Flashback
Several U.S. tech giants including Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation have filled top positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.
WITH NEARLY 6 million Americans unemployed and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel — a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even “America first” politicians. The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading Jewish neocon (and Republican party donor) who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump.
To make matters worse, many of these top tech companies shifting investment and jobs to Israel at record rates continue to collect sizable U.S. government subsidies for their operations while they move critical aspects of their business abroad, continue to layoff thousands of American workers, and struggle to house their growing company branches in Israel. This is particularly troubling in light of the importance of the tech sector to the overall U.S. economy, as it accounts for 7.1 percent of total GDP and 11.6 percent of total private-sector payroll.
Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring members of controversial Israeli companies — known to have spied on Americans, American companies, and U.S. federal agencies — as well as numerous members of Israeli military intelligence as top managers and executives.
This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one Jew — billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who also funds the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the warmongering think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
Singer’s project to bolster Israel’s tech economy at the U.S.’ expense is known as Start-Up Nation Central, which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in relation to its treatment of Palestinians.
This project is directly linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent years has publicly mentioned that it has been his “deliberate policy” to have former members of Israel’s “military and intelligence units … merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners” in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments to boycott Israel.
In this report, MintPress identifies dozens of former members of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit who now hold top positions at Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
Singer’s nonprofit organization has acted as the vehicle through which Netanyahu’s policy has been realized, via the group’s close connections to the Israeli PM and Singer’s long-time support for Netanyahu and the Likud Party. With deep ties to Netanyahu, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and controversial tech companies — like Amdocs — that spied on the American government, this Singer-funded organization has formed a nexus of connections between the public and private sectors of both the American and Israeli economies with the single goal of making Israel the new technology superpower, largely at the expense of the American economy and government, which currently gives $3.2 billion in aid to Israel annually.
Researched and Developed in Israel
In recent years, the top U.S. tech companies have been shifting many of their most critical operations, particularly research and development, to one country: Israel. A 2016 report in Business Insider noted that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple had all opened up research and development (R&D) centers in recent years, with some of them having as many as three such centers in Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey. Other major tech companies that have also opened key operation and research centers in Israel include Sandisk, Nvidia, PayPal, Palantir and Dell. Forbes noted last year that the world’s top 10 tech companies were now “doing mission-critical work in Israel that’s core to their businesses back at HQ.”
Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in the U.S., are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.
For example, Intel Corporation, which is the world’s second largest manufacturer of semiconductor computer chips and is headquartered in California, has long been a major employer in Israel, with over 10,000 employees in the Jewish state. However, earlier this year, Intel announced that it would be investing $11 billion in a new factory in Israel and would receive around $1 billion in an Israeli government grant for that investment. Just a matter of months after Intel announced its major new investment in Israel, it announced a new round of layoffs in the United States.
Yet this is just one recent example of what has become a trend for Intel. In 2018, Intel made public its plan to invest $5 billion in one of its Israeli factories and had invested an additional $15 billion in Israeli-created autonomous driving technology a year prior, creating thousands of Intel jobs in Israel. Notably, over that same time frame, Intel has cut nearly 12,000 jobs in the United States. While this great transfer of investment and jobs was undermining the U.S. economy and hurting American workers, particularly in the tech sector, Intel received over $25 million dollars in subsidies from the U.S. federal government.
A similar phenomenon has been occurring at another U.S.-based tech giant, Microsoft. Beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2018, Microsoft has laid off well over 20,000 employees, most of them Americans, in several different rounds of staff cuts. Over that same time period, Microsoft has been on a hiring spree in Israel, building new campuses and investing billions of dollars annually in its Israel-based research and development center and in other Israeli start-up companies, creating thousands of jobs abroad. In addition, Microsoft has been pumping millions of dollars into technology programs at Israeli universities and institutes, such as the Technion Institute. Over this same time frame, Microsoft has received nearly $197 million in subsidies from the state governments of Washington, Iowa and Virginia.
Though Israeli politicians and tech company executives have praised this dramatic shift as the result of Israel’s tech prowess and growing reputation as a technological innovation hub, much of this dramatic shift has been the work of the Netanyahu-tied Singer’s effort to counter a global movement aimed at boycotting Israel and to make Israel a global “cyber power.”
