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zionism
AIPAC Goes Transatlantic
The Israel Lobby has set its sights much further afield than the halls of power in Washington.
Nov 29, 2024
Like the US, Britain has long been captive of the Zionist lobby, which wields much influence in the country through access to ministers, donations to the parties, and the repression of public opinion critical of Israeli policies of apartheid and genocide.
The Starmer government purged Labour’s ranks of people sympathetic toward the Palestinians, taking cues from the Israel lobby by labeling the critics of Israel as anti-semites. Starmer himself declared a few months before taking over the leadership of Labour, “I support Zionism without qualification.”
He also stated on LBC radio in the UK that Israel has the right of siege in Gaza, including its cutting off of water and power (McShane 2023). This coheres with the view of retired Major General Giora Eiland, who called for a starvation policy in Gaza and told Israeli media: “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal. Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
Starmer put into practice the next phase of his Zionist program by arresting critics of Israel through the employment of the draconian “Terrorism Act 2000, Section 12” which covers materials posted online. A journalist and pro-Palestinian activist, Sarah Wilkinson was arrested under the Act (originally enacted under the Tony Blair government) in August 2024 after a raid on her house by 12 police who confiscated all her electronic devices (Wilkins 2024). She was threatened with a long prison sentence for posting online remarks about the “incredible” way that Hamas was able to launch its assault on 7 October.
The same month, an independent British foreign affairs journalist Richard Medhurst, who is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, was arrested at Heathrow Airport and charged under the same act, which bans any writing regarded as favorable to proscribed entities, such as Hamas. There is no conceivable applications of this law to Jews or Israelis living in Britain who express even bloodcurdling support for terrorism and torture employed by the IDF against Palestinian civilians.
Israel exercises direct power connections to British electoral politics and Parliament through such groups as Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), founded in 1957, and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), founded in 1974, both of which lobby for Israel.
For the Tories, upon election to Parliament, one almost automatically becomes a member of CFI. As a result, Conservative cabinet members have come to expect regular donations from the Israel lobby, which has amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds going to at least one-third of all current sitting members of the party.
Large numbers of Labour MPs have also been feeding at the trough. Twenty percent of Labour’s sitting MPs have been funded by pro-Israel groups or individuals – including 15 who have been directly financed by the Israeli state.
The 2017 Al Jazeera documentary, “The Lobby,” exposed the fact that the Israeli government, working through its embassy in London, has had a direct hand in managing the various friends of Israel groups, including its many city branches. The Union of Jewish Students in the UK, which receives money from the Embassy, sends student delegations to Israel for propaganda immersion. Just prior to the 2024 general election, some 15 MPs took money from pro-Israel lobby groups, the LFI and CFI.
Twelve successful Labour candidates and three winning Conservatives took advantage of the Israeli largesse by accepting the travel invitations and expressing solidarity with Israeli apartheid and genocide policies.
Parallel with the U.S. but on a smaller scale in the UK, elections are open doors for contributions from wealthy individuals and corporate elites. The Zionist lobby is able to exploit these openings to block those Anglo-American politicians from interfering with the apartheid state. Suppressing Palestine rights is fully consistent with neo-conservative foreign policy and fits the long trajectory of western imperialism.
As the Al Jazeera documentary also disclosed, the Israeli main propaganda unit, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, regularly funnels talking points to British MPs to get them to serve as spokespersons for Israeli interests, such as during Prime Minister’s Question Time.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as well is channeling money to universities in Britain to promote propaganda through the efforts of the campus-based think tank, the Pinsker Centre, whose role is to construct a narrative of Jewish student victimhood without a word of condolence for Palestinian students whose relatives are being starved and slaughtered by Israeli Jews.
Beyond the campuses, AIPAC seeks to create a stronghold in Parliament similar to the power it wields in the U.S. Congress. The documentary also exposed plots in the Israeli Embassy in London to take down public officials who are seen as critical of the apartheid policy or insufficiently pro-Zionist.
