Israeli Academics are Anti-Semites

Hundreds of Israeli academics and artists who are urging U.S. President Joe Biden and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres not to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to New York next week, have been accused of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred by members of the far-right government of Israel.

In their open letter, the critics of the Netanyahu government said that “Netanyahu incites citizens against each other, threatens the country’s security and economy, and turns his face away from the historical conflict that tears Israel apart – the forceful domination of the Palestinian people".

Israel's Jewish fundamentalist right-wing government under Netanyahu is ultranationalist and religiously conservative. Its push to overhaul the country's judicial system, weaken the High Court and give more power to the extremist Jewish government, has drawn strong criticism from Washington already frustrated with with the Israeli government's continued illegal settlements in occupied Palestine.

Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an outspoken racist member of the Netanyahu government has accused the anti-judicial reform protesters and the authors of the open letter as being self-hating Jews and anti-Semites. It is extremely rare that a Jewish person be accused of anti-Semitism.

While the protests against the judicial reforms have gained traction over the past weeks and months, very few of the protest movements or their leaders, including the authors of the open letter, have called for an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine and the continued assassinations and killings, house demolitions and other abuses that the Israeli government has carried out for decades. The dehumanization of the Palestinian people have long been a staple of Israeli governments, both right-wing and left-wing, long before the latest and current right-wing government of Netanyahu. The critics of Netanyahu are themselves guilty of keeping silent for decades while their governments were abusing the Palestinians and stealing more of their lands. It is only now that they are paying lip service to the end of the occupation, simply because it gives them some credibility with the international community in their fight against Netanyahu. The vast majority of the international community has been for decades denouncing Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestine, but nothing has ever been done to bring an end to the occupation. There is a world-wide fear of opposing Israel publicly because of the US's blind support for Israel. Any critique of Israel could be tagged as anti-Semitic and lead to US sanctions. 

The BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement against Apartheid Israel has been vehemently opposed by the United States, to the point where anyone expressing support for BDS stands to lose their jobs or go to jail in some US states. The same BDS movement was extremely effective in the 1980s in bringing an end to the Apartheid regime of South Africa, with overwhelming support from much of the western world. Yet, with the Apartheid system in Israel, which is by far worse than it was in South Africa, many countries are fearful of embracing the BDS movement. In South Africa, Apartheid meant simply the segregation of whites and blacks, without land theft, assassinations, home demolitions etc. Charming Israel, on the other hand, has taken Apartheid to new heights of racism, land theft, home demolitions, uprooting millenial olive orchards, and dehumanizing an entire population by denying its very existence: Israeli governments have long denied that there exists a Palestinian people: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1969 "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people".