Treasonous MAGAt Tucker Carlson launched a Tokyo Rose kind of TV show on Russian state television. Not a very big surprise, is it?
All my grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Europe. My parents weren’t religious— my dad was an atheist— and I wasn’t brought up very Jewish, although I was bar-mitzvah-ed, was brainwashed by my grandmother into thinking Israel had something to do with me, and ate lots of latkes, kishka, kasha varnishes, gefilte fish, tsimmis, etc. (My own way of making tsimmis is a show-stopper to this day.) Roland and Iwent to Egypt for a month a decade or so ago and he forced me to board a bus across the Sinai to visit Jerusalem. I didn’t like the vibe in Israel a bit and couldn’t wait to leave, although spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem was a moving experience.
Anyway, I have a couple of pieces of Nazi memorabilia buried in a draw in a clunky old piece of furniture in the dining room. One is a cloth patch and the other a jeweled medallion. Paul Kantner from the Jefferson Airplane gave them to me, either in the mid-60s or more likely in the late ‘70s/early 80s. I never understood exactly why he liked that kind of stuff nor why he decided to share those two pieces with me. Nazi regalia was popular, in a dark kind of way, during the punk era and Kantner and I almost always saw each other at punk shows. The attraction to Nazi symbols and artifacts, even among those, like him, who strongly opposed Nazi ideology probably had something to do with shock value more than historical curiosity. Rebellious people by nature, like Kantner— and those involved in the punk subculture— were drawn to social taboos and controversy. I hope it didn’t have much to do with the fact that Nazi propaganda was highly stylized and visually striking. Dick Hebdige’s research into subcultures and style, examine how groups adopt and repurpose symbols to create identity and meaning, including the use of provocative symbols to establish a distinct identity or to challenge mainstream values. In the punk era it was more a way of rebelling against the establishment and societal norms, than— at least in most cases— any kind of endorsement of Nazi ideology.
Jen Perelman, a candidate for Congress in a Broward County district with a lot of Jewish voters and with AIPAC darling Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the incumbent, was raised a lot more Jewish than I was. She has told her supporters that “Zionism was part of my identity. From as far back as I can remember, my extended family was deeply committed to the idea of a Jewish homeland. I was raised to believe that if there were no Israel, Jews would not be safe in the world.”
Learning and facing the truth about the ideology and history of Zionism has been painful. It is not easy to reconcile that I was once a cheerleader for an ethnostate since I now know it is not possible to do so without committing an ethno-cleanse.
My atonement is using my voice to support Palestinians and to free Palestine from the river to the sea. The best way I can do that is right from the hallways of Congress.
…When I was 16, I spent the summer in Israel with a high school program. As kids, we thought it was cool that we had armed guards with us when we left the campus. As a mother now, when I look back, I'm outraged that we were taken to places where assault rifles were needed to protect us. We were taken to the West Bank, which I now know was and still is occupied land. We were used as human shields as we planted trees in East Jerusalem. How else could Israel justify taking teenagers into occupied territory and using them as tools of ethnic cleansing?
My journey to recognizing the destructive colonial nature of Zionism has not been easy. It has taken me about 12 years to reach my level of outrage at the state of Israel. Even as recently as 2019, I still hoped for a two-state solution. But it has been made abundantly clear by Zionists that they will not abide a Palestinian state. I've decided to take them at their word.
My political views are deeply rooted in human rights and civil liberties, with a strong focus on the importance of justice and community service. From my earliest days of practicing law, I have fought for those who can't fight for themselves.
In 2020, I ran against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for the first time, receiving nearly 30 percent of the vote. Throughout our service-based campaign, we highlighted the stark differences between our vision for the future and our opponent's commitment to the corporate status quo. Building on that experience and with a robust campaign infrastructure in place, we are ready to finish the job and bring to Congress a much-needed progressive voice accountable only to the people.
Please consider contributing to Perelman’s campaign here.
Yesterday, Amos Goldberg and Alon Confino, writing in the Israeli magazine, 972, explained how Israel twists antisemitism claims to project its own crimes onto Palestinians. Deadly serious but clownish snake-handlers and Southern Baptist Republicans would immediately label Goldberg and Confino “anti-Semitic” for their take on the pro-Palestinian student encampments and demonstrations. Both cynical and ignorant right-wingers here and in Israel have long equated criticism of Israel and opposition to Zionism with antisemitism.
“[I]nfluential Jewish and non-Jewish actors in the media and politics,” they wrote, “have deliberately sought to create a public moral panic by conflating harsh criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism. This conflation is the outcome of a decades-long campaign waged by Israel and its supporters around the world [especially AIPAC] to stymie opposition to the state’s violent policies of occupation, apartheid, and domination over the Palestinians— which over the past seven months have taken on immense, plausibly genocidal proportions. This strategy is not only cynical, hypocritical, and harmful to the essential fight against real antisemitism. It also allows Israel and its supporters, as we will argue here, to deny Israel’s own crimes and violent discourse by inverting and projecting them onto the Palestinians and their supporters, and calling it antisemitism. This psycho-discursive mechanism of inversion and projection underpins the foundational document of the so-called ‘fight against antisemitism’: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which Israel and its allies aggressively promote around the world.”
