UNZ’ SALVO—Gaza and the Antisemitism Hoax

Ron Unz
UNZ REVIEW

Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore

We are certainly witnessing the greatest televised slaughter of helpless civilians in the history of the world, with nothing even remotely comparable coming to mind. Over the last two years of the bitter war in Ukraine, a Russian missile fired at a military target occasionally caused twenty or forty civilian deaths as accidental collateral damage, and the resulting story spent days dominating the global headlines, then sometimes suddenly vanished once evidence appeared that an errant Ukrainian missile had actually been responsible.

By contrast, what we are now seeing is the deliberate massacre of civilians, aimed at driving out the Palestinians living in Gaza and rendering their enclave uninhabitable. Most of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities have been eliminated, and when the Jordanians established field hospitals in South Gaza, those too were bombarded. Schools, bakeries, and other facilities necessary for continued human existence have also been deliberately destroyed, along with the bulk of the housing stock, while the Israelis have blocked the inhabitants from any access to food, water, and fuel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified his Palestinian adversaries as the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby, and many of his country’s other political leaders have used equally genocidal language, with one Cabinet minister suggestingthat Israel utilize its illegal nuclear arsenal to eradicate Gaza and its population. Polls show that more than 80% of Israeli Jews support their government’s extremely harsh military measures, hoping to see all the Palestinians killed or expelled.

More and more evidence has steadily accumulated that a majority, perhaps even a large majority of the Israeli civilians killed in the Hamas attack died at the hands of their own country’s trigger-happy military, the victims of tank shells and Hellfire missiles. So the actual number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed by Hamas fighters might have been as low as just 100 to 200, suggesting that the body-count of Palestinian civilians is at least 100 times larger. Yet despite this 100-to-1 casualty ratio, a recent front-page article in the New York Times by longtime correspondent Roger Cohen treated the tragedy in less than even terms, with a decided tilt towards the Israelis.

In recent years, public life in America and the rest of the West has become inordinately sensitive to the nuances of political correctness, with many regarding the misuse of pronouns as morally unconscionable. Therefore, the widespread graphic images on social media of the public slaughter of so many thousands of helpless babies and children has produced considerable unease, with well over half of Democrats being critical of these developments along with a substantial minority of Republicans.

Back in 2015, the widely broadcast image of a single, accidentally-drowned Syrian toddler led European governments to open their borders to millions of migrants, both from Syria and from everywhere else in the world, mostly young men in the prime of health. Greater Syria had traditionally encompassed Palestinian Gaza, so if a single accidental victim from the former had such enormous, nation-transforming political impact throughout Europe, surely the images of the many thousands deliberately killed in the latter must at least be raising a few personal concerns, though since some of these countries have prohibited expressions of pro-Palestinian sentiment, it’s difficult to be sure.

Look at all these "Hamas terrorists" the Zionists eliminated before they could harm Israel! #Gazagenocide #IsraelPalestineConflict pic.twitter.com/ocnMTjpUDH

— Lucas Gage (@Lucas_Gage_) October 16, 2023

Many European Jews have wholeheartedly backed the Jewish State even as it commits this gigantic public massacre, and this has naturally provoked a certain amount of popular criticism. Deeply concerned by this latter situation, the New York Times last week ran yet another major article on the desperate need to combat such “anti-Semitic” sentiments in Europe, obviously one of the world’s most dreadful problems.

A few days ago, I’d asked an American academic friend of mine how his colleagues were reacting to this astonishing situation and he replied:

People are too scared to broadcast their views, I think…But I think a good fraction of even normie academics realize there is something monstrous going on.

This sounds plausible to me, and another senior academic I know reported a roughly similar situation. Fear stalks the land.

Students at our most elite universities have been threatened with permanent employment blacklisting if they supported the Palestinian cause, and a long list of Jewish billionaires have mounted similar attacks against the academic institutions themselves, something I cannot recall ever happening in the past. As a result, a legal analysis article commissioned and approved for publication in the prestigious Harvard Law Review was scrapped at the last moment.

From its earliest roots in the terroristic Irgun, Israel’s ruling Likud party has always endorsed the creation of a Greater Israel—“From the River to the Sea”—proclaiming that territory must be placed under Jewish rule, with all non-Jews subjugated, expelled, or killed. But in recent decades, progressive anti-Zionists have co-opted that same ambiguous slogan, using it to symbolize their goal of a unified country of Palestine, a secular democratic state providing equal rights for both Jews and non-Jews, two populations of similar size. This would naturally involve the dissolution of the existing Jewish state, absolute anathema to committed Zionists.

