Now I'm Not Going to Mince My Words: Anti-Working-Class Elitism Is Killing the U.S. Anti-Zionism Movement

I am horrified by people I'm on activist zoom calls with arguing AGAINST telling the general public about the anti-working-class including anti-JEWISH-working-class PURPOSE of Zionist violence.

I tried to say it very politely in my recent post, “Attention Good People: Stop Helping the Ruling Class Censor the Truth that, When Known, Makes Most People--Even Jews-- Oppose Zionism and Most Whites Oppose Racial Discrimination Against Non-Whites” (read the section about Zionism in this footnote¹ if you haven’t already done so.) And I tried to say it politely earlier in my post, “The U.S. Anti-Zionism Movement Is Failing for the Reason I Explain Here, But You Can Help Make It WIN, as I Also Explain Here” (read the section quoting a delusional anti-Zionist in this footnote.²)

Now I’m going to be blunt.

There are activists who call themselves anti-Zionist but who argue AGAINST me on zoom calls when I say we should tell the general public the truth about the anti-working-class, including anti-JEWISH-working-class, purpose (as far as the actual rulers of Israel are concerned) of Zionist violence against Palestinians.

When—AND ONLY WHEN!—the U.S. general public knows this truth will the vast majority of Americans oppose Zionism because then they know for the first time that that is what one does if one wants to ACTUALLY be on the side of ordinary Jews—the survivors of the Holocaust and their children. ONLY THEN will the vast majority of Americans oppose U.S. government support for Israel and (as the American public, once informed about the fact of apartheid in South Africa, forced the U.S. government to do a 180 and condemn it) force the U.S. government to stop supporting Israel, which would be the death knell of Zionism.

I accuse the “anti-Zionism” activists on my zoom calls (and others like them) who oppose telling the general public the truth—that Zionism’s purpose is anti-working-class including anti-JEWISH-working-class—of being OBJECTIVELY enemies of the Palestinian people!

Let’s examine the kind of specious arguments that these “anti-Zionism” activists use, arguments that OBJECTIVELY help the Zionists get away with their genocidal violence against Palestinians.

Activist argument #1

One such activist (read his words in footnote #2) actually agreed with me about the anti-JEWISH-working-class purpose of Zionism (after initially resisting that idea) but insisted that there was no point in talking about it, that it was a “So what?” point, and that INSTEAD, and I quote, “the point is to stop the slaughter.” As if we could stop the slaughter without winning over most of the U.S. public to oppose Zionist violence instead of believing that they had to support it because it was for the purpose of making Jews safe.

I am sure this activist is NOT being paid by Mossad, but he might f**king just as well be! And I also know that this activist is a smart person. But he says stupid things.

This same activist (his exact words are quoted here) earlier in our email exchange cited the fact that IDF soldiers wantonly killed Palestinian children (a true fact) as a reason (it’s not) for not telling the general public about the anti-Jewish-working-class purpose of Zionism. I will shortly discuss the origin of this utterly stupid manner of thinking. It’s as stupid as saying that MLK, Jr. was wrong when, in his famous 1965 Selma, Alabama speech (that you can listen to and read here), King carefully explained that the rich used the racist Jim Crow laws not only to oppress the blacks but to oppress the poor whites also. The stupid argument goes like this:

“Poor whites supported the racist Jim Crow laws; some even lynched black people and joined the KKK. King was an idiot for talking about how the Jim Crow laws harmed poor whites. The poor whites are just innately racist and always will be and MLK, Jr. was wasting his time talking about how they are oppressed by the Jim Crow laws.”

No! King was not wrong. King was smart! King aimed in the last years of his life to unite ALL the have-nots against racial discrimination, knowing that it harmed ALL the have-nots, and knowing that only when the general public understood this fact would it be possible to truly abolish racial discrimination. This is why King wisely refuted the lie (promoted by the rich) that the Jim Crow laws were for making life better for ordinary white people. King also knew that there was a history in the Deep South of working class unity across race lines, as for example the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a history that the ruling class censored.

