For nearly two years now, we have been waiting for that moment when the dam bursts and the true horrific reality of the Gaza Holocaust comes crashing through into the mainstream. Yet every time an atrocity occurs that should fully open everyone’s eyes to the unfolding Holocaust, it becomes obfuscated. Our news media can be relied on to provide cover for Israel because they are deeply compromised at the highest levels. However, there are signs that the system of Israel apologetics is fragile. Zionist ideology has become rigid, and cracks are showing.
Until now, reality has been fighting an uphill battle against a very expensive campaign of propaganda using all of the sophistication and complexity of modern communications. Much of this seems to have been aimed at blunting and confusing opposition rather than winning converts to the cause of genocide and the hatred of Palestinians. By nature, this creates a building tension, a collective cognitive dissonance between the horrors we see and the bland mumbling concerns expressed by our politicians and pundits. The more expert they are in muting the natural alarm and outrage, the more pressure mounts.
I do not want to understate the capacity in the current media ecology for creating complacency and confusion. Still, the great weakness of pro-genocide voices is that they cannot take any criticism whatsoever. When UEFA put out a banner reading “Stop Killing Children – Stop Killing Civilians,” they were accused of “blood libel” by a wide range of Zionists. The highly respected journalist Stephen Pollard posted the sign “They might as well have gone the whole way and written ‘Fuck you, Jews’”. This sort of response may consolidate the siege mentality of their base, but it is not going to reflect well on them around the water cooler or in the pub. Most people tend to lack the nuanced understanding of antisemitic tropes that this hasbara effort relies on. In their vulgar ignorance, they are liable to think that if someone feels personally attacked by a sign saying “stop killing children”, they might have something to hide.
This is coming at a time when liberal Zionists are under pressure to be more critical of what is happening. Simply saying that you don’t like “Netanyahu and the current right-wing government of Israel” à la Bernie Sanders is not going to cut much ice. This situation creates the potential for an explosive end to pro-genocide apologism. For example, the amoeboid creature that, for some inexplicable reason, is currently the Prime Minister of Aotearoa, said that things were bad and that Netanyahu has “lost the plot”. This caused considerable brouhaha, yet in reality, he was adhering strictly to the liberal Zionist party line that this is all a Netanyahu problem of allowing Israel’s perfectly reasonable need to massacre at least some Palestinians after October 7 to go too far.
The amoeba in question was guilty only of using undiplomatic language to say exactly the thing that the US wants its pets to say, yet Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister responded angrily by suggesting that the greatest threat faced by Aotearoa is a possum. In contrast, Israel has to deal with a “jihadi death cult”. I personally would like for her to come to Christchurch and tell that to the survivors of the massacre committed by a fanatical, murderous, racist, Islamophobe just like her. I would like her to explain how she justifies labelling her enemies a “death cult” when the government she is part of has killed at least 500 Palestinian children for every Israeli child killed on October 7.
Racist double-standards aside, the reaction to the Prime Minister’s comment shows that some anti-Palestinian pro-genocide people cannot tolerate any deviation from a very narrow script. They are genuinely angry at the controlled opposition of Western leaders whose job is to gaslight people with their wildly understated reactions and tepid criticisms. This has been a great strength in the past, with liberal Zionists able to burnish their credibility with the condemnations from zealots, but reality is starting to intrude.
The current fashionable liberal Zionist exit strategy from their past embrace of genocide is to become suddenly concerned over starving children and to reiterate that they have always been for a two-state solution, but is that a defensible position?
The best way I can illustrate the problem facing Zionists is with a hypothetical example featuring a true liberal’s liberal. Pete Buttigieg (a man, incidentally, who once took great personal umbrage at a random sign saying “don’t be a shitlib”) was interviewed on Pod Save America. Matt Lieb of the Bad Hasbara podcast summarised his inauthentic rodent vibes on this occasion by dubbing him “Rat-GPT”, which seems reasonable.
On Pod Save America, Buttigieg, the former Mayor of South Bend (and first openly gay rodent to be US Transport Secretary) said that the US shouldn’t support things that are “unconscionable” and that “…[We are] Israel’s strongest ally and friend. You put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” The host’s reaction to this was not the nausea and rage that it should have provoked. He was as calm as if they were talking about a neighbour who was over-watering the houseplants but prickly about accepting advice. I do not know this Pod Save America guy from any other context. Still, I don’t need to because on the screen I can see two disgusting racists who would never use these words or maintain this casual chatting demeanour if the same atrocities were happening to a less demonised group.
Imagine, though, if Buttigieg had been pressed on the details of what is “unconscionable”.
We don’t live in a world where anyone that Buttigieg would agree to talk to would question why the starving of children is somehow worse than shooting them, burning them, and burying them alive. Nor would we expect any interviewer to contextualise the current starving children (that so troubles the liberal conscience) with the mountains and mountains of evidence that Israelis have targeted and killed children in systematic ways for many years. We might, however, see someone asking for specifics about what is “unconscionable”, and for the liberal Zionist, there is no right answer for that.
Clearly, if you say that Israel is deliberately starving children, you will be attacked violently for “blood libel”. In fact, if you don’t endorse the claim that starvation is all the fault of the Khamas jihadi death cult, you are clearly a self-hating Zionist, a Zionist-in-name-only, and an as-a-Zionist. A single sound-bite to the effect that Israel means to do all the terrible things it does is sufficient to send the Israel lobby money stampeding away from you and into the arms of the ratfuckers (which admittedly would be a fitting and amusing end for Buttigieg’s political career).
Liberal Zionists are trying to walk an impossible line. They want to condemn Israel in the abstract only, while avoiding any mention of what they are condemning so as not to bring down the wrath of AIPAC-on-high that will smite them with ineluctable finality and having smit move on. Whether it is from a media interrogation or from public pressure, some of them will be forced into breaking with the genocidal project. They will be rejected from the Israel supporters club because if you can’t handle the Jewish state at their mass-slaughtering holocaust worst, you don’t deserve them at their Western liberal yoga-loving gay-person-accepting settler-colonial apartheid slow-genocide creeping annexation best.
Wembley Stadium is booked in September for Brian Eno’s “Together for Palestine” one night and a Kneecap gig the next night. This is a sure sign that opposing genocide is becoming pretty mainstream all of a sudden. In these circumstances, we can truly hope that people like Rat-GPT will be forced to flee the sinking ship of the Jewish-supremacist state.
In the meantime, there is a lesson for humble believers in the Palestinian cause, even those not able to get Pete Buttigieg to agree to come on their podcast, because there are implications for the liberal Zionists, the philo-semitic apologists, the Israel exceptionalists, the casual racists, and the Islamophobes in our day-to-day lives. If you find someone wavering in their commitment to “Israel’s right to defend itself from Khamas,” encourage them to express what it is that they are concerned about in Israel’s behaviour. They have lived in an environment where, despite the real-world asymmetry, it is the crimes of Palestinians that have been emphasised and given the weight of emotion and essential meaning. Israel, for them, is only reacting. Once they start to see Israel go beyond any justification, even in the fantasy they have been immersed in, then they may start to think of Palestinian resistance as the justified response. The more they start to think about these things, the sooner they will realise that this is not an occasion for mild or partial criticisms. Some might even admit that they were wrong and it wasn’t all legitimate self-defence until some arbitrary time when they personally deigned to stop making excuses for the death and suffering in Gaza. Stranger things have happened.
Remember that things that can’t go on forever don’t. Palestine will be free.
The post The Sinking Ship of Liberal Zionist Ideology first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kieran Kelly.