2001sep04 | NYT | THE RACISM WALKOUT: THE OVERVIEW; U.S. AND ISRAELIS QUIT RACISM TALKS OVER DENUNCIATION

THE RACISM WALKOUT: THE OVERVIEW; U.S. AND ISRAELIS QUIT RACISM TALKS OVER DENUNCIATION

By Rachel L. Swarns nytimes.com  Sept. 4, 2001 Section A, Page 1

THE RACISM WALKOUT: THE OVERVIEW

The United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations meeting on racism here tonight, denouncing a condemnation of Israel in a proposed conference declaration and lamenting that a meeting intended to celebrate tolerance and diversity had degenerated into a gathering riven by hate.

South Africa rushed tonight to convene emergency meetings to redraft the declaration and program of action in the hope of averting other walkouts, and a spokesman for the European Union delegation, which also raised concerns, said its diplomats would take part in the efforts to rewrite the draft documents.

In announcing his decision in Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, ''I have taken this decision with regret because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution that the conference could have made to it.''

''But following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am convinced that will not be possible,'' he said.

Secretary Powell said negotiators here had failed to persuade Arab delegates to remove criticism of Israel from proposed conference documents that assail ''the racist practices of Zionism'' and describe Israel's treatment of Palestinians as a ''new kind of apartheid.''

Questions about whether Israel should be condemned for its treatment of Palestinians and whether the West should pay reparations for slavery and colonialism have roiled conference preparations for months. Washington has said repeatedly that it would not consider language that criticized Israel or legitimized reparations for descendants of slaves.

The fact that the United States did not send Secretary Powell to the conference, which opened on Friday, was a sore point with many of the countries represented here. The United States and Israel both sent mid-level delegations.

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The decision to withdraw even those delegations dashed the hopes of thousands who have brought their fight against intolerance to a country chosen by conference organizers for its remarkable story of racial reconciliation.

Olivier Alsteens, spokesman for the European Union delegation, said it had no immediate plans to withdraw, ''But if at one moment, we feel there is no other opportunity, then we will leave all together.''

The American and Israeli pullout was warmly applauded by Jewish groups but greeted with great regret by South Africa and other developing countries and with anger by black Americans and their supporters. It seemed likely only to heighten the frustration and divisions between the increasingly polarized groups.

Tonight, black Americans and their allies took to the streets here, chanting ''Shame, shame U.S.A.'' The protesters said they were deeply disappointed that the United States could not find a way to compromise and sign an international declaration that is expected to condemn slavery and racial discrimination.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has been urging the Arab League to back away from the charged language, and members of the Black Congressional Caucus also criticized the Bush administration's decision.

Representative Donna M. C. Christensen, a Democrat who is the delegate to Congress from the Virgin Islands, said, ''It leaves African-Americans with no recognition of all the suffering we have had and all of the suffering we continue to have.''

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California and a delegation member, said he was sorry that the United States was pulling out. But he said the team, headed by E. Michael Southwick, a deputy assistant secretary of state, had no choice because the Palestinians and their supporters refused to compromise.

The American and Israeli decision came after officials from the United States and Norway had huddled for hours in closed-door meetings with Palestinian and other Arab officials, trying to broker a deal.

Norwegian diplomats proposed new language that mentioned the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but was fair to both sides, according to American officials. But the effort failed, and some meetings were so heated that participants ended up shouting.

''It was an ugly meeting,'' Mr. Lantos said in an interview. ''This was not a question of persuading people. This was a question of an iron wall we were up against, and there was no give.''

Senior PLO member Farouk Kaddoumi says U.S. using pretext of Israel for dodging conversation on reparations for descendants of African Slaves

Arab officials blamed the Bush administration for the failure of the talks. Farouk Kaddoumi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused the United States of using the dispute as a pretext to avoid serious discussion of slavery and reparations for the descendants of African slaves.

The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, said the Norwegian compromise document trivialized Palestinian suffering.

''The only mention of Israel is that the Palestinians and Israelis should go back to the peace process,'' Mr. Maher said in an interview. "That is not enough."

''We are talking about a war waged using the most sophisticated weapons on a civilian population,'' Mr. Maher said. ''This is a government that has taken an official decision to assassinate people. You want this conference, which deals with discrimination, not to mention these things? That is precisely what must be raised.''

Polarization has also been evident in the interactions of delegates from civic groups meeting here in the hope of influencing the final declaration on racism, which is to be completed on Friday.

Last week, some Arab groups here distributed offensive literature that included posters of Jews with big noses and bloody fangs. Members of Palestinian and Jewish groups shouted at each other during competing rallies. And on Saturday, about 25 Jews walked out of a meeting of civic groups when someone suggested removing references to anti-Semitism.

After the Jewish groups walked out, the coalition of civic groups approved a report that accused Israel of ''racist crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide'' in its treatment of Palestinians. The report is not binding, and it is unlikely the language would be adopted.

''The U.S. did not reject a discussion about racism, they rejected a conference that was tainted by racism,'' said Stacy Burdett, an assistant director at the Anti-Defamation League, who is attending the conference. ''This wasn't a discussion about legitimate issues. It was a hijacking that vilified and demonized Jews.''

Mordechai Yedid, the head of the Israeli delegation, said in an interview, ''Our position has always been to agree to generic language, to the suffering of people, to war, to occupations.''

''This time because the conference was so important to us and to our history as a people who suffered from anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, we have gone beyond, to specific language,'' he said.

Several human rights groups argued tonight that the United States should have stayed to improve the language about Israel and to show solidarity with the many suffering people in the world.

''We're very troubled by the whole Zionism as racism formulation as well, but we think our responsibility is to stay and have the conversation,'' said Karen K. Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. ''You certainly don't build your moral standing in the world by running away.''

And the South African government warned that by leaving, the United States might give the impression that it was ducking tough issues, like race relations within its own borders.

''It will be unfortunate if a perception were to develop that the U.S.A.'s withdrawal from the conference is merely a red herring demonstrating an unwillingness to confront the real issues posed by racism in the U.S.A. and globally,'' the South African government said in a statement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/world/racism-walkout-overview-us-israelis-quit-racism-talks-over-denunciation.html

2001sep04 | NYT | THE RACISM WALKOUT: THE OVERVIEW; U.S. AND ISRAELIS QUIT RACISM TALKS OVER DENUNCIATION

THE RACISM WALKOUT: THE OVERVIEW; U.S. AND ISRAELIS QUIT RACISM TALKS OVER DENUNCIATION

By Rachel L. Swarns nytimes.com  Sept. 4, 2001 Section A, Page 1

THE RACISM WALKOUT: THE OVERVIEW

The United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations meeting on racism here tonight, denouncing a condemnation of Israel in a proposed conference declaration and lamenting that a meeting intended to celebrate tolerance and diversity had degenerated into a gathering riven by hate.

South Africa rushed tonight to convene emergency meetings to redraft the declaration and program of action in the hope of averting other walkouts, and a spokesman for the European Union delegation, which also raised concerns, said its diplomats would take part in the efforts to rewrite the draft documents.

In announcing his decision in Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, ''I have taken this decision with regret because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution that the conference could have made to it.''

''But following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am convinced that will not be possible,'' he said.

Secretary Powell said negotiators here had failed to persuade Arab delegates to remove criticism of Israel from proposed conference documents that assail ''the racist practices of Zionism'' and describe Israel's treatment of Palestinians as a ''new kind of apartheid.''

Questions about whether Israel should be condemned for its treatment of Palestinians and whether the West should pay reparations for slavery and colonialism have roiled conference preparations for months. Washington has said repeatedly that it would not consider language that criticized Israel or legitimized reparations for descendants of slaves.

The fact that the United States did not send Secretary Powell to the conference, which opened on Friday, was a sore point with many of the countries represented here. The United States and Israel both sent mid-level delegations.

Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing.  The latest news about the conflict.

The decision to withdraw even those delegations dashed the hopes of thousands who have brought their fight against intolerance to a country chosen by conference organizers for its remarkable story of racial reconciliation.

Olivier Alsteens, spokesman for the European Union delegation, said it had no immediate plans to withdraw, ''But if at one moment, we feel there is no other opportunity, then we will leave all together.''

The American and Israeli pullout was warmly applauded by Jewish groups but greeted with great regret by South Africa and other developing countries and with anger by black Americans and their supporters. It seemed likely only to heighten the frustration and divisions between the increasingly polarized groups.

Tonight, black Americans and their allies took to the streets here, chanting ''Shame, shame U.S.A.'' The protesters said they were deeply disappointed that the United States could not find a way to compromise and sign an international declaration that is expected to condemn slavery and racial discrimination.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has been urging the Arab League to back away from the charged language, and members of the Black Congressional Caucus also criticized the Bush administration's decision.

Representative Donna M. C. Christensen, a Democrat who is the delegate to Congress from the Virgin Islands, said, ''It leaves African-Americans with no recognition of all the suffering we have had and all of the suffering we continue to have.''

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California and a delegation member, said he was sorry that the United States was pulling out. But he said the team, headed by E. Michael Southwick, a deputy assistant secretary of state, had no choice because the Palestinians and their supporters refused to compromise.

The American and Israeli decision came after officials from the United States and Norway had huddled for hours in closed-door meetings with Palestinian and other Arab officials, trying to broker a deal.

Norwegian diplomats proposed new language that mentioned the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but was fair to both sides, according to American officials. But the effort failed, and some meetings were so heated that participants ended up shouting.

''It was an ugly meeting,'' Mr. Lantos said in an interview. ''This was not a question of persuading people. This was a question of an iron wall we were up against, and there was no give.''

Senior PLO member Farouk Kaddoumi says U.S. using pretext of Israel for dodging conversation on reparations for descendants of African Slaves

Arab officials blamed the Bush administration for the failure of the talks. Farouk Kaddoumi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused the United States of using the dispute as a pretext to avoid serious discussion of slavery and reparations for the descendants of African slaves.

The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, said the Norwegian compromise document trivialized Palestinian suffering.

''The only mention of Israel is that the Palestinians and Israelis should go back to the peace process,'' Mr. Maher said in an interview. "That is not enough."

''We are talking about a war waged using the most sophisticated weapons on a civilian population,'' Mr. Maher said. ''This is a government that has taken an official decision to assassinate people. You want this conference, which deals with discrimination, not to mention these things? That is precisely what must be raised.''

Polarization has also been evident in the interactions of delegates from civic groups meeting here in the hope of influencing the final declaration on racism, which is to be completed on Friday.

Last week, some Arab groups here distributed offensive literature that included posters of Jews with big noses and bloody fangs. Members of Palestinian and Jewish groups shouted at each other during competing rallies. And on Saturday, about 25 Jews walked out of a meeting of civic groups when someone suggested removing references to anti-Semitism.

After the Jewish groups walked out, the coalition of civic groups approved a report that accused Israel of ''racist crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide'' in its treatment of Palestinians. The report is not binding, and it is unlikely the language would be adopted.

''The U.S. did not reject a discussion about racism, they rejected a conference that was tainted by racism,'' said Stacy Burdett, an assistant director at the Anti-Defamation League, who is attending the conference. ''This wasn't a discussion about legitimate issues. It was a hijacking that vilified and demonized Jews.''

Mordechai Yedid, the head of the Israeli delegation, said in an interview, ''Our position has always been to agree to generic language, to the suffering of people, to war, to occupations.''

''This time because the conference was so important to us and to our history as a people who suffered from anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, we have gone beyond, to specific language,'' he said.

Several human rights groups argued tonight that the United States should have stayed to improve the language about Israel and to show solidarity with the many suffering people in the world.

''We're very troubled by the whole Zionism as racism formulation as well, but we think our responsibility is to stay and have the conversation,'' said Karen K. Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. ''You certainly don't build your moral standing in the world by running away.''

And the South African government warned that by leaving, the United States might give the impression that it was ducking tough issues, like race relations within its own borders.

''It will be unfortunate if a perception were to develop that the U.S.A.'s withdrawal from the conference is merely a red herring demonstrating an unwillingness to confront the real issues posed by racism in the U.S.A. and globally,'' the South African government said in a statement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/world/racism-walkout-overview-us-israelis-quit-racism-talks-over-denunciation.html

The Weekend Essay

In the Shadow of the Holocaust

How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.

By Masha Gessen

December 9, 2023

Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”

Podcast: The Political Scene

Masha Gessen talks with Tyler Foggatt.

Among the few spaces where memory representation is not set in apparent permanence are a couple of the galleries in the new building of the Jewish Museum, which was completed in 1999. When I visited in early November, a gallery on the ground floor was showing a video installation called “Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres.” The video was set in Kibbutz Be’eri, the community where, on October 7th, Hamas killed more than ninety people—almost one in ten residents—during its attack on Israel, which ultimately claimed more than twelve hundred lives. In the video, Be’eri residents take turns reciting the lines of a poem by one of the community’s members, the poet Anadad Eldan: “. . . from the swamp between the ribs / she surfaced who had submerged in you / and you are constrained not shouting / hunting for the forms that scamper outside.” The video, by the Berlin-based Israeli artists Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, was completed nine years ago. It begins with an aerial view of the area, the Gaza Strip visible, then slowly zooms in on the houses of the kibbutz, some of which looked like bunkers. I am not sure what the artists and the poet had initially meant to convey; now the installation looked like a work of mourning for Be’eri. (Eldan, who is nearly a hundred years old, survived the Hamas attack.)

Down the hallway was one of the spaces that the architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the museum, called “voids”—shafts of air that pierce the building, symbolizing the absence of Jews in Germany through generations. There, an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled “Fallen Leaves,” consists of more than ten thousand rounds of iron with eyes and mouths cut into them, like casts of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you walk on the faces, they clank, like shackles, or like the bolt handle of a rifle. Kadishman dedicated the work to victims of the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the current conflict. But, after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble.

Metal faces fill the floor of the “Fallen Leaves” exhibition room at the Jewish Museum, in Berlin.Photograph from Shutterstock

On November 9th, to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the phrase “Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt!”—“Never Again Is Now!”—was projected in white and blue on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. That day, the Bundestag was considering a proposal titled “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany,” which contained more than fifty measures intended to combat antisemitism in Germany, including deporting immigrants who commit antisemitic crimes; stepping up activities directed against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement; supporting Jewish artists “whose work is critical of antisemitism”; implementing a particular definition of antisemitism in funding and policing decisions; and beefing up coöperation between the German and the Israeli armed forces. In earlier remarks, the German Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of the Green Party, said that Muslims in Germany should “clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance.”

Germany has long regulated the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered and discussed. In 2008, when then Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before the Knesset, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, she emphasized Germany’s special responsibility not only for preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a unique historical atrocity but also for the security of Israel. This, she went on, was part of Germany’s Staatsräson—the reason for the existence of the state. The sentiment has since been repeated in Germany seemingly every time the topic of Israel, Jews, or antisemitism arises, including in Habeck’s remarks. “The phrase ‘Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson’ has never been an empty phrase,” he said. “And it must not become one.”

At the same time, an obscure yet strangely consequential debate on what constitutes antisemitism has taken place. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.

In 2020, a group of academics proposed an alternative definition of antisemitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration. It defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)” and provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel statements and actions from antisemitic ones. But although some of the preëminent scholars of the Holocaust participated in drafting the declaration, it has barely made a dent in the growing influence of the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2021, the European Commission published a handbook “for the practical use” of the I.H.R.A. definition, which recommended, among other things, using the definition in training law-enforcement officers to recognize hate crimes, and creating the position of state attorney, or coördinator or commissioner for antisemitism.

