Last month, in response to the rise of discussions about the Gaza genocide within my local community, a group called Shalom Humboldt published a series of assertions. They put out a letter to the editor that said they were “shocked to read so many lies about Zionism and Judaism” from those who’d been quoted in a recent newspaper article. The context behind this was that pro-Zionist activists within the area had put up a deliberately provocative billboard, which read: “Call me a Zionist, it only makes me prouder.” This prompted many people to accurately describe the billboard’s message as fascist and supremacist, so now Humboldt’s pro-Zionist contingent is trying to retake control of the conversation.
I’ve decided to deconstruct that contingent’s arguments because though this is a dispute from inside one small community, the rhetorical tactics these Zionists have used are consistent with how anti-Palestinian propaganda tends to work. Shalom Humboldt is just one among countless other groups that advocate for Zionism, while claiming to uphold humanitarian values. And it’s this wing of Zionism that’s most effective at convincing the average person, because most people are not receptive to the open racism of the Netanyahu wing.
Shalom Humboldt’s letter contains many false claims about historical and current events, and it’s important to refute them, but its argument also conveys a deeper belief: that individual intentions can negate the material impacts of one’s actions. The letter says that “Zionism is simply the belief that Jews have the right to live in their own sovereign and historic homeland. Supporting this principle does not equate with endorsing any specific Israeli government or policy — just as Americans can love their country while disagreeing with its leadership.” To show why this statement is incorrect, it’s necessary to illustrate how the Zionist state’s existence depends on injustice; and how supporting Zionism therefore necessarily means assisting in this justice.
An idea that requires ethnic supremacy
The statement’s definition of Zionism leaves out an important element within the Zionist project: the creation of a Jewish state. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, stated that “The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.” David Ben-Gurion, the founder of this state, then clarified what such a project would entail: “There can be no stable and strong Jewish State so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.”
To make sure that this demographic outcome came into being, starting in December 1947 the Zionist forces carried out the forced transfer of Arabs. And Netanyahu has said the Arabs who remain within the Jewish state’s borders continue to pose a threat, concluding in 2003 that “If the Arabs in Israel form 40 per cent of the population, this is the end of the Jewish state. But 20 per cent is also a problem. If the relationship with these 20 per cent is problematic, the state is entitled to employ extreme measures.” His message was that at any time, the state could start treating the Palestinians inside the Jewish state the same way it treats the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.
These Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are already restricted in numerous areas, from their housing access to their land ownership rights to their political speech. As the Zionist state dismantles humanitarian relief networks for Gazans, and expands its efforts to violently displace the residents of the West Bank, it’s clearer than ever that Palestinians are viewed as an obstacle towards the Zionist project. Yet Zionism’s “moderate” liberal wing, as represented by this group in my area, continues to say that Zionism isn’t supremacist. How can this camp make such an argument? By separating the consequences of one’s actions from the intent behind those actions.
When somebody is actively assisting in the Zionist project, it doesn’t matter if they disavow apartheid and genocide; they’re still narratively helping the Zionist state commit these crimes. The Zionist project has always involved racialized violence, and unlike our American experiment, the state of “Israel” hasn’t undergone historical revolutionary progress which gives it potential for being progressive. The U.S. has experienced a civil war against slavery, a movement for civil rights, and decades of class struggles in which workers of all colors have fought together. This has made the USA come to represent a national identity beyond its settler-colonial aspect. The settler-colonial project that calls itself “Israel” has not undergone an equivalent process, because the character of its internal class conflicts is essentially all racial; rather than having Jewish and Arab workers mutually struggling against a capitalist ruling class, it has Arabs struggling against an order of colonial domination.
That’s why the “socialist” strain of Zionism, which was dominant during Ben-Gurion’s time, has since declined to a fringe status: the material interests of the Jewish majority rest within the preservation of the racial hierarchy, not within victory for the proletariat. Inside “Israel,” the Jewish workers cannot be of the proletariat, they can only be of the labor aristocracy. In occupied Palestine, the proletariat exists within the Palestinian workers, who are given work visas that conditionally let them leave the occupied territories for low pay (often they receive slave wages). Without a common class interest between the land’s different peoples, Israel by its nature cannot become something progressive. The interests of the Palestinian underclass are within the occupying state’s abolition, because for as long as this state exists they’ll remain an underclass.
