Nuclear Uncertainty Has Replaced Nuclear Deterrence

BY MELVIN GOODMAN

 MAY 7, 2024Facebook

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Minuteman III, ICBM. Photo Defense Department.

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”…was arguably the most impactful work of U.S. journalism ever.  It included stomach-turning descriptions of what one small (relative to today’s weapons) bomb did to one city’s inhabitants.

– George F. Will, May 2024.

There is much nuclear mythology connected to the development and deployment of nuclear weaponry.  The late Bernard Brodie, the first nuclear theorist, argued in the late 1940s that nuclear weapons had created a stable balance of terror, which is belied by the violence in the post-war situation.  Nuclear theorists such as Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter argued in the 1950s that the balance was “precarious,” and that it was essential to measure the relevant damage one side or the other would suffer in a nuclear exchange.  Harvard’s Henry Kissinger had the most obtuse theory of all, believing that “limited” uses of nuclear weaponry would not get out of hand.  These theories were used to justify the increased development of nuclear weapons that has created the overkill situation in the arsenals of the United States and Russia.  China’s new nuclear doctrine and practice will produce additional overkill capability.

The United States has driven the nuclear race from the start.  The use of atomic bombs in Japan in 1945 was as a terror weapon; the Truman administration believed the deaths of innocent civilians would put pressure on Japanese leaders to surrender.  U.S. technology also drove the Cold War arms race, particularly the development of multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) that could have been stopped in the 1970s if Washington’s lead negotiator, Henry Kissinger, had been willing to listen to the arms control community.

Once again, the United States is a major driver in the arms race on the basis of a 10-year $1.5 trillion modernization program that is unnecessary.  It is accompanied by Russian and Chinese modernization programs.  The U.S. program emphasizes a new strategic warhead; a new cruise missile; new plutonium cores for warheads; and new submarines, bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).  All unnecessary.

China’s developments are worrisome, particularly the expansion and rebuilding of the Lop Nor testing area in Xinjiang.  The area is the size of Virginia, and in the past five years China has added and renovated 30 buildings; these actions point to renewed testing of nuclear weapons and a more aggressive nuclear strategy.  Xi Jinping called for these developments.  He created the Chinese Rocket Forces in 2015, and he ordered the modernization of the strategic air base near Lop Nor in 2018 following Donald Trump’s emphasis on a “nuclear restart” and renewed testing.

Russia is hellbent on modernizing its nuclear program as well, but the war in Ukraine has worsened production and financial problems in addition to the management problems from the Soviet era.  There have been successes in modernizing the Strategic Rocket Forces, particularly Russia’s ICBM arsenal, but other aspects of the nuclear triad—ships and bombers—have lagged behind.  The primitive level of Russia’s robotization and automation programs have been an obstacle.  President Vladimir Putin’s withdrawal from international inspection efforts has compromised efforts to verify and monitor Russia’s programs.

In the Euro-Atlantic area, Russia is intensifying sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, disinformation campaigns, and other hybrid operations. East European members of NATO—particularly Poland and the Baltic states— have expressed their deep concern over Russia’s hybrid actions, which constitute a threat to Allied security.

Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump expanded nuclear missions and abrogated arms control treaties, creating the worst of all possible strategic worlds.  In 2002, Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the cornerstone of deterrence and one of the pearls of disarmament policy, paving the way for national missile defense, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars but provides no genuine security.  In 2018, Trump abrogated the Intermediate-Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), one of the most successful disarmament treaties in history, leading to a renewed arms race in Europe.  The villain in both decisions was John Bolton, the pastor child for the military-industrial complex, who was an arms control adviser to Bush and the national security adviser to Trump.

Trump’s return to the White House would be disastrous.  When former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as a “fucking moron,” it was after a sensitive briefing on nuclear weapons for the new president at the Pentagon in 2017.  Since then, Trump has said that Japan would be “better off” with nuclear weapons; boasted about building new nuclear weapons (“We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.”); and secretly discussed using a nuclear weapon against North Korea. Trump argued he could blame a U.S. strike against the communist regime on another country, according to New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt.

