We’re propagandized incessantly about anti-Semitism and “Islamism”—terms without stable definitions—but there turns out not to be any terminology in the English language to describe the forcible displacement of a whole population on sectarian grounds by a Jewish State, even if that State has spent its entire history and pre-history doing just that, and invokes an elaborate ideology to rationalize it. The predictable result is that we have words for things we can’t define, but lack words for things that keep recurring. The first thing leads to snap judgments, the second, to blindness about the obvious. Continue reading
Tag Archives: zionism
Activist Interviews: Emanuelle Sippy
This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews I’ll be doing with a variety of activists and practitioners I’ve worked with or met over the years. Emanuelle Sippy was the head of Princeton University’s Alliance of Jewish Progressives during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment of the spring 2024, and both a forceful and articulate presence throughout. My interview with her was conducted May 4, 2025 at Terrace Club, Princeton University.
Q: You were brought up Jewish, the daughter of a Reform rabbi in Kentucky. What was that like? How would you describe the Jewish part of your upbringing, including your education? Continue reading
Stirring the POT (5)
Politics and the Problematics of Fun
I started my “Stirring the POT” series earlier this year as a vehicle for announcements, but it gradually morphed into a series of ruminations on conferences I attended. The latter turned out to be the more interesting enterprise, so I’ll close out the year with a belated conference rumination. This past April, I went to San Francisco, at the invitation of Roderick Long and the Molinari Society, to be on an Author-Meets-Critics panel on Gary Chartier’s Christianity and the Nation State. It promised to be a good time, and it was. Continue reading
Those “Drowned Out” Zionists
Joshua Leifer’s “Conflictedly Connected” Liberal Zionist Center
The well-regarded left Zionist writer Joshua Leifer has a much fawned-over piece in Ha’aretz that’s been adopted in some quarters as the expression of profound wisdom. In it he argues that there’s a “conflictedly connected” Zionist quasi-left “majority” that’s been “drowned out” by the extremist voices of the “ultra-hawkish right” and the “anti-Zionist left.” If only this “conflictedly connected” majority could be liberated from the shackles placed on it by these twin extremists, the Golden Mean would prevail, and virtue would flourish on the topic of Israel and Palestine. Continue reading
Zionism as Incest
“Do not perform the practices of the land of Egypt in which you dwelled, and do not perform the practice of the land of Canaan to which I bring you, and do not follow their traditions.” –Leviticus 18:3
Many people will by now have seen Sarah Hurwitz’s jeremiad at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, complaining about Israel’s having lost the narrative war on social media. Hurwitz is a former Obama speechwriter, and the epitome of Democratic centrism. Her comments are notable, not for any great insight they contain or wisdom they impart, but for demonstrating just how illogical and uninformed you can be while conveying the reverse impression for decades, and while making a fabulous career for yourself in American life. They’re also an object lesson in the double standards of Zionist ideology, and what happens when a double standard collapses, as it must, into incoherent hysteria. Continue reading
A World of Tears
Back in August, I posted a message here from a friend in the southern West Bank about an Israeli ultimatum to the inhabitants of his village to flee their village or be killed. Though the noose is slowly but surely tightening around their village, and around the West Bank itself, the threatened expulsion has yet to take place, at least within that particular village. Hundreds of people have been expelled from their homes in the West Bank in various discrete expulsions over the last few months, but so far, there’s been no mass expulsion. Continue reading
Imprisoned: A Tale of Two Households in Hebron
Guest post by Gary Fields
Dept of Communications
University of California at San Diego
Dept of Communications
University of California at San Diego
Al-Khalil (Hebron) is the paragon of Israeli apartheid, exemplified by the Abu Eisheh family and Zlekha Mutaseb and her mother. Both families were kind enough to spend a few hours with me telling me about their life in the Old City. It would take a lengthy explanation to provide enough context for their similar predicament but let me just say that both households are victims of the outrageously violent settler community in the Old City and the State of Israel that defends them.
What is different in Hebron is that the 500 Israeli settlers here have colonized the core urban space of the Old City through property theft and live literally next to, and even on top of the 30,000 Palestinians who reside in the same space. What the Israeli apartheid state has done for these settlers is create gated communities for them by prohibiting Palestinians from accessing large areas of the Old City that they have used for generations. In what is shocking even to South Africans who come here, Palestinians are literally forbidden to walk on certain streets in the Old City because they are Palestinian. If that is not apartheid, nothing is.
Anti-Semitism: A Pro-Palestinian Rejection
In case anyone had missed the message, the cause of and movement for Palestinian rights is flatly incompatible with anti-Semitism. Put differently, there is no justifiable way of being in favor of Palestinian rights on anti-Semitic grounds or for anti-Semitic ends. When anti-Semites try to appropriate the Palestinian cause for their own purposes, or hijack the cause by attacking innocent Jews, consistent defenders of Palestinian rights are among the first–and loudest and clearest–to call them out. Here’s a piece from CommonDreams for anyone who still has doubts about the supposed “connection” between anti-Semitism and Palestinian rights (ht: Kevin Carson). There is no connection, just the wholehearted disavowal of one.
Continue readingAuschwitz: Some Reminders
This Monday, January 27, marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We’re constantly being enjoined “never to forget” the significance of this day. Just to remind you of what actually happened on January 27, 1945: the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht, wresting Auschwitz from the Nazis, liberating its inmates in one sense, and “liberating” Poland in a somewhat different one. Recall that it was the Soviet government that, in league with the Nazis, carved up and invaded Poland to start the war in the first place. Had they not done so, there might never have been an Auschwitz. And recall that we then spent the Cold War fighting the government of this same Red Army, which arguably went on to instigate the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and commit genocide in Afghanistan. Continue reading
Notes on the Jersey City Shooting
I’ve held off on commenting on the recent anti-Semitic shooting in Jersey City, partly because I’m too overloaded with grading to comment intelligently, and partly because the facts are too sparse for comment. But confusions have already crept into mainstream reporting on the subject. Here is The New York Times. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 