Targeting Jews and Jewish anti-Zionists is explained by Miller’s Failure to Understand Why Imperialism Supports Zionism and Genocide in Gaza – As Such It is Anti-Semitic
The Virulent neo-Nazi Stew Peters Show & His $6 Million Reward for Proving the Holocaust Happened
I didn’t want to have to write this blog. There are far more important topics such as Genocide in Gaza. HoweverMiller’s recent social media postings are becoming ever more bizarre and crossing the line into anti-Semitism. Miller has abandoned anti-Zionism.
His behaviour is not only strange it is also stupid. If ‘antisemitism’ is the ritual accusation of the Zionists why try to prove them correct by attacking Jews as Jews? It seems that Miller believes that it is Western Jews who are responsible for the hideous monstrosity that is the Israeli state. This is the Zionist narrative.
Jews in the West are the moral alibi for imperialism. Does anyone seriously think that Trump is seriously concerned about Jews or anti-Semitism? His ‘concern’ over the ‘plight’ of Jewish students is grotesque in the extreme given his own racism and hostility to Black Lives Matter and anti-racism, with his portrayal of migrants as rapists and criminals.
Trump has given overt support to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville, describing them as ‘very fine people’ and to the Proud Boys and other White Supremacist militias. Miller understands none of this.
When Biden said that if Israel didn’t exist it would have had to be created he was expressing the views of mainstream imperialist thought in the US. According to Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Israel was the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier and cheap at the price in an area of immense strategic and economic interest. Jews in the words of Barnaby Raine are merely the West’s colonial pets.
I was reluctant to break from Miller because of what had happened at Bristol University where he was fired in a McCarthyist witchhunt. I was elated at his victory in the Employment Tribunal and I hope he wins at the EAT. Initially I pushed back against the criticism of him by JVL and Na’amod, I cannot do so now because David has made it clear that he is going down an anti-Semitic pathway.
In holding Jews responsible for Israel’s holocaust in Gaza, Miller lets imperialism off the hook. The genocide could be halted tomorrow if Trump, or Biden had stopped the flow of arms. It could have been halted if the Arab states had stopped the flow of oil. The fact that that miserable humanoid Starmer, has uttered not one word of criticism speaks volumes.
In a tweet of 24 March Miller said
Those who are interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible near them: the entire Zionist movement globally must live in fear of accountability until it is dismantled and its ideology eradicated. And let’s be clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.
Zionism is the worst catastrophe that has befallen the Jewish people next to the Holocaust itself. It is an abomination. It has destroyed Judaism’s moral and ethical traditions.
Isaiah’s injunction to
‘learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause’
Isaiah 1:17
has been replaced by Israel’s determination to turn Gaza into a land of orphans. We have a new acronym WCNSF (Wounded child, no surviving family).
The injunction in Exodus ‘not (to) oppress a stranger… having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” has been replaced by Death to the Arabs.
I am all in favour of destroying Zionism politically and organisationally but targeting individual Zionists is not the way to do it.
Miller is arguing that we start ferreting out individual Zionists. How will that stop the genocide? Israel isn’t even concerned about killing its own hostages. Why should it be concerned about Miller’s fans tracking down individual Zionists? He says ‘there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where they are.’ And then what?
Leaving aside his paranoia, are individual Zionists in Britain, many of whom are Jewish, really responsible for what Israel does? Is that how imperialism operates?
But if like Miller you dismiss imperialism as an interconnected system of war and political domination motivated by economic exploitation, then it is far easier to focus on individual Zionists. In so doing you let off the hook US imperialism and the complicity of Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s MBS.
Because Miller fails to understand why Western capitalism supports Israel, he believes that it is all due to ‘infiltration’ of government bodies. Since about two-thirds of Jews are Zionists this will inevitably be portrayed as Jew hunting. Is that what Palestine solidarity is about?
Miller’s call for targeting individual Zionists lays him open to Police attacks. Of course the hysterical reaction of the Zionists is hypocritical. For years now Zionist organisations like the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitismand UK Lawyers for Israelhave gaslighted and doxxed anti-Zionists and Palestinians like Miller himself and Shahd Abusalama.
Of course if the Police were to act as the Board of Deputies enforcers then of course we would defend Miller despite his stupidity.
I am currently being prosecuted for support for the Palestinian Resistance. I was targeted by Heidi Bachram, who follows in a long tradition of Zionist informers who in countries under Nazi occupation betrayed Jews to the Gestapo.