Shalom Humboldt says that “Israel grants full citizenship to two million Arab Muslims, along with other minorities such as Druze and Christians. These communities actively participate in Israeli society as doctors, judges, pharmacists, nurses and police officers — enjoying rights and opportunities far greater than those afforded to Arabs in any other Middle Eastern country. In no way is Israel an apartheid country. Examples abound, such as the Arab judge George Karra, a Christian Arab, who sentenced former Israeli President Moshe Katsav to prison for seven years. His role in the case highlights the independence of Israel’s judiciary and the full participation of Arab citizens in its legal system.” It’s not just that this argument leaves out the context of the Zionist state’s numerous discriminatory laws; it’s that it leaves out the class analysis which shows just how fundamental racial inequality is to the Jewish state. When the Palestinian proletariat is a class that’s exploited by the dominant racial group, and the laws are designed to favor that group at the expense of the Palestinians, Zionism cannot be compatible with an equal system.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine states that “The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is to establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights and obligations and which will constitute an integral part of the progressive democratic Arab national presence living peacefully with all forces of progress in the world.” In other words, the anti-Zionist movement is the side which seeks equality, and genuinely embodies the progressive values that liberal Zionists claim to represent. Because of this, liberal Zionists have adopted the tactic of pushing blame onto the victims, saying the Palestinians have brought their conditions upon themselves.
Falsifying history, justifying the unjustifiable
Shalom Humboldt talks of how the anti-Zionists “insist that Israel is committing genocide — an accusation that has been repeated since 1948, when local Arab forces rejected Israel’s declaration of independence and launched a war rather than accept a Jewish state as their neighbor. The ongoing conflict has persisted for decades due to this refusal to coexist peacefully. Such inflammatory accusations not only blatantly distort reality but also echo propaganda that originated in Soviet Russia in the 1940s, designed to delegitimize Israel and vilify Jews.” The group doesn’t try to disprove any of the evidence for genocide in Gaza, which is so overwhelming that there really is no serious way to argue a genocide isn’t happening. Instead, it asserts that the Palestinians and the Arabs have provoked the Zionists from the beginning.
The group also doesn’t try to dispute the evidence that the Zionists carried out an ethnic cleansing in Palestine in 1948. It avoids bringing up this part of the story, and accuses the Arab states of acting out of sheer aggression. But when you look at the timeline of the Arab intervention (it began on May 14), then consider that the ethnic cleansing started before the beginning of the year, it becomes clear that these Arab states didn’t do this in a vacuum. And upon investigating the motives of Jordan and Egypt in particular, it’s apparent that the Zionist state’s violent campaign against defenseless civilians was crucial in compelling these countries to act.
As Muhammad Shehada has explained, these countries were also responding to external aggressions from the Zionist state, committed against nations that weren’t even within the land this state was supposed to have jurisdiction over:
Jordan, which had the strongest Arab army in the 1948 war, had actually accepted the 1947 UN partition plan of historic Palestine in secret meetings in 1947 with Golda Meir, then head of the Jewish Agency’s political department. In return, Jordan’s King Abdullah wanted to annex the Arab part to Jordan, according to the Israeli historian Benny Morris. However, in the 45 days leading up to the 1948 war, Zionist militias in mandate Palestine carried out 13 offensive military operations including eight outside the borders of the area allotted to the Jewish state in the partition plan. Zionist aggression included the infamous Deir Yassin massacre on 9 April, which played a central role in spreading fear and terror among Palestinians. After this massacre, Jordan’s king came under pressure to act. But even then, he secretly met with Golda Meir again and offered full Jewish autonomy under his rule after he annexed historic Palestine, which she rejected. “He is going to this business [that is, war] not out of joy or confidence, but as a person who is in a trap and can't get out,” Golda Meir later stated.
