But “Jewboy”, in fact, is not an exact translation of “Yehudon”, or at least the terms’ usage is different. Both are epithets hurled at Jews by non-Jews, but Yehudon also serves as an insult from one set of Israeli Jews to another. Yehudon originated as the Hebrew version of the Russian words “Zhid” and "Zhidy" which originally meant Jew or Jewish but came to be used as slurs. In 1787, Jewish rabbi and businessman Joshua Zeitlin, a friend of Prince Potemkin, famously petitioned Catherine the Great for Russian authorities to stop using the term “Zhid” and to use “Evrei”, Hebrew, instead, which remains the situation to this very day. To a lesser degree, the same fate awaited the word “Jew” in America: it became a derisive adjective, as in ‘Jew-lawyer’ and ‘Jew-doctor’, which is the reason we have the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) rather than YMJA (Young Mens’ Jewish Association). Later, the word Yehudon was also attached to the German Jude, which achieved notoriety before and after the Holocaust.

But right-wing leaders and columnists in Israel have asserted their right to keep on using the “Yehudon”, whatever its connotations. Settler and writer Uri Elitzur defended Handel’s insult to Kurtzer in 2002, saying it was not being used as an anti-Semitic slur but as an “internal Jewish insult that means a hunched Jew, one who kowtows or tattletales, one who is willing to harm his Jewish brothers so that the goyim think he’s OK.” According to Elitzur, as well as Handel, Netanyahu, Bushinski and others, Jews who work for foreign governments, including the U.S. administration, must display dual loyalty, at the very least. If they express or implement a policy of their government that is critical or opposed to Israel’s, they are nothing but Jewboys, informers and collaborators, by definition.

But not only Americans are Jewboys, so are Israelis who supported the Gaza disengagement or who now espouse a two-state solution, never mind those who champion human rights, work with Palestinians or are just overly-critical of the Israeli government or army. Former right-wing, settler MK Elyakim Haetzni often quotes from German philosopher Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book on Jewish Self-Hatred, parts of which he also translated. “The Jewish people are the first and perhaps the only nation that always seeks guilt only in themselves,” Lessing wrote.

Opposition to Israeli policies meant to safeguard Israel and maintain its hold over the territories are nothing less than Jews who have “abandoned Israeliness and returned to the disease of Diaspora Jews with their distorted and destructive self-hatred,” Haetzni noted. It is presumably the same defect that Israeli diplomats “carry in their DNA”, as Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett diagnosed last week.

That’s why Benny Katzover, head of the Samaria Settlers Council, found no fault last year with the blatantly anti-Semitic video “The Eternal Jew” which his organization produced last year, and which has served as the inspiration for Im Tirzu’s recent campaign against “foreign moles”. Katzover defended the video, which depicted hook-nosed Jews betraying their country in exchange for money from a European “Mr Sturmer”, and was unperturbed by the fact that the video, still up on YouTube, took its name from the Nazis’ infamous anti-Semitic “degenerate art” exhibition and subsequent film. “Were talking about despicable Jewboys here” he said, referring to the same leftist activists and NGO’s now being openly and brazenly suppressed by the Netanyahu government.