As president, Trump created a Space Force, which was in violation of the Outer Space Treaty that was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.  Last week, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to prohibit placing nuclear weapons in space, which means the Outer Space Treaty is the latest arms control treaty from the Cold War era to fall by the wayside.  Russia’s veto reinforces the notion that Putin favors launching a nuclear weapon into space.

Prior to the 2020 election, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took unprecedented steps to prevent Trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal during the last month of his presidency.  According to the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Milley called the head of the Chinese military, and told him the “American government is stable, and “we’re not going to attack.”  Presumably, Xi Jinping has taken this call into account in terms of his own worst case thinking regarding the nuclear balance of power. Additionally, there is the threat from Putin to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Despite the end of the “Cold War” three decades ago and the realization of the illusion of “limited” nuclear or the suicidal aspects of “mutual assured destruction,” there is still no comprehensive approach toward nuclear disarmament.  Cicero said that “endless money forms the sinews of war,” which has certainly been the case for U.S. use of force for the past three decades.  At the same time, there has been a withdrawal from the world of arms control and disarmament.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan have not even bothered to pay lip service to the idea of disarmament.  President Bill Clinton abolished the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency nearly 30 years ago, and currently there are fewer Foreign Service Officers in the Department of State than there are members of military service bands.  President Barack Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world, expounded in Prague in 2009 marked a brave and lofty vision.  But the Trump and Biden administrations have ignored it and, as a result, the hopes for arms control and disarmament continue to fade.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

What the Nord Stream Insurers Refusal To Pay Reveals About the Explosions

by Jeffrey Brodsky Posted onMay 06, 2024

This originally appeared at CovertAction Magazine and is reprinted with the author’s permission.

Lloyd’s of London and Bermuda-based Arch Insurance deny the €400 million claim by Nord Stream AG, arguing their policies do not provide coverage for the 2022 underwater explosions that ruptured the natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea because the damage was inflicted by “a government.”

But “the defendants’ argument is prima facie irrelevant,” says an expert in law of the sea.

Nord Stream AG last month brought a €400 million lawsuit against Lloyd’s of London and Arch Insurance in the High Court for refusing to pay an indemnity for the subsea blasts that ripped apart the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that carried natural gas from Russia to Germany along the floor of the Baltic Sea.

The written defense to the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Lloyd’s of London and Bermuda-based Arch Insurance, was made public last week by Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the only private investigative expedition (in which I participated) to all four blast sites of the Nord Stream pipelines. It states that the “Defendants will rely on, inter alia, the fact that the Explosion Damage could only have (or, at least, was more likely than not to have) been inflicted by or under the order of a government.”

Said Mahmoudi, a legal scholar with expertise in law of the sea, international environmental law, use of force, international organizations and state immunity, believes the defendants’ position is “groundless.”

“The defendants’ argument is prima facie irrelevant if one cannot prove that the damage is caused by a named government that has been directly involved in a war in the area,” said Dr. Mahmoudi. “The burden of proof in this case is in my view on the defendant.”

Who perpetrated the Nord Stream sabotage, which stands as the largest act of industrial sabotage in history and the most pressing geo-political mystery of the century, is of great consequence for a future court decision. Initial reports in mainstream media blamed Russia without evidence.

The lead prosecutor on the Swedish investigation said the belief that Russia was responsible was “not logical,” while German investigators have “dismissed” the relevance of observed Russian vessels near the crime scene. Not a shred of the data, obtained during our independent expedition to the blast sites—including underwater drone images, videos and sonar images—has implicated Russia.

Reporting has either imputed guilt to the U.S. or Ukraine, as well as a theory suggesting the UK may be behind it. Seymour Hersh, the veteran investigative journalist, reported that United States Navy divers, in a CIA operation ordered by President Joe Biden, planted the bombs on the pipelines. Equally detailed reporting in German media claims to have identified the alleged financial backer and the apparent members of a six-person crew of “pro-Ukrainians” who allegedly transported the explosives operating from a 50-foot pleasure yacht called Andromeda.

It seems that, should the U.S. or the UK be the proven culprit, the insurers will prevail in court. What has not been previously reported, though, is whether the insurers would be forced to cover the damage from explosions if the perpetrator were Ukraine, for the defendants may have argued the small team of pro-Ukrainian operatives was rogue, not specifically tasked by a government with blowing up the pipelines.

