I am concerned with two forms of criticism directed at Israel. Only one of them constitutes, for me, REAL antizionism. The other one is not true antizionism because it is not against Israel as an ethnostate. Hence, it is instead a form of ethno-nationalism with conspiratorial elements.
“Conspiratorial ethno-nationalism is a political worldview that treats the nation as the property of a specific cultural group and explains perceived loss of sovereignty through narratives of hidden out-group control.”
The position which constitutes REAL antizionism holds that ethnostates are inherently unjust and that Israel’s murderous behavior is an expression of its status as an ethnostate, and that by extension no ethnostates or other exceptionalist states should exist.
The other position, which is critical of Israel but NOT truly “anti-israel” or antizionist, is based on the presumed injustice of one ethnostate “meddling” in the affairs of another. I refer to this position as a conspiratorial ethno-nationalist critique of Israel, instead of an antizionist critique.
The ethno-nationalist critique exemplifies the “America First” position on Israel. While passing references to Israeli genocide are made to further cement the nature of the injustice, and/or as an insincere marker of social capital, the chief concern is that one ethnostate (Israel) is supposedly absorbing American resources that could go towards “helping our own people.” I.e., helping and building “our own” ethnostate.
Never mind that a lot of America Firsters are social conservatives who are against social spending in general (aside from that which directly benefits them, i.e. social security, veterans benefits, et cetera).
The ethno-nationalist position is, itself, inherently antisemitic in its effect, because it furthers the ideas of “dual loyalty,” of “Jewish interference” in our political and economic systems, of fear of people with Jewish names, of the “validity” of falsified “jewish” texts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and of the systematic genuflection by our elected officials to an agenda of “Jewish supremacy,” also know as the ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government) antisemitic conspiracy.
So, how does one separate antisemitic critiques of israel from legitimate ones?
The question is: does the critique center on Israel’s status as an ethnostate, and all the institutional dehumanization that involves and upon which it depends?
Examples of such dehumanization include land grabs, dispossesion, repression of indigenous or minority populations, American-style cultural exceptionalism (i.e. not being subject to the same rules as other countries), scholasticide, “cultural genocide” or the erasure of the existence of the repressed culture, ethnic cleansing up to and including actual genocide, and alliances with other ethnostates who commit similar transgressions.
Or, instead, does the critique center on Jewish hijacking influence over American politics, American politicians having “dual loyalty,” Jews being “predisposed” to organizing with one another to control communities and nation-states, infiltrating our economic and entertainment sectors and propagating a “globalist agenda,” or the like, up to and including overt or covert/hinted reliance on “blood libel” or other antisemitic conspiracies.
In one critique, you’ll see genuine critique of Israel for its crimes against humanity, for the illiberal nature of its society, and for the inevitability of such crimes and illiberalism based on its very foundation, i.e. that of a Jewish nationalist state.
The other critique is critical, not of Israel per se, but of “Jews” for absorbing American resources and “infiltrating” American institutions for the purpose of trying to do what only America should have the power to do: exploit and oppress its minorities, control and destabilize other nations, and spread exceptionalist rhetoric throughout the world, leading to more discrimination against its own people (Jews or Americans) because of it.
In other words, ethno-nationalist critiques of Israel hate it because Israel seeks to be as powerful, important, influential, and terroristic as the United States. And no foreign nation should ever be allowed to become that arrogant.
Moreover, imagine if Israel didn’t wield any influence over the United States and instead received their military aid from some other wealthy country. Would these America First “critics of Israel” still be anti-Israel? Or would they be fine with whatever Israel does to sustain and build itself, up to and including persecution of thousands of people?
As long as it doesn’t interfere with “THEIR” country.
If your answer is, “yes, I would be fine with it,” then you’re not REALLY against zionism; you’re against “Jewish influence” in American domestic and foreign policy.
And through the lens of America First, this policy should be used to serve AMERICAN interests only, perpetually establishing and reasserting American economic and military superiority throughout the world.
By that rationale, “foreign wars” that serve non-American nations are not “America First.” But acceptable wars enrich Americans (even if those Americans are trillionaire defense contractors) or “keep the world safe for democracy” by removing “dictators who were very bad guys” (when that badness usually involves degrees of non-compliance with American market supremacy, i.e. Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Hussein, et cetera. All of whom WERE pretty bad guys, but was that the reason they were removed? Because they were “bad”? Or because they were uncooperative? The question is not always easy to answer, but it must always be asked.)
This is the nature and logical outcome of America First as a worldview: support for an American ethnostate that exists at the expense of other nations.
