A quick lexicography of Israel/Palestine terms pre-'48:

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this will inevitably result in anyone who reads it saying that I'm not being even-handed....

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obviously with liberal help from wikipedia

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Balfour Declaration: A statement issued in 1917, during World War I, by Britain's Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. The statement announced support of a "Jewish National Homeland." It was, however, not an official declaration but rather something in a letter delivered from Secretary Balfour to Lord Rothschild, the de facto leader of Britain's Jewish community. The statement read:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

There is much vaguery in the Balfour Delcaration.

Firstly: as ex-PM, Balfour was a great rival to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He was kept out of inner government meetings and perhaps had insufficient authority to make such a statement. Perhaps he made it as a way of confounding Lloyd George's ability to keep a government together.

Secondly: it may have been a cynical political calculation from the Lloyd George government directly from the Prime Minister. There would have been any number of reasons for it, most obvious among them being that the Russian Revolution had happened less than a month earlier, and the British government would have been worried that the Zionist movement - largely socialist, would try to foment a Soviet-like revolution in Palestine.

Thirdly: the term 'Jewish national homeland' leaves at least a bit of ambiguity for 'which' Jews. Is it a national homeland for worldwide Jewry or for only the Jews already in the British Mandate of Palestine? While it seems to this writer to contain not much ambiguity that it meant worldwide Jewry - after all, Europe wanted to be rid of its Jews for centuries, Israel's enemies have made much of the idea that Balfour never specified which Jews would be allowed to live there.

Fourthly: the Balfour Declaration was extremely clear that in the formation of a Jewish homeland, nothing should be done to infringe on the rights of non-Jews living within Palestinian borders.

The fourth point, however, created still greater ambiguities, because it said that nothing in the formation of Israel should create harm to Jews living in other lands. However, in the four years after the State of Israel was declared, a total of 260,000 Jews left the Muslim lands, including 90% of Jews in Iraq, Yemen and Libya. It is debatable whether the majority of the refugee/emigres were forcibly expelled, but it is also debatable whether a majority of Palestinians were as well.

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British Mandate of Palestine (or League of Nations Mandate, or Mandatory Palestine): in April 1920, the League of Nations - a post WWI predecessor to the United Nations - assigned British administration to the territory of Palestine (now comprising the State of Israel and Palestinian territories), and Transjordan (now simply known as Jordan). The mandate was given with an end in mind of establishing both a Palestinian state and a Jewish homeland.

Due to the Balfour Declaration, it was assumed by many that the British would rule on the Jewish side with a heavy hand, an assumption thought born out by the appointment of Sir Herbert Samuel as its first High Commissioner, a British politician of long experience who came by his knowledge of the Middle East by being a Jew and Zionist. Nevertheless, Britain only allowed for the immigration of a little less than 300,000 Jews over their twenty-eight year administration in Palestine, almost all of which happened in the first thirteen years. When matters became untenable to Jews throughout Europe, Britain closed the doors to Palestine almost entirely.

Mandatory Palestine experienced dozens of riots, untold numbers of conspiracies, proliferant rival organizations and insurgencies taking every permutation and side. It is impossible to explain the events of the British Mandate with any brevity, but if Britain had any perpetual designs on retaining this patch of earth as an imperial territory, those designs were quickly disabused by their administrative experience.

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The Peel Commission: A 'Royal Commission of Inquiry' established in 1936 to investigate the causes of civil disquiet in Palestine. In July 1937, the commission published conclusions come to by the entire world decades before it became official government policy:that a binational Palestine of Jews and Arabs was unworkable in reality. The Peel Commission recommended a partition. While Jewish interests were divided over whether to accept a partitioned state, Arab interests were uniform in rejecting it. This was the first in a long series of disastrous political decisions by the Arab side of this question. While some historians of note claim that the Zionists who accepted the Peel Commission did so as a mere step on the way to conquering the whole of Palestine, one wonders why Arab politicians felt so secure in their position that they would not see the necessity of playing the same political game.

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The White Paper (alternately The White Paper of 1939): in 1939, the government of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain issued a policy paper that simultaneously called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in a Palestinian state within the next ten years. It limited further immigration of Jews to 75,000 in the next five years, with immigration thereafter to be determined by the Arab majority. It further forbade Jews from buying land in all but 5% of the mandate.

The White Paper provides still more ambiguity because it does not specify that the state itself would be Jewish, or if there was simply to be a Jewish province within a larger Palestinian state. Palestine's Jewish population understandably rejected the White Paper and its issue led to Jewish riots on British government property.

