The only responsible course of action for progressives, including anti-fascist Jews, I will argue, is to call for not just the military defeat of Zionism in Palestine, whether by supporting Palestinian armament or calling for a pan-Arab intervention(perhaps including Iran in a grand rapprochement)but to call for Jewish evacuation to the US. It is incumbent upon non-Zionist Jewish-Americans to refute notions of Jewish insecurity and endangerment here as justifying seizure, ethnic-cleansing and colonisation of Palestine. Palestinians may only be able to be safe in their homeland after expulsion of a genocidal occupier, just as Slavic Eastern Europeans felt urgency in expelling the gentile German supporters of Nazism from their countries. Support for genocide legitimises expulsion. No other holocaust-surviving community/people/nation makes such territorial claims and as a founder of Queer Nation I rebuke tolerating such ethno-supremacist demands upon our democracy and our shared if troubled nation. Queers are as vulnerable as any other disfavoured group yet we pursue no seizure of territory. I especially single out Zionist synagogues whose "religious" status gives license to poison young minds and act in support of genocide while hiding behind the tax code. It is their and their rabbis' incitement which now leads to domestic Zionist terrorism such as this weekend's shooting of two perceived Palestinians by a Jewish-Zionist extremist on Miami Beach, encouraged by our fascist Jewish mayor's anti-constitutional violations and repeated denigration of anti-genocide Jews from JVP as well as his outrageous condemnation of Palestine's legitimately elected Hamas government, thuggishly from the dais.
I share your rebuke wholeheartedly-- the organized Jewish community has acted with coordinated cowardice over the past 16 months/76+ years and there is no moral connection to be made between Jewish feelings of insecurity anywhere and practiced theft of land and lives in Palestine.
However, a call for "Jewish evacuation to the US" seems deeply unjust and I don't see how it would solve anything.
Providing Israeli Jews asylum, designating them as refugees, or even granting Temporary Protected Status as a collective would be awful. There are at least three generations of living killers and thieves among them. Why would we import millions of confirmed murderers and robbers from a sick society with their stolen wealth intact, all while millions of migrants from other countries (most of which have been disrupted or destroyed by US policies and actions) are refused entry or abused and deported?
So as not to waste time, I will immediately go full reductio ad Hitlerum/Godwin's law; this proposal would be like inviting the entirety of the German military leadership, top kleptocrat industrialists, and regular-degular N@zis to resettle here while the camps were still operating, no questions asked, lest the final stages of liquidation be completed. To some extent the US and other countries did this, mostly with the wealthiest and most desirable of the bunch, but it was as wrong then as it is now. (Worse today because the US has been the chief defender of and arms dealer to the Israeli nation state). We have a moral obligation to stop the present genocide, prevent expulsion, and push for return, reparations, and prosecution.
It is not my intention for evacuated occupying Jews to retain stolen property or wealth in shares etc belonging to Palestine's economic sovereignty, nor is it my intention to imply any residual Zionist power or control in reconstituted Palestine. I wanted to understate my position but I hope this clarifies. Palestinians may accept them escaping justice but redistribution of ill-gotten economic assets to Palestinians may be an acceptable trade, a bit the opposite of South Africa's current situation.
I don’t have answers, but a handful of post-Israel questions really trouble me. At the dawn of a reborn Palestine, there will be multiple generations of veterans with actual bodies on them and millions of other adults who both contributed to and benefitted from Jewish supremacy (let alone active-duty military and reservists whose weapons are still hot) living in Palestine. A portion of these will have immigrated themselves for ideological, religious, financial, or safety reasons. What would be just reparations for them to pay (not limited to money) and to whom will they pay them? As a prison abolitionist, I do not believe in confinement except as a stop gap measure when dangerous folks need to be isolated. These folks have proven themselves deadly. Should they be confined? What of their children? As people who believe in freedom of movement for all, should we really be advocating to restrict their immigration, given all the problems with receiving them ahead of anyone else? Israeli Jews have put themselves in a terrible, terrible position. Those impacted — Palestinians— should hold all of the power in deciding what amends will suffice.
I agree that Palestinians will need to decide but if occupying Jews are expelled under economic conditions applied to ethnic Germans expelled after WW II, then recovered housing, commercial establishments, factories, oil fields become Palestinian sovereign wealth ideally with privatised redistribution of tangible assets to returning refugees with mega assets such as oil fields serving as a communal fund under technocratic control. Should a Palestinian judiciary issue indictments for incitement to or complicity in genocide, it would cement Zionist evacuees' status as confined to within US territory to avoid international arrest warrants. I see this proposal as both a reparation of gentile US bigotry which refused refuge to desperate, collectively innocent Jewish-Europeans during the Shoah and as a drawing out and de facto neutralisation of the poison of Zionism from Palestine to our body-politic which at ~300 million means a max 2% increase in US population with no meaningful impact on possibilities for return of territory and sovereignty to Turtle Island's Indigenous Nations and with minimal added likely Republican votes, vs ~75 million in November's election.
You might add that it seems that the general public opinion in ISRAEL SUPPORTS THE RETURN TO WAR AND "TOTAL DESTRUCTION" of Hamas as initially proclaimed by Bibi. That fear-hatred needs to be explained not simply in terms of "never again". Education, socialisation,,,,,,cultural values ? This despite the reality that Hamas won't be destroyed given the historical context of occupation. Right ?
Thank you for the recommendation of Dan Senor's conversation with Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal. I found much of what they said in the two episodes to which I listened to be repellent, but I have no reason to believe it is not well-informed.