Israel and its modern day maccabees have made their mark. Members of Labour Friends of Israel have used the (now increasingly discredited) tactic of labeling anyone who brings up Israel’s repression as “anti-semitic.” It was very successful in purging Labour of pro-Palestinian MPs and party members, particularly during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership period (2015-2020).
The “anti-semitic” tag is equivalent to the use of “heretic” during the Inquisition. Though today’s heretics raising such issues may not be burned at the stake, they may lose their position in the party or their jobs or their university matriculation status. The militant attitude of LFI incites fear and intimidation among those concerned about social justice.
Stuart Roden, hedge fund manager and chairman of the Israeli venture capital firm Hetz Ventures, [based in Tel Aviv] “has given the Labour party over half a million pounds ahead of the UK’s [2024] general election,” part of the £1 million he’s donated to Labour since 2023.
Roden is also the principal funder of a Zionist educational program, “I-gnite,” which teaches British children that “the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are acting proportionately in Gaza” (McEvoy 2024c). In October 2023, he was filmed confronting pro-Palestinian protesters but was not taken to task for interfering with the speech rights or feelings of Palestinian Britons or others involved in the demonstration.
AIPAC is just the newest of a number of pro-Israel influencers in the UK. These include the Jewish Leadership Council, the Zionist Federation, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, all elite organizations amongst the Jewish population of Britain.
It was under Tony Blair, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, that the Israel lobby began to seriously make political inroads in the government, according to a (UK) Channel 4 2009 investigative news program. The video also revealed that a press “watchdog” group on behalf of Israel, “Honest Reporting,” regularly challenged the Israel coverage in The Guardian and BBC. The organization is headquartered in Jerusalem with another branch in New York City.
Its managing editor at the time, Simon Plosker, had previously worked for the pro-Israel propaganda unit, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom) as well as for the Israel army press office.
Bicom acts as an influencer upon the British public, largely by issuing press releases to the British media, funding trips to Israel for British journalists, and giving talks at British universities. Funding sources for Bicom have major investments in the occupied West Bank.
The heavy hand of Zionism International helped to build a coalition of leaders, including Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump himself, and Benjamin Netanyahu, dedicated to blocking Corbyn from becoming prime minister and removing him as Labour Party leader. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Starmer will be hard pressed to continue defending Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza and the West Bank as “the right of self-defense.”
From the Jordan to the Sea: Turning the Tide?
By May 2024, a Data for Progress poll indicated that 70% of likely American voters, including 83% of Democrats, favored a permanent ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza. A similar YouGov poll found that 56% of Britons favored cutting arms shipments to Israel and an immediate ceasefire (66%). Despite these findings, neither of the leading political parties in the US or UK have taken action to end human slaughter in Palestine.
In November 2024, the U.S. vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. The vote was 14 to 1. The Biden government, which had already given Israel over $20 billion in military support for the Israeli assault on Gaza and the West Bank, remained super-hawkish to the end.
Based on his actions as a first-term president, it is unlikely that Trump will use leverage on Israel to back away from its subjugation and slaughter of Gazan and West Bank civilians, confiscation of the remaining Palestinian state, and its “final solution.”
Unless the Gulf states, western Europe, and the UN take a more interventionist role in forcing the U.S. to end its complicity in the incomprehensible Israeli atrocities, there appears to be only two possible outcomes: extermination of the Palestinian people or a regional war involving Israel, the US, and UK against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran, with the possible material backing of Russia and China.
For Israel there can never be a win-win diplomatic solution. One way or another, the Zionist project may have met its Waterloo.
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What Will a Second Trump Term Really Mean for Palestine?
Trump has two clear paths when he assumes power next January: continue to allow the U.S. to be led by the nose by the Christian evangelical right or stop Netanyahu’s war.
Nov 09, 2024
Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.
And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump’s first term as president, the U.S.. was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right - the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.
Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.
Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington.
Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.
Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump’s sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.
This was—and still is—a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the wealth of the Gulf.
On October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas attack, the Palestinian cause was all but dead. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination felt like the baggage of an older generation of Arab leaders, which was being unceremoniously dumped by the new generation.
