These Billionaires Subsidize the Israeli Military Through a US Nonprofit


A US nonprofit funnels money from billionaires like Home Depot’s co-founder to effectively subsidize Israeli troops.

By Derek Seidman , 

Truthout

December 2, 2024

David Foster and Haim Saban speak onstage at Friends of The Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) Western Region Gala at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on November 1, 2018, in Beverly Hills, California.

Shahar Azran / Getty Images

Israel’s war on Gaza — marked by extensive war crimes, and widely seen as an ongoing genocide — has been backed by the U.S. government, which has provided Israel with billions of dollars in weapons to be used against Palestinians. On the ground and from the air, the genocidal siege has been carried out by Israel’s military, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whose soldiers regularly post videos and images on social media of them destroying Palestinian neighborhoods, looting Palestinian homes and abusing Palestinian prisoners.

“The main and sometimes only machinery of repressing, killing, genociding and ethnically cleansing Palestinians is the IDF,” Haim Bresheeth, author of the wide-ranging history of the Israeli military, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Force Made a Nation, told Truthout. “This is an illegal, immoral army.”

In the U.S., there’s one group that has long worked to mobilize ironclad support for the Israeli military: the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF).

Founded in 1981, the FIDF is a nonprofit organization that raises tens of millions of dollars annually to fund a range of programs that effectively subsidize the Israeli military by providing numerous services and benefits for Israeli troops. It also channels major donations from a host of powerful billionaires toward these programs.

In building and maintaining support for the IDF, particularly among U.S. Jews, the FIDF promotes and reproduces the dominant Zionist notion that American Judaism is synonymous with support for Israel, and that the essence of support for Israel is support for the Israeli military.

The “Friends of the IDF”

Bresheeth, the son of two Holocaust survivors, served as a second lieutenant in the Israeli military’s Golani Brigade during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It was an experience that disillusioned him forever.

“This is where my anti-Zionism started,” Bresheeth, a filmmaker and photographer who taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before retiring, told Truthout.

Bresheeth argues that the Israeli military is at the core of Israeli national identity. It is the vehicle through which Israeli identity was historically constructed, he says, and it continues to hold Israeli national identity together amid the tensions and contradictions of Zionism.

“It’s the organization that dictates identity in Israel,” says Bresheeth.


The FIDF is a nonprofit organization that raises tens of millions of dollars annually to fund a range of programs that effectively subsidize the Israeli military.

According to its website, the U.S.-based FIDF’s vision is “to secure the survival of Israel, providing a thriving homeland for Jews worldwide.” It describes itself as “the single organization authorized to collect charitable donations on behalf of the soldiers of the IDF across the United States.”

The FIDF is a substantial operation. It has nearly two dozen chapters across the U.S. and 60 board members. It oversees programs ranging from scholarships for Israeli soldiers, to funding construction projects, to support for wounded soldiers, to helping donors subsidize foreign-born soldiers in the Israeli military or even whole military units.

The FIDF reported nearly $175 million in net assets in 2022. Covering an FIDF fundraiser in late 2023, journalist Sophie Hurwitz noted that the group “has a history of aggressive and effective fundraising,” raking in tens of millions every year.

Indeed, the FIDF is a fundraising powerhouse. Its galas typically raise millions of dollars and feature A-list celebrities. From 2018 to 2022, FIDF received $450 million in gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees. It raised more than $50 million in the weeks after October 7, 2023.

While FIDF calls itself a “non-political, non-military organization,” it also describes itself as “the official U.S. partner of Israel’s soldiers.”

Speakers at FIDF galas include top Israeli political and military leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz. One past CEO, Meir Klifi, served as a military secretary to Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Netanyahu before joining the FIDF, and another past CEO, Yitzhak (Jerry) Gershon, was a major-general in the Israeli army. (Both stirred controversy in the pages of Haaretz for accepting unusually large nonprofit salaries with the FIDF.)

Its fundraisers have also featured John Hagee, the far right U.S. televangelist who is the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, and who is notorious for making antisemitic and homophobic remarks.

Ideologically, the FIDF projects extreme Zionist views. It regularly uses maps that depict Israeli borders from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and include the Golan Heights in Syria. It has reposted trolling posts against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). One of its attempts to solicit donations asked: “What is the most direct way for you to help Israel’s IDF soldiers, the defenders of Western values?”

Earlier this year, FIDF drew scrutiny for inviting donors to a talk by Israeli military intelligence veteran Eliyahu Yossian, who has said that “there are no innocents in Gaza” and that Israel should attack Gaza “with the aim of revenge, zero morality, maximum corpses.” Yossian has also said “there is no population in Gaza, there are 2.5 million terrorists.'”
Subsidizing Israeli Soldiers

Donors can subsidize entire military units through the FIDF’s “Adopt a Battalion” or “Adopt a Brigade” programs, funding services such as “financial grants” (likely cash grants to soldiers), flights home, holiday vouchers and events intended to “boost morale and team spirit.”

For example, the Miami chapter of the FIDF has sponsored the Golani Brigade — the same brigade Bresheeth belonged to in the 1960s. The brigade “is considered the first combat brigade of the IDF” whose soldiers “have fought in all of Israel’s wars,” including its current siege of Gaza.

