Haim Saban, a billionaire donor to the US Democratic Party and active in pro-Israel political efforts in the United States, once asserted that, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Saban is a devout Zionist. I’m a devout karateka. I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is anti-Zionism.
I’ve watched livestreamed footage of verminous Israel’s industrial-scale extermination of the beautiful Palestinians. As a human and a karateka, I know where I stand on it. The underlying philosophy of all Japanese martial arts is morality, enshrined in budo (way of the warrior), whose goal is training to avoid violence and to live in peace and harmony with others. Westerners typically latch onto fancy-sounding Japanese terms but don’t properly understand their meaning. Bu, usually translated as “war,” is written as crossed halberds separated by the symbol for “stop”—bu means “to stop conflict”; “do” signifies lifelong learning and self-mastery. To train properly is to establish hontai, which is morality. To establish morality is to increase your ethical conduct and benefit humanity.
Zionism is incompatible with karatedo. Zionism is murderous, racist, Jewish condescension towards anyone not Jewish. Israel as a Zionist state deliberately immiserates and massacres the nearly 2.2 million Palestinians it has imprisoned in Gaza and the West Bank. Zionism is not Judaism, the lovely religion of the Jews, with its seven values that have nothing to do with Zionism. Educate yourself by looking them up. The first and second values—in God’s image and human dignity—are the crux of my anti-Zionism: “Anyone who takes a single life, it is as though he has destroyed the entire world. And anyone who saves a single life, it is as though he has saved the entire world”; and “the Torah does not permit Jews to take an innocent life, even for the benefit of many.”
These lofty values are not evident in the context of how Israel treats the Palestinians, who are not strangers among the Jews because they were in Palestine long before the Jews arrived.
So, if you practice karate but support
• a state so immoral that it uses the Holocaust to justify its intentional infliction of unimaginable death, destruction, and suffering on another people
• untrammelled theft of another people’s land and resources
• indiscriminate bombing of defenceless Palestinians who lack Apache helicopters, drones, jet fighters, and laser-guided artillery to retaliate
• indiscriminate killing of children just so you can build waterfront properties on top of their remains
• burning patients alive while still tethered to their IV drips in makeshift tents because Israel has destroyed all hospitals
• surgery without anaesthetic because Israel has banned medical aid
• deprivation of the basic conditions of life, destruction of entire neighbourhoods into fields of rubble, and obliteration of entire families
• coward snipers who kill unarmed journalists trying to report on Israel’s unfathomable cruelty
• displacement of Palestinians that resembles the death marches of past genocides and the 1948 Nakba
• stomping out speech critical of Israel and its genocidal savagery
• use of white phosphorous on civilians
• referring to starving trapped Palestinians as “putting them on a diet” and to bombing them as “mowing the lawn”
• brutish Israeli soldiers who broadcast TikTok videos of their criminality
you contaminate karatedo and do not belong in it. If I had the power, I would expel you from it. Instead, I actively avoid you for fear of that contamination.
In my opinion, Israel is a foul brat with an unlimited murder budget from its American sugar daddy (“Dad, I need another $14 billion for my Jewish ethnostate” . . . “All right, but be good, don’t spend it all at once). Israel is a crime scene, a pandemic of inhumanity, a serial killer society high on hate and drowning in bad faith, where true human love is unknowable. It should have been under permanent sanctions seventy-five years ago for its subhuman treatment of another people. I dismiss the Zionist “chosen people” canard in the face of their rampant, rapacious, salivating greed and plunder; blatant rejection of law; absolute indifference to anyone else’s life but their own; and their unrelenting, eight decade-long repression and killing of the Palestinians. Zionists like to describe the Palestinians as worthless animals. In my opinion, Zionists are the only animals in the room.
To confront evil—even if there is no chance of success—keeps alive our humanity and dignity. Israel would like to erase from historical recognition the great Marek Edelman, the Jewish survivor of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He reminded the world that, “to be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, and never the oppressors.” Just don’t tell that to Zionists in all their feculent bestiality.