Heidi Bachram would have been in her element feeding the Stasi or the Gestapo with ‘useful information’ on their enemies
Scottish PSC has tried to arrange a debate between Miller and myself without success. Miller has shied away from debating his ideas. David knows that what he is saying is indefensible.
The idea that the West supports Israel because Zionists have crept into powerful positions barely merits a response. Are the Christian Zionists in Trump’s cabinet all infiltrators? Is Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State a Zionist infiltrator?
Does the German state support Israel and attack Palestine solidarity demonstrations because of Jews? Why does the AfD, which is riddled with neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers, love Israel so much?
Far-right and neo-Nazi groups are happy to support Zionism and Israel, not because they love Jews but because they hate Muslims and love imperialism. In appearing on anti-Semitic and White Supremacist platforms like Stew Peters he is mixing in some very unsavoury company. Miller seems to have no sense of self-awareness.
A Reply to Some of David Miller’s Comments
In his first controversial tweet Miller made 3 points:
Jewish Power and Discrimination Against Jews
1. Jews are not discriminated against.
2. They are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.
3. They are therefore, in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.
In reaction to criticism of this tweet I defended it although I had grave misgivings, in particular about the third point.
Miller was correct to say that Jews are not discriminated against or experiencing racism. There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain. Anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice not a form of racism with all its power dynamics. I was saying this long before Miller, as was Norman Finkelstein and others. I could even go along with his observations on Jewish ‘overrepresentation’ in positions of power, because statistically and sociologically it is true.
However where I parted company was Miller’s third point that this enabled Jews to discriminate against those who were oppressed. If Jews in powerful positions discriminate against others they do it as part of the group or organisations they are part of, not as Jews. In private communication with Miller I made my position clear
In this long rambling tweet Miller declared that ‘the State of Israel is at war with you’. That when activists or Muslims are arrested by ‘counter-terror’ police, “that is being done directly on behalf of the State of Israel”
Miller is arguing that Islamaphobia in the West is a product of Zionism and Israel. “the soldiers of Zion have penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy.” How they managed to achieve this is not explained. To call this conspiratorial is an understatement.
At a stroke Miller erases the racism that results from colonialism and imperialism. Trump’s Muslim ban was a consequence of the Israeli state not racism in America. What of the racism against Hispanics in the United States? Did Trump labelling all Mexicans as rapists arise from the soldiers of Zion? Are the deportations to Latin America all Israel’s fault? Apparently so.
It is not difficult to see how this kind of conspiratorial fantasy degenerates into anti-Semitism. When I was young British fascists condemned Israel. Not because of what it did to Palestinians but because in their eyes it was a ‘Jewish’ state. The Palestine solidarity movement wanted nothing to do with them but Miller with his appearance on the Stew Peters Show and other tweets seems to be embracing them.
Racism in the West is not the product of support for Israel and its soldiers of Zion. It is home grown. Of course today Islamaphobia in the West is goes hand in hand with support for Israel, which is seen as an anti-Islamic state. But that is a very different thing. Miller says
‘Take Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands, … Wilders can be said to be a creation of the State of Israel and its foreign intelligence assets.’
This is completely unsupported by anything in the way of evidence. Geert Wilders is the product of racism in The Netherlands. He is a home-grown fascist. His support for Zionism and Israel flows from that. In his own words
If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.
Geert wilders
Miller therefore exonerates the British and other states of racism by saying that their racism is not the product of their own class societies but solely that of Israel.
Miller talks about ‘the global struggle against Jewish supremacism’. In this phrase Miller conflates all Jewish people with the Israeli state like the Zionists. That Israel is a Jewish Supremacist state is a fact which Israel’s human rights group Bt’selem testifies to. Again it is difficult not to take this as a call to oppose Jews everywhere and to brand them all as Jewish Supremacists.
Even accepting that two-thirds of diaspora Jews support Israel and Zionism, for a whole number of historical reasons, I doubt if any but a fraction are open Jewish supremacists. Most Jews see Israel, wrongly, as some form of refuge against anti-Semitism. Of course a minority are overt racists and Jewish supremacists but even they are not arguing for Jewish supremacism within the societies they live in.
Despite his academic status Miller’s language is sloppy, vague and open to misinterpretation. It is not helped by the fact that instead of putting his ideas down on paper he tweets out his latest undigested ideas and thoughts.