According to the FIDF’s most recent tax disclosure, in 2022 it spent about $2.5 million on the Adopt a Brigade program to “sponsor the needs of the 24 brigades adopted by FIDF (over 50,000 soldiers).”


From 2018 to 2022, FIDF received $450 million in gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees. It raised more than $50 million in the weeks after October 7, 2023.

One of the FIDF’s flagship programs is its “Lone Soldiers” program that provides thousands of foreign-born recruits to the Israeli military with cash gifts when they begin their service, holiday vouchers, housing, flights home and recreational activities, like visits to water parks.

In 2022, the FIDF spent about $5.8 million “sponsor[ing] flights” for over 6,800 for lone soldiers, and $5.5 million on providing “economic relief” to about 68,300 soldiers “who are in financial distress through the provision of cash subsidies, holiday gift packages, food vouchers, and other assistance to their families.”

A 2018 Haaretz report on the FIDF’s Lone Soldier program noted that young Jewish adults “often learn about foreign-born IDF recruits, so-called ‘lone soldiers’ on sponsored trips to Israel or college campuses” and that “every year, hundreds of American teenagers and college graduates decide to enlist in the IDF with the wide support of American Jewish institutions.”

In the article, the FIDF said it “does not promote or take part in the process of recruiting or encouraging soldiers to enlist in the IDF,” despite offering millions of dollars’ worth of financial support to “lone soldiers.”

While the FIDF doesn’t donate military equipment to Israeli troops, some of its leaders participate in operations that send weapons to Israel. For example, FIDF board member David Hager has a personal foundation that donates to the One Israel Fund, which sends military supplies to settler militias in the occupied West Bank. Hager also serves on the board of a nonprofit that supports the Netzah Yehuda Israeli military battalion that has been tied to alleged abuses against Palestinians.

In 2016, the FIDF was among the defendants in a $34.5 billion lawsuit filed by 30 Palestinian Americans over connections to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The FIDF also finances construction projects for Israeli troops that include “sports centers, culture halls, synagogues, memorial rooms, swimming pools, sports facilities, and soldiers’ homes throughout Israel.” It’s currently finishing up a building project (named after the family of entertainment billionaire Haim Saban, which donates millions to the FIDF) that will house 222 of Israel’s “lone soldiers.”
Billionaire Donors

While many supporters are smaller donors to the group, several billionaires give huge amounts to the FIDF.

Bernie Marcus, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, gave nearly $13 million to the FIDF from 2009 to 2022, including over $6.6 million between 2018 and 2022 alone, according to a Truthout analysis of tax records of Marcus’s philanthropic arm.

Marcus made several donations per year specific to different FIDF programs, prior to his death in November 2024. His biggest donations until 2022 came in 2012 and 2013, when he donated $2 million each year to the FIDF’s “Lone Soldier Program – Soldier Aliyah Fund.”


FIDF drew scrutiny for inviting donors to a talk by Israeli military intelligence veteran Eliyahu Yossian, who has said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”

As Truthout has previously noted, Marcus was a megadonor to conservative and Zionist organizations, anti-union groups and exchange programs between U.S. and Israeli police.

Entertainment billionaire Haim Saban, who also sits on the FIDF board and has chaired lavish Beverly Hills FIDF fundraisers, has donated tens of millions to the FIDF over the past two decades. In 2017, for example, he pledged over $9 million to the group.

Casey Wasserman, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics power broker and heir of Hollywood baron Lew Wasserman, donated $525,000 to the FIDF in 2019 toward an “outdoor athletic center.” Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of Elliott Management, one of the world’s biggest hedge fund firms, gave over $1.7 million to the FIDF from 2011 to 2019, including over $1 million in 2015.

The largest donation to FIDF may have come in 2017, when Larry Ellison — the co-founder and chairman of Oracle, and who is worth over $200 billion — gave the group $16.6 million. Ellison also donated $10 million in 2014.

Another huge FIDF donor is WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, who is worth $16.3 billion. Koum donated over $6.8 million to FIDF from 2018 to 2022, including $200,000 in 2022 toward a lone soldier center and $5.3 million alone in 2018. Koum has also donated to the Elad NGO, which supports settlement expansion in East Jerusalem.

Koum, Marcus and Singer were also all among the top AIPAC donors in the 2024 election cycle.

Late billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his widow Miriam Adelson have given millions to FIDF. The Adelsons and the Israeli army came under scrutiny in 2017 in the pages of Haaretz when the billionaires were flown to an Israeli military base for a private visit, permitted by the Israel military, to view a sports auditorium they funded.

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump and former top adviser to Trump during his first presidential term, formerly sat on the FIDF board of directors, and Kushner’s family has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the FIDF.

In addition to billionaires’ donations, many corporations also offer matching gifts to the FIDF for their employees who donate, according to the FIDF website.

Some of the corporate donors offer matching gifts of anywhere between $1,000 and $15,000, and include asset managers and banks like BlackRock, Vanguard Group, KKR, Apollo Global Management and Bank of America; weapons companies like Northrop Grumman, Honeywell and Moog; tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple; and grocery and restaurant companies like Starbucks, McDonald’s and Aldi.

