Israel’s ‘citizenship loyalty’ bill was passed into law late on Monday 28 March, as reported at the Jerusalem Post, and elsewhere. A look at the paper’s news items on the bill shows that JPost is rather keen on using the term traitors, without irony: “A bill that will make it easier to strip convicted spies, terrorists and traitors of their Israeli citizenship was approved on Tuesday by the Knesset Interior Committee, and will now go to the plenum for its second and third readings.”
The definition of ‘traitor’ is a person who betrays someone or something, such as a friend, cause, or principle.
In Rian Malan’s account of apartheid South Africa, My Traitor’s Heart: Blood and Bad Dreams, A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself, the author narrates an episode from his teenage years, when his father asked him: “Do you feel you deserve to call yourself an Afrikaner?” His great uncle and former Prime Minister of South Africa, Daniel François Malan, had drafted the original apartheid laws, and the young Malan was aware that in fighting on the side of the oppressed, black South Africans in this case, he was considered a ‘traitor’ to his race. How will it be defined in Israel?
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewishga2012/reform-rabbi-rick-jacobs-american-jews-are-afraid-to-talk-about-israel.premium-1.477429
Reform Rabbi Rick Jacobs: American Jews are ‘afraid’ to talk about Israel
In an interview with Haaretz, Jacobs said that American Jews are applying stricter definitions to the meaning of “pro-Israel.” The ever-diminishing circle of who is included in the word “we,” he adds, “has gotten so small that it’s a shame. There is a wider community that cares a great deal about Israel, but they don’t care within the narrow parameters that the organized Jewish world has framed.”
Jacobs, who is the “scholar in residence” at this year’s General Assembly in Baltimore, also believes that U.S. Jewry must insist on a new definition of religion and state in Israel.
“There’s got to be a sense that the State of Israel gives non-Orthodox Jews the same kind of Jewish opportunities. Because of issues such as Anat Hoffman’s arrest at the Kotel, [MK David] Rotem’s conversion bill and the lack of freedom to marry, North American Jews don’t see an Israel that reflects their core values.”
The number of Israeli Jews unwilling to support and defend Israel’s existence as a supremacist “Jewish State” will likely be significantly less than the number of Israeli non-Jews unwilling to support and defend it.
Israel makes ethnic cleansing legal and respectable. Way to go, supremacist “Jewish State”! :-)