Words Are as Bullets in the Weaponization of Ignorance
Thirteen months on since the horror of Hamas’ 10/7 pogrom knocked the gates of hell off their hinges in Israel and Gaza, the ethos of Judaism’s quest for survival has been falsely twisted into a synonym for colonialism, exploitation, racism, and worse.
Tyranny in action is always preceded by tyranny in thought. Tyranny in thought, in turn, is always preceded by tyranny of word and language. And hence the debasement of our democratic discourse in many realms — no more so than in the fiery debate amid Israel’s seven-front war that erupted with the murderous Hamas pogrom of 10/7.
This is hardly a new insight on corrupted language, of course. George Orwell said as much in his still-echoing 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. Evidence of this abounds in our world today. Certainly it did in our just-concluded election, whose implications are only just beginning to fully unfold as we and the world react. Yet, as I share here, nothing compares to the creation of a warped hall of mirrors through language — distorting the way many perceive Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. This bent refraction undoubtedly influenced the electoral outcome. While I’m not focusing today on the likely shifts in U.S. foreign policy under a new administration, I will say this: despite the daily “ring of fire” attacks on Israel and all the resulting misery and destruction, this is a country with much to offer its neighbors — a point to which I’ll return.
Before that, however, on this one-month milestone since the one-year anniversary of the slaughter that knocked the gates of hell off their very hinges, a moment on language — wherein lies the aspiration of elusive peace. I write in memory of 1,400 slain Israelis, the thousands of innocent Palestinians used as cannon fodder by terrorists (hiding in underground tunnels), and the remaining hostages in Gaza, who number 97 (including the 33 believed to be dead).
Twelve months ago on 11/7, writing on the then-month-old war and language as the operating system of human cognition, my urgent request to readers was this:
… ponder how you used the word “but”, or heard it used, on 10/8, the day after or as the days slowly passed and the detailed reality of the horror of 10/7 was more and more known… Did you condition your reaction to the murder of George Floyd with a but? Did you use a but during Trump’s Muslim ban? Did you say but in discussion of the Stop Asian Hate movement? Did you use a but after the slaughter of so many Muslims (over 230,000) at the hands of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad? Did you react with a but in the Rwandan genocide (over 800,000 slaughtered)? Did you use a but in your thoughts about the Russian slaughter of so many Ukrainians (around 70,000), still happening right now?
The concentric circles of brutal violence and response have only spread since I wrote that. Yet my views on this coordinating conjunction have not changed; this three-letter word is a manufacturer of false equivalence, as I wrote then, a “mind virus” that continues to spread.
Today it is another word, one twisted, robbed of meaning, and now a synonym for antisemitic aspersions: Zionism. One hears and sees it as a synonym for colonialism, exploitation, racism, and worse in campus demonstrations, opinion headlines, political debate, and in antisemitic protest chants. It exists even in such unlikely places as Oslo, the capital of Norway, supposedly one of the world’s most progressive countries, where a tiny Jewish community lives in constant fear. It’s the code in a steady drumbeat from that pernicious movement named “BDS” (boycott, divest, sanction).
A fraught term and concept since its 19th century invention
My thoughts on the word, Zionism — and other words that have been stripped of meaning — were stirred by the remarks a few days ago of Rabbi Brian Strauss, of Houston’s Congregation Beth Yeshurun, who spoke at the Dell Jewish Community Center of Shalom Austin. There, I’m proudly involved in the Planning Committee of The Burt Kunik JAMen Forum, an initiative that endeavors to get Jewish men in Austin together six times per year for dinner with a stimulating speaker.
“There are enemies throughout the world, on college campuses here, in the cities from coast to coast, that have taken the word Zionism and distorted it,” said Rabbi Strauss, in a call for we Jews to reclaim a word that should evoke peace and love, that ethos of Judaism captured in the phrase, “Tikkun Olam”, or to “repair the world”. Rabbi Strauss continued: “Even worse, for years, anti-Jewish protesters and anti-Israel protesters have worked to turn the word Zionism into a derogatory term, a code for racism and genocide.”