In April 2024, a group of Apple shareholders and former and current employees wrote an open letter demanding that the company halt its matching donations to organizations tied to Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. The FIDF was among several groups named in the letter.

In Canada, activists succeeded in revoking the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund of Canada over its support for illegal expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In the U.S., activists and elected officials in New York are attempting to advance the “Not On Our Dime!” act to “prohibit not-for-profit corporations from engaging in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity.”

“They Are Supporting the Instrument of Genocide”

While the FIDF channels millions of dollars to the Israeli military’s soldiers, the money is a tiny drop in a large bucket. The U.S. has given at least $22.76 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023, on top of the billions it annually gave in the years prior.

Ultimately, Bresheeth says, the FIDF’s larger impact is more ideological than financial.

“Every penny is useful, but what’s more useful is the almost semi-religious connection between American Jews and the Israeli army,” he says. “The army is the essence of Israel, and not just for the Palestinians, but for many Zionist Jews in America.”

Bresheeth laments how Zionism — which he calls “a replacement of Judaism” and “basically a non-religious religion” — has become the dominant force shaping Jewish identity, replacing previous values of cosmopolitanism, progressivism and “even socialism.”

He says the “main tenet” of American Jewish support for Israel pivots around the military, reflected in groups like the FIDF.

“They are supporting the instrument of suppression, of murder, of destruction, of genocide,” he says.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian living in Buffalo, New York. He is a regular contributor for Truthout and a contributing writer for LittleSis.

ZIONISM IS FASCISM

America’s future depends on Trump’s promise to punish woke universities

A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that he will make good on his vow to defund institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.

Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Mullett Arena on Arizona State University campus in Tempe, Ariz. on Oct. 24, 2024. Photo by Ash Ponders for “The Washington Post” via Getty Images.

EDITORIAL

Jonathan S. Tobin 

Editor-in-chief of JNS 

(Jewish News Syndicate).

(Dec. 2, 2024 / JNS)

Occidental College seemingly waved the white flag last week in its efforts to defend itself against charges of tolerating antisemitism on its Los Angeles campus. The school agreed to a “sweeping settlement” with the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that acknowledged the ongoing hardships, harassment and discrimination faced by Jewish students since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Occidental’s apathy to all this, which was little different from what has been happening at dozens if not hundreds of other American institutions of higher learning, violated its obligations to prohibit such discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But for many observers, the context for the agreement was not so much a belated interest by one school to address the wrongs suffered by its Jewish students. Rather, it was the fact that it came a few weeks after the election victory of Donald Trump. As one headline in a news article about the settlement put it, “College settles antisemitism claims before Trump can make good on accreditation threats.”
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Trump repeatedly made clear during the 2024 election campaign that the educational establishment would be as much a target for his second administration as the denizens of the Washington “swamp” such as the liberal-dominated federal bureaucracy that did so much to sabotage and obstruct his first four years in the White House.

More will hinge, however, on whether he makes good on this promise than the fate of school administrators or even the safety of Jewish students.

Trump’s war on woke
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The president-elect vowed to punish colleges and universities that tolerated not just the sort of antisemitism that went on at Occidental and so many other schools. He’s also determined to rid American higher education of the plague of “woke” ideology. That’s a term that refers to the way left-wing ideologues have conquered academia and imposed toxic ideas like critical race theory and intersectionality that divide humanity into two permanently warring groups of “white” oppressors and “people of color” who are their victims. The left’s long march through U.S. institutions—and that includes the arts, corporate America and government—has involved the indoctrination of a generation of students in the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that trashes equal opportunity (the opposite of “equity”) and includes only certain approved minorities while excluding everyone else, including minorities like Jews.

Seen in that context, antisemitism is just one aspect of the broad damage that the adoption of this new secular religion by those in charge of education has been doing to America. It’s also fueling a surge in racial divisiveness and a war on the canon of Western civilization that is the foundation of a society grounded in the rule of law, which made America a great nation as well as one that was particularly hospitable to religious minorities.

That means the stakes involved in whether or not Trump keeps his vow to reform education and to turn the antisemites out are as important as any involving his second-term agenda. It represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reverse the left’s conquest of academia. If he and/or his appointees falter in their resolve, the consequences for the country as a whole and for Jews will be incalculable.

But as the coverage of the issue in liberal legacy corporate media like The New York Times and The Guardian indicates, the educational establishment and their allies on the political left and the press are determined to oppose Trump’s goals. They have already begun a campaign to obfuscate the issue and demonize efforts to roll back the woke orthodoxy as part of what they routinely and falsely describe as the next administration’s putative authoritarian putsch. The truth is just the opposite since the real authoritarians are the bureaucrats and “educators” who have been imposing their distorted neo-Marxist vision on the country while also fomenting and enabling a new wave of antisemitism.

Ironically, the legal settlement with Occidental, which was celebrated by both the ADL and the Brandeis Institute as a victory in the effort to push back against campus antisemitism, was an indication of just how feeble the effort to counteract woke antisemitism has been up until now.

The agreement involved some elements that are necessary such as efforts to train school administrators to be more aware of antisemitism and to take into account the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism when dealing with instances of Jew-hatred.

But the lawyerly document Occidental signed leaves plenty of leeway for it to evade responsibility for future violations. It can be defended as probably as much as could be achieved in such a negotiation at this point in time.