Miller confirms that he is no anti-imperialist or socialist when he says that the British and US states don’t do what they do because of imperialism and their need to subjugate, exploit and conquer, but because of infiltration. He even says that
there’s no such thing as ‘foreign’ policy. The British state has made a colossal miscalculation by participating so directly in this genocide,… The British people will have to repair this trajectory by taking British political and public institutions out of the grip of Zionist fanatics. This is the only way to preserve the balance of British society in the long-term. It is essential that Britain is de-Zionised,
In other words he is arguing that the support of the British state for Israel is on account of a handful of Zionist fanatics. Without them the state would be quite a benign institution. It wouldn’t be imperialist or racist, cut disability benefits or privatise the NHS. Instead
A de-Zionised Britain could be an example to other post-imperial states in how to confront centuries of imperial violence and chart a course away from the suicidal client relationship with the US.
This is utter garbage and has nothing to do with a principled opposition to imperialism, let alone Zionism. It ignores the economic imperative behind imperialism. Anyone who thinks Miller is on the left is wrong. I responded to this here and JVL republished it as Looking down the wrong end of the telescope.
The global Left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics
In another conspiratorial tweet we are told that the ‘global left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics.’ For someone who is a Professor Miller is remarkably imprecise in his language. Who is this global left? One of the problems with the left is that it isn’t united but in Miller’s fevered imagination it is homogenous!
The left is divided into Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats and the unaligned. There is little agreement between them. But in Miller’s fantasies we are all infiltrated.
Miller doesn’t realise that attitudes on the Left towards Israel have changed. In the wake of the Nazi holocaust most people on the left saw the establishment of the Israeli state as some form of recompense. They were wrong not to see that an ethno-nationalist Jewish state could not help but become an echo of everything they had escaped from. I summed this up when I said that ‘Israel was Hitler’s bastard offspring’.
The Labour left around Tribune saw Zionism and Israel as progressive. The Labour Party saw settler colonialism as a positive thing and the natives were invisible. This was why people like Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation supported the Boers in the Second Boer War.
Much of the Trotskyist movement adopted a position of neutrality during the Nakba seeing the 1948 war as one between British imperialism and its Arab allies and Israel. The Communist Party, after Stalin’s about turn in 1947 supported UN resolution 181 partitioning Palestine and with it the creation of the Israeli state.
However times have changed and the key point was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. The scales fell from their eyes. In 1948 most people knew nothing of the Nakba. What they saw were those who had survived Hitler’s genocide struggling again to survive. They were wrong. As we now know Zionism had much in common with the Nazis ideologically and had collaborated with them, as my book Zionism During the Holocaust explains. Israel’s fledgling army had been trained by the British and easily saw off the ramshackle Arab armies with the exception of Transjordan’s Arab Legion commanded by Glubb Pasha.
With the rise in support for anti-imperialist struggles, the revolution in Cuba and opposition to the Vietnam War and Apartheid in South Africa, the left moved into the Palestinian camp internationally. Israel was seen as an arm of US imperialism.
In the Labour Party it was the right-wing which had historically been pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian. People like Christopher Mayhew, David Watkins and Andrew Faulds. After 1982 the Right began to realign and Tony Blair made support for Zionism virtually a condition of New Labour.
So Miller is wrong on this point. The global left is less occupied by Zionists than it ever has been. He says that ‘’Pro-Palestinian’ is a meaningless term’. Perhaps to David but not to Palestinians.
Miller says that ‘A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is to begin with suspicion when confronted by possible agents of Empire.’ Really? A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is support for the oppressed against the oppressor. We are told that:
leftists around the world are constantly deferring to Jewish ‘allies’ for analysis on Zionism… Not only do these leftists refuse to protect their movements from entryism, they actively solicit, privilege and even worship Jewish opinion about Jewish supremacist crimes.
It is impossible to interpret this as anything other than anti-Semitic and a symptom of Miller’s hostility to the left. Jews supporting the Palestinians should be treated with suspicion. Miller fails to acknowledge that Jews might have good reason to oppose Zionism in the same way as Jewish communists and the Bund opposed Zionism in their time.
Jews are part of the Palestine solidarity movement. Of course Jews, including Israeli Jews, might have a special understanding of Zionism having gone through a process of deprogramming but that isn’t because they are Jewish. It is a recognition that anti-Zionist Jews have a special expertise.
We only have to think of people like Moshe Machover, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Haim Bresheeth – even myself! It was the Israeli group Matzpen which was first began calling Israel a settler colonial state.
Jewish activists have been to the fore in occupying Congress. Whilst Jewish Voice for Peace have been organising thousands of its supporters David Miller has been waging war against Jewish ‘infiltrators’ on Twitter.
