#anti israel slogans

[lostinsidelostoutside]

[sap-woods]

Can we please stop calling these protestors "anti-war"? If you're yelling "glory to our martyrs," "burn Tel Aviv to the ground," or "Hamas make us proud, kill another soldier now" you're pro-war. You want a change in power through violence.

[themassespress]

"Against Sloganeering, Revisionism, and Gonzaloism" With a Note From the Editorial Board of The Masses

By the Revolutionary Marxist Students Featured Image Artist Statement: The piece [titled “Students Against Revisionism”] focuses on 3 students who are combatting revisionism, wielding the pen as a weapon, uplifting a red book titled ‘Against Revisionism,’ and reading from a small red book titled ‘MLM’. The three students are lit by a red sun, a red horizon, as the namesake of the publication,…

[theghostiedyke]

not me seeing the same discourse the land back movement got being repeated for Palestine. 🤨 y'all aren't even trying to think critically.

[dancedance-resolution]

if any of you guys are wondering if the rnc is as disturbing as you imagine…..yes, and then some!

[spacelazarwolf]

grafiti on a memorial in germany built in honor of non jewish women who protested against the persecution of their jewish family members, primarily their husbands, during the holocaust (german) (english)

The same night as the vandalism, an anti-Israel protest was held in the same borough, according to the Berlin Police. Law enforcement attempted to disperse the unauthorized protest at the Berlin Central Station but reportedly responded with by chanting anti-police and anti-Israel slogans. (X)

[fairuzfan]

AMAZING article about what it means to participate in anti-Zionism work both online and in person.

If your anti-zionism does not in any way acknowledge that it is a way of thought and practice led by and for Palestinians, then you need to reevaluate your "anti-zionism" label.

Some passages that felt especially relevant to tumblr:

If we accept, as those with even the most rudimentary understanding of history do, that zionism is an ongoing process of settler-colonialism, then the undoing of zionism requires anti-zionism, which should be understood as a process of decolonisation. Anti-zionism as a decolonial ideology then becomes rightly situated as an indigenous liberation movement. The resulting implication is two-fold. First, decolonial organising requires that we extract ourselves from the limitations of existing structures of power and knowledge and imagine a new, just world. Second, this understanding clarifies that the caretakers of anti-zionist thought are indigenous communities resisting colonial erasure, and it is from this analysis that the strategies, modes, and goals of decolonial praxis should flow. In simpler terms: Palestinians committed to decolonisation, not Western-based NGOs, are the primary authors of anti-zionist thought. We write this as a Palestinian and a Palestinian-American who live and work in Palestine, and have seen the impact of so-called ‘Western values’ and how the centring of the ‘human rights’ paradigm disrupts real decolonial efforts in Palestine and abroad. This is carried out in favour of maintaining the status quo and gaining proximity to power, using our slogans emptied of Palestinian historical analysis.

Anti-zionist organising is not a new notion, but until now the use of the term in organising circles has been mired with misunderstandings, vague definitions, or minimised outright. Some have incorrectly described anti-zionism as amounting to activities or thought limited to critiques of the present Israeli government – this is a dangerous misrepresentation. Understanding anti-zionism as decolonisation requires the articulation of a political movement with material, articulated goals: the restitution of ancestral territories and upholding the inviolable principle of indigenous repatriation and through the right of return, coupled with the deconstruction of zionist structures and the reconstitution of governing frameworks that are conceived, directed, and implemented by Palestinians.  Anti-zionism illuminates the necessity to return power to the indigenous community and the need for frameworks of justice and accountability for the settler communities that have waged a bloody, unrelenting hundred-year war on the people of Palestine. It means that anti-zionism is much more than a slogan. 

[...]

While our collective imaginations have not fully articulated what a liberated and decolonised Palestine looks like, the rough contours have been laid out repeatedly. Ask any Palestinian refugee displaced from Haifa, the lands of Sheikh Muwannis, or Deir Yassin – they will tell that a decolonised Palestine is, at a minimum, the right of Palestinians’ return to an autonomous political unit from the river to the sea. When self-proclaimed ‘anti-zionists’ use rhetoric like ‘Israel-Palestine’ – or worse, ‘Palestine-Israel’ – we wonder: where do you think ‘Israel’ exists? On which land does it lay, if not Palestine? This is nothing more than an attempt to legitimise a colonial state; the name you are looking for is Palestine – no hyphen required. At a minimum, anti-zionist formations should cut out language that forces upon Palestinians and non-Palestinian allies the violence of colonial theft. 

[...]

The common choice to centre the Oslo Accords, international humanitarian law, and the human rights paradigm over socio-historical Palestinian realities not only limits our analysis and political interventions; it restricts our imagination of what kind of future Palestinians deserve, sidelining questions of decolonization to convince us that it is the new, bad settlers in the West Bank who are the source of violence. Legitimate settlers, who reside within the bounds of Palestinian geographies stolen in 1948 like Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, are different within this narrative. Like Breaking the Silence, they can be enlightened by learning the error of colonial violence carried out in service of the bad settlers. They can supposedly even be our solidarity partners – all without having to sacrifice a crumb of colonial privilege or denounce pre-1967 zionist violence in any of its cruel manifestations. As a result of this course of thought, solidarity organisations often showcase particular Israelis – those who renounce state violence in service of the bad settlers and their ongoing colonisation of the West Bank – in roles as professionals and peacemakers, positioning them on an equal intellectual, moral, or class footing with Palestinians. There is no recognition of the inherent imbalance of power between these Israelis and the Palestinians they purport to be in solidarity with – stripping away their settler status. The settler is taken out of the historical-political context which afforded them privileged status on stolen land, and is given the power to delineate the Palestinian experience. This is part of the historical occlusion of the zionist narrative, overlooking the context of settler-colonialism to read the settler as an individual, and omitting their class status as a settler. 

