My Reply to an Interesting and Rather Sharp Criticism a Friend Made of My Writing about Israel

and a call for activists to use strategic discourse, explained here.

Above, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: No friend of ordinary Jews!¹​

A friend named Tom recently commented on one of my Substack posts, making an interesting and rather sharp criticism of my way of writing about Israel. I have copied his entire comment at this footnote.² His first sentence is a good summary of his point, and it is this:

I think your central theme that Israel primarily exists for the purpose of Israeli billionaires to exploit Israeli workers exhibits a profound lack of insight into what the role of the state of Israel actually is in the world.

Here is my reply to Tom:

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Hi Tom,

Let me explain why I emphasize the fact (that you apparently agree with) that the Israeli billionaire ruling class uses violence against Palestinians for the purpose of creating a Palestinian bogeyman enemy from which it pretends to protect Israeli Jews in order, thereby, to get away with severely economically oppressing the Israeli Jewish working class (by declaring it ‘unpatriotic’ when Israeli Jewish workers rise up against the Israeli ruling class as happened on a huge scale in 2011.)

I do not emphasize this fact--that the Israeli ruling class attacks, not defends, the Israeli Jewish working class--because I foolishly believe (due to some ‘profound lack of insight’) that this fact is the only fact regarding the unjust actions and role of the state of Israel (its ruling class). Such facts as you have enumerated in your comment--facts about the role of Israel in collusion with the oppressors of the entire world order--are facts that I do not dispute. (And I have also on occasion written Substack articles about how all of the rulers of the worlds nations are on the side of the Israeli ethnic cleansing rulers and how Israeli technology is being used against all the people of the world.)

The reason I emphasize the fact that the Israeli ruling class attacks Israeli working class Jews is this. This fact--AND ONLY THIS FACT!!!--is what persuades people (ordinary people, not rich pro-billionaire people) who are passionately pro-Israel Jews to do a 180 and switch from supporting Israel to becoming anti-Zionist and opposing Israeli violence against Palestinians.

I have encountered people such as a Jewish colleague named Michael--who almost punched me in the face in extreme anger when I was collecting signatures at work supporting the Right of Return of Palestinians, and who said I was close to being Hitler!--who, upon hearing me explain how the Zionist leaders were anti-Jewish-working class from the very early days of the Holocaust till the present, did a 180 and became very friendly to me and my anti-Zionism.

I have encountered people such as a Jewish woman named Sharon--working class and my age (elderly), and very sentimentally pro-Israel with an Israel flag decal on her window--who, upon reading my article “Israel’s Government Attacks Ordinary Jews As Well As Palestinians” (at https://www.pdrboston.org/israel-s-government-attacks-jews-to ) did a 180 and now agrees with me in opposing Israeli violence against Palestinians.

My related article, “Israel’s Government Funds Hamas and Works to Keep It In Power” (at https://www.pdrboston.org/israel-funds-hamas-keeps-it-in-power ) drives home the point made by the first one.

For every Michael and Sharon there are very many non-Jews who support Israel because they don’t want to be antisemitic and believe that Jews need and want people to support Israel to protect Jews from the antisemitic Palestinians. When such people see Jews such as Michael and Sharon condemning, rather than supporting, the Israeli government at being one that attacks, not defends, working class Israeli Jews, then these non-Jews also do 180 and oppose the Israeli government (not for the weak reason of believing that its violence is disproportionate even if for the noble cause of protecting Israeli Jews, but for the strong reason of condemning it for being an attack on Israeli working class Jews as well as an attack on Palestinians.)

Tom, you write above, “I doubt if any significant number of people will ever change their opinions about what the state of Israel is based upon your analysis.” You are wrong here; very wrong. Not only does my analysis (with its specific emphasis) change the opinion of people about the state of Israel, it is the ONLY--repeat, ONLY!!--analysis that does this for people such as Michael and Sharon.

The Michael’s and Sharons are the KEY people we must persuade if we aim to turn the American public to opposing Zionism for the strong reason, not the weak one. (The weak reason--“disproportionate” etc.--results in people supporting Zionism and pro-Zionism government policies as soon as the “disproportionate” violence stops for a while.)

