This article in the Jewish Journal underlines my point of yesterday: worried Jews, paranoid Jews, are sticking with McCain. So Obama might win with only 60 percent of the Jewish vote, and these will be the "more enlightened" (I put that in quotes) Jewish bloc. And don't believe he won't know it.
Will Obama be able to take the One-Jerusalem/Israel-first crowd for granted as he wheels around Jerusalem and Tehran? No. As my commenters point out, these elements are deep in American Jewish life; and we're not talking about just voters, but the Jewish establishment, or to be precise the Zionist constituents of the American power structure, from the media to the thinktanks to the big-money zipcodes of 10022 and 90210.
But I continue to insist that if the Jewish vote splits like this, there will be far-reaching consequences. Anti-Zionism is alive on the Jewish left, and its presence on the winning side of the split will give it greater power. In a sense, Jeffrey Goldberg and I will be in the same camp. We will have to make do with one another. Goldberg split from Bill Kristol back in May in this important Times piece; so now he and I and Ehud Olmert and John Mearsheimer agree that the apartheid conditions in the West Bank are destroying the Jewish state, and that the Israel lobby is standing in the way of progress. We disagree about a lot more than we agree about, like what Israel/Palestine should look like in years to come (I'm slowly giving up my two-state illusions), but we recognize that dreams of an undivided Jerusalem have hurt the United States, and also that neoconservatism is over as a real answer to the Arab world.
Neoconservatism really means "transfer." Ethnic cleansing. I'm sure Goldberg is against that. So now he finds himself with the Nakba Jews who are in Obama's base. Or in the company of John Mearsheimer, who has always insisted, in denouncing the occupation and U.S. support for it, that he is talking about Israel's best interests. And Mearsheimer, Glenn Greenwald, Trita Parsi, Tony Karon have all had an effect: Israel-first stuff as a political rallying-post will be suppressed, discredited.
The larger the Jewish vote for McCain, the better by this analysis. The more that distinct bloc of older, worried, Israel-firsters goes down with the McCain ship, the more that Obama can forget about them, and look to the great, young Hannah Mermelstein as the wave of the future; and the more that Jewish political life itself will be transformed.
Marty Peretz and Jeff Goldberg will say I'm wrong. They will say that Jesse Jackson is a lunatic, etc. But a lot of people who are voting for Obama, like myself, believe that what Jackson promised in France is exactly what Obama will try to do: change the water in the aquarium of U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine. Obama's movement supporters, the ones who have been with him since the spring, are for justice in Israel/Palestine. Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, surely believe this too. Yes the essential political addition of the Mel Levine bloc to Obama's winning coalition has watered down his movement backing, but honey-chile, we're still the movement. We're in. As rightwing conservatives were Ronald Reagan's movement, and he threw them bones. (Yes, we're more marginalized that James Watt and Ed Meese were; but not much more, and less so by the second…)
By the way, Haaretz is showing the great division in American Jewish life in this election here… Only in Haaretz.
The one thing that Bill Kristol could do to try to negate these forces is to join the Obama bandwagon now. Maybe this is David Brooks's calculation, or Charles Krauthammer's– all the conservative columnists who have sandbagged Palin. But they are too late. Bambam doesn't need 'em. As John Dickerson wrote in response to my last post:
Yes, and let SOG, John Hagee and Sarah Palin [and Kristol and Perle and Frum] be the future of the Republican Party: wandering in the desert for 40 years.
Thanks to Jeff Blankfort for ammo.
I fishkeeper in me greatly appreciated the fetid aquarium metaphor.
But what specifically will changing the water entail?
Will the Peretz-fish and other six-gilled Dem zionists get flushed down the toilet, too?
You're grossly wrong about Obama, as I said in my e-mail to you.
Obama's program is what he says it is. There is no stealth anti-Zionism in it.
I think you are out to lunch in even considering a single-state with two peoples that sincerely each desire to self-govern, and will viciously defend that right.
If you think 1947/48 was ugly, 2009 would be worse.
"Obama's program is what he says it is"–Richard Witty has found the last honest man in Warshington: the Lawyer formerly known as Barry Obama.
Obama has already shown that he will abide by what he says during his campaign. He said he would limit himself to public financing, and I'm sure that he didn't leave that commitment; that commitment left him.
Unfortunately Witty is ultimately right about Obama's zionist position. Even if Obama does (heart) the poor Palestinians, his survival instincts are too good to confront something like zionism, or hyper militarism, or sociopathic speculation schemes and bubble economies, which have sadly encoded themselves into the American DNA.