All the diplomatic talk was of Saudi Arabia’s impending decision to normalise relations with Israel, with the picture of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shaking hands in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dangling as the prize lying just behind the next corner. One more push, and it would be in the bag.
If that charge sheet is not long enough, it could easily be argued that Trump’s second term will be even worse for Palestinians than his first was.
Wildest Impulses
This time around, and with the Republican party projected to have control over both houses of Congress, there will be no adults in the room to correct the president’s wildest impulses.
After all, did Friedman not just publish a book entitled One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in which he argues that the U.S. has a biblical duty to support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank?
“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections… Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they are not inconsistent with those of Israel,” Friedman writes.
In allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.
So will Trump 2.0 not simply presage yet more territorial changes, such as the annexation of Area C of the occupied West Bank, the permanent division of Gaza, the return of Israeli settlements to northern Gaza, and the clearing of the border area in southern Lebanon?
All of this could, and no doubt will, come to pass under a second Trump term, with no brakes.
I do not for one second underplay or underestimate the sacrifice in blood that Palestinians have paid so far—the death toll in Gaza could easily be three times higher than the current official figure—or could yet pay for all that is about to come.
But in this column, I will argue that the settler movement, backed by a second Trump term, is in the process of burying any chance that Israel will prevail as an apartheid Jewish minority state in control of all the land from the river to the sea.
Irreversible Consequences
Let me make two points about the situation that existed on October 6, before I go on to deal with the irreversible consequences of everything that has happened since. And make no mistake—they are irreversible.
The first is that in allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.
The liberal version of this state had been the main vehicle of Israeli expansion, with its salami slices making ever-deeper inroads into historic Palestine. By killing it, the liberal fig leaf dropped from the Zionist project, and the religious Zionist forces who were once regarded as fringe and even as terrorists, such as far-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir and the Kahanists, became mainstream.
This fundamentally altered the whole project to establish Israel as the dominant state between the river and sea. It suddenly became the only state, and one that was governed by religious fanatics; by people wishing to level the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
It became a state governed by the religious dogmas of Jerusalem not by the European Ashkenazi internet geeks and sophisticates of Tel Aviv. Under the first Trump presidency, the rift between these two camps became irreconcilable and fundamentally destabilising.
The second change that the first Trump presidency brought about, or rather completed, took place in Palestinian minds.
A whole generation of Palestinians born after the Oslo Accords came to the conclusion that all political and nonviolent ways of seeking an end to the occupation were blocked; that there was no longer any meaning in recognising Israel, let alone trying to find anyone in it to talk with.
Talking to Israel became a meaningless exercise. The political route was blocked not only inside Palestine, but outside it.
To their eternal shame and discredit, U.S. President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, kept all the “achievements” of the first Trump presidency in place—first and foremost the Abraham Accords.
Biden's Humiliation
Trump’s big boast during his first term of office was that he made all these changes to the status quo of the Palestinian conflict, and the sky did not fall in.
But the sky did fall in on October 7, and everything that Trump and Biden had done before that contributed to the Hamas attack, which provided the same shock to Israel that 9/11 provided to the US.
After the Hamas attack, it was impossible to ignore the Palestinian cause. It moved from the periphery of global human rights causes to the very center.
It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.
But Biden didn’t get it. An instinctive Zionist, he allowed Netanyahu to humiliate him. His first reaction to the Hamas attack was to give Israel everything it wanted, thwarting all international moves at the United Nations for a cease-fire. His second reaction was to draw red lines, which Netanyahu proceeded to ignore.
Biden told Netanyahu not to reoccupy Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. Netanyahu did it anyway. Biden told Netanyahu to allow aid trucks into Gaza, and Netanyahu mostly ignored him. Biden told Netanyahu not to invade Lebanon; Netanyahu did it. Biden told Netanyahu not to attack Iranian nuclear and oil facilities, and Netanyahu listened to him—for now at least.
It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.
He also emerges as a leader who facilitated genocide. The amount of heavy bombs that the U.S. supplied, and that Israel used against overwhelmingly civilian targets in Gaza and Lebanon, over the past year far outweighs the U.S.’ own use of such bombs during the entire Iraq war.
