Content about Zionism

Anti-government protests have mounted in Israel each week since the new far-right administration led by Benjamin Netanyahu government took power at year's end. The most recent saw over 100,000 march in Tel Aviv, while thousands more filled the streets in Jerusalem, Haifa and other cities. The protests have won support from Israel's traditional political establishment as well as the left opposition. While Israeli flags and slogans such as "Israel, we have a problem" predominate, some demonstrators have raised the Palestinian flag in defiance of an order from new National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to remove all Palestine flags from public places. The demonstrations have included an "anti-apartheid bloc" calling for a secular state and decolonization of Palestinian lands.

The Israeli military has installed robotic weapons that can fire tear-gas, stun-grenades and "non-lethal" bullets in two volatile locations on the West Bank. One is atop a turret at al-Aroub refugee camp; the other in the nearby city of Hebron, where soldiers often clash with Palestinian residents. When young protesters pour into the streets hurling rocks and improvised firebombs at Israeli soldiers, the robotic weapons unleash gas and projectiles on them, according to witness accounts. The robo-weapons, produced by Israeli firm Smart Shooter, use artificial intelligence to track targets. Israel says the technology saves lives—both Israeli and Palestinian. But, as YNet states in its report on the installation, "critics see another step toward a dystopian reality in which Israel fine-tunes its open-ended occupation of the Palestinians while keeping its soldiers out of harm’s way." 

British socialist Daniel Randall’s important 2021 book Confronting Antisemitism on the Left offers an important critique of the phenomenon—but is limited by stopping short of a forthright anti-Zionism that can incorporate Jewish liberation into an anti-oppressive praxis. Drawing on my experiences in the US and Randall’s in the UK, I argue that Left anti-Semitism has some of its strongest roots in a Stalinist approach that instrumentalizes Jews and other oppressed groups as political chess pieces. This can be repudiated in a Jewish cultural resurgence that calls for “smashing Zionism not Israel.” 

Individuals involved in the new outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting may be targeted by an International Criminal Court investigation now underway into possible war crimes in earlier eruptions of the conflict, top prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in an interview with Reuters. Bensouda said she would press ahead with her inquiry even without the cooperation of Israel, which rejects the ICC's jurisdiction. "These are events that we are looking at very seriously," Bensouda stated. "We are monitoring very closely and I remind that an investigation has opened..." She also warned in a tweet of the "possible commission of crimes under the Rome Statue.

President Joe Biden's pledge to rebuild the Iran nuclear deal is already deteriorating into a deadlock—a testament to the effectiveness of the Trump-era intrigues that sabotaged the agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Biden and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei have each traded "You Go First" statements—the White House demanding Tehran return to compliance with the JCPOA and Khamenei insisting the US lift the sanctions that were re-imposed by Trump. There is indeed a case that the US, having abrogated the pact first, should now be the party to "blink" in the stand-off, and lift the sanctions as a good-faith measure.

In a victory for the Trump White House, Sudan officially signed on to the so-called "Abraham Accords," agreeing to normalization of diplomatic ties with Israel. Justice Minister Nasredeen Abdulbari signed the document in the presence of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. But leaders of Sudan's pro-democracy coalition, the Forces of Freedom & Change, have formed an opposition front against the agreement, saying the Sudanese people are not obligated to accept it. Meanwhile, there are alarming signs that the war in Ethiopia is spilling into Sudanese territory. The Sudanese army reported repulsing Ethiopian forces from the contested Grand Fashaga enclave on the border between the two countries. The Grand Fashaga, in Sudan's breadbasket Gedaref state, is adjacent to Ethiopia's conflicted Tigray region, and has seen an influx of refugees from the fighting across the border.

The Supreme Court of Israel ruled that a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank had been built on land that was privately owned by Palestinians, and as a result, the settlement must be removed. The case involved the settlement of Mitzpe Kramim, an outpost in the Jordan Valley built 20 years ago. The settlers claimed they had been granted authority to build there by the Israeli government. Palestinian plaintiffs filed suit in 2011, arguing that they were the legal owners of the land and the construction undertaken by the settlers was illegal. The court has given the government 36 months to arrange for the removal of the settlers to alternative housing. Prime Minister Netanyahu responded that his government will "exhaust all processes in order to leave the residents in their place."

Officials from Israel's "Civil Administration" for the West Bank arrived with a military escort, a bulldozer and two flatbed trucks with cranes at the Palestinian community of Khirbet Ibziq in the Jordan Valley. They confiscated poles and sheeting that had been brought in to erect tents, emergency housing and a field clinic in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The force also confiscated a tin shack in place for more than two years, as well as a power generator and sacks of sand and cement. Four pallets of cinder blocks intended for the tent floors were taken away and four others demolished. Israeli human rights group B'tselem stated: "As the whole world battles an unprecedented and paralyzing healthcare crisis, Israel’s military is devoting time and resources to harassing the most vulnerable Palestinian communities in the West Bank, that Israel has attempted to drive out of the area for decades."

A long time ago, not long after the end of the end of World War II and still in the shadow of the shoah, a nice (half-)Jewish girl in New York's Long Island suburbs decided to wear a Star of David to make sure people would know at a glance that she was a Jew. This, ironically, proved to be the first step on her path to anti-Zionism—a life journey that led from Berlin to the refugee camps of the West Bank.

In Episode 29 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advances a progressive, anti-Zionist critique of Rep Ilhan Omar's controvesial comments, which have posed the problem of US support for Israel in terms of "allegiance to a foreign country"—the nationalist and xenophobic language of our enemies. As a Somali-American woman in a hijab, Omar is ultimately legitimizing reactionary forces that threaten her with the use of such rhetoric. As the massacres of Christchurch and Pittsburgh too clearly demonstrate, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are fundamentally unified concers—and the way Jews and Muslims have been pitted against each other by the propaganda system is part of the pathology. Contrary to the canard of "dual loyalty," Weinberg decalres himself a "zero-loyalist," repudiating both Zionism and America-first nationalism, calling for an anti-Zionism based on solidarity with the Palestinians, not "allegiance" to the imperial state.

The secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee, Saeb Erekat, issued a statement rejecting the US-led conference in Warsaw, ostensibly aimed at brokering Middle East peace. Said Erekat: "Today we face a reality whereby the US Trump administration, in cooperation with the Polish government, is pushing yet a new initiative to annihilate the Palestinian national project." Poland has been making some efforts to resist turning the conference into a propagandistic anti-Iran meeting dominated by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The notable absentees from the summit are meanwhile convening their own meeting in the Russian resort of Sochi. The rival summit is bringing together Vladimir Putin, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran's Hassan Rouhani.