Video source: Double Down News
In this super insightful video, Jewish Journalist Katie Halper asserts that Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing, uses Zionism to justify severe human rights violations, and falsely equates opposition to Israel with antisemitism. As a Jewish critic who lost family in the Holocaust, she argues that Israel’s abuses endanger global Jewry by fueling genuine antisemitism. Halper highlights Zionism’s historical roots in colonialism, racism, and antisemitism, and emphasizes that coexistence is possible, identifying Zionism—not Palestinian freedom—as the primary threat to Jewish safety. Katie is host of The Katie Halper Show on YouTube.
TRANSCRIPT
There's literally nothing that Israel won't do in the name of vengeance and in the name of continuing Zionism For some people, the takeaway is as long as they're not literally putting people in ovens, as long as they're not doing exactly what the Nazis did, that somehow that's OK. It’s actually not OK! Never Again doesn't mean never again in the exact same way that the Nazis did it. If that's your take away from the Holocaust, you really need to look at yourself and do some soul searching.
I'm Jewish. I lost members of my family during the Holocaust and the truth is: Israel does NOT represent me. Israel does not make me safer. In fact, it puts me and all Jews in greater danger because as Israel commits these crimes against humanity and live streams them, and in some cases, gleefully live streams them. We've seen soldiers doing this. Israel doing that and saying it's in the name of Jews. That will create anti-Semitism.
The idea that Israel represents all Jews is, in itself, an anti-semitic idea. The dual loyalty trope says that all Jews are monolith and we're all loyal to Israel and we can't be trusted to be loyal to other governments, regardless of where we live. That is really what Israel is leaning into.
And you have anti-semites and then the government of Israel, AIPAC and the ADL, all making the same argument, which I think really shows you the dangers and the inherent antisemitism of Zionism.
People like to claim that anti-zionism is anti-semitic. Well, it's actually not, given that you literally have more Christian Zionist in the world. Then you have Jewish Zionists. This particular Christian form of Zionism wants Jews to go back to Israel so we can provoke the end times: Armageddon. All Jews, except a very lucky 400 who accept Christ as their lord and savior, burn for all of eternity. So these are the allies.
All these cancel culture warriors who talk about right-wingers being cancelled, are very silent interestingly enough when it comes to critics of Israel, who are probably the most canceled people of all. If you're, a Palestinian critic of Israel, you're very, very, very canceled. If you're a Jewish critic of Israel you're less canceled, but you're still canceled. You're just canceled as a self-loathing Jew, as opposed to an anti-semite, which is a significant difference.
I mean I was fired by a network for saying that Israel is an apartheid state, so my being Jewish didn't really protect me. And, of course, there's a huge bias in the way that corporate media reports on Israel / Palestine. They're very clear when Russia does something. Russia bombs. Russia strikes, Russia kills.
When it's Israel, it’s often Palestinians killed in attack. Palestinians dead after bombing. We even know that networks and outlets instruct their writers and reporters not to use certain words like genocide; not even to use the word Palestine.
In fact, the reporting by the New York Times on the alleged mass rape used by Hamas was so bad that they had to cancel a podcast that they were going to do about it because there was so little to back it up. Now, on the other hand, you have countless stories and allegations of Israelis raping Palestinians that got totally ignored.
It's really fascinating that we hear time and time again about the 40 beheaded Israeli babies, even though there was no evidence of that. And we do have evidence of actually beheaded babies, children with their headsblown off. I mean we saw a child literally shredded.
Various representatives of the Israeli government are never asked about that. They’re never asked to condemn Israel’s violence. They're never asked to condemn Israel’s terroristism. There was a doctor who was tortured to death.
If you don't already feel disturbed by the images of Palestinians, or the stories of Palestinians, the story of Hind Rajab, who was left in a car to die when she was begging for help and Israeli soldiers shot up the car and shot up the ambulance trying to rescue this girl.
If that doesn't haunt you, I would really urge you to imagine this happening to a Jewish child during the Holocaust. I think that Jews should understand this, if anything more than other people, because of our history of being targeted, of being otherized, of being compared to vermin, of attempted extermination, of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and of the world looking the other way. That is something that we have to remember. That happened to us. We can't let that happen to other people. That’s not justice, that's not how we honor those killed in the Holocaust.
