The "antisemitism" cudgel

              (Joe Lombardo, the coordinator for the United National Anti-war Coalition, recently posted an excellent piece on Facebook in which he described how the charge of “anti-Semitism” is being used as a weapon to discredit the movement to bring about a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas War. He also says that while pro-Palestinian demonstrators are falsely attacked for advocating a genocide against Jews, it is the Palestinians who are suffering from an actual genocide at the hands of Israel. Joe’s full article is reprinted here.)  

   By Joe Lombardo

   The weaponization of antisemitism is simply an attempt to shut us up and allow the genocide to continue.

 The corporate media and western governments have been calling the massive Palestinian solidarity demonstrations “antisemitic,” if they report them at all. In the words of Malcolm X, they “Make the criminal look like the victim and make the victim look like the criminal.”

 On November 25, three Palestinian students were shot in Burlington, VT, while in Chicago a six-year-old Palestinian boy was stabbed 26 times and killed while his mother was also attacked and hospitalized. In California a car tried to run down several Muslim families and Muslim and Palestinian groups have reported a sharp upturn in incidences of attacks on Muslims and Palestinians. Yet there is no outcry from the corporate media or the government about these anti-Palestinian and racist attacks. But “antisemitism” is today a constant theme in the corporate media.

 Last week the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, was forced out of her position because of her support for the right of freedom of speech on her campus. She was asked by right-wing congresswoman, Elise Stefanik if calls for genocide of Jews would be termed harassment under the schools’ codes of conduct.

 Magill had to speak carefully to let Stefanik know that she does not support calls for genocide but does support free speech. Similar questions were asked of the presidents of Harvard and MIT. This type of questioning is reminiscent of the McCarthy hearing in the 1950’s.

 It is the Palestinians in Gaza who are facing genocide, not Jews in Israel or the US. Why don’t they ask politicians and others if they support that genocide? If they did, they might get a response such as “I give full support to Israel” and they likely would vote for more money and weapons to Israel to kill more Palestinians. Or they might get an answer like that from Florida State representative Michelle Salzman when asked how many Palestinians should be killed, she answered “all of them.” But she has not been forced to step down.

 Today in the US we find that we not only have to fight for the right of Palestinians to live, but we have to fight for the right to even express that or say we are for a cease fire in Gaza.

 The slogan chanted on every Palestinian solidarity action, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” has especially been criticized as antisemitic by the corporate media and politicians. One wonders what part of Palestine they think should not be free. It should be clear from what is happening in Gaza right now that it is the Israelis who are trying to drive the Palestinian people into the sea or the desert, not the other way around.

 In fact, this slogan was first used by Zionists not Palestinians. It is in the founding document of the Likud Party, the party of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and they have used it in their political campaigns in the form of “between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” I don’t remember the corporate media or the politicians ever criticizing this as anti-Palestinian or racist.

 The campaign to characterize those of us who support Palestinian rights as being antisemitic is simply a campaign to shut us up so they can carry out their genocide against the Palestinian people without hinderance.

 When Palestinians and their supporters say “Palestine will be free,“ the politicians and corporate media try to deny that they are not free. But in their own land there is a separate set of laws for Palestinians and Jews. Palestinians can be arrested without charges and held indefinitely. Many children have been arrested in this manner.

 There are some roads that only Jewish people can drive on or walk on. Palestinian homes are often bulldozed so that illegal settlements for Israeli Jews can be built, or just for punishment. Sometime the Palestinians are only given minutes to leave. There are check points for Palestinians where they sometimes must wait for hours, just to move around in their own land. And there is so much more that can be said about the lack of freedom and equality for Palestinians in their own traditional land.

 Of course, it is far worse in Gaza. There, Israel controls who can leave and who cannot. In most cases people are not allowed to leave. Israel determines what gets into Gaza and what doesn’t. Construction material to rebuild the bombed buildings are often denied. They only allowed a certain amount of food into Gaza, limiting the number of calories per person per day. This they mockingly call the Palestinian diet. This is why Gaza is referred to as an open-air prison. But it is much worse than a prison because prisoners don’t routinely get bombed and shot or have their electricity or water turned off.

  This is why Palestinians want to be free in their own land. “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be free!” That is not antisemitic, it expresses a reality that all Palestine must be free for Palestinians to survive. Those who claim it is antisemitic are only showing their racism and anti-Palestinian sentiment and are themselves being complicit with the genocide against the Palestinians.

Israel’s stated goal in Gaza is to wipe out Hamas. This is impossible. To end resistance from the Palestinians, you must end their repression. Instead, the Israelis are increasing the repression. Even if every member of Hamas was killed, each bomb the Israelis drop and each Palestinian they kill just creates more anger towards the Zionist state and will cause more and more resistance until Zionism is ended. The next generation of Palestinian freedom fighters are being born amid the rubble of Gaza.