By Norman Solomon

“When someone shows you who they are,” Maya Angelou said, “believe them the first time.”

That should apply to foreign-policy elites who show you who they are, time after time.

Officials running the Pentagon and State Department have been in overdrive for more than 250 days in support of Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Supposedly dedicated to defense and diplomacy, those officials have worked to implement and disguise Washington’s war policies, which have taken more lives than any other government in this century.

Among the weapons of war, cluster munitions are especially horrific. That’s why 67 Democrats and an equal number of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted last week to prevent the U.S. government from continuing to send those weapons to armies overseas.

But more than twice as many House members voted the other way. They defeated a Pentagon funding amendment that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions to other countries. The lawmakers ensured that the U.S. can keep supplying those weapons to the military forces of Ukraine and Israel.

As of now, 124 nations have signed onto a treaty banning cluster munitions, which often wreck the bodies of civilians. The “bomblets” from cluster munitions “are particularly attractive to children because they resemble a bell with a loop of ribbon at the end,” the Just Security organization explains.

But no member of Congress need worry that one of their own children might pick up such a bomblet someday, perhaps mistaking it for a toy, only to be instantly killed or maimed with shrapnel.

The Biden administration correctly responded to indications (later proven accurate) that Russia was using cluster munitions in Ukraine. On Feb. 28, 2022, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told journalists that if the reports of Russian use of those weapons turned out to be true, “it would potentially be a war crime.”

Back then, the front page of the New York Times described “internationally banned cluster munitions” as “a variety of weapons — rockets, bombs, missiles and artillery projectiles — that disperse lethal bomblets in midair over a wide area, hitting military targets and civilians alike.”

Days later, the Times reported that NATO officials “accused Russia of using cluster bombs in its invasion,” and the newspaper added that “anti-personnel cluster bombs . . . kill so indiscriminately they are banned under international law.”

But when the Ukrainian military forces ran low on ammunition last year, the U.S. administration decided to start shipping cluster munitions to them.

“All countries should condemn the use of these weapons under any circumstances,” Human Rights Watch has declared.

BBC correspondent John Simpson summed up a quarter-century ago: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”

As the Congressional Research Service reported this spring, cluster munitions “disperse large numbers of submunitions imprecisely over an extended area.” They “frequently fail to detonate and are difficult to detect,” and “can remain explosive hazards for decades.”

The CRS report added: “Civilian casualties are primarily caused by munitions being fired into areas where soldiers and civilians are intermixed, inaccurate cluster munitions landing in populated areas, or civilians traversing areas where cluster munitions have been employed but failed to explode.”

The horrible immediate effects are just the beginning. “It’s been over five decades since the U.S. dropped cluster bombs on Laos, the most bombed country in the world per capita,” Human Rights Watch points out. “The contamination from cluster munitions remnants and other unexploded ordnance is so vast that fewer than 10 percent of affected areas have been cleared. An estimated 80 million submunitions still pose a danger, especially to curious children.”

The members of Congress who just greenlighted more cluster munitions are dodging grisly realities. The basic approach is to proceed as though such human realities don’t matter if an ally is using those weapons (or if the United States uses them, as happened in Southeast Asia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen).

Overall, with carnage persisting in Gaza, it’s easy enough to say that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown us who he is. But so has Presidente Biden, and so have the most powerful Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

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By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.

After working inside this country’s doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American war-making. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: “How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we’re superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

Dan had made history in 1971 by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, exposing the constant litany of official lies that accompanied the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War. In response, the government used the blunderbuss of the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute him. At age 41, he faced a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. But his trial ended abruptly with all charges dismissed when the Nixon administration’s illegal interference in the case came to light in mid-1972. Five decades later, he reflected: “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle.”

That miracle enabled Dan to keep on speaking, writing, researching, and protesting for the rest of his life. (In those five decades, he averaged nearly two arrests per year for civil disobedience.) He worked tirelessly to prevent and oppose a succession of new American wars. And he consistently gave eloquent public support as well as warm personal solidarity to heroic whistleblowers — Thomas Drake, Katharine Gun, Daniel Hale, Matthew Hoh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Mordechai Vanunu, Ann Wright, and others — who sacrificed much to challenge deadly patterns of official deceit.

