If Einstein spoke out today, he would be accused of anti-Semitism – Middle East Monitor

In 1948, while the foundations of the Israeli State were placed on the ruins of the Palestinian villages, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the American friends of the fighters for the freedom of Israel (Affi), condemning the growing Zionist militancy. “When a real and final catastrophe should be reflected in Palestine, the first response would be the British and the second response to what the terrorist organizations build from our own range.

Einstein, perhaps the most famous Jewish intellectual of the twentieth century, refused to combine his Jewish identity with the violence of Zionism. He rejected the sacrifice to become the president of Israel, rejecting the notion that Jewish survival and self -determination should have the cost of displacement and suffering of other people. And yet, if Einstein were alive today, his words are probably condemned under the current definitions of anti -Semitism adopted by many Western governments and institutions, including the controversial international universities of the Holocaust).

According to the definition of Ihra, the criticisms of Einstein or Israel, called its “terrorist” founding actors and denounced their betrayal of Jewish ethics, would leave him suspicious. He would be accused not only or the delegitimation of Israel, but also or anti -Semitism. His moral clarity, once visionary, would be vilified.

That is why we must unravel the threads of Zionism, Colonialism and Human Rights.

Einstein’s resistance to Zionism was not about denying belonging or Jewish rights; It was about refusing to develop those rights on ethno nationalist violence. He understood what many people fail to understand today: that Zionism and Judaism are not synonymous.

Zionism is a political ideology rooted in European colonial logic, one that enforces Jewish supremacy in a land historically shared by the Palestinian peoples and other Levantine peoples. To criticize this ideology is not anti -Semitic; It is, rather, a necessary act of justice and a moral or witness of giving testimony. The religious symbolism that Israel uses is irrelevant in this regard. And yet, in the current political climate, any criticism of Israel-is not important how founded it could be in international law, historical facts or humanitarian concern, increasingly qualified as anti-Semitism. This combination protects from the responsibility of a colonial colonial state, and silence to the Palestinians and their allies of talking about the reality of their oppression. Thousands of millions in sales of weapons, stolen resources and apartheid infrastructure not only happen; They are the reason why the legitimate “criticism is renowned as” hate. “

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To understand Einstein’s criticism, we must face the truth about Zionism itself. Although it is often framed as a movement for Jewish liberation, Zionism in practice has operated as a colonial erase and domination project. Nakba was not a tragic consequence of war, it was a deliberate plan for dispossession and disappearance. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has detailed how David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, approved the “Dalet Plan” on March 10, 1948. This included mass expulsion and the execution of Palestinians to create a state of Jewish majority. As Ben-Gurion himself declared chillingly: “Each attack has to end the occupation, destruction and expulsion.“

This is the basis of the Zionist State that we should not criticize.

Einstein saw that this was developed and backed up. In another open letter from 1948 to New York TimesHe and other Jewish intellectuals described the newly formed political parties of Israel, such as Herut (Likud’s precursor), as “closely similar in … organization, methods, political philosophy and social attraction for Nazis and fascist parties.”

Einstein’s words were not hyperboles, they were a warning. Having fled from Nazi Germany, he immediately had experience with the defining features of Nazi fascism. “From the past actions of Israel,” he wrote, “we can judge what can be expected in the future. ”

Today, we are living in the future that Einstein feared, a reality marked by massacres in Gaza, the destruction of civil infrastructure and the denial of basic essential elements such as water, electricity and medical help. It is not “self -defense”; It is the logic of colonial domination that continues the theft of the earth and violence increases.

Einstein warned about what many still refuse to see: a state established on the principles of ethnic supremacy and expulsion could never transcend its fundamental spirit. The creation of Israel in occupied Palestine is Zionism in practice; It cannot endure without using repression until resistance is completely erased. Therefore, Nakba was a unique event in 1948; He evolved, funded by Washington, armed by Berlin and enabled for each government that exchanges Palestinian blood for political favors.

Zionism cannot be separated from the broader history of the European colonialism of the settlers. As Patrick Wolfe explains, ideology kidnapped the rhetoric of Jewish liberation to mask its colonial reality of re-naturalism, and the settlers became “indigenous” while painting resistance as terrorism.

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The father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, declared in his manifesto-novel Altneurland, “to build again, I must demolish before building.” For him, Palestine was not Sene as a shared homeland, but as a house to be dragged to the ground and rebuilt by and only for the Jews. His ideology was possible thanks to British imperial interests divide and master post-ootomaneous territories. Through the ethnic partition and the military alliances adorned under the 1917 Balfour statement with the ironic Haavara agreement of 1933 Zionist-Nazi of 1933, the Zionist project was perfectly aligned with the objective of the West, according to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Israel is thus criticized due to its political ideology rooted in ethnonationalism and colonialism of settlers. Equipo anti -emptyness with anti -Semitism is a bad service not only for Palestinians, but also for Jews, especially those who, like Einstein, refuse to have their armed identity in the service of war crimes. Today’s Zionism includes Christian Zionistas, Western military and politicians who benefit from the imperial scope of Israel through arms agreements, surveillance technology and geostrategic associations.

Zionism is a global power structure, not a monolithic ethnic identity.

Many Jews around the world (rabbis, academics, students and survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants) continue Einstein’s legacy saying “not in our name.” They reject the co -economic of the Holocaust memory to justify the genocide in Gaza. They refuse to be convenient in what the Torah prohibits: the theft of earth and the murder of innocents. They are not “self -odish Jews.” They are the heirs of a prophetic tradition of justice. And they are being silenced.

Perhaps the most dangerous development today is, therefore, Israel’s insistence on linking his crimes with Jewish identity. Frame the civil massacres, apartheid policies and violations of international law as acts carried out in the name of all Jews and Judaism. When tie the Jewish people to the crimes of a State, Israel runs the risk of exposing Jews around the world to guilt and collective reprisals.

Einstein warned against this. And if Einstein’s vision teaches us something, it is this: justice cannot be compromised by comfort and profits. The truth must survive repression. And freedom must belong to all. In the end, no amount of the armies of terminology, propaganda or the geopolitical alliances of Israel can suppress the resistance of a people forever or survive the global conviction. The only question that remains is: how much more blood will spill before justice prevails?

The struggle for clarity today is not only academic, it is existential. Without the ability to distinguish anti -Semitism of anti -risism, we cannot build a future where Jews and Palestinians live with dignity, security and peace. Claiming the term “semita” in all its meaning, covering the Jews and the Arabs, is fundamental. The additional isolation of the Arabs of their semi-identity has allowed the dehumanization of the Palestinians and the elimination of the shared stories of the Jewish Jews, especially the centuries of coexistence, the Jewish-Muslim golden ages in places like Baghdad, Granada/Andalusia, Istbul, Damascus and Caire.

Einstein defended the future to recover it.

The way to follow must be rooted in truth, justice and responsibility. That means unequivocally opponent anti -Semitism in all its forms, but refusing to allow the term to be manipulated as a shield for apartheid, ethnic cleaning and colonial domination. It means affirming that Jewish security should never reach the price of Palestinian freedom, and that Palestinian resistance is not hate; It is survival.

And if Einstein was silenced today, who will talk tomorrow?

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