Propelled by the horrific images of dead babies in Gaza, this controversial phrase soon began trending among anti-Zionists on Twitter along with talk of “decolonizing” the Israeli settler-state. Wilting under intense Zionist attacks, owner Elon Musk—the world’s wealthiest man—declared that these rather vague and innocuous progressive slogans constituted incitement to “genocide,” with their use being grounds for an immediate ban from his platform. By contrast, I haven’t heard that Musk has banned any of the Israeli politicians or activists publicly calling for the total annihilation of all Palestinians.

Famed Hollywood actress Susan Sarandon had spent decades as a prominent progressive activist, involved in a very wide range of political causes, many of them denounced as “anti-American” by her conservative opponents, and she earned the enthusiastic praise of her peers for her commitment. Yet when she recently showed some public sympathy for the Palestinians, a helpless people now being butchered by the thousands and perhaps soon by the tens of thousands, she was summarily “cancelled” by her longtime talent agency, and others have suffered a similar fate. Around the same time, Maha Dahkil, one of Hollywood’s top talent agents, was demoted and nearly fired for similar reasons. Even before the current fighting began, 80-year-old leftist rockstar Roger Waters of Pink Floyd had been vilified in the international media for supporting Palestinian rights and even bizarrely threatened with a German arrest warrant for supposedly glorifying Nazism.

The lethal accusation of “anti-Semitism” is the charge leveled against all of these individuals, and fear of suffering a similar fate surely keeps a vast number of their like-minded peers silent. In our current Western world, that indictment carries the same weight as “congress with Lucifer” might have held in the Old Salem of the Witch-Trials era.

I discovered that such timidity even extends to many alternative websites and left-liberal bloggers. Although the horrific events in the Israel/Gaza conflict have totally dominated the global headlines during the last few weeks, I’d become rather disappointed that the coverage of such matters had seemed relatively subdued and circumspect.

The Moon of Alabama blogger had fearlessly reported so many controversial facts about the Ukraine war and other important matters, but a few days ago he ran a rather apologetic post entitled “There Are Certain Things I Can Not Write About,” opening with:

Given that the blogger is a German living in Germany, he may have also reasonably feared a knock on the door and a prison cell if he were too candid in his views.

Although the Naked Capitalism blog site was originally launched with a heavy economics focus, other topics regularly constitute a substantial majority of the total content, and I’d therefore been disappointed at the lack of heavy Gaza coverage. However, its proprietor Yves Smith finally published a good post last Wednesday, arguing that the proposed truce and prisoner exchange might merely represent a bump in the road for Israel’s success in achieving its extreme objectives, with her closing sentences reading:

I only very rarely glance at the resulting discussion-threads, but for some reason I did so this time, and I noticed this exchange between a commenter and Lambert Strether, one of the bloggers:

cnchal: The choke chain runs the other way. Since the “globalists” sit at the top of the economic heap they could induce an instantaneous world wide depression with a capital strike. Now, where would Biden be if that happened?

Fifteen to twenty thousand dead Palestinians so far and another million, nine hundred and eighty five thousand to go, then off to the West Bank for moar is the trajectory. Peace in the desert will be achieved eventually on the globalist’s terms.

Lambert Strether: The only way that your “choke chain” comment makes sense to me is if “‘globalist’” (your quotes) is a euphemism for (capitalist) Jews, since in general, global capital is doing very well for itself right now. Therefore, there’s no reason for capitalists qua capitalists to stage a strike. Since this euphemism is both analytically false and politically destructive, please clarify your usage of the term.

cnchal: Yes, my use of the word globalist in this context is a substitute for the word Jew…

Lambert Strether: Your statement is anti-semitic. We can’t have that here. We’re not entertaining it. (It’s also just analytically terrible and destructive, positing as it does that the first loyalty of capitalists is not to capital, absurd on its face.)

Go away.

And that goes for anyone else with the same view.

UPDATE And if anyone’s thinking of sneaking this false construct through using artful language, don’t even try it. Our moderators are good at doping out things like that, and we’ll whack you, too.

The Jews of Israel are currently committing one of the worst public massacres in the history of the world, with the actions of their government loudly cheered on by many or most of the Jewish elites and populations of Europe and America, but taking notice of that obvious fact even using euphemistic constructs is regarded as a mortal sin. In a 2018 article, I described this sort of bizarre reaction now so widespread across the West:

This distressing media landscape also exemplifies a very shrewd aphorism widely misattributed to Voltaire:

As these examples suggest, the accusation of “anti-Semitism” has become an enormously powerful political weapon in today’s West, wielded by Jewish and pro-Israel groups as a trump card that still seems to carry the day against all others. So the historical reality of that concept is an important and interesting topic, one that I had discussed at length in a pair of 2018 articles.