Start-Up Nation Central and the Neocons
In 2009, a book titled Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, written by American neoconservative Dan Senor and Jerusalem Post journalist Saul Singer (unrelated to Paul), quickly rose to the New York Times bestseller list for its depiction of Israel as the tech start-up capital of the world. The book — published by the Council on Foreign Relations, where Senor was then serving as Adjunct Senior Fellow — asserts that Israel’s success in producing so many start-up companies resulted from the combination of its liberal immigration laws and its “leverage of the business talents of young people with military experience.”
“The West needs innovation; Israel’s got it,” wrote Senor and Singer. In a post-publication interview with the blog Freakonomics, Senor asserted that service in the Israeli military was crucial to Israel’s tech sector success, stating that:
“Certain units have become technology boot camps, where 18- to 22-year-olds get thrown projects and missions that would make the heads spin of their counterparts in universities or the private sector anywhere else in the world. The Israelis come out of the military not just with hands-on exposure to next-gen technology, but with training in teamwork, mission orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by contributing to its tech sector — a source of pride for just about every Israeli.”
The book, in addition to the many accolades it received from the mainstream press, left a lasting impact on top Republican donor Paul Singer, known for funding the most influential neoconservative think tanks in America, as noted above. Paul Singer was so inspired by Senor and Singer’s book that he decided to spend $20 million to fund and create an organization with a similar name. He created the Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC) just three years after the book’s release in 2012.
To achieve his vision, Singer – who is also a top donor to the Republican Party and Trump – tapped Israeli economist Eugene Kandel, who served as Netanyahu’s national economic adviser and chaired the Israeli National Economic Council from 2009 to 2015.
Senor was likely directly involved in the creation of SUNC, as he was then employed by Paul Singer and, with neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, co-founded the FPI, which Singer had long funded before it closed in 2017. In addition, Dan Senor’s sister, Wendy Singer (unrelated to either Paul or Saul), long-time director of Israel’s AIPAC office, became the organization’s executive director.
SUNC’s management team, in addition to Eugene Kandel and Wendy Singer, includes Guy Hilton as the organization’s general manager. Hilton is a long-time marketing executive at Israeli telecommunications company Amdocs, where he “transformed” the company’s marketing organization. Amdocs was once highly controversial in the United States after it was revealed by a 2001 Fox News investigation that numerous federal agencies had investigated the company, which then had contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the country, for its alleged role in an aggressive espionage operation that targeted the U.S. government. Hilton worked at Microsoft prior to joining Amdocs.
Beyond the management team, SUNC’s board of directors includes Paul Singer, Dan Senor and Terry Kassel — who work for Singer at his hedge fund, Elliott Management — and Rapheal Ouzan. Ouzan was an officer in the elite foreign military intelligence unit of Israel, Unit 8200, who co-founded BillGuard the day after he left that unit, which is often compared to the U.S.’ National Security Agency (NSA). Within five months of its founding, BillGuard was backed by funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. Ouzan is also connected to U.S. tech companies that have greatly expanded their Israeli branches since SUNC’s founding — such as Microsoft, Google, PayPal and Intel, all of which support Ouzan’s non-profit Israel Tech Challenge.
According to reports from the time published in Haaretz and Bloomberg, SUNC was explicitly founded to serve as “a foreign ministry for Israel’s tech industry” and “to strength Israel’s economy” while also aiming to counter the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use a nonviolent boycott to end the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Israeli apartheid, as well as the growth of illegal Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.
Since its founding, SUNC has sought to transfer tech jobs from foreign companies to Israel by developing connections and influence with foreign governments and companies so that they “deepen their relationship with Israel’s tech industry.” Though SUNC has since expanded to include other sectors of the Israeli “start-up” economy, its focus has long remained on Israel’s tech, specifically its cybersecurity industry. Foreign investment in this single Israeli industry has grown from $227 million in 2014 to $815 million in 2018.
In addition to its own activities, SUNC appears to be closely linked to a similar organization, sponsored by Coca Cola and Daimler Mercedes Benz, called The Bridge, which also seeks to connect Israeli start-up companies with large international corporations. Indeed, SUNC, according to its website, was actually responsible for Daimler Mercedes Benz’s decision to join The Bridge, thanks to a delegation from the company that SUNC hosted in Israel and the connections made during that visit.
