I’m pretty sure that Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, won’t join one of our Friday Zoom calls. Which saddens me because I have so many questions (to be posed respectfully, I promise) about the speech he just gave equating Palestinian solidarity groups with white nationalists. Jonathan, if you’re out there, please come and explain!
Bravo Peter. Thank you for being a voice of reason and fairness, which is the only way for any of us to find lasting peace, in the middle east or elsewhere. The US has much to answer for worldwide, for giving militancy, instead of diplomacy, primacy in its foreign policy and policing of domestic issues. I hope we can still turn the tide toward cooperative coexistence for us all.
Thank you Peter for your clear reasoning on Greenblatt and the ADL, and for your interview with MSNBC. You are opening space on these issues that is encouraging. THe key rests with mobilizing the grass roots, as you rightly stated with Mehdi. Wonder if we will get there before its too late with the upper levels of the Democratic party? The violence in Jerusalem and Israel's dismantling of the Status Quo for not only religious institutions but the settler colonial theft of land in E. Jerusalem and the West Bank continues without accountability to international norm or regulating institution.
The single most egregious lines in your essay here is: “Greenblatt seems to be suggesting that anti-Zionism requires rejecting the Jewish connection to what our texts call the land of Israel. But that’s not convincing either. For most of the last two thousand years, most Jewish religious authorities affirmed that connection while opposing a Jewish state.”
As any reasonably knowledgeable person knows for 2,000 years the Jews have been waiting for a sign or for the Messiah to lead them to the promised land. And in fact, many Jews ignored Palestine when a bunch of Marxists and Socialist decided not to wait and got the ball rolling—even before the Zionism.
As I recall it was not until the June 1967 war that religious Jews finally decided that Israel’s stunning victory was G-d’s way of letting Jews know that he approves of Israel. And then of course all the crazies, mostly from America, moved into the West Bank.
Of course, in all fairness there really was no one to talk to on the other side. Never mind the three NO's from Khartoum. There really wasn’t anyone on the Palestinian side who was ready to agree to an Israel side-by-side Palestine and the Oslo accords were not followed up on because there was always an Intifada to show the Israeli left that the Arabs are not serious about anything other than Israel’s destruction.
Your audience was mostly dismissive of Olmert, his plan was to essentially give all of the West Bank and the Arab section of the Jerusalem to the Palestinian state and the resounding answer was? NO. So, if the other side is not willing to settle for anything less than the end of Israel why does Israel have to agree?
Finally, I suspect you are probably too young to recall the NLF (National Liberation Front) of the Vietnamese people. When I was at Wisconsin, we in the anti-Vietnam war faction routinely supported the NLF because we understood it as the voice for Vietnamese nationalism. Zionism is similarly the organization that was the guiding philosophy for the creation of a Jewish state. Being against it is being against a Jewish state. Is that antisemitism? You can call it what you wish but being anti-Zionist does mean you are for the dismantling of the Jewish state. I suppose those folks can go back to where they came from. Show me the model where this happed in the past. I might be persuaded right after all the white folks in the Americas return to where they came from.
Hoo boy, where to begin on this one? If I had my own Substack, I'd go line by line and debunk the multitude of lies and false equivalences above, but since I'm confided to the comment section, I'll cut right to the heart of the matter.
""If anti-Zionism is “rooted in rage,” so is opposition to any ideology that denies people equality and freedom"
I'm going to state this as plainly and clearly as I can: Anti-Zionism means opposition to the existence of the state of Israel. That means inequality for the Jewish people as a nation, and therefore it is anti-Semitism.
If you oppose the existence of the Jewish state of Israel, which is what anti-Zionism means, you support inequality for the Jewish people on a global level. Without Israel, the Jewish people no longer have a voice and a vote at the United Nations, to give one major example and which should be the end of the discussion. Anti-Zionism is no different than heading down to your local college and demanding the Jewish student group be banned from campus while completely ignoring the Christian and Muslim groups alone.
If Peter actually loved Jews and equality so much, he wouldn't be defending anti-Zionists. He'd be first in line for condemning them as the bigots and anti-Semites that they are.
This debate on Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism is worth a look.
Medhi Hasan & Ilan Pappe debate whether
Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism, with Times columnist Melanie Phillips & Israeli former member of the Knesset Einat Wilf, in this Intelligence Squared debate from June 2019.
I have my own issues with Greenblatt — the ADL misleadingly obscures hate crime data to ignore the biggest contributors: blacks, Muslims, and college students against fellow students.
But once again, Peter, you need to acknowledge that peace is readily achievable between Israel and Palestine when Palestinians 1) accept Israel’s right to exist; 2) agree to a state of their own next to Israel; and 3) agree to a “right of return” to a new state of Palestine and not to Israel. For over 70 years there have been numerous formal and informal efforts to achieve a two state peace, but all have ended with Palestinian rejection.
But times are changing. Arab countries refuse to be held hostage by Palestinian intransigence and are normalizing relations with Israel.