Like some of its 18th c. founders even predicted, to restore democracy America will have to be buried and resurrected. Obama's more gold-digger than gravedigger.
Transformation, Phil? I think Wall St. is looking at it more like a rebranding.
Anti-Zionism has ALWAYS been alive on the American left. You are naive to think that anything that you perceive as "the present change is new".
You should adamently distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-occupation.
Anti-Zionism is a denial of Jewish peoples' sovereignty, which will be fought about. Anti occupation, is a reform movement and is suitably discussion.
"Anti-Zionism has ALWAYS been alive on the American left."
Richard, Phil said it is alive on the JEWISH left, not the AMERICAN left. Of course, perhaps they are one and the same? Anyway, to say that anti-Zionism is alive on the left is sorely missing the current state of affairs. Happily, things are SLOWLY beginning to change, but for years the American left has been a bastion of Zionist propaganda. There is a stronger anti-Zionist voice on the right than on the left.
"Anti-Zionism is a denial of Jewish peoples' sovereignty."
BULLSHIT. First of all, what Jewish people? Phil is Jewish, and he is anti-Zionist. Do you intend to speak for him? Are you going to question his Jewishness, a la SOG? You continue to lump all Jewish people together, when in fact there are myriad different ways of identifying as Jewish. Not all those who identify as such care to be included in your racist ideology. Please do them the favor of speaking only for yourself.
"We speak of the mind of Israel and we believe that we are not like other nations … But the mind of Israel is nothing more than the synthesis of our national identity, nothing more than a justification of our collective egoism … transformed into an idol. We have refused to accept any prince other than the Lord of the Universe. While we are like all other nations and we drink with them from the same cup that intoxicates them. The nation is not the supreme value … Jews are more than a nation: they are the members of a community of faith.
"Jewish religion was uprooted, and this is the essence of the disease whose symptom was the birth of Jewish nationalism around the middle of the 19th century. This new form of desire for land is the cornerstone of what modern Jewish nationalism has borrowed from modern nationalism of the West."
"The feeling I had 60 years ago when I entered the Zionist movement is essentially the same feeling I have today … I hoped that this nationalism would not follow the path of others a beginning with a great hope and degenerating later to become a sacred egoism, daring, even like Mussolini, to proclaim itself sacroegoismo, as though collective egoism could be more sacred than individual egoism. When we returned to Palestine, the decisive question was: Do you want to come here as a friend, a brother, a member of the community of people of the Middle East or as the representatives of colonialism and of imperialism?" -Martin Buber
Not too long ago it constantly was 1938. Now we seem to have an equally collective 1946-48 panic. Everybody seems to be comb through that time span and come up with comparisons. I spare you my collection: Obama is suspect!
Richard Witty has moved one step ahead from that mindset, while basically sharing the concerns, he is convinced Jews can remain "democrats".
Phil is ambiguously Jewish. He is Jewish but does not consider Jewish distinct community as important.
You made that post elsewhere. That would be spam, no?
Nevertheless, I like Buber's sentiments. They resemble mine.
Like Einstein, he urged a humane Zionism, a Zionism that was not either/or.
But, as Buber acknowledged OUTSIDE forces made the condition an either/or. I doubt that Buber suggested that the masses of Jewish refugees from genocide NOT come to Israel. I'm sure that he wished for a more controlled utopian experiment, but the ugliness of politics and power reared.
Its not a statement of a change of nature, as of a change of circumstance.
The Buber objective for a humane Zionism is in process as we speak as well as the corrupted versions.
Most of the refuseniks for example are still Zionists. A few are not, like neo-communist Pappe.
I'm sure Phil is glad that you consider him "ambiguously Jewish."
Buber DID NOT blame OUTSIDE forces for the racist ideology that Zionism has descended to. He acknowledged outside forces, but clearly placed the blame on how the newly arrived Jews REACTED to it:
"It was Hitler who pushed the masses of Jews to come to Palestine, and not an elite who came to carry on their lives and prepare for the future. Thus, a selective organic development was replaced by a mass immigration requiring a political force for its security … THE MAJORITY OF JEWS PREFERRED TO LEARN FROM HITLER RATHER THAN FROM US."
To me, Buber's point is clearly that any humanitarian motives that some early Zionists such as himself might have had were clearly replaced early on by nationalistic, racist policies, quite similar to those of Hitler. He and many others (Einstein, for example) also clearly delineated between what Zionism had become and the true essence of Judaism, which they did not feel were compatible. Why anyone would continue to support such an ideology in the face of such overwhelming evidence as to its destructiveness both externally as well as internally is beyond me.
