Killers in Kippahs: Jewish Fascism for US Totalitarianism
The Jewish community has a colossal, widespread fascism problem: Zionism
In a trailer for a newly released Zionist propaganda film about the fabricated “antisemitism panic” after October 7th, Sheryl Sandberg, a white billionaire settler in America, cries wolf tears as she recalls a conversation with a friend.
Sheryl implored them, “Will you hide me??” referencing a fantasy fear of a future holocaust in which Jews would need to be hidden again like Anne Frank. Enfranchised Jewish Zionists have coddled themselves with victim fantasies since the Shoah.
The cruel irony of course is that at this moment, the White House is facilitating an actual holocaust in Palestine and using lists drafted by Jewish fascist organizations like Betar US to deploy ICE gestapo squads under the pretense of “Jewish safety.”
As Jewish Zionists build entire theatrically-released dystopian productions around their imagined persecutions awash with white crocodile tears, in the real world, Palestinians en masse are being starved and burned to death by US bombs and a proud Jewish army.
In the real world, the US government surveils immigrants' social media activity for so-called “antisemitic” (read: anti-zionist) content to determine visas, green cards, citizenship statuses, and the punishments and privileges therein.
As Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and other international anti-zionist students and faculty of color get kidnapped off the streets for US deportation for opposing relentless Palestinian genocide, enfranchised white Jewish Americans clutch their pearls and imagine a future in which we as Jews are oppressed.
The gap between Zionist fantasy and Palestinian reality is unfathomably cavernous, as Palestinians have asserted since Jewish settlers colonized the land under the deadly pretense of liberal “progress.”
Jewish Zionists are not just fascists, they are solipsists who demand an audience as perpetually indulged victims while wielding behind them the full political, economic, and military might of crusading Zionist Euro-America.
Palestinian children are scorched alive, their martyred corpses blasted up above the clouds, but the real victim is Sheryl Sandberg on a sound stage in Santa Monica.
Cloaking the US military base of “Israel” in a Jewish veneer and crying “antisemitism” whenever challenged has worked exceedingly well for crusading Euro-America in Palestine, so why wouldn’t the US expand its use?
Particularly when this serves to persecute those cast as “heathen and savage Muslim others” - an umbrella religious and racial framing that even Palestinian Christians and other non-Muslim people of color can be cast into vis-à-vis Islamophobia and white supremacy. After all, this is a war between the “children of light” and the “children of darkness.”
The Zionist playbook has been workshopped to perfection in occupied Palestine, as exemplified by US/Israel’s escalated holocaust ripping through Gaza as we speak. Now we are witnessing the natural expansion of this strategy: The White House deploying the same Zionist propaganda justifications of “combating antisemitism” as pretense for executing its domestic totalitarian agenda.
When the White House says it is working to “protect Jewish people” by rounding up Muslim immigrants and “illegal” others cast in their shadows, it is doing what the Zionist entity has always done: Propping up Jewish people as eternally persecuted victims to justify European settler-colonial sadism.
But Jewish people are not innocent victims in this configuration, far from it.
We have built the machinic infrastructure for this current genocidal reality with our Jewish organizations, schools, synagogues, and institutions (virtually entirely Zionist worldwide). Rabbis lead shuls in communal prayer for IDF solider-terrorists, teach lies about Israel to Jewish youth, facilitate propaganda trips to the entity, and solicit donations to bolster the self-proclaimed “Jewish state” from the bimah with the Israeli and American flags flying behind them.
We greased the wheels by creating and proliferating the IHRA definition of antisemitism, redefining (and bastardizing) the very concept of antisemitism to include anti-zionism. Over the last 77 years, the global Jewish community intentionally tightly linked Jewish identity with a modern nation-state that is younger than our grandparents.
US/Israel has not hidden its desire to steal Gaza, expel its people, and reconstruct it as “the new riviera.” The Zionist entity is America’s crown jewel in West Asia and offers empire the bonus of obscuring its imperial nature through its self-proclaimed “civilized” Jewish character. Judaism writ large has consented to being enlisted in Euro-America’s mass killing of Palestinians and the theft of their land under the guise of so-called “Jewish protection.”