The first of these explained how my discovery twenty years ago of a crucial historical fact regarding the true history of the Bolshevik Revolution led to a complete upheaval in my understanding of the issue.

Then perhaps fourteen or fifteen years ago, I encountered a rip in my personal space-time continuum, among the first of many to come.

I found these revelations shocking, both with regard to the crucial role of Jacob Schiff in the Bolshevik Revolution and the rather mundane and plausible contents of Ford’s notorious work The International Jew. This forced me to completely reassess my framework of assumptions, and in my next article, I carefully investigated the historical reality of “anti-Semitism.”

It was obvious that in today’s political world, “anti-Semitism” had become a wildly-exaggerated, even meaningless accusation. So I decided to carefully explore its historical reality in the past, especially in the years prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, given that the very heavy involvement of Jews in the event had subsequently produced a popular backlash in other countries. 

In 1991 Cambridge University Press published The Jew Accused by Albert Lindemann, a noted scholar of European ideological movements, and his book focused on exactly that era and those sorts of incidents. Although the text is quite short, running less than 300 pages, Lindemann built his discussion upon a huge foundation of secondary literature, with his footnotes drawn from the 200 works included in his extensive bibliography. As far as I could tell, he seems a very scrupulous scholar, generally providing the multiple, often conflicting accounts of a given incident, and coming to his own conclusions with considerable hesitation.

A few years later, Lindemann expanded his examination of historical anti-Semitism into a much broader treatment, Esau’s Tears, which appeared in 1997 and was nearly twice as long, providing comparative studies of the social landscape in numerous additional countries, including Germany, Britain, and Italy. Taken together the two volumes ran nearly 900 pages and constituted a very thorough and meticulously objective discussion of a social phenomenon so heavily covered in our media.

Lindemann’s major focus and the centerpiece of his first book were three of the world’s most notorious examples of anti-Semitism prior to the First World War, all of which had had fateful, long-term consequences while receiving attention in my introductory textbooks.

The unmistakable conclusion of Lindemann’s analysis is that if the defendants in both the Dreyfus and Frank cases had not been Jewish, they would have suffered identical arrests and convictions, but lacking any wealthy and politically mobilized Jewish community to rally around them, they would have received their punishments, just or unjust, and immediately been forgotten. Instead, Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, later claimed that the massive anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Affair was the basis of his personal ideological awakening, while the Frank Affair led to the establishment of America’s Anti-Defamation League. And both these cases have entered our history books as among the most notorious examples of pre-World War I anti-Semitism.

Lindemann’s discussion of the often difficult relations between Russia’s restive Jewish minority and its huge Slavic majority is also quite interesting, and he provides numerous instances in which major incidents, supposedly demonstrating the enormously strong appeal of vicious anti-Semitism, were quite different than has been suggested by the legend. The famous Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 was obviously the result of severe ethnic tension in that city, but contrary to the regular accusations of later writers, there seems absolutely no evidence of high-level government involvement, and the widespread claims of 700 dead that so horrified the entire world were grossly exaggerated, with only 45 killed in the urban rioting. Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, later promoted the story that he himself and some other brave Jewish souls had personally defended their people with revolvers in hand even as they saw the mutilated bodies of 80 Jewish victims. This account was totally fictional since Weizmann happened to have been hundreds of miles away when the riots occurred.

Although a tendency to lie and exaggerate was hardly unique to the political partisans of Russian Jewry, the existence of a powerful international network of Jewish journalists and Jewish-influenced media outlets ensured that such concocted propaganda stories might receive enormous worldwide distribution, while the truth followed far behind, if at all.

For related reasons, international outrage was often focused on the legal confinement of most of Russia’s Jews to the “Pale of Settlement,” suggesting some sort of tight imprisonment; but that area was the traditional home of the Jewish population and encompassed a landmass almost as large as France and Spain combined. The growing impoverishment of Eastern European Jews during that era was often assumed to be a consequence of hostile government policy, but the obvious explanation was extraordinary Jewish fecundity, which far outstripped that of their Slavic fellow countrymen, and quickly led them to outgrow the available spots in any of their traditional “middleman” occupations, a situation worsened by their total disinclination to engage in agriculture or other primary-producer activities. Jewish communities expressed horror at the risk of losing their sons to the Czarist military draft, but this was simply the flip-side of the full Russian citizenship they had been granted, and no different from what was faced by their non-Jewish neighbors.