Unauthorized Freedom of Speech

Dan often spoke out for freeing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose work had revealed devastating secret U.S. documents on America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of a visit in June 2015, when they said goodbye inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, I saw that both men were on the verge of tears. At that point, Assange was three years into his asylum at that embassy, with no end in sight.

Secretly indicted in the United States, Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for nearly four more years until London police dragged him off to prison. Hours later, in a radio interview, Dan said: “Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic.”

Unauthorized disclosures were the essence of what WikiLeaks had published and what Dan had provided with the Pentagon Papers. Similarly, countless exposés about U.S. government war crimes became possible due to the courage of Chelsea Manning, and profuse front-page news about the government’s systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment resulted from Edward Snowden’s bravery. While gladly publishing some of their revelations, major American newspapers largely refused to defend their rights.

Such dynamics were all too familiar to Dan. He told me that the attitude toward him of the New York Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize with its huge Pentagon Papers scoop, was akin to a district attorney’s view of a “snitch” — useful but distasteful.

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By Abba A. Solomon and Norman Solomon

In 2014, we wrote an article titled “The Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism.” At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu was in his sixth continuous year as Israel’s prime minister, while President Obama was well into his second term. And J Street, an emerging organization of Jews aligned with the Democratic administration, had momentum as “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans.”

From the outset, ever since its founding in 2007, J Street has implicitly offered itself as a liberal alternative to the hardline American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was established more than four decades earlier. An avowed purpose of J Street has been to seek a humane resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while maintaining fervent allegiance to Israel as “the Jewish state.” 

In the 10 years since our article, J Street — at pains to reconcile the contradictions between its “pro-Israel” bond and the increasing Israeli brutality toward Palestinians — has remained committed to the basic goal (or mirage) of a “Jewish and democratic” state. The war on Gaza since October has heightened those contradictions, thrusting into clearer view Israel’s actual creation-and-expansion story, illuminating the violent repression and expulsion of Palestinian people.

A significant number of American Jews are now willing to challenge the Zionist project while pointing out that it is inherently fated to suppress the human rights of non-Jews in Palestine. Speaking at a protest near Sen. Chuck Schumer’s home in Brooklyn last month, Naomi Klein said: “We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name.”

Standard claims about “democratic Israel” have fallen into notable disrepute on U.S. college campuses, with both Jewish and non-Jewish students this spring protesting against the manifest torture and slaughter of Gaza’s population. Rumblings were audible a decade ago, when the Jewish student group Hillel was roiled with a dispute over whether its national leadership could ban Hillel chapters on college campuses from hosting strong critics of Israeli policies. That dispute, we wrote at the time, “emerged from a long history of pressure on American Jews to accept Zionism and a ‘Jewish state’ as integral to Judaism.” Back then, some Jewish students — “pushing to widen the bounds of acceptable discourse” — were “challenging powerful legacies of conformity.”

This year, in mid-February, J Street issued a statement addressed to President Biden that urged him to propose recognition of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state as a solution leading to acceptance of Israel by Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. This is a rough equivalent of fiddling with the roof of a structure built on a grievously cracked foundation: the forced exile of non-Jews from much of Palestine — what is now Israel — and the refusal of their right of return, while maintaining a right of return (including to the occupied West Bank) for whoever can claim Jewish identity.

Whether Jewish or not, many Americans have come to question the arrogant absurdity of enabling an American in Brooklyn to claim Palestine while denying any such claim by ethnically cleansed Palestinians. In concordance with other Zionist groups, J Street presupposes that Palestinians should settle for areas designated by the Israeli colonizers (who must not be called colonizers), while they reserve a “right of return” only for themselves and their coreligionists.

J Street offers weak tea with its proposal for “a conflict-ending agreement in which Israel also ultimately recognizes Palestinian statehood.” Under such a scenario, Palestinians as a group would dedicate themselves to cooperation, non-resistance, and — in effect, given the one-sided requirement of “demilitarization” — acceptance of Zionist rights to control Palestine.

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By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.

I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel — literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.

