The Catastrophe of US Support for Netanyahu

When a traditional ally is taken over by bad leaders, real friends need to rethink their alliances

This is the kind of post that could have me targeted by the federal government.

If I were an academic, I could get fired for writing it or lose the grants on which my research might depend. If I were a visitor to the U.S., I might be stopped at the border and denied entry to this country or, were I already here, I might be arrested, sent to a federal concentration camp and/or deported. If I were a speaker at a public event, I might see a pressure campaign to deny me a platform. If I were working in a law firm or other business that did business with the United States, I might see those business ties cut off.

I might be attacked by top U.S. officials or by big well-funded special interest groups for being an anti-Semite. This despite the fact that I am Jewish, the son of a Holocaust refugee from a family that saw forty aunts, uncles, cousins murdered in Nazi concentration camps. This despite the fact that the vast majority of Jews share my views. This despite the fact that what I am arguing for is not only consistent with Jewish values but in the best traditions and interests of the Jewish people.

In short, I would be…and perhaps will be…accused of being anti-Semitic despite not being in any way even slightly even remotely anti-Semitic at all.

I say this because during the course of the past year and a half, the leaders of both political parties in the United States have embraced a view that is both perverse and inhumane, contrary to U.S. interests, contrary to Israeli interests, contrary to international law, the view that criticizing the government of Israel is anti-Semitic and a new form of prohibited speech in America.

This view, the result of carefully engineered and well-funded campaigns that have been encouraged and led by formerly mainstream but now right-wing, highly-politicized Jewish groups like AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League egged on by the Republican Party who saw this as a wedge issue and later as a chance to advance their academic censorship agenda capitalized on the right and reasonable outrage that followed the attacks by the terrorist group Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7th, 2023. But it used that outrage as a kind of shield to argue that any criticism of Israeli actions that followed the attack would be in support of those terrorists regardless of the fairness or intent of the criticism.

Politics became conflated with cultural sensitivities and the very language of the debate surrounding Israel’s subsequent onslaught into Gaza was hijacked and twisted to be used to advance the narrow political interests of a subset of Israelis—the most extreme nationalist, racist subset of Israelis—and to argue that any critique of that group was hate speech.

Great wrongs have been committed in the United States as a result of this dangerous and cynical campaign. Individuals have been arrested. Academic freedom has been curtailed. Senior academic leaders have lost their jobs. Free debate has been made more difficult—which was, of course, the objective of pro-Netanyahu groups from the outset.

They did not want the facts of what Israel was doing on the ground to be fairly presented. They suggested that calling the wholesale slaughter of innocents genocide or war crimes or simply reporting the truth was anti-Semitic—even as 52,000 Palestinians have died in the war, two million have been displaced, over a million have suffered and are suffering from starvation, lack of access to medicine, inability to gain all the most basic services necessary for the sustenance of life.

Shamefully, the United States government has participated in both this war on the truth and directly in the provision of weapons and financial support to the Israeli government. Even as the horrific abuses of the IDF were every bit as apparent as the murders committed by Hamas, we excused the former while attacking the latter…even when the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed surpassed 40 to one. We argued that the plight of Israeli hostages warranted laying waste to all of Gaza, to making two million the victims of Israeli wrath.

Most Israelis long ago realized that their government was lying. They realized that their prime minister was prolonging the war and placating the most vile extremist elements in his coalition to achieve political gains, to simply protect his own job. And today, the majority of Israelis oppose the Netanyahu’s latest plan, one that would essential lay waste to what remains of Gaza, force the two million residents of the strip into a tiny land area at its southern tip, put Israel (which has blockaded the provision of food, water and medicine to Gaza for the past two months and effectively for far longer than that) in charge of administering what aid there might be and then seek to force Gazans to leave their homeland so Israel could take it over altogether. (This is the expressed goal of members of Netanyahu’s cabinet.)