Germany had already implemented this particular recommendation. In 2018, the country created the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, a vast bureaucracy that includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts. Since then, Germany has reported an almost uninterrupted rise in the number of antisemitic incidents: more than two thousand in 2019, more than three thousand in 2021, and, according to one monitoring group, a shocking nine hundred and ninety-four incidents in the month following the Hamas attack. But the statistics mix what Germans call Israelbezogener Antisemitismus—Israel-related antisemitism, such as instances of criticism of Israeli government policies—with violent attacks, such as an attempted shooting at a synagogue, in Halle, in 2019, which killed two bystanders; shots fired at a former rabbi’s house, in Essen, in 2022; and two Molotov cocktails thrown at a Berlin synagogue this fall. The number of incidents involving violence has, in fact, remained relatively steady, and has not increased following the Hamas attack.

There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the B.D.S. movement, as was the South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.

In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.

The B.D.S. movement, which is inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid, seeks to use economic pressure to secure equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, end the occupation, and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many people find the B.D.S. movement problematic because it does not affirm the right of the Israeli state to exist—and, indeed, some B.D.S. supporters envision a total undoing of the Zionist project. Still, one could argue that associating a nonviolent boycott movement, whose supporters have explicitly positioned it as an alternative to armed struggle, with the Holocaust is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German memory policy, because B.D.S. is directed against Jews—although many of the movement’s supporters are also Jewish—it is antisemitic. One could also argue that the inherent conflation of Jews with the state of Israel is antisemitic, even that it meets the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism. And, given the AfD’s involvement and the pattern of the resolution being used largely against Jews and people of color, one might think that this argument would gain traction. One would be wrong.

The German Basic Law, unlike the U.S. Constitution but like the constitutions of many other European countries, has not been interpreted to provide an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech. It does, however, promise freedom of expression not only in the press but in the arts and sciences, research, and teaching. It’s possible that, if the B.D.S. resolution became law, it would be deemed unconstitutional. But it has not been tested in this way. Part of what has made the resolution peculiarly powerful is the German state’s customary generosity: almost all museums, exhibits, conferences, festivals, and other cultural events receive funding from the federal, state, or local government. “It has created a McCarthyist environment,” Candice Breitz, the artist, told me. “Whenever we want to invite someone, they”—meaning whatever government agency may be funding an event—“Google their name with ‘B.D.S.,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘apartheid.’ ”

A couple of years ago, Breitz, whose art deals with issues of race and identity, and Michael Rothberg, who holds a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory, called “We Need to Talk.” After months of preparations, they had their state funding pulled, likely because the program included a panel connecting Auschwitz and the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people carried out between 1904 and 1908 by German colonizers in what is now Namibia. “Some of the techniques of the Shoah were developed then,” Breitz said. “But you are not allowed to speak about German colonialism and the Shoah in the same breath because it is a ‘levelling.’ ”

The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.” In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had “gone haywire.”

Germany’s anti-B.D.S. resolution, for example, has had a distinct chilling effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen took back a ten-thousand-euro prize it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; the city of Dortmund and the jury for the fifteen-thousand-euro Nelly Sachs Prize similarly rescinded the honor that they had bestowed on the British-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe had his invitation to a major festival questioned after the federal antisemitism commissioner accused him of supporting B.D.S. and “relativizing the Holocaust.” (Mbembe has said that he is not connected with the boycott movement; the festival itself was cancelled because of COVID.) The director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of supporting B.D.S.—he did not, in fact, support the boycott movement, but the museum had posted a link, on Twitter, to a newspaper article that included criticism of the resolution. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu had also asked Merkel to cut the museum’s funding because, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s opinion, its exhibition on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s B.D.S. resolution may be unique in its impact but not in its content: a majority of U.S. states now have laws on the books that equate the boycott with antisemitism and withhold state funding from people and institutions that support it.)

After the “We Need to Talk” symposium was cancelled, Breitz and Rothberg regrouped and came up with a proposal for a symposium called “We Still Need to Talk.” The list of speakers was squeaky clean. A government entity vetted everyone and agreed to fund the gathering. It was scheduled for early December. Then Hamas attacked Israel. “We knew that after that every German politician would see it as extremely risky to be connected with an event that had Palestinian speakers or the word ‘apartheid,’ ” Breitz said. On October 17th, Breitz learned that funding had been pulled. Meanwhile, all over Germany, police were cracking down on demonstrations that call for a ceasefire in Gaza or manifest support for Palestinians. Instead of a symposium, Breitz and several others organized a protest. They called it “We Still Still Still Still Need to Talk.” About an hour into the gathering, police quietly cut through the crowd to confiscate a cardboard poster that read “From the River to the Sea, We Demand Equality.” The person who had brought the poster was a Jewish Israeli woman.

The “Fulfilling Historical Responsibility” proposal has since languished in committee. Still, the performative battle against antisemitism kept ramping up. In November, the planning of Documenta, one of the art world’s most important shows, was thrown into disarray after the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung dug up a petition that a member of the artistic organizing committee, Ranjit Hoskote, had signed in 2019. The petition, written to protest a planned event on Zionism and Hindutva in Hoskote’s home town of Mumbai, denounced Zionism as “a racist ideology calling for a settler-colonial, apartheid state where non-Jews have unequal rights, and in practice, has been premised on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it under the heading “Antisemitism.” Hoskote resigned and the rest of the committee followed suit. A week later, Breitz read in a newspaper that a museum in Saarland had cancelled an exhibit of hers, which had been planned for 2024, “in view of the media coverage about the artist in connection with her controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel.”

This November, I left Berlin to travel to Kyiv, traversing, by train, Poland and then Ukraine. This is as good a place as any to say a few things about my relationship to the Jewish history of these lands. Many American Jews go to Poland to visit what little, if anything, is left of the old Jewish quarters, to eat food reconstructed according to recipes left by long-extinguished families, and to go on tours of Jewish history, Jewish ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps. I am closer to this history. I grew up in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-seventies, in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust, because only a part of my family had survived it and because Soviet censors suppressed any public mention of it. When, around the age of nine, I learned that some Nazi war criminals were still on the loose, I stopped sleeping. I imagined one of them climbing in through our fifth-floor balcony to snatch me.

During summers, our cousin Anna and her sons would visit from Warsaw. Her parents had decided to kill themselves after the Warsaw Ghetto burned down. Anna’s father threw himself in front of a train. Anna’s mother tied the three-year-old Anna to her waist with a shawl and jumped into a river. They were plucked out of the water by a Polish man, and survived the war by hiding in the countryside. I knew the story, but I wasn’t allowed to mention it. Anna was an adult when she learned that she was a Holocaust survivor, and she waited to tell her own kids, who were around my age. The first time I went to Poland, in the nineteen-nineties, was to research the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent nearly three years in the Białystok Ghetto before being killed in Majdanek.

The Holocaust memory wars in Poland have run in parallel with Germany’s. The ideas being battled out in the two countries are different, but one consistent feature is the involvement of right-wing politicians in conjunction with the state of Israel. As in Germany, the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands saw ambitious memorialization efforts, both national and local, that broke through the silence of the Soviet years. Poles built museums and monuments that commemorated the Jews killed in the Holocaust—which claimed half of its victims in Nazi-occupied Poland—and the Jewish culture that was lost with them. Then the backlash came. It coincided with the rise to power of the right-wing, illiberal Law and Justice Party, in 2015. Poles now wanted a version of history in which they were victims of the Nazi occupation alongside the Jews, whom they tried to protect from the Nazis.