On May 28th, in a recorded message for the Foreign Ministers' Conference on Combating Antisemitism, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the Trump administration has “implemented a vigorous new visa policy that will prevent foreign nationals from coming to the United States to foment hatred against our Jewish community."
Secretary Rubio also retorted that, "Free Palestine”— words that now stand for the death of Jews, the destruction of Israel, and the horrors we must never again allow. There can be no compromise with antisemitism. There can be no nuanced separation of hatred of Israel and hatred of the Jewish people […] There can be no coexistence with evil. There can be no nuance to hatred. Under the Trump administration, the US will stand with the Jewish people."
Zionists have managed to convince the vast majority of the Jewish community that a modern Euro-American colony built and maintained on theft and mass murder is not only justified, but a central tenet of Jewish identity.
We as Jewish people have facilitated an entire settler-colonial genocide for a century, in parallel and on the same tracks as a 533 year old genocide on Turtle Island (settler-colonial US/Canada), cementing the pernicious and slanderous lie that to destroy Israel is to destroy not only Jewish personhood but morality itself.
This cultish, racist, anti-Muslim propaganda is not mere rhetoric - it has a staggering, unfathomably high death count which grows exponentially everyday. These ongoing American and Israeli settler-colonial genocides against Palestinian, Black, and Indigenous peoples are not ignited in isolation of one another, rather they co-exist in the context of a long-standing civilizational war defined by white ideas of who is civilized and who is the barbaric terrorist.
Through the Zionist entity, Jewish people have proven that our allegiance to whiteness and the Euro-American power structure is diehard.
We have slit the throat of Judaism at the altar of violent Zionism and now we will carry water for empire and shield its agenda unconditionally, no matter how many people we have to kill. That is a powerful and precious weapon in empire’s arsenal and they will ride it until the wheels fall off.
It’s Not Just Pretense: Jewish Fascist Groups Make the Lists
Betar is a Jewish fascist organization founded in 1923 by Vladimir Jabotinsky (yimakh shemo, may his memory be erased). Jabotinsky was a profoundly racist and genocidal Zionist zealot who helped to “inspire” Israel’s founding ideology, which cradles carnage at its nucleus.
Betar is chock-full of violent, supremacist Jewish terrorists who brag publicly about drafting abduction and deportation lists used by the upper echelon of the US government. Betar’s members are openly armed and threaten Palestinians and other anti-zionists with violence, putting out bounties on activists’ heads. The organization’s tagline is “Jews Fight Back.”
Betar exists in an ecosystem of Jewish Zionist organizations and individuals working to identify, threaten, punish, deport, and fire anti-zionist activists. Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team recently filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to gain insight into the actions of Zionist organizations in partnership with state officials to facilitate his ICE abduction. Khalil’s team names the notorious Zionist doxing organization Canary Mission as well as “Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus” and the Shirion Collective.
So it’s not only that the US is now explicitly employing “combating antisemitism” as the tip of its spear for implementing domestic totalitarianism, Jewish fascist groups are also actively facilitating the kidnappings too.
So much for “Will you hide me?” So much for Schindler’s List.
Betar has already stated that they intend to expand the targeting from non-citizens to citizens, although it’s important to emphasize that none of these colonial American immigration classifications of “the above” hold any moral weight on stolen Indigenous land (occupied Turtle Island).
It’s dangerous to lean into “perfect victim” and nation-state citizenship malleable hierarchies (“But he has a green card!” “But he doesn’t support Hamas!”) when no one should be targeted for deportation and persecution regardless of status or support for righteous anti-colonial armed movements. “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”
We now regularly see new lists of revoked student visas, new abductions and firings, new schools pressured to turn over data and records to the state or submit names directly to the White House’s “Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism” - all to protect “Jewish safety.”
To be clear, there is no “antisemitism crisis” on college campuses: There is a holocaust in Palestine, totalitarianism in the US, and the Islamophobic and racist propaganda that upholds them both.
While the velocity is accelerated, this playbook is nothing new for Palestinians or anti-zionists globally: For decades, liberal and conservative Jewish Zionists alike pumped copious resources into cultivating the deadly propaganda that deems Palestinian existence, resistance, and advocacy as tantamount to hate crimes against Jews.
