| Yesterday, President Biden reiterated one of his favorite defenses of an indefensible policy: arming a state committing genocide. During a Hanukkah event at the White House, he claimed that “were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who is safe.” This is a stunning thing to say for a man who leads a country home to 7.6 million Jews, the world’s second largest Jewish population. Even if this statement were true, we reject any notion of safety that requires the murder and displacement of Palestinians. But it’s also hopelessly false; in fact, this rhetoric puts both Palestinians and Jews in more danger. For the president of the U.S. to claim that it is only the existence of another country that keeps Jews safe is to imply that the seven million Jews who live in the U.S. are not at home here, and cannot hope to be kept safe by their own government. This is antisemitism: invoking the idea of the Jews as not really belonging, degrading the homes that we have made in the diaspora for millennia. And this is how antisemitism is exploited, and Jews are ultimately used as political pawns — a sitting U.S. president invoking Jewish fear and trauma in order to defend the U.S. government’s arming of a genocidal state, all in order to further U.S. imperialism. At the exact same time, we’re watching a new McCarthyism play out in real time, one carried out in the name of “fighting antisemitism” — but which will make Jews much less safe… |
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 
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