Legalize Public Cannabis Consumption

Legalization must mean the freedom to smoke weed, not just buy it.

BYZACH HARRIS

HIGH TIMES  NOVEMBER 24, 2023

“Smells good.”

If you smoke weed outside, especially in a city, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard that statement of fact from a stranger. It happens to me at least once a week, usually a lot more. 

Look in the pages of the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, watch local news, or listen to politicians, though, and you might be fooled into thinking that weed does not, in fact, smell good. Wild, right? 

Under titles like “I Don’t Want To See You Get High” and “NYC’s Disgusting Pot Stench Is Keeping Tourists Away,” those loud voices fed up with loud smells are the last gasps of prohibition’s fading foghorns. Weed won and the world hasn’t fallen into disarray (well… at least not because of weed), so cannabis critics are reaching for anything they can to push back against its growing role in American life. These smell sheriffs might even support legalization, just as long as they can’t see or smell it. 

But legalization without the guarantee of safe, free, and open consumption is not legalization at all, and while much of the discussion from inside and outside of the weed industry is about, well, industry, New York has quickly shown us that the right to public consumption should be one of the most important facets of any and every legalization law. 

New York has been the most important domino to fall into place on the legalization map since California and this conversation is only coming to a head now because of The Empire State’s uniquely progressive consumption laws. Out of 38 states with some form of medical or adult-use cannabis laws on the books, New York is the first to allow public cannabis consumption. Anywhere you can legally smoke a cigarette in New York, you can also smoke weed. 

In the other 37 states, cannabis use is largely restricted to the whims of property owners. Sure, some states have consumption lounges, although few and far between, but those are also businesses looking to turn a profit, adding another layer of transaction before renters, tourists, or the unhoused can legally consume their supposedly legal weed. In most legal weed states and cities, there are no consumption lounges, and those without property in their portfolios are forced to ask a landlord for permission or continue breaking the law to consume in public.

And so now, in the only state to recognize the catch-22 of legal cannabis consumption and allow smoking in public, the city’s media and politicians are arguing that smokers need to cut it out and go back to hiding – to some people, weed smokers just can’t win.

These screeds against the smell of weed sound eerily similar to the weak arguments used to shame protestors who can never march peacefully enough, queer people who won’t assimilate to hetero norms enough, and unhoused people who can never be quite out of the way enough. If everyone would just pursue a more free and just world a little more politely and out of the public view, the cause would finally get some respect. Sometimes perfect is the enemy of progress though, and trying to fit a non-consumer’s constantly shifting definition of perfect is always a losing battle.  

Instead of trying to cater to the loudest detractors and shape our community into impossibly perfect stoners in their eyes, hiding in shadowy alleys or breaking our leases to smoke inside, I reject the claims that the smell of weed is a public nuisance. People love the smell of weed.

Fighting anecdotal evidence of offensively pungent subway stations and tourists turned off by a smoked out Times Square with my own lived experience, I smoke weed outside just about everywhere I go, in cities where it is legal and cities where it is not, and the compliments I get on the scent exponentially outweigh the complaints and dirty looks. On sidewalks, in parks, at restaurants, and in stores, people love to comment on the smell of weed, and they are almost always smiling when they do. Everyone I know who smokes weed has the exact same stories. 

American cities smell like weed and are filled with weed dispensaries – both licensed and not – because Americans love weed. Legalization is often pitched as an easy way to stop unnecessary arrests and boost tax revenue, and it has been, but politicians and pundits often overlook the reality behind much of the support for legalization; millions of people love to smoke weed – just look at the sales numbers! – and they want to do so without breaking the law or risking the ire of their landlord. At this point, it doesn’t seem like too much to ask for. 

In many cities, including where I live in Philadelphia, where cannabis is only legal medically, public consumption has become fully normalized despite rules restricting it. That’s a good thing, but it also allows police to continue to use weed as an excuse to stop, search, and selectively harass people they would otherwise have no reason to. This same pothole in the legal weed landscape looms over people in California, Nevada, Michigan, and every other legal weed state outside of New York. Legalization at the discretion of police and property owners is not legalization at all. 

It is time for all cannabis laws to follow New York’s lead and include provisions for public consumption. It is a fight that should stand alongside the battle for home grow provisions and farmer’s market distribution systems as a necessary prong of social and financial justice-focused legalization efforts. 

Cannabis legalization cannot stop at buying and selling, we must legalize the free and open consumption of weed everywhere that it is legal.