Certainly the Jews of Russia suffered greatly from widespread riots and mob attacks in the generation prior to World War I, and these did sometimes have substantial government encouragement, especially in the aftermath of the very heavy Jewish role in the 1905 Revolution. But we should keep in mind that a Jewish plotter had been implicated in the killing of Czar Alexander II, and Jewish assassins had also struck down several top Russian ministers and numerous other government officials. If the last decade or two had seen American Muslims assassinate a sitting U.S. President, various leading Cabinet members, and a host of our other elected and appointed officials, surely the position of Muslims in this country would have become a very uncomfortable one.

As Lindemann candidly describes the tension between Russia’s very rapidly growing Jewish population and its governing authorities, he cannot avoid mentioning the notorious Jewish reputation for bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous figures of all political backgrounds noting that the remarkable Jewish propensity to commit perjury in the courtroom led to severe problems in the effective administration of justice. The eminent American sociologist E.A. Ross, writing in 1913, characterized the regular behavior of Eastern European Jews in very similar terms.

These cases are widely regarded as three of the most egregious examples of anti-Semitism in all of human history, and they separately gave birth to the Zionist movement, led to the founding of the ADL, and inspired the revolutionary, anti-Czarist fervor and funding that ultimately resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet when viewed in the cold light of reality, it was not clear to me whether any of them actually constituted “anti-Semitism” in any legitimate sense of the word, and the same was generally true for the long list of far lesser incidents that fill the remainder of Lindemann’s 900 pages of careful historical analysis. All of this suggested that “anti-Semitism” had always been more of an ideological phantasm deployed as a political weapon rather than any sort of meaningful concept in the real world, not merely today but also in the historical past.

Some Jewish scholars, loathe to accept that possibility, seemed to immediately recognize the potential political threat posed by Lindemann’s objective scholarship and they reacted accordingly, though their harsh attacks were rebutted by other, apparently less ideologically-driven academics:

But although I found his analysis quite useful and interesting, the extraordinarily harsh attacks his text provoked from some outraged Jewish academics seemed even more intriguing.

For example, Judith Laikin Elkin opened her discussion in The American Historical Review by describing the book as a “545-page polemic” a strange characterization of a work so remarkably even-handed and factually-based in its scholarship. Writing in Commentary, Robert Wistrich was even harsher, stating that merely reading the contents had been a painful experience for him, and his review seemed filled with spittle-flecked rage. Unless these individuals had somehow gotten copies of a different book, I found their attitudes simply astonishing.

I was not alone in such a reaction. Richard S. Levy of the University of Illinois, a noted scholar of anti-Semitism, expressed amazement at Wistrich’s seemingly irrational outburst, while Paul Gottfried, writing in Chronicles, mildly suggested that Lindemann had “touched raw nerves.” Indeed, Gottfried’s own evaluation quite reasonably criticized Lindemann for perhaps being a little too even-handed, sometimes presenting numerous conflicting analyses without choosing between them. For those interested, a good discussion of the book by Alan Steinweis, a younger scholar specializing in the same topic, is conveniently available online.

The remarkable ferocity with which some Jewish writers attacked Lindemann’s meticulous attempt to provide an accurate history of anti-Semitism may carry more significance than merely an exchange of angry words in low-circulation academic publications. If our mainstream media shapes our reality, scholarly books and the articles they influence tend to set the contours of that media coverage. And the ability of a relatively small number of agitated and energetic Jews to police the acceptable boundaries of historical narratives may have enormous consequences for our larger society, deterring scholars from objectively reporting historical facts and preventing students from discovering them.

• American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 30, 2018 • 5,500 Words

Jews as a people have existed for thousands of years and their often bitter conflict against others around them certainly stretches back that far, with Wistrich having published a book entitled Antisemitism: the Longest Hatred. The Wikipedia entry on the History of Anti-Semitism runs 18,000 words, containing a multitude of references and well over 200 footnotes.

But while the term “Anti-Semitism” is so powerful in today’s political debate, it was only first coined in the late nineteenth century by journalist Wilhelm Marr, a German nationalist writer and former radical. Although his first three wives were all of Jewish ancestry, Marr became alarmed by the growing control over finance and industry exercised by his country’s tiny Jewish minority, which he viewed in racial rather than religious terms, and he therefore founded the League of Anti-Semites to combat such encroachments. Thus, over the course of a century, Jewish media control has successfully transformed a term originally intended to challenge Jewish power and influence into one of the ideological weapons used to maintain it.