This was not true: instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as in the case of my cousin Anna, were exceedingly rare, while the opposite—entire communities or structures of the pre-occupation Polish state, such as the police or city offices, carrying out the mass murder of Jews—was common. But historians who studied the Poles’ role in the Holocaust came under attack. The Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross was interrogated and threatened with prosecution for writing that Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. The Polish authorities hounded him even after he retired. The government squeezed Dariusz Stola, the head of POLIN, Warsaw’s innovative museum of Polish Jewish history, out of his post. The historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking were dragged into court for writing that the mayor of a Polish village had been a collaborator in the Holocaust.

When I wrote about Grabowski and Engleking’s case, I received some of the scariest death threats of my life. (I’ve been sent a lot of death threats; most are forgettable.) One, sent to a work e-mail address, read, “If you keep writing lies about Poland and the Poles, I will deliver these bullets to your body. See the attachment! Five of them in every kneecap, so you won’t walk again. But if you continue to spread your Jewish hatred, I will deliver next 5 bullets in your pussy. The third step you won’t notice. But don’t worry, I’m not visiting you next week or eight weeks, I’ll be back when you forget this e-mail, maybe in 5 years. You’re on my list. . . .” The attachment was a picture of two shiny bullets in the palm of a hand. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, headed by a government appointee, tweeted a condemnation of my article, as did the account of the World Jewish Congress. A few months later, a speaking invitation to a university fell through because, the university told my speaking agent, it had emerged that I might be an antisemite.

Throughout the Polish Holocaust-memory wars, Israel maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations.” The statement asserted, falsely, that “structures of the Polish underground state supervised by the Polish government-in-exile created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.” Netanyahu was building alliances with the illiberal governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying in the European Union. For this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.

Each year, tens of thousands of Israeli teen-agers travel to the Auschwitz museum before graduating from high school (though last year the trips were called off over security issues and the Polish government’s growing insistence that Poles’ involvement in the Holocaust be written out of history). It is a powerful, identity-forming trip that comes just a year or two before young Israelis join the military. Noam Chayut, a founder of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group in Israel, has written of his own high-school trip, which took place in the late nineteen-nineties, “Now, in Poland, as a high-school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.”

Chayut took this feeling into the I.D.F., which posted him to the occupied West Bank. One day he was putting up property-confiscation notices. A group of children was playing nearby. Chayut flashed what he considered a kind and non-threatening smile at a little girl. The rest of the children scampered off, but the girl froze, terrified, until she, too, ran away. Later, when Chayut published a book about the transformation this encounter precipitated, he wrote that he wasn’t sure why it was this girl: “After all, there was also the shackled kid in the Jeep and the girl whose family home we had broken into late at night to remove her mother and aunt. And there were plenty of children, hundreds of them, screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and their things. And there was the child from Jenin whose wall we blasted with an explosive charge that blew a hole just a few centimeters from his head. Miraculously, he was uninjured, but I’m sure his hearing and his mind were badly impaired.” But in the eyes of that girl, on that day, Chayut saw a reflection of annihilatory evil, the kind that he had been taught existed, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only where the Nazis ruled. Chayut called his book “The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust.”

I took the train from the Polish border to Kyiv. Nearly thirty-four thousand Jews were shot at Babyn Yar, a giant ravine on the outskirts of the city, in just thirty-six hours in September, 1941. Tens of thousands more people died there before the war was over. This was what is now known as the Holocaust by bullets. Many of the countries in which these massacres took place—the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine—were re-colonized by the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Dissidents and Jewish cultural activists risked their freedom to maintain a memory of these tragedies, to collect testimony and names, and, where possible, to clean up and protect the sites themselves. After the fall of the Soviet Union, memorialization projects accompanied efforts to join the European Union. “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “Postwar.”

In the Rumbula forest, outside of Riga, for example, where some twenty-five thousand Jews were murdered in 1941, a memorial was unveiled in 2002, two years before Latvia was admitted to the E.U. A serious effort to commemorate Babyn Yar coalesced after the 2014 revolution that set Ukraine on an aspirational path to the E.U. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, several smaller structures had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the invasion, construction halted. One week into the full-scale war, a Russian missile hit directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, some of the people associated with the project have reconstituted themselves as a team of war-crimes investigators.

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has waged an earnest campaign to win Israeli support for Ukraine. In March, 2022, he delivered a speech to the Knesset, in which he didn’t stress his own Jewish heritage but focussed on the inextricable historical connection between Jews and Ukrainians. He drew unambiguous parallels between the Putin regime and the Nazi Party. He even claimed that eighty years ago Ukrainians rescued Jews. (As with Poland, any claim that such aid was widespread is false.) But what worked for the right-wing government of Poland did not work for the pro-Europe President of Ukraine. Israel has not given Ukraine the help it has begged for in its war against Russia, a country that openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Still, both before and after the October 7th attack, the phrase I heard in Ukraine possibly more than any other was “We need to be like Israel.” Politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary Ukrainians identify with the story Israel tells about itself, that of a tiny but mighty island of democracy standing strong against enemies who surround it. Some Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals have argued that Ukraine, which is fighting an anti-colonial war against an occupying power, should see its reflection in Palestine, not Israel. These voices are marginal and most often belong to young Ukrainians who are studying or have studied abroad. Following the Hamas attack, Zelensky wanted to rush to Israel as a show of support and unity between Israel and Ukraine. Israeli authorities seem to have other ideas—the visit has not happened.

While Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion resembles Nazi Germany’s genocidal aggression, Moscow has built a propaganda universe around portraying Zelensky’s government, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis. The Second World War is the central event of Russia’s historical myth. During Vladimir Putin’s reign, as the last of the people who lived through the war have been dying, commemorative events have turned into carnivals that celebrate Russian victimhood. The U.S.S.R. lost at least twenty-seven million people in that war, a disproportionate number of them Ukrainians. The Soviet Union and Russia have fought in wars almost continuously since 1945, but the word “war” is still synonymous with the Second World War and the word “enemy” is used interchangeably with “fascist” and “Nazi.” This made it that much easier for Putin, in declaring a new war, to brand Ukrainians as Nazis.

Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?

In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when its troops were occupying the western suburbs of Kyiv, the director of Kyiv’s museum of the Second World War, Yurii Savchuk, was living at the museum and rethinking the core exhibit. One day after the Ukrainian military drove the Russians out of the Kyiv region, he met with the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and got permission to start collecting artifacts. Savchuk and his staff went to Bucha, Irpin, and other towns and cities that had just been “deoccupied,” as Ukrainians have taken to saying, and interviewed people who had not yet told their stories. “This was before the exhumations and the reburials,” Savchuk told me. “We saw the true face of war, with all its emotions. The fear, the terror, was in the atmosphere, and we absorbed it with the air.”

In May, 2022, the museum opened a new exhibit, titled “Ukraine – Crucifixion.” It begins with a display of Russian soldiers’ boots, which Savchuk’s team had collected. It’s an odd reversal: both the Auschwitz museum and the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., have displayed hundreds or thousands of shoes that belonged to victims of the Holocaust. They convey the scale of loss, even as they show only a tiny fraction of it. The display in Kyiv shows the scale of the menace. The boots are arranged on the floor of the museum in the pattern of a five-pointed star, the symbol of the Red Army that has become as sinister in Ukraine as the swastika. In September, Kyiv removed five-pointed stars from a monument to the Second World War in what used to be called Victory Square—it’s been renamed because the very word “Victory” connotes Russia’s celebration in what it still calls the Great Patriotic War. The city also changed the dates on the monument, from “1941-1945”—the years of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany—to “1939-1945.” Correcting memory one monument at a time.

In 1954, an Israeli court heard a libel case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. A decade earlier, when Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to implement the mass murder of its Jews, Kastner, as a leader of the Jewish community, entered into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann himself. Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungary’s Jews with ten thousand trucks. When this failed, he negotiated to save sixteen hundred and eighty-five people by transporting them by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains to death camps. A Hungarian Jewish survivor had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Germans. Kastner sued for libel and, in effect, found himself on trial. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.”