US House Speaker Mike Johnson Spent Years Defending Christian Speech In Public Schools

“The ultimate goal of the enemy is silencing the Gospel," the Republican said in 2004 after Jewish parents sued a school for pushing Christianity on their kids.

By Jennifer Bendery
Nov 24, 2023

Before coming to Congress, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) spent years taking up lawsuits in defense of Christian speech and activities in public elementary schools and universities.

Johnson, who was a relatively unknown Louisiana congressman before being elected House speaker last month, previously spent eight years as senior attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, an evangelical legal group focused on dismantling LGBTQ+ rights and outlawing abortion. It was in his role there that Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, took up case after case aimed at chipping away at the separation of church and state.

What’s alarming about this pattern in his background is that it raises questions about whether the House speaker ― the person second in line to the U.S. presidency ― disputes the first freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment in the Constitution: ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

In 2004, Johnson was the lead attorney for Stockwell Place Elementary when the Bossier Parish public school got sued for pushing Christianity on its students.

A set of Jewish parents sued the school after learning it was holding prayer sessions, teaching Christian songs in class and promoting a teacher-led prayer group called Stallions for Christ that met during recess. The Jewish parents, who had two children at the school, also cited a teacher with a Christian cross on the classroom door, a Nativity scene in the school library and a graduation program featuring Christian songs and a student-led prayer, and religious speeches delivered by two local sheriff’s deputies.

In their lawsuit, which you can read here, the parents claim their children were ridiculed and bullied by other kids for not participating in the religious songs. They raised concerns with the principal, who allegedly responded by defending the school’s Nativity scene and religious songs, and told the parents to “deal with it.” The parents also complained to the school superintendent, who allegedly defended the teacher-led prayer group because “this is the way things are done in the South” and “welcome to the Bible Belt.”

Johnson spoke about the lawsuit at his church, the Airline Drive Church of Christ in Shreveport, before taking on the case. He warned the congregation what was at stake with cases like the Jewish family suing to keep Christian activities out of a public school.

“The ultimate goal of the enemy is silencing the gospel,” said Johnson, according to an April 2004 story in the Shreveport Times about the lawsuit. “This is spiritual warfare.”


Here’s the article in the the Shreveport Times from April 2004:

"The ultimate goal of the enemy is silencing the gospel,” Johnson said in 2004 amid a lawsuit involving a Jewish family suing a public school for engaging students in Christian speech and activities.
SHREVEPORT TIMES


The Louisiana Republican also told church attendees, some of whom were reportedly nodding and wearing “I support Stockwell Place” T-shirts, that “if we don’t (win), they’re going to shut down all private religion expression.”


Johnson’s comments at church came a week after he wrote an opinion piece in the Shreveport Times calling the Jewish family’s lawsuit “the latest example of the radical left’s desperate efforts to silence all public expression of religious faith.”




Here’s Johnson’s article:

Johnson said in 2004 that a Jewish family suing a public school for engaging in Christian speech and activities was "the latest example of the radical left’s desperate efforts to silence all public expression of religious faith.”
SHREVEPORT TIMES

Johnson spokesperson Taylor Haulsee on Tuesday disputed that the House speaker was referring to the Jewish family as “the enemy” in the 2004 lawsuit.

“You are mischaracterizing his remark,” he said in a statement. “Johnson was referring to any coordinated attempt to impede religious expression that is protected under the Constitution, not any single family.”

Haulsee also emphasized that the first bill Johnson brought to the House floor as speaker was a resolution condemning Hamas and standing with Israel.

The lawsuit was settled in August 2005 with a consent order clarifying the types of religious expression allowed in public schools. But most of the case had been dismissed months earlier because the family moved out of state.

“On or about December 28, 2004, the McBride family moved to Missouri to escape the harassment and threats Tyler and Kelsey were enduring at Stockwell Place Elementary,” reads a March 2005 amendment to the lawsuit.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which was not officially a party to the case, said at the time that the Jewish family likely would have won their case had they not moved away.

“The ACLU believes (the complaints) were meritorious and had the plaintiffs remained in the state, they would have been found meritorious,” Joe Cook, then the executive director of the ACLU’s Louisiana affiliate, told the Shreveport Times when the case was settled.