Your activism is misplaced. It should not be aimed at Israel but rather at the Palestinian leaders who continue to teach children to ‘drive the Jews into the sea.’ Hopefully one day they will instead choose peace so that both peoples can thrive.
I’m just asking questions, unless that’s antisemitic now too. So here are 20 questions for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL. There will be more.
1. Why do Jews get to go home after 2,000 years, but Palestinians can’t after 74?
2. Isn’t there a racist subtext to the counterfactual belief that Jews and Palestinians can’t live together?
3. Why is a one state solution more unrealistic than dividing Jerusalem, evacuating the settlements, and expecting Palestinians to give up their right of return?
4. How will two states create more security for Israeli Jews than one state?
5. Have we learned nothing from our history of being treated as a demographic threat?
6. Is counting how many little Jewish and Palestinian babies there are a good measure of “security?”
7. Why can’t we have law of return and right of return in the same country?
8. Why can’t Jews and Palestinians both enjoy individual and national equality in one country?
9. Where is Israel’s water coming from when the State of Palestine comes into existence?
10. However legal it may be, is it just to expect Palestinians to live on 20 percent of the land- and not the best land from an economic perspective- when their population is nearly twice that of Israeli Jews?
11. Is it reasonable to expect Palestinians to forget the coastal cities that were the seat of their civilization, because they’re on Israel’s side of the imaginary line?
12. Is it reasonable to expect Jews to forget their ancestral homeland, because it’s on Palestine’s side of the imaginary line?
13. What new wrinkle are you going to add to the two state formula to make it work after nearly a hundred years of failure?
14. How will Palestinians fare under the paradigm of separation when 300 billion worth of land and other assets was stolen from them at the creation of the State of Israel?
15. Given the location, is it rational to believe that Jews will be the majority in Israel/Palestine one hundred years from now?
16. Is it moral to permanently exile and dismember another people in order to create an unsustainable majority?
17. Is it moral to keep people trapped in Bantustans in their own country?
18. Is it moral to bomb densely populated besieged cities within an inch of their life, even if the enemy is using human shields?
19. Can there be such a thing as a “White and democratic state?”
20. Is there a Magic Torah you are using to justify Israeli lawlessness, or are you simply keeping two sets of weights: one for Israel, and one for literally everywhere else on planet Earth.
Bravo Peter. Thank you for being a voice of reason and fairness, which is the only way for any of us to find lasting peace, in the middle east or elsewhere. The US has much to answer for worldwide, for giving militancy, instead of diplomacy, primacy in its foreign policy and policing of domestic issues. I hope we can still turn the tide toward cooperative coexistence for us all.
Thank you Peter for your clear reasoning on Greenblatt and the ADL, and for your interview with MSNBC. You are opening space on these issues that is encouraging. THe key rests with mobilizing the grass roots, as you rightly stated with Mehdi. Wonder if we will get there before its too late with the upper levels of the Democratic party? The violence in Jerusalem and Israel's dismantling of the Status Quo for not only religious institutions but the settler colonial theft of land in E. Jerusalem and the West Bank continues without accountability to international norm or regulating institution.
The single most egregious lines in your essay here is: “Greenblatt seems to be suggesting that anti-Zionism requires rejecting the Jewish connection to what our texts call the land of Israel. But that’s not convincing either. For most of the last two thousand years, most Jewish religious authorities affirmed that connection while opposing a Jewish state.”
As any reasonably knowledgeable person knows for 2,000 years the Jews have been waiting for a sign or for the Messiah to lead them to the promised land. And in fact, many Jews ignored Palestine when a bunch of Marxists and Socialist decided not to wait and got the ball rolling—even before the Zionism.
As I recall it was not until the June 1967 war that religious Jews finally decided that Israel’s stunning victory was G-d’s way of letting Jews know that he approves of Israel. And then of course all the crazies, mostly from America, moved into the West Bank.
Of course, in all fairness there really was no one to talk to on the other side. Never mind the three NO's from Khartoum. There really wasn’t anyone on the Palestinian side who was ready to agree to an Israel side-by-side Palestine and the Oslo accords were not followed up on because there was always an Intifada to show the Israeli left that the Arabs are not serious about anything other than Israel’s destruction.
Your audience was mostly dismissive of Olmert, his plan was to essentially give all of the West Bank and the Arab section of the Jerusalem to the Palestinian state and the resounding answer was? NO. So, if the other side is not willing to settle for anything less than the end of Israel why does Israel have to agree?
Finally, I suspect you are probably too young to recall the NLF (National Liberation Front) of the Vietnamese people. When I was at Wisconsin, we in the anti-Vietnam war faction routinely supported the NLF because we understood it as the voice for Vietnamese nationalism. Zionism is similarly the organization that was the guiding philosophy for the creation of a Jewish state. Being against it is being against a Jewish state. Is that antisemitism? You can call it what you wish but being anti-Zionist does mean you are for the dismantling of the Jewish state. I suppose those folks can go back to where they came from. Show me the model where this happed in the past. I might be persuaded right after all the white folks in the Americas return to where they came from.
