Distinguishing criticism from bigotry
Netanyahu needs an intervention
Dear reader, we must be able to criticize the government of Israel. It is a thorny subject fraught with the weight of history, but the Netanyahu government's treatment of Palestinians cannot be immune to protest.
First of all—and I don't know a gentle way to say this—Israel cannot be held above the law because of the Shoah. That is a desecration. You cannot decently say "Never again, never forget" about one genocide while excusing another.
Right-wing Israeli fanatics have taken Zionism, which was about Jews living in their indigenous homeland, and pushed it into something monstrous. Large numbers of Israelis have protested Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption and the atrocities by the Israel Defense Forces, but are dismissed by the war cabinet, which deliberately poisons any chance of a two-state solution.
We must distinguish between antisemitism and opposition to this ugly brand of Zionism. One cannot reasonably equate criticism of slaughter, destruction and ethnic cleansing with bigotry. The videos of state-sanctioned violence are soul-crushing.
One noxious claim is that Palestinians "are not a real people." Setting aside the finer anthropological points of whether Palestinians qualify as "a people," they are human beings and have ties to the land as Jewish people do.
Some Zionists have said, "There are no innocents in Gaza." That is a justification for slaughtering children. Those who repeat it should pause and consider the import of what they are defending.
As I oppose the murder of Israeli children, so I oppose the murder of Palestinian children. How in the name of heaven can that be a controversial statement?
The behavior of Israeli settlers in the West Bank is disturbing as well. Gleefully destroying people's houses and plowing up their olive groves while declaring that "God gave us this land" is blasphemy.
If you criticize Stephen Miller for saying America should have Greenland, how can Israel's accelerated West Bank annexation be beyond criticism?
Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization. But responding to one atrocity with another only sets up generation upon generation of revenge-taking. Another problem is the blatant double standards whereby anything Israel does is considered justified while Palestinians are treated as having no right of territorial sovereignty or self-defense at all.
Author Don Goldstein reports there were acts of terror on both sides in the American Revolution. The definition of terrorism gets slippery, as we see with Trump's habit of calling protesters terrorists while letting his brutal ICE agents off the hook.
People have a right to self-defense. That does not mean they should be able to do anything they please. There is a reason we have rules of war. But the United States is trashing all of that for its own imperial expansion. We are backing the Netanyahu government. As long as that is the case, we have blood on our hands.
Pope Leo says Palestinians have the right to live in peace on their own land. He supports a two-state solution and decries violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza. He calls for dialogue over force. He is right despite the bleak current prospects.
I agree with the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Netanyahu in November 2024 on charges that include starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing an attack against civilians. As of this writing, no similar warrant has been issued by ICC against Trump, though he has earned that more than a Nobel Peace Prize.
Someone on Facebook whose profile pic says "Stand With Israel" recently claimed that a board member of an LGBTQ organization is a registered agent of Qatar. That country's policies toward queer folk are horrible. But this attempt to smear an organization because of outside activity by one of its board members strikes me as a variant of Pinkwashing, in which Israel's comparatively pro-queer policies are used to excuse its colonialism.
I leave the accuser nameless because I do not want to give oxygen to that approach to advocacy. We are at risk of drowning in hate and destruction. I can only hope wiser voices like Pope Leo's are heeded.
Public opinion is shifting against American complicity in the crimes by Netanyahu's government. Yet openly gay New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, like many other Democrats, echoes that government's talking points. I don't know if this will change. The least I can do is to raise my voice against our ally's barbarous treatment of the Palestinian people. My pangs of conscience over staying silent would be worse than being called names.
Richard Rosendall is a writer and activist who can be reached at [email protected].
Copyright © 2026 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.