Of Course Israel Makes Jews Less Safe

Jamaal Bowman is getting attacked for saying that Israel claims to represent all Jews. But Israel does exactly that, all the time.

Steven Ferdman/GC Images

Today is a day ending in y, so you know what that means: there’s a disingenuous freakout about Israel going on.

This one involves New York congressman Jamaal Bowman. If the polls are correct, Bowman is set to be defeated in Tuesday’s Democratic primary against Westchester County Executive George Latimer, whose main campaign tactic appears to be “do constant racism.” Bowman is not any kind of revolutionary on Palestine; he probably had the worst politics on the issue of any Squad member early on in his tenure, though he’s been on something of a journey since. Still, he has called for a ceasefire in Gaza and used the term “genocide,” so AIPAC is destroying him. According to the New York Times, AIPAC’s Super PAC spent $14.5 million in “barely a month” to take Bowman out—more than any outside group has ever spent on any House race, ever. Another cool milestone for some of the worst people alive! (Also Hillary Clinton endorsed Latimer, because of course.)

But this blog isn’t actually about the Bowman primary, at least not directly. It’s about this Politico piece tracking Bowman’s shift towards a firmer pro-Palestinian stance over the last couple of years. The whole article is interesting, but it’s the very last part that got people mad over the weekend. From the piece (emphasis mine):

“There are a large number of people in this district who are Jewish, and I think they felt disregarded and disrespected [by Bowman],” Latimer told me. Bowman has a different take. That Israel’s actions in Gaza might be making Jews in his district less safe.

“I don’t know, man,” Bowman said. “When you [as Israel] say you represent all Jews, and then you behave badly, it opens the doors for people to make the connection between what Israel is doing and Jewish people, which I think is freaking dangerous as hell.”

Can he say that?!?!?! Apparently not, according to some of our most tiresome tweeters.

Here’s video clipping guy Aaron Rupar, last seen sneering at Arab and Muslim Americans for despairing about genocide:

Big yikes! Someone call the politics cops, we’ve got a “big yikes” on our hands.

Leading Israel weirdo and fellow New York congressman Ritchie Torres sensed a bad-faith smear campaign brewing and eagerly rushed to the scene.

So did other fellow New York congressman Daniel Goldman.

Seems like an open-and-shut case. How could “Big Yikes” Bowman ever get the impression that Israel claims to speak for all Jews? How could anyone else in the world get that idea either?

Wait, I think I have an answer to that: because Israel claims to speak for all Jews ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

There are approximately five million examples of this, but let’s go through just a few. As Ben Silver pointed out on Twitter, Israel says that its UN ambassador “represents the State of Israel, its citizens and the Jewish people on the global stage of the United Nations.” I’m no big-shot intellectual, but I feel like a random person in the world might read that and think that “the Jewish people” is a reference to…the Jewish people.

Let’s do another one. For over 75 years, Palestinians have been denied a right to return to the lands that they were expelled from during the Nakba. But if I, Jack Mirkinson—a person with no connection to anyone or anything in Israel—wanted to, I could become an Israeli citizen with ease. I could even make a home for myself on stolen Palestinian land. Why? Because I am a Jew, and Israel grants all Jews that right automatically. “When, in order to become ambassador, I relinquished my U.S. citizenship, an American consul punched a hole in my passport,” former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren wrote in 2014. “But no one can punch a hole in the passport linking you as a Jew to Israel because your passport is your membership in the Jewish people and it's irrevocable.”

I could do this all day, but just a couple more. Benjamin Netanyahu constantly claims to speak for all Jews. In 2019, he said Israel was "the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” Not “Jewish Israelis.” Jewish people. In 2015, he said, “I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel, but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.” Are you sensing a pattern?

Ironically, of course, Israel and its supporters also freak the hell out if you don’t subscribe to the notion that Israel is inextricably linked with Jewishness. That’s how you get BDS slandered as antisemitic, or the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s widely-used definition of antisemitism, which says that it’s antisemitic to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination; e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” It’s how you get anti-Zionists tarred as “un-Jews” who need to be excommunicated from world Jewry.

I hope I’ve proved my point. There is just no denying that Israel frequently claims to speak for all Jews and that it works hard to punish anyone who objects to that idea. And if you tell people over and over again, “Israel represents the entire Jewish people,” and then you commit genocide, some people might think that the Jewish people are committing genocide, rather than the state of Israel. If you tell people over and over again, “opposition to Israel is the same as antisemitism,” you are creating the conditions for antisemitism to grow. You are putting a target on Jewish people’s backs. You are manifestly making Jews less safe.

So it’s not antisemitic to point this out, as Jamaal Bowman did. It’s not “a big yikes.” It’s just a statement of the obvious. And the more we can do away with this idea—the more we can think of Israel as a representative of its citizens like any other country, rather than as a representative of Jews wherever they are in the world—the safer all Jews, and all people, will be.