ArchTroop's Sanctuary

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

It's less of an overwhelming threat or weight for me.

As such it's ENTERTAINING for me to tell these people to fuck off. Not a constant annoying ache for my entire life.

There used to be thousands of Jews in Iraq. The ancient Talmudic centers of Surah and Pumbedita were in Iraq. Jews in Iraq, and indeed most of the world, had never been treated as equal citizens, being subject to Dhimmi laws, but still the Iraqi Jewish culture flourished.

Today, it is estimated that there are only four Jews left in Iraq. Four Jews.

The Iraqi Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities outside of Israel, and it was razed to the ground.

If you talk about the Holocaust but don't talk about the multiple ethnic cleansings and genocides of Jews in the SWANA region, you are being deliberately ignorant and antisemitic.

My ancestors lived and died and were buried in Iraq but I can't visit their hometowns and gravesites because they're all gone.

These images illustrate how the Soviet Union visually equated Zionism with Nazism and colonialism throughout the 1960s and 70s.

You’ll notice striking similarities between these graphics and the infographics commonly seen on social media today.

This is not coincidence.

Most of the slogans and frameworks used in the "Free Palestine" movement today weren't created by Gen Z activists. They were engineered by the KGB and Soviet Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda) departments over 50 years ago.

The Great Pivot

In 1948, the USSR actually supported Israel. But when Israel aligned with the West, the Soviets needed a way to turn the "Global South" against them. They launched a massive ideological campaign to rebrand Zionism (the movement for Jewish self-determination) as a form of "white supremacist colonialism."

They created a state-sponsored "science" called Zionology. The goal was simple: make Zionism synonymous with the world’s greatest evils (Nazism, Racism, and Imperialism) so that opposing Israel became a "progressive" moral requirement.

"Zionism is Racism" (UN Resolution 3379)

The crowning achievement of this era was the 1975 UN Resolution declaring "Zionism is a form of racism." This wasn't a grassroots human rights initiative; it was a Soviet-led diplomatic hit job.

Though the UN revoked it in 1991, the damage was permanent. It gave activists a "scholarly" and "international" license to treat the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate. When you see modern infographics using these exact terms, you are seeing the tail-end of a 50-year-old Soviet PR campaign.

And yes, Russia is doing this again (along with Iran and Qatar).

Why Russia is doing it again

Today, Russia (and its modern disinformation machine) uses the Israel-Palestine conflict in the West as a wedge issue. They don't have to invent new lies. They just amplify existing tensions. By flooding platforms like Tumblr or Twitter with high-emotion content, they force Westerners to pick sides and fight each other.

If Russia can make young Americans believe their government is funding a genocide, it weakens domestic support for all Western foreign policy, including support for Ukraine.

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It is surprisingly easy to fall for it because this propaganda is designed to look like social justice. It uses the language of liberation to hide its origins in Cold War geopolitics.

When you see a post that frames a 3,000-year-old indigenous connection as settler-colonialism, or equates the Star of David with a Swastika, you're seeing a Soviet turd that's been polished for 21st century "progressives."

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The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-Hatred by American Historian Gil Troy

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA066235.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/1949/05/02/archives/antizionism-in-soviet-union-turning-into-antisemitism-developing.html

https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-are-us-socialists-so-anti-israel-scholar-lays-out-soviet-roots-of-anti-zionist-rhetoric/

Mapping the New Left Antisemitism (Edited by Alan Johnson)

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/zionism-and-the-big-lie/11519628

https://quillette.com/2024/02/13/izabella-tabarovsky-on-the-soviet-roots-of-anti-zionist-discourse/

See also from 1999:

and 2011 (Links are good)

Various state department pages that are still un-fucked with as of yet (Links are good)

There are actual, real issues that we could talk about. We could talk about the systemic issues in Israel, the problems (the BIG problems) with the Israeli government. We could discuss the settlements in the West Bank, we could discuss the issues with extremism within Zionism.

We COULD do all of that and possibly have some really great, productive conversations about how to fix these issues!

The saddest part of it all is that the highest price is paid by the very people who carry the title "Palestinians".