Of Green Cheese and Genocide
Some falsehoods are innocently foolish, others foolishly fatal. Not recognizing the difference – mistaking one for the other – can have deadly consequences.
For instance, humoring childish souls who think the moon is made of green cheese won’t hurt anybody, but brushing aside political extremists who think Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians will – and does.
Enablers of such violence certainly include Israel’s “critics” who say they hold nothing against us yet believe the genocide libel: those who’ve already bought the lie and are themselves on the slippery slope to turning into antizionists. Their intellectually lazy, casually reckless disregard for factual accountability is bad enough.
Just as worrying is a willingness – even among folks who personally shy away from passing judgment self-righteously – to downplay deadly consequences that fanatics who peddle the libel are using it to produce.
Liberal society evinces a growing tendency to blur lines between harmless imaginings and deadly lies. Otherwise thoughtful, well-informed, good-hearted people believe that, because they harbor no ill will against Israel, “criticisms” of its national policies – in this case conduct of the Gaza war – cannot conceivably feed into the combustible atmosphere of antizionist incitement and help fan it into actual criminal behavior.
They act as if accusing Israel of genocide is as anodyne as saying the moon is made of green cheese. (A guy like me who sounds the warning is in their eyes an alarmist.)
Jews outside of Israel, tending to be highly educated but lacking lived exposure to realities in the Middle East, are particularly susceptible to this syndrome of complacent denial.
To survive as a Jew in the real world, you can’t afford to make pretend. This isn’t kid’s stuff. It isn’t about whether the moon is made of green cheese.
They who indulge, make light of, or play along with antizionist genocide accusers are, whether through passivity regarding, indifference to, rationalization of, or unconscious sympathy with fomenters of brutality against Jews, encouraging it.
Illustrations of cause-effect correlation between promoting the genocide libel and carrying out anti-Jewish activity (threats, vandalism, assault and murder) are legion. Hamas and its supporters (following Iran’s playbook) make no secret of their intention to kill Israelis and other Jews and – blaming the intended victim in a feint of rhetorical deflection, a brazen act of moral inversion – trot out the genocide charge as justification for their own undisguisedly genocidal aims.
The problem goes beyond dire consequences that come from bandying about the genocide accusation. Even objecting to it can have scary repercussions. Thus, a rabbi who went on public record to challenge the libel became a target of antizionists’ threats2.
Some circumstances bound up with this defamatory mythos compound its grotesque malice with absurdity that would be laughable were it not malicious. For example, an antizionist group that equates “Zionists” with “racist landlords” put out the following statement: “Black people in Brooklyn are violently exploited via rents to then feed their genocidal land grabs in Palestine”3.
Fringe element? Not necessarily.
To a tolerant, openminded, pluralism-affirming person, these bigoted cranks might appear to be swimming in a tiny, backwater cesspool, but it’s tributary to a mainstream flowing from an unending, inexhaustible reservoir of Jew-hatred.
Contempt for and fear of Jews, belief that we harbor genocidal ambitions, was poisoning wellsprings of humane discourse long before Israel’s military response to the October 7 genocide that Palestinians under Hamas’s direction perpetrated against Jews in Israel.
Operative here is a longstanding, heinous assumption: that Jews seek to destroy the human race.
The superstition, stretching back centuries, is sealed into medieval, modern and contemporary belief systems: Christian supersessionist theology, Nazi antisemitic ideology (supplemented by today’s “Great Replacement” conspiracism), and antizionist “post-colonial” pseudo-theory. They are different formulations of the same thing: Jew-hatred4.
Maybe worse, though, than pandemic, inveterate, homicidal hatred toward Jews is its mollycoddling by well-meaning folk. They prop up a facade of vicious insinuation, passing it off as “constructive criticism”; they gullibly shield others’ cruel designs behind their own forbearing inclinations. The attempt to reassure is anything but comforting.
To write off the falsehood as inconsequential is to whitewash it; to whitewash it is, in effect, to ally oneself with it.
“Don’t get so worked up.”
“ It’s no big deal.”
“Just a handful of crackpots spouting silly nonsense.”
“You’re paranoid.”
Anyone who talks this way is equating genocide with green cheese.
Jews and friends of ours: Know the difference.
***
1
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-906003 ; https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/4-members-of-pro-palestinian-group-arrested-for-planning-bombings-across-los-angeles/ar-AA1SrSYp
2
https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/article317092550.html
3
4
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/archaeology-of-a-libel-how-the-genocide-charge-against-israel-emerged/ ; https://brandeiscenter.com/the-thi