However, the White Paper was also rejected by the Palestinian Arab political parties, who deemed it too sympathetic to the Jewish population.

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'The Partition Plan' (alternately 'UN Partition Plan for Palestine; or UN Resolution 181): A 1947 United Nations resolution recommending the creation of separate states for Arab and Jewish peoples in Mandatory Palestine with the creation of Jerusalem as a stateless, international city, to be completed within the next year. Religious and minority rights would be protected within each, and both would exist in an economic confederation with each other.

Palestinian Arab and pan-Arab organizations of influence roundly rejected the partition. Palestine's Arab population comprised 2/3rds of Palestine's population. Jews only owned 6-7% of the land - albeit Jews were prohibited from owning much of it. Arabs therefore thought it unacceptable that Jews should get much of Palestine. This partition, however, would grant 56% of Palestine to the Jewish state, including the highly Arab city of Jaffa (Yafa in Arabic, Yafo in Hebrew), and was therefore accused of being a pro-Zionist document. However, this plan was formulated by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), a committee boycotted by Palestine's Arab representatives for the reason that it granted an independent Jewish state's existence. In retrospect, there could have been no greater blow to Palestinian sovereignty than their rejection of the Partition Plan.

There were enormous international campaigns about the adaptation of Resolution 181, perhaps unprecedented.

For:

In the United States, congressional districts containing lots of Jewish voters swung control of the House of Representatives, causing President Truman to place Jewish interests at a high premium. One transcribed bit leaked from a closed meeting of the Zionist Emergency Council of America reads "Under no circumstanees should any of us believe or think we had won because of the devotion of the American Government to our cause. We had won because of the sheer pressure of political logistics that was applied by the Jewish leadership in the United States." President Truman later noted that the pressure exerted upon him was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his presidency and justified yielding to it by saying "In all of my political experience I don't ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election." Undersecretary of State Robert A. Lovett, working under the anti-Israel Secretary of State George Marshall, claimed that the UN delegations were subject to unremitting pressure of bribes and threats, and when Marshall refused to change his policy, the pressure went directly to the White House. Prime Minister Nehru of India noted the millions with which India was bribed and how India's Ambassador to the UN, his sister, was threatened with her life 'unless she voted right' - India nevertheless voted against. France's UN delegate alleged that Bernard Baruch, longtime financial advisor to Roosevelt and Truman, implied that he would make Truman block badly needed postwar financial aid to France if they did not vote for the partition plan. Liberia noted that they were threatened with foreign aid cuts and by pressure from Harvey Firestone, President of Firestone Natural Rubber Company, that he would withdraw his investments.

Against:

The head of the Egyptian delegation, Muhammad Hussein Heykai Pasha, declared in a UN speech that "the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state... if the U.N decide to amputate a part of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish state, no force on earth could prevent blood from flowing there… Moreover… no force on earth can confine it to the borders of Palestine itself… Jewish blood will necessarily be shed elsewhere in the Arab world… to place in certain and serious danger a million Jews." Iraq's Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said made an assurance that if the United Nations measure was not 'satisfactory', 'several measures would be taken against Jews in all Arab countries.' The former secretary of the Palestine Arab Congress declared that "The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East." While the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Fadel Jamal, made the statement "Partition imposed against the will of the majority of the people will jeopardize peace and harmony in the Middle East. Not only the uprising of the Arabs of Palestine is to be expected, but the masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained."

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Resolution 194 (alternately United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, see also 'Right of return' in future posts): The resolution defining the terms of final settlement in the First Arab-Israeli War. Article 11 was meant to define the timetable of when, or whether, Arabs must be returned to their homes after completion of the war. It did the opposite.

Article 11 states: "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible."

The legal ramifications of this article have lasted the greater part of a century: the meaning of "homes", the meaning of "compensation", the meaning of "loss of or damage to property", the meaning of "Governments or authorities responsible.", even the meaning of "international law" and especially the meaning of "live at peace" is endlessly disputed.

All Arab states originally voted against this resolution, as they believed to vote for it would recognize the State of Israel's legitimacy, only to reverse their position six months later when they found it useful after victory against the State of Israel was unmanageable. The Jewish representatives from Palestine voted for the resolution and even promised on the floor of the UN that the future State of Israel would carry it out. Neither side of this resolution acquitted themselves with honor, but honor is a practice for which neither history nor politics grants much room.