Zionism, of course, has been a fraught phrase and concept since the term was created in 1890 by Austrian-Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, as an expression of the Jewish longing for a place of refuge amid the horrific pogroms then sweeping Central and Eastern Europe. This evolved into the history with which many non-Jews are more familiar: Theodor Herzl and his book A Jewish State, which was published seven years later, followed by the foundation of the “First Zionist Congress” with the explicit aim of a state for the Jews in their ancestral homeland.
There are libraries filled with books on the ensuing history that has brought us to this day. A century of ingenious ideas to cope with what author Walter Russell Mead has called the “talismanic role of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in the global political imagination” has included the most recent: the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab Gulf states and Morocco. In addition to Mead’s comprehensive The Arc of a Covenant, I highly recommend Noa Tishby’s Israel — A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, or her latest, co-authored with Nigerian-American Emmanuel Acho, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew. This Call Me Back podcast episode where Tishby and Acho discuss the book with Dan Senor is soulful.
Genuinely daunting issues — so often serving as proxies for extremists to exploit for self-serving schemes over the last century as well as the last 13 months — await responsible leaders who, frankly, are vanishingly few. Yes, we need a durable ceasefire. Yes, long-suffering Palestinians deserve their rights. I’ll leave the historical arbitration and the parsing of original political sins to others. Except I just need to say: No peace, reconciliation, or reconstruction will succeed without clarity of thought and intention — impossible when we ravage language.
Intent and meaning in historical context matter
Returning to that word now twisted by charlatans, the nationalist dimension of Zionism was in keeping with the zeitgeist of the era in which it was created — France for the French, Germany for Germans, a reestablished Poland for the Poles, even what became U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s famous advocacy of “national aspirations for all peoples”.
Zionism is complex, even among Jews. That an idea which began as a movement that in today’s framing might be “Jewish Lives Matter” could be narrowly construed in nation-state terms was rejected even by Birnbaum himself, who ultimately saw Zionism as a religious and spiritual movement for the Jewish diaspora. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who chronicled the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichman — famously coining the phrase “the banality of evil” — sought and believed in a non-nationalist, bi-national Zionism inclusive of self-determination of all peoples.
That Zionism, about the ethos of Judaism, of Tikkun Olam, of coexistence, of cultural survival, and yes, fairness to Palestinian aspirations and the “two-state solution” that I’ve long advocated, is core to my beliefs. And Rabbi Strauss reminded us of this: “Zionism was never about having a victim mentality. It was never about grievances. It was never about blame, but rather about taking the initiative to better the Jewish people’s destiny.”
Last year, just three weeks after the most vicious attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I shared a stage with Martin Luther King III, the son of the incredible civil rights leader, at the annual gala of Austin’s African American Youth Harvest Foundation. The gala was hosted by its CEO and founder, Michael Lofton, a long-time childhood friend who grew up in part raised by my father. In one of the most important speeches of my life, I summoned this ethos to remind Michael’s 800 attendees of the joint struggle of Black and Jewish Americans, including critical Jewish support for the civil rights movement throughout the 20th century. “The Jewish community and the Black community have stood together throughout history,” I told the gathering, who gave the 25 Jewish and Israeli guests I had invited a standing ovation. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a consistent supporter of Jews and Israel’s right to exist and never fell prey to the tropes we see and hear today couched in the language of “anti-Zionism”.
You’ve heard or seen the language. “Zionism is racism.” “Oppressor Zionists.” “Settler colonialists”. “Globalize the Intifada.” Among the most vile twists of language and history is the slogan, “Jews/Israelis Go Back to Europe.” Back to Europe? A majority of Israelis today are descended from Jews expelled from Arab countries after the 1948 establishment of Israel. Those who’ve embraced this slogan should also know that the last notorious European pogrom against Jews was, in fact, after the Nazi defeat and the liberation of Hitler’s concentration camps. One of the biggest drivers of Europe’s Jewish immigration to British-run Palestine was the slaughter of 42 Jews and the injury of many more when they tried to return to their homes in Kielce, Poland after surviving the nightmare of the camps, on July 4, 1946.
