Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker has further burnished her anti-Semitic credentials. Her latest book, The Cushion in the Road, is replete with an abundance of anti-Jewish rhetoric, including eighty pages devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which she compares the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, bashes Jews and Judaism in general, and suggests that Israel should cease to exist.
“Alice Walker,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, “has sunk to new lows with essays that remove the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly infected with antisemitism. She has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level, revealing the depth of her hatred of Jews and Israel to a degree that we have not witnessed before. Her descriptions of the conflict are so grossly inaccurate and biased that it seems Walker wants the uninformed reader to come away sharing her hate-filled conclusions that Israel is committing the greatest atrocity in the history of the world.”
The ADL cites a dozen essays contained in a section of the book titled “On Palestine” in which Walker makes the effort to justify terrorism inflicted against Israelis. She even rails against black churches whose leaders cite biblical passages in which Jews emerge triumphant. And she compares the plight of Palestinians with the treatment of black Americans: “It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel’s attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.”
Walker condemns Israel for its moral values, which are based on little more than a feeling of “supremacy,” further noting that Israeli settlements are based on the idea that “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” a lesson she claims she “learned from my Jewish lawyer former husband.”
Walker’s “Jewish lawyer former husband” was civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal. Apparently the reality that Leventhal’s parents fled the Holocaust made no impression on Walker, who takes a cheap shot at the man in her book. She describes a meeting with an elderly Palestinian woman who accepts a gift from the author. “May God protect you from the Jews” the woman says. “It’s too late, I already married one,” Walker responds.
When she speaks of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, all of the typically libelous catchphrases are employed in the effort. Thus, Israelis are responsible for “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “crimes against humanity,” and “cruelty and diabolical torture.”
Comparing Israelis soldiers to Nazis no doubt enables her to rationalize Palestinian terrorism perpetrated against innocent Israeli civilians. Walker believes it is “dishonest… that people claim not to understand the desperate, last ditch resistance involved in suicide bombings; blaming the oppressed for using their bodies where the Israeli army uses armored tanks.”
Walker’s latest anti-Semitic outburst follows a familiar pattern. In 2011, she announced her participation in the Freedom Flotilla II, the second attempt to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The effort, aimed at delegitimizing Israel’s determination to keep weapons from being smuggled into Gaza, ended in failure. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton labeled the flotilla “neither necessary nor useful.”
In 2012, Walker again stirred up controversy when she refused to allow her most famous book, The Color Purple, to be translated into Hebrew. Writing a letter to Yediot Books, Walker insisted that Israel engages in “apartheid” and must change its policies. “I would so like knowing my books are read by the people of your country, especially by the young and by the brave Israeli activists (Jewish and Palestinian) for justice and peace I have had the joy of working beside,” she wrote in the letter. “I am hopeful that one day, maybe soon, this may happen. But now is not the time.”
In a piece posted at Commentary.com titled “The Conspiratorial World of Alice Walker,” Jonathan Kay reveals how far beyond the borders of reason Walker has traveled, noting that her “recent musings about world-domination plots still serve to disqualify her from the mainstream marketplace of ideas.”
He refers to her effusive praise of a 2010 book, Human Race Get Off Your Knees, by David Icke, a one-time professional soccer player convinced the earth has been taken over by giant lizards that have taken human form. Kay notes that Icke is a long-time fan of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and his book makes constant references to “Rothschild Zionists,” who control vast numbers of corporations, NGOs and media organizations, and who have inflicted vast amounts of misery on the Palestinians.