Title VI antisemitism complaints to the U.S. Department of Education—the primary mode of carrying on the fight against this scourge in recent years—involves a lengthy process that has, to date, never resulted in any real punishment for even the most egregious violators of the rights of Jewish students. Stripping a university of its federal funding—something that is a given for any institution that engaged in open discrimination against African-Americans or Hispanics—is the sole remedy that could, if fully implemented, mean a much-needed fundamental change in the way American higher education operates.

And as long as schools retain their woke administrators and faculty, as well as curricula that discard traditional standards and help fuel antisemitism, agreements like the one with Occidental are almost certain to fail to create the kind of change that is needed.

Draining the swamp

That is why Trump’s scorched-earth approach is so necessary, even as it is being denounced by the same people who are responsible for creating or perpetuating the current mess as too extreme or even needed at all.

Trump’s stated intention of “draining the swamp” throughout the federal government is being depicted as evidence of his supposed authoritarian impulses and racism. But this is exactly the sort of argument based on a high-handed dismissal of genuine concerns and problems that have caused so many Americans to lose faith both in our educational system and in Washington.

His threats can seem crude to those accustomed to politicians being guarded in their remarks. Yet the events of the last few years—starting with the moral panic about race behind the Black Lives Matter riots and then on to the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism—demonstrated that a restrained “business as usual” approach won’t cut it when the collapse of our most cherished institutions is at stake. Their transformation into purveyors of neo-Marxist indoctrination and toxic ideas that enable hatred for both the West and Jews is a crisis of enormous proportions. It is happening at both the college and graduate levels, as well as in K-12 schools where leftist teachers’ unions have also imposed the indoctrination of critical race theory.

The only reasonable response to this disaster is exactly the kind of tough-minded purge that Trump has envisioned. And far from this being an uninformed or extreme approach, Trump and his transition team are consulting with experts like Christopher Rufo, author of an authoritative and essential book on the woke plague—America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything—and incorporating the ideas of “Project Esther,” a serious plan for dealing with campus antisemitism produced by The Heritage Foundation.

All of this has produced panic on the left and even among mainstream liberals who have been conditioned by partisan political rhetoric to believe that Trump is a second Hitler. They worry that he is already going too far in seeking accountability for institutions that engage in racial discrimination and tolerate antisemitism under the guise of DEI “anti-racist” policies, believing that somehow this will destroy academic freedom. What his critics fail to recognize is that American education is already enduring a catastrophic transformation that has silenced dissent against woke doctrines that seek to trash the Western canon.

A necessary sledgehammer

The only way to fix it is with the same sort of Trumpian sledgehammer that tossed aside failed ideas about the Middle East in his first term that enabled him, among other important policy changes, to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and forge the Abraham Accords. If that means executive orders reversing President Joe Biden’s DEI orders that created woke commissars in every federal agency and department, that should be welcomed. If it means closing the largely useless and counter-productive Department of Education and enacting far-reaching reforms that will defund institutions clinging to discriminatory ideas and actions, then that should be cheered by those who cherish the values of equal opportunity, merit and zero tolerance for hatred and discrimination.

More to the point, it will mean that policing antisemitism on campus will be shifted away from the ineffectual Title VI complaints to federal education bureaucrats to a campaign of lawsuits conducted not just by groups like the Deborah Project, valuable though they may be, but by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with all of the vast resources at its command. In this manner, a message can be sent that will likely motivate the vast majority of college administrations to discard DEI and the tolerance of hate for Jews that accompanies it.

It is impossible to know whether the new administration will succeed. But rather than worrying that he is the wrong instrument to carry out this effort or wasting time decrying his rhetoric, it’s likely that only an outlier like Trump could contemplate such a bold project or have the will to see it to its logical end. Indeed, so grave is the threat that DEI and other leftist ideas pose to the country’s future that anything short of what he has discussed would be inadequate. Instead of expressing concerns or horror at his determination to enact real change, fair-minded Americans of all faiths and in both major political parties should be rooting for him to keep his word and to do everything he promised to punish colleges and universities, in addition to any other entity that promotes the sort of woke hate that has made life for Jewish students and anyone else who dissents against the new secular orthodoxy so difficult.


Jonathan S. Tobin
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin

 

Bringing Reality to the Palestinian Struggle

by Dan Lieberman / November 27th, 2024

The world ponders at the destruction that Israel has inflicted upon the Middle East and North Africa and questions why the United States serves as a surrogate force that assists Israel in accomplishing its purposes. How did a relatively few Zionists deceive an unknowing world to trust its cause and actions were legitimate, convince the United States government to aid and abet in the genocide of the Palestinian people, and achieve decisive power? If there were an obvious answer, and the answer predicted the future, then alerted governments would take remedial action. This has not happened. Approaches to ascertain the cause of the genocide of the Palestinian people and finding the solution to prevent it warrant scrutiny.