Everything that Israel tells you about its founding, about its history, and about its role today is a lie. Some people think, “oh, Israel was founded for Holocaust Survivors and then it got greedy and took over too much land and and ruined its founding mission, which was to be a safe haven for Jews.” The truth is: it was founded on ethnic cleansing. It was not a utopia.
I think it's really eye openening to look at the actual language of early Zionists because they were calling their Banks colonial trusts. They were talking about how natives always resist colonists. In other words, it's not just critics of Zionism who describe Zionism as colonial. It was Zionists themselves.
Israeli society really had a lot of disdain for Holocaust Survivors. So they did something very disgusting: they both weaponized the Holocaust to justify their extermination of Palestinians and they mistreated Holocaust survivors.
In fact, they even refered to them as sapon, which means soap in Hebrew. And that was, because there was a myth that Nazis turned Jewish bodies into soap. It’s not true, but that was a myth. And the important thing is that people thought that was true and they thought it would be appropriate to call durvivors by that name.
Israel wanted to create a new Jew that was armed, that was working the land. They were ashamed of the Jews who were killed. They thought that they went to their slaughter like sheep. They were ashamed of Jews who were religious, Jews who were scholars, Jews who were also cosmopolitan. They really did, ironically, internalize a lot of antisemitism.
There were Zionist bombings in the Middle East that were used to scare people into immigrating out of Iraq, out of Morocco, and into Israel. That's how little they cared about Jewish people. They bombed synagogues in order to get people to leave the Middle East and go to Israel where they would be mistreated, which is what happened to Mizrahi Jews. Some were basically put into camps.
They rejected yiddish, which was spoken by Eastern European and diasporic Jews, and they also rejected Arabic, which was spoken by Mizrahi Jews of the Middle East.
Yiddish is an amazing language and it's dying out and the reason it's dying out is because Israel chose to create modern Hebrew which no one spoke, and they had a lot of disdain for alot of Jewish culture. So, Israel has always been a racist project in many ways against Palestinians, but even against Jews themselves. And it's been an antisemitic project as well.
Not only is Judaism obviously much older than Zionism, but there was Christian Zionism from the very beginning. And that was fueled by antisemitism and the desire to get Jews out of Europe.
Lord Bafor of the Balfor Declaration was a major anti-semite. Zionism actually requires antisemitism to justify its existence. So for Zionists they don't want to defeat antisemitism. They want to use it to strengthen the state of Israel.
It’s also true to remember that this is not a conflict about religion or culture. Jews and Christians and Muslims lived in peace and harmony in many areas of the Middle East for centuries. This is about power. This is about land. This goes back to resources. This goes back to the West wanting to have a foothold in the Middle East. This is not about religion.
Jewish anti-Zionism has existed since Zionism. A lot of Jews opposed Zionism because they, I would say rightly, predicted it would create antisemitism.
There is a very rich radical history of Jewish internationalism. During the Spanish Civil War, which, many people see as the dry run for World War II. Among all the international Brigade, so all the volunteers who left their countries to fight in a war against fascism, the most common language spoken was Yiddish, which speaks to this tradition.
If we look at so many struggles like the civil rights movement in the United States, there were lots of Jews involved in that. Jewish people were over represented in that movement. If you look at South Africa, some of the most active anti-apartheid activists were Jewish. That's the tradition that I'm proud to be part of – not a tradition which weaponizes trauma, tragedy, and the Holocaust to kill more people.
Israel is unsustainable. There’s no coming back from this. Something new needs to be created. Jews can live side by side with Muslims and Christians in Palestine, just as they have for centuries.
If coexistence is so impossible, and if antisemitism is so impossible to fight against, how is it that Jews live in Germany today? Germany was where antisemitism turned into the Holocaust. And yet, somehow Jews are able to live in Germany in safety. But we're supposed to believe that they can't live in Palestine in safety.
Palestine is not the country that created Adolf Hitler. Palestine is not, the country that created the Holocaust. The biggest threat to Jewish safety is not a free Palestine, it's Zionism.
It’s essential to challenge the lies and propaganda of mainstream media. You won't see videos like these in the mainstream media, which is why it's so importantto support the work of Double Down news on Patreon, and if I do say so myself, the Katie Halper show.
