Two more signs that US consensus on the issue is starting to crumble

Here are two more straws in the wind showing that the discourse about the issue in the U.S. is changing. 1, North Carolina Democratic Party considers a resolution blasting Israel for “illegal occupation” — no, that didn’t happen in New York– and 2, there is a sharply anti-Zionist piece at Huffpo by Moriel Rothman based on the planned destruction of Susiya in the West Bank, saying that Israel is a perversion of his Jewish values. (Rothman is also on the news, by the way, the big demo in Susiya yesterday).

Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller:

The North Carolina Democratic Party (NCDP) is seriously considering passing a resolution that would criticize Israel for its “illegal occupation” of Palestine, the latest in a long line of controversial moves coming out of one of the major battleground states President Barack Obama’s team is banking on to win re-election.

The resolution didn’t pass at this weekend’s NCDP state convention, but was tabled and referred to the executive committee for further consideration later. It attacks the United States for providing Israel with “$3 billion annually in military aid,” while the “Israeli occupation, disenfranchisement and impoverishment of significant numbers of the Palestinian population, and Israel’s overwhelming military might and its role as the only nuclear power threaten stability in a region witnessing increased demands for democracy and an end to autocratic rule.”

Here is Moriel Rothman at Huffpo saying that Israel is a perversion of his Jewish values:

Yes: Israel is a state in which people who are Jews are given more rights and privileges than people who are not Jews (let alone the Israeli-controlled West Bank and East Jerusalem, where the majority of non-Jews are barely given rights and privileges at all).

Yes: Israel is a state in which archaic, hyper-masculine and exclusionary readings of Jewish texts are wielded against women and non-Orthodox Jews, as well as against non-Jews.

But Israel is not a Jewish state in any value-based — or valuable — way. The Torah, the backbone of the Jewish people and religion, has a wide range of commandments and imperatives, some chauvinistic and some universalistic, some peaceful and some violent, some which contradict others. However, the most repeated commandment in the Torah, appearing in different forms 37 times, is the imperative to “love the stranger,” for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.

In addition to this religious dictate, Jews over history and throughout the centuries have learned in the most difficult — and sometimes horrific — ways what it means to be a stranger.

The Israeli State — and to be clear, I am not referring to the State as synonymous to Israeli people, many of whom indeed practice some form of loving strangers — the Israeli State has not only failed at any sort of “loving the stranger,” but it has, especially recently, constructed policies that are hateful and oppressive to “strangers” living in our midst..

Jewish history has been transformed by Israeli policy from a rich, complex legacy of human suffering and triumph to a stale combination of archeological findings and Biblical quotes, wielded together as weapons against human beings who happen to not be Jews, to expel them from their homes and to strip them of their land and their dignity.

I refuse to accept such a perversion of my history, religion and culture.

I once wrote that young Jews were going to respond in fury to the bill of goods they were sold in Israel, and I wonder if Rothman is not evidence for that belief.