Teaming up with Israel’s Unit 8200
Notably, SUNC has deep ties to Israel’s military intelligence unit known as Unit 8200 and, true to Start Up Nation’s praise of IDF service as key to Israel’s success, has been instrumental in connecting Unit 8200 alumni with key roles in foreign companies, particularly American tech companies. For instance, Maty Zwaig, a former lieutenant colonel in Unit 8200, is SUNC’s current director of human capital programs, and SUNC’s current manager of strategic programs, Tamar Weiss, is also a former member of the unit.
One particularly glaring connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 can be seen in Inbal Arieli, who served as SUNC’s Vice President of Strategic Partnerships from 2014 to 2017 and continues to serve as a senior adviser to the organization. Arieli, a former lieutenant in Unit 8200, is the founder and head of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program (EISP), which was the first start-up accelerator in Israel aimed at harnessing “the vast network and entrepreneurial DNA of [Unit] 8200 alumni” and is currently one of the top company accelerators in Israel. Arieli was the top executive at 8200 EISP while working at SUNC.
Another key connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is SUNC’s promotion of Team8, a company-creation platform whose CEO and co-founder is Nadav Zafrir, former commander of Unit 8200. In addition to prominently featuring Team8 and Zafrir on the cybersecurity section of its website, SUNC also sponsored a talk by Zafrir and an Israeli government economist at the World Economic Forum, often referred to as “Davos,” that was attended personally by Paul Singer.
Team8’s investors include Google’s Eric Schmidt, Microsoft, and Walmart — and it recently hired former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, retired Admiral Mike Rogers. Team8 described the decision to hire Rogers as being “instrumental in helping strategize” Team8’s expansion in the United States. However, Jake Williams, a veteran of NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking unit, told CyberScoop:
“Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his technical experience. …It’s purely because of his knowledge of classified operations and his ability to influence many in the U.S. government and private-sector contractors.”
In addition to connections to Unit 8200-linked groups like Team8 and 8200 EISP, SUNC also directly collaborates with the IDF in an initiative aimed at preparing young Israeli women to serve in Unit 8200. That initiative, called the CyberGirlz Club, is jointly funded by Israel’s Defense Ministry, SUNC and the Rashi Foundation, the philanthropic organization set up by the Leven family of Perrier-brand water, which has close ties to the Israeli government and IDF.
“Our aim is to bring the girls to this process already skilled, with the knowledge needed to pass the exams for Unit 8200 and serve in the military as programmers,” Zwaig told Israel National News.
Seeding American Tech
The connections between SUNC and Unit 8200 are troubling for more than a few reasons, one of which being that Unit 8200, often likened to the U.S.’ NSA, closely coordinates with Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, and is responsible for 90 percent of the intelligence material obtained by the Israeli government, according to its former commander Yair Cohen. Cohen told Forbes in 2016, that “there isn’t a major operation, from the Mossad or any intelligence security agency, that 8200 is not involved in.” For obvious reasons, the fact that an organization founded by an American billionaire is actively promoting the presence of former military intelligence officers in foreign companies, specifically American companies, while also promoting the transfer of jobs and investment to that same country, is very troubling indeed.
Particularly troubling is the fact that, since SUNC’s founding, the number of former Unit 8200 members in top positions in American tech companies has skyrocketed. Based on a non-exhaustive analysis conducted by Mintpress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former Israeli military intelligence and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous former Unit 8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions in Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
At Microsoft, managers for at least 15 of the company’s products and programs — including Microsoft’s lead managers for engineering, product strategy, threat analytics and cloud business intelligence — publicly listed their affiliation with Unit 8200 on their LinkedIn accounts. In addition, the general manager of Microsoft’s Israeli Research and Development Center is also a former member of Unit 8200. In total, of the 200 accounts analyzed, 50 of them currently worked for Microsoft.
Similarly, at Google, 28 former Unit 8200 members at the company were identified from their LinkedIn accounts. Among them are Google’s Engineering Director, its strategic partner manager, two growth marketing leads, its lead technical manager, and six product and program managers, including Google’s manager for trust and safety search.