A very brief thing about the Rally for Israel Tomorrow: Day 38

I wanted to write at length tonight about my guilt for not going to tomorrow's Rally for Israel. I have a medical appointment, or at least that's why I tell myself I'm not going, but my feelings on it are much too heavy and complicated to rub too raw. Maybe I'll feel differently and write about it tomorrow, but what it comes down to is that I know in my bones that even if this protest is successful, evil people will exploit it for authoritarian purposes.

And yet...

When I heard that 100,000 people were at the Rally for Palestine, and there are only 100,000 expected at the Rally for Israel, my blood chilled. It doesn't matter that the Palestine rally was on a Sunday and ours is on a Tuesday, what will go out to the US is the first evidence the country ever gave that the Palestine side of this argument cares just as much as we do. If they care just as much, they will get just as many votes, and its only a matter of a few years before we officially lose one of the US's two political parties. Probably for generations.

What does the pro-Palestine side think will happen if they make Israel friendless?

Day 36: Nu? Let's Talk about AIPAC

There is only one organization who understands better than the Republican party that it's votes more than deeds which create reality, and that is the America Israel Public Affairs Committee: better known as the second most controversial acronym in Washington: AIPAC.

Is AIPAC really as controversial as all that? All you have to know is that AIPAC's nickname in Washington is 'The Lobby."

What does AIPAC do? It does a lot of things, but above them all is one very simple strategy: get rid of the anti-Israel legislators, bring in pro-Israel legislators to replace them. When legislators vote against Israel, AIPAC promotes a candidate to run against them. AIPAC's candidate usually wins.

The most important thing people should realize about AIPAC is that they are exactly like every other facet of Jewish life: confusing. They are simultaneously much more powerful than they seem and nowhere near as powerful as they seem. The reason they're called 'the lobby' is not because they're bigger than every other lobby, it's because they're better than every other lobby - shrewd enough to make every dollar they spend work as well as ten from a bigger lobby. The US Chamber of Commerce spends 80 million every year on campaign contributions for big business. The National Association of Realtors spends roughly the same. The three biggest arms of Big Pharma each spend roughly 30 million. Amazon and Facebook both spend 15 million dollars each. The big four defense contractors each spend about 12 million. AIPAC? 3.5 million.

And yet, AIPAC's campaign funding is everywhere, and so obvious. AIPAC makes many, many more campaign contributions that seem to come from other, murkier (ok, shadier) sources: political action groups secretly affiliated to AIPAC that do not advertise their connection. But then again, so do all these other, larger lobbies. 'Dark money' is a simple fact of American public life, in which lobbies create separate organizations that seem to have no connection with their cause as a way of contributing more money to the candidate who favors their policy. There's nothing about what AIPAC does that larger lobbies don't do. It's one of the great disgraces of American public life, but when in Rome you fight as the Romans do or you (insert heavyhanded metaphor here).

Furthermore, the vast majority of AIPAC's campaign funding, official, murky, and unofficial, comes from a very obvious place unavailable to the Chamber of Commerce or Amazon: an army of small donors. Obviously, billionaires contribute their fair share, but AIPAC's success is because its followers really believe in its cause, and a small group of people with strong beliefs will always win against a large group of ambivalent fighters. AIPAC's small group of believers is not a few billionaires: it's hundred thousand official members, and something like 3 million Americans who donate by word of mouth - so basically, the American-Jewish community, the vast majority of whom believe that Israel is there for the Jewish people and believe that Israel is perpetually threatened. Whether or not that's true, if AIPAC wasn't there, their belief that their safety is threatened would only increase.

So how does AIPAC have a reputation for a monolithic influence on US foreign policy?

Before answering that, does AIPAC have that sort of influence? The answer is... sort of...When it comes to getting votes for pro-Israel candidates, AIPAC's success is extraordinary, but when it comes to actual policy, AIPAC has the same failures as any organization: if AIPAC had the level of influence that's attributed to it, it would have stopped Obama's "Iran Deal" before Obama could even propose it. It would have forced George HW Bush to guarantee a $10 billion loan to Israel in 1991 regardless of whether Israel continued to build settlements. It would have stopped George W. Bush in 2002 from putting together an anti-terror coalition of Arab countries that included many of Israel's sworn enemies. These are not the policies made with the approval of a lobby that has superhuman influence.