It is essential to note that Palestinians have never rejected Jewish indigeneity in Palestine. However, the liberation movement has differentiated between zionist settlers and Jewish natives. Palestinians have established a clear and rational framework for this distinction, like in the Thawabet, the National Charter of Palestine from 1968. Article 6 states, ‘The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.’ When individuals misread ‘decolonisation’ as ‘the mass killing or expulsion of Jews,’ it is often a reflection of their own entanglement in colonialism or a result of zionist propaganda. Perpetuating this rhetoric is a deliberate misinterpretation of Palestinian thought, which has maintained this position over a century of indigenous organising.  Even after 100 years of enduring ethnic cleansing, whole communities bombed and entire family lines erased, Palestinians have never, as a collective, called for the mass killing of Jews or Israelis. Anti-zionism cannot shy away from employing the historical-political definitions of ‘settler’ and ‘indigenous’ in their discourse to confront ahistorical readings of Palestinian decolonial thought and zionist propaganda. 

[...]

In the context of the United States, the most threatening zionist institutions are the entrenched political parties which function to maintain the status quo of the American empire, not Hillel groups on university campuses or even Christian zionist churches. While the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) engage in forms of violence that suppress Palestinian liberation and must not be minimised, it is crucial to recognise that the most consequential institutions in the context of settler-colonialism are not exclusively Jewish in their orientation or representation: the Republican and Democratic Party in the United States do arguably more to manufacture public consent for the slaughtering of Palestinians than the ADL and AIPAC combined. Even the Progressive Caucus and the majority of ‘The Squad’ are guilty of this.

Leila Shomali and Lara Kilani

[notaplaceofhonour]

A reminder that Anti-Israel doesn’t mean “Pro-Palestinian”.

The militant faction referenced here is Ansar Allah (aka The Houthi Movement, commonly known as just “the Houthis”), a totalitarian theocracy that does not mince words about hating not just Israel, but the Jewish people. Their slogan, which they display as the symbol for their movement, is “God is the Greatest; Death to America; Death to Israel; A Curse On the Jews; Victory to Islam”.

Also no, the Houthis didn’t risk jack shit for Palestine. They’re one in a long line of militant factions who are directly responsible for the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Abandoning their own people’s humanitarian needs to wage war isn’t a “risk” for them; it’s standard operating procedure.

The people obscuring this fact to position them as heroes for opposing Israel are engaging in dishonest, manipulative, and immensely antisemitic propaganda. (Also, like, “puppets”? Really? That’s not even subtle.) You do not even have to scratch beyond the surface of just “who is this referencing, and what is their slogan that they plaster everywhere on everything?” to know this. The fact that anyone would fall for it demonstrates gross negligence & a deep & unserious lack of curiosity on their part. There’s no excuse.

But what if you did actually spend more than 5 seconds to know more than 2 facts about the government of Yemen? Well, you might find:

There is a long history of antisemitic violence in Yemen. It culminated in 1949, and roughly 47,000 of Yemen’s 50,000+ Jews fled to Israel. A few remained, but the Houthi regime (which formed in the 90’s and is the one that is now attacking Israeli ships) is so openly, explicitly, & genocidally antisemitic that it forced even that remnant to flee.

The last Jew in Yemen, Levi Salem Musa Murhabi, is currently rotting in a Houthi prison where he has been illegally detained & tortured for the last 7+ years. Our last sign of life was in 2022, so we don’t actually know if he’s still alive.

The country that tried to murder all their Jews & continues to torture the only one that remains is now attacking the country where all those Jews went, all the while chanting “death to Israel, a curse on the Jews.” Do the math. They didn’t “show up” for Palestinians. They pulled up on Israel because that’s where all the Jews they’ve been trying to murder for years live.

[afloweroutofstone]

Yassin al-Haj Saleh, "The Liquid Imperialism That Engulfed Syria," Commons, December 18, 2023:

Syria is a country of only 71,498 square miles in area, with a population of less than 24 million, and yet two global superpowers (the United States and the Russian Federation) and three of the largest regional powers (Iran, Turkey and Israel) are present on its territory. Israel has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since 1967, and carries out almost nonstop incursions into Syrian air space today. In centuries past, prior to the heyday of European and Russian imperialism, Iran and Turkey were empires. While it is debatable whether they still qualify as imperial powers, they have never let go of their regional imperial ambitions. One way to understand them, regionally, is as “subimperial”: expansionist and interventionist, including militarily, in neighboring countries.

The U.S. and Russia have well-known histories of expansion and domination of peoples and territories. Imperialism was key to the very formation of both nations. But while Russia’s “manifest destiny” had been, for centuries, to expand into neighboring areas in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, it was in Syria that Moscow established its first overseas outpost. I will return to this crucial fact later.

In Syria, multiple imperial and subimperial powers have poured into one small country — some of them to protect a murderous regime, all of them annihilating any independent political aspirations among its people, dividing up sectors of Syrian society among themselves and their satellites, and denying Syrians the promise of a different future.

This unique situation was made possible by a combination of internal as well as international structures and dynamics involving five key powers — the U.S., Russia, Iran, Turkey and Israel...

One slogan of the recent protests that erupted in the southern city of Sweida on Aug. 20, 2023, speaks directly to the imperial-colonial complex that controls Syria:

["]We want the seaport, we want the land (the oil, in another formula) and we want the airport returned to us!["]

The seaport is Tartus, which, as mentioned, has been leased to Russia. The land is divided by the five occupying powers. And Damascus International Airport has, for several years now, been widely perceived to be under de facto Iranian control. The protestors in Sweida are thus drawing a connection between their economic hardships and the colonial relations between the regime and its Russian and Iranian protectors. In the version of the slogan that refers to oil, the implication is that it has been usurped by another imperial power: the U.S...

