Academic Freedom at Risk on Campus

Daring to Speak Truth to Israeli Power

“Academic colleagues, get used to it,” warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. “Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.”

Kramer’s warning inaugurated an attack on intellectual freedom in the U.S. that has grown more aggressive in recent months.

This attack, intended to shield Israel from criticism, not only threatens academic privileges on college campuses, it jeopardizes our capacity to evaluate our foreign policy. With a potentially catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans urgently need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and intentions in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from doing so by a longstanding campaign of intimidation that has terminated careers, stymied debate and shut down dialogue.

Over the past few years, Israel’s U.S. defenders have stepped up their campaign by establishing a network of institutions (such as Campus Watch, Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and the disingenuously named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies. By orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning campaigns, falsely raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often grossly distorted media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians to their cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free function of which once made American universities the envy of the world.

Outside interference by Israel’s supporters has plunged one U.S. campus after another into crisis. They have introduced crudely political — rather than strictly academic or scholarly — criteria into hiring, promotion and other decisions at a number of universities, including Columbia, Yale, Wayne State, Barnard and DePaul, which recently denied tenure to the Jewish American scholar Norman Finkelstein following an especially ugly campaign spearheaded by Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel’s most ardent American defenders.

Our campuses are being poisoned by an atmosphere of surveillance and harassment. However, the disruption of academic freedom has grave implications beyond campus walls.

When professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer drafted an essay critical of the effect of Israel’s lobbying organizations on U.S. foreign policy, they had to publish it in the London Review of Books because their original American publisher declined to take it on. With the original article expanded into a book that has now been released, their invitation to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was retracted because of outside pressure. “This one is so hot,” they were told. So although Michael Oren, an officer in the Israeli army, was recently allowed to lecture the council about U.S. policy in the Middle East, two distinguished American academics were denied the same privilege.

When President Carter published Palestine: Peace not Apartheid last year, he was attacked for having dared to use the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s manifestly discriminatory policies in the West Bank.

As that case made especially clear, the point of most of these attacks is to personally discredit anyone who would criticize Israel — and to taint them with the smear of “controversy” — rather than to engage them in a genuine debate. None of Carter’s critics provided a convincing refutation of his main argument based on facts and evidence. Presumably that’s because, for all the venom directed against the former president, he was right. For example, Israel maintains two different road networks, and even two entirely different legal systems, in the West Bank, one for Jewish settlers and the other for indigenous Palestinians. Those basic facts were studiously ignored by those who denounced Carter and angrily accused him of a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.

That Israel’s American supporters so often resort to angry outbursts rather than principled arguments — and seem to find emotional blackmail more effective than genuine debate — is ultimately a sign of their weakness rather than their strength. For all the damage it can do in the short term, in the long run such a position is untenable, too dependent on emotion and cliché rather than hard facts. The phenomenal success of Carter’s book suggests that more and more Americans are learning to ignore the scare tactics that are the only tools available to Israel’s supporters.

But we need to be able to have an open debate about our Middle East policy now — before we needlessly shed more blood and further erode our reputation among people who used to regard us as the champions of freedom, and now worry that we have come to stand for its very opposite.

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, writes often about the Middle East. Read other articles by Saree, or visit Saree's website.

42 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. Deadbeat said on October 18th, 2007 at 12:41pm #

    Abbas and his faction doesn’t speak for the Palestinians people since they elected Hamas to be their representative. Abbas unfortunately desires to sell out his people and accept the terms of his Western benefactors. The so-called “two state” solution is all but forgotten and is not a viable and just solution for the Palestinian people. A one-state solution is but that won’t happen until the people of Israel own up to the reality that Zionism will not bring them peace.

  2. gerald spezio said on October 18th, 2007 at 12:46pm #

    In 1903 when the bloody fookin Czar of Holy Russia commissioned his law enforcement henchmen to stand and deliver some effective peeyar about the Czar’s Jewish problem, the result was; “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

    Did those old Czarist aristocrats know their framing and peeyar?

    Joseph Goebbels came 30 years later.

    What a field day in literary criticism and hatred could be had by real modern anti-Semitic politicos with Martin Kramer’s assinine “scrutinizing for Zionist murder and chosen-ness.”