"I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from the practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which wehave already had to fight without a Jewish state." -Albert Einstein, 1950
Witty's litmus test is whether a person sees zionism as just.
The world increasingly fails that litmus test… good thing Abe Foxman is there to orient poor old Richard as to why that is.
I agree strongly with the sentiments of both Buber and Einstein.
You two err in ignoring the reality of the second world war, the holocaust, and the aftermath of the holocaust.
It made an idea into a necessity, and when things get to desparation, they don't go as utopians plan.
Again, I doubt that Einstein or Buber thought or suggested that Israel should not have come to exist as a state, nor that Zionists of humane and fascist stripes should not have done everything they could to facilitate legal and illegal immigration of refugees.
I personally do not apologize for the formation of the state of Israel, and will act to preserve it as a distinct state.
I live within the culture of European Jews, meaning my FAMILY experienced the holocaust, the formation and emigration to Israel, the attacks by Arabs on Israeli civilians for extended periods.
The compassion for those that suffer is not foreign, and the experience of the suffering of my own is not foreign, as it is to Phil, and as he URGES it be to succeeding generations of American Jews.
Israel similarly is populated by children of those that were oppressed, genocidally (not the routine treatment of Jews of forced ethnic cleansing).
Their consciousness is rationally different than Phil's, so different that his flirting with impositions of single state, is a cruelty to them.
"I live within the culture of European Jews, meaning my FAMILY experienced the holocaust, the formation and emigration to Israel, the attacks by Arabs on Israeli civilians for extended periods."
The "attacks" by Arabs on "Israeli civilians?" More like self defense against occupiers. As Buber points out, the newly arriving Jews could have worked and lived humanely alongside the native population, or they could have adopted the policies of Hitler. They chose the latter, and you're still defending it to this day.
"If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?" -David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, speaking to Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress
"The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East".
-Message from Bertrand Russell to the International Conference of Parlimentarians in Cairo, February 1970." Reprinted in The New York Times, Feb. 23, 1970
"The compassion for those that suffer is not foreign, and the experience of the suffering of MY OWN is not foreign, as it is to Phil, and as he URGES it be to succeeding generations of American Jews."
You're not suffering now, Richard. The Palestinians are suffering now. Many others are suffering now, thanks to the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism. Many Jewish people who were much closer to the tragedy of WWII were able to come to terms with it THEN. Why can't you NOW?
"I like Jewish cooking, Jewish music, Jewish jokes — but I'm not *serious* about it. I also like other kinds of cooking, music, and jokes (in fact, we were eating in a Chinese restaurant). I don't even mind *being* Jewish. I make no secret about being Jewish in this book, or elsewhere, and I've never tried to change my name.
I JUST THINK IT IS MORE IMPORTANT TO BE HUMAN AND TO HAVE A HUMAN HERITAGE; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all." -Isaac Asimov
"Right now, there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet at the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye." -Isaac Asimov
Anti-Zionism is a denial of Jewish peoples' sovereignty, which will be fought about. Anti occupation, is a reform movement and is suitably discussion.
Posted by: Richard Witty
Huumm…I though we had already proved there is no such thing as a people of Jews….only people who belong to the religion of Judism.
The others who call themsevles jews like witty are just the cult side of the religion…they the 'joiners' who want their own compound to rule like the Jim Jones cult that set up camp in SA and suicided themselves.
Deranged.
"I live within the culture of European Jews, meaning my FAMILY experienced the holocaust, the formation and emigration to Israel, the attacks by Arabs on Israeli civilians for extended periods"
Posted by Richard Witty
Guess what witty….every time we have to listen to you and jews like you whine on about YOUR family and YOU we get more and more disgusted. OTHER families have suffered as much as the jews did, millions thruout history have suffered in similar ways and yet all the jews like you ever do is whine about yourselves.
Wonder what you would whine about if you weren't a Jew? Huummm? That's probably why you are a jew, so you can identify with and whine about yourself as a victim. Why don't you become a catholic or a veggie and whine about how you are discriminated against and hated for that instead. The holocaust thing is getting very old.
Witty and the zionuts wish WWII could last forever.
As Haygood pointed out, the U.S. *still* hasn't demobilized from it.
RE: "The compassion for those that suffer is not foreign, and the experience of the suffering of my own is not foreign, as it is to Phil, and as he URGES it be to succeeding generations of American Jews."
–Witty witless.
Witty, a childhood playmate of Phil, with overlapping family devotion, dares to accuse Phil of not caring about his own genetic
family wit large, the Jews….
The difference between Witty and Phil is that Phil is an American more than in name only, and Phil is also a humanist.
Witty is a racist.