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Rabbi Yoffie offers racism first, so as to have his warning heeded by Israel

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Must Rabbi Yoffie first offer racism to be taken seriously in Israel– and then offer ignorance?

In Haaretz, the rabbi wisely warns: “Israel’s leaders’ defiance of reality is the real danger.” The racism:

 
Extremism of a particularly vicious variety is a Palestinian disease for which a cure has yet to be found.
 
The ignorance (“never object to a reprimand from an Israeli colleague”?):
 
“American rabbis should never object to a reprimand from an Israeli colleague, particularly one who has helped us to think about Israel in new and important ways. But I urge Rabbi Gordis to remember that if he is concerned about confronting reality, there are realities that he is not addressing.”
 

The Yoffie piece is evidence of my assertion that a divorce is coming between US and Israeli Jewry. Yoffie sees it too:

Far from being wild-eyed liberals, most American Jews have sensible, pragmatic views on Israel and the likelihood of peace, but they are confused and incredulous at the myopia of Israel’s political leaders – a dismay that far eclipses the ‘faults’ of U.S. Jewish leaders as identified by Daniel Gordis.

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Without a view of the original (I do not subscribe to Haaretz) I cannot judge all this. But the Israel-worship (golden-calf-worship?) of so many American Rabbis and the abject cowardice of the rest who (presumably not worshiping) do not “speak evil” to Israel’s racism, imperialism, war-crimes, anti-democracy (even for Jews) is astounding. The “circle the wagons” efforts to censor other rabbis who speak out — in preference to joining in principled discussions — is abhorrent. Perhaps all this fear is part of the effect of what some are calling Israel’s (and I’d add: AIPAC’s) fascism.

Fear of suffering retaliation, terrorist attacks, etc., can indeed silence people. But if rabbis have anything to distinguish themselves from cheer-leaders (who are generally at least cuter or more handsome), it should be attention to ethics and concerns for human rights. If these folks cannot speak truth to power, what earthly use are they?

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Gosh, I thought I knew a little something about the English language. But I never knew “myopic” could be used as a synonym for “criminal”.

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What Jewish leaders from Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism — the Jewish religious establishment — need to ask themselves is this: do they really want Judaism to become associated in world public opinion with:

1. AIPAC
2. apartheid
3. arson
4. assassinations
5. attacks on children
6. attacks on women
7. black ops
8. censorship
9. Christian Zionists
10. collective punishment
11. ethnic cleansing
12. ethnic fanaticism
13. false flag ops
14. house demolitions
15. Islamophobia
16. land theft
17. Mossad
18. neoconservatives
19. olive tree uprootings
20. passport thefts
21. price tag attacks
22. racism
23. radical wealth inequality
24. religious fanaticism
25. segregation
26. shady billionaires
27. spitting on Christians
28. spitting on women
29. torture
30. vandalism
31. verbal abuse
32. war crimes
33. warmongering
34. West Bank settlers
35. World War III

Do they? Shouldn’t Judaism be strongly opposed to all these things?

Eric Yoffie’s voice needs to be accompanied by thousands of other voices from mainstream Judaism. They need to start the difficult process of disentangling Judaism from Zionism before Zionism takes down Judaism with it.

And they need to give up the fantasy that Zionism is going to reform itself from within — that is not going to happen. Israel is going to continue to migrate towards the extreme racist and fascist right — all the social, cultural and demographic indicators are there in plain view in front of one’s nose.

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Regarding Daniel Gordis, who is an important Jewish religious leader, see Jerry Haber here:

http://www.jeremiahhaber.com/2010/11/israels-arab-problem-part-two.html

Readers: This is a long post, so here it is in a nutshell: I argue that in his recent book, Rabbi Dr. Daniel Gordis, Senior Vice President at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, implicitly endorses the involuntary expulsion of Israeli Arab citizens in the future as a way to solving what he calls “Israel’s conundrum”, i.e., what to do about its Arab citizens. I try to understand what leads Dr. Gordis, a well-known rabbi and author with whom I agree on many things, to this conclusion. I note that discussion of the “transfer” option, which once was considered taboo by Jews, has now gone mainstream. Dr. Gordis’s favorable discussion of “transfer” is in a book that won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in the category of “Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice.”

In his book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win A War That May Never End, Rabbi Dr. Daniel Gordis does not explicitly endorse “transfer” – the euphemism for the involuntary expulsion of Israeli Arab citizens – to resolve what he calls “Israel’s conundrum,” its “Arab problem”. But the tenor of his discussion clearly implies that he sees such expulsion as a very live, if painful, option – perhaps the only real option available.

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Richard Silverstein on Daniel Gordis:

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2010/11/20/daniel-gordis-and-the-transferists-among-us/

Gordis wants to posit an Israel that has a right to be Judeo-centric and a right to accord superior rights to Jewish citizens. That is how he even flirts with the Kahanist transferist program advocated by Avigdor Lieberman and the Israeli far-right. That a mainstream American Jewish rabbi should be speaking about transfer as if it is an unfortunate, but necessary concept that may be necessary to preserve Israel as a Jewish state indicates how far to the right Israel discourse has gone both in the U.S. and Israel. This rabbi, who speaks favorably of the notion of forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens from their homeland, is toying with Jewish fascism. But you wouldn’t know it by the generous accolades on his book cover from the likes of Cynthia Ozick and Natan Sharansky.

And here is Daniel Gordis in his own words:

Therefore, despite the great pain, these potentially agonizing solutions to an undeniable problem have to be raised… Those who seek to restore purpose to Israeli life will have to decide how to preserve Israel’s Jewish majority. For it is that majority that enables Israel to serve as such a beacon of hope for Jews. That, in turn, invariably will entail more than rhetoric. It will require abandoning the pretense that Israel is just like other countries, the charade that claims that Israel can deal with its minorities precisely as other democracies do…If Israelis genuinely believe in that purpose, they will then have to be willing to discuss what they are actually willing to do to protect the existence of the state that has saved the Jewish people.

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