The charge of collaboration against Kastner rested on the allegation that he had failed to tell people that they were going to their deaths. His accusers argued that, had he warned the deportees, they would have rebelled, not gone to the death camps like sheep to slaughter. The trial has been read as the beginning of a discursive standoff in which the Israeli right argues for preëmptive violence and sees the left as willfully defenseless. By the time of the trial, Kastner was a left-wing politician; his accuser was a right-wing activist.

Seven years later, the judge who had presided over the Kastner libel trial was one of the three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was the devil himself. The prosecution argued that Eichmann represented but one iteration of the eternal threat to the Jews. The trial helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively. Arendt, reporting on the trial, would have none of this. Her phrase “the banality of evil” elicited perhaps the original accusations, levelled against a Jew, of trivializing the Holocaust. She wasn’t. But she saw that Eichmann was no devil, that perhaps the devil didn’t exist. She had reasoned that there was no such thing as radical evil, that evil was always ordinary even when it was extreme—something “born in the gutter,” as she put it later, something of “utter shallowness.”

Arendt also took issue with the prosecution’s story that Jews were the victims of, as she put it, “a historical principle stretching from Pharaoh to Haman—the victim of a metaphysical principle.” This story, rooted in the Biblical legend of Amalek, a people of the Negev Desert who repeatedly fought the ancient Israelites, holds that every generation of Jews faces its own Amalek. I learned this story as a teen-ager; it was the first Torah lesson I ever received, taught by a rabbi who gathered the kids in a suburb of Rome where Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union lived while waiting for their papers to enter the United States, Canada, or Australia. In this story, as told by the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust is a predetermined event, part of Jewish history—and only Jewish history. The Jews, in this version, always have a well-justified fear of annihilation. Indeed, they can survive only if they act as though annihilation were imminent.

When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.

Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.

From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away. In 1948, the year the state was created, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the dire conditions—“old people so weak they were on the verge of death”; “a boy with two paralyzed legs”; “another boy whose hands were severed”—in which Palestinians, mostly women and children, departed the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “One woman carried her child in one arm and with the other hand she held her elderly mother. The latter couldn’t keep up the pace, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but the daughter did not consent. Finally the old lady collapsed onto the road and couldn’t move. The daughter pulled out her hair … lest she not make it on time. And worse than this was the association to Jewish mothers and grandmothers who lagged this way on the roads under the crop of murderers.” The journalist caught himself. “There is obviously no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “This fate—they brought upon themselves.”

Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. It was the first academic study of Stepan Bandera to be published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; dozens of monuments to him have appeared since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He ended up in Germany after the Second World War, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K.G.B. agent, in 1959. Bandera was also a committed fascist, an ideologue who wanted to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about twelve hundred copies. (Many bookstores have refused to carry it.) Russia makes gleeful use of Ukraine’s Bandera cult as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Ukrainians mostly respond by whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is ever so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that someone could have been the enemy of your enemy and yet not a benevolent force. A victim and also a perpetrator. Or vice versa. ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described what Jan Tomasz Gross wrote. It also misstated when Anna’s parents decided to kill themselves and Anna’s age at the time of those events.

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Commentary: Anti-Semitic "Semantic Infiltration" subverting Democracy, Judaism, and Freedoms

by TULPPP

College Campus: Where your children are expected to learn and experience American Freedoms and values. 

Terrorist (Zionist) Strategy--Controlling our Language to Control our Foreign & Domesic Policy: Insinuating by "semantic infiltration" a malicious definition of Anti-Semitism defining as Anti-Semitic all dissent and all forms of resistance towards the terrorist-Holocaustic-criminal regime led by Putin's Puny Mini-Bibi. According to professorial Senator Patrick Moynihan of New York, the term "semantic infiltration" was coined by Dr. Fred Charles Ikle (formerly a professor of political science at MIT, followed by appointment as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency) in a paper on American difficulties in negotiating with communist countries (published by the Rand Corporation), where Ikle pointed to the process whereby 

we come to adopt the language of our adversaries in describing political reality. 

Ikle gave to this process the intriguing term "semantic infiltration."  Quoting Ikle directly, He said: 

Paradoxically, despite the fact that the State Department and other government agencies bestow so much care on the vast verbal output of Communist governments. we have been careless in adopting the language of our opponents and their definitions of conflict issues in many cases where this was clearly to our disadvantage.

Semantic infiltration is the clear and undeniable objective of the persistent, pathological Zionist campaign against Reality itself epitomized by the attempt to force-feed resisters with implementation of the discredited, malicious IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism.

Once the Zionist legally bind us to their dystopian alternative reality, they will control our foreign policy by knee-capping our ability to agree upon a set of facts, which is necessary for both acquiring knowledge and for establishing a commonly agreed upon set of facts necessary for making policy decisions. If we can't agree about the existence of a pothole, or the existence of non-person Palestinians, we can neither organize municipal resources to repair our streets nor address the gross violations of Israel--which by definition is Anti-Semitic to speak of.  Thus, like a dufus dive bar bouncer usless for anything but fear-factor presence, the hyper-power United States will be confined to the roles of spectator of war crimes and perpetrator of war crimes as the chief military and financial sponsor of Israel's collective madness and barbarism. 

Zionist engaged in abuse of our laws and judicial resources (aka lawfare) are usurpers and terrorists seeking to impose their evil totalitarian Jewish-Supremacist Sharia-Zionist conformism on Americans--especially Jewish young peopl. The objective is Totalitarian non-thinking compliance among individuals now melted into 'masses' of drones unable to defend their freedoms and liberties against overwhelming forces of state media performing classic Soviet propaganda functions that amplify Stasi-styled Big Lies, Sloganeering, DoubleSpeak, Veils of Verbiage, Misrepresentations, Scapegoating, and Demonizing of refuseniks (dissenters and speakers of Truth). The enemy is subverting our own democratic institutions by attempting to legitimize a coup'd etat on campus with a patina of positivist legal legitimacy through implementation of a fraudulent definition of Anti-Semitism granting them exclusive rights to persecute, sanction, and expel anyone daring to speak of Israel's war crimes, genocide, and Apartheid by forcing us not to speak about our values and our American's Creed. 

Instead they seek to force our surrender of our independence, our free will, our belief in Truths we hold self-evident such as our belief that all men and women are created equal, in the the eyes of our Creator, and as matter affirmed collectively by generations of Americans about the best way for our self-governance. As one nation among many nations, we have decided as a matter of declaration and by binding treaty obligation to enshrine our belief that all men and women are entitled to equality under the rule of law. 

Word Up, Here's this year's Holocaust Ransom note from  God's Chosen Victims!

Because Zionists are Jews, and Jews are generally clever wordsmiths, Zionists instead of taking up arms against America have chosen to take up words instead for waging verbal abuse and domestic violence against the American people. Thus semantic manipulation and deception is high-tech weaponry in the Zionist arsenal. Not surprisingly, Zionists have done a definitional extension of their Holocaust racketeering--their exclusive right to be top-floor, first-class, seniority status as victims in perpetuity, which according to their reasoning entitles them to annual U.S. taxpayer gift of $3 Billion in unrestricted funds used for violating human rights; building 4-meter-high 'security walls' around Palestinian cities; building illegal settlements prohibited by international law; and acting against U.S. national interests with impunity because of God's chosen people are blameless for eternity. 

