(I've been working on my book, and this is a chapter I drafted this morning.)
Prominent anti-Zionists continually cross the line into
antisemitism, with little or no repercussions to their careers.
Former Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters was interviewed by Hamas-affiliated
Shehab News Agency in 2020. During the interview he essentially quoted Nazi
literature:
Sheldon Adelson, who is the puppet master pulling the strings
of Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and what's his name... The Ambassador [to
Israel], Greenberg [sic] I think his name is. Sheldon Adelson is the puppet
master pulling all of the strings. And Sheldon Adelson is a right-wing fascist
racist bigot who doesn't understand the first thing about the idea that human
beings might have rights. Sheldon Adelson believes that only Jews - only Jewish
people - are completely human. … everybody else on Earth is there to serve
them. Sheldon Adelson believe this. I'm not saying Jewish people believe this.
I am saying that he does, and he is pulling the strings.
There are no quotes by Sheldon Adelson that remotely
resemble what Waters is saying this “puppet-master” believed. However, similar
quotes abound all over neo-Nazi websites referring to Jews altogether. Waters,
knowing Adelson was a religious Jew, connected the fake antisemitic Talmud
quotes that are all over the Internet with every religious Jew, and Adelson –
as a “puppet-master” – was the most dangerous religious Jew.
Another example that was eagerly seized upon by the
anti-Zionist crowd was the “Deadly Exchange” campaign. Started around 2015, it
claimed that police exchange and training programs between local police departments
in the United States and Israel led to US police brutality that they learned
from their Israeli counterparts.
The charge is obviously and provably false. The training that
US police received in Israel was not on riot control techniques or anything
else to do with subduing people; the programs emphasized intelligence
gathering, counterintelligence techniques, border security, mechanisms to delay
terrorists on their way to a target such as checkpoints, site security for
terror targets like restaurants, shopping malls, preventing bombings, securing
airports and border crossings and performing mass rescue operations.
But those facts don’t stop anti-Israel propagandists and heroes of the Left
like Rania Khalek and The Nation’s Dave Zirin from asserting that Israel
teaches US police “the arts of suppression.”
The accusation veers into pure antisemitism because it
assumes that somehow local US police departments have no autonomy or agency of
their own. If, as they falsely claim, Israeli police taught them how to place a
knee on a suspect’s neck or other potentially fatal techniques, that would mean
that the local US police were somehow brainwashed into putting these techniques
into their own procedure manuals. It is another variant of the Jewish puppet-master
who bends the gentiles into doing its nefarious will.
Even Jewish Voice for Peace, which spent years pushing the “Deadly
Exchange” lies, did an about-face when it enlarged its focus from purely
anti-Israel activism into more general social justice issues. It quietly admitted that blaming US police brutality
on Israel was, yes, antisemitic and the exact same thing that the alt-Right
racists do:
Making connections between the U.S. and Israel without
context can do harm Highlighting these police exchange programs without enough
context or depth can end up harming our movements for justice. Suggesting
that Israel is the start or source of American police violence or racism shifts
the blame from the United States to Israel. This obscures the fundamental
responsibility and nature of the U.S., and harms Black people and Black-led
struggle. It also furthers an antisemitic ideology. White supremacists
look for any opportunity to glorify and advance American anti-Black racism, and
any chance to frame Jews as secretly controlling and manipulating the world.
Taking police exchanges out of context provides fodder for those racist and
antisemitic tropes.
Tropes that JVP heartily encouraged only a couple of years
before, blaming US police brutality on Israel.[5]
Another example of how Zionists are the secret puppet-master
of hapless, defenseless gentiles comes from the United Nations.
A 2005 UN report on violence against women said,
Women with husbands explained that the dire economic
situation and the pressures of the occupation have made men more violent
because they have lost their ability to provide and protect - two essential
elements of manhood in a traditional patriarchal society. As men become
stripped of their manhood, women become the shock absorbers of the crises as
targets of domestic violence.
This blaming Israel for Palestinian men beating their wives
has been echoed by then-High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in 2014
and again in 2015.
This might not be direct “puppetry” but the message being
hammered home is that Israel is responsible for domestic abuse of Palestinian women.
This is doubly bigoted: it echoes the theme of Jewish control over non-Jews,
and it infantilizes Palestinian Arabs as not being responsible for their own
lives.
Those two themes are accepted as truth in countless other
ways. Arab terrorism is Israel’s fault, Arab intransigence is Israel’s fault, the
lack of vaccines in the territories is Israel’s fault even when the Palestinian
leaders explicitly say they don’t want Israel’s help. Israel has all the responsibility
and Palestinians have none. What is that if not an echo of the traditional antisemitic
themes of Jewish control over the “goyim”?