Category: Zionism

France Had a Two-State Solution Too: It Was Called Vichy.

Communists were opposed to the two-state solution for France. It is a mistake for them to accept the two-state solution for Palestine.

9 October 2026

By Stephen Gowans

Pro-Zionist communists, such as the Communist parties of the United States, Canada, Britain, and China, support the two-state “solution,” a euphemism for the colonization of 78 percent of Palestine. Many base their support on the argument that a) communists must allow Palestinians to decide the solution to the problem of Jewish colonization of their homeland and b) that most Palestinians favor the two-state proposal. The first part of the argument is logically flawed. The second part is empirically invalid.

Let’s begin with the second part.

A little over a year ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Polls in recent years have shown that only a minority of Israelis and Palestinians support the idea” of a two-state solution. Among Palestinians, “just 28 percent of those interviewed … supported such a plan, while 64 percent opposed it.” A Gallup poll released this month showed that 58 percent of Palestinians interviewed in the West Bank and Jerusalem oppose the two-state proposal. (Palestinians in Gaza, could not, for obvious reasons, be surveyed.) As Mondoweiss, an independent, non-profit news website focused on Palestine concluded, “Most Palestinians disagree with a two-state solution.”

In 1947, when partition of Palestine was proposed by the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinians were dead set against it. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why. Palestinians were expected to hand over 56 percent of their country to recent immigrants who made up only one-third of the population, while they would keep only 42 percent of their homeland. (Jerusalem, two percent of the territory, was to be internationalized under the UN plan.)

The partition plan sparked a civil war followed by an international war. When the dust had settled, Jewish colonizers had driven 83 percent of Palestinians who lived in what has since become 4 June 1967 (or Green Line) Israel out their homes, and refused their repatriation. At the same time, they expanded their territorial holdings from the 56 percent the UN General Assembly had proposed to 78 percent of Palestine. The colonizers said they had accepted the partition plan, but they implemented not one of the plan’s provisions.

For the next 40 years, Palestinians tried to recover their country, pursuing a vision of one democratic state in all of Palestine.  They met with no success. After decades of struggle, the PLO accepted what has become known as the two-state solution. At the time it appeared that an independent Palestinian state comprising 22 percent of Palestine, as prescribed by the two-state “solution”, had some hope of coming to fruition. But after decades of a failed “peace process” it became obvious to Palestinians that they had been sold a bill of goods. Instead of getting a Palestinian state on one-fifth of Palestinian territory, they were presented with ongoing colonization of the West Bank, the Judaization of East Jerusalem, and a concentration camp in Gaza.

Let’s examine the first part of the argument: Communists must allow Palestinians self-determination to decide the solution to the problem of Jewish colonization of their homeland.

Alain Alameddine and Saman Hasan are active in the Palestinian-led One Democratic State Initiative. They argue that “Standing against the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine in the name of Palestinian self-determination is a laughable contradiction. Democracy is, by definition, rule of the people. Democratic states are precisely the tool by which people self-determine.”

On top of being a laughable contradiction, opposing the call for a decolonized Palestine is, for communists, an ideological contradiction. Following Lenin’s lead, communists have always favored decolonization, but somehow their support for decolonization has stopped short of Palestine. Lenin didn’t call for the liberation of the world’s oppressed people, except the Palestinians.

Furthermore, no communist would ever have said “The French must be allowed the self-determination to decide whether to accept the partition of their country into a German colony with a capital at Paris (comprising 60 percent of France), and a French state with its capital at Vichy (comprising 40 percent.)  Nor would they have said that the French have accepted that their country should be partitioned, as evidenced by the agreement of their government with the Germans, so we’re going to support the French right to a self-determined “two-state solution.” Any communist who accepted a two-state solution for France would have been justifiably denounced as a collaborator with German colonialism, and hardly a communist at all.

There’s a further contradiction. Pro-Zionist communists say their support for the two-state solution is based on letting Palestinians lead the way, the only true anti-colonial position. The problem with this argument is that pro-Zionist communists have never allowed Palestinians to lead the way.

  1. They supported the transfer of 56 percent of Palestine to Jewish colonizers in 1947, even though Palestinians were vehemently opposed.
  2. Today, they continue to support the two-state proposal despite the fact that most Palestinians oppose it.

The only lead pro-Zionist communists have ever followed is that of Moscow, and today, China and Cuba.  Moscow reversed the position of the communist movement in 1947 from anti-Zionism to pro-Zionism and from support of one secular democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine to support for the Jewish colonization of the better part of the Palestinians’ homeland. The volte-face was carried out for Soviet geopolitical aims. Stalin believed the Zionists were committed socialists whose opposition to Britain would make them good allies. Leaving aside the question of whether this policy turned out to be an opportunist blunder, it’s absurd that pro-Zionist communists today mimic a policy based on the realpolitik of a state that has been dead for 35 years!

To sum up, many communists think they’re anti-Zionist because they criticize Israel and (say they) stand with the Palestinians (though it’s not clear how they can claim to stand with the Palestinians while supporting a two-state solution the Palestinians oppose.) Anti-Zionism is a rejection of the project of establishing an ethno-supremacist Jewish state in a colonized Palestine. Supporting the two state “solution”, a euphemism for supporting the Jewish colonization of 78 percent of Palestine, is not anti-Zionism. It is the very opposite.

The pro-Zionist two-state “solution” position is clearly at odds with the communist tradition of opposing colonization. It is also at odds with the call for one secular democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine, the position of the communist movement before the Soviet Union’s 1947 realpolitik volte-face, as well as that of the Palestinian Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Finally, we should recognize the absurdity that lays at the heart of pro-Zionist communist support for the two-state proposal. It assumes that Palestinians would actually prefer the occupation of 78 percent of their land over its liberation. This idea is as absurd as the notion that the French would have preferred a state based at Vichy to the liberation of all of France.

Alain Alameddine and Saman Hasan of the One Democratic State Initiative point out that “A number of movements such as Citizens in a State (Lebanon), the Democratic Popular Unity Party (Jordan), Democratic Socialists of America (USA) [though this is unclear: see comments below, and] Diem25 (Europe)” support some version of one democratic Palestinian state in Palestine. And of course, so too does the Green Party of England and Wales, whose recent support for this position, has been widely covered in the news media.  Ironically, it is reformists, not revolutionaries, who are taking the lead in building anti-Zionist platforms and calling for decolonization of Palestine.

Communists must do more than oppose genocide and accept Israel’s existence as a settler colonial state. As Alameddine and Hasan write “The Israel you have seen over the past three years is the one we have been seeing over the past 78 years. It is the only Israel there is—a danger to Palestine,” the Levant, “and the world. The time for non-solutions is over. We must push forward the dismantling of the settler state and the establishment of its antithesis,” one secular democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine.

Would Lenin Support the Two State “Solution” or a Decolonized, Secular, Democratic State in All of Palestine?

7 October 2026

By Stephen Gowans

Many Communist parties are pro-Zionist, even if they express solidarity with Palestinians. Their pro-Zionism lies in their support for the so-called two-state “solution,” a proposal to create a Palestinian state in historic Palestine, alongside a Jewish state. What makes this position pro-Zionist is its acceptance of a colonial Jewish state.

Israel, conceived as that part of Palestine colonized by Jewish settlers by the end of the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War, is based on the colonization of the greater part (78 percent) of historic Palestine. (What Israel is, in fact, as opposed to in theory, is based on the colonization of all of historic Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s stick with so-called Green Line Israel, the Jewish state before it took over the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.). Hence, endorsement of the two-state “solution” is, in part, an endorsement of the colonization of the greater part of Palestine.

Pro-Zionist Communist parties call for a Palestinian state to be created on the 22 percent of the Palestinians’ homeland that Jewish colonizers failed to colonize from 29 November 1947 to 20 July 1949. Even if one were to (incomprehensibly) accept the legitimacy of colonization, why would one accept such a grossly unbalanced division of territory, considering that Palestinians outnumber Israeli Jews? (There are about nine million Palestinians living in historic Palestine and refugee camps versus about 7.4 million Israeli Jews.) Two-state supporters somehow think their proposal is fair, though it’s difficult to see how giving part of one people’s country to another is fair, or how a division that gives four-fifths of the territory to settlers and one-fifth to a greater number of natives is equitable, notwithstanding the fact that giving away any of it to another people is unfair to start.

Some supporters of the pro-Zionist Communist parties say that the parties’ backing of the two-state proposal is based on what Palestinians and their political leaders want, and that they’re only reflecting the aspirations of the Palestinians themselves. This is clearly not the case, since the Communist movement’s support for partition—and hence for the Zionist colonization of a part of Palestine—dates to late 1947, when Palestinians were overwhelmingly opposed to giving up part of their country to Jewish colonizers. (The proposal, which the Soviet Union endorsed, assigned 54 percent of Palestine to Jewish settlers, who made up only one-third of the population, while the Palestinians were allocated 42 percent, even though they comprised two-thirds of the population. Two percent was to be internationalized.) Despite fierce Palestinian opposition, the Communist movement backed the colonialist project anyway because it accorded with the geopolitical goals of the Soviet Union. The views of Palestinians didn’t count. Moscow saw the Zionists as committed socialists whose opposition to Britain marked them out as anti-imperialists and, therefore, potential allies. This position turned out to be, not only a moral and ideological blunder, but a political one, as well. The Zionists, as it soon became evident, were not allies.

Communists continued to back a colonial Zionist state in Palestine during a period when all Palestinian political leaders called for one democratic state in a decolonized Palestine, the very same position that, ironically, Communists themselves had staked out prior to reversing course in late 1947. For example, on the eve of the Communist volte-face, Communists of the British Empire called for “the creation of a free, independent and democratic Palestinian state, which will guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jewish.” Arab and Palestinian political leaders adopted the same position, but after 1947, their views didn’t matter much to the Communist movement. It continued to accept the Jewish colonization of part of Palestine.

If Communists couldn’t legitimately use the excuse in 1947 that they were docilely reflecting the political preferences of the Palestinians, they still can’t. A Gallup poll released yesterday, shows that six of 10 Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem (Gaza for understandable reasons couldn’t be surveyed) are opposed to the two-state proposal.

The rejection of the two-state proposal meshes with the view of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist party active in the Palestinian armed resistance. It vehemently opposes the two-state proposal and calls, instead, for a single, secular, democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine.

Palestinian opposition to what scholar Khalid Rashidi has called “the two-state illusion” is understandable. In 1988 the PLO dropped its goal of achieving a democratic state in a decolonized Palestine in favor of the two-state proposal. Since then, it has become clear that neither Israel, nor its partners in North America and Western Europe, have any intention of allowing the vision of a Palestinian state to come to fruition.  The two-state proposal has proved to be a mirage, peddled to Palestinians to pacify them with pie in the sky while Jewish colonizers gradually Judaize that part of historic Palestine they have yet to formally annex.

