Jewish ANTI-Zionism, a history (KPFA FM)

No, but neither is the swastika Nazi. Both are ancient Indian symbols of union and enlightenment

What's money got to do with a US-armed, British imperial, Jewish settler colonial project?

Balthaser (Indiana U South Bend)

GUEST: Jewish academic Benjamin Balthaser is an associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend.

He is the author of the forthcoming book, Citizens of the Whole World: The American Jewish Left and Cultures of Anti-Zionism, due out this fall (Verso Books).

He has also written, Anti-Imperialism Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, and Dedication, a personal history of growing up in a Jewish “red diaper” family.

• AUDIO: A History of Jewish Anti-Zionism | KPFA
• VIDEO: A History of Student Movements
• In Solidarity with the Students
• #This is a Coup | Verso Books

Anti-Imperialist Modernism

He sits in conversation with Mitch Jeserich on Letters & Politics (KPFA.org, Berkeley) about American Jewish thinking, once very anti-Zionist until the 6 Day War.

Then Zionism, the idea of having a right to return to a land your ancestors (Jews) wrote in a book (the Bible) was yours for all time, started to get a foothold. If when you arrive on that land and find it full, say, "These are not a people," therefore the land is empty.

"We'll take it over with British and American help and say we built it out of nothing. Never mind that we work for empire, our own, British globalism, and a nascent American urge to control the oil-rich and geopolitically strategic region."

No genocide in our name: Ceasefire NOW! (ifnotnowmovement.org)

• Jewish Voice for Peace (jvp.org)
• NOT IN OUR NAME (ifnotnowmovement.org)
• Jewish Veterans for Peace: breakingthesilence.org.il
• ‎شرش | Shoresh | שר”ש‎ (@shoresh_us) • Anti-Zionist Jews
• American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)
• Amnesty International
• American Veterans for Peace
• Code Pink: Women for Peace

Tricking US Jews to fight for empire

Even Leftist Jews can get behind that, right? If not, they're antisemites and need to be expelled from the culture and community if not the religion. But we're secular so that doesn't matter, and the Ultra-Orthodox religious Jews assure us we're behaving in an anti-biblical way in complete contravention to religious dictates.

Setting up a CIA-groomed dictator in Bibi Netanyahu, as well as his brother, to run the settler colonial project is a mere expedient, and soon Israeli prime ministers will align with their own interests, sell weapons to whomever they want, and take over all the land they can conquer from Lebanon to Egypt, to Jordan to Qatar. Israel will be the capital of a new empire for and by Zionist Jews.

• Benjamin Balthaser | Indiana University South Bend
• Bad Jews Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, Jewish New Left
• Not Your Good Germans: Holocaust Memory, Anti-Fascism, and the anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left | Benjamin Balthaser - Academia.edu
• Host Mitch Jeserich, Prof. Benjamin Balthaser (Letters & Politics, KPFA.org, 5/8/24); Text by Shauna Schwartz, Sheldon S., Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly