The steady flow of articles alleging that it is immoral to take the side of the oppressed in Palestine is becoming tiresome. All these articles simply ignore the longstanding oppression of the Palestinian people and the ongoing and unconscionable devastation of the Gaza ghetto. They all mispresent Israel as the victim of those who refuse its colonial oppression and misrepresent all those who oppose the vicious repression meted out by the Israeli state as anti-Semites, including the many Jewish critics of Israel.
The piece by Milton Shain (PoliticsWeb 21 December 2023) is as puerile as recent pieces by Greg Mills, Tony Leon, Frans Cronje among others. Shain does not say a word about the violent oppression of the Palestinians going back to even before 1948, or the currently unfolding war crime in Gaza. His silence is tacit support for that oppression and for the genocide being perpetrated on live television as he wrote his article.
Shain has so little to say that he resorts to referencing the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion at length, the notorious 1903 Czarist police forgery produced at a time when European empires were paranoid about the role of non-Zionist Jews in left wing causes. Those repressive states sought to divert attention away from issues of democracy and freedom and towards an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Shain, following many right-wing commentators in the United States and Israel, uses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for exactly the same purpose. He cynically diverts attention away from the urgent issue of the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and the West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli state.
Nobody disputes that the 1988 Hamas Charter contained anti-Semitic statements; declaring that the “Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.” It is of note that the leaders of Israel advocate the same in reverse about Jews killing Muslims, and in fact all Palestinians - Christian victims amongst them. To the credit of Hamas, they have deleted such statements from their new Charter, whereas Israel’s leaders have doubled down on such declarations.
Unlike more crude right-wing commentators Shain does acknowledge the revised 2017 Hamas Charter which disavows anti-Semitism and makes it clear that Hamas is struggling against Zionism and the Zionist state and not Jewish people. However, Shain does not take the content of the revised Charter seriously and simply repeats the flawed idea that anti-Zionism is inevitably anti-Semitism, a position as ludicrous as assuming that being anti-apartheid is being anti-white. He writes that in the Charter “’the Zionist project’ in the text is simply functioning as code for ‘the Jews’.” He provides no actual evidence to support this statement.