When I was in Jerusalem 3 years ago, a Palestinian shopowner said angrily to me, "Muslim people are sleeping. But when George Bush used the word ‘crusade,’ Muslim people open one eye."
I wonder whether the failure of Obama’s Cairo commitment is causing American Establishment types to open one eye on the conditions that we chronicle on this site. Last night I went to a party at a friend’s house. Everyone there was American-privileged, including me. There were a couple of Jews. I had h’ors d’oeuvres with a landowner/intellectual friend who has sympathy for Zionism but keeps up on the news. He said, "Tell me what this ‘unprecedented’ statement means, from Hillary. Don’t you see what is happening? They are setting up apartheid, with an international battle by the Palestinians. And now there are 50 percent Jews. But there will be fewer and fewer in years to come, as they find ways to leave." I told him that Ehud Olmert warned about this two years ago, when the two-state-idea was dying.
Later I was sitting next to my hostess. Fiercely intelligent. She told me about a Republican Washington friend who has recently visited Israel and Palestine and came back appalled at the conditions for Palestinians. My friend was upset. She reflected on the reasons that privileged non-Jewish Americans so supported Israel:
"I believed it all. When the Life Magazine cover came out after the 1967 war, with the Israelis on the tank, I thought, This is really a miracle. The people who were almost wiped out in the Holocaust have been reborn. They’re so goodlooking, and they have kibbutzes, they’re on the land, and they won’t be defeated. I never thought that it involved displacing other people. I’ve come to think that I was brainwashed."
It upset me to hear all that, but I had a tribal feeling, and I said, "Jews were brainwashed too."
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American Jews support Israel so they can fly over there to have their kids’ bar mitzvahs at the theme park, like Rahm Emanuael.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3804760,00.html
Does that theme park also have
one of these?You know, for authenticity’s sake.
Yeah they also sell small models of that machine in a gift box–comes with a tiny
crushed young lady in an orange vest. Good price too.
Potsherd, if all Jewishly-Jewish Americans (a dwindling minority) such as Rahm Emanuel cared about was a Disneyland Israel, why would they bother to fly halfway round the world? What is deeply moving about American Jews in places like the Western Wall is its antiquity. If handled correctly, there’s no reason why that shouldn’t continue, even if the Old City were international territory.
The background to Hagai Segal’s article is a. the familiar Zionist gripe against Diaspora Jews getting the Land of Israel goodies without doing the heavy lifting of actually living there and b. the recent housing shortage in Jerusalem. My friends in the center of Jewish Jerusalem complain about the luxury construction for non-residents. A growing number of American and French Jews maintain holiday apartments in Jerusalem and the locals resent this gentrification by foreigners.
Elliot, you’re quite correct. But I don’t think the majority of US Jewish Zionists are going to be so reasonable. They are in love with the idea of being able to go to Israel – for bar mitzvahs, for Passover, for funerals, for vacations – they love the sense that it is theirs, and the idea of sharing the place doesn’t produce that holy glow.
I think there are a lot of US Jews who are willing to see Arab children incinerated and starved, just so they can dream about one day having a seder or a bar mitzvah in Jerusalem.
Yeah, but Elliot, Christians take the same sort of reverence for antiquity for sites in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel/Palestine, as places walked by Jesus Christ. When Christians have pursued domination of those places the way Zionists have, that’s what we call the Crusades (and if you talk to people like the Bush family or Erik Prince, that’s what we’re still doing today).
Rahm Emanuel, you should remember, volunteered for the Israeli Defense Force, not the US National Guard. That right there sets him apart from most Jewish Americans.
Potsherd, I agree that most Jews who travel to Israel are in the rightwing camp. Most are willfully ignorant of what’s being done in their name that makes their dream trip possible.
However, we could do worse than find common language with the Jews who resist progressive views on Israel-Palestine. It doesn’t cost me anything to be sympathetic to a religious attachment to Jewish holy sites.
Cutting out the religious dimension won’t solve I/P; you’ve just lost the language to engage with the many people who do care that way.
Chaos, progressive Christians are some of the key activists on Israel-Palestine. The first public panel I participated in on Israel-Palestine some years ago was with a Lutheran minister who was reporting about his stay in Bethlehem.
I wish more Christians dared speak out on the Holy Land.
Elliot, I would very much like to find a common ground with these Jews whereby they could be made to realize the cost of their religious themepark, but this is a delusion that they tend to cling to at all costs. It is willful ignorance, but the will is strong.
I suggest that characterizing the focus of another man’s religious convictions as a “theme park” will not get you to the common ground you are looking for.
How about “religious tourist trap?”
“Jews were brainwashed too.”
By who, Phil? The Jewish Vatican pronouncing ex cathedra on Zionism’s necessity?
We brainwashed ourselves, Phil. Because we thought there was something to gain, of one type or another, even if it was just a good ziocaine high.
So unless you can come up with a brainwasher, I’m gonna stick with that.
And, damnit, I am not gonna let some no-account, no-atom-bomb, no-country, one horse Protestant snake-handling paskudnik tell me that American Jews can’t brainwash themselves as well as any American Gentile can!
So American Jews used their freedom and liberty, their education, their influence and affluence to back a criminal colonial regime, and in fact, made sure it turned out even worse than it had to. And you think Jews are smart? We got took to the cleaners by a bunch of Machers- who-would-be-Kings, a bunch of Kiplinged herrings and their fishy projects. (What the hell, if you don’t try something, how you gonna know if it works?)
Why do all of Phil’s friends seem to have the intellectual subtlety of third graders? “I believed it all, but it was all a lie!” if these are the fiercely intelligent ones, well, in the words of Woody Allen, you ought to meet some stupid people, you might learn something!
The irony is almost toxic, isn’t it? OJ calling other people third graders. I expect he will follow it up by calling me a doodiehead in his reply.
Fair enough: poopy pants! Seriously, has anyone noticed how cartoonish are the attendees of these “elite parties” that Phil is mysteriously invited to?
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