Michael Brooks, Jewish American Writer 1983-2020

It’s not a complex issue. That’s the big thing. It’s super simple. There’s one group that has enormous power. It’s the most powerful country in the Middle East. It’s backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity, is never held accountable for anything, so there’s no symmetry in the relationship, period.

And just as a thought experiment, if we know that if somehow a population of Jewish refugees ended up in the West Bank and Gaza, and an Arabic government in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv had an open-air prison in what you know Jewish Gaza, which they bombed with white phosphorus, they killed civilians indiscriminately, and they had no provisions for medicine, they had an embargo that blocked food, that the electricity wasn’t running, that there was an over 48 unemployment rate, life expectancy and malnutrition statistics were horrifying, one of the major policymakers in this hypothetical Arab Palestinian state said we need to put those Jews on a diet in the West Bank, there was another Jewish area where there was a little bit more autonomy but there were regular Arab settlements where they pulled up the Jewish farmers’ food, they terrorised them with rocks, the security forces broke children’s bones, and they couldn’t drive their own roads, we’d all have no problem understanding what that was.

So there’s nothing complex about it. It’s a pure asymmetry relationship, and the question is rights or not. So that’s it. It’s not complicated.

There’s always been and there’s always going to be crackpots who are antisemitic who condemn Israel. That’s not what drives the movement. Particularly in the United States, you work around most people who are concerned with this issue, it’s actually populated with a lot of Jewish people.

The real question we have to ask is why is it that AIPAC is hosting an information minister for Slobodan Milošević? Why is it that there are relationships between the Israeli government and far-right parties in Europe? why is it that Benjamin Netanyahu’s son is posting borderline alt-right memes? why is it that Israel is an alt-right state even though it is from the descendants of the victims of one of the greatest crimes in history?

That’s inseparable from the racism of the project, which goes back to the first part that we have to solve.

But thank you, shalom, and I am serious about it. Coming from Jewish values, like Tony Judt, my reading, to the extent I do, which I actually do have some connection to in a religious sense, it’s unacceptable for me.