Finally, A disagreeable definition for Anti-Semitism

The latest bit of Zionist wordsmithing is promoted by a Zionist-lobbying group serving as a kind of umbrella for an international ring of Holocaust racketeers. The "International Holocaust Rembrance Alliance" definition of Anti-Semitism is nothing but classic Soviet doublespeak where their definition focuses on so-called "New Anti-Semitism," which is conveniently defined as any dissent or criticism of the Israel's Apartheid Occupation and egegious human rights violations. Israeli spokespersons pretend that it is normal for Western democracies to authorize military personnel to maim and murder children; or build 4-meter high walls for imprisoning residents of municipalities; or sponsoring pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank. If it were not for guilt about the Holocaust, which the racketeering organizations remind us of, Israel might have been nuked by now. Seriously, were it not for their Holocaust racketeering, would anybody be sympathetic about their plight? Their apparent genetic disposition to engage in genocidal campaigns and uncontrollable warmongering? How would average Americans respond to the goading of our goverment by a foreign adversary?/ally? to do their bidding by having the USA engage in fighting their expensive, stupid, unconscionable wars? 

Zionists trivialize the Holocaust--and therefore are by Definition Anti-Semitic.

This is an inherently Anti-Semitic strategy trivializing the Holocaust by obsence and absurd comparisons of truth-telling about Zionism being an 19th-century European colonial-settler ideology manifesting features of not merely equal to plain fascism but tantamount to Nazism which is fascism plus the ideological components  of a God-ordained master race, liberated from moral constraints of Western civilization by Yahweh's double-standard for Israelis who are exempt from the Golden Rule--treat thy neighbors as thou wish to be treated--or any Mosaic commandments about coveting what belongs to others; murdering, stealing, perpetual warmongering, and truly blasphemous counterfeit claims of Anti-Semitism that dishonor grandparents and their generation who lost millions--not a thousand--SIX million fellow Europeans who shared Jewish identity. Millions of non-Jewish people were also murdered by the Nazi regime including nearly THREE million Soviet prisoners of war, and TWO million non-Jewish ethnic Poles.

Problem: Zionists serving as agents of a foreign fascist regime are waging war against American Freedoms and Values. Their objective is to literatlly stifle Thinking to achieve a Totalitarian takeover. By Definition, the Banality of Evil is Non-Thinking, Just Doing. Zionists are exerting an outsized influence in transforming the fourth estate--the free press--into their non-state actor terrorist propaganda network performing classic Soviet propaganda functions for amplifying Stasi-styled Big Lies, Bold Assertions, and Slogans while dictatorially defining our reality through deployment of DoubleSpeak, Veils of Verbiage, Misrepresentations, Scapegoating, and Demonizing of refuseniks (dissenters and speakers of Truth). The Zionist enemy from within is subverting our own democratic institutions by attempting to legitimize a coup'd etat on campus with a patina of positivist legal legitimacy provided by a legally-binding implementation of their malicious definition of Anti-Semitism, which has the singular purpose of stifling all perceived anti-Nazi, anti-terrorist criticism of Israel. Adoption of their Definition of reality has been shown to be hazardous to democratic insitutions and a linchpin of Zionist efforts to persecute, sanction, and expel any discussion of the terrorist Israeli regime's perpetration of war crimes, genocide, and Apartheid! Their Definition of reality is incompatible with American principles of equality, rule of law, and protecton of constitutional freedoms and liberties.  

Zionists seek our surrender of our independence, our free will, our belief in Truths we hold self-evident such as our belief that all men and women are created equal, in the the eyes of our Creator, and as matter affirmed collectively by generations of Americans about the best way for our self-governance. As one nation among many nations, we have decided as a matter of declaration and by binding treaty obligation to enshrine our belief that all men and women are entitled to equality under the rule of law. 

Israel is a rogue state; a terrorist state; a dreadful neighbor; an annoyance to its American Ally, and now a Usurper of my American rights; my independence; my nation. I refuse to surrender my liberties to some totalitarian terrorists hijacking Judaism from the vast majority of freedom-loving Jews in Israel, America, and around the world. I refuse to endorse a warmonging pathetic thug acting out its inferiority complex on a world stage like a vaudeville actor making a minstrel performance as the stereo-typical evil-global-conspiracy Jew but plainly relying on the protection provided by the strongman in plain sight, namely the self-destructivesuperpower and its so-called Western alliance who appear hellbent on destroying the world order agreed upon after the loss of 150 million souls between two world wars. Do we NOT know who are, and what our grandparents fought for and suffered through so that we may NEVER again succumb to tyranny, to grave crimes against humanity.

Our rules reject moral relativism. Our laws--and the laws of Moses--reject What-aboutism; Nazism in all of its forms; totalitarianism in all of its manifestations; territorial imperialism; Apartheid aggression against Christians and Muslims residing in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, who if born today would be born into hellish ghetto prison with 4-meter (yard) high concrete walls imprisoning Mary and Joseph who would while trying to escape to Nazareth with baby Jesus be either in the sites snipers perced in guard towers or shot dead at security gates designed for preventing escape of any prisoners, including baby Jesus no matter if his untimely death by aerial bombardment or sniper fire resulted in eternal damnation for all mankind. Let's say a 10-year old Jesus somehow survived biblical King Herod's killing of all children below the age of two for the sake of killing any potential political rival--something Bibi Netanyahu would surely do just as he's killing off his own hostages today. What would happen when rebellious Jesus places a Palestinian flag on the security fence? He'd be shot dead by an IDF sniper. Business as usual in King Bibi's terrorist regime. 

Israel's terrorist regime pisses on America's Greatest Generation

Our rules condemn as war crimes killing of children. Our rules condemn as genocide the "obliteration: of civilians being used as human shields. Our patriotic duty renounces any relations with terrorist who insist on their right to piss on the graves of the greatest generation of Americans who created the international-rules-based order held in contempt by some sanctimonious cowardly religious-nationalist fanatics whose arrogance, incompetence, and cruelty is the greatest catastrophe for all humanity in this new century and a colossal failure of the U.N. Security Council to safeguard collective security due the hypocrisy and double-standards of the so-called leader of the free world.  

AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION RESOLUTION RE Anti-Semitism [REJECTED/FAILED]

NoIHRA Letters, Against ABA Adoption of IHRA\

⏩Backgrounder on Weaponization of IHRA Definition to Chill Free Speech 

⏩NoIHRA# ACLU Letter in Opposition to Adoption of IHRA Definition

⏩NoIHRA# Other Opponents (Urging NoIHRA)

⏩Human Rights Watch Letter to Co-Sponsors of Proposed ABA Resolution 514 on Antisemitism

⏩NLG Issues Letter to Co-Sponsors of ABA Resolution 514 on Antisemitism

⏩40+ Civil and Human Rights Groups to ABA: Controversial IHRA Definition Deployed to Target Advocacy for Palestinian Rights Should Have No Part in Resolution on Antisemitism

The arguments by the PRO-IHRA camp

⏩PRO1 - Proposal: ABA  Resolution 514 (rejected)

⏩PRO2. ADL: About the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism

⏩PRO3 - Propaganda for Petition

⏩PRO4 - Petition for ABA to reconsider rejection of IHRA 

Resolution and ACLU Responses include below.

