Archie Gottesman
© Jewish JournalArchie Gottesman
Archie Gottesman, a board member of Democratic Majority for Israel and president of the board of directors of Zioness, was exposed Wednesday as an advocate for genocide directed at Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip.

As first noted on Twitter by Eli Valley, a writer and artist, in June 2018 Gottesman tweeted: "Gaza is full of monsters. Time to burn the whole place." Nearly as disturbing is that Gottesman acknowledged it "won't matter." She then contended that "The UN will just give another meaningless sanction."

For all the anti-UN vitriol from advocates for Israel and the Israel lobby, she is recognizing that the international body really doesn't protect Palestinians at all.

Gottesman has deleted both her Twitter and her Facebook accounts. As of this writing, no statement has been issued by either DMFI or Zioness. Neither organization responded to questions from The Electronic Intifada.


At the time of the tweet, Gottesman had a daughter serving in the Israeli army - the very military Gottesman is presumably calling on to commit genocide. Both mother and daughter regard such service in an occupying army as "badass."

DMFI's biography for Gottesman describes her as a "Democratic activist and the co-founder of JewBelong, a groundbreaking organization focused on rebranding Judaism." For nearly 30 years, the biography continues, she was the Chief Branding Officer/Principal of Edison Properties.

With such branding expertise, it's impossible to think she didn't understand the import of her words. Her statement clearly must be branded as a call for Israel to carry out a genocide directed at two million Palestinians in Gaza living under Israeli occupation and siege.

For his part, Valley rebrands DMFI as Democratic Majority for Genocide.

So far, Gottesman remains on the board of both DMFI and Zioness, an astroturfing organization that describes itself as "unabashedly progressive," even though it also calls itself "unapologetically Zionist."

Indeed, Brooke Goldstein, asserts Zioness was "funded and incubated" by The Lawfare Project, a right-wing organization. Goldstein, the executive director of The Lawfare Project, holds the bizarre and bigoted opinion that "there's no such thing as a Palestinian person."

Twitter responses were highly critical of the 2018 tweet from Gottesman:

Valley also highlights that in December 2018 Gottesman directed her vitriol at Rebecca Vilkomerson, accusing the then executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace of being an "anti-Semitic bitch."

For the record, I know Vilkomerson as an advocate for equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. Gottesman is leveling a cruel and false charge of anti-Semitism.

Vilkomerson told The Electronic Intifada that
"Archie Gottesman is saying the quiet part out loud - her hatred for Jews who speak out for Palestinian rights is probably only second to hatred of Palestinians themselves. Despite trying to dress it up in more palatable language, this is exactly what the DMFI stands for."
In December 2020, DMFI approvingly cited the work of Regavim, a right-wing settler group connected to Bezalel Smotrich.

Smotrich is a member of Israel's parliament who supports segregation and expulsion for Palestinians - ideas that have been called potentially genocidal by Daniel Blatman, a prominent Israeli scholar of the Holocaust.

Anti-Palestinian racism pervades DMFI, an organization that worked unstintingly to prevent Senator Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted her concern, though it's not just anti-Muslim hate, but anti-Palestinian hate being voiced by Gottesman:

Such hate "should have no place in our party," Omar wrote. It's long past time for veteran leaders of the Democratic Party to ask some basic questions about the racism of the DMFI.

But they won't. And that failure to respond will be the same whether Gottesman stays on the DMFI board or is removed before the week is up.