The reason it has that influence is because not only does AIPAC have an almost unrivaled donor base, but AIPAC knows how to stretch its dollars. AIPAC finds out potential candidates feelings on Israel before they're elected, and basically gives the sympathetic candidates what amounts to 'seed money' so that they can win first elections or close elections, the implication being obvious that if they vote against Israeli policy, they can do the same for other candidates. This process is a little intricate. AIPAC plays a much more delicate dance than the NRA does: the NRA has long since become advocates for only one party. Israel must exist through constant oscillations of public opinion: forty years ago, Israel still seemed the liberal alternative, a chance for liberals to score one for democracy and human rights against petrol authoritarians and corrupt oil men. The playing field was very different then, but gradually, there was a pendulum shift through which the Israeli cause became equated with Christianity, while the Arab cause became equated with anticolonialism. Through all this, AIPAC had to execute a labyrinthine series of political maneuvers on the most difficult political terrain to keep Israel in lawmakers' sympathies even as the sympathies of their voters were changing. The only way to do this was to plan for the future in such a manner that even if one party moved away from sympathy with Israel, their most powerful lawmakers would not.

Let's take what's perhaps the obvious example of how AIPAC succeeded: the peak of AIPAC's influence started in 1982 when they wanted to unseat a Republican congressman from Illinois named Paul Findlay who seemed inordinately passionate about the Palestinian cause. This was back in the now unimaginable days when Republicans were passionately pro-Arab because, in the pocket of Big Oil, they wanted policies that favored Big Oil's business partners. At the time, Gaza seemed dumped in Israel's lap by the Egyptians and it was considered a matter of debate whether there was even such a thing as a Palestinian people, so it was pretty much a given that Findlay was advocating for the Palestinians as just another front in Big Oil's PR war. So to face Findlay, AIPAC funded a little known lawyer named Dick Durban. In 2005, Durban became the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate and remained there ever since. So even the party weaker on Israel has members of the highest rank that have no special connection to Jews or Israel, but owe their entire careers to AIPAC.

Then, of course, there is the question of money.

Much is made of Israel's hefty foreign aid bill to the US: more than $3 billion every year. It's a lot of money, and it also isn't. Israel has Gross Domestic Product of almost $500 billion every year. So on the one hand, Israel seems like it doesn't need the money, and believe it or not, there are calls across the political spectrum to cut it in both countries - nearly as many on the right as on the left, so it probably won't last much longer. So why is it there? The answer is: it's a public endorsement, a statement of credibility on both sides Israel's favored nation status is not the reason Israel misbehaves, it's reason Israel doesn't misbehave a hundred times worse. So long as Israel exists publicly under the US's embrace it will act in the interests of a place like the US and not drop a host of WMD's on the Arab world - this is something the left has never understood. In this arrangement, the US gets the use of Israeli intelligence (of which General George J. Keegan said is 'worth more than five CIA's'), and Israel gets the confidence from American investors without parallel in any other country. The result? Look at Israel's list of scientific discoveries alongside its munitions spending.

Israel ranks #2 in innovation by the World Economic Forum and start up 1,000 tech companies every year! Israel has easily more startups per capita than anywhere in the world, the highest number of scientists, engineers and technicians as percentage of its population, 10 times as many scientific articles published percentage wise as its population percentage to the rest of the world population. It's thanks to Israel that the world has modern desert irrigation, the USB stick, micro-robotics for surgery, water desalination technologies, digital firewalls, geothermal powerplants, heart tissue made from algae, bird migration radar for planes, solar windows, the cherry tomato, baby monitors that measure breaths to help prevent crib death, electronic hair removal, steel security doors, Waze - the first GPS that gave us up-to-the-minute traffic and speed trap information.

If you really want to boycott Israel, you'll have to boycott all that.

Would all this have happened without that check? Can it continue without it? It's certainly possible, but you'll have to forgive some of us for not wanting to find out.

But then we have to ask the question: is AIPAC truly lobbying in the interests of Israel? Is it in Israel's interests to have so conspicuous an advocate in American discourse? Is it in Israel's interests to have an American lobby so loyal to Israel that it toes the absolute party line of its country? One can argue either way, but what's clear is that it has its deleterious effects.

When the Iraq War happened, AIPAC was immediately connected with the push for deposing Saddam. It seems circumstantially plausible: Saddam after all did launch chemical weapons on Tel Aviv in 1991, and in 1981 Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility in the town of Osirak where it was widely assumed that Saddam Hussein ordered the construction of an atomic bomb.

But if Israeli intelligence is half so good as its reputation, they surely knew that the Saddam regime was extremely weak by 2003, and, let's face it, AIPAC would have known too. Furthermore, I once read a story in a reputable news source that Prime Minister Sharon advised President Bush against the Iraqi invasion - but I can't find it anymore so who even knows if what I read was a false flag... More importantly, the only evidence of AIPAC's involvement lobbying for the Iraq War was when Congressman Jim Moran implicated the entire Jewish community in the push for it: saying that "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should." - more on sentiments like that in a moment...