Zionism succeeded as a concept and failed as a mission. Starting with spurious premises, Zionism fulfilled promises to its followers, enabled some Jews to obtain a better life, and added little to what the established Jewish community had already achieved and was continuing to achieve. It traded destruction, oppression, and decades of suffering of the Palestinian community for a contrived state, an ideal nation where Jews could easily integrate and be safe from persecution and physical danger. The latter has not happened. The narrative consisted of unproven and fantastic propositions that scattered Jewish communities throughout the world, who spoke different languages, had different histories, ate different foods, and practiced different customs, constituted a nation. Although a limited number of Jews lived, visited, or had any interest in the area for 2000 years, this nation had a national home in Palestine. The latter concept succeeded from another preposterous supposition ─ 19th century Jews, separated by 100 generations, were descendants of Hebrew tribes that wandered the area, and their wanderings, which left no significant footprints on the soil, were mesmerizing connections, beckoning Jews to return. The preposterous narrative remains relatively unchallenged in a preposterous world.

Palestinians watched helplessly as Zionists seized their lands and kept them in submission. Caught between “heads I lose,” and ”tails you win” choices, the Palestinians had no choice but to participate in meetings of  “peace proposals” that offered establishment of two states, while knowing  that the Israeli government never intended to fulfill a “two state agreement.” If the PLO refused to continue with the farce, it faced accusations of sabotaging peace; going along with the farce meant diverting from countering Israel’s aggressions that prevented peace. This had become obvious during the 1980s, when Palestinians in the West Bank were hopeful, willing to cooperate with Israeli authorities, and eager to pave a path to self-governance. During that decade, Jewish terrorists planted bombs in the cars of elected Mayors Karim Khalaf of Ramallah and Bassam Shakaa of Nablus. Khalaf lost a foot and Shakaalost both of his legs. A third bomb planted in the car of Ibrahim Tawil, elected Mayor of El Bireh, was discovered before detonation. Between 1980 and 1984, Jewish terrorists killed 23 and injured 191 Palestinians in 354 attacks. The terrorist attacks on Palestinians motivated Hamas, a charity organization, to rebrand itself into an organization fighting for Palestinian rights. As usual, the Zionists used the charges against them for their benefit; the terrorist Israelis who murdered Palestinians provoked Hamas to retaliate and Hamas became known as a terrorist organization murdering innocent Israelis.

Not until recent years, after several Israeli invasions brought death and destruction to the Gazans, not until illegal settlers stole land, proliferated throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem, and casually murdered Palestinians, and not until the 2023 invasion of Gaza has the world’s populace realized the extent of Israel’s murderous rampages and intent to commit genocide of the Palestinian people. Not until contemporary times has the extent of a worldwide propaganda machine that obscured the truth of the Zionist endeavor been completely recognized. There is no Israeli state, no Israeli people, no Israeli government with which to deliberate and arbitrate. They refuse all entreaties and, by doing that, deny their existence. Three salient characteristics describe the Zionism that led to the establishment of Israel:

(1)   The Zionist adventure is best characterized as an enterprise, which became criminal in its manifestation. An enterprising band of discontented and idealistic Jewish outliers organized themselves as a business enterprise. Their Histadrut, the General Organization of Workers in Israel, became one of the most powerful institutions in the British mandate and turned into a state sponsored enterprise. As an enterprise, the marauding Zionists resembled the Puritans; their sponsors, Jewish entrepreneurs throughout the world, duplicated the Massachusetts Bay Company, financiers of the Puritan voyage.

A small congregation of Puritans refused to reconcile their independent organization with the established Church of England. Desiring to preserve their identity and feeling constantly persecuted, they sought new places to live their unique social and communal life. In the year 1621, they concluded Europe would never accept them and sought an opportunity in America. The Massachusetts Bay Company sponsored the Puritan settlements and constructed the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose fatal encounter with the local native population set the stage for the settlement of the entire coast-to-coast American territory and the decimation of the native peoples.

The Zionist experience is not being detoured and, because the result may be the same ─ decimation of the native population ─ it is important that the crisis be accurately characterized. Israel is a criminal state that willfully murders Palestinians, steals their lands, ethnically cleanses them, buries their villages under rubble, and destroys their history and heritage.

One word summarizes the taking of another person’s property, livelihood, and dignity – theft! In this case, there is a specific type of theft, Raubwirtschaft, German for “plunder economy.” In Raubwirtschaft, the state economy is partially based on robbery, looting and plundering conquered territories. States that engage in Raubwirtschaft are in continuous warfare with their neighbors and usurp the resources of their conquered subjects, while claiming security objectives and defensive actions against defenseless people.

(2) Israel is a mirror image of the Nazi state.
Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany result from its constant wars and policies that insinuate Israel as a repressive and militaristic nation.