If the Israeli state has fundamentally changed after October 7, so too has the Palestinian mindset.
The scale of the killing—the official Palestinian death toll from the war has exceeded 43,000, and the real count could be several times higher, with the degree of destruction rendering most of the Gaza Strip uninhabitable—has crossed all red lines for Palestinians, wherever they live.
No Room for Negotiations
From now on, there is no talking or negotiating with a state that does this to your people. The only two votes in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that secured unanimity among Jewish Israeli MKs included legislation to veto a Palestinian state, and a law banning UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
These two votes alone told Palestinians that they would be deluded to think that a post-Netanyahu government would bring any relief from occupation. In a deeply divided Israel, the only thing that all Jews could agree on were two measures that fundamentally made life impossible for Palestinians, the majority of the population.
In such extreme conditions, there are only two alternatives: to do nothing and die, or to resist and die. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, believe in the latter.
Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.
Consequently, Hamas is at the height of its popularity in areas where the Muslim Brotherhood was on October 6 at its weakest: in the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Walk around Nablus’s old city and ask people who they support. The answer will not be the defunct Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. By a substantial margin, it will be Hamas, a group that is proscribed in the U.K. and other countries as a terrorist organization.
In Jordan, Hamas is praised by the whole population, East Bankers and Palestinians alike, because Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank is seen as an existential threat to the kingdom.
Walk into a Palestinian home for dinner on Friday, and everyone will tell you that this death toll, and the deaths under a second Trump term, are the price to be paid for liberation from occupation.
This generation of Palestinians has shown a degree of fortitude that no previous generation showed. They are not cutting and running, like former President Yasser Arafat’s PLO did when surrounded by Israeli forces in Beirut in 1982.
No one in Gaza is fleeing to Tunisia, and few to Egypt, which is just across the border—and far fewer than Netanyahu intended. Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.
'Time for Complete Victory'
This is the answer to those who argue that looking at the long term is all very well, when the short-term duty is simply to survive. There is no short term for Palestinians any more. It’s over. There is nothing left.
The short term means returning to your tent. It means going back to your home in the occupied West Bank, knowing that tomorrow you could be burned out by settlers armed by Ben Gvir. There is no going back. Palestinians have all lost too many family members for surrender to be considered an option.
Viewed from the perspective of a Palestinian farmer clinging to his stony ground in the face of repeated settler attacks in the hills of South Hebron, it’s a toss-up as to whether Kamala Harris as U.S. president would have made any difference. If anything, she could well have been an even weaker influence on Netanyahu than Biden was.
Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.
So we have ended up with Trump once again.
The settler right are popping bottles of champagne in celebration. Speaking in the Knesset, Ben Gvir welcomed Trump’s election victory, saying that “this is the time for sovereignty, this is the time for complete victory”.
Netanyahu is also using this period to clear out the stables in his government by sacking his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Trump thus has two clear paths when he assumes power next January, assuming that Biden continues to fail to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. He can either carry on where he left off, and continue to allow the U.S. to be led by the nose by the Christian evangelical right, or he can do what he strongly hinted he would do to the Muslim leaders he met in Michigan—which is to stop Netanyahu’s war.
Either path is littered with elephant traps.
Fires of Regional War
Letting Netanyahu and his alliance with Ben Gvir achieve “total victory” would mean, in reality, the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the occupied West Bank, with a huge refugee influx ending up in Jordan—an act that would be seen in Jordan as a cause for war.
It would mean the expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza and the permanent destruction of southern Lebanon, with the assumed right of Israel to continue bombing Lebanon and Syria.
Each of these actions would lead to more war, which Trump has pledged to stop. Remember that one of the last things Gallant said before he was sacked was that a war in Syria to cut Iran’s supply lines was inevitable.
Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.
Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.
Nor would getting Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel, putting the cherry on top of the cake of the Abraham Accords, make any difference—although I strongly doubt whether Mohammed bin Salman would be stupid enough to do this anymore.
The reality is that such deals have no meaning while Palestine does not have its own state, and while each Arab leader feels the anger of their own population on Palestine.