Not only did the Zionist forces refuse to respect the Palestinians people’s right to self-determination; it also violated the sovereignty of its neighbors, trying to exercise control beyond the territories the UN had granted to it. Shehada also describes how these provocations motivated Egypt: “King Farouk’s main motives were to prevent the Jordanian king from claiming leadership of the Arab struggle and potentially capture southern Palestine for Egypt, according to the Israeli historian Efraim Karsh. The Egyptian troops he sent into Palestine were relatively symbolic, and their first communiqué from Cairo described their mission as ‘merely a punitive expedition against the Zionist ‘gangs’ as later recounted by the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.”
With this context, the argument that the Zionist state was “invaded” by these states falls apart. It was only when the Zionist state entered into the areas designated for the Palestinians that the Arab states took action; moreover, these states never crossed into the borders of the land that had been designated for the Jews. When Zionists say that “the Arab states” had “invaded Israel,” they’re not talking about the territories the partition plan said was going to make up the state of “Israel”; they’re talking about the lands that the Palestinians were promised, and that the Zionist forces stole.
This logic—in which the Zionist state must always be in the right—is how Zionists have extended these victim-blaming narratives to the rest of the Zionist state’s history. The letter says that “Palestinians could have had a state multiple times over the past 80 years, yet their leadership has repeatedly rejected these proposals, preferring instead to call for Israel’s destruction.” The first instance in which there came about a real breakthrough towards a Palestinian state was 1995, with the second Oslo Accords. As Decolonize Palestine explains, the Zionist state did not fulfill its promise for creating a Palestinian state, so new negotiations were arranged:
The Palestinian Authority was supposed to last no longer than 5 years, after which a sovereign Palestinian state would be established as a culmination of the negotiation process. Clearly, this did not materialize and the negotiation process stalled. In 2000, US. President Bill Clinton called for a summit at Camp David to try and nudge negotiations forward and put an end to the “conflict” once and for all. The summit lasted for approximately two weeks, and needless to say, it failed in its objectives. Following this failure, there was a media frenzy blaming Arafat and the Palestinians for the negotiations breaking down.
Why did they break down? Because during this summit, the Zionist state didn’t actually offer the Palestinians a state:
Palestinians would need to give up 10% of the most fertile land in the West Bank, in exchange for 1% of desert land. Not to mention that if the past record is any indicator, the additional 8-12% under “temporary” Israeli control would remain so forever. In addition to all of this, Israel demanded permanent control of Palestinian airspace, three permanent military installations manned by Israeli troops in the West Bank, Israeli presence at Palestinian border crossings, and special “security arrangements” along the borders with Jordan which effectively annexed additional land. The cherry on top of all of these stipulations, is that Israel would be allowed to invade at any point in cases of “emergency”. As you can imagine, what constituted an emergency was left incredibly vague and up to interpretation. The Palestinian state would be demilitarized, and the Palestinian government would not be able to enter into alliances without Israeli permission. None of these are ingredients for the creation of an actual sovereign state.
These historical realities further disprove Shalom Humboldt’s claim about what Zionism represents, which the group repeats by saying that “Zionism simply means that Jews have the right to live in their indigenous homeland — nothing more, nothing less.” By attempting to justify the ethnic cleansing, and by denying the genocide rather than conceding that it’s happening, the group is proving that Zionism means much more than this. The group isn’t merely arguing that Jews have the right to live in the area; it’s arguing that the Zionist state didn’t do anything wrong when it forcibly transferred the Palestinians. Because if the neighboring countries weren’t justified in defending the designated Palestinian lands, then the Zionist state (by this logic) should have been able to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians without anyone stepping in.