Before coming to Congress, Johnson spent a lot of time defending religious speech and activities in public schools, specifically Christianity.
TOM WILLIAMS VIA GETTY IMAGES

In another case in 2006, Johnson represented parents suing the Katy Independent School District in Texas for allegedly trying to ban religious expression and “acknowledgement of the Christian religion.” The parents argued that the school district violated their First Amendment rights by preventing them from “speaking about their religious beliefs” and “distributing religious items or literature to classmates” on school grounds.

This lawsuit was dismissed in 2010 with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs can’t refile the same claim again in this court. The school did have to pay Johnson’s attorney fees, though.

The House speaker twice represented teenagers, in 2007 and in 2008, who were denied public school transportation to a “Just for Jesus” religious event.

In 2007, Johnson represented a high school student in a civil rights action lawsuit after her school refused to provide a bus for her club, called the One Way Club, to attend a “Just for Jesus” event. The student claimed that the school provided other clubs with transportation for fields trips and that it wasn’t fair to not provide a bus for the religious event. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed because the student found her own ride to the event.

A year later, Johnson represented a middle school student who sued her school for not providing a bus to the same event. This student, who was part of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, claimed that she was denied school transportation to the “Just for Jesus” event because she and others in her club talked about their religious beliefs.

School officials claimed the real issue was safety concerns, because there was a shooting near the “Just for Jesus” event the year before, and some students had been “injured and fearful.” The school officials suggested the organizers of the event hold it during non-school hours or on the weekend. As a compromise, school officials offered to give students excused absences if they went to the event on their own during the school day.

The judge in the case ruled that the school worked in good faith with the student by offering an excused absence and rejected Johnson’s argument that the student demonstrated “a substantial threat of irreparable injury.” The student voluntarily ended her suit shortly afterward.

“It is repugnant to Sonnier that he ... must obtain governmental permission to talk to a student about his Christian faith.”

- Johnson defending a traveling evangelist's right to preach on a public university campus.

Johnson also led lawsuits in defense of religious speech on the campuses of public universities. In 2008, he lost a case involving a traveling evangelist who sued Southeastern Louisiana University after a school police officer told him he had to move to a free speech zone on campus to deliver his remarks and get his speech pre-approved.

As they stood there, the evangelist, Jeremy Sonnier, began engaging with a student about religion, at which point the officer warned he would be arrested if he didn’t move.

Sonnier’ legal argument, led by Johnson, was that the university’s speech policy was “unduly burdensome” and based on religious grounds.

“It is repugnant to Sonnier that he, as an individual citizen, must obtain governmental permission to talk to a student about his Christian faith,” reads the legal document, presumably written by Johnson.

A passage from a lawsuit led by Johnson in 2008 in defense of a traveling evangelist.
U.S. DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA

A federal judge ultimately dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning Sonnier can’t refile the same claim again in the court.

In another lawsuit in 2003, Johnson represented a student at Texas Tech University who accused the school of violating his First Amendment rights by requiring him to get his speech pre-approved in order to speak on campus in a spot that was not in the “free speech area” gazebo. The student was challenging a school policy that barred students from engaging in speech that might “intimidate” or “humiliate” another person on campus.

The university initially denied a permit to the student to deliver remarks outside of the designated area expressing his religious view that “homosexuality is a sinful, immoral and unhealthy lifestyle,” and passing out literature citing Scripture. But the student was ultimately given permission to do this if he moved across the street.

In 2008, Johnson was the lead attorney for the Tangipahoa Parish school board in Louisiana when it got sued for opening its meetings with prayers and requiring they be delivered by eligible members of the clergy in the parish.

The plaintiff took issue with the school board bringing religion into its meetings at all and with the denial of his wife’s request to give an invocation at a meeting because she was a non-denominational Christian.

“Plaintiff finds equally objectionable the non-secular manner in which the Board meetings are conducted,” reads the plaintiff’s legal filing. “The Board meetings are an integral part of Tangipahoa Parish public school system, requiring the Board to refrain from injecting religion into them. By commencing the meetings with a prayer, the Board is conveying its endorsement of religion.”

The lawsuit was dismissed in 2010 after the parties reached a compromise.

Asked Tuesday if Johnson fundamentally disagrees with the separation of church and state, his office pointed to comments that he made last week on CNBC, when he claimed that Americans “misunderstand” the concept.

“When the Founders set this system up, they wanted a vibrant expression of faith in the public square because they believed that a general moral consensus and virtue was necessary,” Johnson said in the TV interview. “The separation of church and state is a misnomer. People misunderstand it.”

