Why say “Jewish” when you can say “White” (and dodge responsibility)?

Pictured below is Anna Baltzer, peace activist and National Organizer with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, She’s holding a sign reading “Challenge White Supremacy”. Sounds like a reasonable claim, until you visit her own web page and find out Anna is Jewish, and in the first paragraph reminds her visitors of “the type of persecution that had plagued families like mine throughout history”.

Two things of note here: First, by informing visitors that she’s Jewish, she utilizes basic Jewish Power (“as a Jew …”) without identifying, nor challenging, that power. Second: she lays the “Jews as eternal, innocent victim” card right on the table before the betting has even begun.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hersko/Photos/Baltzer.jpg

So why are Jewish activists (Anna is certainly not alone, and this report is not intended attack her personally) claiming that we must fight “white supremacy” when the state they are purportedly criticizing is a “Jewish” state? Why does the Jewish Anna feel it proper to challenge white supremacy when it is the Jewish supremacists in her own community that openly and actively support the supremacy of the Jewish State?

Anna must certainly know that Theodore Herzl wrote “Der Judenstaat”, and not “Der Weißenstaat”. She must know that Israel’s own Declaration of Statehood proclaims “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the state of Israel.” She must be aware that white Americans cannot make Aliyah to the Jewish state unless they are Jewish. It wouldn’t make much sense for white non-Jews to attempt Aliyah, because IT IS NOT THE WHITE STATE. White Christians can be Zionists, but they – unlike Anna – can not be citizens of the Jewish state.

Listen to what Malcolm X said when addressing sympathetic whites who wanted to join his movement: “Where the really sincere white people have got to do their ‘proving’ of themselves is not among the black victims, but out there on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is – and that’s in their own home communities.”*

Malcolm might have counseled Anna, thus: “Where really sincere American Jews have got have got to do their ‘proving’ of themselves is not among the Palestinian victims, but out there on the battle lines where Israel’s racism really is – and that’s in their own Jewish communities in the United States.” But Anna doesn’t do this. She and scores of other Jews in the peace movement have consistently avoided the responsibility of holding fellow Jews accountable for their support of the crimes of the Jewish state.

Eleven years ago, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends invited Anna to stand with us, and she refused, on two separate occasions. The last we looked there were at least seven synagogues in the St. Louis area, where Anna is located. Do any of these synagogues dispute Elliott Abrams’ observation, “Where is it possible to find a group of Jews who are committed to Israel, and whose children are likely to honor that commitment? The answer is, in a synagogue on the Sabbath”? Readers should inform us forthwith if any of these synagogues do not support Israel’s claimed right to exist as a Jewish state.

Maybe Anna is just trying to trick the St. Louis black community into believing that Jews share the same oppressed status as blacks, when American Jews like Anna experience extremely high rates of economic and educational success, and have disproportionate influence in public arenas such as banking, law, government, media and the arts, even in pro-Palestinian activism.

But whatever her reasons for carrying such a sign, she abandons her duty to challenge Jewish supremacy. She hides behind the mask of fighting the straw man called white supremacy. White supremacist South Africa was defeated three decades ago. It’s time that Jewish activists like Anna to set her sights on challenging the Jewish supremacism that surrounds her and work to peacefully dismantle the Jewish state.

Comments?

Four vigilers
Henry Herskovitz
Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends
Free speech or selective speech?

* The Autobiography of Malcolm X, pp 383-384
(for an on-topic interview with Malcolm, click here)