    Kramer’s Zionist techniques to purify Zionist murder and censoring any criticism of Israel’s chosen-ness combined with a literal reading of the Protocols is sure to throw more gasoline and explosives on the fires of hatred and stupidity.

    Try the Protocols sometime and see if you don’t shake and shudder at its uncanny relevance for today’s routine Zionist monstrosities.

    No matter that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an outrageous lie and forgery.

    No matter that it is just framing and peeyar from long ago.

    It is, of course, no different than the slick and expensive Zionist peeyar inundating every aspect of our lives today.

    And that MATTERS, big time.

    Throw in some runaway inflation ending in deflation and starvation depression, and you have a potential replay of 1920s Weimar Germany worldwide all over again.

    Kramer and countless others with their murdering Zionist racism and incessant propaganda are playing right into the anti-Semitic playbook.

    Incessant high priced Zionist propagandizing with its sickening racist slap in everybody’s face could very likely create the most monstrous Jew-Hating-Israeli-Hating-Madness the world has ever seen.

  3. Hue Longer said on October 18th, 2007 at 3:43pm #

    “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti – Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

    –David Ben-Gurion

  4. sk said on October 18th, 2007 at 5:25pm #

    They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

    Palestinians should accept that because as Thomas Friedman put it they do not belong to the “biblical super story through which the West looks at the world”.

  5. Deadbeat said on October 18th, 2007 at 5:40pm #

    But people are going to have to accept that it means accepting the existence of Israel and the right of Israel to exist.”

    Another way to read Rice’s words is that the people of Palestine has to capitulate and accept the racist destruction of their nation. It is not about accepting Israel, it is about “what we say goes”. In other words, INJUSTICE.

  6. Deadbeat said on October 18th, 2007 at 5:55pm #

    Incessant high priced Zionist propagandizing with its sickening racist slap in everybody’s face could very likely create the most monstrous Jew-Hating-Israeli-Hating-Madness the world has ever seen.

    These words are very true. This is why the citizens of the United States MUST deal their long held history of racism. This MUCH MORE THAN Capitalism is the most pressing issue facing the working class in the United States today.

    Paul Krugman was on Democracy Now! yesterday and he is perhaps the only Liberal that I can think of who has the GUTS to give a radical analysis about how the political economy of the U.S. during the past quarter of a century was in fact the white backlash to the Civil Rights movement. In other words “conservatism” and has now morphed into neo-conservatism was actually grounded in racism. This was not lost on the Neo-cons. The so-called “liberals mugged by reality” were liberal who lurched rightward and towards Zionism as the radicalism of the Civil Right movement ventured internationally and brought up the issue of the Palestianian oppression. Groups such as the Black Panthers were one of those group whose movement embraced the world wide nationalist movements and raised the issue about the Palestinians and supported the Palestinian struggle.

    The “liberals” who became “neo-cons” feared that the message coming from the more militant blacks would get an audience and thus contributed to attacks on the black community by supporting policies detrimental to the black community. This was the genesis of the breakdown of the “alliance” between the Jewish and Black communities.
    The kickoff of this break was with the election of Ed Koch whose policies devestated the black and brown communities.

    Koch embraced the racism of the “Reagan Revolution” and to advance the Zionist agenda as well. Racism has always been used to breakdown solidarity and to create distrust and suspicions. Racism is the lubricant of Capitalism and until WHITES and JEWS realize that they must defeat BOTH pillars of racism and Zionism then there will never be the kind of solidarity needed to defeat capitalism.

  7. Hue Longer said on October 19th, 2007 at 1:24am #

    Jaime, please stop calling people joo haters or anti semites…it doesn’t make you a martyr to get banned when the only way you can be is by throwing baseless vitriol…are you out of ammo?

  8. jaime said on October 19th, 2007 at 8:19am #

    Hue Wrote:

    “Are you out of ammo?”
    No Hue, your progressive editor just likes to delete postings that expose or protest bigotry and racism here.

  9. Espresso said on October 19th, 2007 at 12:51pm #

    You want to talk about censorship? Go to Huffington Post. The ONLY blogs they allow on there are all anti-Mearsheimer and Walt ones. And then they censor all those who post in disagreement of the blogger.