He claimed that Thomas Jefferson meant something entirely different from what we think it means when he coined the phrase.

“What he was explaining is they did not want the government to encroach upon the church, not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life,” Johnson said. “It’s exactly the opposite.”

He never actually said, though, if he disagrees with the separation of church and state.

“An abject danger to our democracy.”
- Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said she has “grave concerns” about Johnson’s claims.

“Any public official ― let alone the speaker of the House and second in line to be president ― who claims America is a Christian nation and discredits church-state separation is an abject danger to our democracy,” she said.

Laser said Johnson is “repeating the myth that Christian nationalists typically use” to deny that church-state separation is foundational to democracy.

“Church-state separation is baked into the Constitution, from Article VI’s prohibition on religious tests for public office to the First Amendment’s religious freedom protections. Our freedoms, equality and democracy rest on that wall of separation. Without it, America would not be America.”

COMMENTARY
Biden is gaslighting us about natural gas exports

Time for President Biden to say NO to methane gas exports

By CALEB HEERINGA - ROISHETTA OZANE
SALON
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 24, 2023 5:30AM (EST)
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting about countering the flow of fentanyl into the United States, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House November 21, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Imagine you woke up one morning to find out that the government approved the construction of a giant “natural” gas processing facility in your backyard. Though your community already suffers from elevated levels of asthma, respiratory disease and cancer from polluting industry, no one asked you or your neighbors whether you wanted yet another source of air pollution.

Now imagine that the federal government told you that your new polluting neighbor was a solution to climate change and the escalating extreme weather disasters that routinely devastate your community.

That kind of gaslighting is the current reality for communities in Southern Louisiana, as President Biden’s Department of Energy considers granting a license to build a new “liquified natural gas” export terminal called Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2). This is the latest in the oil and gas industry’s mad dash to build gas export facilities that will make countries around the world dependent on fossil fuels for decades to come.

For years, the industry has pushed a myth: that “natural” gas is a clean energy solution that can act as a “bridge fuel” until clean energy like wind and solar are ready. In reality, wind and solar are now the most affordable source of new energy and are being deployed at record levels across the planet. And “natural” gas is mostly methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that warms to the atmosphere more than 80 times as quickly as carbon dioxide; it constantly leaks (or is purposefully released) from fracking sites, gas pipelines, and storage and processing facilities like CP2.

When all that methane pollution is taken into account, it erases any supposed climate benefit that gas has over coal power. According to researchers at Cornell University, it could even make gas worse than coal in terms of its contributions to extreme weather. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell, found that even under a best-case scenario with as few leaks as possible, the greenhouse gas emissions from the entire gas export cycle are 24% worse than those caused by digging up and burning an equivalent amount of coal.

In addition to their vast climate impacts, exporting vast amounts of gas fuels inflation and raises energy prices for American families, as US utilities are forced to compete with entire foreign countries for the same limited supply of fuel. The price of gas nearly tripled last year as the industry rushed to make top dollar selling it overseas following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Huge new facilities like CP2 would only further tie US consumers to volatile international gas markets and risk higher monthly energy bills

These revelations about “natural” gas may be shocking to DC politicians who have been fed a steady diet of misleading marketing and industry lobbying, but it’s no surprise to Gulf Coast communities that are living next to these facilities. They see the bright red flames of methane that the industry routinely burns off, and can feel in their lungs the invisible pollutants these facilities release. A new poll released this month found that respondents want limits on natural gas exports by a 2-to-1 margin. 62% support a pause on the construction of new export facilities until the proper reviews are completed.

Even though pollution from gas export facilities is supposedly “regulated,” the industry often ignores those laws in order to keep reaping the profits on the sale of gas. Just down the road from where CP2 would be built, Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 1 LNG exceeded its air pollution limits 139 times last year but kept operating because any potential fines are minuscule compared to the profits that executives can make selling gas overseas.

Does polluting Gulf Coast communities, warming the planet with more methane gas and raising US energy prices sound like its “in the public interest?” That’s the metric that President Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) is supposed to be weighing to determine whether gas export facilities like CP2 can be built. But as a group of Democrats in Congress have noted, “DOE’s case-by-case approach to approvals ignores the aggregate impact that the explosive growth in U.S. LNG exports is having on climate, communities, and our economy.”

