Dear Caitlin Johnstone, Your Anger at Pro-Israel People Is Just, But You're Wrong In Refusing to Say the KEY TRUTH about Zionism That Truly Does Persuade Pro-Israel People to Be Anti-Zionist

Your calling pro-Israel people "psychopaths" and "generally shitty human beings" is COUNTER-productive

Dear Caitlin Johnstone,

As an anti-Zionist myself I sympathize with your anger at Pro-Israel People. But I also call you out for not expressing the KEY FACT about Zionism that persuades most pro-Israel people to change their view and become anti-Zionists just like us. Instead, you accuse pro-Israel people of being “psychopaths” and “shitty human beings,” which only further persuades pro-Israel people that you and I and other anti-Zionists who are pro-Palestine protesters are their enemy.

Before I say below what the KEY FACT is that you don’t express but that I do express and thereby persuade pro-Israel people to become anti-Zionists, let me clarify what exactly it is that most pro-Israel people believe is wrong about the view shared by you and me and most of the pro-Palestine protesters. The disagreement is NOT about whether there should be a ceasefire in Gaza or whether the current Israeli violence in Gaza is too extreme to be justified. No!

Most pro-Israel people take the position recently expressed by pro-Israel Robert Reich in this video in which he calls for a cease fire in Gaza and in which he expresses strong disapproval of Israeli violence there because of how it has killed thousands of innocent people including many children. Reich calls for conditional, as opposed to unconditional, support for Israel.

You and I and most pro-Palestine demonstrators disagree with Robert Reich because we call for no support for Israel at all, not conditional support for it. We call for no support for Israel at all because, unlike Robert Reich and most pro-Israel people, we oppose the entire idea of an exclusively (so-called) Jewish state based on seven-plus decades of violent ethnic cleansing to ensure that Israel will always have a large majority Jewish population. This is why we oppose what pro-Israel people such as Robert Reich advocate: a Two-State Solution (which is immoral as I discuss here.)

Pro-Israel people look at the pro-Palestine protesters and they see that the protesters’ demand for divestment from Israel means they are opposed to any support for Israel; they see that the protesters chant “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free” and this implicitly means no more exclusively Jewish state; they see that the protesters do NOT agree that “Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself” (the real meaning of which I explain and condemn here.)

The protesters are right! But Caitlin, you never persuasively explain WHY, even from the point of view of concern for the safety of Israeli Jews, they are right. You never express the KEY FACT that pro-Israel people don’t know but need to know in order to see and then AGREE that the protesters are right.

THE KEY FACT

The KEY FACT is that the seven-plus decades of Zionist violence against Palestinians has NEVER been for the purpose that pro-Israel people think it has been for. It has never been for the purpose of making Israeli Jews safe from antisemitic violence. NEVER! It has been for the purpose of making the Palestinians be a bogeyman enemy that the billionaire rulers of Israel (yes, that’s right: billionaires are the actual rulers of Israel the same as billionaires are the actual rulers of the United States) pretend to protect ordinary Israeli Jews from and thereby get away with severely economically oppressing and getting rich off of the Israeli Jewish working class (the Israeli working class that rose up against this in 2011 but was defeated by Netanyahu’s Zionist demand that Israelis must stop fighting their government that was protecting them from the “real enemy—Palestinians.”

Dear Caitlin,

Please educate yourself about this by reading my articles that I have been introducing to my Substack readers with these words:

I have written about the true purpose of seven-plus decades of Israeli violence against Palestinians (violent ethnic cleansing and denial of the refugees' right of return, brutal and humiliating military occupation of the West bank, violent enforcement of apartheid laws inside Israel) and proven my case with mainstream sources  here ( https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/11/27/israels-government-attacks-ordinary-jews-as-well-as-palestinians/?fbclid=IwAR18O6MNVFmMXV3jrIAkxAWjKIAeFsVFXjkyOagQUrHcUw27eYiGknJ2q38 ) showing that Zionist violence against Palestinians is used by the Israeli billionaire ruling class to make Palestinians a bogeyman enemy that it pretends to protect ordinary Israeli Jews from in order thereby to get away with severely economically oppressing working class Israeli Jews to get rich off of them.

I have written here ( https://www.pdrboston.org/israel-funds-hamas-keeps-it-in-power ) about how—and why—Israel’s government for decades has been funding HAMAS and working to keep it in power in order to make the Palestinian bogeyman enemy maximally frightening.

I have written here ( https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/why-really-zionist-leaders-have-always?r=1iggn ) about how the early Zionist leaders who became Israel’s leaders opposed rescue efforts of Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust because these rescue efforts didn’t advance the Zionist leaders’ goal of obtaining a Jewish working class of their own to get rich and powerful off of in Palestine.

If the public knew the truth about the real anti-working-class--including anti-Jewish-working-class--purpose of Israeli violence against Palestinians, then the vast majority of the public—INCLUDING GOOD PEOPLE WHO CURRENTLY ARE PASSIONATELY PRO-ISRAEL!!—would be condemning Israeli violence against Palestinians the way that the vast majority of the public condemned apartheid in South Africa in the early 90s once they learned of its existence.

Dear Caitlin,

The way to properly deal with your understandable frustration at the fact that there are so many pro-Israel people is not to scream at them that they are psychopaths and shitty human beings, but to explain to them the KEY FACT so that they will become anti-Zionists like us. This is what the Palestinians need you to do. Please do it. OK?

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to unite ALL the have-nots against the haves who treat us like dirt.