Israel has taken over much of the West Bank, and in ways that make anything remotely resembling a viable Palestinian state impossible to achieve. Even were there a genuine will to create a Palestinian state in the small part of historic Palestine the two-state proposal deigns to grant the Palestinians (and time has demonstrated that there isn’t), the project—never politically or morally acceptable to begin with—is long past feasible.

The Green Party of England and Wales—perhaps hearing the echoes of the British Empire Communists’ call for a single, decolonized, democratic state in Palestine—has recently called for the same. Ironically, a reformist party has staked out an unequivocally Leninist position, while the heirs of Lenin (some of them) have clung mightily to a reformist position.

The Green Party’s call for decolonization has prompted the One Democratic State Initiative to ask what is keeping other left organizations from doing the same. The Initiative is a Palestinian political project aimed at shifting the focus of those involved in the Palestine question from solidarity with Palestinians and criticism of Israel alone, to campaigning for decolonization, much as Communists campaigned for the decolonization of South Africa and the establishment of one, democratic state, where blacks and whites live as equals.  

Communists need to consider what the ODSI asks. Will their involvement with the question of Palestine be limited to rhetorical solidarity with Palestinians and criticism of the Jewish state—undertaken within the framework of the pro-Zionist two-state illusion—or will they reject colonization, as Leninists must, and endorse what the movement once supported: a decolonized secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for all, regardless of ethnicity or religion?

The Predators: United States, Israel, and Russia and Their Bella Ultra Inferre

1 October 2026

By Stephen Gowans

The UK government claims to have foiled a planned “terrorist” attack on a USAF air base masquerading as an RAF air base in the English countryside, claiming the thwarted attack was likely orchestrated by Iran.   

The Wall Street Journal commented that using “proxies to plot an attack on a U.K. military installation would mark a significant escalation given that Britain isn’t directly at war with Iran”—an acknowledgement that Britain is at war with Iran, even if not directly. It added that “Iran has targeted British bases abroad during the war” “including Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Akrotiri in Cyprus.” It failed to mention that the bases were used by US forces to attack Iran. It’s incomprehensible that anyone should expect immunity from attack for a party that materially aids an aggressor.  

Moreover, how can an alleged planned attack on a UK military facility that has been used by Washington to prosecute a bellum ultro inferre (an unprovoked war of aggression) be characterized as “terrorist” without completely rewriting the definition of terrorism to mean an attack on the military of a foe rather than on its civilians?

Whether you want to call RAF Fairford a concealed US military base, or a shared British-US military facility, three things are clear: One, the base is used by the US military. Two, it has been used to carry out an unprovoked offensive war on Iran. Three, it is, as a consequence, fair game for Iranian retaliation. If you’re going to participate in a war, don’t whine if the enemy plans to strike back.

To be sure, the story of the alleged plot is sufficiently turbid to raise questions about whether there actually ever was a plot to begin with. But if the plot is genuine, and it was orchestrated by Tehran, it is perfectly legitimate.

Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy writes that all Jewish parties in Israel are committed to annihilating Gaza

All leaders of the major Jewish political parties in Israel wish to return to war in Gaza, or more accurately, to resume a genocide by means of massive violence preparatory to the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza, which means they all favor the total and final annihilation of Palestinian Gaza, or what the Nazis would have called a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation.

Given that the Israeli orgy of violence started three years ago, and that the aim of resuming it will be to complete the job begun on 8 October 2023, we might call the project the Endlosung, which is to say, the final solution.

I should add that while Israel has inflicted massive violence on the Palestinians, it is not through violence alone that it carries out its genocide. Violence is the means by which Israel has made Gaza uninhabitable. The aim is not to kill all or even a substantial part of the Palestinian population, but to leave Palestinians with no option but to quit Gaza, or die.  

Jewish colonizers have been using both violent and non-violent means to efface the Palestinian natives from their territory and to replace them with a Jewish majority for the last century. Genocide does not depend on violence alone, or even require it. Even so, the Jewish colonizers have, since 7 October 2023, discovered a newfound lust for violence, which they have been able to indulge, thanks to the largesse of the United States and Germany, which provide the Zionist Vernichtungskrieg 99 percent of its military aid. The Zionists could not run a settler colonial apartheid state, subjugate the Palestinians, occupy parts of Lebanon and Syria, bomb Iran, assassinate Iranian leaders and scientists, support pogroms in the West Bank, and reduce Gaza to rubble, without the substantial assistance of the United States and Germany. In return, Israel does the West’s “dirty work“, as Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has pointed out.

Soviet support for the Zionism is racism resolution

On 10 November 1975, the UN General Assembly approved resolution 3379, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism.

It was sponsored by the Arab League and Muslim-majority countries, and backed by the Soviet bloc.

The claim that Zionism is racism was a curious stance for the Soviet bloc to take, since it was inconsistent with Soviet support for the two-state ‘solution,’ which in turn, was inconsistent with Lenin’s championing of decolonization.

In backing the two-state ‘solution,’ the Soviets endorsed the Jewish colonization of Palestinian territory, and by implication supported the very Zionist racism they claimed to oppose. At the same time, they rejected Lenin’s anti-colonialism in promoting a colonialist endeavor in Palestinian territory.

Sadly, the contradictions persist in the communist movement today, where support for the two-state proposal is nearly universal, except among many Trotskyist groups. One can’t be a champion of decolonization while backing the colonization of Palestine. Nor can one be against racism while endorsing a racist Zionist state.

An End to Israel Altogether

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has called for Israel to end its occupation of southern Syria, not because the occupation is predatory and imperialist, but because “it may well push residents of southern Syria into the arms of” what the newspaper calls “the Iranian axis.”

That the occupation may drive occupied people into the arms of a coalition that opposes occupation, evinces clearly what “the axis” is: an anti-imperialist resistance against the predations of the US-backed Jewish supremacist state in the Levant.

The axis comprises Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah (the Houthis), a branch of the Iraqi PMF, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Marxist PFLP. Before its overthrow by rebranded US-backed Al Qaeda forces, Baathist Syria was also a member. The thread that connects these groups is not Islam (for how would we explain the inclusion of the Marxist PFLP and secular Arab nationalist Syria?) Nor is it Twelver Shia Islam (for neither Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Ansar Allah fit this category.)

The occupation of southern Syria, which is said by Haaretz to represent a tragedy in embryo, is no different, but in its recency, from the US-backed Zionist occupations of Syria’s Golan, southern Lebanon, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Palestinian territory known as 4 June 1967 Israel (the first territory the Zionists occupied, representing the 78 percent of Palestine supporters of the two-state proposal believe should be reserved for an ethno-supremacist Jewish state. Miko Peled asks why it is that two-state supporters think Zionist colonizers should get over three-quarters of Palestine, while the Palestinians are relegated to less that one quarter of their country. This makes little sense, considering that there are as many Palestinians living in historic Palestine as Jews. We might call the two-state solution a proposal to carve up Palestine into one big state for Jewish colonizers and a reservation for the natives.)

While I agree with Haaretz that Israel should exit southern Syria, I part company with the newspaper on the reasons for calling for the occupation’s end (because it is predatory, and not because it will strengthen the resistance, which is desirable) and also on the scope of what ought to be called for. If one settler colonial occupation is indefensible, so too is every other. Rather than calling for an end to Israel’s occupation in Syria, one ought to be calling for an end to Israel altogether, the decolonization of the Levant, and the demise of the US imperialist project in the region.

The big enemy and the smaller one

While Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and the settler colonial regime he represents are execrable, and while it was encouraging to have witnessed scores of UN delegations walking out on the genocide-leader’s address to the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump and the imperialist regime he leads are doubly repugnant, and yet only two delegations (Iran’s and Cuba’s) walked out on Trump’s belligerent, self-serving, gasconade before the UN.

Worse, even Trump’s threat to inflict a Vernichtungskrieg on Iran—in the grand hall of an organization ostensibly dedicated to saving humanity from the scourge of war—failed to offend the conscience of UN delegates sufficiently to induce them to walk out. Apparently, a man who is carrying out a genocide of a Palestinian population of 7 million offends the conscience of UN delegations more than his enabler who has repeatedly threatened to carry out a genocide of 90 million Iranians.

 The United States ought to arouse, not less indignation than Israel, and not as much, but far more, considering that not only is it the principal patron, armorer, defender, and promoter of the Jewish supremacist state in Palestine, but its own conduct, apart from its support of Israel, is even more repugnant.

Consider, for example, the unprovoked war of aggression on Iran; the thuggish kidnapping of the Venezuelan president; the effort to conquer Cuba, and to do so by reducing the entire population to misery; the ICE-led fascist pogroms against immigrants and the cold-blooded murder of our comrades Rene Good and Alex Pretti; and on and on ad nauseam.

On top of these offences, Washington makes every one of Israel’s crimes—from racism, to apartheid, to colonization, to genocide—possible.

That makes the United States worse than Israel.

To treat Netanyahu and the US-backed Jewish supremacists in Palestine as outliers while blithely accepting the Zionist state’s chief sponsor—and the world’s most predatory country—as a state worthy of respect, is insupportable and evidence of a widespread failure to order our political enemies from greater to lesser.

Of course, the reason why Trump received a polite reception and Netanyahu did not, is because Trump has the power to punish nearly every country, and Netanyahu does not.

So, delegations are careful about how they express their indignation, and whether they express it at all. It depends on the power of the one who provokes it. Which from the perspective of Washington is just fine. Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate so long as they fear.

On the responsibility of citizens to condemn their own country’s imperialism

In a Washington Post op-ed, NHL Hall of Fame goalie Dominik Hasek wrote that the Washington Capital’s star Alexander Ovechkin, a Russian citizen, must condemn “Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine and the horrific crimes associated with it,” otherwise he acts as “a walking advertisement for” his government’s actions.

Here’s what Hasek wrote:

“Every citizen acts as a representative of their country and serves as a walking advertisement for its actions — unless, of course, they publicly condemn those actions. At present, this means that every Russian citizen, and especially every supporter of President Vladimir Putin, serves as an advertisement for Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine and the horrific crimes associated with it, including the mass abduction of Ukrainian children. This applies to all Russian citizens.”

Hasek’s argument might be more compelling if he applied the same logic to the support of US citizens for comparable US crimes. Were Hasek to do so, his argument, using his own words with appropriate substitutions, would look like this:

‘Every citizen acts as a representative of their country and serves as a walking advertisement for its actions — unless, of course, they publicly condemn those actions. At present, this means that every US citizen, and especially every supporter of President Donald Trump, serves as an advertisement for the United States’ imperialist war on Iran and the horrific crimes associated with it, including the mass killing of Iranian schoolgirls. This applies to all US citizens.’

