Harvard Professor Noah Feldman denounces opposition to the Gaza War as the “New antisemitism”
Time Magazine has chosen as its cover story Harvard Professor of Law Noah Feldman’s maliciously dishonest and morally bankrupt defense of Israel’s savage war against the population of Gaza.
The “old” antisemitism was a central element of fascism, espousing virulent nationalism, anti-communism and anti-socialism, and implementing genocide of defenseless people.
The “new” antisemitism, according to Feldman, is a central element of the left, which opposes the Israeli war machine, nationalist xenophobia, anti-Arab racism, and the mass murder of defenseless and oppressed people in Gaza.
Feldman’s propaganda piece consists of the crudest historical falsifications. He writes, “Ultimately, in different ways, both Nazism and Marxism identified Jews as an enemy deserving liquidation.” This is an outrageous lie.
The Marxist and socialist movement led the struggle against antisemitism in Germany, throughout Europe, and in the United States. Fundamental to Nazi and fascist ideology and politics was the identification of Jews with socialism and the labor movement.
Feldman dissolves Judaism as a religion into Israeli nationalism, proclaims the Israeli state as the supreme manifestation of Jewish existence, and asserts its “status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own.”
This claim ignores the fact that more than half the world’s Jewish population, including Feldman, hold citizenship in countries other than Israel. And, one might add, that thousands of Israelis abandon this “homeland” every year.
Feldman resorts to the most vile sophistries to minimize Israeli crimes, such as the claim that ethnic cleansing practiced by Israel “would arguably not count as genocide under the legal meaning of the term.”
He also states, “The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.”
According to Feldman, since Israel’s “stated war aims” are merely “to hold Hamas accountable,” it cannot be accused of genocide. Israel’s “aims are lawful in themselves.”
Writing as an attorney for mass murderers, Feldman asserts, “There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective.”
Feldman, shedding a tear, writes, “The number of Palestinian dead, over 29,000 as of this writing, is heartbreaking.” But the actual killing of the 29,000, according to Feldman, is not a crime.
Of all the arguments advanced by Feldman, the most cynical is his claim that “Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into oppressors.”
This is the same argument made by the Polish government in introducing a law in 2018 illegalizing references to the complicity of Poles in the mass murder of Jews during World War II.
The bill passed by the Polish Senate declared that “whoever accuses … the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years.”
The fascistic Polish government justified this law on the grounds that references to Polish complicity in the Holocaust detracted from the sufferings of the Polish people during the years of Nazi occupation. Israel denounced the Polish law.
Feldman invokes the Holocaust as a cover for Israeli atrocities. But his defense of Israel’s genocidal war, with the support of the US, is a desecration of the memory of the six million Jewish victims of Nazism and the universal significance of the Holocaust.
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Information Liberation
The Washington Post ran a column from Noah Feldman on Tuesday telling progressive Jews to get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign in Gaza or face excommunication.
After paragraph upon paragraph aimed at building rapport with the progressive Jews Feldman is targeting, he finally got to the point at the end of his column.
From The Washington Post, “To be a Jew today: The aftermath of Oct. 7” (Archive):
[Young progressive Jews] believe in the teachings of social justice that compel them to social action. But they also find that they cannot avoid what they see as the broken reality of Israel.
[…] Their solution — their Jewish, progressive, sincerely felt solution — is to express their belief in social justice by criticizing or condemning Israel for its failures of equality, liberty, dignity and human rights.
[…] As today’s college students become adults and gradually assume leadership of their movements, progressive Judaism will have to work out its long-term attitude toward Israel. One possibility is for progressive Jews to tack away from the focus on Israel, to engage their Jewishness in other ways — familial, spiritual and personal. This would entail real theological change.
But so would embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a state that rejects liberal democracy. Israel will not change just because progressive American Jews want it to. They will have to find their own answers to the looming crisis facing them — and soon, before a new generation finds itself alienated from a Jewishness whose inner contradictions it cannot reconcile.
At the individual level, Jews who want to think less about Israel also face serious challenges because Jewishness is a collective identity. If most Jews self-define in relation to Israel, positively or negatively, it is hard for any Jews to choose not to do so.
Yet a turn to a Jewishness that is more personal, familial and spiritual and less national-political may be the inevitable result, even if no formal movement within Jewish life consciously adopts such a policy. If this happens, Jews will have to draw more than ever on their rich traditions of faith, doubt, struggle and love — and do so as families, rather than as a nation.
Translation: get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign or face excommunication. Israel’s not going to change anything — and you will never be given any national-political power — so you need to change yourself to get in line with Israel (or become a hermit and stay the hell out of our way).
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said similar in the wake of October 7, stating that “every Jewish person is a Zionist” and labeling anti-Zionist Jews (whom he stripped of their Jewishness) as a “hate group.”
Noah Feldman, who is a professor at Harvard Law School, is the same writer who had the cover story in Time Magazine last week on “The New Anti-Semitism” which argued that the entire world was antisemitic for opposing Israel’s genocide of women and children in Gaza.
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xenagoguevicene 