But reporting in at least two articles in The Washington Post, which often operates as a public relations firm for the U.S. national security and intelligence services, alleges the “attackers were not rogue operatives,” but “those involved reported directly to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer [who is now ambassador to the UK], who was put in charge so that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wouldn’t know about the operation.” (Emphasis added.)

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi [Source: dynamo.kiev.ua]

So, the possible pro-Ukrainian saboteurs were neither rogue nor private, according to the Post. But because the president of a nation state, in this case, the president of Ukraine, was allegedly unaware of the attack, would the court interpret this as “the Explosion Damage could only have…been inflicted by or under the order of a government”? Or would the court rule that the sabotage was not a government-ordered act but merely greenlighted by a country’s highest-ranking military officer yet not its president?

The answer, “no,” has not been previously reported.

“If this is true and the court accepts that the explosions have been ordered and organized by a high-ranking Ukrainian military officer, even without the president’s knowledge, then the damage is attributable to Ukraine, and the state of Ukraine will be responsible for the damage,” said Dr. Mahmoudi. “Zelensky’s lack of knowledge about this operation has no effect on the issue of State responsibility.”

Another fascinating aspect of the lawsuit is the question of sanctions against the pipelines. “In the event that the Defendants are found to be liable to pay an indemnity and/or damages,” the defense brief states, “the Defendants reserve their position as to whether any such payment would be prohibited by any applicable economic sanctions that may be in force at the time any such payment is required to be made.”

Resulting questions arise: Should future sanctions be levied against Nord Stream 1, even if these sanctions are to be put into force after the lawsuit had already been filed, could the insurers be let off the hook?

“In such a case, the order of the court cannot for the time being be executed due to the new sanctions,” explained Dr. Mahmoudi, “but the court can still decide an indemnity that will be paid when the sanctions are lifted in [the] future.”

That the court can rule the defendants must honor the policy’s indemnity obligations once any future sanctions may be lifted has not been previously reported.

Still, the insurers may maneuver to protect themselves using subsequent sanctions as a pretense to skirt payment. In 2021, 16 insurance companies withdrew their support for Nord Stream 2, according to a leaked document from the Biden administration. Apparently, the insurers were pressured as the U.S. threatened to “examine entities involved in potentially sanctionable activity.” Both Lloyd’s of London and Arch Insurance are listed as companies that cowered before the threats.

The current legal and geo-political milieu of the U.S.-led, “rules-based” global order may be propitious for the defendants: The West sanctions Nord Stream 2, leaving it bereft of insurance coverage, and subsequently destroys it along with its twin pipeline, Nord Stream 1. Then the West may, retroactively, sanction Nord Stream 1 in advance of a court ruling that giant Western insurers have to pay up to the tune of around €400 million.

[Source: flipboard.com]

At the same time, the dynamics of the lawsuit are potentially uncomfortable for the West. It appears that two behemoth Western insurers will be legally compelled to pay substantial indemnities if they cannot demonstrate that the Nord Stream sabotage was ordered and executed by a government. The defendants’ brief references the Russian-Ukraine war, but makes no mention of a possible Russian self-sabotage. This could be seen as an admission that a Western nation, not Russia, is the perpetrator of the attack.

Because the insurance policy seems to cover “terrorism” but not “war,” compensation for the plaintiff would only be possible if the attack were deemed the former. However, even if the insurance covers only terrorism, a distinction has to be made between when a state is involved and when there is no state involvement.

“Even if the sabotage is an act of terrorism, the author of the act can be a state or a private entity,” said Dr. Mahmoudi. “If a private entity, the insurance company, is the only source for the compensation of damage; if a state is responsible for the terrorist act, theoretically, it is both the insurance company and that state that have a legal obligation to compensate the damage.”

Both the defendant and plaintiff in the case appear to argue that the obligation to prove the attack was government-ordered rests with the other party. As a general rule, the burden of proving an insurance policy applies and therefore covers damages usually lies upon the insured.