Decades of reifying this racist and Islamophobic lie has cultivated ripe conditions for today’s dystopian reality: Both an expedited genocide in Palestine, and Euro-America using the false pretense of “Jewish protection” to kidnap Palestine-supporting dissidents of color off the streets for incarceration and deportation.
Through Palestine, Jewish people have internalized the logic of Nazis - who inherited their blueprint from the US - and now we’ve weaponized our own holocaust to commit another one.
Liberal Zionist Egotism in Trump’s America
Faced with the inevitable blowback from Trump’s escalating deportation and persecution campaign in the name of “fighting antisemitism,” some liberal Jewish Zionists are now saying, “Wait wait wait! We don’t want Judaism being Trump’s excuse for fascism! They're using us for their agenda and deporting people in our name…this will harm us! It’s setting us up to be the fall guys, they don’t care about protecting Jews!”
Jewish Zionists have the audacity to now say “Wait!” after building and solidifying this deadly discourse for the past and ongoing 20 genocidal months, let alone 100 years.
Zionism and Israel have indeed always relied on antisemitism to function and justify itself, as the project intentionally fused Jewish identity with a violent nation-state using (eagerly willing and complicit) Jews as settler human shields to further the agenda of crusading Christian colonial white supremacy.
But the manner in which liberal Zionists center and deploy this line of thought regarding “Jewish safety” amidst a century-long Palestinian holocaust committed by the self-proclaimed Jewish state is deeply problematic in and of itself. It is rife with the same self-centeredness that built and sustains the entire Jewish ethno-supremacist project in occupied Palestine.
Zionists’ shameless narcissistic anxiety centers hypothetical Jewish victimhood at a time when Palestinians are getting their heads blown off daily by Jewish people in the name of “combating antisemitism.”
We as Jews aren’t getting snatched off the streets by the state in unmarked vans – Jewish people are in fact the declared reason for the gestapo abductions.
At the end of the day, liberal Zionists only care about themselves as perpetual victims. Their feigned calls for “peace, co-existence, and democracy” have never reckoned with Jewish people as modern-day Nazis in occupied Palestine, and US/Israel as innately illegitimate settler-colonies. Liberal Zionists are motivated to maintain intact their status, privilege, stolen homes, and sham-colony.
Judaism and Jewish people have been acting as the cloak and dagger for a bloodbath of colonial and imperial violence in occupied Palestine for nearly a century, and liberal Zionists have been key to keeping the engine running.
Why is it that liberal Zionists in America can see the Jewish shield clearly when Trump employs it, but not when it comes to the entire settler-colony of Israel? Because they are still invested in the selfish lie of Zionism, the faux “American dream,” the existence of Israel, and the inherent racism and Islamophobia required to uphold the fraying dissonance.
As articulated by esteemed Palestinian organizers like the Good Shepherd Collective, liberal Zionists (many of whom refer to themselves as “anti-zionist”) do not want real justice or land back. They want to appear moral while keeping the settler-colonial, nation-state, and capitalist structures that benefit them intact, from Israel to the US.
The reason liberal Zionist Israelis protest in Tel Aviv while proudly waving the Israeli flag is because they want their “hostages returned” or are dissatisfied with Netanyahu’s impact on the reputation of their precious colony. It has nothing to do with the fact that their family and friends are raping Palestinians to death in torture camps while they get invites to watch.
Liberal Zionist colonizers want to live their sweet settler lives without the glaring spotlight of embarrassing PR. They want the death machine to run, but on a less cacophonous hum. They would never dream of returning their stolen homes or supporting Hamas’s heroic al-Qassam resistance fighters in word or deed.
As Gaza burns, the liberal Zionist is at their core concerned with themselves, their comfort, their power, and their stolen spoils: Egotism of the highest order.
While it’s true that crusading Euro-America doesn’t actually care about Jewish people unless we serve its interests (which we collectively currently do), I choose to not harp on this completely narcissistic point. We as Jews are the ones consenting to being the shield, the soldier, the infrastructure, and the cannon fodder for imperialism via our overwhelming allegiance to Zionism and America. The US is killing and kidnapping in the name of Jewish protection - it is not acceptable to engage in discourse that centers us as victims in any shape or form.