Meanwhile, like many far-rightwingers have been, America First doesn’t have a problem with a Jewish state unto itself because it provides a place for Jews to go—Israel—so that they’re not in “your” country. Antisemites have long supported Zionism as a movement because it facilitates the transfer of Jews out of “their” ethnostates and into a separate, distant ethnostate of their own.
So, what bothers the antisemitic critic of Israel is not that Israel behaves like the ethnostate that it is; it’s that it influences that critic’s OWN ethnostate.
Which is unacceptable.
The Lie of America First and its reliance on Jewish Conspiracy
The idea of criticizing Israel on an “America first” basis is tied to an inability to accept that what Israel does, no matter how insane and murderous and genocidal, is, in fact, not *only* in service to Israel as a foreign entity, but also (if not chiefly) IN THE INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES, in service to the United states, is in some way dictated or directed by the United states, and is allowed to flourish and encouraged to expand by the United States.
In short, America benefits from funding an ethnostate.
America First as an ideology refuses to accept that the United States could ever be guilty of such a thing as not only sanctioning mass murder and genocide, but profiting from it.
America First attempts to “let America off the hook” for such genocidal violence, total flouting of international law, destabililzation of the region, et cetera, when these occurrences don’t JUST benefit Israel and “the Jews.”
(In fact, it could be said that these negatively affect the Jewish people at large by furthering antisemitism about Jewish conspiracies and nationalist violence. But ISRAEL benefits because MORE antisemitism among critics of Israel is Israel’s main propaganda mechanism (Hasbara) by which to justify its warlike posture and its very existence).
The United States benefits from the brutal and destructive actions of Israel on multiple levels, some hypothetical and some pragmatic.
First the hypothetical: indiscriminate murder of civilians illustrates just how much violence the United States will tolerate from its military ally, which the US could unleash, either personally or by proxie, on any target it chooses. In other words, Israeli mass murder has a deterrent effect on American enemies and an emboldening effect on American military allies.
The use of these uniquely violent and savage war methods are shared with the United States as test data, such that the US can use them themselves some day, in conflicts foreign or domestic.
By having its political will enacted by a third party—essentially a proxie force—the United States manages to avoid and deflect layers of acountability for its imperialist endeavors, and Israel is more than happy to take the blame. Why?
I referenced this phenomenon in my parenthetical above: by committing mass murder, the resulting waves of anti-Israel and anti-jewish sentiment that reverberate throughout the world are employed as means of discrediting critiques of Israel, as well as dividing and disrupting American society along ethnic/religious lines.
Onto the pragmatic benefits of Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Gaza specifically. The acquisition of land, such as Gaza itself, allows the United States to control greater volumes of land and wield accordingly greater influence, now asserting its unbelievably cynical “Board of Peace” as a counterweight to the EU or UN.
Secondly, a satellite government in the Middle East armed to the teeth and possessing elite training and equipment and seemingly unlimited resources functions to preserve general American hegemony in the region.
What about Anti-Israel Nazis?
Israel is an ethnostate, and nazis generally support ethnostates. So any appearance of antizionist sentiment among self-described nazis or overt antisemites or racists must be highly questioned.
Anti-Israel nazis or their cryptofascist ilk like Tucker Carlson, MTG, or actual-nazi Nick Fuentes should NOT be welcomed “into the fold” of antizionism simply because one of their positions seems to align with our own. Their “efforts” serve to delegitimize the antizionist cause and pollute it with outright and historical antisemitism, thereby validating Israel’s last remaining rhetorical argument against antizionism, which is that it’s “inherently” antisemitic, which I have already demonstrated is patently false.
Even if an America Firster does not accept the idea that they support an ethnostate, ask them how they feel about multiculturalism, borders, racial intermingling. Interrogate the possibility that America First is, itself, an ideology that seeks to turn the United States into an ethnostate, based on Christian nationalist white supremacy.
In other words, an ethno-nationalist ideology.
Hence, disdain for Jews but support for Israel as an ethnostate with a reason to exist (never mind a right) is what separates true anti-zionism from antisemitic ethno-nationalism.
A lot of antisemites, including outright Nazis, who support Israel in substance because it is a Jewish state that gets Jews out of “their” country, also have little problem with direct military destabilization of countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Venezuela, or indirect destabilization such as Yemen and Iran (through Saudi Arabia and Israel), Sudan (through UAE), or Thailand (through funding pro-democracy groups), all for the ends of securing Western markets.
Meaning, many antisemites are fine with the neoliberal privatization or appropriation of every resource or public asset in a country such as Syria, which will inevitably destroy its economy and cause migrant flows into Europe. In an America First style, many of these misguided pro-Israel antisemites believe that the superprofits rendered through the destruction and exploitation of that country will “serve American interests” and, believing in the benevolence of their government, that these profits will trickle down into their own pockets.
