Jewish Dissent on Zionism

Doppelgangers Doubling

Naomi Klein devotes a few chapters and several passages to Jewish dissent on Israel, Zionism and charges of antisemiticism in Doppelganger, her cultural critique of Naomi Wolf and the Mirror World. Klein’s long form journalism about the paranoid conspiracy rabbit holes Wolf holed up in during the Plandemic is not investigative, in searching out facts contradicting or supporting selected conspiracies. Her unexamined opinions about the entire field, without selection from the spectrum of evidence or nonsense for each are the norm. More of a fascist bundling of conspiracies into one that ruled them all, anti-Semitism, (there’s still debate over how to spell it, even more on what it encompasses).

Wolf was driven out of her liberal, academic and media pastures when she called “genocide” on Israel’s relentless bombing of Gazans, back in their 2014 cyclical reprisal. This exclusive word is another redline, like comparing Israel’s actions with those of Hitler and Nazis, These universal metaphors are reserved for their enemies, like Saddam Hussein. Zionists are stingy about drawing parallels with their generational trauma. That might be anti-semitic by now. I have an old list, but it’s growing like slime mold.

Klein has not been cancelled by the left, even after she called genocide in a Washington D.C. protest, two weeks after Israel’s war on Gaza began again. She was dejewified by the right, though. “Naomi Klein told protesters gathered on Washington’s National Mall that Israel was ‘attempting genocide by making use of the Jewish fears of another genocide [against Jews]. We will not let our fears of antisemitism be manipulated in this way.’

“David Friedman, the conservative former US ambassador to Israel during Donald Trump’s presidency, tweeted- ‘Any American Jew attending this rally is not a Jew – yes I said it!’ He’s not the Pope, so it’s hardly a fatwa.

Both Naomis are halakh Jewish, of matrilineal and patrilineal descent, raised in diverging strands of modern Jewish culture, one in New Jersey, the other in Canada. Klein’s mother kept Kosher until she became pregnant with a Canadian radical from a communist family that believed religion is the opiate of the masses. A working class distraction, numbing them to injustices of life under capitalism that cleverly divides them along racial, national and religious fractures.

This was after Stalin and Mao had murdered, enslaved and starved millions of intellectuals, capitalist landowners, progressives, divergents and poor peasants. So idealized economic models. Once the people were educated, or reeducated.

Splitting their differences, little Naomi was enrolled in Hebrew Day School in Montreal from the latter 70’s through early 80’s. Trauma training dominated with Nazi genocide dogma “drummed into us like arithmetic tables. The numbers of dead, twisted forms of torture, gas chambers, cruelly closed borders. This was before immersive Holocaust museums, where visitors walk in cattle cars.”

The March of the Living Tours pays for hundreds of thousands of young Jews to tour Auschwitz, with the not so subliminal message, “this could be you- terrified imaginations filled in the rest.” Visitors to Israel are herded through Yad Veshem, where “nine chilling galleries of interactive historical displays present the Holocaust. It is definitely somewhere we recommend all visitors to Israel experience.”

Klein’s class learned songs and performed rituals in Hebrew and Yiddish. Like summer camp with really scary stories, but no s’mores. Being “taught we were trapped inside a holocaust Phoenix. Descendants of Holocaust survivors.” Against this terror, Israel was venerated for “fighting back against blood thirsty Arabs, dark Satans”, who’d lusted to kill Jews Since Time Immemorial. She donated her allowance to buy trees to plant in Israel, a point of pride, then.

It’s understandable that many Jewish Americans strongly identify with Israel after such indoctrination. Making it primary, provokes the Dual Loyalty antisemitic trope. So not criticizing Israel is antisemitic.

Klein provides a short history of European anti-semitism from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to Rothschild bankers and George Soros’ color revolutions, bundling them all into an international Jewish conspiracy to undermine Christian values and seize property. Like the communist vision she acknowledges is Jewish in origin.

Karl Marx was descended from rabbis on both sides, but not raised Jewish. Emma Goldman represented the anarchist left. Trotsky was Jewish, and portrayed as the devil, horns and all. At home, Klein learned “the left really is a Jewish conspiracy, whose attraction to communist and socialist ideology” is a lodestar for “my people-preternaturally concerned with tackling injustice in its many forms.” Those were the “flattering lefty stories” she grew up with.

She supports Wolf’s take on the recurring anti-Jewish trope, that from “revolutions to pandemics to terrorist attacks, it always seems to be our fault”, with the twist that “Jewish scapegoats are a buffer for elite power, tossed over when required in the socialism of fools.” Multiethnic workers are diverted from class consciousness, using “rootless Jewish devils pitted against rooted christian citizens.”

In opposition to Zionists’ claim that Jews will only be safe from anti-Semitic purges and prejudices by colonizing their ancestral homeland, the Russian Bund (hereness) movement insisted Jews belong where they live and work alongside non-Jewish in class solidarity.

They argued for abolishment of the pale of settlement— Jewish ghettos, for greater rights, increased justice against economic and legal unfairness. Bundists regularly debated Zionists, proclaiming that Jews would be free when everyone was free of the opium of the masses, not from militarized garrisons on occupied land in Palestine.

Zionism won that war, only to enter generational wars with the Semitic people they brutally colonized and subject to occupation now. Their unbridled bombing and starving of women and children is pushing one fourth of Americans into the Anti-Semitic camp, if Israel’s actions are the redline.

When a few dozen Jewish Zionist billionaires can direct our democracy’s foreign policy, it promotes the antisemitic trope of Dual Loyalty. Jewish billionaires are Anti-Semitic by definition. If they lead our leaders by the nose, following the smell of money and fear of punishment., where’s the Land of the Free?