By Elana Dushey
Last week, my cousin’s 14-year-old son was enjoying a school trip with his Jewish day school in New York City. The weather was beautiful, the students were having fun, and then someone called my cousin a “fucking Jew”. That same day, a Jewish man was beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters in Times Square in broad daylight, and Jewish diners in LA were attacked by a group of identifiably pro-Palestinian men.
Earlier that week, John Oliver unpacked the Israeli/Gazan conflict and accused Israel of war crimes. It was an egregiously irresponsible accusation that neither provided sound logic nor context, and it neglected to mention the many crimes Hamas committed against Israelis and Palestinians. I bring up Oliver because he is one of many celebrities whose commentary on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is especially dangerous as it brazenly distorts facts, utilizes faulty logic, effectively demonizes Israel and is read/seen by millions of people A couple of weeks since the conflict erupted, anti-Semitic violent attacks in the US have risen exponentially. Did Oliver and anti-Israel voices like him entirely cause that to happen? Obviously not. Are they blameless? No. They are culpable.
I am a Zionist, and I am pro-Palestinian, and as such I believe both Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to peace, prosperity and freedom. I am also a mother and a humanist. I am deeply grieved by the fact that Palestinians and Israelis are dying. We who are watching the conflict from aboard are heartbroken and angry, which means that those who publicly comment on it have an obligation to present the situation with an unyielding use of facts and sound logic. Yet, Oliver, and pundits like him, do the contrary. Behind a posture of humanitarian concern (solely designated for Palestinians it seems), they incite not only hate toward Israel but also violence toward Jews, and they are doing so with egregious equivocations and skewed logic. In short, they are spewing propaganda and endangering Jews.
If you haven’t seen Oliver’s bit from May 16, I will provide his key points because they echo much of the anti-Israel propaganda currently being disseminated:
1: Israel has a stronger military than Hamas and can inflict more damage on the Palestinians than the Palestinians can inflict on Israelis- as if strength is an indicator of immorality .
2: Israel has had to bomb civilian buildings, which has caused the death of Palestinians. Oliver minimized the fact that the IDF forewarns Palestinian civilians to evacuate the building prior to Israel destroying it in an effort to avoid casualties, as if that is standard procedure in military campaigns in other nations; it is not.
But Oliver did not mention that Hamas has aimed thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, that Hamas launches those rockets from within civilian occupied buildings to maximize its own civilian casualties, that 17 Palestinians were killed by Hamas’s own rockets, and that Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group, who took leadership of Gaza by throwing their political opponents off of roofs.
In rhetorical negligence, Oliver did not ask what Israel should do instead? Should Israel allow itself to be bombarded by thousands of rockets because many of those rockets don’t hit their targets – though some do, despite Israel’s defense mechanism the Iron Dome?
Oliver’s monologue is one example of many where egregiously irresponsible rhetoric about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict vilifies Israel and excuses/ ignores Hamas’s culpability. More disturbingly, anti-Israel rhetoric like Oliver’s is not only blindly accepted but applauded. What is most astounding is that within the schema of woke politics that pervades American discourse now, and which is supposed to locate and identify discrimination, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism continue to go unchecked. And whoever says now that anti-Israel sentiment is not anti-Semitism, please take a look at AMERICAN JEWS who are being attacked by mobs of pro-Palestinians just because they are Jewish.
Anyone is welcome to criticize Israel, as Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians is certainly not beyond reproach, and vice versa. There is much that needs to be worked on by both sides to create peace. But promulgating propaganda with unsound information will not help Palestinians or Israelis and has dangerous consequences for Jews. Part of the reason that propaganda repeatedly goes unchecked in our cultural climate is because intersectionality has created a framework that oversimplifies issues and polarizes people into groups of good or bad, based on race, privilege, and socioeconomic status. It has created groups of oppressors and the oppressed, and assumes power and strength are always immoral.
Furthermore, social media (which does not require claims to be supported) has devalued the necessity of civil and informed debate and replaced it with memes and tribal alliances.
Put another way, millions believe the vilifying lies about Israel because 1) Israel is strong, 2) because people are willingly not educated enough about the complexity of the conflict, and 3) most disturbingly, people also believe those lies because they are lies about Jews. It is certainly not the first time in history incendiary lies about Jews were propagated and believed-which highlights the irony and hypocrisy of intersectional discourse, especially the way it allies the oppressed against the oppressor. Please look at the plethora of violent and oppressive campaigns launched at Jews historically. Recognize the fact that Israel is the only Jewish country in the world and is surrounded by multiple Muslim countries that want to destroy it, and tell me that the willingness to believe anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda is not partially or fully engendered from anti-Semitism. Yet, Jews are still demonized and often it is through “woke” and intersectional narratives.
Furthermore, social media has morphed into a digital mob that assigns inaccurate labels to Israel. For the sake of accuracy, let’s unpack some of those labels. 1) The digital mob accuses Israel of being an apartheid state; it is not - Israeli Arabs are afforded the same legal rights and liberties as Jewish Israelis. 2) It accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing – the only area that has been ethnically cleansed is Gaza, but it was cleansed of Jews. 3) It accuses Israel of genocide - the Palestinian population in Gaza grows 3% every year, the 13th highest growth rate in the world. 4) It accuses Israel of European white colonialism - how can Jewish Israelis, who are indigenous to Israel, who have maintained a continuous presence in the land for thousands of years, and who are neither ethnically nor racially European or white, be European white colonizers? (Furthermore, about 50 percent of Jewish Israelis are descendants of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who were refugees from Muslim countries. Many of those countries too have been ethnically cleansed of Jews.)
Of course, the digital mob is not an abstract ether; it is comprised of millions of people who perpetually share anti-Israel ideas. The result is an unyielding wave of anti-Semitic propaganda that grows and grows and grows. Given the fact that Oliver’s show is watched, tweeted and retweeted by millions of people, we can assume that his 10-minute monologue created millions of anti-Semites and incited those who already were. I’m calling him out on it; I’m praying he won’t have Jewish blood on his hands, and I’m praying for peace.
Elana Hornblass Dushey earned her PhD in English Literature from Fordham University in 2015 with a dissertation that focused on Jewish American literature and its approach to Zionism and Israel. For 12 years, she taught literature, composition, and film at St. Johns University and Fordham University, where she was awarded numerous fellowships. Following her degree, she was a Connected Academic Fellow in the Modern Language Association. Read full bio here.