This kind of attack, which can only turn the solidarity movement against itself is divisive and destructive. Miller is effectively doing the Zionists’ work.
American Jews are divided as never before, especially young Jews. Jewish students have been an integral part of the campus protests in the United States and Britain. Jonathan Ben-Menachem was one of many Jewish students who joined the protests at Columbia and other universities across the US calling for their institutions to cut ties with companies linked to Israel. In an interview he described his
amazement as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organisations playing a central role in them.’
There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism,… It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has become.
Sarah, also a Jewish student at Columbia, was arrested for taking part in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in zip ties. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.
“It was definitely one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”
Sarah had been appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that the term had been
weaponized in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
There’s never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,” Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Nara Milanich, professor of history at Barnard College, asked:
Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto campus and haul our students off in zip ties? I don’t feel safer,” she said.
According to Miller all of those quoted above are Jewish infiltrators whom non-Jewish Palestine solidarity protesters are deferring to. Whereas to the press and politicians like Starmer and Braverman anti-Zionist Jews are invisible.
What really made me sit up and take note of Miller’s direction of travel was his retweeting of an article by Richard Lynn, editor of Mankind Quarterly ‘On the high intelligence and cognitive achievements of Jews in Britain’.
Mankind Quarterly isn’t some obscure academic journal. It was was established in 1960 with funding from White segregationists opposed to civil rights in America. It has been described as a ‘white supremacist journal’ and ‘a pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality.’
When I first saw the tweet I immediately saw that it smacked of the racial sciences:
Are Jews so (relatively) privileged because of ‘intelligence’ or ‘culture’? Or are there other explanations? And what are the consequences in terms of the power and influence of Zionism and the production of genocide in Palestine and Islamophobia in the West?
Miller saw a connection between ‘Jewish intelligence’ and Zionism. I explained in my response that Zionism was the idea of British imperialism and its Christian Zionist advocates not Jews.
A lead article in The Times of 17 August 1840, called for a plan ‘to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers’ claiming that it was under ‘serious political consideration’ and commending the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury. When Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in August 1840 to inquire about co-operation in Jewish settlement projects, he got a very lukewarm response. The only ones who didn’t want to ‘return’ were the Jews themselves! In a resolution passed on 7 November 1842 the Board of Deputies resolved that it
‘is precluded from originating any measure for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria’.
In his latest tweet Miller simply digs himself further into a hole. We are told that ‘there are no ‘Israeli’ anti-Zionists’. Presumably my comrades Ronnie Barkan and Stav, who are currently facing trial for participating in a Palestine Action outing and who are already on suspended sentences don’t exist? Both of them are Israeli.
Miller also doubts that there are ‘more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere, particularly if we assess anti-Zionism on a *material* basis.’ What is this material basis? Apparently we must first become martyrs! I wonder if this applies to non-Jews and if not why not?
Apparently I was one of the few Jewish anti-Zionists he conceded did exist but I suspect that after this article I will also be relegated!
Miller is not only going down an anti-Semitic rabbit hole but a Zionist one too. Zionists claim that all Jews, bar a handful of ‘self-haters’ are Zionists. Anti-Semites too are happy to see Jews as Zionists with anti-Zionist Jews rendered invisible.
It is extremely sad and regrettable that Miller is unable to see that Zionism was the adopted policy of British and then US imperialism well before Jews. Jews provided the imperialists with legitimacy. Winkling out Zionists is not a strategy.
Tony Greenstein
Snippets , , and reveal that Wilders has received financial contributions from pro-Israel organizations in the United States, such as the David Horowitz Freedom Center and The Middle East Forum, which are also known for their anti-Islam rhetoric. This funding suggests a convergence of interests and ideologies between Wilders and certain Zionist groups who share a strong opposition to Islam [Insight 9]. This indicates a strategic alignment based on shared ideological positions rather than necessarily Zionism being a direct outgrowth of Wilders’ “fascism.” It suggests a mutual reinforcement of anti-Islam sentiments, where these pro-Israel groups see Wilders as an important voice in their broader ideological battles against what they perceive as threats from radical Islam.