The reality is that the rush to expand gas exports has more to do with the interests of oil and gas executives than the public, which will be stuck with more extreme weather disasters, higher energy bills and air pollution in frontline communities in Southern Louisiana. It’s time for Biden and DOE to slow down and actually weigh the impacts that gas exports are having on the American public.


By CALEB HEERINGA
Caleb Heeringa is Campaign Director of Gas Leaks, a nonprofit educating the public about the harms of “natural” gas.MORE FROM CALEB HEERINGA

By ROISHETTA OZANE
Roishetta Ozane is the founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a grassroots mutual aid, disaster relief, and environmental justice organization.

Railyard explosion, inspections raise safety questions about Union Pacific’s hazmat shipping


 Smoke emanates from a railroad car after an explosion at Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard, Sept. 14, 2023, in North Platte, Neb. The explosion of a shipping container filled with toxic acid inside the world’s largest railyard, combined with hundreds of rules violations inspectors found there, raises questions about Union Pacific’s safety and the effectiveness of the rules for shipping hazardous materials. The Sept. 14 blast fortunately happened in a remote corner of the railyard and the resulting fire did not spread widely.

 (Ryan Herzog/The Telegraph via AP, File)

Locomotives are stacked up with freight cars in the Union Pacific Railroad’s Bailey Yard, April 21, 2016, in North Platte, Neb. The explosion of a shipping container filled with toxic acid inside the world’s largest railyard, Bailey Yard, combined with hundreds of rules violations inspectors found there, raises questions about Union Pacific’s safety and the effectiveness of the rules for shipping hazardous materials. The Sept. 14, 2023, blast fortunately happened in a remote corner of the railyard and the resulting fire did not spread widely. 

(AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

A Union Pacific train travels through Union, Neb., July 31, 2018. The explosion of a shipping container filled with toxic acid inside the world’s largest railyard, Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Neb., combined with hundreds of rules violations inspectors found there, raises questions about Union Pacific’s safety and the effectiveness of the rules for shipping hazardous materials. The Sept. 14, 2023, blast fortunately happened in a remote corner of the railyard and the resulting fire did not spread widely.

(AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)


BY JOSH FUNK

 November 23, 2023

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Federal inspectors have twice found hundreds of defects in the locomotives and railcars Union Pacific uses at the world’s largest railyard in Nebraska, but none of those seem to explain why a shipping container filled with toxic acid exploded there this fall.

Investigators haven’t confirmed the cause of the Sept. 14 blast in a remote corner of the railroad’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, about 250 miles west of Omaha. The explosion didn’t spread far, but investigators appear to be delving into the questionable decision to load dozens of plastic barrels of perchloric acid inside a shipping container with a wood floor and possibly atop wooden pallets, even though that acid is known to react with wood or any other organic material.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever read about perchloric acid, but when it comes in contact with organic material, it becomes highly volatile. So that car was doomed from the day it was loaded,” said Andy Foust, a Nebraska leader of the largest rail union that represents the workers who were switching those railcars just before the explosion.

The explosion highlighted not only potential problems at the sprawling railyard but also the national rail network’s reliance on everyone involved in shipping hazardous materials taking proper precautions. As the Nebraska explosion made clear, there can be problems that are hard to spot before potentially disastrous accidents occur.

Some details about the explosion might never be known because the shipping container carrying the acid was destroyed. Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Warren Flatau said “the leaked acid reacted with the wooden floor of the intermodal container, and any other organic material within the container (i.e., pallets).”

The resulting explosion propelled shrapnel up to 600 feet away and prompted first responders to evacuate everyone within a mile outside the railyard. After the first container exploded, a second metal shipping container — believed to hold memory foam — fell down on top of it and caught fire, but no other cars ignited.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told a gathering of rail labor leaders in Nebraska the explosion could have been much worse and “grabbed national headlines had the wind been blowing a little bit different or had things gone just a little bit different in the yard that day” — much like Norfolk Southern’s fiery derailment in eastern Ohio did.

That February derailment — and others that followed — put the focus on railroad safety and prompted Congress and regulators to propose reforms, which have largely stalled.

Foust said Union Pacific never evacuated the railyard. Nearby workers left the area on their own, but most in the railyard continued working. Foust expects that to change because he said UP is revising its emergency response plan.

“There was a large part of that yard that had no idea what was going on, and they were told to continue doing their job,” said Foust, who has discussed the explosion with FRA inspectors, the railroad and first responders because of his role with the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers-Transportation Division union.