Hasek’s logic also fits with US participation in the genocide of the Palestinians. The United States provides Israel with the arms to carry out the genocide, and the diplomatic backing that enables Israel to pursue its heinous crimes with impunity. This means, per Hasek, that unless every US citizen condemns their country’s participation in the genocide, they are walking advertisements for complicity in a horrible crime.

I join Hasek in condemning Russian imperialism. And I invite him to join me in denouncing US and contingent Israeli imperialism and their horrific crimes.

The United States and Russia. Two predatory powers—one obviously much stronger and more predatory— struggling for control of Ukraine

Readers might ask: How can you characterize Russia as a predatory power for its war on Ukraine, without recognizing US predation on Russia? The answer is that I do recognize US predation on Russia, and I denounce it as firmly as I do the raptorial wars of the United States on Iran and the Palestinians. But while the United States preys on Russia—and does so through NATO and its support for Ukraine—this fact in no way gainsays the reality that what Moscow risibly calls its “special military operation” is a bellum ultro inferre, an offensive war. I see the conflict in Ukraine as a war between Russia and the United States for control of Ukraine; what Lenin would have called a predatory war.

Antisemitism on Canadian Campuses: Debunking a New Report by the Government of Canada

By Stephen Gowans

August 9, 2026

A Canadian-government-sponsored report has concluded that antisemitism is widespread on Canadian university campuses. Some media outlets have picked up on the report. According to the CBC, the new report shows that “Antisemitism on campus is ‘systemic’ and going unaddressed.” Israel’s Haaretz reports that the research found that “95 percent of Jewish Students on Canadian Universities Have Encountered Antisemitism.” Meanwhile, The Canadian Press let its readers know that the study reveals that “Jewish students on Canadian campuses report pervasive antisemitism.”

But what the report really shows is that there is a growing wave of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian activism on Canadian campuses—hardly a revelation. The authors, whose political biases and methodological lapses will become evident in a moment, have turned this commonplace into an alarming trend by a slight of hand: They have defined criticism of Israel as hatred of Jews.

It’s difficult not to conclude that the motivation behind the report is to discredit pro-Palestinian activists by smearing them as antisemites, with the clear intention of shutting down criticism of Israel at Canadian universities. Once you consider who sponsored the report (a pro-Israel, pro-Zionist Canadian government); who wrote it (the lead author is a Zionist who was once the executive director of pro-Israel organization); and who was surveyed (Jewish students who identify Israel and Zionism as important parts of their lives), it becomes clear that the report is not to an honest attempt to gauge antisemitism on campus but a politically motivated effort to discredit students who have organized against Israeli atrocities in Gaza as Jew-haters.

All of this starts to become clear when the report reveals that it “uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism,” a definition that has been widely discredited for falsely conflating antisemitism with antizionism.  The Government of Canada’s “Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism” (Ottawa adopted the definition in 2011) cites the following as examples, among others, of antisemitism:

  • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
  • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
  • Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
  • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

All these examples refer to attitudes toward Israel, a state, and Zionism, a political movement, not Jews as an ethnoreligious group. The action depicted in the third example—using antisemitic images to denote Israel—may be crude, stupid, and intolerable, but the target is Israel, not Jews. This illustrates the problem with the IHRA definition, and why it’s considered invalid. If it were true that hatred of an ethnocratic movement (Zionism) or ethnocratic state (Israel) was the same as hatred of an ethnoreligious group (Jews), then it would be true that anti-fascism represented anti-Italian hatred, that anti-Nazism equaled anti-German animosity, and that opposition to South African Apartheid amounted to intolerance of white people.

The report’s pro-Zionist orientation is further evidenced by its definition of antizionism as “a movement that calls for the erasure of Israel and denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland.” In defining antizionism this way, the report’s authors make the claim—which would hardly be accepted by pro-Palestinian students on campuses—that the Jewish people have a right to dispossess the Palestinians of their country, land, homes, and property.

The report’s authors argue further that antizionism relies “on libel and distortion to claim that the Jewish collective, Israel, rather than the individual Jew, is uniquely evil. It further asserts that Jews, who have thousands of years of history in this place, are fabricating a legitimate claim to their ancestral homeland. Antizionism claims that Israel, exceptionally, is the one state that must be eradicated.”

These claims are false. First, antizionism is not a doctrine concerned with definitions of evil, let alone unique evil. Second, it doesn’t deny that many, though not all, Jews claim Palestine as a homeland, only that Jews are not the only peoples who have lived in Palestine, and that prior residency or what the Pentateuch says Yahweh promised to Moses do not justify the colonization of Palestine and the dispossession of its inhabitants. Finally, antizionism is only anticolonialism specific to Palestine. Anticolonialism has opposed other settler colonial states, including Algeria, Rhodesia, and Apartheid South Africa, declaring that these states too needed to be eradicated as ethnocratic political orders. Much as Israel’s supporters like to think the Zionist state is being singled out, it is not.

The report’s lead author, Jack Jedwab, served as Executive Director of the Quebec branch of the Canadian Jewish Congress, from 1994-1998. The CJC became the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (note the priority of ‘Israel’ in the title), a pro-Israeli outfit that “educates Canadians about the central role Israel plays in Jewish life and identity” and which monitors “issues that affect the Canada-Israel friendship”—like the growing disapproval of Israel in Canadian society, owing to its connections to genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism.

Citing the report, the CIJA is urging “university leaders and governments at every level to carefully consider this report and the recommendations by the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics.” NECA recommends that Canadian universities formally adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a gambit that would allow university administrators to suppress pro-Palestinian activism on campus by labelling it as antisemitic. The body also recommends that universities define Zionism as a part of a Jewish student’s identity. In this way, antizionist activism can be proscribed and punished as antisemitic speech and conduct.

Survey Results

If the authors’ overly broad definition of antisemitism leaves much to be desired, so too does their survey methodology and treatment and reporting of the results.

Below are the percentages of surveyed Jewish students who say they have experienced or witnessed various instances of what the authors call “antisemitic” incidents.

Over the past 12 months, how often have you experienced or witnessed the following on your campus?

(Scale: Often or Occasionally)

  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists. (81%)
  • Vandalism of school property motivated by antisemitism. (71%)
  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Israelis. (67%)
  • Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at others. (59%)
  • Hateful or discriminatory treatment of Jews. (56%)
  • Intimidation or threats directed at Jews. (54%)
  • Exclusion from an event or group (on campus). (36%)
  • Antisemitic remarks/gestures directed at you. (34%)
  • Physical violence directed at Jews. (22%)

Notice that two of the incident types concern Jews as Zionists and Jews as Israelis, not Jews as Jews. Second, the most frequently reported incident of hate or discrimination concerns Zionists, followed by Israelis. Jews, as a group, come last. This says that more of what Jewish students report as antisemitism is anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli conduct than antisemitism.  

Who were the Jewish students the study surveyed? According to the report, they were recruited “through Jewish student organizations, community networks, and related channels.” Nine of every 10 said that attachment to Israel was important to them and nearly as many said the same about Zionism. Since pro-Israel, Zionist Jews have long been inclined to label criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitism, it comes as no surprise that these students would view the growing wave of pro-Palestinian activism and opposition to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, apartheid, and settler colonialism as a sign of rising Judeophobia.

A final remark on the results. The study used a four-point scale of often, occasionally, rarely, or never.  The percentages sum two points—often and occasionally. This invites the question or whether the answers leaned more to “occasionally” than “often”, or whether results based on the percentage saying “often” alone would tell a different story—one less likely to arouse media interest? Not that it would matter much. When a government that officially equates antizionism with antisemitism hires researchers who equate antizionism with antisemitism to survey students who equate antizionism with antisemitism about their experiences with antisemitism, it would be naive to think that the findings would claim anything other than campuses that are bursting with antizionist activism are hotbeds of antisemitism.

Conclusion

The report is a transparently dishonest attempt to shut down pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist activism on campuses by misrepresenting opposition to Israel as Jew hatred. It was sponsored by the Canadian government, which supports Israel and has adopted the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism. Its first author is a Zionist, who once held an executive position in a pro-Israel organization. The study surveyed overwhelmingly pro-Israel, pro-Zionist students—students inclined to see opposition to Israel as antisemitism. Likewise, the study’s authors accept a discredited definition of antisemitism, which conflates opposition to Jewish ethnocracy with hatred of Jews as an ethnoreligious group. Additionally, the results, for what they’re worth, show that incidents labelled as antisemitic tend most often to be directed at Jews as Zionists and Jews as Israelis than Jews as Jews.

Based on the study’s evident political bias, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the aim of the research was to paint pro-Palestinian activists as antisemites. It would appear the study pursued this goal in order to support the Zionist and pro-Israel project of pressuring governments and university administrations to prohibit and punish campus campaigns against Israeli apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism.  This is a study with a clear pro-Israel agenda. It cannot be taken seriously as a measure of antisemitism on Canadian campuses.

The Via Crucis of John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer developed the theory of the Israel lobby because the facts contradicted his Realist theory of international relations. Now the facts are contradicting the very same Israel lobby theory he developed to plug the holes in his IR theory.

15 June 2026

By Stephen Gowans

It’s difficult to argue that Israel and the Israel lobby control US foreign policy when Washington arrives at an agreement with Tehran:   

  • That Israel had no say in;
  • Achieves none of Israel’s war aims;
  • Is universally opposed by Jewish Israeli leaders across the political spectrum;
  • Is met with skepticism by pro-Israel hawks in the US.

Even if the agreement falls apart, it is still the case that Washington has acted in a manner that is hostile to what Israelis perceive as their interests.

“The Israel lobby” is a category of explanation invoked to account for the failure of certain theories to explain US actions (e.g., some Realist IR theories, or the theory that US foreign policy is fundamentally benign in its intentions if not always its actions.)

The problem lies with the theories. They don’t explain what they set out to explain.

John Mearsheimer is a Realist IR theorist, and the most vocal exponent of the theory that 1) Washington acts against US interests in West Asia and in favor of Israel’s and 2) it does so because its foreign policy has been hijacked by the Israel lobby. He readily acknowledges that his IR theory doesn’t explain US behavior in West Asia.

Steve Walt and I, who are both card-carrying Realists, wrote this book called the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. And lots of people over the years have delighted in pointing out, in a “got-ya!” moment, that the Israel Lobby book contradicts our Realist theory. Because the Israel Lobby book says that domestic politics causes the United States to act in non-strategic ways. This is what the Israel Lobby book says. It says that when it comes to Israel, the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave. It’s because of the Lobby; domestic politics. And people expect us, when they level that charge at us, to be defensive and say ‘Oh no, the Lobby book really fits in with our theory.’ But our response is, ‘You’re absolutely correct. The Israel Lobby contradicts my basic theory of international politics.’ [1]

You may notice that Mearsheimer engages in some question-begging here (question-begging in the sense of assuming the truth of what he’s trying to prove in his premise.)  He says “that when it comes to Israel, the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave,” and then adds “It’s because of the Lobby.” An alternative explanation is that the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave because the theory is wrong. Instead, he assumes the theory is correct, and that something else must be going on to obscure its validity. Presto, the Israel lobby theory is born.