When a lobby has as much scrutiny as AIPAC, then surely journalists could turn up more evidence for something as enormous as lobbying for the Iraq War, but no journalist did. AIPAC may wield incredible power in Washington, but with great power comes great exposure, and surely no lobby can work in the shadows to that extent... Can they?

But the question of whether AIPAC's disproportionate power is helpful erupted in 2006 when two of the most famous academics in geopolitical science, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, leveled an accusation in print that an 'Israel lobby' basically dictates American foreign policy. Mearsheimer and Walt are ultra-realists ('offensive realism' is the technical term), and from a basically right-wing orientation, they came to conclusions very much like the left wing. Their concern in the Middle East was not the human rights of Arabs, but rather, that American power depends on Middle Eastern oil, and the United States's support of Israel is directly contradictory to our state interests.

But Mearsheimer and Walt did not stop at accusing AIPAC, they accused everyone from the New York Times to the Christian Coalition of being a 'loose coalition' to promote Israel's interests over the United States. They also admitted that "the boundaries of the Israel lobby cannot be identified precisely."

So let's call this what it is. Mearsheimer and Walt not only implicated AIPAC supporters in this lobby organizations, they not only implicated organizations so ideologically diverse that the orgs can't even speak to each other without mistrust, Mearsheimer and Walt alleged that this enormous lobby of extremely disparate elements is invisible to the layman. Basically, they leveled against pro-Israel Americans an accusation beyond a conspiracy: they accused pro-Israel Americans of a cabal. Hopefully, I don't have to remind you that such accusations have very old and dangerous precedents.

Whether the power that AIPAC wields is truly as large as it seems, AIPAC is so powerful that two of the top academics in America leveled an accusation that the levers of power extend well beyond AIPAC to what seems like half the major institutions in America. What's remarkable about that is that their point seemed plausible to thousands of readers, and millions take it ever more seriously today. An effective lobby is far less visible than this.

AIPAC is that usual Washington mixture of morality and immorality. If AIPAC were truly a right wing or pro-war organization, they'd have opposed the peace process in the 90s, but they were staunchly in its favor. On the other hand, AIPAC's beginnings could not possibly be more immoral: for its first twenty years AIPAC was quite small by modern standards, but it was founded in 1953 after an Israeli massacre in a Palestinian town of 69 people, at least two thirds of them women and children, a massacre lead by none other than Ariel Sharon. The Eisenhower administration suspected that AIPAC was none other than the Israeli government in disguise, and it's fruitless to pretend that the Israeli government is not intimately involved with AIPAC. On the other hand again, in the 80s AIPAC was responsible for Senator and liberal lion Paul Simon (different Paul Simon) killing a bill that would have sold military planes to Saudi Arabia - planes that Saudi Arabia was more likely to use against Iran than Israel, and even in the 80s, Iran was a deadlier enemy to Israel than Saudi Arabia.

The problem with AIPAC is not necessarily that AIPAC exists, but that it exists at the expense of other Jewish points of view. When a pro-peace Jewish lobby began, J-Street, AIPAC immediately moved to crowd J-Street out of any influence. To AIPAC, the move may have been cravenly political, but to the lay Jewish public, the issue was a moral question. To millions of Jews, J-Street had the chutzpah to suggest that Israel might be pursuing policies contradictory to its interests, and is therefore a danger to Israel. But as a result of crowding J-Street out of widespread support while supporting ever more right-wing Israeli governments, AIPAC signaled to a new generation that there is no such thing as simultaneously being pro-Israel while simultaneously backing progressive causes. As a result, millions of people whose sympathies would have landed with J-Street now support 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and 'IfNotNow' - anti-Zionist organizations committed to Israel becoming a binational state, with no concern ever stated for the inevitable, and far bloodier than now, civil war that would ensue between Israelis and Palestinians... that's the nicest way I can phrase what JVP stands for.

AIPAC is a fact of Washington, not a good or bad fact, just a fact, and it's not going away any time soon. But if AIPAC continues to support Israel through good and ill, it will alienate entire generations of Americans away from Israel, and perhaps it already has. Liberals who care about Israel need a pro-peace alternative - not only for moral considerations, but for the practical considerations that AIPAC willfully refuses to consider. Whether there is or not a partner in peace, Israel's continued success requires the pursuit of a partner, and if AIPAC refuses to push Israel to find one, then another counterlobby must arise who pursues those Israeli interests at which AIPAC fails.