The other historical falsehood from this part of the statement is the notion that the Jews who’ve settled on the land are indigenous to it, which can also be debunked; the Jewish people who’ve come there in these last couple centuries are part of a different heritage than that of the land’s actual indigenous peoples, those being the Palestinians. But one doesn’t even need to disprove this “blood ties” narrative to successfully discredit the Zionist position. Because whether a people are indigenous to a given land has no relevance to the question of whether they can force out another people. We already have the answer: it is never acceptable to commit ethnic cleansing. And though liberal Zionists disavow the idea of ethnic cleansing, they consistently defend it in practice.
Because this is the act that Zionists need to defend in order to uphold their stance, it becomes necessary for them to accuse the pro-Palestine side of doing the same thing. This way, they can appear to have the moral high ground. But more of our society is learning the truth about what the Palestinian cause represents, and this cause is headed for victory.
The slanders against the resistance, & why they can’t stop liberation from coming
Shalom Humboldt says that “A local critic’s assertion that we would consider as antisemitic any billboard displaying the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ is correct — not for the reasons he assumes, but because the phrase is a direct call for the destruction of Israel and the deaths of its seven million Jewish inhabitants. Calling for the violent eradication of the Jewish people is, by definition, antisemitic.” The arguers make no attempt to support why the phrase means these things. They don’t cite any pieces of historical background about the phrase that may show this to be true; nor do they point to any present-day phenomena in which the phrase may be used as an anti-Jewish dog whistle. There are plenty of euphemistic phrases that bigots use to covertly signal their hatred for Jews, but the arguers can’t point to any evidence that this phrase is one of them.
If the arguers are trying to say the anti-Zionist movement’s leadership intends to exterminate Jews, therefore making it anti-Jewish to repeat this slogan, then the argument still lacks basis. Because Hamas, the primary organization within the Palestinian resistance, shares the same view of Jewish people that PFLP does; this being that Jews should be treated like any other people. Zionists often say Hamas is prejudiced against Jews, but this simply isn’t the view it puts forth. Here’s what Hamas actually says about the matter in its charter:
Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.
The letter also says that Hamas “routinely uses their own civilians as human shields. This is a well-documented fact.” Yet even the human rights organizations with ties to the U.S. government have never said this is a documented fact, because saying so would be too blatant of a lie. Khaled Elgindy and Eyal Lurie-Pardes of the Middle East Institute report that:
While there have been cases of Hamas fighters and weapons located in or near civilian structures in violation of international law, whether these were done deliberately to deter attack is not clear. What is clear is that Gaza is among the most densely populated areas in the world, with some 2.3 million people packed into less than 140 square miles. Thus, there are very few spaces that would not be in proximity to civilians and critical infrastructure. Moreover, the need to demonstrate intent further complicates the matter. Even so, while no studies have yet been conducted on the current war in Gaza, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have investigated similar allegations in previous wars and found no evidence of Hamas using human shields.
Towards the letter’s end, it says that “Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly 20 years ago, dismantling all Jewish communities and businesses while leaving behind fully operational greenhouses for Gazans to use for economic development. Rather than building a sustainable future, Hamas chose to divert billions of dollars in international aid — including U.S. taxpayer funds — to construct an underground terror network where only Hamas operatives, not civilians, can find shelter. These tunnels are also used to torture hostages and Palestinian dissidents.” The “Hamas stole the aid” claim is how Zionists justify the Zionist state’s systematic efforts at restricting the flow of resources into Gaza; if Gaza’s leadership hasn’t been letting the people benefit from this aid, then Zionists can support their narrative about “Israel” only wanting to help Gazans. And if “Israel” has been doing its best, then all of its arbitrary limitations upon the aid must be good-faith “security” measures.
But there’s no evidence for the “stolen aid” assertion either, and even some of the most pro-Zionist sources have been forced to admit so. Last February, when the IDF seized upon an isolated piece of video footage to allege that Hamas was stealing aid, the Times of Israel reported that “The top US diplomat involved in humanitarian assistance for Gaza denied allegations that Hamas has stolen aid and commercial shipments into the enclave, saying that no Israeli official has presented him or the Biden administration with ‘specific evidence of diversion or theft of assistance.’” Then former French diplomat Catherine Colonna led an independent investigation into the claim, and found in April that there was indeed no proof for it. This further exposed how the Zionist entity is the one which starves Gaza’s people, because it was this false accusation against Hamas that created an excuse for withholding $450,000,000 worth of Gaza aid.