The problem, however, is that the Israel lobby theory has as many holes in it as there are holes in the original theory it was designed to plug. That’s evident in the obvious rift that has developed between Washington and Tel Aviv over the question of how to proceed on Iran.

Apart from being an add-on to save Mearsheimer’s IR theory, the Israel lobby theory is also a political tool used by some activists to mobilize support for pro-Palestinian positions by deliberately fostering a misunderstanding that a foreign power has hijacked the US state and that US citizens are paying for wars fought in Israel’s interests and not US interests.

The truth is that US citizens are paying for US wars—and the wars are being fought in the overlapping interests of US billionaires and Israeli colonizers. They may not want to face up to the fact that their government’s conduct is vicious and tyrannical, and may prefer, instead, to see the United States as a fundamentally benign but helpless giant manipulated by an Israeli Svengali, but this is nothing more than a comforting illusion.

The reality is that the domestic billionaire class that shapes US foreign policy goals has set objectives that, for the most part, mesh with the settler colonial project of Israel. Broadly speaking, the overarching US objective is to prevent the emergence of an independent regional hegemon in energy-rich West Asia.

Owing to its cultural, ethnic, demographic, and economic connections with the West (Israel sees itself as part of the West, a Western outpost in the East), and its complete dependency on Western support to survive, Israel is uniquely placed to act as a US janissary—a protector of US interests in the Land of the Five Seas [2] and elite combat force equipped and motivated to assert US interests. Guardian of the interests of great powers in the Arab and Muslim worlds has, from day one, been the role sought by Zionists for a Jewish state. The quid-pro-quo has always been understood as: We look after your interests in the region against those of local forces of independence, and you guarantee our survival.

A troubling aspect of the Israel lobby theory is its resonance with a Nazi theory.  

Hitler did much the same as Mearsheimer in explaining why something didn’t happen that he thought should have happened.  

Mearsheimer says the United States is not behaving in a way a Realist would expect American policy-makers to behave because policy-making in Washington has been taken over by decision-makers who are committed to Israeli goals and Israeli goals are inimical to US interests.

Similarly, Hitler said Germany should have won the First World War and didn’t because Jews penetrated German policy-making circles and took over German decision-making and pursued Zionist goals that were hostile to German interests. How else could one explain, asked Hitler, that no enemy troops had ever set foot on German soil, and still Germany lost the war? In this, Hitler anticipated Mearsheimer’s wondering how Realist IR theory failed to account for US behavior in West Asia. For both, a Zionist take-over offered a ready explanation of failed expectation.

Overlapping interests, not Israeli colonization of foreign policy decision-making in Washington, account for why US and Israeli decision-makers are so often in sync. Occasionally, however, the goals of the two states depart, as they do, now, on Iran. Israel wants to finish off Iran, destroy Hezbollah, and continue its expansion into Lebanon. Washington wants to prevent the world economy from going off an oil- and fertilizer-scarcity cliff, and is prepared to make concessions to Iran that Israel doesn’t like in order to avoid a world-wide calamity.

When US and Israeli interests fail to align, the US asserts its greater strength, and Israel tries to maintain some degree of autonomy by negotiating the terms of its subordination. But it remains, as always, a subordinate state and instrument of US policy. For its part, the US remains, as always, the guarantor of its janissary Jewish state’s survival.

1. John Mearsheimer in Athens: Why Realism Explains Better than Alternative Theories, Address to the Council for International Relations and the Institute of International Relations, Athens, Greece, 2 June, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVuZbW4qKNY

2. The territory bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Arabian Sea, and Red Sea.

Whether the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or Israel, It’s All Stolen Land

By Stephen Gowans

13 June 2026

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, “left-wing UK leaders” are “slamming” an Israeli real-estate event, alleging that it seeks to sell properties to Jews on stolen West Bank land.

While efforts to impede the ongoing Judaization of Palestine are commendable, there is a fundamental problem that lurks in the campaign’s understanding of what is and isn’t stolen Palestinian land. The reality is that all the land in historic Israel that is claimed by Jewish settlers—both within the 1967 borders and outside—is stolen.

Failing to acknowledge this reality implicitly legitimizes Israeli colonialism and all earlier thefts of Palestinian land. While it identifies land stolen in 1967 as Palestinian, it tacitly accepts land stolen in 1948 as legitimately belonging to Zionist settlers.

Of course, it can’t be true that land taken from Palestinians by Zionist violence in 1967 is Palestinian land, while land taken from Palestinians by Jewish settler violence in 1948 is not.

All the same, the illogic is concealed behind the claim that the violent transfer of Palestinian land to the new Israeli state in 1948 was legitimized by the UN partition plan.

This view, however, is wrong for a number of reasons.

1.) The plan was legally invalid, since it was based on a General Assembly resolution, and

1a.) General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and

1b.) the General Assembly didn’t have the authority to partition Palestine. (Indeed, the UN Charter accords to neither the General Assembly or the Security Council the authority to create new states);

2.) The Palestinians rejected the plan;

3.) The Zionists also rejected it, as evidenced by the fact that:

3a.) They didn’t implement it; and

3b.) They conquered territory in excess of what the plan allocated to them.

The plan apportioned 56 percent of Palestine to one-third of the population that was Jewish (mainly settlers), and only 42 percent to the Palestinians, who comprised two-thirds of the population. (Two percent was allotted to what was to be an internationalized Jerusalem.)

By early 1949, the Zionists—keen to control as much of Palestine as they could—had conquered 78 percent of the territory (versus the 56 percent they were supposed to have under the plan.)

Still, even if the partition plan had been legally valid, it remained flagrantly colonial, since it endorsed the expropriation of the territory of the existing inhabitants by a group of settlers animated by the project of expelling as much of the Palestinian population as possible and them imposing a regime of Jewish ethnoreligious supremacy on those that remained.

The partition plan has become embedded in international law, but colonialism does not become just by virtue of its inclusion in international law. International law is the instrument of the colonial powers that formulated it. They formulated it to defend and promote their interests—not to protect weaker peoples and states.

The great powers make, and have made, international law, and when it doesn’t suit their purposes, they break it. So it is that they have read the partition plan into the global legal order, even though the plan was invalid under the very same order.

There exists today one Jewish supremacist state in all of historic Palestine. All the land, both within and beyond the 1967 borders, is stolen. The ineluctable conclusion is that home sales to Jewish settlers anywhere in historic Palestine, (not only in the West Bank), are auctions of stolen land.

The competing view that only settlements in the West Bank represent confiscated Palestinian land, endorses the colonial fiction that Jewish settlement within the 1967 borders is not colonial and has not taken place on the dispossessed land of the Palestinians. On the contrary, all the territory controlled by the US-backed colonial settler regime is colonized and stolen.

The solution to colonization is not colonization of all but 22 percent of a people’s territory—what’s proposed in the two-state “solution”—but decolonization, the creation of one democratic state, in which all people are equal, regardless of their ethnicity or religious identity.

That’s what Palestinians proposed from the very beginning. It is a multidimensional solution, one that remedies both the problems of settler colonialism (by creating its antithesis, the democratic state of all its citizens) and the problems of anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism (by depoliticizing ethnic and religious identity and thereby establishing the full equality of individuals, regardless of the religion they practice or the people they identify as.)

From the 22 percent of historic Palestine that the two-state proposal envisages for a Palestinian state; to Jawlan (called the Golan Heights by Israelis; conquered by the US-backed colonial settler regime in 1967; ethnically cleansed of its Syrian population; settled by Jews; and annexed by the Israeli state in 1981); to Israel itself: it is all stolen land. Failing to recognize this reality perpetuates an injustice and blocks implementation of the only fair and democratic solution to the multiple problems at the center of the Zionist colonization of historic Palestine and Jawlan.

Nazi Myth. Zionist Myth.

By Stephen Gowans

4 June 2026

A national Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published an editorial on 4 June 2026, lambasting Canadian prime minister Mark Carney for failing to condemn anti-Zionism. The editorial board pressed Carney to equate opposition to Israel’s existence with demonizing Canada’s Jews.

The editorial was titled “The Missing Words in Carney’s Speech”, a reference to a speech the prime minister had made to condemn what he described as a growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada. “It was good that Mr. Carney went to a synagogue and addressed antisemitism,” argued the editorial, but added that “He should have said: ‘If you oppose Israel’s existence, if you demonize Jewish-Canadians, you are wrong, you are hateful and I stand against you.’”

The growing wave of anti-Semitism in Canada is a myth. As I explained in a previous post, B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia. The organization, along with other pro-Israel partisans, are pressing Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian, pro-democracy and anti-Zionist, anti-colonial political positions. Carney’s speech added grist to the mill of the anti-Palestinian argument, but the Globe and Mail felt he hadn’t gone far enough.

Let’s be clear

1/ Zionism is not Judaism and nor are “Zionist” and “Jew” the same. Indeed, there are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jewish Zionists.

Zionism is a settler colonial, ethno-supremacist, apartheid ideology, that is the foundation of laws and practices that maintain the dominance of one ethnic group (Jews) over all others in historic Palestine. Nazism, and the ideology of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, shared the same ethnic chauvinism and colonialist mentality.

2/ Conflating Jew and Judaism with Zionist and Zionism is reminiscent of the Nazis conflating, in one instance, Jew and Judaism with international banker and finance capitalism, and in another, with Bolshevik and Bolshevism. The Nazi’s “Judeobolsheviks” have become “Judeozionists” in the hands the Globe and Mail and other Israel supporters.

The conflation is a form of anti-Semitism, since it argues that ethno-supremacism and settler colonialism are inherent in Judaism (which they are not) and that all Jews, and only Jews, are ethno-supremacists who support settler colonialism (manifestly untrue.)

Neither were all Jews Bolsheviks or finance capitalists, though the Nazis would have had you believe they were. Likewise, The Globe and Mail would have you believe that all Jews in Canada are ardent Zionists and die-hard supporters of Israel. In point of fact, all Jews do not support an ideology and regime of ethnoreligious exclusion and rule over colonized natives and many of those who do support these abominations are not Jews. There is, therefore, no necessary connection between Jew and Zionist.

We can look at this another way.

Despite the Nazis’ self-appointment as representatives and champions of the German race, anti-Nazism was not hatred of Germans. Anti-Nazism=anti-German is an obvious logical fallacy, but one Nazis were happy to promote.