Facebook also has several Unit 8200 members in prominent positions, though fewer than Google and Microsoft. MintPress identified at least 13 Unit 8200 alumni working for Facebook, including its director of engineering, lead manager for express wi-fi, and technical program manager. Notably, Facebook has spent the last several years collaborating with Israel’s government to censor Israel’s critics.
Of course, there is likely much more influence of Unit 8200 on these companies than this non-exhaustive analysis revealed, given that many of these companies acquired several Israeli start-ups run by and staffed by many Unit 8200 alumni who subsequently went on to found new companies and start-ups a few years or shortly after acquisition. Furthermore, due to the limitations of LinkedIn’s set-up, MintPress was not able to access the complete list of Unit 8200 alumni at these three tech companies, meaning that the eye-opening numbers found were generated by a relatively small sample.
This jump in Unit 8200 members in top positions in tech companies of global importance is actually a policy long promoted by Netanyahu, whose long-time economic adviser is the chief executive at SUNC. During an interview with Fox News last year, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin if the large growth seen in recent years in Israel’s technology sector was part of Netanyahu’s plan. Netanyahu responded, “That’s very much my plan … It’s a very deliberate policy.” He later added that “Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities. These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”
Netanyahu further outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel’s emergence as one of the top five “cyber powers” had “required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and that this further required allowing “our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners.” The direct tie-ins of SUNC to Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a long-time political donor and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key part of Netanyahu’s policy of placing former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major technology companies.
Notably, just as SUNC was founded to counter the BDS movement, Netanyahu has asserted that this policy of ensuring Israel’s role as a “cyber power” is aimed at increasing its diplomatic power and specifically undermining BDS as well as the United Nations, which has repeatedly condemned Israel’s government for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the Palestinians.
Building the Bi-National Surveillance State
Top U.S. tech companies have filled top positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and moved strategic and critical operations to Israel, boosting Israel’s economy at the expense of America’s, and SUNC’s role in this marked shift merits scrutiny.
A powerful US-based Jewish billionaire has built an influential organization with deep connections to the U.S.-Israel lobby (AIPAC), an Israeli company that has been repeatedly investigated for spying on the U.S. government (Amdocs), and the elite Israeli military intelligence unit (Unit 8200) that has used its influential connections to the U.S. government and the U.S. private sector to dramatically shift the operations and make-up of major companies in a critical sector of the U.S. economy.
Further consider that U.S. government documents leaked by Edward Snowden have flagged Israel as “leading threat” to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions, which use much of the software produced by these top tech companies, and have also flagged Israel as a top espionage threat. One U.S. government document cited Israel as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the U.S. behind Russia and China. Thus, Paul Singer’s pet project in Start-Up Nation Central has undermined not only the U.S. economy but arguably U.S. national security as well.
This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties connecting top tech companies like Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military. Microsoft and Google are both key military contractors — Microsoft in particular, given that it is set to win a lucrative contract for the Pentagon’s cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a “secure” election system known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented in some U.S. states for the 2020 general election.
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Source: based on an article at MintPress
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When Israel’s Supreme Court Acts as a Military Court
CONTACT@IFAMERICANSKNEW.ORG AUGUST 28, 2023 COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT, GIDEON LEVY, HOME DEMOLITION, ISRAELI MILITARY COURT, ISRAELI SUPREME COURT
Israel’s Supreme Court justices hearing a case before the court earlier this August. (photo)
Israel’s Supreme Court is just as cruel as its military court when dealing with Palestinians: it is a rubber stamp of injustice and apartheid. (Below that see a recent interview with author Levy.)
by Gideon Levy, reposted from Ha’aretz, August 27, 2023
Petitioner number 6 is a 3-year-old girl. Plaintiff number 5 is an 11-year-old girl. Petitioner number 4 is an outstanding high school student. Petitioner number 3 is on the cleaning staff at Hadassah Medical Center, Ein Karem. Plaintiff number 1 is a remodeling contractor and number 2 is his wife. They all live together in a dilapidated apartment in the Shoafat refugee camp in Jerusalem.
Israel intends to demolish their home, and they appealed to the High Court of Justice in a futile attempt to reverse this contemptible decree. The High Court, in its capacity as the highest military court in Israel, approved the demolition on Thursday. Nothing could have been more predictable.
