If you are not Jewish, and you listen to what Israel says about itself, and see what it does to Palestinians, you can easily become an anti-Semite. Israel says it is a Jewish state and speaks for all Jews everywhere. It says that the Jewish state is for Jews only, and passes laws that are meant to restrict Palestinian citizens of Israel from equal access to education and housing. It places military controls all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem to check the IDs of every Palestinian, search them if they want, deny them passage if they want, and keep them off roads that are for Jews only.
They allow Jewish settlers to confiscate Palestinian land, attack Palestinian farmers, burn their olive trees, throw stones at their children. They demolish Palestinian homes and charge them the cost of the demolition. They put Gaza in a genocidal grip fenced in and without enough clean water, electricity or medicine to survive. The abuses are too many to list here, but each one is a painful violation of human rights and/or international law.
Seeing all this, why would you like Jews? Indeed, you might think Israel wants to create anti-Semites, maybe to maintain its image as a persecuted victim that requires maximum security measures for its survival.
How to escape this push toward rejection of an entire ethnic group and its religion? The antidote is to substitute the word ZIONIST for ISRAEL and JEW. Zionists have created this system of inequality and injustice.
Zionism began as a Jewish secular, colonial project to take over the entire area of Palestine (from the river to the sea). Zionists worked to empty the land that they wanted for a Jewish state of all of its native inhabitants - the Palestinians. Their methods were the methods of war: to kill, to terrorize, to dispossess, to remove by any means necessary. The objective was to colonize, to possess, and then to create a message to the rest of the world that would defend what they had done. Many Jews worldwide opposed this Zionist project for various reasons such as foreseeing how it would be divisive, not wanting to leave the countries in which they had grown up, or understanding that it would be unjust to the native population.
But Zionists became excellent ambassadors for their project, especially among Jews who were discriminated against in their home countries like Russia or Eastern Europe, and Nazi Germany. They created phrases like , “A land without a people for a people without a land,” as if no one lived in Palestine. Or, “We will make the desert bloom,” as if Palestinians had never planted olive trees, almond and citrus groves, vegetables and native herbs. To this day Zionists can justify the military occupation of Palestine, with an infrastructure that not only controls the movement of Palestinians, but how much water they can drink and which roads they can drive on, where or if they can build a house. Palestinian daily life is an arduous experience, meant to wear them down until they leave.
And occupation slowly erodes civil society, fostering corruption in high places, deception and mistrust among the general populace, and a vast network of collaborators. The latter are cultivated by Israel to undermine community life. One example: A sick person in Gaza may seek a permit to be treated inside Israel. The permit is granted, and the sick person goes to the checkpoint at the “border”. The soldier there asks the sick person if he/she could name a neighbor who is a member of Hamas. Just one name, and no further requests will be made. “Only one name and I am free to go?” thinks the sick person, who is desperately ill. “Yes,” comes the lie. Because it will not be the last time the sick person’s vulnerability will be tapped.
This is Zionism. For this I encourage you to be anti-Zionist, never anti-Semitic.
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