get no compensation for his injuries or his lost land. His village was attacked repeatedly in a few months by gangs of lawless Zionist thugs. If Jews elsewhere in the world than Israel feel threatened by antisemitism, they should be glad they are not the Semites called Palestinians, who are suffering appallingly at the hands of those constantly playing the antisemitism card in self interest. But they will cry in alarm that Ms Foyer is an antisemite.

Why, even, it is antisemitic to deny the right of Israel to exist? Civilized nation states represent all of their citizens, regardless of their ethnic or religious background. When they do not, they have been broken up, like Austria Hungary, and in more recent times the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. What is unusual about the State of Israel is that the government of a land refuses to accept some of the land’s native people, while claiming to represent a collection of people, the Jews, from many other lands whose ancestors have never been there. The Nazis were glad to accept as Germans the people of many other places in Europe and the USSR regarded as ethnic Germans, though they had never lived in Germany. Jews, German or otherwise, were still considered as untermenschen.

Equally, there is nothing wrong and nothing racist about being opposed to the existence of a Zionist State of Israel, that Zionists make out as being antisemitic. In urging it, no one is “insulting or racially abusing them, or defacing the graves of their departed”. Urging a united state of Palestinians and Israelis, with neither privileged, is to oppose discrimination, not to uphold it. Jewish and Arab musicians can act like civilized people in Daniel Barenboim’s orchestra, the “West East Divan”. Are Zionists saying Barenboim is antisemitic or a self-hating Jew. If so, they just expose their own unremitting hatred—usually kept hidden by the smoke and mirrors of alleged antisemitism!

Reform Jews Resolve to Defend the Integrity of Science

A few years back, at the height of the Bush administration, the Union for Reform Judaism, concerned by the politicization of science, passed the following excellent resolutions. Others, especially science organizations, should do the same:

1. Demand that public officials and appointees to governmental and advisory bodies respect the integrity of the scientific process, and not manipulate scientific data and evidence, to achieve political or ideological objectives
2. Call upon all levels of government to ensure that the appointment of scientists to government positions and advisory boards be made on the basis of scientific experience, expertise and accomplishment
3. Demand that federal funding of scientific research result from a merit based peer review of proposals, relying strictly upon scientifically objective criteria
4. Demand that government employed scientists and scientists conducting research under government sponsorship be free from threats and intimidation that might compromise their scientific integrity
5. Support appropriate measures to ensure that all of the above principles are adhered to and valued
6. Oppose government efforts and policies that seek to redefine science or the scientific method to incorporate religious, theological or other theories, including “intelligent design” and creationism, that are neither testable by experiment nor observation.