Every few weeks, High Court justices are called up for reserve duty. This occurs when they hear petitions against the defense establishment. They don’t put on military uniforms, as would be appropriate, or wear officer insignia – but the court is clothed in khaki, functioning exactly like the military court at the Ofer military base. It’s hard to distinguish any differences between the High Court justices and every last military judge, ordered to approve any injustice.
IN ISRAELI COURTS, JUSTICE AND MERCY ARE ONLY FOR JEWS
The two courts have an identical ideological purpose: to legitimize, whitewash and approve anything the Shin Bet security service and the military demand; to deny any petition asking for a measure of justice, an observation of human rights, or a little humanity regarding the occupation. The beacon of justice then extinguishes its light, and darkness descends until the court returns to dealing with civilian matters, when its enlightened nature is again revealed.
Even in this depressing reality, there are points that are particularly troubling. Such is ruling 5933/23, given in a petition filed by the family of the child M.Z., accused of stabbing a policeman without causing his death. The policeman died when a security guard opened fire. The child’s family asked the court to block the razing of their home.
With a majority of two wicked justices against one righteous one, Alex Stein and Gila Kanfi against Uzi Vogelman, the court approved the demolition. It’s always nice to have one ethical judge in the minority position, so as not to completely shatter the court’s widely renowned prestige.
The three justices have never visited the Shoafat camp, one can safely assume, and they have no concept of life there. It is among the harshest of refugee camps. The justices were exposed, however, to a report of the interrogation of the boy’s father, carried out by a Shin Bet operative called “Majdi.”
In point number 10 of that report, the agent wrote that the boy was a friend of Mohammed Ali Abu Saleh, who was shot to death the day another house in the camp was demolished after he threatened Israeli forces with a toy gun. According to the indictment, M.Z. found a knife near his aunt’s house and decided on the spur of the moment to stab a policeman in response to the killing of his friend.
His parents and siblings most likely had no idea about his intentions, but his 3-year-old sister will now pay the price for his deed. Now, she, too, will become homeless, courtesy of the High Court of Justice.
The demolition of houses is collective punishment – a war crime. The razing of the home of a 13-year-old boy’s family is graver and even more inconceivable. The demolition of Palestinian attackers’ houses, never those of Jewish ones, is a quintessential marker of an apartheid-style justice system. The fact that the High Court of Justice didn’t even wait for the boy to be convicted – his trial is still underway – only proves that when it comes to Palestinians, there’s no need for a trial.
M.Z. stabbed a policeman on a bus after his friend was killed during an earlier demolition in the camp. Now, warming up on the sidelines is the next attacker, who will grow up on the ruins of M.Z.’s house. How ridiculous is the claim of the majority justices, stating that the demolition will deter parents. It’s sad how disconnected from reality it is.
At the entrance to the Shoafat camp is a checkpoint with stormtroopers ruling over its inhabitants. The police attack the camp every day and night and abuse its residents. 13-year-old M.Z. was old enough to realize that he had to do something. The arbiters of justice thought his family needed to be cruelly punished. The shamefulness is beyond words.
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and was previously the newspaper’s deputy editor. Below is a recent interview with him:
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FURTHER READING ON ISRAEL’S COURTS:
- New Israel Supreme Court ruling gives further backing to use of torture
- Israeli Supreme Court Approved “Child Trafficking” of Muslim Children
- Israel’s military courts for Palestinians make a mockery of justice
- Israeli High Court: Palestinian homes “too close to the wall, must be demolished”
- Israeli court upholds shady sale of Jerusalem church property to settlers
VIDEOS:
- How to buy a politician – and get away with bending (breaking?) the law
- Israel lobby’s false claims of “antisemitism” – Israeli journalist Gideon Levy
- State Dept. spokesman Ned Price on Israeli apartheid, death of 80-year-old by Israeli soldiers
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The core of Zionism is settler-colonialism, not democracy
“Zionism has never been a movement for self-determination”
June 18, 2019 at 9:00 pm
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The passing of Israel’s Nation-State Law last year rekindled age-old questions about Zionism and Jewish self-determination. To unpack these issues, I sat with Professor Joseph Massad who was in London to give a keynote speech on “Israel’s fear of democracy” at a MEMO conference in the capital.