Lenin’s argument that imperialism represents “the highest stage of capitalism” has led many to think of imperialism as embodied in a very few capitalist powers. By this logic, there has been only one imperialism since World War II: Western imperialism, with the U.S. as its center and NATO as its military arm. The Soviet Union was not generally seen by those on the left as imperialist: not following World War II, nor after it invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, nor even after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Similarly, Putin’s Russia has not generally been understood as imperialist, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the intervention in Syria in 2015. For much of the so-called anti-imperialist left, not even the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was enough.

This conception of imperialism must be challenged. The case of Syria requires a paradigm shift in the understanding of imperialism and the theorizing of new practices and phenomena pertaining to it.

Ultranationalism, expansion, dismissal of international law, exceptionalism, imperial imaginaries — these are characteristics of many powers in the age of the war on terror. With “terror” identified as the principal political evil globally, any state that joins in this alleged war can gain international legitimacy — even those engaged in war crimes and murder on an industrial scale. This has dealt massive blows to the rule of law both locally and internationally. It has contributed to a securitized politics, it has promoted thuggery among political elites and has weakened democracy and popular movements everywhere. Imperialism has permeated the practices of power in many countries, among which Syria is arguably the most unfortunate, with no fewer than five expansionist powers on its territory.

The concept of liquid imperialism is an attempt to capture the fact that five different powers have penetrated one small country. But it also speaks to the lack of solidity or coherence in these powers’ strategies, practices, visions and commitments. Unlike the imperial projects of the past, in Syria there is no “civilizing mission.” Natural resources are not a primary motive (though the intervening states have seized whatever they can get their hands on, from oil and phosphates to seaports and airports, to water and real estate). Rather, this is a scramble to control the future of the country.

There is also a liquid aspect in the relations among the five colonial powers. In Syria, we have two Russias — one of them is called the U.S. On a rhetorical level (especially at the beginning of the uprising), Moscow and Washington seemed to be on opposite sides: The Kremlin stood by Assad and the White House denounced him. Yet operationally, Russia and the U.S. were effectively on the same side — especially after the Islamic State came into the picture and became the central focus of U.S. strategy in Syria. From that point forward, Moscow and Washington were on the same page: The two powers closely coordinated “deconfliction” and their military personnel were on the phone to each other on a daily basis to avoid planes flying in the same location at the same altitude and to ensure airstrikes didn’t hit one another’s “friendlies.” For all the bluster about Washington wanting “regime change” in Syria, the exact opposite was the case. The researcher Michael Karadjis has demonstrated that U.S. policy in Syria was decidedly one of “regime preservation.”

[kaalbela]

In Solidarity with Palestine

1. People shout slogans during a protest to show solidarity with Palestinians outside the Israeli consulate in Istanbul, Turkey | Emrah Gure

2. Some protesters try to stop other protesters not to attack the French Embassy in Tehran, Iran during an anti-Israel protest | Vahid Salemi

3. Demonstrators chant during a protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza, at Martyrs' Square in downtown Beirut, Lebanon | Bilal Hussein.

4. A man poses with a Palestinian flag as people gather in Tahrir Square of Baghdad, Iraq to protest | Murtadha Al-Sudani.

5. People clash with anti riot policemen outside the Israeli consulate during a protest to show solidarity with Palestinians, in Istanbul, Turkey | Emrah Gurel.

6. Protesters clash with Lebanese security forces outside the U.S. Embassy during a demonstration in solidarity with the people of Gaza in Awkar, East of Beirut, after Israel's strike on Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza | Joseph Eid

7. Protester demonstrates in front of the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey after Israel's strike on Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza | Ilker Eray

[eretzyisrael]

by POTKIN AZARMEHR

‘Pro-Palestine’ protests have become a near-weekly occurrence across Britain. Since Hamas’s 7 October massacre, regular marches have been drawing in a growing number of young people, marked by passionate advocacy and fervent slogans. Yet despite their zeal, many of these protesters lack a fundamental understanding of the conflict they are so vociferously decrying.

In the past six months, I have attended many of these marches. Having engaged with numerous protesters, I have noticed a startling disconnect between their strong opinions on the Gaza conflict and their shaky grasp of basic facts about it. Among the most perplexing are the LGBT and feminist groups (the ‘Queers for Palestine’ types) who flirt with justifying Hamas’s atrocities. This is a bewildering alliance, given that Hamas’s Islamist ideology is clearly antithetical to the rights and values these groups claim to champion. Its reactionary agenda is profoundly hostile to women’s rights and LGBT individuals.

Protesters seem eager to make excuses for Hamas, but are conspicuously uninformed about exactly what or who this terrorist group represents. On 18 May, during a protest at Piccadilly Circus in London, I spoke to demonstrators who firmly believed that Hamas represents all Palestinians. When I questioned a well-educated participant about the last Palestinian election, she was unaware that none had occurred since 2006, when Hamas gained power in Gaza.

It wasn’t just young people who were uninformed. An older woman with an American accent, seemingly a veteran protester, admitted she knew that Hamas was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, but had no deeper knowledge of its ideology or history. Others, such as members of revolutionary socialist groups, displayed similar gaps in understanding, unaware of critical events like the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

That revolution gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocratic regime that brutally oppresses its own citizens. It also sponsors Islamist groups like Hamas. I left Iran for the UK not long after that regime began and have spent years resisting its religious extremism and ruthless political intolerance. Protesters were not only unaware of these facts about the Iranian regime, but also ill-informed about the struggle against it, such as the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests against the government that began in 2022.

One particularly telling conversation involved a man advocating for a ‘Global Intifada’ to replace capitalism with socialism. When asked about successful socialist models, he was unfamiliar with the Israeli kibbutzim, one of history’s few successful egalitarian experiments. His ignorance of these communal settlements in Israel, built by socialist Jewish immigrants, was all too typical.