• Virulent nationalism ─ Israel, similar to Nazi Germany, combines a virulent nationalism with militarism.
• Irredentism ─ Annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession, drove the Third Reich. Israel’s irredentism regains mythical lands and joins a single folk in these lands.
• Military adventures ─ The Third Reich fought continuous wars for about eight years. Israel has been fighting continuously for 75 years. The former explained their military thrusts as revenging a “stab in the back” loss in World War I. Israel explains its battles by warranted reprisals, defensive, and security measures.
• Using overwhelming military force to subdue powerless antagonists ─ The Nazis and its Panzer troops went full attack against all opponents, regardless of their strengths. Israel uses a strategy that minimizes its casualties, and despite its claim of being a humane army, has always attacked with pulverizing force, with kill ratios of tens to one and having civilians constitute a large proportion of casualties
• Racist laws ─ The Nazis had their Nuremberg laws. In Israel, a Jew cannot marry a non-Jew within the boundaries of Israel, similar to a Nuremberg Law that prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans. The Nakba Law, states that “groups or institutions that mourn Israel’s Independence or deny the state’s Jewish and democratic nature” can be denied state funds. The Citizenship Law allows the state to revoke citizenship and imprison anyone convicted of acting against “the sovereignty of the state.” Few Palestinian Israelis can rent housing or buy property in West Jerusalem. Immigrant Jews are able to acquire property and not allowed to sell the property to Arab citizens. Few, if any Arabs, have been able to purchase government sponsored housing and obtain mortgages. A separation of ethnicities results in the separation of their activities, recreation centers, schools, and education.
• Severe repression in occupied territories ─ Israel duplicates Nazi repression of conquered people, and construction of ghettoes to house them. Repression of Palestinians under occupation includes confiscation of Palestinian lands for military use, destruction of wells, olive trees and agriculture, raids on villages, obtrusive checkpoints, mass arrests of opposition, and denial of highway use. Walls separate Palestinian communities and families and farmers from livestock and fields, choke the Palestinian economy, and obstruct daily exchanges between people.
• Killing of opposition and punitive measures after an attack ─ The Nazis used punitive measures and collective punishment to terrorize its captive peoples and crushed resistance. Israel has done the same. The Nazis had Lidice, a village destroyed after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi leader in Bohemia and Moravia. In 1953, in retaliation for a Palestinian guerrilla incursion into Israel that killed several Israeli civilians, the Israeli military raided the West Bank village of Qibya, killed 67 Palestinians and destroyed 56 houses. Palestine has been victim to tens of Lidicies ─ destruction of areas and houses due to accusations of being the homes of suicide bombers.
• Ethnic cleansing ─ The Nazis planned to move populations in Eastern European nations and repopulate the areas with Germans. After the 1948 and 1967 wars, Israel destroyed 412 Palestinian villages and eventually created 1.2 million refugees who were not permitted to return to their homes. Palestinian bank accounts, land, homes, and industries were confiscated. Incursions have destroyed patrimony, archives, and cultural identity of the Palestinians. Israel military seized the Palestinian archives in Beirut during the war in Lebanon and, under international pressure, eventually returned them.
• Propaganda ─ Due to its international reach, the Israel propaganda machine exceeds that of the Nazis, churning out each day books, films, plays, music, and articles that extend memories of the Holocaust, references to anti-Semitism, and the greatness of little Israel who needs support as it fights against the world’s evils. An army of several hundreds of thousands of Israeli supporters include planted “emigrants” to the United States and Germany, who invade civic life and institutions throughout the western word, lobby support for Israel, criticize opponents, spread false charges of anti-Semitism, and convince the world of Israel’s cause.
• Genocide ─ The Nazis are identified with a genocide of European Jews. Israel’s policies are paving a route to destruction of the Palestinian people. Hopelessness, despair, immobility, lack of redress for the loss of their lands, economic insecurity, and constant attacks against their persona and livelihood drive the Palestinians to a difficult existence. Israel’s occupying force shows no care for the rights of the occupied people and no desire to address the fatal issues concerning them; even reinforcing the misery.

(3) Psychologically disturbed ─ Widely known and not widely discussed, are the disturbing comments and activities of Jewish Israelis and Zionist Jews around the world. Rarely censored by the Israeli government and their native countries, they give an impression that Zionist Jews are morally corrupt, psychologically disturbed, and gain pleasure in lying, deceiving, and harming others, even murdering innocents. Zionist Jews elevate themselves to a superior and unique place in the firmament, the chosen people to whom all others must give homage. Claiming to be eternal victims of anti-Semitism, they daily demand restitution and forgiveness for mostly fabricated crimes committed against them.

Nowhere and never in the civilized world have a preponderance of a nation’s leaders and its citizens expressed hatred and violence against others equivalent to the expressions from Israel’s leaders and citizens. Without shame, without control, and without concern of their malevolent appearance to others, their detestable utterances have become commonplace and are well known.

• Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu suggested that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities” in the current conflict.
• Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals.”
• Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “The Palestinian village of Huwwara should be wiped out. The state needs to do it and not private citizens.”
• David Ben-Gurion said, “it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We will turn Gaza into an island of ruins.”
• Former Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave orders “to break the bones of Palestinian inciters.”
• Ariel Kallner, a member of Israel’s parliament, said, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join! Their Nakba, because like then in 1948, the alternative is clear.”

Israel’s citizens reflect an indoctrination of hate and violence that complement their government’s expressions. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans arriving at Ben Gurion airport from Amsterdam sang: “Ole ole, ole ole ole, Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!” An X user commented, “These people are deranged. They have lost all humanity. A culture of murder and theft doesn’t come without cost.”

A rocket hit the northern Israel home of Safa Awad, a Palestinian Israeli schoolteacher, and killed her. The Middle East Eye reports that a volunteer at Magen David Adom, an Israeli rescue service organization, wrote, in a post that has received more than a thousand likes, that, “There is nothing to feel sorry for. She is a terrorist in every respect. She is not in our favour in any way. May her getting fucked be blessed.”