Nazis of this sort who DO have a problem with american imperialist excursions generally do—once again—not because they care about the lives of the people being needlessly killed, but because such wars represents resources that could be spent “to take care of our own people,” when history of government in general and conservative governments in particular clearly indicate that this money would not be used in this way. Hence, I apply the same critique to these nazis as I did to the prowar nazis in the previous paragraph: as idealistic believers in regressive trickle-down economics.
In both cases, whether as an “antiwar” or prowar America Firster or as an open antisemite, the basis of the critique or embrace of Israel or of American empire in general comes down to whether it is believed to benefit the self-interest of the believer and his or her social group. By and large, it is not tied to the immorality of empire, the murder and traumatization of generations of men and women, the murder, rape, and maiming of women and children, the destruction of natural resources, cultures, ecospheres, and the mechanisms of dehumanization among colonizer and colonized that make it all possible.
The America First Pretense of “Antiwar”
Along these more benevolent lines, the PRETENSE of America First is that it is antiwar. In practice, this principle goes by the wayside as long as the wars being engaged in are not “new wars,” or at least not “forever wars.” Ultimately, it endorses or at least accepts interventionist foreign policy as “America First” when it “makes the world safer for democracy” by asserting American military superiority.
And even when the interventionist act is accomplished, such as the removal of Maduro, even if that intervention is disagreed with in principal as “foreign intervention,” the refrain of, “well, he was a bad guy and I’m glad that he’s gone, even though intervention is wrong,” is ALWAYS quick to follow, signifying the assumption of any noble character to such interventions.
Again, it is not because war is evil that these people are against war, any more than they are against Israel because ethnostates are inherently evil. Nor is it because other nations deserve to choose their own leaders or control their own destinies and economies. These are abstractions that do not even occur to them.
They are posturally against war because wars cost American resources that could go towards helping the “average American.”
In an “America First system,” however, as I’ve discussed, these resources would NOT be employed in this way, because “America First” is deeply tied to the American tradition of antisocialism.
Instead, these supposed “taxpayer dollars” would just enrich some billionaire or another.
It is identical to the dynamic of a neoimperialist system. In neoimperialism, the superprofits rendered by the exploitation of the third-world workers could completely cure poverty in the mother country if they were employed that way—not that this would at all justify their extraction. Instead, however, these profits never come near the pockets of the “average American” back home, outside of providing some cheaper consumer goods. Far from stronger social safety nets or happier, longer lives, what you end up with is an expanding class of Jeff Bezoses and Sam Waltons.
Also, never mind that interventionist policies create “hordes” of immigrants who then “invade” the “mother country.”
In this way, America First—which I have already demonstrated is ethno-nationalist in character—is fully compatible with neoconservatism, whose unashamedly “neocon” stalwarts—who seek to expand American military dominance under the pretense of “spreading democracy”—the average America Firster claims to despise.
The Intolerable Truth to all America Firsters and American Antisemites
A great therapist once said, “behavior is a solution.”
What does the behavior of criticizing Israel on an America first basis solve? It solves for their psychological inability to accept that what Israel does, no matter how insane and murderous and genocidal, is, in fact, in the interests of the United States, is in SERVICE to the United States, is in various ways dictated by the policies of the United States, and in some way is allowed to flourish and expand by the United States.
The fact that Miriam Adelson is a huge donor to Republicans is no different from any other massive government financial influence, and few other lobbies receive as much accusations of autonomy and aspersions of malignancy and manipulation like Israel does.
In this scenario, Israel “controls the government,” but the plastics industry, military industrial complex, corn and other farming subsidies, and all the other huge budget private interests that control, sway, influence, whatever you want to call it, the government, are somehow secondary, or any less independent or autonomous.
In fact, it is not one or another private interest or lobby that exerts “evil influence” over our government, that misleads it, corrupts it, or is allowed to destroy it.
It is our government which is evil, which invites ITS OWN destruction, which harbors, courts, accepts, and depends on the financial influence of these entities, and which bends to their will not because they are being controlled in any other way, including blackmail.
(Of course blackmail is rampant, as reported on by Whitney Webb, but it is the spirit of these people which compels them to do the illegal, depraved, and destructive things that they can then be blackmailed for. That is, the evil is IN THEM ALREADY, BEFORE they are blackmailed. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t commit the depraved or illegal acts, or they would ALLOW themselves to be exposed to undermine the threat. But none of them do.)
So it is not because of outside influence that politicians allowed themselves to be controlled by lobbyists and warmongers. It is because they are psychopaths; they are insane murdering warmongering justice-denying crazy motherfuckers who don’t give a shit about you at all. So even if they are controlled by blackmail, that is no excuse or any sort of redeeming or ameliorating reasoning behind why they act with absolutely no morals or principles.