Focusing the conversation on Jewish feelings amidst Palestinian genocide is not only tribalistic, racist, and woefully out of touch, it obscures our widespread institutional complicity in Zionist settler-colonialism.
Jewish Zionists fundamentally care more about their cousin the settler-squatter-soldier than the Palestinian he shoots dead into a mass grave. This is the Nazi logic we have internalized and employ.
Black, Indigenous, Arab, Muslim, and people of color more generally in my life certainly don’t have the expectation that the ruling class in Euro-America will stop the whole world to protect them if they express feelings of (actual) unsafety. That’s laughable. Euro-America is indeed the reason they feel unsafe to begin with. They already exist as walking crimes - searched, stopped, harassed, surveilled, incarcerated, assaulted, and killed just for existing.
But “Jewish safety” is currently enough to move heaven and earth for, constructed and deployed by Zionists as a perpetual open wound that must be prioritized and tended to with the utmost care — the natural conclusion when we’ve submitted to the logic of “the above” for 100 years.
Entire US congressional committees, initiatives, and taskforces are dedicated to how Jewish people feel amidst a genocide that we are carrying out from a satellite colony. An IOF soldier who returned to campus after his military stint in Gaza engaged in a chemical weapon attack on fellow students and was awarded $395,000 by Columbia University when he sued for damages.
The pampered indulgence, the centering, the inversion of truth.
We make the rubble, we don't suffocate under it. We block the aid trucks, we don’t die from hunger.
Many liberals right now are finally realizing that with Trump’s escalating totalitarianism, “the state could come for you next!” True, but is Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim blood really that cheap to you? Is their life so paper thin? That you must hallucinate yourself as the victim, instead of grappling with the fact that you have some real power and positionality that you could - indeed morally, ethically, politically should - leverage in this equation of life and death?
This Isn’t New, This is America
While this current level of overt totalitarianism under Trump is an escalation, it is more accurately an unveiling: An unmasked continuation of the US’s innately and unwaveringly fascistic setter-colonial fabric since its so-called founding. Palestine is a continuation of the European settler-colonial project initiated in so-called “America” in 1492.
White supremacist laws on stolen land, based on blood quantum logics that Hitler drew inspiration from, have always been selectively and racistly applied. Over 500 treaties with Indigenous peoples were never honored on this land and Americans are chanting to “Bring Back American Democracy!” - what democracy?
Just ask Black descendants of the Middle Passage (a third to a fifth who were Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula and the west coast of Africa) about their ongoing interactions with “the law.” Or Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island about child abductions, boarding schools, torture, missing and murdered women, incarceration, and the list goes on. We cannot dismiss these dual ongoing genocides against Black and Indigenous peoples - rife with abductions and slaughter - which form the foundation of the American settler-colony and therefore the Zionist entity.
The settler-colonial structure itself is innately fascist and irreformable regardless of the operator at the helm, as articulated by luminaries like George Jackson.
This is not Israel or America gone rogue with right-wing authoritarianism, rather this is the settler-colonial structure laid bare. It is merely the facade of saccharine liberal rhetoric that Trump and Netanyahu abandon, the genocidal foundation remains unaltered. They are indeed the true faces of crusading settler-colonialism: Brutal, brazenly naked, sadistic, unyielding.
There is no reformation possible for the American or Israeli entities because a settler-colony itself is structurally antithetical to justice. There is no “democracy” to harken back to, it’s rotten to the core.
It would be easy to say that these accelerating Zionist persecution and abduction campaigns are violations of American constitutional rights and civil liberties. But again, this liberal framing misses the larger structure: Like liberal international law, these configurations have always relied on fundamentally illegitimate colonial governing apparatuses for their authority.
Penned by slaveholders on mass Indigenous graves, “democratic ideals” are not merely selectively applied, they are deployed to mask the inherent violence of the American “civilizing” missionary project both domestically and globally.
It is cowardly and misleading to relegate this to a “free speech” or “academic freedom” issue when we are really grappling with Palestine, America, Black and Indigenous genocides, crusading settler-colonialism, 1492, and the entrenched Islamophobia and racism embedded therein. The issues themselves are central, not just someone’s so-called “right” to express them.