The exploration of a potential synthesis considered whether these seemingly contradictory perspectives could overlap or inform a more nuanced understanding of Wilders’ political trajectory. The conclusion, while leaning towards the domestic origins of Wilders’ ideology, acknowledges the potential for foreign influence, representing a synthesis that recognizes the complexity of the issue and avoids a simplistic either/or dichotomy.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17KqsNILNDWA3dzhR8jkNJgVgEXEutMnBWpGjKEPYKgE/edit?usp=sharing
I am not very familiar with this guy but when white anglo-saxon men become too frantically “anti-zionist” there is reason to be cautious. If Palestinians are distrustful or even hateful of Jews that’s a bit unsettling for me but I can’t blame them. When a middle-aged privileged and educated white man from the imperialist center goes to lengths to explain that Jews can’t be trusted, on the other hand, it raises some concerns. Beyond being rather discomforting, it seems to me that this is a service to Zionism, whether consciously or not, at a time when Jews internationally are increasingly cutting their ties with the occupier state (which in turn, is a severe blow to that state). Jews no longer supporting Israel is probably the greatest threat to its existence, along with the Palestinian resistance of course. I can’t help thinking that this sowing of suspicion against Jews in general among pro-palestinians is undermining that force, to the detriment of the struggle against Zionism.
Well written and clear: David Miller is in fact showing Zionist/imperialist tendencies, losing sight of imperialism, the father of Zionism, in order to denigrate Jews and associate them with the US/UK/EU sponsored Israeli atrocities. Zionism represents an imperialist project to exploit Jewish persecution in order to create a vehicle to keep settler-colonial imperialist domination alive through a historical period of anti-colonial resistance.
I took slight exception to “The left is divided into Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats and the unaligned.” Firstly I felt left out – I disagree with Marx over the dictatorship of the proletariat (it should be the hitherto dominated more widely), with Trotsky over Kronstadt, with Stalin because his violence was shameless., with Social Democrats because they’ve already capitulated, but I am not unaligned – I support anyone resisting domination. “We are all Palestinians” represents a possibility of putting behind us all these history-inflected divisions, if perhaps it needs to be de-territorialised into “We are all anti-imperialists” or we are all abolitionists – referring not just to prisons and police, but including armies, weapons systems, and borders.
I take note of your objection, however I didn’t want to traverse all of the possibilities so I created an ‘other’ category!
I agree broadly that Miller is essentially echoing the common British social-fascist trope of ‘declining institutions’ when trying to explain why Britain supports Zionism. That is, there is no analysis of the internal contradictions and class basis of Britain’s support, i.e, Britain’s position as an imperialist nation. It’s as if Britain’s existence is pure and untouched without Zionist ‘infiltration’. Such ideas have also been more prevalent in America, when it is even worse since America is also an illegitimate settler-colony and American imperialism is the principal contradiction facing the world today. It’s also plain moronic since ‘israel’ is more than happy to collaborate with the useless Arab states like Saudi, UAE, etc. Of course, Miller’s collaboration with white Neo-Nazis is just pathetic (not to downplay its seriousness, but it shows the vacuousness of the so called ‘support’ for Palestine by those like Candace Owens).
At the same time, its is wrong that you talk about ‘not targeting individual Zionists’. This is like not targeting individual Nazis, or individual Hindutva supporters, individual whatever. Not saying ‘ferreting’ out individual zionists should be a task on anyone’s list, but if an individual Zionist is exposed and shamed or punched for being a Zionist, that is good. Besides that, what is more troubling is your support for a liberal Zionist organisation like JVP. That certain groups and people are willing to be arrested for something does not prevent them from being liberal Zionists. This is not particular to Jewish groups, many Muslim led charity based or NGO groups exist for the same purpose of legitimising ‘israel’ and ensure the circulation of Western capital in Palestine. And I disagree with another comment saying Jews not supporting ‘israel’ is it’s greatest threat, essentially minimising the role of Palestinians themselves, and the threat of a national liberation movement annihilating ‘israel’ once and for all. At the same time, I agree that it is always odd when Europeans talk about ‘jews’ the way people in the Middle East do, who have only known Jews in the context of Zionism and have been wronged by the illegitimate Jewish state.
I believe you’ve done good work exposing PSC’s uselessness and liberal Zionism, and also the BNC’s role in the same. But perhaps you have not applied those very same critiques well enough.
I am not saying that in certain cases where individual Zionists pose a particular threat or danger they should not be targeted, e.g. Jonathan Hoffman, as I have done so myself but to target and winkle out anyone who is a Zionist is a fruitless task and of no benefit to the Palestinians as a means of solidarity.
JVP, i.e. Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States is an overtly anti-Zionist group which has led the solidarity protests in America. It is not a liberal Zionist organisation.