OK, Who's Antisemitic, part 2 - severely rewritten from early today: Replacement Day 32

(This is severely rewritten from this morning and even more severely from late last night. The original draft to which people might take offense is back up, but after many post edits, this version is far more articulate.)

Buckle up. This won't be fun.

I didn't want to do this post, but I have to, no matter whom it alienates.

So the most basic point is this: Jews don't count. The very antiracists who use every other oppressed demographic as a trump card to correct injustices don't care a fig for how Jews are oppressed. They see the majority of Jews in a whole country of Jews as the oppressor, and millions of Jews in the US as manipulative enablers.

But the corollary point is not that people should be a better anti-antisemite, the point is that the very ideas of antiracism and its related concepts are a farce that created more people who mean to be racist, sexist and LGBTQ-phobic than it ever neutralized.

Eventually, all of us have to come to terms with this. If it's meant to foster dialogue then it's done the exact opposite: there is no dialogue to be had if the dialogue comes to a foregone conclusion that we have no right to tell a member of a minority demographic that their notions are incorrect.

We oppressed minorities are not children. Don't treat us like children by assuming that we are automatically correct in our assumptions - a notion you will probably find more necessary to acknowledge as you read this post...

The reason I stopped writing this the other day is that there's no way to sugarcoat that truth. It's a farce when some left-crank on Medium demands it, it's no less a farce when some right-crank in Tablet Magazine demands the same special treatment for Jews.

It's a literally impossible standard of human interaction, and the more you demand it, the more totalitarian groups like Hamas and the FSB can exploit your ideals to perpetrate the worst sort of human crime.

Once upon a time, Marxists demanded similar sorts of interactions to be the ally of the lower classes, and it lead to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and at least a dozen other genocidal dictators - probably well over 100 million people murdered total - not counting the wars in which they partook.

You may laugh at these warnings or think you're preventing mass murder exactly like this, but many well meaning groups before you have done exactly the same, and their impossible ideals lead the world to mass murder in every one of the last five centuries.

But if we're going to have a reasonable dialogue about this, we have to consider the points of both sides without getting angry. If you find yourself getting angry with the points I'm making, take a breather and perhaps come back when you find yourself able to approach things with a cooler head. But, be warned, this is a post about antisemitism, not about Islamophobia.

There are so many antisemitic acts currently that I think anybody with the most basic understanding of the world would understand what they are the moment they read them. They're just a google search away, and the people who would read them and not consider them antisemitic are beyond reaching.

It's not worth talking too much about slogans, but when you say 'From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free', or a simple 'Free Palestine,' whatever meanings that holds about freeing Palestinians from oppression, you also have to take into account that it means many other things: does it mean two states living side by side?

From the river to the sea certainly sounds as though there is no room for Israel, and it's meant to recall the PLO charter's line that Jews should be 'tossed in the sea.'

And even if you believe there should only be one un-Jewish state, there are hundreds of millions of people who hear those slogans as a call to the murder of Jews, not just a few Jews, millions.

Both sides have to take the other into account, and just because you've chanted it does not mean you're an antisemite, but if you want a peaceful solution, you will stop partaking of those chants.

If, however, you want a war against the Jewish state, there's no reason to stop. If that's what you want, you're not necessarily even an antisemite, just incredibly naive for thinking that a Palestinian army as currently constituted would seek vengeance rather than targeted strikes with a clear objective in mind.

If you believe that indiscriminate vengeance against Israeli civilians is justified, then yes, I'm afraid you're an antisemite and a particularly dangerous one - there are a few hundred thousand in every major first world country, a few thousand of whom intent to become violent themselves.

If you think there's at least a good reason for that sort of vengeance, you're not necessarily an antisemite, but you're nearly as bad - you've become a slimy, ugly fellow traveler to antisemites enabling the wars you claim you want to end. Of these, there are millions everywhere. Among Americans 18-24, polls determine this is 51% of the country's population.

But there is something arguably worse than an antisemite, and so common that there are tens of millions in every first world country, and that is an anti-Jew. Antisemitism as we currently think of it is a racial prejudice, and as so many specialists on the issue from David Nirenberg to Max Diamant point out, it really only goes back to the mid-19th century.

But anti-Judaism, or anti-Hebraism, goes back at least 3000 years, and with that, there is almost no daylight between being anti-Judaism and being anti-Jew. That doesn't mean Jews automatically get a pass for their own exclusionist policies and rhetoric, but it does mean that Zionism is indivisible from the core of the religion.