Likewise, despite Israel’s self-appointment as representative and champion of the world’s Jews, anti-Zionism is not hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism=anti-Jew is also an obvious fallacy, but it is one, all the same, that Israel and its supporters are indefatigably keen to propagandize.

Having no other argument to make—how can one argue that settler colonialism and its offspring, apartheid and genocide, are good things?—Zionists reliably fall back on the myth that Nazis relied on to defend their own settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide: Anyone who rejects the ethno-supremacist ideology I’ve adopted as self-appointed representative of my ethnic group, is obviously against my ethnic group.

Germans didn’t appoint the Nazis to represent their “race.” Nor did all Germans support the Nazis. Saying that all Germans were Nazis and that opposition to the Third Reich therefore amounted to demonizing Germans, is plainly absurd. It’s also a slur against Germans.

And yet this is precisely the argument Zionists, no less the Globe and Mail editorial board, make when they equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

The world’s Jews didn’t appoint Israel to represent them. Not all Jews support Zionism. (And most of the world’s Zionists are not Jews, but evangelical Christians. For example, CUFI, Christians United for Israel, has more members than all the Jews in the United States.) Saying that all Jews are Zionists and that criticism of Zionism is therefore demonization of Jews is no less absurd than saying all Germans were Nazis and anti-Nazism is demonization of Germans.

The truth of the matter is that Israel and its Zionist ideology are bleeding support, and the pro-settler colonial, apartheid, anti-Palestinian Israel lobby is trying to stop the hemorrhaging. Their answer: Invent a crisis of antisemitism, blame it on anti-Zionism, and press governments to implement laws and practices to silence activists calling for the decolonization and de-Zionization of historic Palestine.

Plus ca change. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, The Globe and Mail strongly supported apartheid South Africa and opposed the ANC, Nelson Mandela, and the liberation movement. Had it been able to, it might have argued that the prime ministers of the day should have dressed down ANC supporters, telling them that: ‘If you oppose the apartheid regime’s existence, you demonize white-Canadians.’” The newspaper, the organ of Bay Street, Canada’s financial center, will, it seems, forever be on the wrong side of history.

B’nai Brith Canada Invents a Crisis of Antisemitism to Pressure Governments to Criminalize Political Opposition to Israel

B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia in order to press Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist political positions.

30 April 2026

By Stephen Gowans

On April 27 B’nai Brith Canada issued its Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, arguing that “Canada is in the throes of a national crisis of antisemitism.” The report documented 6,800 incidents of antisemitism” in 2025, the “highest volume recorded” since the group began its tracking in 1982.

What is B’nai Brith, how does it define antisemitic incidents, and what actions does it want governments to take to address the crisis it has identified?

B’nai Brith is a pro-Israel lobby group which “works tirelessly to support and defend Israel” and whose mission is to “stand unequivocally with the State of Israel,” according to its website. The group does not represent Canadian Jews as a whole. Not all Canadian Jews are Zionists or supporters of Israel. Instead, the outfit represents Israel and Jews in Canada who stand firmly with the Jewish state.

Significantly, B’nai Brith describes its support for Israel as “unequivocal.” It backs Israel, right or wrong. In 1988, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people. Then US president George H.W. Bush refused to apologize for the incident, saying that “I will never apologize for America.” B’nai Brith is the George W. Bush of Israel. It will never apologize for what it calls “the only Jewish state in the world.”

The group’s commitment to defending Israel is evidenced in its definition of antisemitism. The organization uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, prepared by an outfit that is as ardently pro-Israel as the B’nai Brith.  The IHRA definition has been widely criticized for 1) not being a definition at all, but a list of examples of what the group calls antisemitism, with no explanation of the principles than undergird the examples; and 2) for including anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel in three of its 11 examples.

The IHRA cites the following as an example of Jew hatred: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” While anti-Zionists do not deny Jews the right to establish a state per se, they do deny Jews (and anyone else for that matter) the right to establish a national state on the country of another people. Israel’s existence depends on the non-existence of Palestine. In practice, Jewish self-determination is equivalent to the denial of Palestinian self-determination.

A careful and precise interpretation of the IHRA example above would exclude anti-Zionism as an example of antisemitism were an anti-Zionist willing to accept the creation of a Jewish state on a genuine terra nullius (unoccupied, unclaimed land). Indeed, I would argue that virtually all anti-Zionists fall into this category, since their opposition to Jewish nationalism lies not in Jews creating a state, but in the cancelation of one people’s right of self-determination (the Palestinians’) to assert another’s (that of Jews).

However, it is clear from the B’nai Brith report that the organization has interpreted the IHRA example to mean that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The report describes criticism of Zionism, (e.g., that “Zionism is analogous to “settler colonialism”) as “demonization of Jews who believe in the right of the Jewish people to practice self-determination in their ancestral homeland,” and that this criticism, or “demonization”, creates “a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community.”

I would make a few points in reply:

  • Jews, to be sure, did have a state in Palestine in antiquity. But the Palestinians’ ancestral claim to the same land is equally strong. Indeed, it seems likely that today’s Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who lived in Palestine in antiquity, and were converted to Islam during the Muslim Expansion of the seventh century.
  • Palestine was the ancestral homeland of many peoples. That Jews once had a state there does not negate the rights of other peoples who have also had a presence in the same territory. The Palestinians, significantly, have an unbroken, multi-millennial presence in the land.
  • Criticism of Zionism does not create a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community. The categories Zionist and Jew are no more coterminous than are the categories Zionism and Judaism. There are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jews, let alone Jewish Zionists. And not all Jews are Zionists; some are ardently anti-Zionist. Zionist and Jew are not the same. Criticism of Zionists is not equal to criticism of Jews. Likewise, criticism of Zionism is different from criticism of Judaism; one is a nationalist ideology, the other a religion.

It is likely that a majority of Jews in Canada support Israel and hold Zionist views. Based on this reality, B’nai Brith advances the sophistical argument that criticism of Zionism and Israel amounts to criticism of Jews (again, illegitimately conflating Jew and Zionist), and that, therefore, this criticism amounts to antisemitism. The argument is tantamount to claiming that anti-Nazism, at the height of the Nazi’s popularity, was an expression of hatred of Germans as a people. Only if one conflates Nazism with German ethnicity can this sleight of hand be pulled off.

Other indications that B’nai Brith defines anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian positions as antisemitism:

  1. The pro-Zionist organization objects to pro-Palestinian student clubs at Canadian universities celebrating Palestinian resistance, decrying armed Palestinian resistance as “terrorism.” As an organization that stands unequivocally with Israel, we can be sure that the B’nai Brith regards the Irgun and Stern Gang—Jewish insurgent groups which, from 1931 to 1948, practiced terrorism in Palestine—as groups that resisted British colonialism.  Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and the British preferred to call them terrorists, even fascists. Of course, one can be a resistance fighter and use terrorist methods, as much as a state can be a state and practice terrorism, Israel being an emblematic case. The categories are not mutually exclusive.
  • The pro-Israel group objects to the use of the terms “massacre” and “genocide” by Canadian journalists reporting on Israel’s conduct in Gaza and deplores the Canadian media’s “focus on civilian casualties and humanitarian imagery” along with the “presentation of casualty figures.” Moreover, it defines the following headlines as examples of anti-Israel media bias linked to antisemitism:
  • “Israel killing journalists and getting away with it, say advocates.”
  • “More than 400 dead in Gaza as Israel makes ‘extensive’ strikes ending ceasefire, standoff.”
  • “Winnipeggers rally to condemn Israel’s attacks on Iran, humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

The points above make clear that the B’nai Brith is little more than a pro-Israel public relations outfit that objects to any and all criticism of Israel, and seeks to neutralize opposition to the state it tirelessly defends and stands by unequivocally by smearing the state’s opponents as Jew haters.  In the organization’s view, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and Israel-critical positions are antisemitic by definition. Political positions are cast as expressions of irrational hatred. When it reports that there is a crisis of antisemitism in Canada, what the Israel lobby group really means is that there is a growing tide of opposition to Zionism, hostility to Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians, and intolerance of Israel’s character as an ethno-supremacist, apartheid, state.

Name-calling critics of Israel and anti-Zionists as anti-Semites is fairly harmless.  But B’nai Brith has no intention of stopping at traducing Israel’s opposition. Its real intention is to pressure Canadian governments at all levels to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist positions by portraying them as hate-speech.

The pro-Israel lobby group calls on the:

  • Federal government to designate the Lebanese, Egyptian, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations;
  • Provincial and territorial governments to prosecute antisemitic hate crimes, which, given the organization’s broad definition of antisemitic hate, includes any expression of opposition to Jewish nationalist ideology and ethno-supremacism and all support for pro-Palestinian positions;
  • Municipal authorities to ban “events that promote hatred”, by which it means pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist events, including Al Quds Day.

To understand how dishonest both the B’nai Brith and its report are, consider what a pro-Palestinian report would look like if it mimicked the pro-Israeli lobby group’s approach. It would define denial of a Palestinian right of self-determination on the Palestinians’ ancestral homeland as anti-Palestinian hatred. Denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization; denying the Nakba as a genocide; disputing the stamp of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal; dismissing as false or exaggerated reports of torture and sexual assault in Israeli prisons; denouncing the October 7 attacks as acts of terrorism rather a campaign of national liberation; rejecting the reality of Israeli apartheid; all of these–in other words, adopting the B’nai Brith’s own political positions—would be defined as hate speech rather than political speech. The media would be censured for describing October 7 as a massacre and focusing on Jewish casualties, as well as for failing to place Palestinian atrocities within the appropriate context. Media “bias” would be blamed for an avalanche of anti-Palestinian hate incidents. Finally, the report would call on governments at all levels to criminalize political speech that is critical of the Palestinian cause.

Canadians might think of the B’nai Brith as a Jewish advocacy group that works to overcome antisemitism. In reality, it is a pro-Israel lobby group that uses antisemitism as a weapon to smear people and organizations that oppose its pro-Israel political positions. The outfit poses as a representative of all Jews in Canada, but is, on the contrary, only a champion of Israel and Zionists, not Jews and Judaism. Its self-avowed mission is to work “tirelessly to support and defend Israel”, which it does, in part, by attacking opponents of Israel as antisemites, using a definition of Jew-hatred that includes opposition to Israel and the nationalist ideology on which the state is founded.

There is no crisis of antisemitism in Canada. The “crisis” is a myth invented by the Zionist outfit to pressure Canadian governments, at all levels, to criminalize pro-Palestinian positions and anti-Zionist advocacy—that is political speech—as hate speech. B’nai Brith must be resisted, exposed for the pro-Israel lobby group it truly is, and contained as a menace to the right of political advocacy.