This background is important to understand the rotting foundation on which the slander against the idea of Zionism is based. When Israel was established in 1948, the new nation’s Declaration of Independence enshrined “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex”. There have been challenges to that bedrock principle from Israel’s far right. Yet to this day, this declaration is the foundation of Israel’s democracy and applies to all citizens, including the 20 percent of Israelis who are of Arab origin. That certainly contrasts with the Hamas charter, which calls for the eradication of Israel and its replacement with a strictly Muslim state.
Please remember that Israel made this commitment at a time when six million Jews (and three million non-Jewish, primarily Roma, disabled, LGBTQ+, or other “undesirables” in Hitler’s eyes) had just been murdered by the Nazis. More than a quarter million surviving Jews were refugees in Europe, and the flight of a million Jews from the Arab lands was well underway. In 1950, Israel promulgated its law that Jews immigrating from anywhere in the world, regardless of religion, could become Israeli citizens immediately. This is the “Law of Return” that both ill-informed activists, and even some journalists and academics who should know better, will cite to justify the claim that Zionism is racist. Never mind that countries including Germany, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Armenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Ghana, and others have similar or virtually identical laws.
A work-in-progress demands work from all of us
Yes, extremist settlers in the occupied West Bank whose assaults on Palestinians, and the current Israeli government’s blind eye to land seizures, must be condemned and halted. Yes, Israeli citizens of Palestinian and other minority origin suffer insults in their daily lives, which are unjust. Like all democracies — including our own — Israel is not perfect and much needs to be done. I make no excuses for the abuses of Palestinian rights over the years, the illegal settler movements that have been supported by Benjamin Netanyahu, or the efforts by his government to undermine Israeli courts. Israel is a work-in-progress.
How do we contemplate this work as tens of thousands of Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, and Iranian drones, rockets, and missiles rain on Israel, with support from militias in Syria and Iraq? As the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is often quoted: “If Israel lays down its arms, there will be no more Israel. If the Arabs lay down their arms, there will be peace.” Her remark is as true today as when she said it a half century ago.
This struggle and these tasks toward enduring peace and difficult healing are only made more difficult by this mind virus that equates Israeli law to “apartheid”. It has even spread to people who have moved me in the past, such as the author Ta-Nehisi Coates. In my book of entrepreneurial lessons, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, I wrote how I was moved to tears when reading his Atlantic magazine essay, Letter to My Son, on the struggle of Black Americans for dignity and safety amid racism and violence. His sentiment is redolent of Birnbaum writing on the Jewish search for the same in Vienna 125 years earlier.
Now, however, Coates has produced a new book The Message, written after a ten-day visit to Israel, in which he concludes that the Law of the Return — in other words Zionism — is state-sanctioned discrimination that he declares must be universally condemned. “I am offended by states built on ethnocracy no matter where they are,” Coates said in a CBS interview that is worth viewing — and jettisoning.
The tyranny of this ill-informed if not corrupt language and its destructive power is vividly confronted by Israeli human rights activist Yirmiyahu Danzig, who is of Black and Jewish Origin. (Yes, there are Black Jews in Israel, 2% of the population, which is right around the percentage of the total number of Jews in America!)
“This isn’t just a rhetorical or philosophical problem. Coates’ words, sadly, play right into the hands of dictators with imperial ambitions in the region today,” writes Danzig. “The Jewish presence and pursuit of self-determination in their people’s ancestral lands — in the context of a competing Palestinian Arab national claim — is unique and complex. When Coates insists on analyzing it in the language of an American paradigm, he disqualifies himself from offering truly useful insight on a deeply painful situation.”