    How the hell do the neo-con Zionists get to censor a liberal blog like Huffington Post? They let Alan Dershowitz spew his dishonest crap, they place it front and center as a relevant blog, and then not let anyone who disagrees post in response. I gotta wonder if the “friends of Israel” crowd is encouraging all their minions to apply for moderator spots at all the liberal blogs so they can control the dialogue there like they already do in the mainstream media. Makes me SICK!!

  10. Hue Longer said on October 19th, 2007 at 1:31pm #

    Interesting thought Espresso….Jaime, have tried applying for a moderator spot on DV?

  11. Hue Longer said on October 19th, 2007 at 4:03pm #

    jaime said on October 19th, 2007 at 2:18 pm: ” Heck I just had a posting here deleted that directly quoted Condi Rice out of the LA Times. And I’ve already called Kim Petersen a hopelessly racist jerk, so getting banned here is more likely then seriously being asked to moderate”.

    Then one can only assume that as a law professional, you are attempting to get banned by name calling in order to claim that it was your opinions which got you banned. I used to think you were benighted, but now I must agree with Kim Petersen that you may in fact be Alan Dershowitz

  12. jaime said on October 19th, 2007 at 4:32pm #

    Oh Yeah. I’m Dershowitz. And you’re Peter Pan. Like he hasn’t got anything better to do than cruise toilets like this…

    But, truth be told, it’s been interesting to see what’s important to you nice people. Even so, this shared, irrational negative obsession over Israel is a study.

    The kinkiest bit yet was trying to hang the Burma atrocities on Israel because Israel presumably did some arms deals with the Junta 7 or 8 years ago. And as someone pointed out, in 1954!

    Very interesting how important it is to whitewash The Hamas. Everyone knows what they are. Why even try to paper it over?

    See ya.

  13. Deadbeat said on October 19th, 2007 at 4:37pm #

    How the hell do the neo-con Zionists get to censor a liberal blog like Huffington Post?

    Easy, you have a lot of Zionist who are liberals and why the issue of dealing with racism/Zionism is of utmost importance in the U.S.

  14. Espresso said on October 19th, 2007 at 8:45pm #

    Deadbeat,
    Zionism is the inverse of liberalism. That’s like saying a lot of nazis are liberal. How can you be a lying, ethnic cleansing biggot and still be liberal?

    At best, they’re wolves in sheeps’ clothing.

  15. Hue Longer said on October 20th, 2007 at 2:15am #

    or Espresso, they are selective in their morality…most non-Jewish liberals removed from the topic of Zionism are the same

  16. Hue Longer said on October 20th, 2007 at 2:18am #

    “Very interesting how important it is to whitewash The Hamas. Everyone knows what they are. Why even try to paper it over”?

    Careful of that well, Jaime

  17. Theo said on October 20th, 2007 at 4:07am #

    Not an academic I, unsurprisingly, was completely unaware of Mr. Kramer, who (we learn) creepily informs the American professoriate that they are being watched.

    To be fair, I decided to read something by Kramer before dismissing him as a goony academic out to intimidate his peers and took a look at his rebuttal to Stephen Walt (also mentioned here).

    (Personally, I do not have an overly strong opinion about the Israel lobby or [the Saudi lobby] simply because I haven’t invested much time studying either; but at least I read the LRB Mearsheimer-Walt paper.)

    Pace Walt, Kramer maintains anti-American sentiment among Arabs has little to do with US foreign policy but is born of a centuries old inferiority complex.

    “In fact, America isn’t hated for what it does or what it is. It’s hated because of what they [i.e., Arabs] can’t do, and what they aren’t. They can’t accumulate power, and they can’t handle modernity, and they resent anyone who reminds them of it.”

    He thinks US support of Israel does not create more terrorist recruits and, weirdly, ignores that one of OBL’s greivances made public is that the U.S. does in fact support Israel. (How Kramer overlooked that detail puzzles me.)

    Then it got worse.

    Displaying a true-believer’s disdain for logic, Kramer argued how a US-Israeli alliance is a plus for American interests in the ME, that Israel is a stabilizing influence in the region, etc., apparently oblivious to the obvious: that very American presence in the ME he thinks is helped by a strong Israeli alliance is precisely the foreign policy irking those militant to begin with.

