Jews and Israel are not the same: (The Guardian)
JVL Introduction
It is pleasing in some ways to see this article in the Guardian – at last. This is focused on the USA but the same approach to Israel is reflected in far too many countries, especially those we loosely include as “the West”. The rhetoric of the UK government is not as extreme as that of US leaders, but the result is remarkably similar and, just as in the USA, Jewish Establishment Institutions back Israel even in the face of the horrors it is meting out in Gaza and in the face of Israel breaking the ceasefire in March this year.
In addition to the sources cited below, we can add a UN Commission also finds that Israel IS committing genocide and cites Herzog, Israel’s President as well as Netanyahu as guilty of inciting genocide. Of course this is rejected by Israel and the USA but just days before Herzog was shamefully allowed to visit the UK, the UK government announced that it was NOT genocide. (see, eg here.)
The writer notes that at root is the idea that Jewish lives – and I would add western and white lives – count for more than Palestinian lives. This is unacceptable to anyone who believes in human dignity and equality and, of course, democracy.
LL
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Tue 16 Sep 2025. Read the original here.
Jews and Israel are not the same. Equating them is a propaganda technique
The claim is central to rationales for arming Israel even as leading human rights groups decry genocide in Gaza
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It’s good to know that the Guardian dares at last to publish this. But so many of us have shouted ourselves hoarse for so long trying to make these exact points, and the Guardian has ignored them for years. It joined the pack that was hunting down the unfortunate Corbyn with exaggerated and unproven allegations of antisemitism. And it didn’t challenge Mirvis’ bloodthirsty demands for uncritical support of Israel.
Better late than never I suppose….
ABOUT TIME, GUARDIAN!
Westerners of all stripes have drifted en masses towards atheism – and when a religious belief of sorts is essential to one’s identity, idolatry beckons. People see it’s excoriation as the silly sin, the pointless commandment, let’s move in to other other ones that seem to make more sense. And subsequently ignore the error of taking an invented set of criteria to determine the difference between right and wrong.
What is to be Jewish today? “Secular Jew” seems almost oxymoronic (culturally Jewish might be better; ethnically Jewish seems confused). To be honest, had I not been born Jewish I wouldn’t have become one (I imagine I’m far from the only such). But now in my late 80s after a lifetime scarcely different from that of my “gentile” peers, I thought I’d find out and for several months have been reading books by Marc Ellis (currently ‘Out of the Ashes’) and dipping into Abraham Heschel’s brilliant ‘The Prophets’. I’m still an atheist (at least that dissolves the problem of theodicy). I might have drifted towards a Reconstructionist version had I not felt it didn’t help. What really drew me back to this stuff was of course the horror of Israel, its depravity, endless cruelty and now the collective mental introjection of the Shoah projected out as its own holocaust on Palestinian victims, as if in some perverted redemption and sense of vicarious revenge. For a while I didn’t even want to identify as Jewish, a new thing for me (I’d always insisted on *Jewish* atheist). It was Ellis and his — I really think — reinvention of “the Prophetic” for today that restored my balance, alleviating the nausea and vertigo induced by all those images of demented destruction, the legacy of a savage Bronze Age desert sky-god with its righteous indignation, its metaphysics of supremacism. All that the Zionists did (and with some charity one can understand under the burden of history why) was to create yet another god that failed.