They Demonize Our Revolutionaries

20 April 2026

By Stephen Gowans

On April 14, Ezra Klein, the New York Times’ columnist and podcaster, sought a “reckoning with Israel’s ‘one-state reality’.” He organized a discussion with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, a pair of academics who had written a 15 July 2025 article in Foreign Affairs, The Promise and Peril of Recognizing Palestine. Their article asked whether “a two-state solution [could] emerge from a one-state reality?”

The discussion had two merits: First, it acknowledged that a Jewish supremacist state exists from the river to the sea. As Lynch and Telhami put it in their Foreign Affairs article:

Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.

Israel, in other words, is a democratic state for Jews, and a Jewish state for Palestinians, on whose country, land, and homes, Israel has been built. The philosopher Domenico Losurdo called it a Herrenvolk democracy—a democracy for (and only for) a master people. Others call it, correctly, an apartheid state. The three descriptions are congruent.

The second merit was Telhami, who offered a number of important insights. I’ll cite but one.

Israeli strategy from Day 1 has been to have what they call escalation dominance. It is a one-sided deterrence; it is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand. In effect, you’re saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East. That’s half a billion people. And you are a country of 10 million. That is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons

The last sentence, perhaps, requires some elaboration. Consider this: On April 18, New York Times’ reporters Mark Mazzetti, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes began a report on the US-Israeli war on Iran with the following: “The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.”

Note that the reporters didn’t say the two aggressors attacked Iran because it had threatened either country or any of their allies, or because they were motivated by human rights considerations. Instead, they wrote that the United States and Israel launched their war to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear arms that would provide Tehran a means to deter future US and Israeli aggression. These arms would, in Telhami’s words, check US and Israeli escalation dominance. Were Iran to achieve this objective, it would deny the two aggressor states strategic dominance over “half a billion people” and “every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East.” Thus, it is not a nuclear threat to the physical safety of Americans and Israelis that Washington and Tel Aviv seek to deter, but a threat to their ability to dominate West Asia and its hundreds of millions of people.

Klein, a man who acknowledges that he does not count himself among those who want to see Israel cease to exist (though the idea that anyone should want an apartheid state to continue exist is troubling), offered his own commentary, some of which had merit.

  • He argued that “the one-state reality” [which is to say, Israeli apartheid, is] not accidental. It was, and is, not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land — in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes.”
  • He noted that “More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the previous two decades combined.”
  • He lamented that “Israel has allowed — has protected — a terrifying rise in settler and military violence toward the Palestinians who live” in the West Bank, adding that “There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank — and it is not the P.A.”
  • He pointed to how “Israel has used the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people, adding that “it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes.”
  • He acknowledged that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians a state of their own.

Sadly, Klein’s merits are outweighed by his egregious faults. Significantly, he fails to explain how Israel’s resolve to deny the Palestinians a state of their own has left the Palestinians bereft of any option but violence to redress a fundamental wrong; and that this, by itself, explains the outbreak of Palestinian violence on 7 October 2023.  

Palestinian rebellion was met on the Israeli side by Tel Aviv stepping up its decades-long efforts to erase the Palestinians as a people. These efforts have been evinced, to use the language of the Genocide Convention, in the:

  • Killing of Palestinians in large numbers;
  • Inflicting on them serious bodily and mental harm; and
  • Imposing on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their demise.

Klein excuses these genocidal acts as “what any state and any people would do.” That’s doubtful. What any state and people might have done, and certainly could have done, is begin to redress the historical injustices that produced the rebellion. As Marx observed about the 1857 Indian Rebellion against the country’s British colonizers: “There is something in human history like retribution.” (The Indian Revolt, 16 September 1857) Or, to borrow from Marx again, with appropriate alterations of language for time and place: “However infamous the conduct of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023, it was only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of Israel’s own conduct”. Any serious effort to prevent future Palestinian violence, would address the root of the violence, not try, by escalation dominance, to suppress it, so that the fruits of the injustice Zionists have visited upon their victims — the theft of their land, homes, property, and country — can continue to be enjoyed by Israeli Jews into the future. That is what is meant when one says Israel’s response to the Palestinian rebellion is justified because it is what any state or people would do.

Genocide is built into settler colonialism. Settlers seek the land of indigenous peoples for the exclusive use of their own ethnic group. European settlers did so in North America, Australia, and New Zealand; German settlers did so in southwest Africa; and the Nazis tried to do so in eastern Europe, where Slavs, Jews, and Roma–the occupants of the land Hitler coveted for Lebensraum and German settlement–paid a terrible price. Jewish settlers have done the same to the natives of Palestine. In all cases, the result has been genocide. Settlers drive indigenous peoples off land they covet by expulsion, extermination, or both. Settler colonialism rests on the logic of the elimination of the natives.

Settler colonial states of the past have acted just as Israel, a settler colonial state of the present, has. But that’s hardly a justification for genocide. The Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen shot 34,000 Soviet Jews and dumped then in the Babi Yar ravine in September 1941 in retaliation for Soviet agents detonating mines in occupied Kiev which killed as many a three-hundred German soldiers. This was an instance of settler colonial forces undertaking harsh reprisals against the violent rebellion of the natives, in this case, against an ethnic group, Jews, viewed by the Nazis as being intimately linked to the political leadership of the resistance, or terrorists, as the Nazis called them. According to Klein’s logic, the Nazi reprisal killings were justified as “what any state and any people would do.”

It might also be pointed out that if Israel did “what any state and any people would do,” then Hamas and Hezbollah have done what any colonized and oppressed people would do. Colonized people never allow the colonizer to despoil their country, land, homes, and property, without putting up a fight. We might call this an iron law of history. To borrow Marx’s language, the inevitable rebellion of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023 no more lends itself to moralizing – for or against – than does an earthquake in California or a snowstorm in Canada, both inevitable events. It’s what colonized and oppressed people have always done and will always do. So, if we can point to genocide as what any colonial settler state and settler people would do to the people it’s oppressing, we can also point to violent rebellion as what any colonized people would do to the people who are oppressing them.

Klein’s heart bleeds for Palestinians who have been denied a state of their own and for the Shia of south Lebanon who the Israelis have driven from their homes, perhaps never allowed to return. But in his view, Hamas and Hezbollah, the inevitable response to Zionist settler colonialism, are anathema. Israel’s “right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah,” he says, “is undeniable.” Sure, as much as the SS’s right to reprisal against Jews for the killing of three-hundred German soldiers at Kiev was undeniable. Zionists will object that you can’t compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But you can. As a settler colonial state, Israel shares much in common with its settler colonial cohorts: the United States, Canada; Australia; New Zealand; and Germany.

Klein must, in the words of the Syrian singer Siba, “demonize our revolutionaries,” as much as Israel must “eradicate our roots; demolish our homes; criminalize our existence; falsify our origins; separate our loved ones; and slaughter our children.”

Those who pity the oppressed but condemn their rebellion and demonize their revolutionaries are no friend of the oppressed. They aid the oppressor. But, then, I suspect Klein is alright with that.

Who Rules the US Revealed in Washington’s Cuba Demands

The idea that US foreign policy is driven by national security and human rights considerations is contradicted by the list of demands the US State Department issued to Havana last week. In reality, US foreign policy is driven by the interests of US businesses and investors, as the US demands make clear.

Cuba must:

o Transition to a market-based economy;

 o Expand its private sector;

o Open its door to foreign-investment;

o Compensate U.S. citizens and corporations whose assets and properties were nationalized in the 1960s;

o Release political prisoners;

o Expand political freedoms.

Washington “signaled that the United States would not tolerate resistance to its demands.”

The New York Times’ headline that reported on this meeting said that US officials travelled to Havana to lay out proposals, when, in point of fact, as the text of the article indicated, the US delegation issued demands to which it said it “would not tolerate resistance.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Epstein Avant La Lettre

I have been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the first modern autobiography. I was shocked by one incident the eighteenth-century composer, novelist, and philosopher describes.

Rosseau writes of “a little girl of eleven or twelve,” named Anzoletta, who he and his friend, Carrio, bought from her mother with the aim of enjoying her “sensual pleasures,” that is, keeping her as a sex slave.

Carrio, who was a lady’s man, grew weary of always going to women who belonged to others and took it into his head to have one of his own; and as we were inseparable he suggested to me an arrangement which is not rare in Venice, that we should keep one between us. I agreed. The next question was to find a safe one. He made such thorough investigations that he unearthed a little girl of eleven or twelve, whom her wretched mother wanted to sell. We went to see her together…She was fair and gentle as a lamb. … We gave the mother some money, and made arrangements for the daughter’s keep. (The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Book Seven, Penguin, 1953, p. 302.)

Rousseau says that he developed a parental affection for the girl that prevented the relationship from developing into a sexual one. All the same, he and Carrio bought the girl with the intention of “being the corrupters of her innocence,” as Rousseau writes.

What is striking is that the theorist of liberalism passed over the incident without showing the faintest pang of conscience, though at other times he expressed great remorse for actions that by today’s standards pale in comparison with the intended sexual enslavement of a prepubescent girl.

Throughout his Confessions, Rousseau claims to tremble in outrage at wrongs and the exploitation of the weak, though clearly his aversion to injury inflicted on the weak was far from universal, and likely very much limited to inflictions upon people such as himself, and certainly not on little girls of poor families.

The Historical Injustice Behind Palestinian Violence

29 December 2025

Stephen Gowans

There is a fundamental injustice at the root of Palestinian violence.  In 1948, Jewish settlers stole most of the Palestinians’ country. Israelis claim that part of historic Palestine was given to them by the United Nations, but the claim is false, and even if it were true, Palestine wasn’t the United Nation’s to give away. It’s true that the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 recommended a partition of Palestine between a state for recent Jewish immigrants and a state for indigenous Palestinians, but the recommendation was rejected by the Palestinians, and was never implemented. Moreover, the United Nations had no authority to deny the Palestinians self-determination in their own land, or to confiscate part of their country to create a Jewish state. There was no moral foundation or legal basis for the creation of a state for Jews in Palestine. Israel is not the child of moral necessity and law but the product of naked aggression, land theft, and ethnic cleansing.

In 1967, Israel conquered those parts of Palestine it had not stolen from the Palestinians in 1948. Its new conquests included the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, along with parts of Egypt (the Sinai) and Syria (Golan). Since then, the newly-seized Palestinian territories have been occupied while the Sinai has been returned to Egypt (in return for Cairo renouncing Arab nationalism and becoming a US client state), and the occupied Golan has been annexed illegally with the blessing of the United States.  

