[rad-green] Trump and the West Seek to Put All Jews in the Pro-occupation Basket

*https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-west-aims-to-put-all-jews-in-the-pro-occupation-basket-1.8268551
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-west-aims-to-put-all-jews-in-the-pro-occupation-basket-1.8268551>Haaretz
         Dec 16, 2019 *



*Trump and the West Seek to Put All Jews in the Pro-occupation BasketIt’s
difficult to find a historical precedent for this type of immunity. What
other country enjoys, or has ever enjoyed, such a privilege? That is, to be
above criticism.*

*By Odeh Bisharat*

   -

[image: President Donald Trump shows the executive anti-Semitism order he
signed during a Hanukkah reception in the East Room of the White House in
Washington, December 11, 2019.]
*President Donald Trump shows the executive anti-Semitism order he signed
during a Hanukkah reception in the East Room of the White House in
Washington, December 11, 2019. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP*

Something terrible is brewing in the West, including the United States.
Last week President Donald Trump signed an executive order that adopts a
broad and controversial definition of anti-Semitism that includes certain
types of criticism of Israel, according to the Haaretz report
<https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-hanukkah-comes-early-at-white-house-as-trump-signs-anti-semitism-executive-order-1.8259863>.
But the process of extending immunity to Israeli government policy began
seven months ago in Europe, when the German parliament passed a resolution
<https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-german-parliament-passes-motion-condemning-bds-as-anti-semitic-1.7252038>
defining
the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel as
anti-Semitic. Then the French National Assembly a few weeks ago passed an
even sharper resolution
<https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-french-parliament-expected-to-pass-contested-resolution-to-combat-anti-semitism-1.8219304>
saying
that anti-Zionism is a type of anti-Semitism.skip - Haaretz Weekly Ep. 5

In theory, these developments are an unprecedented victory for Israel’s
extreme right; the world, or at least a substantial part of it, is agreeing
to an extreme interpretation of anti-Semitism
<https://www.haaretz.com/misc/tags/TAG-anti-semitism-1.5598882>. Moreover,
these resolutions grant Israel near-total immunity from any criticism. But
after all of the surrounding verbiage is cleared away, this immunity is
being given to Israel in regard to a single issue: the occupation in
general and the oppression of the Palestinian
<https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians> people in
particular.

It’s difficult to find a historical precedent for this type of immunity.
What other country enjoys, or has ever enjoyed, such a privilege? That is,
to be above criticism. Is there a legislature in any democratic country
that would dare to pass a law determining that criticism of Russia’s policy
in Ukraine is “anti-Russian”? Or that criticism of America’s policy toward
Mexican migrants is “anti-American”? Only Israel is given this dubious
privilege: Don’t touch its precious occupation.

Now the right-wing government and the ideological groups that surround it
are trying, somewhat successfully, to create an absolute identity between
the Jewish individual and government policy, between the ideology and the
person. They want the world to relate to individual Jews and Israeli
government policy as a single unit — the ban on “certain types of criticism
of Israel” in the U.S. executive order, and also to have the individual Jew
totally identified with a certain ideology — France’s  “anti-Zionism is
anti-Semitism.”

It should be noted that only a minority of the Jewish people supported
Zionism <https://www.haaretz.com/misc/tags/TAG-zionism-1.5599160> until
after the state was established. While most Jews, at least in Israel, now
consider themselves Zionists, this doesn’t mean that all Zionists are in
favor of the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Moreover, there are Jews who — gasp — are not Zionists. Some of these are
leftists, liberals and religious Jews; there are even anti-Zionists. Now
come the Jew-lovers from across the sea and decide that all the Jews are
“Moshe,” just as racists see all Arabs as infinite copies of “Ahmed.”

This is a pyrrhic victory, because there are two sides to this coin. The
flip side of this Western embrace is that all the Jews in the world become
responsible for all the injustices committed by this messianic right-wing
government in the occupied territories. This is the unholy covenant that is
being realized between the anti-Arab right in Israel and the Western right,
which considers all Jews responsible. Therefore, if you reverse the logic,
these resolutions are actually anti-Semitic because they don’t allow any
room for criticizing or opposing Israeli policies. The term “bear hug” was
invented for exactly this situation.

Isn’t it puzzling that, precisely after this wave of embraces, anti-Semitic
crimes have gone up a notch, or even many notches, especially in the United
States? After all, these resolutions make a statement to the Western public
that respectful criticism of Israeli government policies is out of the
question, leaving the public domain to the anti-Semitic racists.

It’s time for a revolution of consciousness, that will be led by wide
circles in Jewish public life both here and abroad under the slogan, “Don’t
put us all in one basket” — the pro-occupation basket. Here’s another
slogan: “Release us from your choking embrace.”

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