Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter recently offered what he apparently believed was a devastating answer to those decrying the genocide in Gaza.
“Jews do not use children’s blood for rituals,” Leiter said. “Jews do not poison wells. And Jews do not starve populations or commit genocide.”
The smear in this common Zionist talking point is obvious: Those who accuse the Israeli government belong in the same moral category as those who spread medieval blood libels against innocent Jews. To say the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has committed genocide is not merely to criticize a government, an army, or a political ideology. It is to accuse “the Jews.”
But there is a growing problem for Zionism and its favorite smear: the moral indignation of Jews.
According to a new AP-NORC poll, 30% of Jewish adults in the United States say Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Only 49% say it has not. Among religiously unaffiliated Jews, the share rises to about four in ten. Also, only about four in ten Jewish adults believe Israel’s continuing military operations in Gaza are justified, while roughly six in ten view Netanyahu unfavorably.
In light of the grave public perspective of a growing percentage of Jews, the Zionists look more and more foolish. Their go-to argument – if you can even call this substanceless insult an argument – has become an argument ad absurdum: Nearly one-third of American Jews, Zionists believe, are secretly medieval antisemites; Jewish critics of Netanyahu believe Jews poison wells; Jews who watch children starve in Gaza and call it genocide are not morally serious observers but morons trafficking in blood libel … against themselves.
But the absurdity is rapidly leading to yet another Zionist offense – as if a genocide were not enough. Since the inconvenient Jew is now one of Zionism’s biggest problems, the Jew himself – insofar as he accepts the universal human principles that genocide flies in the face of – must be treated as an impossibility.
He cannot be debated honestly, because his very existence blows the argument apart. He proves that Jewish identity does not require loyalty to Netanyahu. He proves that revulsion at starving children is not (forgive the grotesque suggestion – it is not mine but Zionism’s) an anti-Jewish prejudice.
So Zionism does to the inconvenient Jew what it does to every inconvenient person.
It erases him.
He becomes “self-hating,” “brainwashed,” “disloyal,” or – perhaps most insultingly of all – “not a real Jew.”
Hellbound and Down 