For years and years, a small group of self-identifying anti-Zionist Jews have engaged in an energetic campaign against the existence of the State of Israel. These anti-Zionist Jews have poured venom on those who support Jewish self-determination in Israel, alongside Palestinian self-determination in a Palestinian state. They have painted Jews who disagree with them as agents of a foreign power, conspiracised about Zionist cabals and plots, and accused Israel of the worst crimes imaginable, including the deliberate killing of children.
While loudly declaring that Israeli Jews and their supporters are the new Nazis, they have staged antisemitic plays like “Seven Jewish Children”, in which Jews rejoice in their supposed “chosenness” while glorying in gore. They have marched hand in hand with supporters, members, of the genocidally antisemitic Hamas and Hezbollah, while attacking the critics of these groups as Islamophobes.
And now, they’ve been outclassed. By Gilad Atzmon.
Atzmon’s book launch takes place today, at a panel discussion on “Jewish Identity”, where he will be joined by the prominent Atzmon supporter and Reader in Law at Southampton University, Oren Ben Dor. According to Atzmon, the anti-Zionist Jews are planning to leaflet this event:
It didn’t take me by complete surprise to find out that J-Big (Jews Only Israeli Boycott Campaign) are operating relentlessly against the book. I always asked myself, how long is it going to take before J-Big contaminates my song with one of their Ava Nagilas or any other Jewish folklore anthem. It is almost amusing to follow the distorted Jewish progressive interpretation of the BDS. Instead of mounting pressure on Israel or its Hasbara agents, J-BIG is now trying to suppress intellectual exchange within our movement.
The anti-Zionist Jews paved the way for Atzmon. They promulgated the canards of Jewish political and cultural control, they promoted the notion that Israel was uniquely evil, and they promoted and covered up for Islamist and Arab nationalism antisemitism. Now, they have been replaced by a man who does the job just a little bit better than them, who is fully in harmony with the sentiments of the Hamas Covenant, and they’re not happy.
So, having spent a lifetime accusing Jews of raising lying concerns about antisemitism for cynical and wicked purposes, the anti-Zionist Jews find that they have little support.
Sure, two revolutionary communist bloggers – Andy Newman and Richard Seymour – have written pieces expressing their opposition to Atzmon’s rhetoric. And well done them.But, as far as I can see, the anti-Zionist Jews be demonstrating against Atzmon, alone.
They’re not being joined by any of the prominent anti-racism and anti-fascism campaigns: indeed, Unite Against Fascism could hardly do so, as the Socialist Workers Party which controls it was an early supporter of Gilad Atzmon. None of the Hamas or Hizbollah supporters, with whom the anti-Zionist Jews were allied, appear to have any problem at all with Atzmon’s message. They are without allies, out on a limb, isolated: mocked by Atzmon.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is showing no solidarity with these anti-Zionist Jews: so long their mainstay. Why should they? As we have seen, antisemitic material appears on the websites of their branches, while one of their supporters believes that there weren’t any gas chambers in the Holocaust, and that only a couple of hundred thousand of Jews died, by “having had their foreskins chopped off“. Antisemitism helps to build Palestine solidarity politics.
The anti-Zionist Jews cheered on Professor Mearsheimer and applauded Professor Falk: the academic “big guns” of anti-Zionism. They were gobsmacked to discover that both enthusiastically endorsed Atzmon’s book. Who are the academics who oppose Atzmon?
As the anti-Zionist Jews stand outside Atzmon’s launch event this evening, handing out their leaflets, they should reflect on the contribution of their own activism to the situation they are now in.