Frederick Douglass, for the same reason as King, also refuted the same lie about chattel slavery by explaining how chattel slavery harmed, not benefited, ordinary whites. In his My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass wrote:​

"The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to one slaveholder, and the former belongs to all the slaveholders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into open competition with a class of laborers who work without wages."

But according to the stupid argument of this otherwise very smart “anti-Zionism” activist, MLK, Jr. and Frederick Douglass were wrong for exposing the anti-working class purpose of racial discrimination! Instead of doing that, this activist essentially says that Douglass and King should have kept quiet about the anti-working-class purpose of racial discrimination because (can you believe it?!) “the point is to stop the oppression.”

Because the ruling class killed King and nobody since him with a substantial audience is explaining that racial discrimination harms, not benefits (“white privilege”), working class whites, we have no movement in the U.S. today large enough to end the New Jim Crow of racist prison incarceration or the racist “war on drugs” or the use of reverse racism and Critical Race Theory to turn whites against blacks.

Likewise, because the anti-Zionism movement refuses to refute the lie that Zionist violence is for the purpose of making Jews safe and because it views the American pro-Israel working class public as an enemy to attack rather than people to win over, the U.S. movement against Israeli violence is able to recruit ONLY the minority of people (which includes some Jews) who believe that Zionist violence is wrong EVEN THOUGH IT IS FOR THE PURPOSE OF MAKING JEWS SAFE. It will for this reason remain a minority and the Zionist project will keep getting the support it depends upon from the U.S. government, thanks to the stupid arguments made by anti-Zionism activists.

Activist argument #2

Another activist on my zoom calls never says in his many speeches and publications that the purpose of Zionist violence is to to enable the oppression of working class Israeli Jews. He doesn’t tell me I’m wrong about this, but he expresses zero desire to inform with his own words his readers and listeners of the fact. Instead he says that our main point about Zionism should be that (as is true) the Israeli government does things (by producing technology for surveillance, etc.) that harm ordinary Americans including Jewish Americans.

Where does this objectively stupid thinking come from?

It comes from an elitist anti-working-class viewpoint, deeply ingrained and virtually never challenged in public or activist discourse.

Look, for example, at Activist argument #2. The unstated premise of this argument is that ordinary people just “think with their belly,” that they only care about their self-interest, that they do not care about what is morally right and wrong, just about how things affect their well-being. The premise is:

“We activists are different from ordinary people because we have noble moral values and aims, but in order to influence ordinary people we have to forget about such moral values and aims and appeal to people on the basis of their pocket book or their self-interest (not wanting to be surveilled with technology) in some way.”

According to this elitist anti-working-class view, there is no point (like the other activist said, it’s a “So what?” point) in telling Americans (Jews or otherwise) that Zionism is not really about making Israeli Jews safe because that’s not what they really care about, which is only their self-interest.

But on the contrary, ordinary Americans DO care about what is morally right and wrong.

In particular for this reason they do not want to take the side in the “Israel/Palestine” conflict that they believe is the side of the antisemites, and they will not take that side EVEN IF THEY BELIEVE THAT THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT DOES THINGS THAT HARM THEM PERSONALLY. (Most people will respond to information about the Israeli government producing surveillance technology that is used against them by saying that it is unfortunate that the Jewish state needs to do some bad things in order to stay strong and be able to keep defending the Jewish people from antisemites.)

Likewise, anti-Zionism activists view the Israeli working class as innately and fundamentally and permanently selfish and extremely racist against Palestinians, because that’s just the way they are, supposedly. Anti-Zionism activists have so much contempt for the Israeli working class that they make no effort to know the history of the enormous Israeli working class movement (450,000 people demonstrating for many weeks with the support of 85-90% of the entire Israeli public) against the Israeli ruling class/government’s economic oppression of them in 2011, nor to learn how the Israeli ruling class killed that movement by using fear of the bogeyman Palestinian enemy to demand that the protesters stop fighting the government that was “protecting them from their real enemy.”

Nor do these anti-Zionism activists express any interest in knowing (God forbid telling the general public) about how the seven-plus decades of Israeli government violence and cruelty against Palestinians has been for the purpose of making Palestinians hate Israel and thus be easily portrayed to Israeli Jews as their existential enemy against whom the Israeli government is (supposedly) protecting them.

