As the horrific siege against Gaza escalates, we need to confront the violence of Israel's ethnonationalist militarism.
A group of Jewish activists stage a demonstration near the White House, calling for the ceasefire in Israel, in Washington D.C., on October 16, 2023.The horror and heartbreak in Gaza reaches new proportions each minute: Israel’s siege has killed at least 3,000 people and injured 12,500 in the past week and a half, and a possible ground invasion threatens unspeakable levels of new violence. The Israeli forces and settlers have also killed 61 and injured 1,250 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
to antisemitic violence, was partly forged to serve the interests of actors who were either antisemitic or callous to the suffering of Jews. In supporting Israel, the U.S. and other colonizers were pursuing geopolitical power in a colonial context, a reality that continues today, at the expense primarily of Palestinians, as racist dehumanization undergirds modern Zionism.
However, one thing I found most surprising going through the Jewish left press in the 1940s — publications of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party, and writings by Hannah Arendt — is that even after the scope of the Holocaust was widely understood, their official position was still anti-Zionist.
While Jewish anti-Zionism isn’t a majority position, it is an undeniable force in U.S. politics today. Jewish Voice for Peace, a U.S. organization, released a“Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations, systematically separating Palestinians from their homes, land, and each other,” it states.
Some critics of Israeli policies and military actions hail from within Israel itself. Army reservists who refused combat in the Lebanon war formed a group in 1982 called Yesh Gvul, which means “there is a limit.” In 2002, five young people who refused conscription into the Israeli military on ethical grounds were sentenced to two years in prison.
Meanwhile, there is a deficit of coverage in the U.S. of what Palestinians are facing right now. Most U.S. press outlets are telling the stories of Israeli civilians killed but still giving shockingly little airtime to Palestinian civilians, even as Israel embraces war on a scale we have not seen in our lifetime.
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College students: Everything is ‘violence’ except for literal violenceMadeline Fry Schultz is the contributors editor at the Washington Examiner. She previously worked at the Philanthropy Roundtable, where she helped edit Philanthropy magazine and run the website's blog. Before that, she was the culture commentary writer at the Washington Examiner. She studied French and journalism at Hillsdale College.
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