Marty Kaplan at Huffpo: “I take Israel personally.” Further proof that the left is permeated by the Israel lobby. Further proof that Zionism has produced a giant IQ drop in what I grew up thinking were the smartest people in the country. Note that Kaplan hadn’t been to Israel in 40 years till he visited lately; but he regards the wall there as his wall. And note the 3000-year-old artifacts of Jewish civilization Kaplan sees at the Israel Museum that combined with genealogical records at the Holocaust museum justify Zionist land claims for him and the rest of the “Jewish people.”
If Christians said this kind of stuff, Huffpo would scream that they are religious nuts. When Shlomo Sand tried to contest this type of racial thinking, he was eviscerated in our country as being “political,” when his only politics are trying to save Jewish minds from mythology that blinds them to the facts before them.
Re mythology, note the “competing narratives” claim at the end of this excerpt. Tony Kushner once said to me that most American Jews have an idea of Israel that is a delusion on top of a fantasy; and that’s what we see here. A guy who hasn’t been to a place in 40 years, who is happily making his life as an empowered minority in the U.S., declares that a western “narrative” about a Jewish right to the land is equal to the Palestinian narrative of 63 years of actual dispossession. I am not saying there is not an Israeli narrative; but it is shot through with all sorts of diaspora projection on the part of people who haven’t been there in decades and whose ideas of Jewish powerlessness are fed by a visit to the Holocaust museum, and who can thereby elide the plain history of Palestinian expulsion/discrimination. Young Jews will have to save us from these ideas… Kaplan:
[T]his is the point where I have to, leap to, declare my love and support for the existence of the Jewish state of Israel. I think the international campaign to delegitimize Israel is based on a malicious misreading of history, abetted by a level of naïveté, ignorance and racism that would surprise me if I hadn’t just lived through the past two years of media and politics. I reject the contention that Zionism is racism, colonialism or any other -ism designed to steal land, disenfranchise citizens or exterminate enemies. The 3,000-year-old artifacts of Jewish civilization that I saw in the Israel Museum and the Nazi Who-is-a-Jew? genealogical charts that I saw at Yad Vashem and the secular Israeli majority I saw in the streets and know from the Diaspora, reminded me that Israel’s nationhood derives from its existence as a people, not as a religion.
I actually came back from Israel more of a hawk than when I left. I am more respectful of the security fence — my security fence — than I was before. Yes, I know the case against it, but I’ve returned convinced that its designers are motivated by fighting terrorism, not by appropriating land or humiliating Palestinians. I haven’t concluded that a pre-emptive strike on Iran is a good idea, but I’m less inclined to think that the threat Iran poses is only a politically pumped-up neocon job. I no longer think that “settlements” is a useful, or necessarily pejorative, term; it encompasses too wide a variety and history of dwellings to be deployed as a shorthand for obstructionism. Like everything else in Israel, it’s complicated.
But don’t get me wrong: I’m closer to J Street than to AIPAC. When Netanyahu acts as though the status quo can go on indefinitely, I not only despair at his delusion; I wear it as my own albatross, whether I want to or not. When he catastrophically bungled the response to the Gaza flotilla stunt, I was unable to prevent myself from feeling personally soiled…
Israel is a battleground between two competing narratives. The Palestinian account of history, its assignment of right and wrong, is a mirror image of the Israeli version; just about everything is flipped. No negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians can settle the matter of which narrative is right. No historian, journalist, political figure or international tribune can sort through the dueling accounts and create a composite that either side will accept.
