I hit the New Yorker for protecting Americans from the dark Israeli reality, well David Remnick does a modified limited hangout of Israel’s bad news in a piece that ends by acknowledging that Israel faces a crisis if a viable Palestinian state is not created. (The crisis is already here, but that statement is progress.) Other info is conveyed to American readers:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, Hagai Ben-Artzi, declared on Israeli radio that Obama was an “anti-Semite.” No one, not even Netanyahu, should be denied his right to an idiot relation, but the remark is less readily dismissed when one recalls reports (later denied) that the Prime Minister himself has referred to David Axelrod (whose West Wing office featured an “Obama for President” sign in Hebrew) and Rahm Emanuel (a civilian volunteer in the Israeli Army during the first Gulf War) as “self-hating Jews.”
…the memory of the trivial-seeming aspects of the dispute—the affronts, the lacerating phone calls—obscures a more unsettling pattern: a deep Israeli misreading of the President and an ignorance of the diversity of opinion among American Jews and in the United States in general…. Netanyahu and his ministers are in the habit of speaking directly to adoring audiences at AIPAC and other groups led by older, conservative philanthropists; they largely overlook younger, more liberal constituencies, which for years have been more questioning of Israel policy. They have shown distinctly less affection for J Street, the newly formed lobbying group intended as a counterweight to AIPAC.
In fairness, many Americans see Israeli politics in atavistic terms, too, yearning for a Labor Party that shattered long ago. Even as they rightly deplore the injustice of the occupation and last year’s war in Gaza, they fail… etc
h/t Alex Kane
From Haaretz:
By a single vote, the cabinet approved Sunday the demand of Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman (United Torah Judaism) to move the planned bomb-proof emergency room of Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, after ancient burial grounds were discovered in the original site.
..
the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement saying that professional evaluations of the burial grounds will take place over the coming month, “and if it emerges that the graves do not belong to Jews, the matter will be returned to the cabinet for more discussions.
..
The Israeli government is moving further to the right not only politically but religiously. And part of their disconnect from American Jewry is a total inability to grasp Reform Judaism and the fact that this is the dominant strain of Judaism in the US.
Just as much of the support of US Jews for Israel is based on a failure to grasp the pernicious influence of the Haredi strain of Judaism, where a week ago male Haredi thugs threw chairs at women worshippers.
Where else but Israel could you find chairs being thrown at Jews trying to pray?
Oh lord. So it’s not bad enough they’re deporting the living from their own homeland, now Jewish immigrants are planning on deporting the dead as well?
If the New Yorker were to run an article which lists and briefly describes merely Israel’s horrors just of 2009-2010, such honesty would be an overdose or overload. Imagine seeing just a list of the ill-treatment of Israelis by other Israelis and the government. The laws to close down B’Tzelem, et al. The court decisions (pro-Palestinian) ignored by the government or military. Then imagine a second list of the offences committed by settlers and government against Palestinians.
Think of the 1000-day closure and vicious attack on Gaza, the trashing of Goldstone, the “lawfare” conference held at NY County Lawyers Association, the destruction of an ancient Muslim graveyard to build a “tolerance museum”, killings, kidnapings, treatment of reporters (including Israelis), treatment of (and denial of entry visas to) internationals and representatives of international organizations including the UN.
I think Americans including most American Jews would become heartsick and ask the government to do something. The patient has become too clearly a danger to itself and others. (The 60 year history of that danger will be gladly overlooked, and America’s enabling role.)
The notion of David Axelrod and Rahm (Israel First) Emanuel as self-hating Jews is so outlandish that Netanyahu, and Zionism in general, seem to be courting a backlash.