Tom, I suggest you try using my analysis to persuade people (who are not pro-billionaire) to change their mind about Israel. Find out for yourself what happens. I sugest you become familiar with my other article about why Zionists wanted a ‘state of their own” at https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/why-really-zionist-leaders-have-always?r=1iggn . Share these facts with people and you will see them start doing a 180 before your very eyes.

In contrast, when you talk to people about the OTHER nasty things the state of Israel does--the ones you talked about and think are the really important facts--you will see that when pro-Israel people hear about these facts they just shrug their shoulders. They say, or think, “Well, the Israeli government that defends Jews against their antisemitic enemies needs to do some disturbing things in order to remain strong, that’s just real politics and business smarts, and who am I to say the Israeli state must cease to exist for this reason?”

We need to start thinking about our political discourse strategically.

By that I mean we need to find out exactly WHY it is that otherwise good people (the vast majority) support the ruling class’s oppressive policy on this or that issue. Invariably the reason is that they believe that the morally right thing is to support that ruling class policy. And invariably the reason they think this is because they believe something that is factually not true; let’s call that false belief X. Therefore, the strategically MOST important point for us to make and emphasize about the given topic is that X is false. We need to be persuasive, which means we need to cite the relevant facts and explain what the relevant truth is about which X lies.

Whether X is the lie regarding the given topic that seems most horrible to us personally is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that X is the lie that the ruling class relies on to get support from the public for its oppressive policy. By ignoring X we hand victory to the ruling class.

What do you think?

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I have written here how we can be strategic in our discourse on various topics that the rich use for divide-and-rule. I hope well-intentioned activists will adopt this strategic approach.

“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel.” [26] —David Ben-Gurion, 1938

“Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 [Jewish] orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven.” [20] The reason for this cruelty? To send the children to Palestine to fight Palestinians so that people like David Ben-Gurion could have a “state of their own” to rule over. [from Baruch Kimmerling’s review of Yosef Grodzinsky’s In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II [20]

1. The footnote sources are provided in my Substack article here.

2. Tom’s comment:

I think your central theme that Israel primarily exists for the purpose of Israeli billionaires to exploit Israeli workers exhibits a profound lack of insight into what the role of the state of Israel actually is in the world. In the first place, to the extent we already exist in an international New World Order in which our rulers come from basically the entire world, collaborate on most, if not all issues, have their own system of governance in which they work together to give an appearance of nation states but in actual fact mainly work together to exploit workers everywhere, we can’t be sure. Their actions and policies are often well-kept secrets of which we know absolutely nothing, even if we often can deduce what they are. The use of the Israeli state as a fascist tool to obliterate the structures of the Palestinians and murder untold numbers was done not only by the Israeli billionaires. There was a collaboration with the rulers primarily from the US, England and Europe, but also done with the complicity of the Russian and Chinese. The devastation is so overwhelming that it can only be compared to the destruction of Dresden or Warsaw during WW2. Exploitation of Israeli workers is not just secondary to the importance of Israel as fascist war tool for the purpose of subjugating the workers of the entire Middle East for the purpose of geopolitical advantage and the control of their resources. Exploitation of Israeli workers is far, far, down the list of the reasons for the existence of the fascist state of Israel. I doubt if any significant number of people will ever change their opinions about what the state of Israel is based upon your analysis. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to point to the fact that there is a difference between the rulers of Israel and their workers. But unfortunately for the world, Israeli and Jewish workers of all types generally seem to cling to their identification as Jews above their identification as workers, and as such, they are siding with our fascist rulers. I’m basing this, of course, on my own experience in the US upper middle class and my associations with Jews I know and have known who reside here. It may be different in Israel. I’m not so sure about New York. But our rulers know that central to their plan for the Middle East (and the world) is to maintain that trust that Jews have in their leaders, whether in Israel, England, Europe, or the US. Whether the widespread attack on Jews, known as the Holocaust, was part of the long-term plan now being carried out, or if this plan is an opportunistic event using the results (the fear and brainwashing, and fearmongering of Jews everywhere) is not possible to know. I certainly don’t claim to have any deep knowledge of the details of how this is being done. But I don’t buy the simplistic mantra, John, that you keep throwing out there.