The only responsible course of action for progressives, including anti-fascist Jews, I will argue, is to call for not just the military defeat of Zionism in Palestine, whether by supporting Palestinian armament or calling for a pan-Arab intervention(perhaps including Iran in a grand rapprochement)but to call for Jewish evacuation to the US. It is incumbent upon non-Zionist Jewish-Americans to refute notions of Jewish insecurity and endangerment here as justifying seizure, ethnic-cleansing and colonisation of Palestine. Palestinians may only be able to be safe in their homeland after expulsion of a genocidal occupier, just as Slavic Eastern Europeans felt urgency in expelling the gentile German supporters of Nazism from their countries. Support for genocide legitimises expulsion. No other holocaust-surviving community/people/nation makes such territorial claims and as a founder of Queer Nation I rebuke tolerating such ethno-supremacist demands upon our democracy and our shared if troubled nation. Queers are as vulnerable as any other disfavoured group yet we pursue no seizure of territory. I especially single out Zionist synagogues whose "religious" status gives license to poison young minds and act in support of genocide while hiding behind the tax code. It is their and their rabbis' incitement which now leads to domestic Zionist terrorism such as this weekend's shooting of two perceived Palestinians by a Jewish-Zionist extremist on Miami Beach, encouraged by our fascist Jewish mayor's anti-constitutional violations and repeated denigration of anti-genocide Jews from JVP as well as his outrageous condemnation of Palestine's legitimately elected Hamas government, thuggishly from the dais.
I share your rebuke wholeheartedly-- the organized Jewish community has acted with coordinated cowardice over the past 16 months/76+ years and there is no moral connection to be made between Jewish feelings of insecurity anywhere and practiced theft of land and lives in Palestine.
However, a call for "Jewish evacuation to the US" seems deeply unjust and I don't see how it would solve anything.
Providing Israeli Jews asylum, designating them as refugees, or even granting Temporary Protected Status as a collective would be awful. There are at least three generations of living killers and thieves among them. Why would we import millions of confirmed murderers and robbers from a sick society with their stolen wealth intact, all while millions of migrants from other countries (most of which have been disrupted or destroyed by US policies and actions) are refused entry or abused and deported?
So as not to waste time, I will immediately go full reductio ad Hitlerum/Godwin's law; this proposal would be like inviting the entirety of the German military leadership, top kleptocrat industrialists, and regular-degular N@zis to resettle here while the camps were still operating, no questions asked, lest the final stages of liquidation be completed. To some extent the US and other countries did this, mostly with the wealthiest and most desirable of the bunch, but it was as wrong then as it is now. (Worse today because the US has been the chief defender of and arms dealer to the Israeli nation state). We have a moral obligation to stop the present genocide, prevent expulsion, and push for return, reparations, and prosecution.
Something else. Not this.
It is not my intention for evacuated occupying Jews to retain stolen property or wealth in shares etc belonging to Palestine's economic sovereignty, nor is it my intention to imply any residual Zionist power or control in reconstituted Palestine. I wanted to understate my position but I hope this clarifies. Palestinians may accept them escaping justice but redistribution of ill-gotten economic assets to Palestinians may be an acceptable trade, a bit the opposite of South Africa's current situation.
I don’t have answers, but a handful of post-Israel questions really trouble me. At the dawn of a reborn Palestine, there will be multiple generations of veterans with actual bodies on them and millions of other adults who both contributed to and benefitted from Jewish supremacy (let alone active-duty military and reservists whose weapons are still hot) living in Palestine. A portion of these will have immigrated themselves for ideological, religious, financial, or safety reasons. What would be just reparations for them to pay (not limited to money) and to whom will they pay them? As a prison abolitionist, I do not believe in confinement except as a stop gap measure when dangerous folks need to be isolated. These folks have proven themselves deadly. Should they be confined? What of their children? As people who believe in freedom of movement for all, should we really be advocating to restrict their immigration, given all the problems with receiving them ahead of anyone else? Israeli Jews have put themselves in a terrible, terrible position. Those impacted — Palestinians— should hold all of the power in deciding what amends will suffice.
I agree that Palestinians will need to decide but if occupying Jews are expelled under economic conditions applied to ethnic Germans expelled after WW II, then recovered housing, commercial establishments, factories, oil fields become Palestinian sovereign wealth ideally with privatised redistribution of tangible assets to returning refugees with mega assets such as oil fields serving as a communal fund under technocratic control. Should a Palestinian judiciary issue indictments for incitement to or complicity in genocide, it would cement Zionist evacuees' status as confined to within US territory to avoid international arrest warrants. I see this proposal as both a reparation of gentile US bigotry which refused refuge to desperate, collectively innocent Jewish-Europeans during the Shoah and as a drawing out and de facto neutralisation of the poison of Zionism from Palestine to our body-politic which at ~300 million means a max 2% increase in US population with no meaningful impact on possibilities for return of territory and sovereignty to Turtle Island's Indigenous Nations and with minimal added likely Republican votes, vs ~75 million in November's election.
You might add that it seems that the general public opinion in ISRAEL SUPPORTS THE RETURN TO WAR AND "TOTAL DESTRUCTION" of Hamas as initially proclaimed by Bibi. That fear-hatred needs to be explained not simply in terms of "never again". Education, socialisation,,,,,,cultural values ? This despite the reality that Hamas won't be destroyed given the historical context of occupation. Right ?
Thank you for the recommendation of Dan Senor's conversation with Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal. I found much of what they said in the two episodes to which I listened to be repellent, but I have no reason to believe it is not well-informed.