To see all letters from Contents list, Please view this RESEARCH PAGE LINK

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AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION

ADOPTED BY THE HOUSE OF DELEGATES FEBRUARY 6, 2023

RESOLUTION

RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments in the United States to condemn antisemitism;

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments in the United States to support legislation which combats and condemns antisemitism, such as H. Res. 1125 (May 18, 2022) and S.Res.252 (June 14, 2021);

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges the United States and all other United Nations member states to adopt legislation and to pursue policies and measures that condemn and eliminate antisemitism;

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association should take a leadership role in opposing antisemitism, both in the United States and around the world, and use its best efforts to:

1. Condemn all antisemitic attitudes and actions, whether intentionally discriminatory or that have the effect of being discriminatory;

2. Advocate for governments at all levels to take all reasonable steps to improve the physical security of Jewish institutions and organizations, including by using existing tools such as increasing funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program of the Department of Homeland Security, to keep at-risk houses of worship, schools, and community centers safer from antisemitic violence;

3. Encourage laws, policies and training that build the capacity of the legal community, government agencies and officials, law enforcement and the public at large to research, understand and counter antisemitism;

4. Encourage and collaborate with attorneys and other bar associations to advocate against antisemitism in the profession and the community;

5. Provide, and encourage other bar associations to provide, training and education, to give people the knowledge and tools necessary to identify, prevent, respond to, and remedy antisemitism, including by providing support to support victims of antisemitism; and

6. Call on social media platforms to institute stronger and more significant efforts to identify, measure and address online antisemitism;

FURTHER RESOLVED, That nothing in this resolution is intended to diminish or infringe upon any right protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution; and

FURTHER RESOLVED, That nothing in this resolution is intended to diminish or infringe upon any right detailed in Article 19 and Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Link to Resolution 514

ACLU Letter in Opposition to Adoption of IHRA Definition 

January 18, 2023

Dear Co-Sponsors of Proposed American Bar Association Resolution 514 on Antisemitism, 

We write to convey our strong objection to the reference to the “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism” in proposed ABA resolution 514 (Resolution 514). 

We urge you to remove all mentions of the IHRA definition from ABA Resolution 514.

With antisemitism surging in the United States and in countries around the globe, we agree with the co-sponsors of proposed Resolution 514 that the ABA – as a leading organization devoted to, among other things, justice and human rights – can and should be involved in fighting antisemitism. There are many constructive forms such involvement could take; embracing the IHRA definition of antisemitism is emphatically not among them

Ongoing efforts to codify the IHRA definition into law and policy, including at the ABA, are invariably framed as efforts to fight antisemitism. Yet, the clear objective behind the promotion of the IHRA definition is the suppression of non-violent protest, activism, and criticism of Israel and/or Zionism – a fact that is so well-documented as to be beyond reasonable dispute. 

• The IHRA definition has been instrumentalized, again and again, to delegitimize critics and criticism of Israel and its policies, and to suppress voices and activism in support for Palestinian rights. 

• The most common targets of IHRA-based attacks have been university students, professors, and grassroots organizers over their speech and activism on Israel/Palestine; IHRA has likewise been used to disparage (among others) human rights and civil rights organizations, humanitarian groups, and members of Congress for documenting or criticizing Israeli policies or speaking out about Palestinian rights.

Indeed, regardless of the original intent of its drafters, in practice the IHRA definition has been used consistently (and nearly exclusively) not to fight antisemitism, but rather to defend Israel and harm Palestinians – at the cost of undermining and dangerously chilling fundamental rights of free speech, freedom of assembly and protest, and academic freedom. Any embrace of the IHRA definition by the ABA would legitimize and encourage this undermining of core democratic rights. Equally, extending its own credibility to the IHRA definition would implicate the ABA in ongoing efforts to pressure states and the federal government to adopt and enforce the IHRA definition, and the violations of basic democratic rights that have been at the center of its application, both as a matter of policy and of law.

To be clear: while its champions present the IHRA definition as a “consensus” and “non- controversial” definition, nothing could be further from the truth. 

The IHRA definition has been challenged, vigorously, by hundreds of antisemitism experts, rabbis, and scholars of Jewish studies, Jewish history, and the Holocaust, by Palestinians who have borne the brunt of its application, as well as by experts on fighting racism and free speech. 

These experts – who include Kenneth Stern, the original lead drafter of the definition – have published hundreds of reports and articles articulating their concerns and objections. 

• They have given speeches at countless think tanks, universities, synagogues, and international forums.

• They have presented testimony before Congress, and even before the ABA in connection with this resolution. 

• Concern about either the misuse of, and/or the plain text of, the IHRA definition among Jewish scholars is so acute that it has given rise (so far) to two mainstream, independent projects aimed at developing alternative definitions.

Just as we believe the ABA should be involved in fighting antisemitism, we believe the ABA – consistent with its commitment to the rule of law, the legal process, holding governments accountable under law, human rights, and justice – has an important role to play in conveying concerns about Israel and its policies. With that in mind, we are concerned that the reference to the IHRA definition in the ABA resolution would undermine the ABA’s own ability to engage on key issues related to Palestinian rights, including in support of human rights defenders who are increasingly under attack.

For all of these reasons, we urge you to remove all mentions of the IHRA definition from proposed ABA Resolution 514.

Sincerely,

American Civil Liberties Union Americans for Peace Now 

Center for Constitutional Rights

Foundation for Middle East Peace 

Palestine Legal

Joined by: [LARGE LIST OF GROUPS] 

SEE LINK to ACLU Letter and co-sponsors

To see all letters from Contents list, Please view this RESEARCH PAGE LINK

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RELATED Matters of Defining Anti-Semitism

• Research Page: Alternative Nexus Definition for antisemitism created in opposition to Malicious IHRA definition. 

• Research Page: American Anti-semitic Charles Lindbergh-the template for IHRA activists who are true antisemites in action either due to malicious intent, brain-washing, or ignorance.. Just like American crypto-Nazi ‘America First’ spokesperson Charles Lindbergh, they make bogus claims about being censored, canceled, delegitimized by the elites and political opponents, and victimized by a deep-state conspiracy.Link to Lindbergh speeches from 1930. And 1940s.

Related

• Research Page. Declassified FBI & CIA files. U.S. history of ‘Secrecy, Censorship, and Suppression, and Reviews of Pat Moynihan’s book about Secrecy.

• Research Page. Know their Dirty Tricks and Treachory. 

  • CIA Memo on Propaganda techniques, 

  • Republican ‘Southern Strategy’ Techniques, 

  • The Finkelstein Formula, The Anti-Semitic Jews electing Fascists like Victor Orban, Bibi and Trump

Research Page. Reagan campaign commits Treason, Delays Release of U.S. Hostages 

In TULPPP words...

Is Zionism Evil? YES 

PERSONAL NOTE: To talk about Zionism means talking about 'the other' that Zionism does not acknowledge as having the right to exist, or as having any historical ties to the land preceding the aliyah's (great migrations) beginning in the 1880s from Europe to Palestine.In a nutshell, I don't know any Palestinians. Rarely do I meet any. In contrast, I am quite connected to American Jews, and wouldn't have it any other way. I am also "pro-Israel" but the governments of the last 25 years have been increasingly deplorable. For me, Israel must be a full-democracy and must end the Occupation and must have FULL-equality for all citizens like any normal Western-style nation state. 

I had been generally OK with Zionism previously--I personally did not realize I had double-digit Ashkenazi  Jewish DNA until I decided to StandwithUkraine before the war. When I met Ukrainians, many noticed I looked like a relative or acquaintance, who was invariable Jewish. Then the parents got their DNA tests back, and eventually told me the 'central europe' was actually Ashkenazi. I'm not surprised to be honest. Here on the west side, most Jews think I am Jewish, which I take as a compliment of course, and the more data I enter in those dating websites, the more I am filtered out for Jewish women. II considered Zionism as a kind of a nostalgia for most Jewish Americans--natural kinship with Israel--but Not something they'd Holocaust the Palestinians over. What has changed my view is hatred and capability for endorsing EVIL by a) far-right Jewish supremacist in the USA (which is a very vocal minority like Christian-fascist-anti-woman nationalist),  at least half of Israel, including people identified in so-called 'left' or progressive, and what I consider the majority of Israelis who are being gas-lit by Bibi.  The ideology of Zionism is OWNED by extremists in Israel. And its not 'nostalgia.' It's Nazism on steroids. Zionist Finance Minister Smotrich and National Security minister Ben-Gvir represent an  existential threat to Israel's existence, both as a a democratic state, or frankly as a literal place on the map.

What about Jews? We LOVE our fellow Jewish Americans. Don't Fck with Our Fellow Americans.