A familiar saying — “the more things change, the more they stay the same” — is both false and true. During the last several decades, the consolidation of corporate power and the rise of digital tech have brought about huge changes in politics and communications. Yet humans are still humans and certain crucial dynamics remain. Militarism demands conformity — and sometimes fails to get it.

When Columbia University and many other colleges erupted in antiwar protests during the late 1960s, the moral awakening was a human connection with people suffering horrifically in Vietnam. During recent weeks, the same has been true with people in Gaza. Both eras saw crackdowns by college administrators and the police — as well as much negativity toward protesters in the mainstream media — all reflecting key biases in this country’s power structure.

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1967. “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

Disrupting a Culture of Death

This spring, as students have risked arrest and jeopardized their college careers under banners like “Ceasefire Now,” “Free Palestine,” and “Divest from Israel,” they’ve rejected some key unwritten rules of a death culture. From Congress to the White House, war (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it) is crucial for the political business model. Meanwhile, college trustees and alumni megadonors often have investment ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where war is a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Along the way, weapons sales to Israel and many other countries bring in gigantic profits.

The new campus uprisings are a shock to the war system. Managers of that system, constantly oiling its machinery, have no column for moral revulsion on their balance sheets. And the refusal of appreciable numbers of students to go along to get along doesn’t compute. For the economic and political establishment, it’s a control issue, potentially writ large.

As the killing, maiming, devastation, and increasing starvation in Gaza have continued, month after month, the U.S. role has become incomprehensible — without, at least, attributing to the president and the vast majority of Congressional representatives a level of immorality that had previously seemed unimaginable to most college students. Like many others in the United States, protesting students are now struggling with the realization that the people in control of the executive and legislative branches are directly supporting mass murder and genocide.

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By Norman Solomon

When the Washington Post revealed Friday afternoon that “the Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel,” a lot of people cared. Readers of the story posted more than 10,000 comments on its webpage. A leading progressive site for breaking news, Common Dreams, quickly followed up with coverage under a headline that began with the word “obscene.” Responses on social media were swift and strong; a tweet about the Post scoop from our team at RootsAction received more than 600,000 views.

But at the New York Times — the nation’s purported newspaper of record — one day after another went by as the editors determined that the story about the massive new transfer of weaponry to Israel wasn’t worth reporting on at all. Yet it was solid. A Reuters dispatch said that two sources “confirmed” the Post’s report.

By omission, the New York Times gave a boost to a process of normalizing the slaughter in Gaza, as if shipping vast quantities of 2,000-pound bombs for use to take the lives of Palestinian civilians is unremarkable and unnewsworthy. Just another day at the genocide office.

The intentional failure of the Times to report the profoundly important news of the huge new shipments of armaments was a tacit signal that the flagrant willingness of Uncle Sam to talk out of both sides of his mouth — assisting with further carnage on a soul-corrupting scale — was no big deal.

At the end of the weekend, I sent an email to the Times managing editor Carolyn Ryan and asked why the newspaper wasn’t covering the story at all. She passed my question along to the Times public-relations manager, who provided only a non-answer on Monday night. Here it is in full: “The New York Times has invested more than any other U.S. newspaper over the past decade to help readers understand the complexities of the Israel-Hamas conflict. We continue to report on events as they develop, both in the region, internationally and within the U.S. government.”

The complete evasion, laced with self-puffery, reflected the arrogance of media power from the single most influential and far-reaching news outlet in the United States. Rather than amplify the crucial story into the nation’s media echo chamber, the Times opted to quash it.

The saying that “justice delayed is justice denied” has a parallel for news media and war — journalism delayed is journalism denied. The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.

The Post article had laid bare, at a pivotal historic moment, a lethal contradiction within the behavior of top U.S. government officials — directly aiding and abetting Israel’s methodical killing of civilians in Gaza while spouting facile platitudes about them.

In its lead sentence, the piece said that the White House had okayed the new shipments of bombs and jets “despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.” The juxtaposition showed just how phony “Washington’s concerns” actually are.

“The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter,” the Post reported. “The 2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.”

The piece quoted an unidentified White House official who, in effect, underscored that all the talk of President Biden’s supposed distress about the ongoing massacres of civilians in Gaza has been a cruel exercise in PR smoke-blowing: “We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself. Conditioning aid has not been our policy.”