Zionism is not just a fringe part of the religion that one can divorce from it.

The longing for Zion is not like the injunctions against homosexuality and permission to own slaves that are mentioned once each in the Torah. Zionism is Judaism's eleventh commandment, only not listed among them because the covenant to the land of Israel is scrawled around nearly every one of the Torah's other columns.

And if you have a problem with that, you have a problem with Judaism. You can say that Zionism is a catchall excuse for the militant among Zionists to inflict pain on other peoples: and you would be correct, but if you do not allow for labor Zionism, liberal Zionism, moderate Zionism, even of religious and conservative and orthodox Zionisms of principle, you have a problem with Judaism.

If you have a problem with Judaism, you have a problem with every one among the millions of Jews who practice it. You can reconcile yourself to having this problem and still think yourself a decent person with much justification - there are more important moral issues in the world than bigotry - but you should have no illusion for what this means to your relationship to Jews.

This belief probably comprises a near-majority of people in every first world country. Saying that Zionism does not mean Judaism is as illogical as saying that you can be Jewish while believing that Jesus is the Messiah.

We may not have called it Zionism until the late 19th century, but the longing for Zion goes back to the second century expulsion. It is in well over a dozen prayers Jews have chanted multiple times every day ever since. Believing that Jews are white, or European, or not native of Israel, in every sense, a denial that Jews are from the Middle East.

Think about it for a minute, how do you think so many European Jews got white skin? Jews were low enough in the social hierarchy that it was unthinkable to marry a Jew in well over 90% of European societies. What was, though, permissible was rape. The only reason Jews look white is because the European gene pool was forcibly introduced into Judaism from the invasion of the Greeks, continuing unabated for 2300 years with only a few interruptions.

Even if a Jew has European blood, Jews are Jews, Jews are Israeli, Jews are Judean, Jews are citizens of the Palestinian land. There is no conceding an inch on this, and anyone who denies it is anti-Jew. We were thrown off of it by the very imperialism today's anti-Jews so decry, and we have always deserved our own country upon it, even if other people deserve their own country in it too.

There are other precepts that make a Jew, but alongside those others, Zionism is far more Jewish than corned beef and matzoh balls. If you throw us out again, we will never stop longing for Zion and never stop trying to get it back. You may think that when the most violent anti-Zionists come for us, you will stand up for us, but why should we ever believe you if you didn't stand up for us when we still had a state?

Zionism IS Judaism. Anti-Zionism IS anti-Judaism. A person who seeks to divorce Judaism from Zionism is, at best, a person whose prejudices should be viewed with suspicion. You may disagree with that, you may disapprove of that, but it is what it is and it's never going to change. If you don't like that, you don't like Jews. The rest is commentary.

OK, Who's Antisemitic, part 2: replacement Day 31

What I didn't want this post to be is a checklist of different attitudes in which I call what sentiments are antisemitic like a referee. It sounds like that same stupid/sinister cocktail of 'how to be a better ally' that Robin DeAngelo and Ibrahim Kendi make millions on.

The most basic point is this: Jews somehow don't count. The very antiracists who use every other oppressed demographic as a trump card don't care a fig for how Jews are oppressed.

But the point is not that people should be a better anti-antisemite, the point is that the very idea of allyship is a farce. The reason I stopped writing this the other day is that there's no way to sugarcoat that truth. Antiracism makes every minority into children for whom everybody needs to approach with kid gloves in order to be to be koshered as a decent human being. It's a farce when every other demographic demands it, and it's as much a farce when Jews demand it. Are we adults who live in the real world, or do we approach dialogue in a manner in which everybody has to surrender their individuality at the door of a sinister playhouse where you either speak to each other with pre-digested dialogue that comes to a foreordained answer about what the problems are, or risk losing lifelong friendships? It's a literally impossible standard of human interaction, and the more you demand it, the more totalitarian groups like Hamas and the FSB can exploit your ideals to perpetrate the worst sort of human crime. Once upon a time, Marxists demanded similar sorts of interactions to be the ally of the lower classes, and it lead to the crimes of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and a dozen other genocidal dictators - probably over 100 million people murdered. You may laugh at these warnings or think you're preventing murders exactly like this. Many well meaning groups before you have done the exact same thing, and their impossible ideals the world to mass murder in every century.

That is probably the most contentious claim I will make in this post.

