Why I’m Fed Up With Zionism

I’ve never cared for Zionism. I’ve always considered Zionists later day Pilgrims: obnoxious, strident, unpleasable, and desperate to find a country on which they could inflict their particular brand of self-absorption.

Correction, I meant a second country. For good or ill, Zionists have imposed their worldview on the United States since the day Harry Truman took a meeting with Eddie Jacobson. And perhaps I’m being unfair to the Pilgrims. At least they conceded that native Wampanoag existed on the land attached to Plymouth Rock, whereas Zionists would’ve declared the land people-free. An approach which streamlined the process of dividing the Palestinians of Palestine into terrorists and corpses.

Until very recently, these were the kind of thoughts a Gentile kept to himself. On Israel, he confined his views to Love it or Fund it, lest he run the risk of being called an antisemite.

It’s easy to be called an antisemite. Especially since no leading Jewish organization seems to know what antisemitism is – current definitions conflate religion, ethnicity, and nationhood into an amorphous trinity intended to stigmatize any act or utterance which hinders arms shipments.

But an amazing thing is happening. More and more, Jews and Gentiles alike are realizing that if Israel is “a light unto the nations” the primary glow is coming from incendiary fires caused by American 2000 pound bombs. So as someone whose first “antisemtic” Op-Ed was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer more than a quarter century ago, I think I have some useful thoughts to offer now that Trump’s Honest Brokerage and its chosen people are once again smiting everything in sight.

To begin with, I am not a “Jew hater”. I hate specific Jews for the specific reason that they attempt to wield their Jewishness to either close off candid conversation regarding Israel, or give hogwash divine sanction. Also, I did not set out to be labeled an antisemite. It’s just that, as a satirist, I’ve always considered unacknowledged hypocrisy to be the wellspring of biting satire… Israel did the rest.

But I had to put in the work and educate myself. I had to read the Bible and histories of the Ancient Near East. I had to learn about Herzl and the Balfour Declaration and the Irgun and the Stern Gang and the Nakba. For events like Sabra and Shatilla and both Intifadas, I was old enough to have experienced the news coverage in real time. Then too, I was fortunate to casually know the late great Gore Vidal, whose work was a major influence.

And as a fellow “antisemite”, I’d like to think Gore would agree with the following observation regarding how Israel is treated by the United States. Namely that – from ambushing the crew of the USS Liberty – to deliberately crushing Rachel Corrie beneath an armored bulldozer – to remorselessly slaughtering the women and children of Gaza – no other nation on earth has garnered unlimited weaponry and a lenient press by combining pathological savagery with pleadings of victimhood.

The world is an unjust place. If it weren’t, Benjamin Netanyahu’s only concern would be how to conceal a cyanide capsule in his navel to cheat getting hanged by the neck until dead while the desiccating carcass of Joe Biden rotted in an adjacent cell. The Congress would not be AIPAC owned and useless, with pro-Israel platitudes dripping from lips and shekels bulging from pockets.

Above all, an honest examination of Israel’s press coverage would penetrate journalism’s holy of holies – the editing room. Tangible, discussable views would no longer be summarily dismissed as tropes, double standards and blood libels. Accuracy would be granted a moment.

For if it’s antisemitic to say rich Jews control the media, it’s accurate to say a Zionist billionaire sold Paramount literally so she could devote more time to Israel. That Paramount was bought by a Zionist billionaire who turned it over to his son, who immediately hired a reactionary Zionist millionaire to run CBS News. Meanwhile, the Zionist father and son purchased WarnerBros.Discovery, thereby guaranteeing run-of-the-war docility at CNN and job security for Dana Bash and Jake Tapper.

If it’s antisemitic to say Jewish opinion is monolithic, it’s accurate to say that on March 1st and 2nd the Opinion page of The New York Times was occupied by Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman and Ben Rhodes. That respectively, they provided readers with the maniacal Zionist, militaristic Zionist and milquetoast Zionist rationale for the unprovoked war with Iran. All were content to see what happens after lots of innocents died, and the basic preconception of a nuclear-armed Israel’s perpetual right to exist without defined borders or a constitution went unchallenged.

A piece like this is a vanity project. It solves nothing. It’s a despairing shout into a void best described by Jean Renoir: “The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has their reasons.” Words seem worthless in times of madness, and today’s madness is uncharted. Humanity is precariously balanced between possibility and the Iron Age, and the greatest negative weights on the scale are not Jews – who comprise less than 3% of the population of the United States – but Donald Trump and Christian Zionists.

Yet perhaps the least we can do is cling to two truths, one factual, the other biological, through which we may, even now, summon common sense: Nowhere in the annals of recorded history has killing people resulted in the subservience of their surviving relatives; and eventually every last one of us, not just Iranian Revolutionary Guards, face certain death.

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