I’m not aware that anti-Zionist Jews are the greatest threat to Israel but that they are nonetheless important in countering the Zionist narrative. If that weren’t so then I doubt that Zionists would expend so much energy and vitriol in attacking us.. Unfortunately the Palestinians have not formed a national liberation movement capable of destroying the Israeli state. I hope that clarifies my position
JVP’s existence depends on funding from liberal Zionists. Its existence as an NGO type organisation means it depends on imperialist capital. Even theoretically, say an organisation is created on radical lines and then gets funded by such capital. This will inevitably mean the transformation of the politics of said organisation. There is a reason many Palestinian civil society organisations rejected conditional funding.
Beyond that, its politics are quite obvious. It perpetrated colonial propaganda after Operation Al Aqsa on October 7, and its website continues to state that it was a ‘massacre against Israeli civilians’. It talks about the safety of ‘israeli’ jews. This again, is just apologia for settlerism. It does not even have a concrete stance on One State vs Two State solution. Instead it defers to identity politics saying ‘its not their place to tell Palestinians and Israelis what the best political outcome is’. This is honestly vomit inducing. They don’t even have the courage to have a stance, and more importantly put the coloniser entity on the same platform as a colonised nation.
That it led solidarity protests in the US says nothing. If anything, the (mis)leadership of such groups is precisely why the solidarity movement is stagnant. Those groups with radical line on the Palestinian question are suppressed by such ‘leadership’. We have seen this with Palestine Action, Samidoun, any local BDS group that dares stray away from the BNC liberal Zionist position (honestly, it’s overstatement to call it leadership since there is no actual leading being done in terms of organisation, politics, ideology, etc. It’s a structureless blob much like it is in the UK. But that’s a conversation for another day).
You can look for yourself. JVP, much like many big organisations (like PSC) talk about apartheid, human rights and international law. This international law was created by the colonisers and don’t even get abided by the same colonisers. More importantly, the sole focus of this is ‘equality’ between Palestinians and ‘israelis’, aka, between the native and the settler. Let’s not forget the state South Africa is in right now, and the deplorable conditions that the oppressed black and coloured people live in.
History will look behind on such actors as spineless cowards at best, and enemies of the revolution at worst (which is closer to reality).
I am not saying one must boycott anything to do with such organisations, rather these organisations should be a channel through which we can identify those with radical ideas and must be pulled away from these counter-insurgent liberal organisations. If anything, these organisations treat its people like fodder, letting them be arrested and brutalised for nothing.
I really cannot agree with any of this. JVP is an explicitly anti-Zionist organisation. Who it gets its funding from I do not know but it has led the protests in the United States against the genocide.
It may not have adopted the hard line that I would have liked. I support the right of resistance of occupied people. Likewise I support a one state solution however actions speak louder than words. They have led the protests in the USA. We have to stop being purist over this. We don’t live in revolutionary times. We have to work with people we don’t necessarily agree with. JVP have done excellent work. Of course I’m not in them and if I were I would want them to go further but for me the crucial thing is that they are self-declared anti-Zionists and that is most important. Their funding is secondary but you haven’t said who these liberal Zionists are. They are actively campaigning against the genocide in Gaza. Liberal Zionists aren’t doing any such thing. So if you are in the USA get involved and don’t stand on the sidelines criticising them
I know you cannot agree to any of this. I am not writing this with any intention of persuading you or anything. Like I said, I respect what you have done wrt to oppose PSC on a very strong ideological and political line + your work on Zionism’s collaboration with Nazism, and Zionism’s antisemitic foundation which validates antisemitism as the fault of Jews, as Herzl said. Besides that, I am not here to persuade you. I don’t really care tbh.
Anyway, JVP’s connection to J Street + funding from such liberal Zionist organisations is quite glaring. https://orinocotribune.com/a-tactic-not-a-trademark-how-the-bds-national-committee-supports-the-liberal-zionist-agenda/
‘As early as 2011, Rebecca Vilkomerson, JVP’s former executive director, was pitching BDS at its J Street conference. During this same conference, Rabbi David Saperstein mentioned that if BDS were to become a strategy, it would have to be J Street to “guide [BDS] away from deligitimization efforts [against “israel”].” In 2014 Sam Jadallah, chairman of IMEU, explained at a J Street session his vision for a “thriving Palestinian state” next to an “israeli” one. He also stated, BDS “is not about destroying israel.”’