As we have seen above, the historical evidence for the existence of “anti-Semitism” in any meaningful sense really seems rather meager, and such apparent hostility was usually either fabricated by heavily distorted accounts or else appeared in direct response to very serious Jewish provocations. With perhaps 20,000 Gazan Palestinians having now been slaughtered by Jews, I don’t doubt that the miserable survivors currently feel a great deal of hostility towards the group responsible, but how could we possibly expect anything else? Do we gain any extra insight by labeling this animosity “anti-Semitism”?

Meanwhile, in sharp contrast, the fundamental tenets of traditional Judaism have always included an enormous amount of inherent hostility towards all non-Jews, something that has been widely remarked upon for thousands of years. As I discussed in 2018:

Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principle of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.

Despite these facts, the reifying power of the term “anti-Semitism” has helped ensure that any hostility displayed by Gentiles towards Jews enjoys an enormously higher profile than any reciprocal hostility in the other direction, with the latter lacking any name to give the concept solid meaning. Indeed, over the years I’ve occasionally seen some anti-Jewish activists attempt to fill that gap by inventing new terms such as “anti-Goyism” or “loxism,” but given their lack of media power, none of these have caught on.

Yet named or not, the phenomenon is certainly real, with bits of evidence occasionally seeping out. Despite the current 100-to-1 civilian casualty ratio, tendentious pro-Israel propaganda has currently stoked enormous levels of Jewish hatred towards Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, which sometimes leads to striking real-world incidents. Just a few days ago, a Jewish former State Department official, a senior figure who had been responsible for Israel/Palestine relations in the Obama Administration, was caught on video berating a random Egyptian immigrant food cart vendor in New York City, promising to use his powerful political connections to have the poor man’s family brutally tortured and killed.

That astonishing video clip together with its longer versions received well over 10 million impressions on Twitter, and provoked such a furor that it led to the man’s arrest on charges of “harassment.” Because the victim was Muslim, the outrageous behavior was described as “Islamophobic.” But under slightly different circumstances, I’m sure the target of his wrath could have just as easily been a German or an Anglo-Saxon or any other Gentile group, with the behavior then lacking any identifying name. Indeed, the same perpetrator had reportedly been similarly accosting and insulting ethnic Russians earlier this year.

Just a few weeks ago, a top Israeli political figure interviewed on KremlinTV had denounced Russia for being insufficiently pro-Israel in the current conflict and outrageously threatened the country possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal:

Finally, in the most astonishing example of all, Israel’s national broadcaster released a propaganda video showing sweet young Israeli children singing songs calling for the total annihilation of Gaza and all of its inhabitants. The video was eventually deleted after the Israelis realized that other peoples around the world may have other ways of thinking and might consider it inappropriate.

Copies of this striking song video remain in circulation and have been viewed many millions of times around the world, perhaps providing an important insight into the thinking of Israeli Jews, and this telling incident was discussed on the Grayzone.

In his sharp criticism, Max Blumenthal characterized this Israeli video as “Nazi-esque” but I think he is almost certainly mistaken. If any such official propaganda project had ever been undertaken in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, it surely would have subsequently become the centerpiece of every American documentary seeking to demonstrate the unspeakable evil of Nazi Germany. Indeed, I suspect that the notion of the German government coaching young German children into singing songs calling for the total annihilation of Jews or any other group would have been utterly unimaginable in that society. As I half-jokingly suggested in a 2018 article, Nazism might reasonably be characterized as “Judaism for wimps.”

I have explained that decades ago a small handful of shocking discoveries caused me to completely reassess my understanding of the world and begin considering ideas that I previously would have dismissed. I suspect that the graphic images coming out of destroyed Gaza and some of the surprising behavior of Israel’s governmental leaders and its committed advocates may now be having a similar effect upon hundreds of millions of individuals around the world, including some in our own country. And this may be the most important long-term consequence of the sanguinary events that were triggered by the Hamas attack last month.

We must carefully distinguish between the realities of the world and the extreme beliefs that agitated Jewish propagandists have often projected upon their various adversaries, both past and present. I touched upon this issue in several of my pieces from earlier this year, published prior to the outbreak of the current Israel/Gaza conflict.

• Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words

• More Falsehoods of World War II
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words

• Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words

Related Reading:

• American Pravda: Israel, Gaza, and Broader Issues
  American Pravda: War Crimes and Atrocity-Hoaxes in the Israel/Gaza Conflict
  Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Racialism
  American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
  American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism
  American Pravda: The ADL in American Society

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

Ron Unz, who is Jewish, is The Unz Review's publisher and founding editor.