It’s not just that the White House tweets: “Shalom _____!” when announcing deportation or education defunding with the fanfare of weaponized Judaism for US totalitarianism. Jewish people with US citizenship are also settlers on stolen land and therefore have a responsibility towards the rematriation of land on Turtle Island. This is another layer of analysis that most US, Canadian (and New Zealander/Australian) Jewish anti-zionists are unwilling to acknowledge or reckon with.
As settlers and supporters of Israel, American Jewish Zionists are complicit in both imperialism abroad and settler-colonialism at “home.” When Jewish Zionists auction off Palestinian land from US synagogues, they are Turtle Island settlers facilitating settlerhood in occupied Palestine. They are selling stolen land from stolen land. Fundamentally, there is no free Palestine without a free Turtle Island, as masterfully articulated by scholar-organizers Dr. Linda Quiquivix and Dr. Mohamed Abdou.
The Call is Coming from Inside the House
The vast majority of Jewish people want Israel (and America) to exist in some formation and consider their desire for stolen Palestinian land a facet of their Jewish identity. Does that mean it’s antisemitic to want the complete and total end to Israel and Zionism? No of course not, it just means that the Jewish community has a vast and pernicious fascism problem that is now instrumentalized for US totalitarianism.
Nearly half of Jewish Israelis recently polled expressed their support for killing all Palestinians in Gaza. A full 82% of Jewish Israelis expressed support for ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from Gaza. For context, almost half of the Jewish population globally are “Israelis” (46% of Jews).
Jewish people’s death grip on Zionism and the Zionist entity is not a reflection on the morality of the Palestinian freedom struggle: Palestinians don’t require Jewish approval to get free. Rather, Judaism’s widespread adoption of fascism in the form of Zionism is a searing indictment of us.
Jewish people post-WWII overwhelmingly married Jewish life with violent Zionist nationalism and punished anyone who dared to call it out for the evil entity it is. It’s a smart playbook that Trump understands perfectly - you slap “combating antisemitism” on your totalitarianism, you can get away with whatever you want. Palestinians know this deadly recipe all too intimately as they have been paying the price of Zionist settler-colonial domination for over a century. This escalation will not slow down anytime soon and as it expands, so too does our complicity intensify.
This expanded Jewish fascism reflects our further assimilation into settlerhood and the “world of the above” which requires stepping on the necks of the “below.” It requires Indigenous dispossession, be that in so-called America or Israel. This cannot be petitioned away, there is no one to plead to. The call is coming from inside the house.
The pressing question for Jewish people of conscience remains - given this serious, explicit, fascist and totalitarian threat coming from our own people, where is the resistance from Jews that meets the gravity of the moment?
We are not the ones having to hold our breath and hide beneath the floorboards anymore. We are the SS officers banging on the door, the jeering Nazis who spit on holocaust victims. We are the doctors who torture in barbed-wire camps, the eager “civil servants” who draft abduction and deportation lists. Who among us will defect from the death pact of Zionism?
Our ancestors hover awaiting the answer.
Thank you for your clear and searing indictment of our Jewish communities' support for Zionism. It's helpful to hear you name so clearly what I think many of us are feeling but don't have the words for. A conversation I'd love to have among Jews who see things similarly is what we feel will be strategically effective not only to address support for Zionism and Israel as a whole (those are strategy conversations that aren't specifically Jewish and don't center us) -- but also, as Jews, specifically how we build the resistance you are calling for within Jewish community. How do we do more than express outrage as so many of us already have, and more effectively work to break Jewish Zionist power? How do we more impactfully collectively build leverage to achieve tangible things like undermining Jewish Zionist power alliances, hampering Jewish financial support for Israel, deprogramming Jewish youth who have had no exposure to anything but hasbara, etc? These aren't new questions, but right now there is as you say particular urgency because of the damage our communities are doing. And I think also particular opportunity: more Jews in North America are visibly mobilizing than I've seen at any point in the past 35 years of doing Palestine solidarity work (even while there is also doubling down on support for Zionism as you point out, which is the other side of this polarizing time).
Thanks Amanda. Very few people express this truth at all let alone so comprehensively.