It is telling that you have not grappled with the fundamental nature of imperialist funding to NGOs and similar bodies. It is an issue many do not want to confront in Palestine solidarity. JVP isn’t the only organisation that has had a lot of money put into it by imperialist funders. It does not matter whether ‘you want them to go further’ if you were a member. Their very existence as an organisation depends on their political line being one of normalisation. Again, Palestinian organisations have already talked about the issue of imperialist conditional funding https://badil.org/press-releases/585.html
“stop being purist” is precisely the issue. This is not an issue of ‘purism’. It is about the existence of a people who are currently being slaughtered. The fact remains that besides some isolated actions of sabotage like Pal Action, material arms sales to Zionist Entity have not decreased one bit. Palestinians recently (journalists, resistance groups, diaspora, Gazans, etc) have made it clear they are tired of the performative activism. So your repetition that “JVP has led the protests in the US” are redundant. The radicalism in the movement is despite such organisations, not because of them. More and more student groups, and organisations have recognised this and are starting to push back against it. Not just US, UK but other imperial core nations as well.
Another key point: “self declared”. Even PSC is self declared anti-Zionist, but it doesnt actually mean anything. You keep talking about ‘hard line’ as if it is a spectrum of opinions we have to cater to. But its actually quite simple, it is obvious why the state of Palestine solidarity is stagnant and Palestinians are getting tired of it: the movement is being ‘led’ by those that want “Israel” to continue existing. Very simple really.
I am not on the sidelines (and I don’t need to prove my activism for one to engage with my points), and it is quite repetitive to see this thought terminating cliche being brought up anytime someone does not want to engage with this critique. I made it clear in my earlier reply that we cannot just abandon any activism because it includes liberal counter-insurgent tendencies. Our job is to fight against it, not shamelessly tail it. I do recognise that an organisation like JVP might be beneficial in delegitimising ‘israel’s’ inevitable failing national identity project of Judaism, in that JVP shows that more Jews can fight against Zionism and still be Jewish. But that’s where it ends. I have a lot more faith in people that they can search for the radical line of Palestinian liberation.
The kind of defeatist idea that we have to put up counter-insurgency because ‘we dont live in revolutionary times’ is an incorrect idea. We must build the revolutionary times and believe that we actually have agency to change things. More people have been sympathetic to armed struggle in palestine than ever before, and that is no thanks to organisations like PSC. If we can’t even agree on what a ‘free Palestine’ even is, then that’s where the issue starts.
Even if you are right on every single issue you know and I know that it won’t stop the genocide. Tragically Israel is also being covered for by the Arab states which are in league with imperialism. Maybe Palestinians are tired of performative activism but their own tolerance of a Quisling Palestinian Authority, their support for Hamas rather than a secular socialist organisation like the PFLP, which calls for an Islamic state doesn’t suggest that most Palestinians have figured out a strategy either. The idea that we in the West can change things by ourselves is not likely to work bar bringing down our governments. We ae simply not powerful enough. Unfortunately the Arab masses haven’t got rid of their regimes.
Whether JVP should be more radical and whether its funding compromises them I don’t know. Unfortunately I don’t have time to look into every issue so I will take your word for it.
Appreciate your comment. I’m curious about your labelling of JVP as a liberal zionist organization. Could you elaborate? It’s the first time I hear such a thing. I guess the goalposts must have moved. For all I know, zionists despise JVP. But residing in Europe, I’m not well informed about this org.
Also, regarding my comment about Jews not supporting Israel as a threat to Israel, I understand how it could be misread when I wrote “along with the Palestinian resistance, of course”. I didn’t mean to equal the the two, as the latter obviously is the number one threat. I do think that it is more than a slight nuisance to Israel, however, that Jews are beginning to distance themselves en masse from Zionism. After all, one of the tenets of zionism is to equate it with Judaism. That’s how they got people to take the land (one of the ways at least), that’s how they get people to support them (disproportionally influential people at that, to reference Miller) and that’s also how they have managed to play the antisemitism card with such success. When Jews abroad stop playing a long it’s making the zionist enterprise more difficult… I think, I believe, I hope.
I expanded my point about JVP in another comment. And no, it is not some original thought I came up with (of course I have also verified this with my own study) but actually through various sources and broader education about NGOisation of liberation struggles and personal experience with such politics.
Anyway, to the point about Judaism and ‘israel’.
Of course, I agree with what you’re saying. And I acknowledge your clarification as well.
Don’t get me wrong, ‘israel’ nationally failing is because of its inherently illegitimate national foundations. Judaism has existed for a while, and ‘israel’ has struggled to fit this into its model of colonial white supremacy as well. I do agree that it is more than a slight nuisance to israel that so many jews are disavowing the entity.