Hoo boy, where to begin on this one? If I had my own Substack, I'd go line by line and debunk the multitude of lies and false equivalences above, but since I'm confided to the comment section, I'll cut right to the heart of the matter.
""If anti-Zionism is “rooted in rage,” so is opposition to any ideology that denies people equality and freedom"
I'm going to state this as plainly and clearly as I can: Anti-Zionism means opposition to the existence of the state of Israel. That means inequality for the Jewish people as a nation, and therefore it is anti-Semitism.
If you oppose the existence of the Jewish state of Israel, which is what anti-Zionism means, you support inequality for the Jewish people on a global level. Without Israel, the Jewish people no longer have a voice and a vote at the United Nations, to give one major example and which should be the end of the discussion. Anti-Zionism is no different than heading down to your local college and demanding the Jewish student group be banned from campus while completely ignoring the Christian and Muslim groups alone.
If Peter actually loved Jews and equality so much, he wouldn't be defending anti-Zionists. He'd be first in line for condemning them as the bigots and anti-Semites that they are.
This debate on Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism is worth a look.
Medhi Hasan & Ilan Pappe debate whether
Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism, with Times columnist Melanie Phillips & Israeli former member of the Knesset Einat Wilf, in this Intelligence Squared debate from June 2019.
https://youtu.be/K1VTt_THL4A
Are there factual reasons to believe Israel is going to be wiped from existence ?
I have my own issues with Greenblatt — the ADL misleadingly obscures hate crime data to ignore the biggest contributors: blacks, Muslims, and college students against fellow students.
But once again, Peter, you need to acknowledge that peace is readily achievable between Israel and Palestine when Palestinians 1) accept Israel’s right to exist; 2) agree to a state of their own next to Israel; and 3) agree to a “right of return” to a new state of Palestine and not to Israel. For over 70 years there have been numerous formal and informal efforts to achieve a two state peace, but all have ended with Palestinian rejection.
But times are changing. Arab countries refuse to be held hostage by Palestinian intransigence and are normalizing relations with Israel.
Your activism is misplaced. It should not be aimed at Israel but rather at the Palestinian leaders who continue to teach children to ‘drive the Jews into the sea.’ Hopefully one day they will instead choose peace so that both peoples can thrive.
I’m just asking questions, unless that’s antisemitic now too. So here are 20 questions for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL. There will be more.
1. Why do Jews get to go home after 2,000 years, but Palestinians can’t after 74?
2. Isn’t there a racist subtext to the counterfactual belief that Jews and Palestinians can’t live together?
3. Why is a one state solution more unrealistic than dividing Jerusalem, evacuating the settlements, and expecting Palestinians to give up their right of return?
4. How will two states create more security for Israeli Jews than one state?
5. Have we learned nothing from our history of being treated as a demographic threat?
6. Is counting how many little Jewish and Palestinian babies there are a good measure of “security?”
7. Why can’t we have law of return and right of return in the same country?
8. Why can’t Jews and Palestinians both enjoy individual and national equality in one country?
9. Where is Israel’s water coming from when the State of Palestine comes into existence?
10. However legal it may be, is it just to expect Palestinians to live on 20 percent of the land- and not the best land from an economic perspective- when their population is nearly twice that of Israeli Jews?
11. Is it reasonable to expect Palestinians to forget the coastal cities that were the seat of their civilization, because they’re on Israel’s side of the imaginary line?
12. Is it reasonable to expect Jews to forget their ancestral homeland, because it’s on Palestine’s side of the imaginary line?
13. What new wrinkle are you going to add to the two state formula to make it work after nearly a hundred years of failure?
14. How will Palestinians fare under the paradigm of separation when 300 billion worth of land and other assets was stolen from them at the creation of the State of Israel?
15. Given the location, is it rational to believe that Jews will be the majority in Israel/Palestine one hundred years from now?
16. Is it moral to permanently exile and dismember another people in order to create an unsustainable majority?
17. Is it moral to keep people trapped in Bantustans in their own country?
18. Is it moral to bomb densely populated besieged cities within an inch of their life, even if the enemy is using human shields?
19. Can there be such a thing as a “White and democratic state?”
20. Is there a Magic Torah you are using to justify Israeli lawlessness, or are you simply keeping two sets of weights: one for Israel, and one for literally everywhere else on planet Earth.
While you rejectionists for peace continue making noise, progress continues with more Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel, unwilling to play into the Palestinian obstructionist game plan. Now the Saudis are moving forward and all but publicly acknowledging their alignment with Israel…https://www.wsj.com/articles/jared-kushners-new-fund-plans-to-invest-saudi-money-in-israel-11651927236
There is no limit to hypotheticals .
“ without Israel , the Jewish people no longer have a voice and a vote at theUnited Nations “ Really ?