Railroad officials said at the time that the wind blew smoke away from the facility, and because the railyard is up to eight miles (13 kilometers) wide, most UP workers were a safe distance away.

Despite the explosion, the method of loading 56 barrels of acid doesn’t appear to violate any regulations, so such shipping methods could still be occurring. A Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration spokesman said that “as the regulations prohibit any leakage from a package, the regulations do not specify what materials the drums are loaded onto.”

Shippers are required to take precautions when loading hazardous materials, including ensuring that plastic drums can’t tip over. The drums used to ship hazardous materials also must undergo extensive testing.

In this case, the FRA spokesman said investigators couldn’t determine what loading precautions were taken because the container was destroyed.

The perchloric acid, used in explosives and some industrial processes, was produced at a company in Ohio that hasn’t been publicly identified. Norfolk Southern transported the acid, then handed it off to Union Pacific. Both railroads declined to comment on the explosion, citing the ongoing investigation.

Given the timing of the explosion, the leak likely happened inside UP’s railyard.

Railroads inspect railcars before they pick them up for mechanical problems or signs of tampering, but they assume shippers have properly packed them.

“We really rely on them to know best how to package and do it in a safe way, so it isn’t going to become an issue for us,” said North Platte Fire Chief Dennis Thompson, who led the response to the explosion.

Thompson said the emergency response went smoothly because the weather conditions and location were favorable, and the railroad let him know within 25 minutes exactly what they were dealing with.

Before the explosion, inspections at the railyard in July and August prompted the head of the FRA to write a letter to UP’s CEO highlighting that the rate of defects was twice the national average. In September, the week after the explosion, inspectors returned to follow up and turned up more than 500 additional problems.

Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena said he understands and welcomes the agency’s scrutiny.

Vena said Union Pacific and other major railroads have become safer over time. But there were still more than 1,000 derailments last year, and as the East Palestine derailment demonstrated, just one train crash can be disastrous if hazardous materials are involved.

“Do we have more to do? Absolutely,” said Vena, who became CEO in August. “And that’s what I’m challenging the team with here at Union Pacific is we have to get better ... We’ll invest in it. We’ll spend money on technology. We’ll spend money on people.”

FRA regulators who oversee the inspectors aren’t overly concerned, with the head of the agency’s Office of Railroad Infrastructure and Mechanical saying violations are common when he sends a team out.

“We did not find any systematic issues that would indicate they are operating unsafe equipment that put the public at risk,” the FRA’s Charlie King said.

  

On Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

A “non-Jewish” Jewish perspective. 

LEWIS SIEGELBAUM

THE NATION

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside the constituency office of Labour Party leader Keir Starmer on November 18, 2023 in London, United Kingdom, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.(Mark Kerrison / Getty)

Seeking some “common understanding” about the relationship of anti-Zionism to antisemitism, New York Times columnist Charles Blow consulted Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. Greenblatt, fresh from the March for Israel held on November 14 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., told Blow that he regarded anti-Zionism as, by definition, antisemitism, because “Zionism is fundamental to Judaism.” Someone claiming to be anti-Zionist but not antisemitic, according to Greenblatt, would be “like someone saying in 1963 that ‘I’m against the civil rights movement, but I’m also against racism.’”

Really? Leaving aside the analogy for the moment, the claim that anti-Zionism is “by definition” antisemitism strikes me—a self-professed anti-Zionist Jew—as incredibly intolerant and exhibiting a colossal ignorance of history. Let’s start with the history. Judaism, according to experts’ consensus, originated about 3,700 years ago in the related kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Babylonian captivity of the Judahites and other untoward events during the Hellenistic and Roman periods led to the dispersal of Jewish groups throughout the Mediterranean, and the eventual formation of three distinct diasporic communities (Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Mizrahim). In succeeding centuries, these communities interacted with their polytheistic, Christian, and Muslim neighbors in distinct ways, experienced repeated religious-cultural schisms, and also spawned revivalist movements—of which Hasidic Judaism is probably the best known. Two developments in post-Enlightenment Europe are worthy of note: the emancipation of Jews from various legal restrictions thanks to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests; and the concurrent Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) that stressed secular culture and a turn away from Yiddish.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw two further developments: the emigration of large numbers of Jews from Europe to the Americas; and the emergence of Jewish nationalism, or modern Zionism, that sought a Jewish national homeland. Both were responses to the persistence of antisemitism in Europe and the failure of assimilationist strategies to cope with it. From its first congress in 1897, the Zionist Organization led by Theodore Herzl proclaimed that Jews, no less than any other national group, deserved their own homeland—that is, their own nation-state. Although Zionists had some early success in recruiting European Jews to settle in Ottoman-held Palestine, their numbers remained small up to 1914 in comparison to the indigenous Muslim and Christian populations as well the transatlantic wave of emigrants. Within Europe, Zionism faced significant pushback from Jews who threw in their lot with internationalist movements, especially of Marxist inspiration.