My point is, ultimately it is the success of the armed struggle and the overall national liberation movement that will determine the liberation of Palestine. When so many Jews are distancing themselves, why do we have to coddle them and not have faith that we can progress the narrative to one that is more radical? We are still at a very similar place 1.5 years ago. We cannot tail counter-insurgent organisations forever. We must criticise more and look deeper. Like I said in the other comment, armed resistance is more popular than ever. We cannot allow more potential people being shackled by liberal organisations who ultimately want the preservation of the Zionist entity, albeit in a different more ‘humanitarian’ form. Coming from colonised nations, we have seen manifestations of this more ‘liberal’ line countless of times and everytime you have a faction that says “dont jeopardise the movement by breaking unity”. Inevitably, this leads to a prolonging of colonialism.
actually the armed struggle in palestine doesn’t have a chance of succeeding. It is the overthrow of the Arab regimes, whose existence accounts for imperialism’s support for Israel that is the key
Thanks for your reply, appreciate it. I’m going to read what you have written about JVP with much interest. I do remember raising an eyebrow when I looked them up a long time ago and saw some of the donors. That said, my impression up until now is they have done a great job at least in disqualifying the antisemitism card, which as you know is one of the sionists’ most frequently used propaganda weapons. Groups like JVC help a great deal in making it quite dull.
Organisations change and JVP has matured and developed over time. The Zionists hate them and that’s good enough for me
Miller is not “targeting Jews as Jews”, this is unsubstantiated. What he has said is e.g. that a great many Jewish organisations are either overtly or covertly Zionist or actually do lobbying work for Israel. And that there are very few Jewish anti-Zionists. These should be debated as matters of fact. It seemed to me that some of this was exaggerated for impact e.g. by saying that there are “no more than a handful” of Jewish anti-Zionists, which is literally absurd, but if anti-Zionism is a minority viewpoint in Judaism, should not work be done to reverse this ie taking the issue to the Jewish diaspora, especially as Zionism as propounded by Israel is a Jewish supremacist ideology? Is Judaism as generally practiced tending to generate Zionism? That question also deserves to be addressed dispassionately as a hypothesis. When the chief Rabbi of the UK is also clearly a Zionist, it seems reasonable to think that there is some impetus to Judaism as practiced in the UK being a factor generating Zionism in the UK.
Except Miller does target Jews. That is a fact. Try reading the blog.
I’m well aware that many Jewish organisation support Zionism/Israel. There are more Jewish anti-Zionists today than ever. The fact is that Miller did say there’s only a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists and no Israeli anti-Zionists. If that’s not targeting Jews what is?
I think Jewish anti-Zionists are active but the main support for the Zionists comes from non-Jewish imperialism which wants to main a Jewish facade for their own reason.
Judaism like all religions has changed. No religion is fixed much as they would like to think so
I have read it, thanks. If you re-read my comment I’ve remarked myself on the absurdity of “no more than a handful”, it’s an exaggeration but you acknowledge yourself that anti-Zionism is a minority position in the Jewish diaspora, let alone Jewish Israelis. It seems to me that the logic of saying that there are no Israeli anti-Zionists, again an ill-articulated statement, is that it is contradictory to self-identify as both, given that Israel as a non-Palestinian let alone Jewish state can only exist (and has only done so) at the expense of political rights of the existing population. I don’t see a contradiction on the other hand between the factors you identify as behind Western support for Israel and Miller’s Zionist lobby explanation. Why don’t they go hand in hand? It would seem odd to dismiss the apparent power of AIPAC for example, out of hand. But of course Israel is also the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east.
You don’t say whether in your view Judaism as practiced in the UK today is a factor tending to produce Zionism amongst Jewish people in the UK. I was raised a Catholic, it’s clear to me that Catholicism as practiced in the UK and elsewhere tends to produce anti-abortion sentiment amongst Catholics here. Is this a bad analogy or a good one? I appreciate it may be a difficult question but it seems that even to raise it one risks being labelled an anti-semite, which I am not.
I am sure that the change in Judaism as practiced today has a reinforcing effect in respect of Zionism among those who attend synagogue services. It will have less or no effect on the 50% of British Jews who don’t attend synagogues though
In that case it seems to me reasonable to extrapolate somewhat to those raised in the faith but who no longer practice. By analogy most of my family are now passive Catholics but apparently have been deeply influenced by this upbringing. I do agree with your take on David Miller’s appearing on the likes of the Stew Peters show, which is wrong in itself and can’t be other than counterproductive.