And it is not your “beliefs” that determine your moral or ethical rectitude; it is your actions.
To rant for a moment, if these people were being blackmailed, it’s probably because they’re sickos and they get caught doing the sicko bullshit that they, as aristocratic rich psychopaths whose grandparents owned slaves, engage in on a regular basis. So if they weren’t deranged sociopathic sick motherfuckers, they wouldn’t have been able to be blackmailed, and hence they wouldn’t be able to do the sickening disgusting horrible shit that they’re doing under this “influence.” I’m not saying that occasionally, once in awhile, overall fine and decent people aren’t blackmailed. You can be a good person and be blackmailed doing something you’re less than proud of. But for the average citizen, with the average means and the average level of influence, what are the stakes? And therefore, what is the value of the dirt if an online hacker photographs you whacking off to [legal] porn and threatens to blackmail you for $900? That’s one thing, but if some pro-Israeli oeprative catches you having sex with children, and then they get you to fund a genocide as their price for keeping it a secret, that’s something else. It’s the value of the dirt that determines the depravity, sickness, moral disgustingness, and moral objectionability. And, of course, by extension, the impact, and measure of evil that can be applied to it. End of rant.
Quick Reiteration
The idea of America First assumes that what Israel does is NOT in service to America. I. E. the destruction of Gaza directly benefits the US in multiple levels, not the least of which as a reminder of what the US will SANCTION, let alone do. What we might DO promises to be even worse than what we have our proxies do.
Liberal Nazism, or, Where Liberals and Nazis Join Hands and Sing
Thanks to liberalism and postmodernism amid late capitalism, the American ethnostate needn’t be a “white” ethnostate, per se, or an outright “nazi state” based on racial purity.
At this more “tolerant” point, “American” ceases to be a nationality and becomes akin to an ethnicity. Hence anyone, of any race or color, can be part of an American ethnostate. Similiarly, any gender, sexuality, religion, or any other identity.
This is part of what explains the appearance of Latino white nationalists like Enrique Tarrio (an FBI informant) and Nick Fuentes (???), “Black nazis” like Mark Thompson, gay homophobes like Milo Yiannopoulos, Jewish antisemites like Jake Long, gay fascists like Peter Thiel, tradwife reactionary women who essentially want to be second-class citizens, and all these other insane assholes who advocate against the very liberal values that arguably “allowed” “their people” to be seen as human beings in the first place.
Let’s say such an ethnostate were to prevail. Whether these individuals of a racial or cultural minority would share equal influence and status in such an ethnostate, is a separate question. But it has an obvious answer, since any society based on ethnic or racial superiority rests on dehumanization as its guiding principle.
The point is, America CAN become an ethnostate while still maintaining a supposedly multicultural, “liberal” ethic of “inclusion.”
This is America First in probably its most benevolent incarnation, wherein The United States of America wields exceptionalist superiority over other nations, and denies the equal value and humanity of non-American peoples (i.e. immigrants or refugees), while offering a “big-tent” approach to fascist, i.e. corporatist, domestic policy.
Conclusion
What is the significance of this distinction between antizionism and ethnonationalist critiques of Israel?
True antizionist critiques of the war in Gaza and Israel in general have been suppressed through repressive anti-expression laws and threats (and acts) of deportation. Genuine anti-Israel sentiment among the few American politicians who espouse it, like Tlaib and Omar, has led to outcries of antisemitism and censure, not to mention outright racist attacks from the likes of MTG and others, while America First ideations exhorted by conservative pundits—sickeningly, like MTG—do not lead to this kind of indignation or systemic repression.
The ethnonationalist critique has become the “politically correct” critique in the cultural discourse, and we must ask why. Why is this outlook acceptable? And how has a traditionally leftwing tenet like being critical of Israel been so effectively co-opted by the right while mealymouthed AIPAC-owned Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries waste the historical moment?
Ethnonationalist critiques of Israel justify Israel’s weaponized use of antisemitism as a means to silence dissent, while also deflecting blame for the crimes of American empire, specifically the current administration.
The right wing recognized that public opinion was becoming more critical of Israel, and rather than endorse or espouse a true antizionist critique, they articulated one that not only sustains the existence of Israel but also maintains American exceptionalism: the idea that the rules of the world do not apply to the United States.
Why? So it can continue to perpetrate and enable genocide and other crimes throughout the world without being held to task, either by other countries because they are too scared, or by its own populace, who willfully continue to see it as “God’s country”: beyond reproach, comprehension, or critique.
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