But forcing Netanyahu to stop the war, in the way a strong Republican president like Ronald Reagan forced Israel stop the bombing of Beirut four decades ago, would also have seismic consequences.
It would stop the religious Zionist project in its tracks. It would feed the growing dissatisfaction within the Israeli army’s high command, who have already signalled they have achieved all they can in Gaza and Lebanon, and are suffering from war fatigue.
Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.
Hope for the future
One year on, there is still no credible project to install a government in Gaza that would allow the withdrawal of Israeli troops. The moment they do, Hamas reemerges. The only government of post-war Gaza that could succeed would be a technocratic government that is agreed with Hamas—and that in itself would represent a huge humiliation for Netanyahu and the army’s vow to crush the resistance movement.
Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington. It lies with the peoples of Palestine and across the Middle East.
And that is the biggest hope for the future. Never before in U.S. electoral history has Palestine been a factor in turning the youth vote away from the Democratic Party. Henceforth, no Democratic leader wishing to rebuild their coalition can ignore the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim vote.
It may be that as Biden departs, we have seen the party’s last Zionist leader. That in itself is of immense significance for Israel.
The irrational, quixotic, transactional occupant of the White House—the president who insists that his advisers reduce all their analysis to one sheet of A4, which they are lucky he actually reads—will only accelerate the destruction of the status quo in the Middle East that he started in his first term.
With much help from Netanyahu, Trump has already killed the dream of Zionist liberal democracy that lasted for 76 years.
This is some achievement in itself. In a second term, he will only hasten the day the occupation ends.
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Zionist Vigilante Groups Won’t Make Jewish Students Safe
Persecutory tactics long used by Zionists to curb anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere are now being imported into North American university campuses, putting all students at risk.
Oct 20, 2024
Last academic year saw university students across North American campuses form Gaza solidarity encampments to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians and their universities’ financial complicity in the carnage. The sit-ins received widespread media coverage and helped carry Israel’s crimes against Palestinians to the top of the Western news agenda.
Although these campus protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and included many anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty, Israel’s supporters in media, politics, and academia itself responded to the demonstrations by accusing protesters of peddling antisemitism and intimidating Jewish students. Toward the end of the academic year, police dismantled most of these campus protests, arresting hundreds of students in the process and charging them with crimes ranging from third-degree trespass to felony burglary.
Now, as a new academic year starts and Zionist genocidal aggression continues in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon students are once again mobilizing in protest. These student protesters are already facing further intimidation from university administrations, threats from political leaders, abuse from the police, and unsubstantiated accusations of antisemitism from mainstream media. Moreover, campuses this academic year are facing a new threat: intimidation from so-called Zionist “self-defense” groups with far-right links.
Zionist vigilante groups like the JDL employ the same “self-defense” rhetoric and methodologies used in Palestine since 1948 to justify offensive aggression and colonization while appropriating Jewish victimhood and conflating it with Zionist criminality.
At the University of Toronto, Magen Herut Canada (Defender of Freedom Canada), a volunteer-based Zionist vigilante group affiliated with Herut Canada—an organization tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right, revisionist Likud Party, which advocates for the “Greater Israel” settler-colonial vision—was mobilized to ostensibly “defend” Jewish students from what they claim to be protesters’ antisemitism.
Magen Herut plans to expand its “volunteer safety patrols” across Canada and into the United States. Membership requires ideological alignment with Zionism and experience in policing, security, or the military. With more than 50 members, Magen Herut coordinates through WhatsApp groups to patrol up to 15 zones, including university campuses, and to appear at Gaza solidarity protests, where they intimidate attendees. They go on patrol in sizeable groups, wearing black T-shirts that identify them as members of the Magen Herut “Surveillance team.” The group’s leader, Aaron Hadida, a security expert, teaches “Jewish self-defense,” including the use of firearms. Magen Herut works closely with J-Force, a private security firm that provides “protest security” for Israel supporters. J-Force deploys volunteers to pro-Palestine events in tactical gear. Both groups are expected to remain active on campus throughout the academic year.