Before the Nazis came to power in Germany, therefore, the vast majority of Jews would have laughed at the notion that Zionism was “fundamental to Judaism.” It took a lot more to realize the Zionist project of creating a state of Israel that would assume the burden of protecting all Jews who made aliya (immigration to that state). It took British colonial machinations, insistent fundraising among Jews wealthy and otherwise, and paramilitary Jewish “self-defense” organizations with names like Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi (“the Stern Gang”) that carried out terrorist missions against both the British and Palestinians. But the decisive factor was undoubtedly the Holocaust and the persistent unwillingness of the United States to take more than a small fraction of Jewish refugees before, during and even after the war.

In the course of realizing the Zionist project, a lot of other people got displaced, lost, or had severely constrained, their homeland. Palestinians also had their civil and political rights restricted even under relatively liberal Israeli governments. Little wonder that the 75 years of Israeli independence have been punctuated so often by war: the 1948 War of Independence/Palestinian Nakba; the 1956 Suez Crisis when Israel joined neocolonialist Britain and France to attack upstart Egypt; the Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel took the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt; the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (initiated by Egypt to regain the Sinai); the war Israel launched in 1982 to expel the Palestinian Liberation Organization from southern Lebanon; the two Intifadas of 1987–93 and 2000–05; and the Israel-Hamas War of 2023. This dolorous list does not include the far more frequent skirmishes, instances of rock-throwing, slingshot hurling, kidnapping, imprisonment, shootings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers, beating by settlers, attacks on Israeli civilians, so-called “targeted killings” and other forms of violence indicative of endemic ill-will.

Notwithstanding, most Israelis probably do not think of themselves as racists. But they don’t necessarily favor equal rights for all Israel’s inhabitants, either. There are, however, millions of Jews scattered throughout the world who do. Their rejection of Zionists’ insistence on the requirement to support Israel come what may makes them neither antisemites nor “self-hating Jews.” They may be simply non-nationalistic or even anti-nationalist, which is to say, internationalist.In this sense, they are the legatees of a long Jewish tradition going back to the 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and carried forward by the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, by Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky. Isaac Deutscher, the Polish-Jewish Marxist, called them “non-Jewish Jews.” They each transcended their own ethnic or religious particularities to struggle for the emancipation of all.

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November 27/December 4, 2023, Issue

In an interview he gave in 1967 in the wake of the Six Day War (and shortly before his death), Deutscher referred to Israel, victorious in three successive wars, as the “Prussia of the Middle East.” But this Middle Eastern Prussia was, Deutscher observed, a “feeble parody of the original” in the sense that “the Prussians were at least able to use their victories for uniting in their Reich all German-speaking peoples living outside the Austro- Hungarian Empire.” The Israelis were stuck with the problem of what to do with the conquered Arabs. Should they, as Ben Gurion, “the evil spirit of Israeli chauvinism,” urged, create an Israeli Protectorate on the West Bank of the Jordan? He went on:

None of the Israeli parties is prepared even to contemplate a bi-national Arab-Israeli state. Meanwhile great numbers of Arabs have been “induced” to leave their homes on the Jordan, and the treatment of those who have stayed behind is far worse than that of the Arab minority in Israel that was kept under martial law for 19 years. Yes, this victory is worse for Israel than a defeat. Far from giving Israel a higher degree of security, it has rendered it much more insecure. If Arab revenge and extermination is what the Israelis feared, they have behaved as if they were bent on turning a bogey into an actual menace.

So how fundamental is Zionism to Judaism? In the aftermath of the massacre of October 7 and the plethora of antisemitic acts committed in the United States and elsewhere in the world in response to the Israeli army’s retaliatory violence inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza, we might consider another question: How fundamental is anti-Zionism to Judaism?

Lewis Siegelbaum

Lewis Siegelbaum is an emeritus professor of history at Michigan State University, and a member of the Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD) Israel-Palestine Working Group.