In order to argue the opposite—that it is the defendant who must prove the policy does not cover the damages—the plaintiff relies on the provision that, “in the event of any conflict of interpretation between the General Conditions and the specific insuring conditions…then the broadest possible interpretation to the benefit of the Insured should always prevail,” according to the plaintiff’s legal brief.

Dr. Mahmoudi confirms this.

“The normal order of arguing how the damage has happened is not applicable in such cases. It is not insured luggage that is damaged during air travel and the claimant must prove that the damage did not exist before and has been inflicted during the trip,” said Dr. Mahmoudi. “It is the insurer that has an obligation to show that one of the exceptions of the insurance agreement applies, not vice versa.”

The defendants contend that there is a distinction between “sovereign power” and “government,” arguing that, if the saboteurs were agents of a government, they should not be held liable. But it seems exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for the insurers’ legal team to prove the attack was planned and carried out under the order of a mere sovereign power and not a government.

In fact, even convincing a judge that the saboteurs acted only on behalf of a sovereign power would have no bearing on a forthcoming court ruling, according to Dr. Mahmoud’s understanding of the application of international law to this case, which has not been previously reported.

“There is no difference between ‘sovereign power’ and ‘government’ in this context,” Dr. Mahmoudi contends. “They are the same, and, as such, different from private and commercial acts/agents.”

That there is no legal distinction between “sovereign power” and “government” in the lawsuit’s context has not been previously reported.

Nord Stream AG is not just a Russian company; it is an international consortium in which Russia’s Gazprom holds a 51% stake, alongside German, French and Dutch energy companies. In other words, to avoid a gargantuan indemnity obligation, the Western insurers will likely be made to prove a Western nation destroyed critical infrastructure valued at around €10 billion, 49% of which was owned by Western companies.

Germany is one of the three countries conducting an investigation into the sabotage, and two of its own energy firms had stakes in Nord Stream 1. (Sweden and Denmark are the other two, but both in February closed their probes without unmasking the perpetrator.)

In such a scenario—where the defendants are compelled to prove responsibility for the attack to prevail in court—what legal recourse do the insurers have? Can they sue Germany, Sweden and/or Denmark for not disclosing the results of their investigations into the sabotage? Similarly, can the plaintiff sue the same countries for withholding their probes’ findings?

The answer, “no,” has not been previously reported.

“None of these states have any legal obligation to disclose the results of their investigations,” said Dr. Mahmoudi. “The dispute between Nord Stream AG and the insurance company is of pure commercial nature even if the claimant is mainly state-owned.”

What about the investors? Could the investors, who potentially lost billions, sue any or all of the three investigating countries?

According to Dr. Mahmoudi, the answer to this “interesting legal question” is far from clear-cut. He cited case law for legal precedent but called any legal action a “remote possibility” for investors and described it as a “long and uncertain procedure.”

“A state whose citizens constitute majority shareholders of a company may sue before the International Court of Justice another state that is responsible for great financial loss of those citizens as a result of a national decision that breaches international law,” said Dr. Mahmoudi.

Some conditions must be met. A state must agree to grant its nationals the right to sue, and this protection can only be given to its own citizens, though there is no obligation on the part of the state to do so. “Thus, the citizens of Germany, Sweden, and Denmark cannot rely on this possibility,” said Dr. Mahmoudi.

“States are normally reluctant to get involved in such costly and resource-demanding disputes for the sake of their own nationals,” he added.

Nevertheless, the legal dispute between Nord Stream AG and the Western insurers reflects the enormous deceit surrounding the Nord Stream sabotage as a whole. For Denmark, Sweden and Germany, admitting that the perpetrator is either the U.S. or Ukraine, or both acting in concert, would be humiliating. And should any of those three investigating countries attribute the sabotage to Ukraine, it would amount to an admission that the country they support in the conflict with Russia committed an act of war against them.

If the United States were found to be the perpetrator, it would mean that the supposed guarantor of European security has executed an attack against its protectorates. Telling the truth would be mortifying.

Jeffrey Brodsky is the only journalist to travel to all four blast sites of the Nord Stream sabotage. Jeff writes the “Un Americano en España” column at Diario16 and his writings have appeared in magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and Europe. Find Jeff @JeffreyBrodsky5 or www.jeffreybrodsky.com or on Substack.

