I’m confused. Yesterday evening, NPR scolded the Republican Party for being a party composed chiefly of white people:
[Robert] SIEGEL: Your article in The New Republic is titled not just “Why the GOP Is,” but why it “Will Continue to be the Party of White People.” This is a season of introspection among Republicans, we’re told, self-examination, what went wrong… And then you’re also saying that when you hear people speaking of ‘taking back the country,’ the country that they say we built, minority groups – who are part of the Obama majority – hear people .. [trying] to undo the reality of America today.
[SAM] TANENHAUS: That’s right. Yeah, as I say in the story, when they say take back America, they seem to mean take America back to some earlier, better time.
The very next report, by Larry Abramson on Women of the Wall, involved a female Jewish group that demands the right to pray wearing prayer shawls at the western wall in occupied East Jerusalem:
Anat Hoffman, the leader of Women of the Wall [says:] “Secular Israel, the democratic, Jewish state of Israel, has taken the keys to the holiest site of the Jewish people, and given it to one rabbi, who belongs to less than 8 percent of Israel’s population,” she says, referring to the country’s ultra-Orthodox Jews.
I really don’t understand how you can valorize the “democratic, Jewish” state of Israel right after you’ve done a piece saying that the Republicans are so evil for wanting to take us back to a white country.
Israel is 20 percent minority; that percentage doesn’t even count the 200,000 Palestinians who live in occupied East Jerusalem, where the NPR story was set; those Palestinians have second-class citizenship. And that doesn’t count the millions of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of getting lectured by Israelis about democracy.
Zionists do not acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians or Arabs and Muslims in general.
Identity politics. Group mobility. Social inequality.
I mean, does our political culture treat Islamophobia the same as anti-Black racism?
Hypocrisy = Zionism.
Hmm… good point. Blacks in America are at least 20% of the population, and America wasn’t even defined as a “white state” during racial Segregation.
Phillip says he’s tired of being lectured to by Israelis about democracy.
But he doesn’t have a word of reproach for the Palestinian Arab regimes in Gaza and in Ramallah that are literal dictatorships that arrest each other’s opponents and which deny Palestinians the right to freely elect their own leaders.
None of which is Israel’s fault. Tolerance and respect for others is not a noted Arab trait. Arabs in Israel and eastern Jerusalem certainly do hate and resent their Jewish ruler but they’re also well aware an Arab ruler would treat them far worse.
They only have to look at how Arabs fare in Syria, Egypt, Hamas and the PA in which there is no democracy and in which the state puts down dissent with naked force.
There is nothing similar in Israel.
This is the real conundrum: most liberal Zionists aggressively oppose ethnic and religious nationalism everywhere in the world except in Israel. At the same time they aggressively promote and defend the expression of Jewish ethnic and religious nationalism not only in Israel, but everywhere in the world (especially in the United States — see AIPAC and dozens of organizational components of the Israel lobby).
Cognitive dissonance doesn’t begin to cover it.
What makes them tick? What is their real center of gravity — reactionary ethnic nationalism or progressive universalism?
Are they using progressive universalism in the Diaspora in a cynical and manipulative way to advance a narrow ethnic nationalist agenda? To weaken the ethnic and religious competition while strengthening themselves?
According to most liberal Zionists, progressive universalism is good for all ethnic and religious groups in the Diaspora except for Jewish Zionists. And reactionary ethnic nationalism is especially good for Jews in Israel.
Bill Maher reveals this irrational and indefensible cognitive dissonance in spades — on the one hand he ridicules white identity politics while on the other hand rhapsodizing over Jewish identity politics. He advocates both positions with the utmost self-righteousness and “moral” passion.
Liberal Zionists like Robert Siegel, Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow and a few hundred others like them (most of them in the Democratic Party) are the most intellectually confused (or intellectually dishonest) political group ever to emerge on the American scene. One should be relentless in pointing out (and, yes, ridiculing) their blatant self-interested self-contradictions.
Back to what makes them tick: one suspects that some of them have been indoctrinated in the biblical ideology that Jewish nationalism is the only nationalism that really counts — “the nations” constitute a bloblike collection of inferior and inconsequential peoples. Many Northern liberal Zionists (like the recently deceased Ed Koch) hold views about the world that are as primitive as any Southern Christian Zionist or neo-Confederate.
I have often posed the question to pro-Israel activists here: what ethnic and religious nationalist movements around the world do you support other than your own? One never receives a straight answer. These people don’t add up.
Phil, If it is not right (as the lady suggests and NPR possibly goes along with) for ONE RABBI (who represents at most 8% of Israeli Jews) to control (important things religious in Israel), HOW CAN IT BE RIGHT for one minuscule group of (ahem, very wealthy indeed, close-ahem) Zionists (roughly, AIPAC) to control ALL USA’s media and politicians?
If the answer to the second question is: “that’s American politics”, “way it goes fella”, “get out of my face” (spoken by tool of AIPAC), then why not give the same answer to the Israeli religious lady’s plaint? Why should religion in Israel be free of politics?