A Study in Dishonesty: Deconstructing Joseph Klein’s Attack on Israel

This is a rebuttal to Joseph Klein's Kapo-esque essay "You Can’t Be Anti-Identity Politics And Pro-Zionism. My Former Colleagues Are Hypocrites".

It is always a curious spectacle when history is placed in a vice and compressed into a convenient moral fable, especially when that fable demands that the audience suspend its critical faculties and accept, without question, a narrative that is both selective and deeply dishonest.

The somewhat viral essay by Joseph Klein is the epitome of this phenomenon.

Klein’s article—indulgent in its sanctimony and slippery in its omissions—presents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as if it were the story of a villain and his unfortunate victims, rather than a tragedy in which agency, culpability, and folly are not the exclusive property of one side.

Joseph (Jake) Klein’s article “You Can’t Be Anti-Identity Politics And Pro-Zionism. My Former Colleagues Are Hypocrites” is a masterpiece in ignorance, dishonesty and delusions.

The Elided Contexts: What We Are Not Supposed to Notice

First, let us acknowledge the gaping black hole where history should be. It takes a remarkable degree of either ignorance or cynicism to discuss the displacement of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 while utterly ignoring the pogroms and systematic dispossession of nearly a million Jews from Arab lands in the same era. Jewish communities that had existed for millennia in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere were suddenly besieged, their homes torched, their businesses expropriated, and their lives imperilled. Where is the hand-wringing for this lost world? Where are the breathless accounts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in these cases? Their suffering is, apparently, inconvenient to the broader narrative.

Then there is the matter of Arab leadership’s own role in the Palestinian exodus. One must have the intellectual flexibility of a contortionist to claim that all Palestinian displacement was an act of Zionist aggression while conveniently omitting the fact that Arab armies explicitly encouraged flight, promising that refugees could return after the Jews were ‘driven into the sea.’ That sea, as we now know, failed to oblige. But these details are omitted, as they present the awkward problem of acknowledging Arab agency in their own history.

Equally absent from the discussion is the role of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who, rather than acting as a leader for peace, was a willing and enthusiastic collaborator with Adolf Hitler.

Al-Husseini in conversation with Adolf Hitler

Al-Husseini wrote in his memoirs that he had supported the Nazis because he was convinced that if Germany had won, no trace of Zionism would have remained in Palestine. His connections to the highest levels of the Nazi regime were extensive: in 1943, Heinrich Himmler personally assured him that more than three million Jews had already been exterminated. Husseini visited concentration camps, collaborated with Nazi intelligence, and was instrumental in fostering antisemitic propaganda throughout the Arab world. He was placed on the Nazi payroll, receiving a generous stipend, and he helped form a Muslim SS division in Yugoslavia, further embedding himself within the Nazi war machine. His speeches, amplified by figures such as Yunus Bahri, painted Jews as eternal enemies of Islam and accused them of controlling both the United States and the Soviet Union. Nazi antisemitism was thus seamlessly adapted into Arab nationalist rhetoric, transforming into a foundational pillar of what Jake Wallis Simons has called “Israelophobia”.

To discuss Palestinian history while ignoring the Mufti’s deep entanglement with Nazi Germany is to engage in a studied falsification of the record. If one wishes to lament the tragedies of the region, then let us begin by acknowledging that its leaders, time and again, chose the path of maximalism, aligning themselves with the worst regimes of their age, rather than seeking pragmatic solutions for their people.

The Inaccuracies and Half-Truths: A Lesson in Creative Omission

Then we get all the classic shibboleths; ethnic cleansing, apartheid, discriminatory laws against Arabs… Klein makes particular liberal use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’—a phrase with all the rhetorical impact of a judicial verdict but none of the precision. If Israel’s actions in 1948 amounted to a campaign of ethnic cleansing, it must have been the most inept such effort in recorded history, given that a substantial Arab population remained within the new state and now enjoys full citizenship. The same cannot be said for Jews in any Arab-majority country, where their presence has been all but erased.

Klein claims that Arabs are discriminated in law, but fails to offer any examples, except the right of return (more on this shortly).

Moreover, to speak of the Palestinian exodus as though it were an uncomplicated act of Israeli villainy is to wilfully ignore the reality of war. In 1948, Israel was not engaged in a gentleman’s debate over land rights; it was fighting for its very existence against an enemy that openly declared its intention to annihilate the nascent state. The idea that in the midst of this war, decisions made by Israeli forces were purely malevolent rather than primarily strategic is not history—it is political cartooning.

Let’s debunk the few positive examples Klein offers in his ludicrous piece.

Zionism and Classical Liberalism

Klein’s claim that Zionism is inherently illiberal is not only historically uninformed but fundamentally incoherent. If Zionism—the belief that Jews, like all other peoples, have the right to national self-determination—is illiberal, then so too is every national movement that preceded it, including those that built the very liberal democracies Klein presumably admires. John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill all recognised the necessity of political sovereignty as a means to safeguard individual liberties. Nations exist not as a means of exclusion, but as structures within which human rights, personal freedoms, and democratic institutions can be nurtured.