Perhaps the most telling moment was captured by commentator Konstantin Kisin earlier this year, when he encountered a young man holding a ‘Socialist Intifada’ placard. The protester admitted he had no idea what this meant and that he had taken the sign simply because it was handed to him.

Reflecting on past movements, such as the American anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and the British Anti-Apartheid Movement of the 1980s, one can’t help but note a stark contrast. Protesters then were generally well-informed about their causes. Today’s pro-Palestine protests, however, seem to be driven more by unthinking fervour than by an understanding of the issues at hand.

Throughout all these protests, I am yet to encounter a single participant who condemns Hamas or carries a placard denouncing its terrorism. This not only undermines the protesters’ cause, but also risks aligning them with groups whose values fundamentally oppose the very rights and freedoms they claim to support. It appears that today’s young protesters are high on ideology, but woefully thin on facts.

Potkin Azarmehr is an Iranian activist and journalist who left Iran for the UK after the revolution of 1979.

[pettytiredandjewish]

So uh… to the “pro-Palestine” crowd

- harassing random jews on the streets (and online) isn’t going to help Palestinians

- swarming and blockading college campus buildings (and hospitals) and chanting genocidal slogans at jews isn’t going to help Palestinians

- defacing synagogues and jewish owned stores isn’t going to help Palestinians

- displaying antisemitic signs and waving nazi flags isn’t going to help Palestinians

- chanting for intifada isn’t going to help Palestinians (Hamas would love that though)

- spreading Hamas propaganda isn’t going to help Palestinians

This doesn’t help Palestinians- but it sure does help Hamas who’s goal is to wipe out Israel and all jews. Also Hamas could care less for Palestinians- why do you think they are being used as human shields???

Doing all of these things makes you antisemitic (some of y’all were probably already antisemitic, and is using the I/P conflict to go fully unmasked). You doing this is causing harm to so many people. And to be honest- doing this shit shows that you actually don’t care for Palestine. In fact you are using this conflict to go fully unmask and be raging antisemitic little asshats.

Instead of doing something that could help those who are affected by this war, you are harassing jews, defacing synagogues, and calling for intifadas. Why is that? (I know the answer- but humor me). Why is this acceptable? How does harassing and harming jews help Palestine? And how does supporting Hamas (a terrorist organization) help Palestine?

Also I may get hate for this but I don’t care: anti Zionism is antisemitism. The term anti Zionist was created during the soviet era by one of the soviet leaders. The Soviet Union hated jews and wanted to stamp them all out. One of the ways that they “succeeded” was “persuading” jews that their culture and religion was dirty. That they- the jews should be ashamed of their “Jewishness”. And that was how anti Zionism came to be.

I said what I said. If you don’t like it then maybe you have some thinking to do.

Also as another fucking reminder:

Stop fucking spreading vile antisemitic shit (and stop harassing Israel citizens) !!! This includes:

- blood libels

- organs harvesting

- holocaust denial

- “hitler was right”

- “gas the jews”

- lizard people

- “jews are rats”

- “jews are rich”

- “jews control the media”

- “jews are landlords”

- the majority of conspiracy theories

- Zionist occupied government

- Zionism is racism

- stop fucking reading protocols of the elders of Zion

- “from the river to the sea…” is a genocidal chant.

- stop calling Israel a “terrorist” state and stop saying that all Israelis are terrorist (people are not their fucking government)

(Just to list a few)

I said what I said and if you don’t like it- the doors over there.

Am yisrael chai! ✡️

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

ANTISEMITISM ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES EXPOSED

Committee on Education & the Workforce. U.S. House of Representatives

KEY FINDINGS

Key Finding: Students who established unlawful antisemitic encampments—which violated university polices and created unsafe and hostile learning environments—were given shocking concessions. Universities’ dereliction of leadership and failure to enforce their rules put students and personnel at risk. o Finding: Northwestern put radical anti-Israel faculty in charge of negotiations with the encampment. o Finding: Northwestern’s provost shockingly approved of a proposal to boycott Sabra hummus. o Finding: Northwestern entertained demands to hire an “anti-Zionist” rabbi and Northwestern President Michael Schill may have misled Congress in testimony regarding the matter. o Finding: Columbia’s leaders offered greater concessions to encampment organizers than they publicly acknowledged. o Finding: UCLA officials stood by and failed to act as the illegal encampment violated Jewish students’ civil rights and placed campus at risk.

Key Finding: So-called university leaders intentionally declined to express support for campus Jewish communities. Instead of explicitly condemning antisemitic harassment, universities equivocated out of concern of offending antisemitic students and faculty who rallied in support of foreign terrorist organizations. o Finding: Harvard leaders’ failure to condemn Hamas’ attack in their widely criticized October 9 statement was an intentional decision. o Finding: Harvard President Claudine Gay and then-Provost Alan Garber asked Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker not to label the slogan “from the river to the sea” antisemitic, with Gay fearing doing so would create expectations Harvard would have to impose discipline. o Finding: The Columbia administration failed to correct false narratives of a “chemical attack” that were used to vilify Jewish students, but imposed disproportionate discipline on the Jewish students involved.

Key Finding: Universities utterly failed to impose meaningful discipline for antisemitic behavior that violated school rules and the law. In some cases, radical faculty successfully thwarted meaningful discipline. o Finding: Universities failed to enforce their rules and hold students accountable for antisemitic conduct violations. o Finding: Columbia’s University Senate obstructed plans to discipline students involved in the takeover of Hamilton Hall. o Finding: Harvard’s faculty intervened to prevent meaningful discipline toward antisemitic conduct violations on numerous occasions. o Finding: Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker acknowledged that the university’s disciplinary boards’ enforcement of the rules is “uneven” and called this “unacceptable.”