Nor do these anti-Zionism activists have any desire to explain to the public that the Israeli government for decades has funded Hamas and worked to keep it in power even after October 7, 2023 as I prove here, for the purpose of making sure that Palestinians would be seen by Israelis as a people who wanted to kill all the Jews, as (supposedly) demonstrated by the fact (yes, it’s a fact) that Hamas for decades has used explicitly terrorist violence aimed at killing non-combatant Israeli Jews with suicide bombers in restaurants and bus stops, etc., and then with rockets fired on Jewish civilians even before the October 7 attack.

These activists say “So what?” about all of this. They don’t believe that this effort by the Israeli ruling class is the reason why ordinary Israeli Jews fear—and hence hate—Palestinians. No. They think ordinary Israeli Jews are just racist against Palestinians because that’s how working class people are, don’cha know? They think Israeli Jews would hate Palestinians even if the Israeli ruling class did nothing to make them fear Palestinians. So “what’s the point,” say these anti-Zionism activists, in telling the American public that the purpose of Zionist violence against Palestinians is to create the frightening bogeyman enemy that the Israeli ruling class needs in order to get away with its severe economic oppression of the Israeli working class?

These anti-Zionism activists say that, instead, we should just keep being active against Zionism by talking about how cruel and unjust it is to Palestinians and by ignoring how it is for the purpose of oppressing Israeli working class Jews also. Israel’s Mossad and the Rockefellers et al LOVE that this is how anti-Zionism activists think. This kind of anti-Zionism activism ensures that Zionism will prevail. And these Zionist forces make sure that anti-Zionism activists never are influenced by a pro-working-class strategic perspective, as I prove here.

To repeat: I am DISGUSTED by and HORRIFIED by “anti-Zionism” activists who vehemently, with one specious elitist anti-working-class argument after another, argue that we should NOT tell the American public the truth about the anti-working class including anti-JEWISH-working-class PURPOSE of Zionist violence against Palestinians. What these activists are saying is as STUPID as saying the MLK. Jr. and Frederick Douglass were wrong to explain how racial discrimination was for the purpose of oppressing not only blacks but working class whites as well. What these activists are doing is OBJECTIVELY HELPING THE ZIONISTS TO REMAIN IN POWER. They should be ASHAMED of themselves, and immediately reverse course.

Likewise, the truth about Zionist violence against Palestinians is being censored

1. As I prove here, the purpose (as far as the actual billionaire rulers of Israel are concerned) of the decades of Zionist violence against Palestinians has been to enable the Israeli ruling class to control and thereby severely economically oppress the Israeli Jewish working class. The control is achieved by using violence against Palestinians to make them hate Israel and then telling the Israeli working class Jews that Palestinians are their enemy, an existential threat, and that their only protectors from this enemy are the same rich Israelis who economically oppress them.

Nobody expresses this crucial truth about the anti-working-class, including anti-JEWISH-working-class, purpose of Zionist violence against Palestinians.

How come?

Obviously the rich rulers of the world don’t want the truth to be known because it would prevent them from using Zionism to destroy working class solidarity, pitting “pro-Jews” against “pro-Palestians” people against each other not only in the Middle East but in the United States and other Western nations as well.

But how come the anti-Zionists don’t express this key truth? (I show that they don’t here.)

One reason is corruption. The rich control the anti-Zionism organizations, as I show here.

But corruption is not the only reason.

The other reason is extreme contempt for working class people who are less oppressed than the most oppressed people, in other words contempt for white working class people in the United States and Jewish working class people in Israel.

Here is an example of this. A woman named Heather Connolly commented on my recent Substack post titled, “The U.S. Anti-Zionism Movement Is Failing for the Reason I Explain Here, But You Can Help Make It WIN, as I Also Explain Here.” She vehemently objected to my writing there about the fact that the purpose of Zionist violence against Palestinians was (as far as the actual rulers of Israel are concerned) to enable the richest Israelis to control and economically oppress the Israeli Jewish working class. Here are her words:

Maybe you would have more buy in if you stop centering Israel all the time and stop treating the Palestinians as useful idiots for the Israeli ruling class. The entire Takeaway of your post, and I did read it all, is the poor working class Jews are the real oppressed, not the Palestinians being bombed, starved, maimed, and tortured. Stop centering the powerful.

