“Genocide and Judaism.”

An essay concerning human understanding of barbarity.

This is a Jewish Israeli. A family forced from its home, Al–Mughayyir, West Bank, 15 May. (Screenshot, with permission.)

How many of us have struggled since 7 October 2023 with questions to do with Israel and the savage acts it commits daily against the Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank? With distinctions between Zionism and Judaism, Zionists and Jews, anti–Semitism and “anti–Semitism,” and how these matters are properly understood in relation to one another? Countless people, we would say, ourselves among them.

The Floutist begins an occasional series engaging these questions. As this first piece makes clear, these will be essays in the way Montaigne, who invented the form, used this term. We offer them as reflections, explorations, observations written in something other than stone, always leaving room for more to be said.

—The Editors.

Cara Marianna.

4 JUNE—Moshe Feiglin, formerly a member of the Knesset and now leader of Zehut, a Zionist political party, caused a stir of outrage among paying-attention people recently when he declared publicly, “Every child, every baby in Gaza, is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas . . . Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.”

You would know nothing of Feiglin’s outburst if your sole source of news was the Zionist-aligned, genocide-enabling New York Times. Or indeed any of the Zionist-aligned, genocide-enabling mainstream media in the United States. Omissions of this order amount to a form of complicity. These media are all criminally negligent.

Outrageous though his comments were, the real outrage is that Feiglin is hardly an oddity. He’s about as representative of Jewish Israeli society as one can be. Feiglin said in public what a great many Israeli Jews think and encouraged a program of extermination many Israeli Jews support.

This regrettable reality leads me to something Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian commentator, observed recently in a piece published under the headline, “Israel is a uniquely evil society.”

It takes a special kind of evil to encourage the wholesale slaughter of babies and children, as Feiglin does. Johnstone references his public statements as an example of the depravity of Israeli society as a whole:

Israel is a uniquely evil society. I don’t think that’s an unfair or unreasonable thing to say. Many other nations do evil things and many other nations have murderous extremists, but what other nations have their own mainstream politicians saying this sort of thing on mainstream television? I can’t think of any.

A new poll shared by Israel’s Channel 13 News found that most Israelis still don’t believe their government has to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. It’s not just the leaders. It’s not just the fringe wingnuts. It’s a whole country full of sociopaths. Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are the result of what Israelis are as a collective. The entire nation is heartless and fucked in the head.

Johnstone’s voice has been one of rare honesty and clarity these past 19 months. I read her work with approval. But in this commentary, it seemed to me that she replicated a mistake common among critics of the genocide in Gaza.

In an attempt to avoid descending into genuine anti–Semitism, or out of fear of being accused of anti–Semitism, critics of Israel’s genocide appear at times to be dancing around one of its most obvious features: This obscene crime against humanity is being committed, supported, often insisted upon, by Jewish citizens of Israel.

What are we to think of this? Does this most obvious of facts require pointing out? If not, why not? And if so, why and how?

What are we looking at, when we see pictures of Jewish Israelis standing in front of aid trucks blocking food from entering Gaza, where the populace is starving—and while Israeli police officers stand around watching? What are we seeing when we watch videos of desperately hungry Palestinians herded into fenced areas that resemble cattle chutes, only to be shot and killed by Israeli Occupation Forces?

What follows is an essay in the true sense of this word. It is an exploration, a foray, a door to a discourse. It is an attempt to consider answers to these questions. My purpose is clarity. My intent is to consider Israel’s conduct and criminality such that these are properly defined and understood.

We witness an increasing number of incidents—the shootings outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, the attack on a group demonstrating in Boulder in behalf of Israelis now hostage in Gaza—that our purported leaders and the above-noted media reflexively describe as cases of anti–Semitism. Defining such events in this way, as if a primitive hatred of Jews and not the Zionist state’s conduct was the motivating force, is a preposterous fiction and of course nothing new. Now, as the Israeli military’s barbarities in Gaza and the West Bank assault us daily, the dangers of this disgraceful lie are manifest. This imposes a pressing responsibility on all of us, and a special responsibility on Jews who stand against the conduct of the Zionist state—and, indeed, its ideology.