Key Finding: So-called university leaders expressed hostility to congressional oversight and criticism of their record. The antisemitism engulfing campuses was treated as a public-relations issue and not a serious problem demanding action. o Finding: Harvard president Claudine Gay disparaged Rep. Elise Stefanik’s character to the university’s Board of Overseers. o Finding: Columbia’s leaders expressed contempt for congressional oversight of campus antisemitism. o Finding: Penn’s leaders suggested politicians calling for President Magill’s resignation were “easily purchased” and sought to orchestrate negative media coverage of Members of Congress who scrutinized the University

[beardedmrbean]

I bet the last thing Bernie Sanders expected upon his arrival in Ireland and Britain was to be met by angry protesters—to find himself heckled and damned as a sellout by the kind of radicals who would have been shouting his praises just six months ago. And yet that is what happened: Some of Britain's Bernie Bros have morphed into Bernie bashers.

Why? Because he refuses to describe Israel's war on Hamas as a "genocide" and he doesn't approve of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.

Quick—cast him out. Unperson him. He has ventured outside the parameters of acceptable Left-wing thought and must be punished.

It all kicked off in Dublin. Senator Sanders, who is on these isles to promote his book, Why It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism, was speaking at University College Dublin. A group of pro-Palestine protesters assembled at the entrance to the venue, all wearing the uniform of the virtuous: a keffiyeh. "It's OK to be angry about capitalism, what about Zionism?" they chanted.

It got heated inside, too. Sanders was interrupted by audience members. "Resistance is an obligation in the face of occupation!" one shouted. "Occupation is terrorism!" yelled another.

Sanders kept his cool with his reply: "Good slogan, but slogans are not solutions," he said.

It continued at Trinity College the next day. Sanders was in conversation with the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. Outside, a small but noisy gaggle of anti-Israel agitators displayed a banner that said: "Boycott Apartheid Israel."

"Free Palestine!" they chanted. (Deliciously, a woman who was queuing for the Sanders event bellowed "from Hamas!" every time they said it.)

Again, Sanders was heckled by hotheads. "Ceasefire now!" they shouted. At one point, in the words of Trinity News, Sanders "threw up his right arm in frustration and looked at O'Toole, as if to ask him what would be done."

It is little wonder he felt frustrated. Sanders was there to talk about capitalism, yet angry youths kept badgering him about Zionism. He is used to a fawning response from Socialist twentysomethings, and yet now some were effectively accusing him of being complicit in a "genocide." It's quite the downfall for one of the West's best-known leftists.

The turn on Bernie is underpinned by a belief that he is too soft on Israel. The radical Left will never forgive him for initially supporting Israel's war on Hamas. Even his more recent position—he now says there should be a ceasefire—is not good enough for these people, who seem to measure an individual's moral worth by how much he hates the Jewish State.

They want Bernie to say the G-word. They want him to damn Israel as uniquely barbarous. They want him to agree with them that it is right and proper to single Israel out for boycotts and sanctions.

In short, they want him to fall into line. They want him to bend the knee to their Israelophobic ideology.

These illiberal demands on Bernie to bow down to correct-think continued when he arrived in the U.K. A group of communists protested against him in Liverpool. Normally, Sanders would have been shown only love in a historically radical city like Liverpool, said the Liverpool Echo, but this time, "the atmosphere was different," for one simple reason: "his refusal to brand Israel's actions in Gaza as 'genocide'."

Sanders' resistance of the G-word haunted him in his media interviews, too. Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, a key outlet of Britain's bourgeois Left, asked him three times if he would call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide." He refused and it went viral. Armies of ersrtwhile Bernie fans damned him as a "genocide denier."

There is something quite nauseating in this spectacle of an elderly Jewish man being pressured to denounce the world's only Jewish State as genocidal. Millennial Gentiles who want to trend online might be happy to throw around the G-word. But Senator Sanders, who lost family in the Holocaust, clearly has a deeper moral and historical understanding of what genocide is. And it seems he is not willing to sacrifice that understanding at the altar of retweets or an easy ride.

Good for him.

Sanders' father was born in Poland, where most of his family were exterminated by the Nazis. Sanders is a son of the Shoah, a descendant of survivors of the greatest crime in history. To subject him to the modern equivalent of a showtrial in which you demand that he scream "Genocide!" at Israel feels unconscionable. As does branding him a "genocide denier."

Why won't he call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide"? Maybe, says a writer for the Jewish Chronicle, it's because he lost so much of his family to Hitler's gas chambers and therefore he "knows what a genocide is, what a war crime is." He knows that while the war in Gaza, a war started by Hamas, is "horrible," to use his word, it cannot in any way be compared to the Nazis' conscious efforts to vaporize an entire ethnic group.

There has been a Inquisition vibe to some of the Bernie-bashing in Britain. At times it has felt cruel. The sight of fashionable, privileged Israel-bashers haranguing a man who will have heard stories from his own father about the genocidal mania of the Nazis has come across like Jew-taunting rather than political critique.

More broadly, this unseemly episode gives us a glimpse into the authoritarian impulses behind the Left's obsessive opposition to Israel. Israelophobia, it seems, is less a rational political stance than a borderline religious conviction. There are true believers, who dutifully repeat the G-word like a mantra, and sinful outliers, who refuse to treat Israel as uniquely "problematic."

One's moral fitness for radical society is increasingly judged by one's willingness to treat Israel as the most wicked nation in existence. The dangers of making hostility to the Jewish State a requirement of being a Good Leftist should be clear to everyone.

Sanders is wise to resist this tyrannical zeitgeist, and to say what he believes rather than what he believes will be popular.

Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer of spiked. His new book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

[girlactionfigure]

"From the River to the Sea"

@Daniel_Sugarman

In this thread, I’m going to go into some detail about what the phrase “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” means to many Jewish people. You may not agree, but I hope that it may enlighten those who simply don't understand the almost visceral reaction to it.