Here is how I responded to her:

Your takeaway is absolutely false and unfounded. I suppose you think MLK, Jr. in his 1965 Selma, Alabama speech (read it and listen to it at https://www.pdrboston.org/mlk-jr-jim-crow-hurts-poor-whites )--in which he devoted many words to explain that the racist Jim Crow laws HARMED, not benefited, the poor whites and were instituted by the rich in order to oppress all races of working class people including whites--was treating the blacks as useful idiots for the white ruling class and saying that the poor poor whites were the real oppressed and not the blacks being subjugated by the Jim Crow laws and that MLK, Jr. was "centering the powerful" UH?

By not wanting to expose the actual PURPOSE of Zionism and of the Jim Crow laws, people help keep the racists and Zionists in power. Is that your goal too? If not, then re-think your absurd comment please.

I first ran into the likes of Heather Connolly at a large conference of anti-Zionists at Boston University in 2013. I was appalled and saddened by the fact that these hundreds of good anti-Zionist people, as I discovered, were absolutely unable to understand the anti-working-class purpose of Zionism. They were, hence, unable to persuade the majority of the United States population that wanted to be “on the side of the Jews and not on the side of the antisemites” that in order to be on the side of the working class Israeli Jews they had to OPPOSE, not support, the Zionist Israeli government.

As soon as I returned home from this anti-Zionism conference, I wrote an article about it intended primarily to be read by the organizer of the conference whom I knew personally. Guess what? My article actually convinced him that he had been wrong and what I said in the article was right! I hope you will read this article too. It is “True or False: An Injury to One Is an Injury to All?” Maybe it will convince you too.

2. One sincere anti-Zionist actually said this to me (trust me, I am not making this stuff up):

I think that all of us involved in this discussion concur, as do I, but perhaps see it as almost self-evident, so as not to require much elucidation. SURE the Zionists are using the Palestinians as the bogeyman, but so what? The point is to stop the slaughter.

I replied this way:

"but so what?" Are you serious?!

Literally hundreds of millions of Americans currently support Israel, despite its obvious genocide that they truly are horrified by, because they believe supporting Israel is what you must do to avoid being on the side of the antisemites. When these people learn--for the first time!--that the Israeli government's violence against Palestinians is not at all about keeping Jews safe but on the contrary for the purpose of enabling rich Israelis to severely economically oppress working class Israeli Jews, then these hundreds of millions of Americans turn totally against Israel's government and its violence against Palestinians (as I know from personal experience, and as you would know too if you told non-rich pro-Israel people the truth.)

And when these hundreds of millions of Americans learn the truth they will demand that the U.S. government stop supporting the Israeli government, just as they demanded that the U.S. government stop supporting South African apartheid when they learned the truth about that apartheid, and succeeded in forcing the U.S. government to do a 180 and go from supporting to condemning that apartheid.

This is "so what" if we tell the American public the truth (which they NEVER ever hear now because people like you-know-who [some people we know in common—J.S.] never express it and the mass media censor it) about the anti-Jewish-working-class purpose of Zionism.

If we do this, then Zionism will lose the support of the U.S. government and will be dead in the water.

THAT is so what.

Do you get it now?

I didn’t reply with sarcasm, but I was tempted to do so this way:

You say “SURE the Zionists are using the Palestinians as the bogeyman, but so what? The point is to stop the slaughter.”

Oh yes! Silly me for wanting to waste precious time refuting some Zionist lie, when we should instead immediately stop the slaughter. Obviously we should immediately send in our two-million-man anti-Zionism military force with all the modern weapons and air-defense and just go into Israel with it and disarm the IDF and remove the Zionists from power. How stupid of me to think that we should delay this action by first refuting some obvious Zionist lie, right? Please, don’t let my blathering nonsense prevent you from going right ahead and stopping the slaughter.