Congress’s Antisemitism Bill Is an Insult to Jewish History

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to enshrine in law a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionist messages. It’s an egregious attack on free speech — and one that gravely insults the memory of millions of anti-Zionist Jews.

By Oren Schweitzer

May 5, 2024

Source: Jacobin



Over the past two weeks, student protests over the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have been met with brutal police crackdowns. Meanwhile, the campus demonstrations have provoked hysteria among politicians and the media, who have smeared the protests as violent, antisemitic, and potentially even connected to international terror networks.

Last week, the McCarthyist meltdown reached absurd new heights last week when the House of Representatives passed a bill enshrining a legally binding definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism. This past Wednesday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act, by a vote of 320 to 91. The bill urges the Department of Education to codify a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionist criticism of Israel.

Despite the bill’s name, purporting to call “awareness” to antisemitism, its actual contents are an insult to Jewish history and historical memory, erasing decades of Jewish anti-Zionist politics. In fact, in a tragic and deeply twisted irony, the bill would desecrate the graves of millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, many of whom were anti-Zionists themselves.
Erasing Jewish Anti-Zionism

The Antisemitism Awareness Act directs the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism when “reviewing, investigating, or deciding whether there has been a violation of title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism includes among its examples of antisemitism “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

In other words, the IHRA includes anti-Zionist political speech, the dominant Jewish stance on the idea of a Jewish nation-state before the Holocaust, in its definition of antisemitism. It would, for instance, define an article I wrote last spring — which outlines the similarities between the current politics of the Israeli state and my own family’s experiences in the Holocaust and the shtetl pogroms — as antisemitic.

If passed and adopted by the US Department of Education (DOE), the act would empower the DOE to strip schools of federal funding if they refuse to repress students engaged in anti-Zionist speech, ban organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and bar teachers and professors from endorsing anti-Zionist messages. It would further give legal cover and encouragement to university administrations and local police departments already seeking to repress anti-Zionist demonstrations.

Despite the Israeli state’s insistence on the centrality of Israel and Zionism to Jewish identity and practice, Zionism is a nationalist political movement, and a rather recent one in Jewish history. In Ten Myths About Israel, Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé shows that before the Holocaust, Zionism was a minoritarian political movement among European Jewry.

Most European Jews, Pappe explains, held one of three other political views, all of which were non- or anti-Zionist. In Western Europe, where Napoleon’s conquests emancipated Jews from de jure oppression, Jewish people were more assimilated into their own countries’ cultural practices and identity. For these Jews, many of whom were liberals, the goal was to be accepted within these national communities, not to break off and form a new and separate one — an idea not too different from those advocated by antisemites in their home countries.

In Eastern Europe, where Jews remained subjugated under Tsarist rule — confined to the shtetls, ghettoes, and the Pale of Settlement — Jewish politics took two primary forms: socialist internationalism on the one hand, and religious orthodoxy on the other. Both were vehemently opposed to Zionism.

Working-class Jews throughout Eastern Europe played an outsize role in the militant and powerful labor movement that eventually seized power in the October Revolution. The Jewish Bund was the largest Jewish trade union movement and Jewish political party in Europe, and it fought for Jewish liberation alongside the struggle for socialism and international solidarity with other workers and oppressed peoples. In addition to the Bund, Jewish workers and intellectuals were disproportionately represented in other socialist, Marxist, and revolutionary parties like the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as well as in communist and socialist parties outside the Russian Empire.

Against Zionism, the Bund insisted “wherever we are, that’s our homeland.” It saw Zionism as abandoning the struggle against antisemitism, which could be defeated through working-class solidarity and struggle, and overturning the political and economic conditions that fueled antisemitism. Zionists, on the other hand, accepted the basic nationalistic and racialistic premises of our oppressors: that Jews could never be safe among non-Jews and instead needed to separate ourselves.

Last, the more theologically orthodox in Eastern Europe rejected Zionism for religious reasons. Israel, the biblical promised land, could only be brought about by the messiah, not humankind. Transforming the concept of Israel into a modern nation-state-building project — let alone one requiring war, colonization, and displacement of the current population — was largely seen as anathema to religious dictates. As Pappé recounts, a prominent Hasidic rabbi declared that “Zionism [asked] him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil and a song (i.e., a flag, a land, and an anthem).”