Zionist activists with the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group whose stated goal is to “protect Jews from antisemitism by any means necessary,” have also been spotted at pro-Palestinian events at the university. The group, which was largely inactive prior to October 7, was deemed a “right-wing terrorist group” by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2001,
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that several “counter-protesters” waved flags with the JDL or the Kahane Chai symbol on them at a small pro-Palestine march at the University of Toronto on September 6. Kahane Chai is a fascistic Israeli group tied to JDL, which advocates for the forced expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Other participants in the Zionist action, the newspaper said, were seen wearing Kahane Chai caps and shouting chants calling for violence against Muslims and Palestinians, including “Let’s turn Gaza into a parking lot.”
The JDL has a long history of racist violence and terrorism. Its members bombed Arab and Soviet properties in the U.S. and assassinated those it labelled “enemies of the Jewish people,” focusing on Arab American activists. They were linked to several 1985 bombings, one of which killed West Coast Regional Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Alex Odeh; the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre when 29 worshipers were fatally shot in a Hebron mosque during Ramadan; and a 2001 plot targeting U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in his San Clemente, California district office and the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California.
The presence of uniformed far-right Zionist “patrol teams” and JDL flags at the University of Toronto is alarming. It means that persecutory tactics long used by Zionists to curb anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere are now being imported into North American university campuses, which in the past year became epicenters of anti-Zionist resistance and solidarity between anti-colonial movements in the West.
The aim of these Zionist groups is twofold: fracture, weaken, and defame intersectional resistance to white supremacy, which of course includes Zionism, and provide support for U.S.-led Western imperial expansionism and genocide, spearheaded by Israel.
To divert attention away from their far-right ties, fascist roots, and blatant aggression against anti-genocide student protesters, the Zionist vigilantes active at the University of Toronto duplicitously frame themselves as Jewish “self-defense” forces.
The concept of “self-defense” has vastly different meanings for the colonized and the colonizer. For the colonized, “self” is tied to cultural identity, ancestral land, and vital resources. Whereas for the colonizer, it is grounded in a constructed identity, land theft, and the protection of stolen resources along with shifting blame for resistance to colonization onto the colonized victims. Indeed, the leading Zionist militia from 1920 through the 1940s, the precursor of the “Israel Defense Force,” was named Haganah, meaning “defense” in Hebrew, and was a major force in appropriating Palestinian land and ridding it of its native population.
Zionist vigilante groups like the JDL employ the same “ self-defense” rhetoric and methodologies used in Palestine since 1948 to justify offensive aggression and colonization while appropriating Jewish victimhood and conflating it with Zionist criminality. They invoke fear in order to produce subservience and support for their eliminatory agenda. These groups rely on the concepts of deterrence and dehumanisation of Palestinians to justify extreme measures, framing their actions as defensive, thus obfuscating the potential illegality that comes with offensive aggression whilst responding to perceived threats with lethal force.
Zionist vigilante groups on Northern American university campuses target anti-genocide protesters under the guise of “Jewish defense” as a means of defending white supremacy in its Zionist and American forms and fracturing anti-colonial resistance led by Palestinian, Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and Jewish anti-Zionists.
In contrast, the anti-colonial alliance, both in North America and globally, is built on a shared understanding that white supremacist oppression is entrenched in systemic racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and imperialism. By presenting a united front against all forms of racism and capitalism, it challenges the colonial and neocolonial establishments. As part of this resistance, it rejects Zionism as a white supremacist, European-driven project, drawing parallels to other manifest destiny ideologies that have fuelled Western settler-colonial ventures, including in the U.S.
Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. elections, white supremacy, Islamophobia, and antisemitism continue to rise across North America. Additionally, the election discourse risks diverting attention from the threats posed by the increasing presence of Zionist groups with direct ties to far-right violence. To challenge it, people, including Jews, must stand against all forms of ethnocentrism and exclusion. The Jewish community’s long history of trauma and persecution should inspire a unified pursuit of justice, freedom, and equality for everyone, rejecting Zionist vigilante terrorism.
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