“Zionism,” he told me, “has never been a movement of self-determination. It never claimed to be. This is a new claim that began to be put forth sometime in the 60s and 70s. However, in that period, the claim was not for Jewish self-determination but something called Israeli self-determination.”
These important distinctions and the significance of what he was suggesting became clear in the course of our discussion which honed in on many of the common propaganda tropes peddled to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He offered a lengthy explanation for why the “self-determination” claim is problematic. His remarks also debunked many of the false assertions that have washed up in the current political climate, the most significant of which is the determination of pro-Israel groups to conflate Israel and Zionism with Jews and Judaism. Proponents of the Zionist state have of late pushed the narrative that its founding ideology is merely Jewish self-determination and, the argument goes, if you oppose Zionism you are in fact denying Jews a basic right that’s granted to all other nations and you are, therefore, being anti-Semitic. The sole purpose of this novel formulation seems to be to suppress criticism of Israel and Zionism, an ideology whose similarity with settler colonialism is far greater than its alleged connection to anything resembling a modern liberal democracy.
Zionism always defined itself as a settler-colonial movement
“Zionism is first and foremost a settler colonial movement; this is not a national movement, for example, by native populations that were trying to liberate their country from colonial forces,” explained Massad in tracing the history of the ideology. “This is a movement by European settler-colonial who wanted to take over someone else’s country and create a settler colony.” He explained that the founders of Zionism never shied away from admitting that the project they envisaged was a settler-colonial movement and not one for national self-determination, as we are constantly led to believe. “This is not just what the enemies of Zionism have said; this is what Zionists themselves have said.” He cited the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who spoke openly about colonisation in his writings.
Unlike the current proponents of the State of Israel, Herzl felt no obligation to conceal the true nature of his project through “double speak” and pretences. Zionist organisations founded by Herzl, for example, named themselves “colonisation associations”, such as the “Jewish Colonisation Association” and “The Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association” which is also known by its Yiddish acronym PICA. Nor was there any attempt to disguise the true goal of Zionism when its leaders named the “The Jewish Colonial Trust” which was founded in 1899. The organisation helped fund Jewish settlers in Palestine. All were Zionist institutions that used the word colonial and its derivatives to explain that their project was indeed intended to establish a Jewish colony.
Jewish opposition to Zionism
Massad pointed out that from the 1890s to the 1940s the majority of world Jewry opposed Zionism and refused to endorse it. “Zionism,” he told me, “was a minority Jewish position by a minority of Jews.”
He mentioned the lead-up to the first Zionist Congress in Basle to illustrate Jewish opposition to Zionism. In 1897, when Herzl decided to convene the meeting in Munich, the orthodox and reform rabbis in the city got together and blocked it, because they viewed it as an anti-Jewish gathering. Their opposition to Zionism forced Herzl to move the Congress to Basle in Switzerland.
Zionist discourse evolves from settler colonialism to liberation
Prof. Massad described the evolution of the Zionist discourse which, he noted, mutated according to historical context. After 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Zionists began to throw out the language of settler-colonialism and started to use the terminology of “national liberation”. He explained that Zionists saw an opportunity and wanted to capitalise on the rise of national self-determination groups across the world, which was characteristic of the time. “Indeed, by the 1940s they [Zionists] realised that using the world colonial and colonising in their own literature was becoming offensive because colonialism was no longer fashionable in the age of anti-colonial movements. They immediately adopted a strategy of purging from these programmes the names of agencies that mentioned colonisation and adopted the terms of national liberation groups.”
Why then, adopt legislation like the Nation-State Law which has been denounced widely as an apartheid law? Massad said that two important things happened: In 1947/8 the Zionist colonial movement was able to expel 90 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian population and declare a state of Israel. This artificial construction of a Jewish majority enabled the settler-colonialists, who had suddenly become a majority, to speak of Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state. He emphasised the fact that only after Israel had expelled the vast majority of Palestinians did it adopt democratic procedures. At the same time, Israel was concerned about the small number of Palestinians it had failed to expel. In order to deal with their presence, lawmakers adopted a battery of racist laws to ensure that the Palestinian citizens of Israel would not be in a position to threaten Jewish and colonial privileges.