🧵 

2) For the benefit of a number of students at some of America’s most expensive higher education institutions, let’s start by clarifying - the river is the River Jordan, the sea is the Mediterranean.

3) So what do those chanting it mean? When asked, a bunch of them will say they want a single state in this area in which all people can live together in dignity and equality. Sounds great, right? Who would argue with that? 

4) That claim is somewhat muddied when one particular version of that chant is used in Arabic, as has been heard and seen at various protests - من المية للمية / فلسطين عربية “From water to water, Palestine is Arab”. But let's leave that aside for the moment. 

5) Note that the protesters are not calling for Israel to be *changed* into what they see as a free and equal society. For them this can only be achieved by Israel being *ended* and replaced by Palestine. 

6) Objectively, you can say that the reason for this is that the protestors believe that Israel (and Zionism) is fundamentally incompatible with what they see as equality and freedom for all, which is why for them it has to go in its entirety. But... 

7) But there is a significant degree of ambiguity as to what the end result *actually* means. And it’s that question mark which is why so many Jewish people see this slogan the way they do.

8) Because Jewish people have lots of different examples of what happens to Jewish communities who are minorities in countries in the MENA region. They get destroyed. I'll give you some examples. 

9) Egypt. 1948 - 75,000 Jews. 2024 - 30 Jews.

10) Lebanon. 1948 - 9,000 Jews. 2024 - 20 Jews.

11) Syria. 1948 - 15,000 Jews. 2024 - 4 Jews.

12) Yemen. 1948 - 55,000 Jews. 2024 - 1 Jew.

13) Iraq. 1948 - 156,000 Jews. 2024 - 1 Jew.

14) Iran. 1948 - 150,000 Jews. 2024 - 8,750 Jews (under the strict control of the Iranian regime).

15) Libya. 1948 - 40,000 Jews. 2024 - No Jews.

16) Algeria. 1948 - 150,000 Jews. 2024 - 150 Jews,

17) Tunisia. 1948 - 105,000 Jews. 2024 - 1,500 Jews.

18) Morocco. 1948 - 270,000 Jews. 2024 - 2,000 Jews.

19) The anti-Zionist narrative is that this mass Exodus was the fault of the Zionists, who created Israel. No Israel, goes the refrain, and all those communities would still be there.

This ignores a very simple point. 

20) In every single one of these countries, to a greater or lesser extent, Israel’s independence was followed by significant repression of local Jewish populations.

Every one. 

21) Remind me, what’s the way to describe holding members of an ethnic or racial group responsible for what other members of that group may have done elsewhere?

22) By doing so - oppressing the local Jewish population via pogroms, repressive laws, denying Jewish people full citizenship, confiscation of land and property - these MENA countries made a more effective argument for Zionism than Israel ever could have done by itself. 

23) What that said, very clearly, was that Jews as a minority in a MENA country lived there strictly on sufferance. That at any time they could be deprived of everything - including their lives.

This had been clear pre-Zionism too, but the reaction post-'48 put the seal on this.

24) Which brings us back to now. The one-state Palestine being dreamt of is one where, at best, Jews will be allowed to live as a minority. 

25) I put it to you that the experience of more than half of Israel’s Jewish population - descended from those who had to leave MENA countries, means that they *know* what the end result of such a Palestine will be.

A land without Jews. 

26) This, by the way, given most Israeli Jews now are descendants of MENA Jews is also why the “post-colonial” depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as some sort of “white vs brown” battle is so utterly brainless. And that’s before we discuss Israel’s many Ethiopian Jews. 

27) I’ve gone on too long, I know, but just one final point. If the anti-Israel protestors really wanted to assure Jews - all Jews - that there would be a real future for Jews in their hoped for future one-state Palestine - they would be doing their best to engage with Zionists. 

28) They would be saying “Zionism is an ideology built on numerous examples - in MENA and in Europe - that Jews are, in the long term, only safe in their own country. Let us show you that this isn’t necessarily the case. Let’s talk. Find common ground. Try for friendships.” 

29) Instead Zionists are told they are Nazis. The same age-old antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control are applied to “Zionists”. “Zionists” are excluded from the Community of the Good. 

30) Congratulations! 

You’ve just proved every single Jewish Zionist’s point for them - and you’ve helped create new ones. In a very similar way to those MENA countries post 1948. 

*Thread ends* 

[mariacallous]

The New York Times once dubbed the Princeton professor Robert George, who has guided Republican elites for decades, “the reigning brain of the Christian right.” Last year, he issued a stark warning to his ideological allies. “Each time we think the horrific virus of anti-Semitism has been extirpated, it reappears,” he wrote in May 2023. “A plea to my fellow Catholics—especially Catholic young people: Stay a million miles from this evil. Do not let it infect your thinking.” When I spoke with George that summer, he likened his sense of foreboding to that of Heinrich Heine, the 19th-century German poet who prophesied the rise of Nazism in 1834.

Some 15 months later, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson welcomed a man named Darryl Cooper onto his web-based show and introduced him to millions of followers as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” The two proceeded to discuss how Adolf Hitler might have gotten a bad rap and why British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War.”

Hitler tried “to broadcast a call for peace directly to the British people” and wanted to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem,” Cooper elaborated in a social-media post. “He was ignored.” Why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place—and what a satisfactory “solution” to their inconvenient existence might be—was not addressed.

Some Republican politicians spoke out against Carlson’s conversation with Cooper, and many historians, including conservative ones, debunked its Holocaust revisionism. But Carlson is no fringe figure. His show ranks as one of the top podcasts in the United States; videos of its episodes rack up millions of views. He has the ear of Donald Trump and spoke during prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention. His anti-Jewish provocations are not a personal idiosyncrasy but the latest expression of an insurgent force on the American right—one that began to swell when Trump first declared his candidacy for president and that has come to challenge the identity of the conservative movement itself.