    That someone forwarding fluff arguments like this imagines himself fit to watch over intellectuals who happen to disagree with him really is a sad comment on the state of the American academy.

  18. Espresso said on October 20th, 2007 at 7:32am #

    “or Espresso, they are selective in their morality…most non-Jewish liberals removed from the topic of Zionism are the same”
    – Good point, but I’d counter that few non-Zionist liberals are selective when it comes to things such as ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc..

  19. Espresso said on October 20th, 2007 at 7:51am #

    … for instance, most liberals are the first to point out their own country’s crimes against humanity (i.e. slavery, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, rounding up Japanese Americans during WWII, etc..)

  20. Espresso said on October 20th, 2007 at 7:58am #

    … by the way, I’m obviously speaking of American Zionists who claim to be liberal. There are plenty of Israeli voices on the left who are VERY vocal about Israelis’ atrocities against the Palestinians.

    But here you have American Zionists who scream about Guantanomo Bay (rightfully so), but then lie and distort the fact that Israel has been operating “Guantanamo Bays” for the last 30 years.

  21. jaime said on October 20th, 2007 at 8:46am #

    Always Israel with you lot.
    Every country has it’s version of “Guantanamo Bay,” especially the countries that you folks seem to admire so much like Iran and China, where people are routinely arrested imprisoned tortured and executed without due process….but Israel gets singled out every time here and others don’t. It’s a double standard.

    Let’s see how long this post lasts…

  22. Hue Longer said on October 20th, 2007 at 2:10pm #

    point taken Espresso,
    Jaime,
    Your post will not get deleted because you didn’t name call in it…really, do you think anyone is buying that you get deleted for anything different (including mind numbing sophistry)?

  23. jaime said on October 20th, 2007 at 2:58pm #

    Thanks for the unexpected generosity Hue, but seems I’ve had all kinds of things deleted because they presumably didn’t fall in with the party line.

    ie: the quote from Condi Rice in the LA Times Oct 16th to the effect that the Pals need to recognie the existence of Israel if they want to get anywhere.

    No name calling in that. But maybe it was deleted by Kim or another mod with higher (or lower) standards than you..

    For some reason I keep running into problems because I actually have this funny idea that DV should reflect “the struggle for peace and social justice.” Kinda by definition, the idea of being for “peace” means peace for everybody and a degree of acceptance, and not just a bunh of hysterical name-calling.

    Or leave the hysterical hate crap up and be known as a toilet. Either way it doesn’t matter to me. I’m mainly interested in studying your patterns and trends. Especially the really dumb ones.

    ie: blaming the Burma humanitarian disaster on Israel, the chief “evidence” being that Israel maybe did some arms deals with the junta like 8 years ago..

    Another truly disreputable thing is to leave obvious libels in place after they’ve been debunked.

    ie: Israeli rape of Palestinians, and allegedly ” salting” Palestinian soil.
    When these were challenged for substantiation, 2 things happened.

    First, the posters without substantiation slid sideways mumbling something about meaning these bogus assertions “figuratively,” and second, my posts were deleted.

    Think about that one, Hue.

  24. Espresso said on October 20th, 2007 at 3:15pm #

    Jaime,
    We, the U.S. taxpayers, don’t give billions of dollars each year to fund China’s and Iran’s “Guantanamo Bays”. Their lobby groups also don’t control our politicians.

    Israel thus has a very unique welfare and “tail wag the dog” relationship with the U.S. so therefore it’s expected that they’ll uphold our moral standards (pre George W. Bush morals, that is) than the dictatorial China and the fundamentally Islamic Iran.

  25. jaime said on October 20th, 2007 at 5:30pm #

    Israel lobbyists don’t control US politics.

    But if you have something to substantiate that remark, then let’s see it.

  26. Espresso said on October 20th, 2007 at 8:16pm #

    I would direct you to Meirsheimer and Walt’s “The Israel lobby”. It’s a very insightful book that is well documented with over 110 notes pages. Most of the sources are Israeli sources.

    These guys don’t leave a stone unturned. I promise you that if you read it you will see that Israel Lobbyists DO control US middle east policy.