Go to Quora, and observe a string of comments by Israeli propagandists who plant  question and then answer it: “Gaza has a fertility rate of 3.38 in 2023. In 2005 its fertility rate was 6.2. Islam at its finest. They breed like cockroaches.”

Contending  those defending Israel’s genocidal tactics as geopolitical power politics (USA), guilt for the Holocaust (Germany), and as a settler colonial state (Western nations) have legs, but are counterproductive and have not moved nations to contend Israel. Accusing nations of duplicity only makes them defend themselves and reinforce their duplicity. Showing that Israel cannot be defended and is an immoral, social, economic, and military threat to humanity ─ well, who wants to defend a nation of that description?

Unless others share in the proceeds, a criminal nation has no defenders. What benefit is it for the Western nations to support criminal activities that negatively affects them?

Western nations and the Soviet Union fought a World War to defeat Nazism and bring order to the world.

• How can nations allow the transfer of the racist and genocidal doctrines of the German Nazis to a similar regime? Why did we fight the war?
• How can Germany claim to makes amends for its past Nazi experience and support the transfer of that experience to another nation?
• How can nations allow Israel serve as a model and catalyst for ultra-reactionary regimes?

The mentality that perpetrates the genocide and regales in it is unacceptable. Turning protests against genocide into attacks on Jews, and using the anti-Semitism word are delusionary. We need protection against people who exhibit murderous, racist, venomous, and delusionary characteristics and not offerings of invitations for them to manipulate our society.

The analysis may seem overkill, but for understanding the critical situation, it is necessary to place in proper perspective the nature of the Israeli regime. Treating it as a despotic nation is incomplete. People make a country and the Israeli people and their worldwide supporters are not the empathetic and cordial populace that guarantees healthy living.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

McGill Admin Battles its Pro-Palestinian Students

Yves Engler

 November 29, 2024
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Image by Sohaib Al Kharsa.

The Harvard of the North has been the site of an increasingly intense battle linking Justin Trudeau, Roger Waters, a government handbook marginalizing Palestinians and a historic student strike for Palestine. The alma mater of the prime minister and a disproportionate share of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is aggressively repressing a movement to divest from apartheid and genocide.

At the start of the month, the McGill administration canceled the room booked for a talk by the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese. It’s remarkable that the prestigious university would suppress a representative of the United Nations but it’s consistent with McGill’s increasingly authoritarian response to those protesting genocide. Days before Albanese’s talk, the university sought to convince a judge to extend a 10 day ban on protests near its many buildings across downtown Montréal. The administration also had Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) banned by threatening the Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) entire funding structure if it didn’t suspend the longstanding student club.

The administration’s response to an encampment calling for the university to cut ties with Israeli universities and companies assisting the slaughter in Gaza was to repeatedly ask the Montréal police to intervene. They even sought a court ruling to force the police to do so. After that was unsuccessful McGill hired a private security firm to demolish the encampment in July. They then largely shuttered campus for the next six weeks.

The encampment on McGill’s lower field, which is unused but exceptionally well-placed downtown, enraged genocide supporters. They pressed the police and politicians to act and instigated a court case to force the police to dismantle it. Over the past decade the Zionist lobby has become ever more aggressive in seeking to overturn student democracy and undercut opposition to apartheid.

Last November McGill students voted for the Policy Against Genocide in Palestine. In the largest referendum turnout in SSMU’s history, 78.7% of undergraduates called on the university administration to denounce Israel’s “genocidal bombing campaign” against Gaza. The resolution also called on McGill to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.”

Before the election was completed the genocide lobby had already demanded the student’s vote be ignored. Simultaneously, they pressed McGill’s administration to condemn the resolution and demand SSMU jettison the results. If the student society ratified the results, the administration announced that it would terminate its Memorandum of Agreement with SSMU, which regulates fees, use of name and other matters between the university and student union.

The Israel lobby followed a similar playbook 18 months earlier when 71% of McGill undergraduates supported a Palestine Solidarity Policy, which called for boycotting. Between 2014 and 2016 there were three votes inspired by the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement at biannual SSMU general assemblies. Fearing students at the prestigious institution would support BDS, the Israel lobby went into overdrive. Among a slew of pressure tactics, they got then Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau to tweet that “the BDS movement, like Israeli Apartheid Week, has no place on Canadian campuses. As a McGill alum, I’m disappointed. Enough is Enough.” In February 2016 a motion mandating the student union support some BDS demands passed the union’s largest ever general assembly. But after the McGill administration, Montreal’s English media and pro-Israel Jewish groups blitzed students the online confirmation vote failed.

In response to growing sympathy among students for the plight of Palestinians, Zionist activists worked to ban these resolutions, claiming they were discriminatory. After being challenged for promoting this suppression campaign, anti-Palestinian activist Noah Lew cried “antisemitism” when he wasn’t elected to SSMU’s Board of Directors. At a October 2017 general assembly, Democratize SSMU sought to impeach the student union’s president Muna Tojiboeva for her role in suspending a SSMU vice president and adopting a Judicial Board decision that declared a BDS resolution unconstitutional. While they couldn’t muster the two thirds of votes required to oust the non-Jewish president of the student union, Democratize SSMU succeeded in blocking the re-election of two Board of Directors candidates who supported the effort to outlaw BDS resolutions.