Anti-Semitism has always existed on the political extremes, but it began to migrate into the mainstream of the Republican coalition during the Trump administration. At first, the prejudice took the guise of protest.

In 2019, hecklers pursued the Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw—a popular former Navy SEAL from Texas—across a tour of college campuses, posing leading questions to him about Jews and Israel, and insinuating that the Jewish state was behind the 9/11 attacks. The activists called themselves “Groypers” and were led by a young white supremacist named Nick Fuentes, an internet personality who had defended racial segregation, denied the Holocaust, and participated in the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

The slogan referred to a far-right fantasy known as the “Great Replacement,” according to which Jews are plotting to flood the country with Black and brown migrants in order to displace the white race. That belief animated Robert Bowers, who perpetrated the largest massacre of Jews on American soil at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 after sharing rants about the Great Replacement on social media. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the gunman wrote in his final post, “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Less than three years later, Carlson sanitized that same conspiracy theory on his top-rated cable-news show. “They’re trying to change the population of the United States,” the Fox host declared, “and they hate it when you say that because it’s true, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.” Like many before him, Carlson maintained plausible deniability by affirming an anti-Semitic accusation without explicitly naming Jews as culprits. He could rely on members of his audience to fill in the blanks.

Carlson and Fuentes weren’t the only ones who recognized the rising appeal of anti-Semitism on the right. On January 6, 2021, an influencer named Elijah Schaffer joined thousands of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol, posting live from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Eighteen months later, Schaffer publicly polled his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers: “Do you believe Jews disproportionately control the world institutions, banks, & are waging war on white, western society?” Social-media polls are not scientific, so the fact that more than 70 percent of respondents said some version of “yes” matters less than the fact that 94,000 people participated in the survey. Schaffer correctly gauged that this subject was something that his audience wanted to discuss, and certainly not something that would hurt his career.

With little fanfare, the tide had turned in favor of those advancing anti-Semitic arguments. In 2019, Fuentes and his faction were disrupting Republican politicians like Crenshaw. By 2022, Fuentes was shaking hands onstage with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In 2019, the Groyper activists were picketing events held by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded by the activist Charlie Kirk. By 2024, Turning Point was employing—and periodically firing and denouncing—anti-Semitic influencers who appeared at conventions run by Fuentes. “The Zionist Jews controlling our planet are all pedophiles who have no regard for the sanctity of human life and purity,” one of the organization’s ambassadors posted before she was dismissed.

In 2020, Carlson’s lead writer, Blake Neff, was compelled to resign after he was exposed as a regular contributor to a racist internet forum. Today, he produces Kirk’s podcast and recently reported alongside him at the Republican National Convention. “Why does Turning Point USA keep pushing anti-Semitism?” asked Erick Erickson, the longtime conservative radio host and activist, last October. The answer: Because that’s what a growing portion of the audience wants.

“When I began my career in 2017,” Fuentes wrote in May 2023, “I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views … In 2023, on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream.” Fuentes is a congenital liar, but a year after this triumphalist pronouncement, his basic point is hard to dispute. Little by little, the extreme has become mainstream—especially since October 7.

Last December, Tucker Carlson joined the popular anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points to discuss the Gaza conflict and accused a prominent Jewish political personality of disloyalty to the nation. “They don’t care about the country at all,” he told the host, “but I do … because I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I’m shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned. And I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America, because he doesn’t, obviously.”

The twist: “He” was not some far-left activist who had called America an irredeemably racist regime. Carlson was referring to Ben Shapiro, arguably the most visible Jewish conservative in America, and insinuating that despite his decades of paeans to American exceptionalism, Shapiro was a foreign implant secretly serving Israeli interests. The podcast host did not object to Carlson’s remarks.

The war in Gaza has placed Jews and their role in American politics under a microscope. Much has been written about how the conflict has divided the left and led to a spike in anti-Semitism in progressive spaces, but less attention has been paid to the similar shake-up on the right, where events in the Middle East have forced previously subterranean tensions to the surface. Today, the Republican Party’s establishment says that it stands with Israel and against anti-Semitism, but that stance is under attack by a new wave of insurgents with a very different agenda.

Since October 7, in addition to slurring Shapiro, Carlson has hosted a parade of anti-Jewish guests on his show. One was Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster known for her defenses of another anti-Jewish agitator, Kanye “Ye” West. Owens had already clashed with her employer—the conservative outlet The Daily Wire, co-founded by Shapiro—over her seeming indifference to anti-Semitism. But after the Hamas assault, she began making explicit what had previously been implicit—including liking a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood,” a reference to the medieval blood libel. The Daily Wire severed ties with her soon after. But this did not remotely curb her appeal.

Today, Owens can be found fulminating on her YouTube channel (2.4 million subscribers) or X feed (5.6 million followers) about how a devil-worshipping Jewish cult controls the world, and how Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and killed President John F. Kennedy. Owens has also jumped aboard the Reich-Rehabilitation Express. “What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” she asked in July. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’”

“Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote after Carlson’s Holocaust conversation came under fire. The post received 15,000 likes.

Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics intensified several forces that have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism on the American right. One was populism, which pits the common people against a corrupt elite. Populists play on discontents that reflect genuine failures of the establishment, but their approach also readily maps onto the ancient anti-Semitic canard that clandestine string-pulling Jews are the source of society’s problems. Once people become convinced that the world is oppressed by an invisible hand, they often conclude that the hand belongs to an invisible Jew.

