Hasan Piker Is Right: The “We Stand With Israel” Jews Endanger All Jews -- MJ Rosenberg
Sid Shniad
Hasan Piker Is Right: The “We Stand With Israel” Jews Endanger All Jews
And everyone knows
Empires don’t go down peacefully. They go down fighting.
So there was never any reason to expect AIPAC — now, along with ADL — the most despised special-interest lobby in American politics — simply to close up shop and go home. Too many people make too much money off the enterprise. Too many careers, reputations, and the ability to use Israel for influence peddling (like donors getting into a Senator’s office and then using the connection to get some regulation removed or tax exemption added).
Still, I have to give some credit to Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s leader for a quarter-century. He accomplished something AIPAC’s enemies could only dream of: he helped destroy the lobby by bringing to light what his predecessors understood had to remain in the dark.
Kohr’s great innovation was to make public AIPAC’s previously more discreet manipulation of American elections — boasting about targets, celebrating victories, advertising how much money was being deployed to defeat candidates who crossed the lobby. “We will spend $30 mill in the primary and then another $30 mill in the general to defeat El-Sayed.”
It didn’t start with Kohr. But he advanced the weaponization of the Israel lobby, made the weaponization public, and in doing so helped destroy the very thing he was trying to strengthen.
Good for him.
But still.
Back in 1982, on my first day working at AIPAC — yes, I know; if I had my life to live over again, I would never have gotten involved with AIPAC — the late Steve Rosen (later indicted for espionage), then AIPAC’s No. 2, handed me a note.
It read:
“MJ, a lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun. Remember, the walls have ears.”
That Rosen credo has since appeared all over the place, including in The New Yorker. But the original was handed directly to me by Rosen, and I later handed it to investigative reporter Chuck Babcock of The Washington Post.
I did not like Rosen, to put it mildly. But he understood something Kohr apparently did not.
A lobby like AIPAC survives by exercising power without constantly announcing that it is exercising power.
Bank robbers don’t issue press releases announcing which bank they’re hitting next. Inside traders don’t advertise their next trade. And political operatives who understand what they are doing don’t shout from the rooftops: Here is the next congressman we are going to destroy.
AIPAC did. AIPAC does.
And now it is paying the price.
Good riddance.
Which brings me back to the point about dying empires. AIPAC Inc. is not disappearing quietly. Its latest target is Hasan Piker, whom it and its allies are attacking for comments they characterize as antisemitic, a blood libel and even an incitement to violence against Jews.
Here is what Piker said:
“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.
“I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews. You’re running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish ISIS and you’re saying, as Jews, this is all we care about. You’re making antisemitism worse.”
I would not have phrased it quite that way.
Piker should have made absolutely explicit that attacking American Jews for the actions of Israel — or for the behavior of American Jewish organizations — is evil and indefensible. I listen to him enough to know that is what he means.
But here is the great irony: stripped of Piker’s specific language, the danger he is describing is one that American Jews understand perfectly well.
For decades, the Israeli government and much of the organized American Jewish establishment, have worked relentlessly to blur the distinction between Israel and Jews.
That is the whole point of insisting that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
It is why Israeli flags are ubiquitous at American Jewish institutions. It is why synagogues and Jewish organizations proclaim “We Stand With Israel” on their front lawns. It is why prayers for the “success” of IDF “missions” are incorporated into religious services. It is why politicians (usually Muslim) who sharply criticize Israel are so often portrayed not merely as wrong about Israel but as enemies of the Jews.
The message, repeated endlessly, is unmistakable:
Israel is us. We are Israel. Attack Israel politically and you are attacking the Jews.
Well, you cannot spend decades telling the world that Israel and the Jews are one and the same and then express shock when some people — including dangerous people — believe you.
That is what scares me.
After Gaza, millions of people around the world have come to despise the Israeli government. And Israel itself. And there are violent people among them, just as there are violent extremists in every population.
What happens when one of those people takes the organized Jewish community at its word?
What happens when someone decides that if Israel equals the Jews, then some random Jew walking into synagogue on Rosh Hashanah is somehow responsible for what Israel does in Gaza?
That would be monstrous.
It would also demonstrate precisely why the conflation of Israel and Jews is so dangerous.
And we Jews ought to understand this better than anyone.
After 9/11, Americans repeatedly heard variations of the argument that Muslims collectively had to answer for Islamic terrorism. The fight over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero was saturated (often by Jews) with precisely that kind of collective guilt, despite Muslim leaders who explicitly condemned the attacks.
I have heard Jews say versions of “they’re all Hamas.” Anyone who has spent time in the Jewish community hears it all the time. (It’s why I avoid mainstream Jewish spaces).
So are we really going to pretend that collective guilt can only run in one direction?
If some Jews can look at Hamas and blame Muslims generally, why is it inconceivable that some extremist could look at Israel and blame Jews generally?
The answer is not to excuse antisemitism. It is to stop feeding it.
American Jews are Americans. We are not representatives of a foreign government. We are not responsible for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli cabinet, the IDF or anything Israel does. A Jewish child walking into Hebrew school in Bethesda has no more responsibility for an Israeli bomb falling on Gaza than a Muslim child in Dearborn has for October 7th.
That distinction should be shouted from every synagogue, every Jewish federation and every Jewish organization in America.
Instead, too many of those institutions have spent decades shouting the opposite:
We are one.
No, we aren’t.
And pretending that we are endangers us all.
That, underneath his phrasing, is what Piker was talking about.
And that is why Israel’s fanboys and fangirls attempt to silence him rather than confront the substance of the warning is so revealing.
The danger is not in saying that conflating Jews with Israel can produce antisemitism.
The danger is in doing the conflating. It’s not Hasan Piker. It’s Jonathan Greenblatt of ADL and whoever runs AIPAC now.
And when Jewish organizations do it themselves, knowing where collective guilt can lead, they are playing with the safety of the very Jews they claim to protect.
Frankly, I don’t think they care. Israel comes first.