This lack of substantiation for the more recent aid theft claims reflects the veracity behind every other one of these accusations. We know “Israel” has been lying about it from the start because as Norman Finkelstein points out, all investigations into Gaza’s governance have exonerated Hamas on this point:
There is probably no spot in the world which has been more closely engaged in and monitored by international human rights organizations, humanitarian organizations, the EU, affiliate organizations, and the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development. The IMF, the World Bank, anybody and everybody in the human rights system have a presence in Gaza…everyone agrees, there’s no dispute, that the primary reason for the horrific conditions in Gaza is the blockade. You’ll have some criticism of Hamas here and there, but nobody disputes that the primary cause of the abject poverty that Gaza experienced beginning 2006 in particular, though it goes further back…is the blockade. The EU and various other organizations, they have stipulated there’s no evidence that Hamas is misusing the aid. It’s just not true.
The letter’s final accusation is that Hamas has tortured the hostages, alluding to the Zionist narrative about the resistance forces committing rape. Unsurprisingly, no proof has materialized for this claim either. Wrote Ali Abunimah this January in The Electronic Intifada:
Investigations by The Electronic Intifada and other independent publications have consistently demonstrated that the rape claims are unsubstantiated or outright fabrications – atrocity propaganda used to incite and justify Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza…when the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan applied for arrest warrants against senior Hamas leaders last May, he did not include any allegations of rape on 7 October 2023. This is a strong indication that the court’s investigators could not substantiate them either (although Khan did include tenuous allegations that Israeli prisoners of war and civilians held in Gaza since 7 October have been subjected to sexual violence). Two separate UN reports could not verify any of Israel’s 7 October rape claims, finding in the extensive materials they reviewed, including thousands of photographs and videos, that there were “no tangible indications of rape” as well as an “absence of forensic evidence of sexual crimes.”
To refute the letter’s statements in a way that’s substantive, I’ve needed to put together an essay that’s many times longer than the letter is, and the quotations have multiplied its length. This demonstrates how lies so often take a much shorter time to communicate than is the case for fact-checks; how false narratives can be conveyed simply through a few quippy remarks, precisely because these narratives lack substance. That doesn’t necessarily mean a false narrative is going to win out, though. When the majority of our society has already been exposed to the evidence of Zionism’s crimes, the majority won’t be convinced to go back to its old, default position of uncritically supporting “Israel.” Since October 7, an irreversible consciousness shift has taken place.
When pro-Zionist groups publish newspaper letters like this one, realistically the only Americans they’ll convince are the ones who haven’t been paying attention to the issue of Gaza. And there are plenty of people who do fit this category, because the average individual isn’t a news junkie. But when there’s been a constant onslaught of footage showing the worst crimes imaginable, and there’s no way to deny these crimes have been committed by “Israel,” even a lot of casual spectators are going to have their minds changed.
The outcome of this trend is that the bulk of the USA’s masses will come to align with the Palestinian people, including the Palestinian resistance; because all the resistance truly wants is freedom for the Palestinians, and that’s a goal which the average American can get behind. This is why the liberal Zionists put effort into trying to convince people that the Palestinians are free: if this myth gets exposed, then “Israel” finds itself isolated. It’s already become isolated from much of the globe; if the USA’s people work to obstruct their government’s efforts at aiding the genocide, then the stresses upon the Zionist colonization project will become too great.
This is why all of us, especially those within the United States, have agency to help change the situation of the Palestinians. Each of us have potential to influence how things go; which makes it impossible for liberal Zionists to truly separate themselves from the Zionist state’s crimes. They’re assisting the types of Zionists who want to exterminate Palestinians, even if they disavow those Zionists. The more of us recognize this, and see that Zionism can never come in a positive form, the closer our society gets towards ending this ideology’s racist influence. And the better we become at aiding the Palestinians in their liberation.
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