Translation: We continue to support, with massive military aid, Israel’s prerogative to keep slaughtering Palestinian civilians.

If the Times editors need to grasp just how significantly horrific the 2,000-pound bombs now en route to Israel really are, they could read some reporting from their own newspaper. In December, it described those bombs as “one of the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals” — a weapon that “unleashes a blast wave and metal fragments thousands of feet in every direction.” Back then, the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times,” and those 2,000-pound bombs were “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.”

It’s a safe bet that the new transfer of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel would seem more newsworthy to the editors of the New York Times if the lives of their loved ones were at stake.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including “War Made Easy.” His latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones.

A few ethical words from Glazer while accepting his award provoked outrage. He spoke of wanting to refute “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” and he followed with a vital question: “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Those words were too much for the letter’s signers, who included many of Hollywood’s powerful producers, directors and agents. For starters, they accused Glazer (who is Jewish) of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

Ironically, that accusation embodied what Glazer had confronted from the Academy Awards stage when he said that what’s crucial in the present is “not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”

But the letter refused to look at what Israel is doing now as it bombs, kills, maims and starves Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where there are now 32,000 known dead and 74,000 injured. The letter’s moral vision only looked back at what the Third Reich did. Its signers endorsed the usual Zionist polemics — fitting neatly into Glazer’s description of “Jewishness and the Holocaust” being “hijacked by an occupation.”

The letter even denied that an occupation actually exists — objecting to “the use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years.” Somehow the Old Testament was presumed to be sufficient justification for the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whose ancestors lived in what’s now Israel. The vast majority of 2.2 million people have been driven from their bombed-out homes in Gaza, with many now facing starvation due to blockage of food.

Israel’s extreme restrictions on food and other vital supplies are causing deaths from starvation and disease as well as enormous suffering. In early March, a panel of U.N. experts issued a statement that declared: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.” (So much for the anti-Glazer letter’s claim that “Israel is not targeting civilians.”)

Last weekend, on Egypt’s border at the crossing to Rafah, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “Here from this crossing, we see the heartbreak and heartlessness of it all. A long line of blocked relief trucks on one side of the gates, the long shadow of starvation on the other. That is more than tragic. It is a moral outrage.”

But there is not the slightest hint of any such moral outrage in the letter signed by the more than 1,000 “creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.” Instead, all the ire is directed at Glazer for pointing out that moral choices on matters of life and death are not merely consigned to the past. The crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany against Jews are in no way exculpatory for the crimes against humanity now being committed by Israel.

What Glazer said in scarcely one minute retains profound moral power that no distortions can hide. Continuity exists between the setting of “The Zone of Interest” eight decades ago and today’s realities as the United States supports Israel’s genocidal actions: “Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Much of the movie’s focus is on the lives of a man and a woman preoccupied with career, status and material well-being. Such preoccupations are hardly unfamiliar in the movie industry, where silence or support for the Gaza war are common among professionals — in contrast to Jonathan Glazer and others, Jewish or not, who have spoken out in his defense or for a ceasefire.

“What he was saying is so simple: that Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering, must not be used in the campaign as an excuse for a project of dehumanizing or slaughtering other people,” the playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner said in an interview with an Israeli newspaper days ago. He called Glazer’s statement from the Oscars stage “unimpeachable and irrefutable.”

Yet even without signing the open letter that denounced Glazer’s comments, some in the entertainment industry felt compelled to assert their backing for a country now engaged in a genocidal war. Notably, a spokesperson for the financier of Glazer’s film, Len Blavatnik, responded to the controversy by telling Variety that “his long-standing support of Israel is unwavering.”

How many more Palestinian civilians will Israel murder before such “support for Israel” begins to waver?

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including “War Made Easy.” His latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

If we condemn Hamas for its October 7 attacks in Israel, we’re not accused of anti-Arab bigotry. Nor should we be. Nothing could possibly justify the atrocities that Hamas committed against hundreds of civilians, who were the majority of the 1,200 people killed as a result of the attacks by Hamas forces. And nothing can justify the taking of civilian hostages.

