J.M. Sorrell’s Jan. 7 column entitled, “Zionophobia zealots” ends with a George Orwell quote. “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” We couldn’t agree more. The problem with applying the quote to her column lies in what she leaves out of the story, starting with writing that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. While both Israel and the U.S. identify as democracies, both have strong men as leaders with fascist tendencies, legislatures and courts to do their bidding and unconstrained power to exercise over their citizens. In Israel’s case, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and those who have survived mass destruction in Gaza have no democratic rights whatsoever. Proclaiming that Israel is a democracy does not make it so.
Ms. Sorrell goes on to deride those seeking freedom, equality and justice for Palestinians in a state that has never allowed such fundamental rights. Cabinet ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have found every pretext imaginable to dehumanize Gazans and West Bank Palestinians. From there Ms. Sorrell is off to the races bringing into her article all of the ways in which those of us who are critical of Israel as an ethno-nationalist state that has its own caste system of privilege must be “Zionophobes” and antisemites.
In fact, debates about Zionism have existed since its inception, and include Jewish thinkers and religious movements who have been anti-Zionist and/or opposed to the formation of a Jewish state. According to Ms. Sorrell, they must therefore be unequivocally antisemitic. She also leaves out the actual history of political Zionism as expressed by key leaders from Theodor Herzl to Ze’ev Jabotinsky to Golda Meir, all of whom expressed derision, exclusion and dismissal of Palestinians, as they proclaimed their hopes for Israel as a Land Without a People For a People Without a Land. In this slogan, Palestinians were not just dehumanized; they didn’t even exist.
Did Jews who survived endless pogroms, the Holocaust and the antisemitism throughout Europe for centuries need a safe and lasting home? Absolutely, but as Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson wrote in their poignant book, “THE WALL BETWEEN: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want To Know About Each Other,” the metaphor that aptly reflects the Jewish narrative is of Jews atop a burning building (Nazi Europe) having to jump to survive, and landing on the Arabs of Palestine. Generational trauma exists for both peoples. For Jews, it is the Holocaust and more recently, Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7; for Palestinians, it is the 1948 Nakba, settler violence condoned and supported by the IDF, a rights-denying occupation in the West Bank since 1967 and the genocide of Gaza. There are no Olympic medals to be awarded for peoples’ suffering, though Israeli power and domination must be recognized, despite their claims to sole victimhood.
None of the above makes an appearance in Ms. Sorrell’s article. We are left with the conclusion that criticism of Israel or Zionism is, by definition, antisemitic and “Zionophobic,” and correspondingly, all Palestinians are antisemitic terrorists. Nowhere does she mention the antisemitism of the far right in this country as a real threat to Jews. Nowhere does she mention the ongoing U.S. financial and military support that contributed to what international scholars have identified as a genocide of the Gazan population. Nowhere does she mention that international human rights organizations — including those in Israel — have labeled what is occurring in the West Bank as apartheid. Also left out is this: the conflation of Israel with Judaism makes Jews actually less safe — through both the weaponization of antisemitism by the right wing and by making it seem that all Jews are responsible for the actions of the state of Israel.
Ms. Sorrell writes of the wonderful rescue of African Jews yet fails to mention their beneath second-class status in Israel, where prejudice based on color is much as it has been for 400 years and counting in this country. So, bottom line, simply proclaiming something as “the truth” does not make it so, as Orwell’s definitive work, “1984,” and Raoul Peck’s recent, frightening and immensely powerful film, “Orwell 2+2=5,” demonstrate. We also refer readers to the new book by Mark Mazower “On Antisemitism, A Word in History,” for a nuanced historical understanding of antisemitism and its most powerful wake.
When there is a democracy in America and in Israel/Palestine, we will readily acknowledge it. Both countries have a long way to go to acknowledge their histories and a deeply disturbing present to be held accountable for.
Tom Weiner of Northampton on behalf of Bridging the Divide, a local group comprised predominantly of Arab and Jewish people.