They are heretics who worship Israel, reject Jewish teachings, and hide behind their identity.
Israeli settlers destroying olive trees. Image Evergreen State University
Between 1980 and 2010, over a million people claiming to be Jews fled the Soviet states. Many went to Israel to ‘escape antisemitism.’ Now some of these immigrants are “settling” the occupied West Bank and terrorizing Arabs.
Ironically, Israeli studies show that as many as 70 % of the immigrants weren’t Jewish at all. They were just people with some connection to actual Jews and who wanted to escape hardships in the USSR. Those who came to Israel hoped to gain the economic privilege given to Jews by Israel’s Law of Return.
When I think about it, the story of these Soviet fake Jews sounds just like modern Zionism as a whole. Zionists were having a hard time where they were and used their Jewish identity as a cover for land, money, and power grabs. That’s what Israel does every day.
My Jewish friends and I are sick to death of Israel and its Zionist supporters’ claiming that all Jews support their baby killing and war crimes. We refuse to let monsters like Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennet claim their apartheid state represents us. We won’t let them put a war criminal face on Judaism.
By now, everyone knows the Zionist game plan, repeated endlessly for 78 years. Demonize Israel’s Arab neighbors as terrorists. Then drive them off their land and out of their homes with real terror. When people oppose your ethnic cleansing, call those people Jew-haters (“antisemites”) and call yourselves victims of religious hate.
But I say Zionists aren’t real Jews. They’re heretics. Some may fulfill the traditional requirement of having a Jewish mother, but they neither believe in the religious tenets of Judaism, nor do they practice the behaviors the sages taught. My parents and rabbis always told me that treating everyone fairly and helping those in need was part of our identity. We were supposed to make the world a better place, not to destroy it. I was raised to believe God wanted us to be good members of a society, not to run it. The Bible and other Jewish texts are full of advice for doing that.
Zionists believe something very different. Israeli historian Ilian Pappé has written, “Most Zionists don’t believe in God, but they do believe that he promised them Palestine.” They believe in Israel. Nearly all the founders of Zionism, such as Theodore Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky, were atheists who despised European Jewish culture. Nothing Israel does conforms to the teachings of modern (rabbinic) Judaism. They believe in power, money, and a state that they run.
Look at how Israel makes a complete mockery of the Ten Commandments. ‘Do not kill another human. Do not steal. Do not covet that which is thy neighbor’s.’ Those behaviors are daily routine for the Zionists.
It’s not just the Commandments. There are many other instructions from God in the Bible which Israeli settlers and the IDF violate regularly. The ancient Israelites were told categorically in Deuteronomy 20:19 to preserve fruit-bearing trees, even during times of war. The verse asks” Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you?” To me, that’s the best thing God said in the whole book, but Israeli settlers and military carry out massive olive tree destruction in Palestine, in a time of peace. Research in al-Jazeera found that almost a million of these ancient, beautiful trees have been destroyed.
Ironically, while Zionists used to crow that they had “made the desert bloom” with their technology, they are actually turning vast swathes of blooming farmland into desert with their tree cutting.
What’s left when the trees are gone. Image B’Tselem
True, Bible books such as Joshua and Samuel commanded the ancient Israelites to conquer the land and kill men, women, sheep and goats. Ruthlessness was a virtue for them, and Benjamin Netanyahu frequently cites those stories when encouraging his countrymen to slaughter people.
Now some far right Israeli leaders cite the Bible in seeking to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and import the red heifer described in Numbers 19 to consecrate it. Although I doubt many Zionists really believe these stories, the narrative allows them to say they’re killing for God. Perhaps conquering the world is what Judaism means to them, but it hasn’t meant that for the Jewish community for 2000 years.
A Zionist might argue that Judaism isn’t about what one believes or does. It’s an ethnicity one belongs to by birth. OK then, but how does your ethnicity gain you the right to kill, displace and dominate others? What puts you above international law and the most basic standards of human decency? Your claimed identity does not shield you from all accountability.
To be claiming in the 21st Century that all Jews support Israel and that those who oppose Israel are antisemitic is a flat out lie and drags the name of Judaism through the mud. Instead of Albert Einstein or Baruch Spinoza, it makes war criminals like Yoav Gallant the face of our community. It tells the world that Jews support mass murder and believe Israeli lies. As professor Steven Salaita wrote in 2014 about an earlier Gaza massacre, “If it’s antisemitic to deplore colonization, land theft, and child murder, then what choice does any person of conscience have?”
Zionists go around bombing hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings, suing underfunded school districts for teaching about Palestine, criminalizing political expression as antisemitic, pulling the world into war after Middle East war. These evils are not called for by Judaism or by any other religion. They are the actions of a heretical sect. I refuse to let them speak for me.
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