Endless examples have been recorded over the years demonstrating how this definition serves to curb free speech, silence criticism of Israel, and harass those who voice it. So much so that Kenneth Stern, who was the main drafter of the definition, has become its major opponent. Alternative definitions like the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (among whose initiators and drafters were these two authors) have been suggested as more accurate and less politically biased tools to be used for educational purposes in fighting antisemitism.
Crucially, the IHRA definition manifests the inversion and projection mechanism by which Israel and its supporters deny Israel’s crimes and attribute them to the Palestinians. One of the definition’s examples states, for instance, that “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is antisemitic. Yet Israel’s official policy of settlement, occupation, and annexation for the last several decades has denied the Palestinian people their own right to self-determination.
This policy has been intensified under Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in January 2024, publicly vowed to resist any attempt to establish a Palestinian state. The governing coalition’s fundamental guiding principles further declare, echoing the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law, that “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right over all areas of the Land of Israel.” As Israel actively thwarts Palestinian self-determination, the IHRA definition inverts and projects this onto the Palestinians themselves, calling it antisemitism.
According to the IHRA definition, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is another example of antisemitism. Here, too, the pattern of inversion and projection is evident, as Israel and its supporters continuously link Arabs and especially Palestinians to the Nazis.
…Israel and its supporters find a call for genocide against the Jews where it does not exist. Yet in Israel, after the massacres and atrocities of October 7, many Israeli leaders, war cabinet ministers, politicians, journalists, and rabbis called explicitly and openly for a genocide in Gaza in more than 500 documented cases in the first three months alone, some of them on prime-time television shows. This was shockingly laid out for the whole world to see in the case that South Africa filed against Israel in December at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
They include, for instance, President Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu. More recently, the influential Rabbi Eliyahu Mali urged the Israeli army to kill all children and women in Gaza, while Smotrich called for the total annihilation of the cities of Rafah, Deir al-Balah, and Nuseirat. Such voices represent a broad swath of Israeli public opinion, and correspond to what is actually happening on the ground.
On Jan. 26, the ICJ issued a provisional ruling declaring that there is a “plausible risk” that the right of Palestinians to be protected from genocide is being violated. The situation has deteriorated further since then, with Israel extending its invasion into Rafah, and deliberately starving Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people.
Many scholars of genocide— among them Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, Ronald Grigor Suny, Marion Kaplan, Amos Goldberg, and Victoria Sanford— reached more or less the same conclusion as the ICJ. The UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, too, in her recent report “Anatomy of Genocide,” asserted that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”
Thus, what Israel and its supporters accuse Palestinians of inciting, Israeli officials and public figures are explicitly and openly declaring, and the Israeli army is prosecuting. And while Palestinians and their supporters chant for liberation “from the river to the sea,” Israel is enforcing Jewish supremacy “from the river to the sea” in the form of occupation, annexation, and apartheid.
We therefore suggest interpreting this inversion and projection not only as a classic case of hypocritical double standards against the Palestinians, but also— as is often the case with processes of projection— a defense mechanism of denial. Israel and its supporters cannot confront the state’s oppressive apartheid structure, its delegitimization of the Palestinians, or its genocidal rhetoric and crimes, so they twist these allegations and thrust them onto the Palestinians.
The so-called “fight against antisemitism” that Israel and its supporters are waging, grounded in the IHRA definition of antisemitism, should therefore be seen as yet another means used by a powerful state to deny its criminal acts and mass atrocities. The U.S. government must reject it outright.
Most Americans, even most younger Jewish Americans don’t know this but many religious Jews were opposed to Zionism when Israel was founded and for some decades thereafter. Traditional Jewish belief held that the return to the Land of Israel and especially the establishment of a Jewish state would occur with the coming of the Messiah. Religious Jews— including those living in Palestine before 1948— believed that human efforts to establish a state were premature and a dangerous deviation from divine prophecy. They argued that only the Messiah could legitimately establish a Jewish state. They believed that the establishment of Israel should be a miraculous event orchestrated by God, rather than a political movement driven by human efforts. On top of that, early Zionist leaders were secular Jews and the movement itself was overwhelmingly secular and socialist. Religious Jews were horrified by these people and worried that they and their state would undermine traditional Jewish observance and values. They worried about the potential erosion of religious life and the establishment of a state that did not adhere to Halacha (Jewish law). Agudath Israel were Orthodox Jews who opposed Zionism and Neturei Karta were ultra-Orthodox Jews who were— and remain— the most vocal opponents of Zionism and the State of Israel. No one calls them anti-Semitic.