Another such force is isolationism, or the desire to extricate the United States from foreign entanglements, following decades of debacles in the Middle East. But like the original America First Committee, which sought to keep the country out of World War II, today’s isolationists often conceive of Jews as either rootless cosmopolitans undermining national cohesion or dual loyalists subverting the national interest in service of their own. In this regard, the Tucker Carlsons of 2024 resemble the reactionary activists of the 1930s, such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who infamously accused Jewish leaders of acting “for reasons which are not American,” and warned of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Populism and isolationism have legitimate expressions, but preventing them from descending into anti-Semitism requires leaders willing to restrain their movement’s worst instincts. Today’s right has fewer by the day. Trump fundamentally refuses to repudiate anyone who supports him, and by devolving power from traditional Republican elites and institutions to a diffuse array of online influencers, the former president has ensured that no one is in a position to corral the right’s excesses, even if someone wanted to.

As one conservative columnist put it to me in August 2023, “What you’re actually worried about is not Trump being Hitler. What you’re worried about is Trump incentivizing anti-Semites,” to the point where “a generation from now, you’ve got Karl Lueger,” the anti-Jewish mayor of Vienna who inspired Hitler, “and two generations from now, you do have something like that.” The accelerant that is social-media discourse, together with a war that brings Jews to the center of political attention, could shorten that timeline.

For now, the biggest obstacle to anti-Semitism’s ascent on the right is the Republican rank and file’s general commitment to Israel, which causes them to recoil when people like Owens rant about how the Jewish state is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Even conservatives like Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, a neo-isolationist who opposes foreign aid to Ukraine, are careful to affirm their continued support for Israel, in deference to the party base.

But this residual Zionism shields only Israeli Jews from abuse, not American ones—and it certainly does not protect the large majority of American Jews who vote for Democrats. This is why Trump suffers no consequences in his own coalition when he rails against “liberal Jews” who “voted to destroy America.” But such vilification won’t end there. As hard-core anti-Israel activists who have engaged in anti-Semitism against American Jews have demonstrated, most people who hate one swath of the world’s Jews eventually turn on the rest. “If I don’t win this election,” Trump said last week, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”

More than populism and isolationism, the force that unites the right’s anti-Semites and explains why they have been slowly winning the war for the future of conservatism is conspiracism. To see its power in practice, one need only examine the social-media posts of Elon Musk, which serve as a window into the mindset of the insurgent right and its receptivity to anti-Semitism.

Over the past year, the world’s richest man has repeatedly shared anti-Jewish propaganda on X, only to walk it back following criticism from more traditional conservative quarters. In November, Musk affirmed the Great Replacement theory, replying to a white nationalist who expressed it with these words: “You have said the actual truth.” After a furious backlash, the magnate recanted, saying, “It might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” Musk subsequently met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accompanied Ben Shapiro on a trip to Auschwitz, but the lesson didn’t quite take. Earlier this month, he shared Carlson’s discussion of Holocaust revisionism with the approbation: “Very interesting. Worth watching.” Once again under fire, he deleted the tweet and apologized, saying he’d listened to only part of the interview.

But this lesson is also unlikely to stick, because like many on the new right, Musk is in thrall to a worldview that makes him particularly susceptible to anti-Jewish ideas. Last September, not long before Musk declared the “actual truth” of the Great Replacement, he participated in a public exchange with a group of rabbis, activists, and Jewish conservatives. The discussion was intended as an intervention to inoculate Musk against anti-Semitism, but early on, he said something that showed why the cause was likely lost before the conversation even began. “I think,” Musk cracked, “we’re running out of conspiracy theories that didn’t turn out to be true.”

The popularity of such sentiments among contemporary conservatives explains why the likes of Carlson and Owens have been gaining ground and old-guard conservatives such as Shapiro and Erickson have been losing it. Simply put, as Trump and his allies have coopted the conservative movement, it has become defined by a fundamental distrust of authority and institutions, and a concurrent embrace of conspiracy theories about elite cabals. And the more conspiratorial thinking becomes commonplace on the right, the more inevitable that its partisans will land on one of the oldest conspiracies of them all.

Conspiratorial thinking is neither new to American politics nor confined to one end of the ideological spectrum. But Trump has made foundational what was once marginal. Beginning with birtherism and culminating in election denialism, he turned anti-establishment conspiracism into a litmus test for attaining political power, compelling Republicans to either sign on to his claims of 2020 fraud or be exiled to irrelevance.

The fundamental fault line in the conservative coalition became whether someone was willing to buy into ever more elaborate fantasies. The result was to elevate those with flexible approaches to facts, such as Carlson and Owens, who were predisposed to say and do anything—no matter how hypocritical or absurd—to obtain influence. Once opened, this conspiratorial box could not be closed. After all, a movement that legitimizes crackpot schemes about rigged voting machines and microchipped vaccines cannot simply turn around and draw the line at the Jews.

For mercenary opportunists like Carlson, this moment holds incredible promise. But for Republicans with principles—those who know who won the 2020 election, or who was the bad guy in World War II, and can’t bring themselves to say otherwise—it’s a time of profound peril. And for Jews, the targets of one of the world’s deadliest conspiracy theories, such developments are even more forboding.

“It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure,” Jonathan Tobin, the pro-Trump conservative editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, wrote after Carlson’s World War II episode. “He must be put in his place, and condemned by Trump and Vance.”

Anti-Semitism’s ultimate victory in GOP politics is not assured. Musk did delete his tweets, Owens was fired, and some Republicans did condemn Carlson’s Holocaust segment. But beseeching Trump and his camp to intervene here mistakes the cause for the cure.

Three days after Carlson posted his Hitler apologetics, Vance shrugged off the controversy and recorded an interview with him, and this past Saturday, the two men yukked it up onstage at a political event in Pennsylvania before an audience of thousands. Such coziness should not surprise, given that Carlson was reportedly instrumental in securing the VP slot for the Ohio senator. Asked earlier if he took issue with Carlson’s decision to air the Holocaust revisionism, Vance retorted, “The fundamental idea here is Republicans believe not in censorship; we believe in free speech and debate.” He conveniently declined to use his own speech to debate Carlson’s.