  27. Mike McNiven said on October 21st, 2007 at 3:43am #

    Professor Makdisi,
    As an academic and a human rights activist, i have been” in trouble” since Jimmy Carter’s time. Racism in the academia, and the academia’s direct involvement in promotion of imperialism are older than WWII !
    Hopefully you believe in the “Golden Rules” of fairness and care about the treatment of muslim academics in the muslim societies as well! The following link is just one example:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/world/middleeast/09iran.html?th&emc=th

  28. jaime said on October 21st, 2007 at 8:24am #

    Meirsheimer and Walt’s “The Israel lobby” has been popular in conspiracy circles such as here at DV and among white supremacists, but their essay is based on theory and conjecture, not fact. Which is why they’ve had speaking engagements canceled and are now routinely rejected in legitimate academia.

    I asked Espresso to substantiate his remark with some specific evidence. So we’ll conclude that the response so far received is an evasion.

  29. jaime said on October 21st, 2007 at 8:47am #

    Let’s have a closer look at Meirsheimer and Walt

    I think wikipedia does a good job.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy

    White supremacist David Duke likes their report.

    Noam Chomsky (who is widely revered here on DV) felt that the authors “have a highly selective use of evidence (and much of the evidence is assertion)”, ignores historical “world affairs”, and blames the Lobby for issues that are not relevant.

  30. Espresso said on October 21st, 2007 at 9:06am #

    No Jaime,
    The American Zionists have made it their number one priority to try and discredit, demonize, and slag off Meirsheimer and Walt’s work. The problem is they NEVER can refute the actual work. They NEVER pick apart the proof that their documentation because most of it is from Harretz and other Israeli newspapers and Israeli historians.

    So they resort to general anti-semitic stereotyping like your statement “‘The Israel lobby’ has been popular in conspiracy circles such as here at DV and among white supremacists”

    Their documentation is impeccable and I have actually read the book, unlike yourself, so you are in NO position to judge the book’s merit. Just continue to spew your dishonest Zionist propaganda. But be careful about continuing to use the “anti-semite” card too much. Remember the moral of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” story. It’s relevance is becoming more and more important these days.

  31. Espresso said on October 21st, 2007 at 9:09am #

    “they’ve had speaking engagements canceled and are now routinely rejected in legitimate academia.”

    >> You know as well as everyone here that the ADL and Israeli Lobby are trying to censor anyone on campus who speaks of the Israeli Lobby. Now you try and use that as some sort of proof to discredit the merit of their book. It ONLY makes their case outlined in their book.

  32. jaime said on October 21st, 2007 at 11:56am #

    It might make Espresso feel good to play the Finkelstein/Meirsheimer and Walt card to try and shrug off accusations of anti-semitic discrimination and propagandizing, but the fact is that that card’s been played already.

    And it doesn’t grant you an automatic ” free pass” in world outside DV.

    If you’re making patently false claims about Jews and get outed, then depending upon the venue, expect to get called out for it.

  33. Hue Longer said on October 21st, 2007 at 2:47pm #

    Charlie Manson was a huge Zig Ziggler fan and student, what does that mean for Zig, Jaime?

  34. jaime said on October 21st, 2007 at 3:23pm #

    Apples and oranges, Hue.

    Let’s look at a simple scenario using DV as an example.
    Someone posts the assertion:

    THE JEWS CONTROL THE US GOVERNMENT.

    Let’s look at this for a second.
    You can either accept it at face value, or wonder if it’s true, or how much of it’s true.

    If it’s completely true, then “The Jews” presumably includes my cousin Sheldon, who works the night shift in a paper bag factory in Chico California. And my Aunt Yetta who is in palliative care in a hospital in Newark, NJ, with maybe 2 weeks to live.

    If the Jews control the US government, how come nobody’s asked me about the Highway allocations for Madison Wisconsin, or this year’s budget for Yellowstone National Park?

    I could go on. But if you’ve got more than one brain cell to rub together
    i’s not hard to see that the above statement is ridiculously bigoted and uninformed.

    Do Jews get organized and lobby the government? Yes they do.
    And so do Muslims, weapons manufacturers, “big” tobacco, egg producers, porno distributors and manufacturers of mouse traps.