Today, approximately seven million Jewish settlers live in conquered Palestine, occupying about 85 percent of the country. A roughly equal number of Palestinians live in the remaining 15 percent of their homeland (while some eight million are scattered abroad, many living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan). Israeli policy, as evidence by the country’s actions, is to gradually drive into exile as many of the seven million Palestinians who remain in historic Palestine as possible, mainly by usurping their land and making their lives miserable. The process echoes the efforts of the Nazis from 1933 to Kristallnacht of 9-10 November 1938 to drive Jews out of Germany in order to create an ethnically pure German state. The Israelis, for their part, aim to create nothing as extreme as the Nazi’s homogeneous ethnic state, but a demography that substantially favors Jews. With a rough balance of Jews and Palestinians currently living within the territory Israel controls, that means either significantly reducing the Palestinian population, or ceding a Palestinian state on the 15 percent of historic Palestine in which Palestinians are concentrated, and accepting that the land of Israel will not include what Jews of antiquity knew as Judea and Samaria. The latter option, however, is rejected, not only by the current Israeli government, but by Israeli society generally.

In the absence of any intention to concede a Palestinian state, the Zionist imperative of creating a Jewish majority within a territory in which as many Palestinians as Jews live, means either driving the indigenous people out of the country, or failing that, forcing them into an ever shrinking space, as Israel takes more and more of their land, homes, and property for the building of settlements for Jews (including newly immigrated Jews from such places as the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.) The process echoes the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and of the Slavs and Jews of the German East (the territory of Eastern Europe the Nazis sought to conquer as Lebensraum to settle the German Herrenvolk.)  It also means denying Palestinians political rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem—in other words, apartheid.

This raises a question. Why are the Israelis so adamant about refusing the Palestinians a state of their own, especially considering that the state would comprise only a tiny fraction of the Palestinians’ original country and leave the bulk of it to the Jews? The answer is surely that, from the perspective of the Zionist project, a Palestinian state represents an opportunity cost (giving up land that could be otherwise taken from the Palestinians for the use of Jews) but offers no clear benefit. The presumed benefit is peace. With their own state, it is supposed that the Palestinians will recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state comprising the bulk of their country, making up that part the Zionists stole in 1948, plus part of the territory conquered in 1967 that has strategic value to Israel and which contains major Jewish settlements. True, the organized Palestinian resistance would gladly accept a Palestinian state in even only 15 percent of historic Palestine, but it has made clear that the realization of the two-state solution is not its end-game. Western states that back the two-state solution envisage something like a Palestinian protectorate with Israel as suzerain, controlling the state’s borders, police force, and foreign policy. The only way to persuade Israel to accept a Palestinian state, in their view, is to assure the Israelis that a Palestinian state will pose no threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. And the way to do that is to insist that the state of Palestine have no military and that its leaders are quislings who serve at the pleasure of either Israel or Washington or both. This reflects an implicit acknowledgement that the dispossessed will always be a threat to those who dispossess them; that the dispossessed want returned to them what is rightfully theirs; and that unless a Palestinian state has no military and is governed by stooges of Israel and its Western patrons, the Palestinians will be at liberty to use the resources of their new state to attempt to recover, by force, what they have been unjustly denied.   

Of course, Israel could be strongarmed into acceding to a Palestinian state. The Zionist state depends significantly for survival on the support it receives from the United States and major US allies. By threatening to cut off or reduce arms transfers and diplomatic support, the West could compel its client state to comply with its demands to accept a state for the Palestinians. But the West has never used its leverage to force the Israelis to make any meaningful concessions to the Palestinians, and shows no sign of departing from this policy. Indeed, since the Oslo Accords of 1993, which were supposed to begin a process of moving toward the creation of a Palestinian state, the Israelis have consistently maneuvered to undermine the project, and the West has done precious little to stop them.  The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, which would form the largest part of a Palestinian state, has grown from 280,000 shortly after the Oslo Accords to 950,000 by 2023, more than a three-fold increase. [1] And Israeli efforts to sabotage a Palestinian state have only accelerated since 7 October 2023. The Zionist state unabashedly, even proudly, conducts itself in a manner aimed openly at denying the Palestinians a viable state. Western states occasionally utter protests, but fail to follow through with deeds that would induce Israel to abandon its ongoing sabotage.

Many states and political organizations in the West, including most far-left and progressive political parties, proclaim their affection for an independent Palestinian state along 1967 borders, along with the full right of return for Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) to the homes from which they were expatriated.  Advocates of this position have no answer to the question of why a Palestinian state should be constituted along 1967 borders, that is, why it should comprise only the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, territory not conquered in 1948? Implicitly the position endorses the 1948 theft by Zionist forces of most of the Palestinians’ country, but condemns the 1967 theft of the remaining part of the country. In this view, the second (1967) conquest is objectionable but the first and larger (1948) conquest is not. Moreover, Israel and its Western patrons would never accept the emergence of an independent, militarized, Palestinian state, for reasons cited above. Nor would they accept the repatriation of eight million Palestinians living in the shatat, a development that would radically alter the demographic balance of Israel, turning it into a Palestinian-majority state. The proposal, thus, is not only confused morally (why reject the 1967 conquest but not the 1948 one?) but is also pie-in-the-sky, since it assumes conditions (a truly independent Palestinian state and repatriation) that are completely unacceptable to the states that would need to accede to them. Moreover, were the Palestinians strong enough to compel Israel and its Western patrons to accept an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, they would also be strong enough to press for the recovery of all their country. So why would they stop at the 1967 borders? The proposal, vaunted by its supporters as both morally defensible and pragmatic, turns out to be, on inspection, confused, inconsistent, and unrealistic.

Returning to the question of why Western states allow Israel to get away with blocking implementation of the two-state solution: The simple answer, favored by followers of the US political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, is that a lobby of Zionist Christians and Zionist Jews wields enormous political power, which it has used to hijack the foreign policy relevant to Israel and the Middle East of the United States, as well those of its major allies.  If this is indeed true, the obvious question is: How did this lobby get to be so powerful that it can make Washington do what Mearsheimer and Walt claim is at odds with American interests? The answer, never spelled out, lurks within the Mearsheimer-Walt theory: The lobby is made up of enormously rich Jewish financiers who identify with Israel because they’re Jews and as a consequence place Jewish interests above those of American interests. This echoes the Nazi view that Jewish international financiers, operating in the shadows, controlled German politics, to the detriment of the German Volk and to the benefit of the Jews. If, to Hitler, German Jews were committed to Jewish interests and not those of Germany, to Mearsheimer and Walt, Zionist American Jews are committed to Jewish interests and not those of America. It could also be said that the lobby comprises fabulously wealthy Zionist Christian moneybags who identify with Israel because they’re evangelical Christians and many evangelical Christians believe that God has ordered them to support Israel; as a consequence, they place evangelical Christian theological interests above those of US secular interests. But, were we to say this, we would invite an obvious question: Aren’t these evangelical Christians also Americans? If Zionist Christians define their interests as support for Israel, then support for Israel is an interest of these Americans. Likewise, if Zionist Jews define their interests as defending Israel, then the defense of Israel is an interest of these Americans. What are American interests but the interests of a group that includes Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians as much it includes those of anyone else? To say the interests of Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians are not American interests is to say Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians are not Americans—that they operate on behalf of temporal (Israel) or spiritual (evangelical Christian) constituencies whose agendas are independent of American agendas and are therefore potentially in conflict with them. This is only a way of saying “If you disagree with me about what America’s interests are, you’re not a loyal American; you are, instead, an agent of a Church or an agent of a foreign state.”

Obviously, there are many American views of what the American interest is, so many that the idea that there is one, single, American interest—the interest that Mearsheimer and Walt claim to know—is absurd. Sociologically, what is called “American interests” are the interests of the class of people who have the means to dominate the ideological sphere and represent their own class interests as the interests of everyone else. As Marx and Engels put it, the ruling ideas [about what American interests are] are the ideas of the [US] ruling class. And the US ruling class happens to be made up of fabulously wealthy Zionist Jews and fabulously wealthy Zionist Christians, along with fabulously wealthy people who identify neither as Zionist Jews nor Zionist Christians but who happen to believe that Israel is a useful instrument for defending US ruling class interests in the Middle East.  We should not, therefore, adopt a view that implies, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that Zionist Jews are not true Americans, committed to true American interests, because they’re Jews (or that Zionist Christians are not true Americans, committed to true American interests, because they’re evangelical Christians).  

A better answer to the question of why Western states allow Israel to get away with blocking implementation of the two-state solution—even though these states profess to favor it—is that the United States and its North American and European clients:

  • Are committed to Israel as their instrument for defending their interests in the Middle East. Indeed, the entire history of political Zionism has been one of Zionists seeking the support of Western states to establish and then maintain a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds in return for acting as the paladin of Western interests in the Middle East, and Western states accepting the proposal. The Palestinians, in this view, are a threat to achieving Western aims, since they are a threat to the West’s instrument for achieving those aims.
  • Don’t really believe that an independent Palestinian state, existing side-by-side with Israel, constitutes a genuine solution to the problem of two national movements vying for the same space. A Palestinian state, for reasons explained above, does not make the Palestinians’ desire for the recovery of their country, and the concomitant end to the Jewish state, vanish. If anything, it strengthens it, especially if the Palestinian state is militarized and truly independent. Palestinians won’t long be satisfied with just a small fraction of their country. The dispossessed always aspire to recuperate what they have been dispossessed of, and will use an independent state as a base from which to pursue the liberation of their country in its entirety. That is why no Western proposal envisions a truly independent, militarized, Palestinian state.
  • Accept the view, articulated in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinisky, that the only way to make a Jewish state in the center of the Arab and Muslim worlds secure from Palestinian irridentism, is to overwhelm the Palestinians by force and military strength until they give up their dreams of recovering their country as futile. This accounts for why Western states, the United States and Germany especially, have been prepared to furnish Israel with munificent military aid, to the point of giving it a qualitative military edge over all regional states. Israeli military primacy in the Middle East allows the West’s outpost in the Arab and Persian worlds to a) defend itself from Palestinian irredentism and b) take on states and movements of national assertiveness and independence that threaten the West’s domination of an important petroleum-producing region.
  • Conceal their commitment to the strategy of the Iron Wall behind a professed commitment to the two-state solution as a way of managing the demands of their own populations to intercede on behalf of the Palestinians. We seek justice for the Palestinians through our advocacy of the two-state solution, they say, while failing to hinder Israel in its efforts to thwart the very possibility of even a non-militarized, vassal, Palestinian state.

On top of the genocidal violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, it has waged a low-level war on the Palestinians of the West Bank. The war is multi-faceted: approval of new settlements; destruction of refugee camps; expulsion of Palestinians from their land and homes; settler attacks; pogroms.  Almost daily, newspapers are filled new Israeli horrors.