Imperial powers, especially Britain, soon began to adopt their own form of Christian Zionism, having identified a potentially powerful symbiotic relationship between Jewish Zionists and Christian and imperialist interests. A Britain-aligned Jewish colony in Palestine was seen at once as an incredible geopolitical asset for the British Empire and a solution to British and other European leaders’ “Jewish problem” (i.e., antisemitic animus), all the while potentially fulfilling Christian prophecies of a Jewish-controlled Jerusalem that would bring about Armageddon.

It’s no wonder Bundists decried Zionism as “escapism,” and Jewish liberals saw it as bolstering, not opposing, antisemitism.
Suppressing Jewish Speech

The Antisemitism Awareness Act, expected to soon be passed in the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden, attempts to erase this history, and thereby gravely insults centuries of Jewish theology and politics. Since its founding, the Zionist movement and Israel have engaged in a global campaign to equate the political movement of Zionism with Judaism, the religion and people. In doing so, they have cynically co-opted the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust to silence critics of Israel’s apartheid system and military occupation of Palestine.

Supporters of Israel demonize Jewish anti-Zionist activists around the world as self-hating Jews, exiles from our own community. Before student protesters launched the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia and were met with brutal police repression, the university had already banned the chapter of the Jewish Voice for Peace there.

Similarly, one of first three students to be expelled by a university for Palestine activism, an organizer at Vanderbilt, was the chair of the school’s JVP chapter and had lived in Israel for a year, where he first became an anti-Zionist after participating in anti-eviction activism in East Jerusalem. In Germany, perhaps the one country where anti-anti-Zionism crackdowns have been even more extreme than within Israel and the United States, many Jewish activists have been among those arrested and facing repression.

In fact, Jewish anti-Zionism not only has a rich history, but until the Holocaust was the dominant politics of international Judaism. While many survivors were convinced that their earlier ideas were naive, internalizing the fascist premise that Jews will never have a place in broader society, and many more were won over to Zionism in the years following the establishment of Israel, Zionism’s rise to dominance within institutional Judaism must be understood in the context of the extermination of millions of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews in concentration camps.

Congress is currently seeking to pass a bill that would cast the views of millions of Jewish Holocaust victims as anti-Jewish and beyond the pale and would suppress those at schools throughout the country from freely discussing their ideas. In doing so, they are spitting on the graves of our ancestors.

Another Bogus Antisemitism Scare

by Sheldon Richman Posted onMay 07, 2024

I’ve been watching and thinking about the nationwide campus antiwar demonstrations in support of the suffering Palestinians of Gaza, and the appalling reaction to and “coverage” of those events. Something important needs to be addressed.

I won’t be concerned here with the violence committed by anyone, including the police, or by lesser misconduct, such as occupying and damaging buildings and other violations of university rules. It’s also irrelevant whether the demonstrations stand any chance of ending Israel’s onslaught or ending U.S. and university complicity in it, or whether most of the pro-peace demonstrators share a libertarian orientation. (Not likely.) All that is for another time.

I want to examine the overwhelming depiction of the demonstrations as nothing more than rank antisemitism – the blind hatred of all Jewish people because and only because they are – by birth, blood, belief, or practice – Jewish.

Are the demonstrations antisemitic and hence pro-Hamas, as Spiked magazine and many other observers claim? Are the protestors tapping into what CNN’s Dana Bash called “a deep undercurrent of antisemitism”? (The smears know no bounds.)

To sort this out, I thought I might employ one of my areas of expertise. I spend a lot of time watching excellent British television police dramas. I consider myself a student of British detective techniques. (The Brits take their police dramas very seriously.)

Among other things, I’ve learned that if a crime is alleged to have been committed by a particular person, but you have no damning CCTV or credible witnesses, you begin your investigation by asking if the “person of interest” has a plausible motive for the offense. If not, the chances are good that the person is innocent. People act, which means they have motives.

That’s what I want to do here regarding the campus demonstrations, which are on their face objections to Israel’s bloody (not just in the British figurative sense) seven-month campaign against the Gaza Palestinians. That campaign has taken at least 34,000 lives, injured and starved countless other people, and destroyed so many homes, hospitals, universities, and other facilities vital to life.

So here’s the detective’s challenge: why would non-Jewish pro-peace demonstrators on college campuses across the country knowingly, intentionally alienate their clearly Jewish pro-peace co-demonstrators with whom they encamp all day every day, sharing meals, having teach-ins together, and participating in ecumenical outdoor religious events, like Passover seders? Why would antisemites want to do it?

Does that sound remotely plausible? Are the Jewish students idiots who don’t recognize antisemitism when they’re supposedly drowning in a sea of it? Are the antisemites able to threaten Jewish non-demonstrators and pro-Israel demonstrators while keeping it a secret from Jewish demonstrators standing next to them? That seems unlikely.

What do they take us for – those pro-Israel alarmists, who see an existential threat to all Jewish people every day around every corner? They assume (or pretend to believe) that anti-Zionism – that is, opposition to a Jewish supremacist state – is the same as antisemitism. But a moment’s reflection reveals that this is bunk – no matter how many times Israel’s partisans say so. On a variety of grounds, many Jewish people fundamentally oppose Israel as a Jewish state. They have since the time of Theodor Herzl, the reputed founder of Zionism.

As an aside, this is not the first time that America has been subjected to a false antisemitism scare. The boy has cried wolf falsely many times before. Whenever Israel lays waste to Gaza, a sudden spike in antisemitism is reported by the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, and their congressional spokesmen. Isn’t that interesting? Or is it? Could it be that the Israel lobby weaponizes antisemitism to shut up anyone who would object to Israel’s crimes against humanity?  (For a close look at this weaponization, see Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.)

Israel’s partisans tell us that America’s campuses today are indistinguishable from 1930s Nazi Berlin. Jewish students, they say, are routinely harassed, threatened, and assaulted. They can’t walk safely to class. The Hitler Youth rule. Really? I can’t recall newsreels from the Nazi years showing Jews and non-Jews peacefully celebrating the sabbath and Passover with open-air religious services and meals. Have you ever seen films from Nazi Germany in which Jewish Germans enthusiastically sported tee-shirts emblazoned with sayings like: “Jewish Voice for Peace,” “Not in Our Name,” “Jews for a Ceasefire Now,” and “Jews for Freedom in Palestine.” Maybe the memory is suppressed, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t.

My policy is to assume good faith in my opponents, but it’s tough in this case. I am confident that the alarmists do not believe their own words when they say that terrorists and Nazis control the universities.

So why do they say it? Because it distracts attention from Israel’s unending massacre. The apologists’ agenda is to support Israel no matter what and to explain away the palpable atrocities. It’s also an attempt to continue America’s shameful complicity.

If Israel and its supporters were truly concerned about antisemitism (rather than needing it to prevent assimilation and abandonment of Israel), they’d do some soul-searching. Israel identifies itself as the Jewish state and claims to represent “the Jewish people” – not only Jewish Israelis but Jews everywhere whether they want it or not. Thus Israel’s long mistreatment of the Palestinians encourages, at least tacitly, the relatively few antisemites, who are eager to point to anything they can use to describe “the Jewish people” as bad actors. “The Jewish state equals the Jewish people” – that’s what they’ve been told by the pro-Israel side. It’s not true, but they’re happy to believe it.

In other words, Israel’s definition of itself and its abuse of the Palestinians ratify the antisemites’ crazy ideas about the international conspiratorial malevolence and collective guilt of “the Jewish people.” Antisemites are encouraged to ignore the over-representation of Jewish Americans in the ranks of Israel’s opponents.

Israel and its supporters then aggravate matters by strategically equating odious antisemitism with honorable anti-Zionism. That in turn gives cover to the antisemites, who can hide in plain sight among the anti-Zionists.

That amounts to Israel’s protection of antisemitism!

You’d think that would be a bad thing. And it is. So why do Israel’s leaders and supporters do it? Because all that matters is the tribal sanctuary, Israel.

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.