  35. Hue Longer said on October 21st, 2007 at 5:11pm #

    the analogy was not false, Jaime. It does not matter what idiots and psychopaths think of a book– the book should be judged for the book

  36. Hue Longer said on October 21st, 2007 at 5:17pm #

    “White supremacist David Duke likes their report”. I suppose you are hoping to find children who may have stumbled upon this site, because when you state that you are a dual professional with a law background, one can only assume that you knowingly practice in base fallacy and are not actually believing that your words make sense to anyone here responding to you.

  37. jaime said on October 21st, 2007 at 5:53pm #

    Hi Hue,
    Hey for a minute I thought I detected a glimmer of intelligence and maybe a sense of fair play. Didn’t take much for the shoe to drop.

    And you bozos wonder why you don’t get taken seriously, other than as some kind of social problem.

    Good luck.

  38. Espresso said on October 21st, 2007 at 6:27pm #

    Jaime
    You are certainly carrying the Zionist torch as the most intellectually dishonest groups to walk the face of the earth. And you wonder why anti-semitism follows you around the globe? Do the Jewish community a favor and disassociate yourselves from them. They don’t deserve the shit you shovel.

  39. Espresso said on October 22nd, 2007 at 12:37pm #

    Seriously Jaime,
    Judaism is a religion born thousands of years ago. You are an ideological Zionist zealot. Zionism is a political ideology that was founded in the late 1800s, yet you conveniently try to equate Zionism with Judaism, calling anyone who criticizes Israel or the Israeli Lobby as being anti-semitic.

    Your like are actually fostering anti-semitism because you trivialize the label “anti-semite” to rhetorically silence critics of your zionist ideology. You do a great disservice to Jews everywhere. Your crying wolf at every discussion is grotesque and dishonest.

    Your extreme ideology can’t win on its merits in the marketplace of ideas, so you conveniently try to cloak it as Judaism, the religion. Shame on you!!

  40. jaime said on October 22nd, 2007 at 12:53pm #

    Espresso, You have no idea what you’re going on about, the nature of Zionism, the nature of Judaism or what I myself personally believe.

    That’s OK. If you don’t mind giving the impression of being mentally ill and pathologically obsessed with Jews and Israel. On this board, you’re in good company too.

  41. Espresso said on October 22nd, 2007 at 2:06pm #

    I think you’re pathologically obsessed with Jews and Israel. I’m a concerned American taxpayer watching our country’s credibility in the middle east go down the toilet as we put Israel’s best interest before our own.

    I also resent that our tax money is being shipped off to a thriving economic country with a GDP per capita that is higher than Spain’s and New Zealand’s. Our tax money finances Israeli violations of international law as they use it to build illegal settlements, thereby increasing further hatred for the U.S.

    So, you see, if you are an American in the least bit concerned over your country’s welfare and standing in the world, then you have to be incensed at our relationship with Israel.

    Your obsession with Israel is based on pure tribalism which says volumes about your agenda.

  42. pnconner said on October 31st, 2007 at 6:23am #

    What is a “peeyar”..?????

    And, regarding Israel’s “right to exist”, since when do nation states have rights???

    There are human rights, civil rights, etc., but national rights?

    The claim to Israel’s right to exist is a thinly veiled claim to equating Judaism with Zionism, and to suggest that Israel speaks for all Jewish people and any who criticize Israel are anti-Semites, to associate them to Nazis, that if you don’t support the idea of a racist Jewish state then you advocate genocide.

    The issue is not anti-Semitism, it is racist Jewish supremacy. Remember, when the U.N. created the nation of Israel, it also created the nation of Palestine, which the Zionists promptly began to invade and annex.

    What of Palestine’s “right to exist”. Zionists say the Arabs want to push the Jews into the sea, but in truth it is the Zionists who are pushing the Palestinians into the desert, into prisons, into their graves.

    What right have I to criticize Israel??? I’m an American worker whose taxes purchase Zionist aparteid. Though I didn’t ask for it, I paid for it and it is mine. I can say what I want about it, even if I am denied the right to decline the purchase.

    Independent Jewish state my butt. try, racist welfare state.