"Clearly and firmly anti-Zionism is antisemitism”
The House of Reps entered an intra-Jewish debate about what it means to be Jewish and crudely put its weight on the scale.
I know this is a few days old now, which might as well be a billion years by the infinite speed standards of today’s news cycle, but I can’t let it pass without some sort of recognition. With death rates quickly approaching Dresden levels, Israel continues its retribution campaign of murder and destruction and ethnic cleansing, mostly firing American-provided shells and missiles at civilians from a very safe distance while enjoying full American political support. It’s been making carpet-bombing history against a helpless civilian population trapped inside walls that Israel had itself built.1 While all this is going on, the U.S. House of Representatives decided to weigh in and lend another helping hand on the domestic propaganda front: It just passed a non-binding resolution that defined anti-zionism as anti-semitism.2
The resolution was introduced by the only Jewish Republican reps — one from Ohio, the other from Tennessee.
Mr. Kustoff, the architect of the resolution.
It was Republican resolution and all but one Republican voted for it. But it was also backed by an overwhelming Democratic majority: aside from a handful of reps who voted no, most Democrats either voted “yes” or a cowardly “present” — in both cases helping the resolution pass by a massive margin of 311 to 14.3
Last week, I wrote about the central beliefs of Jewish nationalism — aka zionism — and its focus on equating the existence of Jewish identity with a Jewish majority state. And this resolution basically got the House of Representatives to endorse this nationalist vision.
Not sure if it is historic. It sure feels historic, especially when looked at from a Jewish point of view.
The House of Representatives has entered a big fight that has been happening about Jewish identity among Jews in one way shape or another since probably the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th century…a fight from which zionism by, say, the 1970s, had emerged totally victorious in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and around the world.
Here in America, aside from a few Hasidic sects like the Satmar, anti-zionist Jews that had existed mostly on the yiddish-socialist-communist working class flank of the community.4 But as new integrated post-WWII generation of Jews left the working class and entered American professionalism, that old Jewish world basically disappeared — and so did any sort of organized alternative to the Jewish nationalist worldview.5 Zionism has since ruled undisputed in the Jewish community.
But things have been changing. Jewish anti-zionism has been on the rise. From what I can gather, anti-zionist Jews don’t have much of a cohesive alternative identity. It’s a mixture of people. Progressive religious Jews, a small crew of anti-zionist old timers, leftwing younger types who are comfortable just being diaspora Jews and increasingly pissed off that a violent ethnostate project is being carried out in their name… What unites them is being against something — being against zionism. It’s a minority. But the sentiment has been on the rise, and that has triggered nationalist Jews in huge way.
For years zionist Jews have been trying to deny the Jewishness of Jews who don’t fully embrace the ideology. That’s because at the center of zionist cosmology is the belief that a Jewish majority state is necessary for Jewish survival. The two are linked. Anyone who criticizes Israel or calls for the creation of a binational state or some other one-state type solution that threatens monopolistic Jewish power in Israel-Palestine is basically an antisemite because they want to destroy the Jewish people. That’s the logic. After October 7 these calls to “un-Jew” anti-zionist Jews have gotten louder and more insane.
With this resolution, the House entered an intra-Jewish debate about what it means to be Jewish and crudely put its weight on the scale — siding the Jewish nationalists, the ones with the most power.
So now according to a majority of (non-Jewish) reps in the House, hundreds of thousands of Jews in America who are critical of zionism are antisemitic. It’s almost funny. They basically adopted the “antisemites with Jewish parents” slur and entered it as an official proclamation.
—Yasha
Notes only for subscribers…