Israel, unlike the homogenised ethno-states that populated Europe for centuries, was founded as a refuge for a people facing perpetual persecution. Far from being an affront to liberalism, it is a manifestation of it—a liberal democracy that guarantees its citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, the rights enshrined in its Declaration of Independence. What alternative does Klein advocate? A borderless world with no national identities?

But what if the right of return was extended to the so called Palestinians? Does Klein think this would lead to less tensions and conflicts, or more? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a people, whose theology, philosophy, politics and entire rasion d’etre rests on the annihilation of the Jewish people, wouldn’t make the best neighbours.

This is realpolitik, not some teenager’s Ayn Randian fantasy. Israel, even before it was re-established, was under constant threat of annihilation by Arab nations.

The Right of Return Fallacy

Klein makes a big song-and-dance about how only Jews have the right of return to Israel, but one has to be extraordinarily illiterate, to the point of deluded, to not understand why. He completely neglects context and presents his case devoid of the reason why this small strip of land must be a safe haven for Jews in particular.

An example (which I have written about in previous posts) should illuminate how corrupt his logic is:

On 27 May 1939, the German ocean liner M.S. St. Louis, carrying 937 Jewish refugees, arrived on the shores of Cuba, then the United States and Canada, only to be denied entry by the immigration authorities at each harbour. The ship had no choice but to return to Europe, where the Jews escaping the horrors they had witnessed only months prior during Kristallnacht, were captured and predictably murdered by the German Wehrmacht.

This was not an isolated incident, and only three years later, the same fate befell the Jewish refugees onboard the SS Drottningholm, because “the State Department and FDR claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security.”

Identity politics? No, the exact opposite—Israel is the only insurance that the most poisonous, evil and lethal form of identity politics the world has ever known—Nazism—will never succeed again.

The Myth of Israeli Apartheid

Klein, in his eagerness to paint Israel as a modern-day South Africa, fails to produce any evidence for the apartheid accusation beyond rhetoric. If Israel is an apartheid state, it is surely the first in history where the supposed victims of apartheid serve in parliament, the judiciary, and the military. Arab Israelis have full citizenship, vote in elections, own businesses, and enjoy freedoms unimaginable in any neighbouring Arab country.

An Arab judge, Salim Joubran, sentenced both former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former President Moshe Katsav to prison. Does that sound like an apartheid system? The very concept of apartheid is predicated on the absolute segregation and systematic oppression of a people based on race—none of which applies to Israel. South Africa under apartheid had laws barring black citizens from voting, holding political office, or sharing public spaces with whites. Israel, by contrast, grants Arabs full civil rights and ensures their representation in the highest echelons of power, from the Supreme Court to the Knesset.

What Klein really means when he throws around the term ‘apartheid’ is that Israel insists on maintaining a Jewish national identity—something that every other nation, from France to Japan, does without attracting similar condemnation. The misuse of the word ‘apartheid’ is not just a falsehood; it is a cynical attempt to hitch Israel to a historical crime with which it shares no resemblance.

The Fiction of Israeli Aggression

Klein makes much of Israeli military actions but forgets to mention the inconvenient reality that every war Israel has fought was one of survival. The Six-Day War, for instance, was not a land grab but a preemptive strike against an impending invasion by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—nations that had amassed troops on Israel’s borders and made their genocidal intentions clear. The Yom Kippur War was not an act of conquest but a desperate defence against a coordinated surprise attack on one of Judaism’s holiest days.

Israel’s military doctrine has always been one of deterrence, not expansion. When Israel has seized territory, as it did in 1967, it did so to prevent its own annihilation, not out of imperial ambition. The return of Sinai to Egypt in 1982 demonstrates that Israel is more than willing to trade land for peace when it has a credible partner. Klein’s omission of these crucial facts is either an act of deliberate obfuscation or evidence of his stupendous ignorance on the topic.

Conclusion:

It is one thing to be critical of Israeli policy—Israel, like any other democracy, is not beyond scrutiny—but it is quite another to engage in the kind of systematic distortion and revisionism that Klein indulges in (hilariously, Klein bemoans that “criticism of Israel was allowed in theory, yet seemingly never in practice. I saw how enormously successful those claims of bigotry were in coercing either compliance or silence” - to which I have a challenge to him: Name me one country on earth that is criticised more than Israel. I’ll wait.)

His arguments, when stripped of their rhetorical posturing, collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. He ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands, absolves Arab leaders of their own complicity in the Palestinian refugee crisis, and deploys historically illiterate accusations such as ‘apartheid’ with reckless abandon.

Worst of all, Klein frames Jewish self-determination as some sort of moral aberration, while implicitly granting that right to every other people on earth. This is not merely an error—it is a moral inversion. Israel exists not because of some colonialist whim, but because history has demonstrated, time and again, that the Jewish people can rely on no one but themselves for survival. Zionism is not an affront to liberalism; it is its necessary consequence. And for all Klein’s posturing, his argument boils down to a simple but grotesque proposition: that the Jews alone must remain stateless, vulnerable, and at the mercy of those who have sought to annihilate them.

History has already answered that proposition with forceful finality. And it will not be revisited.