Nate Bear Do Not Panic
A UK taskforce has just released a report detailing 27 recommendations for “ending antisemitism in schools and colleges” which the government has agreed to adopt in full.
The second recommendation is that teachers shouldn’t wear pro-Palestine pins.
This alone tells anyone with half a brain what this report, like so many of the reports about “antisemitism” over the last few years is actually about: shutting down criticism of Israeli apartheid and genocide.
The report, like so much fake antisemitism panic in the west, is so transparently an attempt to protect Israel over its genocide of Gaza, and to make sure children don’t grow up questioning Israel, it’s hard to know where to start.
Firstly, the report was supposedly commissioned because of an increase in antisemitism, yet it mentions Israel 60 times, Palestine or Palestinian 35 times and Zionism or Zionist 11 times.
This is a classic tactic. Judaism and Israel have nothing to do with each other when it suits the establishment narrative (Israel is distinct from Jewish identity and many Jews oppose Israel, so we shouldn’t conflate the two) but at other times, especially when a pretext is being sought to shut down criticism of Israel, the narrative is manufactured to purposefully conflate Israel with all Jews. As this fraudulent report does.
And it doesn’t even try hard to hide it.
The most revealing sentence comes 30 pages in.
Read this again if you need to.
“Anti-Jewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable whereas anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing.”
Can you believe it? The report explicitly says that the only “problem” is increased criticism of Israel. Why would attitudes to Israel have any bearing on the scope of a report into antisemitism, unless what they really mean by antisemitism is antizionism. Which of course is exactly what they mean! This is an astonishing admission and fully exposes the true intentions of this report: making sure young people aren’t exposed to any criticism of Israel and raising them instead to be loyal Zionists.
The 27 recommendations make this clear. As well as banning pro-Palestine pins in schools, the report encourages schools to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism (which says that criticism of Israel is antisemitism) and urges that the “history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is taught fairly and sensitively.” We know exactly what this will mean. It will mean whitewashing Israel’s crimes, omitting its history of ethnic cleansing, pretending history began on October 7th, and dehumanising the Palestinians.
The entire “antisemitism” debate across the west is utterly, shockingly fraudulent. It’s fake, a lie. There is no structural hatred of Jews or discrimination against Jews in the west. As the report itself literally states. There are a lot of people angry at the genocide committed by the Jewish state, which has led many to question the legitimacy of such a state. Just as one would rightly question the legitimacy of any apartheid state which committed genocide.
Being a Jewish Zionist is the most protected characteristic in the world today. if you are a Jewish Zionist you will be prioritised and protected over every and all other racial or ethnic groups. And if you are confronted because of your adherence to a genocidal ideology, the full power of the state will be mobilised to extinguish any opposition to that ideology to ensure you feel safe. That power will extend to banning protests, charging grandmothers holding pro-Palestine placards as terrorists, and indoctrinating children into your ideology so you don’t face any opposition from the next generation.
It almost feels like the UK is one more fake antisemitism panic away from encouraging all school-age children to convert to Judaism and enlist in the IDF.
It’s incredible. This post on Twitter put it well.
And all this happens while the people being genocided by the Jewish state are not even an afterthought. A people, who, right now, are once again going hungry because the World Food Programme says that because of funding cuts it can no longer afford to feed half a million people in Gaza. A people who will go hungry, and once again face the spectre of famine, while living among the ruins and dust of their former homes. Homes destroyed with the full complicity of our governments, and by a country and its military which is funded with our taxes.
It’s disgraceful.
What we need are 27 recommendations for children to ensure schools and colleges don’t become breeding grounds for the scourge of Zionism.
So I’ve come up with my own:
- Explain that Israel wasn’t founded as a response to the Nazi holocaust and that Zionism as an ideology emerged in the 1850s
- Explain that Zionism as the ideological basis for Israel has always been an explicitly racist and exclusionary ideology which long advocated for the removal of the Palestinians from Palestine
- Teach children about the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, many of whom were forced from their homes at gun point while Jews stole the family homes they’d lived in for generations
- Teach children about Jewish Zionist terror groups such as the Irgun, the Haganah and the Stern gang which killed hundreds of Palestinians in the decades before Israel’s founding
- Explain the process by which the leaders of these terror groups became the leaders of Israel
- Explain that these Jewish Zionist terror groups never gave up their arms, but were absorbed into and became the foundational components of the Israeli state military
- Teach children how Israel expanded beyond its UN borders, denied statehood to Palestinians and has illegally and violently occupied Gaza and the West Bank for nearly 80 years
- Teach children that Gaza was and is the world’s largest open air concentration camp, the people trapped and controlled by an occupying power who imposed a near-twenty year blockade on the territory
- Teach children that October the 7th was a response to this occupation and to decades of Israeli terror, an act of rebellion and resistance, not an act of terrorism
- Explain that Hamas was not a terrorist group but a resistance group and that its armed wing was made up primarily of orphans whose parents had been murdered by Israel
- Teach children that for 30 years Israel had a policy referred to as “mowing the lawn” which entailed randomly killing scores of Palestinians in Gaza on a frequent basis to ensure obedience and a baseline level of terror
- Teach children that the genocide of Gaza had been long-planned by Israel and October 7th was merely the pretext
- Teach children that most of the Israelis killed on October 7th were military personnel, and that many others were killed by their own government after the Israeli military invoked the so-called Hannibal directive
- Teach children about the apartheid structure of Israel and Israeli society which includes curfews for Palestinians, over 500 military-controlled checkpoints for Palestinians and separate fenced off areas for Palestinians only who are required to carry permits to move between zones
- Teach children that Israel burns down Palestinian-owned olive groves as a tactic not just to deprive Palestinians of income, but to strip away their familial connections to the land
- Document the torture prisons operated by Israel in which many women have reported being raped
- Explain Israel’s practice of child-detention without charge which means that over 10,000 Palestinian children have been held in military detention, the only children in the world systematically prosecuted in military courts
- Explain that Israel created the largest cohort of child amputees in the world
- Show the wealth of evidence documenting the genocide of Gaza, including videos of Israeli soldiers proudly committing war crimes
- Detail the various findings by experts and UN expert groups that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza
- Explore in detail the story of Hind Rajab and how her murder is emblematic of Israel and Israeli society
- Detail the ICJ warrant for Israeli leaders and how Netanyahu and others have escaped justice
- Explain how international Jewish paedophiles flee to Israel for safety because they know they won’t get extradited or prosecuted
- Examine how the “law of return” enabling any Jew to move to Israel contributes to Israel’s military system and bolsters its international impunity
- Examine the Zionist lobby in the west and how it has infiltrated political systems to ensure Israel is protected and never answers for its crimes
- Explore how Israeli military systems are tested on Palestinians before being sold to governments around the world
- Explain that for a future of true humanity and justice all this must change and Palestine must be free