Fact. Israel was endorsed by European powers as a means to rid themselves of the problem of annoying Jews, When Britain et al gave a thumbs up to adios to the Jews in the 1917 Balfour agreement between Britain and itself, the goal was sayonara Jews who would be useful in securing a British 'entrepot' on the eastern Meditterrean 

Are Israelis 'just like' Americans? NO. NO. NO. 

Even though I have ZERO-Chinese DNA, I have more in common with the people of China than I do with Israelis because both I share the Chinese hatred of Bullying Racist Occupying white supremacists.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)Definition of Anti-Semitism claims that to be Anti-Apartheid = Anti-Semitic; to be Anti-Zionist = Anti-Semitism. To believe in equality under the law is Anti-Semitic. By definition, Zionism requires a master race chosen by God to reconstitute a mythical state from the sea to the Euphrates River that is presently inhabited by infidels--non-humans--who should be removed by any means necessary including force expulsion, military conquest (and expulsion), genocide, or prior to implementing the final solution, transferral into 'reservations' aka Ghettos aka concentration camps before bravely going where only Hitler has gone: Hardcore Holocausting! 

Were their Jewish collaborators helping HItler's Holocasting operation? Well it would seem so because the Israelis are incompetent in their self-defense despite $200 billion of hard-earned American taxpayer direct assistance; billions more in concessionary lending facilities, and tax-exempt fake charity to an apparent terrorist state; and a military backstop from the entire U.S. Government.

We as Americans and civilized people of the world REJECT this false equation.

Zionism is by definition Anti-American because Zionism makes the claim of a God who has chosen the imaginary descendants of ancient Hebrew tribes who had once settled in what we'll call "the Holy Land" t return from Europe where they and their ancestors have lived for thousands of years to become an entirely new people, called the Super-Nazi-Jew--not the nerdy Jew--not the weak Jew--not the blabbermouth argumentative hilarious Yiddish-speaking Jew, and not vaudeville Jew or ghetto-ass Jew, and absolutely NOT the worst kind of Jew in the whole wide world--the Jew that says No to moving to Israel and No to Zionism.  The most Jew of Jews is Bernie Saunders--he is a stereotypical post-war Roosevelt-New-Deal supporting Brooklyn Jew. He looks like a Jew. Talks like a Jews. Probably eats Junior's Cheesecake more than he would like to admit. He is a Jew's Jew--but not for Zionists, because he's not "hardcore" enough to be a Jew--so Bernie is excommunicated from the Jewish project and is spied upong by groups like the Anti-Defamation League whose primary mission is to squash any dissenting views. To call Zionists representative of all Jews is like calling the infamous Hitler political enforcers--the S.S. or Stasi, the most Nazi of the Nazi--the true representatives of the German people. 

To call Zionist Nazis even though they are not merely fascists, but are true Nazis is to commit an act of Anti-Semitism. But if the Zionist aren't Nazis, then the Nazis aren't Nazis, and maybe the Holocaust did not happen because you need the S.S. specifically to conduct the Holocaust but the only logical deduction one can make from the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism 

Zionism is a 19th-century ideology created by European Jews for European Jews with an objective of establish a Jewish homeland somewhere---anywhere--including in Kenya/Uganda, which had been proposed by Zionism-founder Theodore Herzl as a "temporary" docking station for those Pale of Settlement--the original home of the Jews that had fallen into Russian hands during three partitions in the last decade of the 1700s that entirely dissolve the former Polish-Lithuanian (Ukrainian) Commonwealth, where Jews had been invited to live free by commonwealth rulers since the 13th century. Now, the poor emancipated Jews and their fellow citizens of the commonwealth fell into the hands of the Tzar, who promptly eliminated their 'emancipation'  and allowed Jews to experience dreadful "pogroms" (literally meaning riots), which are basically spontaneous or sometimes quasi- or fully-state sponsored 'riots' geared towards using tools of vandalizing, pillaging, and plundering as well violent crimes causing bodily harm such as raping, beating, and murdering for the purposes expelling Jews. Basically same thing Zionist settlers are doing in the West Bank on daily basis with full support from this Jewish extremist government. Same thing that the Ku Klux Klan did. Same thing that this Israeli bombardment of civlians in Gaza is intended to do and same thing that Zionist paramilitaries during the 1947-1948 did in fact do as during an intentional "ethnic cleansing "program, resulting in far more innocent Palestinian civilians murder   

Israel is like America? Hell NO!

Israelis are NOT Americans, and they are NOT like Americans. But those people deserve the SAME protections under international law that the Palestinians or the UKrainians or the English or the Scottish or the Irish or French or Turkish or any other group is entitled by virtue of the International Declaration of Human Rights, and the international-rules based order. Life is sacred. Israelis, and their Zionist Supremacist allies in America undercut liberties and freedoms for all Americas. They are threat. Full Stop. Call it what you want, but recognize this the Truth.

I once considered Zionism to be an assortment of flavors and a 'harmles' acceptable sort-of nostalgic belief in a Jewish state tied to some ancient book of religious significance. But NOW, I understand "soft" Zionism does NOT exist in Israel--and I also understand at its core, the Zionist 19th-century ideology to be what it is: a racist, Anti-American, Apartheid Nazi movement that MUST be STOPPED. To kill children and women civilians but claim you area "victim" is as NAZI as hardcore NAZI can get!

Driving God into mad acts of Holocaustic Rage (a little humor, poking fun)

For every what-aboutism from these Israeli Nazis and their Nazi sympathizers, God will punish each individual-No collective punishment but individual punishment. God gave up on Hebrew Huckster Collective a long time ago after each of divine mental breakdown due to frustration with his chosen people resulted in his predictable act of collective Holocaust Hebrew destruction, but inevitably no improvement in chosen people performance. The Hebrews first demanded elevation to special designation as God's Chosen People, but that's not enough; they special favors and double standards for themselves alone, but that was not enough. They were given a a homeland and victories on the battlefield, but that was not enough. They were allowed to prosper, but they raised funds to build a temple in honor of their one true god, Yahweh, the pharisees only intended to create a monument to their own self-importance and that would be built with 50 percent--because the other 50 percent was embezzled by Shas Party leader Areyah Deri, and funneled into off-book accounts benefiting constructions union leaders, and everyone else on the pharisee patronage mill. As we  all know, the archeological record for ancient Hebrews is silent their contributions--other than a sacred footer where shabbily built temple probably fell apart with less effort than commercial bulldozer mowing down a fence on 7 October when Israel's backdoor was suspiciously wide open for an invasion as if somebody really wanted to end the protests threatening to topple their regime and plans for a coup d'etat.

No amount of God's graces could boost the integrity, character, or general performance of the wretched Hebrew tribe. The exhausted and depressed God recognized the error of his ways; the folly of picking favorite nations (as George Washington warned against); and the massive headache of dealing with ungrateful, blabbermouth, argumentative, incompetent, pathetic weaklings whose mission is to find a Sucker SUPERPOWER to save their pathetic, blasphemous, crooked regimes.  The two greatest political moments in world history for Judaism were the freedoms granted to Jews by the Polish-Lithuanian (Ukrainian) empire in the 1200s (13th-century) and the migration of Jews to the center of world Jewish culture to day--the United States of America, which would not be as exceptional and accomplished as we are today if we had not corrected our racist policies against Jews so that they may live however they want, wherever they want, believing or not believing, sleeping with whomever, for the benefit of all America and all humanity. Israel is no bigger in population than LA County, but it is a national disgrace wasting too much of America's resources. I don't often agree with a crypto-Nazi like Vivek Ramaswamy, and don't agree with his reasoning which is pure hatred of Jews, but I do agree is time to cut umbilical cord tying baby Israel to big America. Time for Israel to grow up and deal with consequences of its actions with no interference from the USA.