  • “The United Nations has warned of an alarming surge in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, with the number of incidents rising every year for almost a decade. This year, the U.N.’s humanitarian office, OCHA, has recorded more than 1,400 settler attacks that resulted in casualties or property damage.” [2]
  • “Since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers; one in every five dead was a child. In the same period, over 3,000 Palestinians say they have been displaced from their homes and lands largely because of Israeli settler violence. Anestimated40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the northern West Bank by Israel Defense Forces operations. In the past two years, Israel has erected nearly 1,000 barriers and makeshift checkpoints across the West Bank, suffocating Palestinians’ ability to move and work freely.” [3]
  • “Pogroms in Palestinian villages have become routine, while the army and police stand by – or worse, assist the attackers. … These terrorists brag openly, knowing that even when settlers are filmed shooting and killing a Palestinian or beating an elderly woman with a nail-studded club, no one is prosecuted and the public remains indifferent. Settler violence isn’t outside the law – it is the law.” [4]
  • “Israel has also conducted extensive military operations that have uprooted entire neighborhoods in Palestinian cities. Historians and researchers say that has led to the largest wave of Palestinian displacement in the West Bank in a half-century.” [5]

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the genocide—established as a fact by the International Association of Genocide Scholars; the United Nations Human Rights Council; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; B’Tselem; Physicians for Human Rights—Israel; the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories; and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights—carries on, despite the 10 October 2025 halt to hostilities. From the start of the misnamed cease-fire through 27 December 2025, Israel killed 414 Palestinians and injured 1,142, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health/Gaza.  The victims were mainly non-combatants—Palestinians who had never participated in hostilities or had but were observing the cease-fire. “When Israel targeted two cousins on Oct. 29 — it said they were both local militant commanders — overnight missile strikes destroyed both their homes,” reported the New York Times. “One of the men was killed. So were 18 other members of their extended family, including two 3-year-olds.” The report continues: “Maysaa al-Attar, 30, a pharmacy student was shot in the abdomen as she slept in her parents’ tent.” [6] 

In a 19 December 2025 report on the faux cease-fire, the Israel human rights organization, B’Tselem, made the following observations:

  • The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas on 10 October 2025 did not lead to any meaningful change in Israel’s conduct.
  • Even within the territory that supposedly remained under Palestinian control beyond the “yellow line,” Israel continues to inflict extensive harm on civilians, homes, and infrastructure – often within the very area designated as the al-Mawasi “humanitarian zone,” where hundreds of thousands of displaced people currently live.
  • Moreover, as of November 2025, Israel refuses to open several commercial crossings through which it was supposed to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, disrupts and delays the entry of essential aid through the crossings that have opened, and continues to impose draconian restrictions on humanitarian organizations and to prevent journalists from entering devastated Gaza.
  • UN agencies and international organizations reported that between the agreement’s entry into force and 21 October, Israel rejected approximately 75% of all requests submitted for the entry of aid into the Strip. [7]

The conclusion, according to Martin Shaw, a sociologist of global politics, war and genocide, is that “What we have is supposed to be a ceasefire, but Israel is still killing, starving and systematically destroying buildings; people are still dying and suffering. [8]

Lamenting the Zionist war on Palestinians, especially the largely unremarked war in the West Bank, Jack Khoury, a writer with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote that “Neither the United Nations (and its agencies), nor the International Court of Justice, nor enlightened Europe, nor powerful China have been helping West Bank residents. There is also no point in trusting Arab countries.” [9] Strange that Khoury thinks any of these bodies can, or even wants to, help Palestinians. The United Nations and its agencies can’t help the Palestinians because the UN is an instrument of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council who dominate it, three of which, as we have seen (the United States, Britain, and France) conduct their foreign policies in a manner that strongly suggests they are committed to Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall view of dealing with the Palestinian threat to their outpost in the Middle East. Any one of these veto-wielding permanent members can stay the hand of UN humanitarians who take it into their heads to help the Palestinians in any material way. Western Europe fails to help the Palestinians because it too supports the Iron Wall, as evidenced by the colossal military contributions it provides Israel. China, however powerful it is, is not powerful enough to take on the United States in the Middle East, which it would have to do were it to help Palestinians against Washington’s Zionist protégé. Moreover, China is a country that exists for the Chinese; its leadership cares as much about the Palestinians as the Americans do, which is not at all. China is not a Soviet Union, pursuing universalist ideals (and even the USSR had limits on how far it would go on behalf of internationalism.) It is, by its own admission, focused on building the Central State and not interfering in the affairs of other countries (except insofar as doing so helps advance its project of national rejuvenation.) As to the Arab countries, Khoury implicitly acknowledges that they exist as what Norman Finkelstein has recently called slaves and stooges of the United States. They won’t help the Palestinians because 1) what’s in it for them? and 2) they don’t want to displease their master.  It’s true that the Arab states have to feign concern for the plight of the Palestinians in order to mollify the passion of the street for the Palestinian cause, but then so too do Western states.

Further evidence that the Western states view in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall the correct way to manage the threat Palestinian irridentism presents to their outpost in the Middle East comes from their insistence that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” In practice this phrase means “Israel has a right to use overwhelming violence against Palestinians, far in excess of what is actually needed for defense.” Even if we accept that Israel has a legitimate right to defend itself from the recalcitrance of the people it oppresses, in the same manner that defenders of the slaveocracy of the American South might have said that the slave-owners had a right to defend themselves against the rebellion of their slaves,  or fascists might have asserted a Nazi right of self-defense against the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a critical question arises as to how much violence is necessary for Israel to provide itself an adequate defense? It is clear to all but biased observers that the level of violence Israel inflicted upon Palestinians in Gaza from October 2023 to October 2025 (with the substantial aid of arms flows and intelligence from the United States, Germany, and other Western states) was well beyond what was necessary to defend Israel. Instead, the level of violence was consistent with the aim of achieving permanent security, which is to say, annihilating the possibility of future Palestinian attacks altogether–in other words, preventive war. The threat of future rebellion can be construed as immanent in Hamas, or more broadly the Palestinian resistance, or most broadly of all, Palestinians as a whole, for it is from within the Palestinian community that the threat of violent rebellion against Israeli oppression arises. Did the Nazis have a right to defend themselves against the Warsaw uprising by annihilating the community from which the threat arose: the Jews? By the logic that underpins the slogan “Israel has a right to defend itself”, they did. The genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has argued that genocide is a quest for permanent security.  The condition for genocide is an inverse relationship between the existence of one group and the existence of another. If the existence of Israel, as a Jewish state, is threatened by the existence of a Palestinian nation as a displaced people, then the Palestinians are at risk of genocide at the hands of the Israelis. Likewise, Israelis are at risk of genocide at the hands of the Palestinians, since the existence of a Jewish state in the Palestinian homeland threatens the existence of the Palestinian nation.  It is for this reason that the idea of one, democratic state from the River to the Sea, in which everyone is equal, regardless of ethnicity or religion, is preferable to a struggle between two peoples to build their own ethnic states in the same space. Struggles between ethnic groups have a high potential for genocide.

One way of achieving Israel’s permanent security is to eliminate the Palestinians as a people. This can be accomplished in various ways. One way is to disperse Palestinians throughout the world in order that they become assimilated into other communities and cultures. Israel would love nothing more than for Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to accept the Palestinian refugees living within their borders as citizens. After a time, these Palestinians and their descendants would come to identify as citizens of the countries in which they live, rather than as Palestinian refugees waiting to return home. 

Another way of destroying the Palestinians as a nation is to destroy what makes them a nation—their heritage and culture; the things that bind them together as a people and make them more that just a collection of individuals. This is part of the reason why Israel has destroyed mosques, schools, universities, and other cultural infrastructure in its war on Gaza, and targeted the community’s intellectuals.

Physical annihilation of individual Palestinians is yet another way of achieving the same end, but killing every Palestinian, or even a substantial fraction of them, is too difficult to be considered a practical aim. Nevertheless, physical annihilation does have a role to play in Israel achieving permanent security. Overwhelming physical violence, along with the imposition on Palestinians of conditions that are inconducive to a thriving life—too little food; inadequate sanitation; shortages of potable water; inadequate shelter; no garbage collection; no schools; no universities; no recreation; no cultural activities; impoverished health care; i.e., the conditions that Israel has imposed on Gaza with Western backing— combine to limit population growth, if not reverse it, but more importantly, create significant incentives for self-exile.  The aim of Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians qua Palestinians is to make their conditions of life in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, impossible, so that they vacate these territories to make way for Jewish settlers.

When Western states justify Israel’s massive violence against Palestinians as self-defense, they endorse their protégé’s adoption of a point of view that is no different from my telling you that if you bite my toe while I’m stepping on your head, I have a right to take a crow-bar to your skull and bash your brains in. That North American and European governments offer this justification is further evidence of their commitment to Israelis using massive reprisal violence to deter the future rebellions of the Palestinians. Massive violence as reprisal for rebellion has forever been the theory and practice of the oppressor.

If, as Khoury points out, the United Nations, the European Union, powerful China, and the Arab states, won’t help Palestinians, who will? The answer has always been no one but the Palestinians themselves. And the Palestinians have, for a very long time, asserted their own agency. They have launched massive strikes, practiced diplomacy, appealed to the conscience of humanity, invoked international law, inspired countless UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions on their behalf, and used moral suasion. They have tried making concessions. They have also used violence. Nothing has worked…yet. That the Palestinians have resorted to armed force, and will continue to do so, is assured.

Simone de Beauvoir once remarked that “All oppression creates a state of war”.  I would say that all oppression is a state of war, and until the oppression of Palestinians is overcome, they will continue to turn to violence (along with other methods of struggle.) Anyone who condemns them for doing so sides with the oppressor.

1. Hamas Media Office, “Al-Aqsa Flood: Two Years of Steadfastness and the Will for Liberation”, Dec. 2025.

2. Feliz Solomon, “Israeli Settlers Burn Mosque as West Bank Violence Escalates”, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 2025.

3 Mairav Zonszein, “There Is No Cease-Fire in the West Bank”, The New York Times, Nov. 11, 2025.

4. Yoana Gonen, “Creative Use of Bullshit: Why Right-wing Populist ‘Journalist’ Amit Segal Calls Haaretz Israel’s Greatest Threat”, Haaretz, Oct 28, 2025.

5. Natan Odenheimer and Fatima AbdulKarim, “How Israel’s Settlement Surge in the West Bank Is Displacing Palestinians”, The New York Times, Dec. 4, 2025.

6. David M. Halbfinger, Bilal Shbair and Aaron Boxerman, “The Truce Is 2 Months Old. So Why Have Hundreds of Gazans Been Killed?” The New York Times, Dec. 24, 2025.

7 “No Place Under Heaven”: Forced displacement in the Gaza Strip, 2023-2025,” B’Tselem, Dec. 19, 2025.

8 Martin Shaw, “Freedom of Expression in the New Age of Genocide”, Substack, Nov 13, 2025.

9. Jack Khoury, “When Did Israeli Settler Attacks Become Official Netanyahu Government Policy in the West Bank?” Haaretz, Dec. 25, 2025