There are so many things currently happening are clearly antisemitism that I think anybody with the most basic understanding of the world would understand what they are the moment they read them. They're just a google search away, and the people who would read them and not consider them antisemitic are beyond reaching.

But if we're going to have a reasonable dialogue about this, we have to consider the points of both sides without getting angry. If you find yourself getting angry with the points I'm making, take a breather and perhaps come back when you find yourself able to approach things with a cooler head.

It's not worth talking too much about slogans, but when you say 'From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free', or a simple 'Free Palestine'; whatever meanings that holds about a Palestine free of oppression, you also have to take into account that it means many other things: does it mean two states living side by side? From the river to the sea certainly sounds as though there is no room for Israel. And even if you believe there should only be one un-Jewish state, there are millions who hear those slogans as a call to the murder of Jews, and not just a few Jews but millions. Both sides have to take the other into account, and just because you've chanted it does not mean you're an antisemite, but if you want a peaceful solution, you will stop partaking of those chants. If, however, you want a war against the Jewish state, there's no reason to stop. If that's what you want, you're not necessarily even an antisemite, just incredibly naive for thinking that a Palestinian army as currently constituted would seek vengeance rather than targeted strikes with a clear objective in mind. If you believe in avenging for the Palestinian state, then yes, you're beyond doubt as an antisemite and a particularly dangerous one - and every first world country clearly has thousands. If you think there is at least a good reason for that sort of vengeance, you're not necessarily an antisemite, but be honest with yourself - you're a fellow traveler to antisemites enabling the wars you claim you want to end.

But there is something arguably worse than an antisemite, and so common that there are millions in every first world country, sometimes tens of millions, and that is an anti-Jew. Antisemitism as we currently think of it is a racial prejudice, and as so many specialists on the issue from David Nirenberg to Max Diamant point out, it really only goes back to the mid-19th century. Anti-Judaism, or anti-Hebraism, goes back at least 3000 years, and with that, there is very little daylight between being anti-Judaism and being anti-Jew.

The longing for Zion is not just a fringe part of the religion like the injunctions against homosexuality and permission to own slaves that are mentioned once each in the Torah. Zionism is Judaism's eleventh commandment, not listed among them only because the covenant to the land of Israel is scrawled around nearly every one of the Torah's other columns. If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with Judaism. If you have a problem with Judaism, you have a problem with the millions of Jews who practice it.

We may not have called it Zionism until the late 19th century, but the longing for Zion goes back to the second century expulsion. It is in well over a dozen prayers Jews have chanted multiple times every day ever since. Believing that Jews are white, or European, or not native of Israel, in every sense, a denial that Jews are from the Middle East.

Think about it for a minute, how do you think so many European Jews got white skin? Jews were low enough in the social hierarchy that it was unthinkable to marry a Jew in well over 90% of European societies. What was, though, permissible was rape. The only reason Jews look white is because the European gene pool was forcibly introduced into Judaism from the invasion of the Greeks, continuing unabated for 2300 years with only a few interruptions.

Even if a Jew has European blood, Jews are Jews, Jews are Israeli, Jews are Judean, Jews are citizens of the Palestinian land. There is no conceding an inch on this, and anyone who denies it is anti-Jew. We were thrown off of it by the very imperialism today's anti-Jews so decry, and we have always deserved our own country upon it, even though other people deserve their own country in it too.

There are other precepts that make a Jew, but alongside those others, Zionism is far more Jewish than corned beef and matzoh balls. If you throw us out again, we will never stop longing for Zion and never stop trying to get it back. You may think when the most violent anti-Zionists come for us, you will stand up for us, but why should we ever believe you if you didn't stand up for us when we still had a state?

Zionism IS Judaism. If you don't like that, you don't like Jews. The rest is commentary.

A Quick Word about JVP

 I'm going to make a very contentious claim here about a certain antizionist group, and I will delete any attempt to have a fight or even dialogue on this subject. If the majority of your sympathies are with the Palestinian side and you don't want to get mad, don't read further. But just so you know, this message is particularly to you.

A lot of people are sharing stuff from Jewish Voice for Peace, a very clever name for a group that is quite frankly a hate group masquerading as dovish peaceniks, who accepts plenty of funding from the most corrupt anti-democratic organizations and states around the world who disguise their funding under inoffensive names.

Anybody who shares it is, at best, breathtakingly naive, at worst, allowing themselves to be the most hateful sort of fellow traveler to the world's most poisonous, totalitarian antisemites.

If you've shared anything from them, please, I beg you, take it down immediately. You owe anyone you don't wish dead that much.