Massad believes that the Nation-State Law was adopted to address a key question that had faced every Israeli leader: how could they annex and colonise more land without the indigenous non-Jewish population? The current international atmosphere is not conducive to allowing Israel to expel Palestinians en masse, as it had done previously. The solution for Israel, he believes, is to drop its pretence of democracy and invoke the notion of Jewish self-determination. “By doing this you no longer need the question of demography; it doesn’t matter if you’re a majority or a minority. This way you can be 10 per cent of the population and still claim an exclusive right to Jewish self-determination in the so-called land of Israel.” The new law enables Israel to discriminate openly against all non-Jews even if the latter form the majority because Israel’s leaders are no longer concerned about the question of democracy. Israel, Massad insists, has dropped this pretence of being a democracy and found this “formula for coming out as a racist state.”
Israel has passed the Nation-State Law becoming officially an Apartheid State – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
Can liberal Zionists maintain their support for an apartheid state of Israel?
I asked Prof. Massad what this means for liberal Zionists, especially now that Israel has crossed a moral and political red line unthinkable to progressive Jews worldwide by adopting the Nation-State Law. Was there ever any hope that Israel and Zionism could be rescued from their exclusivist impulses in the way liberal Zionists hoped?
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. “If they had killed all the Palestinians or expelled them all then it might have become a liberal democratic state [but] for Jews only.” He admitted that he did not believe that Zionism had historically sought any kind of accommodation with the Palestinians. Israel was always, he insisted, “an exclusivist racist state” from the very beginning. “Indeed that is always what Zionism had planned in all its documents. Its founding fathers spoke about how to expel the population, and the conditions that were needed to ‘transfer’ the population.”
Population transfer: a “cosmetic” term to conceal ethnic cleansing
The conversation shifted to the term “population transfer”. Tracing its usage, Massad said that “transfer” was merely “cosmetic”, a euphemism that Zionists had always used to describe the expulsion of the Palestinian population. Plans for this were adopted in the 1920s and 1930s, not least by the head of the World Zionist Organisation, Chaim Weizmann. Prior to becoming Israel’s first President, he had hatched several plans to expel the Palestinians. According to Massad, Weizmann wanted to expel a million Palestinians to Iraq and replace them with 5 million Jews.
These plans are said to have been debated and planned openly. The Zionist movement in Palestine from the 1930s onwards, for example, set up groups called “Transfer Committees” to expel Palestinians from the country by force. “So it is not as though it [Zionism] sought to live with the Palestinians in a democratic state,” Massad insisted. “It always sought to expel them.” With policies that openly advocated ethnic cleansing, he accused liberal Zionists who try to defend the country as a liberal democratic state of being extremely hypocritical. He pointed out that apartheid laws have been in force in Israel since 1948. “The problem for liberal Zionists is that historically they could cover up the chauvinism and exclusivity that Israel sought at the expense of the Palestinians because they could get rid of the Palestinians. Today they are unable to do that so they are in a bit of a bind on how to defend Israel.”
When asked if there is a split between liberal Jews and Zionism, Massad suggested that the split is more between Zionists and anti-Zionists, including Jews who identify as anti-Zionists. Liberal Zionists, Prof. Massad said, have realised that the image of Israel which they had propagandised over many years as democratic is no longer possible. Repeating the contradiction within the liberal Zionist position, he said that their position is extremely insincere, and contrasted it with liberal white South Africans who defended apartheid but opposed occupation: “Imagine that white South Africans during the 1980s said, ‘We support the withdrawal of the South African occupation forces from occupied Namibia but at the same time support white apartheid in South Africa.’ Essentially, liberal Zionists are saying the same thing. They support Jewish racial and colonial privilege enforced by law inside Israel but they don’t want Israel to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
Israel’s claim to be a democracy has always appeared to be more fiction than fact. The settler-colonial instinct of Zionism has been the main driving force of its policy over the past 72 years. With no indication that Israel’s appetite for displacing Palestinians and seizing territory is anywhere near sated, there needs to be a real effort by the international community to hold the state to account, end its apparent impunity and decolonise occupied Palestine with a vision that defends genuine democracy and human rights for all.
BIG BROTHER in the 21. Century 