Sham nation: Eretz Israel or Ersatz Israel? (Part 3/3)

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Sham No. 4 – The Zionist state of Israel is the national embodiment of the Jewish people and being critical of Zionism and Israel is being antisemitic

I do not wish to single out Jews as uniquely separate from the rest of humanity. Every people is part of our common humanity. Every people has its own particular history.

In popular usage, ‘the Holocaust’ usually refers to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It was among the defining catastrophes of the 20^th Century, and it was central to the emergence of genocide as a recognised crime in international law.

But this makes us think about the prior holocausts of other peoples in history. For centuries, millions upon millions of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania were colonially dispossessed, massacred and, in many cases, exterminated. Their suffering did not receive the same legal, political or moral recognition.

It took the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews in Europe itself to produce a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).

Zionist institutions and Israeli state advocates have made political use of the memory of the Nazi Holocaust in what Norman Finkelstein has described as “the Holocaust industry”.

In a similar vein, Pankaj Mishra refers in The World After Gaza to “atrocity hucksterism”, where “the power and prestige of victimhood is that even the powerful demagogues… present themselves as besieged…”   

In this framework, the Nazi Holocaust has become a cloak of impunity for atrocities committed by Israel against Palestinians and others.

Herein lies a massive sham: a state that claims to speak in the name of Jewish suffering now commits genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, while continuing to present itself as the victim even though it is the oppressor.

But let us take Israel on its own terms: its claim to be the national embodiment of the Jewish people. If I were asked to think from within Jewish ethical tradition, would I be happy for Israel to make such a claim on my behalf? The answer is no.

Would I recognise the force of the commandments: you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbour?

Would I listen to the injunction not to oppress others, because I know the soul of the oppressed? As Exodus 23:9 says: “You shall not oppress a stranger: for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Would I respect the sanctity and dignity of human life, rooted in the belief that every human being is created “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26–27)?

Would I care for the poor, widows, orphans and the oppressed? (Deuteronomy 10:18; Deuteronomy 24:17–22; Isaiah 1:17)?

My answers would be yes to the above. Even if I were secular, the answers would still be yes, because these are deeply rooted ethical principles in Judaism, central to much of Jewish moral and spiritual inheritance. They speak also to my conscience as a human being.

But what is the reality?

Do not murder? Israel has been committing what many UN experts, human rights organisations, humanitarian organisations and genocide scholars already recognise as genocide in Gaza for nearly three years.

Israel is also before the International Court of Justice in proceedings alleging violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza.

Look these up:

• Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children – OHCHR
• Torture and genocide – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 – OHCHR
• International Association of Genocide Scholars’ resolution on Gaza

Incredibly, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry in its June 2026 report said children were deliberately targeted (link above). This constituted “one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.”

Thus – from a divine commandment to not murder, to the deliberate targeting of children by Israeli forces. We should let that sink in.

Not to steal, not to covet? Israel’s occupation has normalised the seizure, settlement and appropriation of Palestinian land and homes.

The contrast is stark. A Jewish person born anywhere with no personal connection to Palestine may settle on land from which indigenous Palestinians were expelled, while those Palestinians and their descendants remain refugees.

The result is what historian Vijay Prasad has described as the extra-territorialisation of apartheid.

Thus, the term ‘land theft’ to describe Israel’s conduct.

Do not oppress others? Respect the sanctity and dignity of human life? We’ve already mentioned the genocide in Gaza and the eight decades of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of indigenous Palestinians. 

There is also Gaza itself, a besieged open-air prison whose deplorable conditions produced the multi-generational despair and rage that erupted in the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack.

If that’s not enough, there is also the use of starvation as a weapon of war and a form of collective punishment against civilians, itself a war crime.

The starvation imposed on Gaza over the past two years has been documented by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – a global standard used by the UN and international aid groups to measure and classify the severity of hunger and malnutrition – and other UN agencies to be at the highest levels of acute food insecurity. Other UN agencies warned that the situation in Gaza had exceeded famine thresholds.).

Everyone, children included, was starved with full awareness of what was happening. This itself would amount to genocide.  

Where was the Judaic principle of respect for the sanctity and dignity of human life?

Care for the poor, orphans and the oppressed? Consider one fact: over 21,000^* children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in the past two and a half years. This is the reality behind Israel’s boast of having “the most moral army in the world”. (The figure of 21,000 children killed by Israeli occupation forces does not fully capture those who died indirectly from starvation, dehydration, lack of medicine, untreated wounds, disease, collapsed hospitals, and the destruction of basic conditions of life.)

These were not deaths compressed into a single terrible day. It was a sustained pattern day after day, week after week, month after month, one year after another. On and on it went, the killing continuing with full knowledge of its consequences as the number of civilians and children killed kept climbing.

But they kept doing it. What pathological condition is needed to do that?

Instead of caring for orphans, Israel is creating them. This surely cannot be an example of Jewish moral tradition. Even the word ‘sham’ is too weak a description.

Making it worse is that, even after the October 2025 ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump, the greatest enabler of Israel’s extreme actions, Israel’s stranglehold on and killing in Gaza continue today.

Abnormal outgrowth

The word excrescence is a formal medical term for an abnormal outgrowth from a body surface or tissue.

The Zionist state of Israel is far from being the national embodiment of the Jewish people, if that means embodying the ethical ideals deeply rooted in Jewish moral tradition.

On the contrary, Israel is better understood as an excrescence upon the history of the Jewish people and upon the human conscience.

There is a yawning gap. That is why being critical of Zionism and the state of Israel is not to be equated with hostility toward Jews as a people.

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

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