It is unfortunate, given Coates’ newfound perspective, that he didn’t explore the diasporan return policies of numerous African countries, known as “Blaxit”, which admirably grant citizenship to immigrants descended from enslaved people in the United States and elsewhere. He skipped Africa’s laws of return in The Message, despite beginning the book with a section on the continent’s diaspora, drawn from his visit to Senegal before he went on to Israel. This act of omission is negligent at best — the mind virus at work. Immigration that preferences cultural origins is fine in many places around the world, but Coates (and far too many others) consider it racist in Israel.
Thankfully, many are embracing rational language, rational thought, and ultimately rational action. And their cogent words and clear voices are what we need to hear and amplify.
Such voices as those of the Palestinian and Jewish students at Tel Aviv University, who have been studying, collaborating together, and seeking peace throughout this war, while so many of their peers on American campuses have been shouting ignorant slogans with praise for terrorists who rape and kill, are heartening. Their moving example should inspire all of us.
The world should listen to such Palestinian voices as that of Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a native of Gaza who has lost dozens of loved ones in the past year yet is unwavering as he holds Hamas responsible for the death and destruction in his homeland. “Zionists are an inevitable part of the solution,” Alkhatib writes in just one of his moving posts that make many criticisms of Israel while accurately acknowledging history and demanding that the world understand that Israelis and Palestinians must — and can — live together.
More people seeking reasons for hope should be aware of the work of IsraAid, and its technology-driven spinoff SmartAid, which provide humanitarian relief around the world and have been quietly delivering tents, food, and medical supplies to Gazans displaced by the war: “It’s the Jewish thing to do,” founder Sachar Zahavi told me when he visited me in my home in Austin last spring. It’s the Zionist thing to do, I would add.
The important work of friend and fellow entrepreneur Daniel Lubetsky needs attention and support. Daniel, the son of Holocaust refugees and the founder of KIND Snacks, created the PeaceWorks Foundation in 2002 that has sponsored and supported dozens of projects throughout Israel and the Palestinian territories to create a “human infrastructure” for peace. In the past year, Daniel has expanded that work to American college campuses as well — in no small measure to challenge this use of language I describe here. In May, he launched Builders, a nonprofit global initiative with goals that include the reduction of polarization while encouraging people to work together to find solutions they can all support.
These are all examples of Zionism. These are builders who hold a vision for lasting peace and collaboration in a region beset by decades of turmoil. And as Rabbi Strauss put it the other evening: “We’ve got a lot of work to do to reclaim that precious word of Zionism.”
Indeed. We must reclaim that word and many others as we call out false equivalent narratives, confront the mind virus variants eating at the souls of so many around the world, and use accurate words, intelligent language, and, ultimately, decisive action to build enduring clarity and peace. I read a friend’s post today on Facebook, which resonated with me so profoundly. She was reflecting on our nation’s Presidential election but it applies here and everywhere:
We must together lift that state of consciousness and realize what is at stake around the world. We are in a fight for the survival of Western values and freedoms. Israel is in a fight for its very existence. Palestinians are in a fight against their real terrorists oppressors, who are funded by Iran — the true head of the snake, who oppresses its female citizens in a way that we can’t even begin to understand. Palestinians are used as pawns and we must not let this stand for the sake of the world. I was hoping Vice President Kamala Harris would win this presidential race, but she didn’t. Even though I’m not a fan of the winning candidate’s character, I hope he lets Israel handle this issue fully and finally. Both Israelis and Palestinians will be forever thankful as a result. If one good thing comes out of this new administration, I pray for it to be that (and, of course, I hope that more good comes than just that.) In his prior administration, there is no doubt that The Abraham Accords were one good thing, and I hope his new administration builds on that for the sake of the entire region.
On this 397th day since 10/7, I mourn the deaths and tragedy on all sides, pray for the still-suffering hostages in a truly horrific captivity, and hope that the end of Israel’s seven-front war is near. Tikkun Olam; let’s repair the world together.
