I was accused of being antisemitic today. I posted a message on Mastodon in which I said that resolving the issues in Israel and Palestine requires that Israel be reconstituted as a multiracial democracy that provides equal rights for all its citizens. Someone wrote back to me and asked if I was also advocating that the land that had been stolen from Jewish people in Europe and the Middle East be given back to them. I replied that, while there would be some justice in land being given back to Palestinians, Jewish people, and the Native People of the Americas, that was not realistic. Instead, I was advocating that the Israeli state abandon its apartheid government and grant equal rights to the Palestinians. It was at that point that my conversation partner accused me of antisemitic beliefs, saying that I was proposing that the world’s only Jewish state do something that no other state is asked to do.

And I must admit, I have to be cognizant of my own antisemitism, just as I need to be conscious of my racism and sexism. As a white man raised in a Christian family in the United States, I carry all of those prejudices within me. I have absorbed them through the culture around me, and as a member of the dominant culture I must recognize where they benefit me and where I enact them.

But in this conversation, I was not in fact asking something of Israel that I don’t believe is needed from every other state. The United States is no longer an explicit apartheid regime, but systemic racism means that Black and Latinx people here face hurdles that white people do not face. Poor people of all races face economic barriers to caring for their families, and those barriers continue to expand into the middle class. We in the United States need to expand our own government into a true multiracial, multiclass democracy. That is work we need to do every day. Many of the European states should be working on the same project.

Israel places the same systemic barriers in front of its Arab citizens, and it also confines 5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as non-citizens, even though most of them and their families have lived in that land for decades and centuries, long before the founding of the state of Israel. And, as we all know, Israel is currently engaged in an all-out assault on the people it is holding in the Gaza Strip. 

Among the black marks I listed previously, the United States is the prime funder of Israel’s assault. This means that I have both a duty as a global citizen and a duty as an American citizen to express my horror at Israel’s actions and the actions of my own government. 

I may have antisemitic beliefs. I must continually examine myself for such beliefs and work against them. But it would be unjust for me to refuse to criticize Israel for wrongdoing because it is a Jewish state. I will continue to speak out as long as I believe they or anyone else are worthy of criticism.

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