After failing to be re-elected to the Board of Directors at the same meeting Lew claimed he was “blocked from participating in student government because of my Jewish identity and my affiliations with Jewish organizations.” Lew’s claim received international coverage and the affair was even mentioned in the House of Commons, prompting the (anti-Palestinian) administration to launch a major investigation. After interviewing 38 students, former student ombudsman Dr. Spencer Boudreau concluded that he could “not substantiate the notion that the vote was motivated by anti-Semitism.” Rather, Boudreau found that the vote was “motivated by politics, that is, based on his [Lew] support for Israel and Zionism and/or for his view of the BDS movement.” Considering the uproar and political climate, this was a devastating finding.

But it didn’t stop, and probably helped, Lew being hired as an antisemitism authority by Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism Irwin Cotler (a former McGill professor and student). Lew interned at Cotler’s Raoul Wallenberg Center for human rights and in 2022 was hired to assist the special envoy. Probably the only Canadian ever shown by an official university inquiry to have fabricated claims of antisemitism to smear Palestine solidarity activists, Lew was the “lead drafter” of the government’s just released “Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism”. Lew’s involvement tells you what you need to know about this latest effort to suppress opposition to apartheid and genocide.

In an example of how McGill weaponizes the charge of antisemitism against its students, university president Deep Saini recently smeared students at a town hall hosted by the most vocal advocate of Israeli violence in the House of Commons. In an event Liberal MP Anthony Housefather billed as a discussion about Jewish students and faculty’s “safe return to campus”, Saini declared, “It’s very hard to tell whether the antisemitism went up or it became more overt.” In a talk in which Saini asked Jewish Zionist students to spy on professors, the president added “Did we actually see a rise in antisemitism? Or did we see people using this moment, forum these circumstances, to give themselves a license to express antisemitism?”

Does Saini truly believe that students organizing an encampment, hunger strike, rallies and referendum in favour of divestment are engaged in antisemitism? The answer is yes if billionaire McGill donor Sylvan Adams, who promotes war with Iran and greater Israeli violence in Gaza, can be believed. In a Canadian Jewish News interview about McGill last month Adams said he and Saini “agree on everything” when it comes to the “problem” of anti-Semitism.

Even if Saini didn’t believe this nonsense, Adams and other mega donors would ensure he toed the line. In an interview in which he calls on McGill to expel students opposing genocide, Adams details how Zionist donors are coordinating to leverage their wealth to suppress students’ demands.

In 2022 Adams put up $29 million to establish the Sylvan Adams Sports Science Institute as part of a project that partners McGill with Tel Aviv University. Other Israel supporters such the Azrielis, Seymour Schulich, Aldo Bensadoun, Heather Reisman/Gerald Schwartz and Charles Bronfman have given tens of millions of dollars to the university. Also McGill’s chancellor, Pierre Boivin, is Vice-Chair of the Board of arch-Zionist Stephen Bronfman’s private investment firm Claridge Inc, which is heavily invested in Israel.

Alongside a series of racist bromides against Muslims and the former Black woman president of Harvard, Adams attacks rock legend Roger Waters as a “nutball” in an interview in which he describes his “fantasy” to reunite Pink Floyd to play Israel. Waters has been maybe the highest-profile supporter of the McGill students, signing a public letters criticizing the administration’s suppression of their 2022 vote and rallying with SPHR on the eve of his show in Montreal that year. A week after an event that draw significant attention to the administration’s undemocratic and anti-Palestinian actions, B’nai Brith announced a lawsuit against SPHR and SSMU for asking students to vote on Palestinian rights. Amidst his touring Waters wrote a powerful retort to B’nai Brith’s bullying.

In response to Adams’ recent call to repress students Waters penned an op-ed rebuttal and letter to the McGill president in support of students opposing genocide. In it Waters challenged the billionaire who paid Madonna and Argentina’s football club to play Israel, to debate whether wealthy donors should be allowed to dictate university policy and whether Israel is committing genocide.

On the eve of Waters participating in an online event on “Students over donor money: the suppression of Palestine solidarity at McGill University and beyond”, Adams responded publicly. In a column, video and interview the “self-appointed ambassador for Israel” repeated his absurd claim that Qatar, Iran and China have put “trillions of dollars” into supporting students opposing apartheid and genocide. He also responded to the letter Waters sent Deep Saini, which 3500 have emailed the McGill president. Adams told the Jerusalem Post that his people reached out to Piers Morgan about hosting a debate but Waters hasn’t received any indication of that.

As Waters was rallying with students online, many McGill participated in probably the largest international focused student strike in Quebec history. Over 40 student associations representing 85 000 students voted for a two-day strike in solidarity with Palestine. Quebec’s largest college was completely closed Thursday. The students want their institutions to cut all ties to Israel and are also criticizing the repression targeting students at McGill (and Concordia).

Amidst the McGill administration’s increasing repression and ongoing refusal to divest from genocide, the bigger picture is more hopeful. Students at the university have become increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and considering how many Canadian government ministers are McGill alumnus this must terrify the Israel lobby.

Yves Engler’s latest book is Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military.