But if we condemn Israel for its actions since then, we might be accused of antisemitism. Meanwhile, nothing could possibly justify the atrocities by Israel in Gaza, where the death toll is now estimated at 32,000, while uncounted thousands of other Palestinian people are buried under rubble. Seventy percent of the victims have been children and women.

The U.S. government continues to make the atrocities possible. As retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick said midway through the second month of the war: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.” He added: “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Because of federal laws and minimal decency, the U.S. should have cut off all military aid to Israel long ago. A single standard of human rights should apply. But adhering to that simple, basic precept can provoke the virulent epithet of “antisemitism.”

The gist of the trick is to equate Israel with the Jewish religion — and then to equate opposition to Israel with antisemitism.

And so, writing in the New York Daily News last November, an official at the American Jewish Committee declared that a “virus of antisemitism has spread to the U.S., where college campuses and city streets have been taken over by anti-Israel protesters raging, ‘From the river to the sea!’ — a call for the mass murder of Israelis, and ‘Globalize the Intifada!’ — an appeal to kill Jews worldwide.”

As Peter Beinart pointed out in a 2022 essay, “Under the definition of antisemitism promoted by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the State Department, Palestinians become antisemites if they call for replacing a state that favors Jews with one that does not discriminate based on ethnicity or religion.”

While Israel continues to slaughter children, women and men — no more guilty of anything than a crowd you might see at a local supermarket — the extreme misuse of the “antisemitism” charge often boils down to: Be quiet. Don’t protest. Don’t even speak up.

Of course antisemitism does exist in the United States and the rest of the world, and it should be condemned. At the same time, to cry wolf — to misuse the term to try to intimidate people into silence while Israel’s atrocities continue in Gaza — is an abuse of the word antisemitism and a disservice to everyone who wants a single standard of human rights.

Last week, 17 rabbis and rabbinical students went to Capitol Hill urging a ceasefire and an end to the unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. Rabbi May Ye said: “We are rabbis representing hundreds of thousands of Jews affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace Action imploring our leaders to end their complicity in the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign in the name of tzedek (justice) and real safety for all people.”

Are we supposed to believe that those rabbis are antisemitic?

The Jewish American author Anna Baltzer grew up learning about the evils of antisemitism. “Much of my family was killed in the Holocaust,” she wrote. “My grandparents arrived at Ellis Island traumatized by the unfathomable murder of their families in the gas chambers of Auschwitz while the world let it happen.” And she added: “We must get clear that Israel’s wiping out of entire families in Gaza is not simply revenge for October 7; Israel is continuing its long-existing practice of forcing Palestinians out of Palestine and closing the door behind them.”

Do Baltzer’s words make her antisemitic?

In mid-October, 43 Jewish American writers, academics and artists — including Michael Chabon, Francisco Goldman, Masha Gessen, Judith Butler, Tony Kushner, and V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) — released an open letter to President Biden saying: “We condemn attacks on Israeli and Palestinian civilians. We believe it is possible and in fact necessary to condemn Hamas’ actions and acknowledge the historical and ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. We believe it is possible and necessary to condemn Hamas’ attack and take a stand against the collective punishment of Gazans that is unfolding and accelerating as we write.”

Along with denouncing Israel’s “war crimes and indefensible actions,” the statement added: “We write to publicly declare our opposition to what the Israeli government is doing with American assistance.”

Do those words mean that the signers of the statement are antisemitic?

Or how about the more than 100 Jewish Americans who signed the statement released this week denouncing AIPAC, the Israel-is-never-wrong lobby?

Ten years ago, 40 Holocaust survivors issued a statement condemning Israel for its “wholesale effort to destroy Gaza.” The statement, also signed by 287 people who were descendants of Holocaust survivors or victims, called for “an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people” and decried “the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever pitch.”

Were the 327 Jewish signers of the statement antisemitic?

For that matter, when I write here that the Israeli government has been committing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, does that mean I’m antisemitic?

There’s a word for seeing — and saying — that Israel is engaged in large-scale crimes against humanity. And that word isn’t “antisemitism.” It’s realism.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” was published in 2023 by The New Press.

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