Samuel Freedman extols Jewish ‘love affair’ with Jewish state– while decrying ‘dogma of white supremacy’

Last month author Samuel G. Freedman wrote a long piece in the Forward saying that Netanyahu is “abandoning American Jews.” A liberal Zionist lament, the article celebrated the American Jewish “love affair” with Israel, now threatened by the affinity between a right-wing Israeli administration and a rightwing American one; celebrated too Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, the unification of Jerusalem, and the strength of the Israel lobby; and called Israel “the Jewish state we have wanted to love and support.”

You will see that Palestinian political conditions and history are completely absent from the article. No Nakba, no expulsions, no second-class citizenship. Freedman mentions Palestinians only from a Jewish point of view– “the Palestinian terror war of the second intifada.”

Two days back Freedman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times praising the resistance of football players to U.S. segregation. Titled “Politics Has Always Had a Place in Football,” the piece slammed an ideology of white supremacy, twice referenced the “Jim Crow” South and sang the worthy praises of the civil rights movement:

In the pros, and even more at the college level, football was not incidental to the doctrine of segregation and the ideology of white supremacy. It was one of the pillars on which they rested. At the football powerhouses in the American South, the sport resisted integration nearly a decade longer than lunch counters, bus systems, hotels and other strongholds of Jim Crow….

Why, one might ask, would the White House care enough to intervene? Because with the civil rights movement marching at home and a battle underway against the Soviet Union for hearts and minds in the nonwhite “developing world,” having an all-white team in the nation’s capital was a liability.

The battle for equal rights in pro football continued with the efforts of black quarterbacks to break the color line at that position. The resistance to a black quarterback, which ran through every single pro team, was built upon the dogma of white supremacy.

Freedman’s two positions are incompatible. The occupation is permanent; liberal Zionism has enabled that permanence by failing to prevent meaningful criticism of the occupation in the United States; and now that apartheid exists, liberal Zionists refuse to bear witness to it. They’re too busy laying out America’s own awful record on civil rights. And people see that blindness.

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Samuel Freedman’s hypocrisy is glaring. How one can compartmentalize this in their mind is beyond my understanding.

” liberal Zionism has enabled that permanence by failing to prevent meaningful criticism of the occupation in the United States; ”

I think that’s a typo. I’m pretty sure you mean liberal Zionism prevented meaningful criticism. They were successful in that respect.

Or maybe you meant they failed to present meaningful criticism of the occupation.

The folks who fund or manage the “Lobby” are aware that Dick and Jane , could care less about Zionist Supremacy ,(most don,t even know what a zionist is) and are unlikely to make the intellectual investment to educate themselves on the subject.Too busy trying to make ends meet.

This and the tens of millions of dollars in funding ,is what makes the Lobby so impervious to outside scrutiny and allows hypocrites like Freedman to publish what can only be described as rank hypocracy.

Throw in the almost total control of the MSM and bingo , you can get away with War Crimes and Ethnic cleansing , not to mention all the other crimes committed by the rogue entity , on a daily basis.

Freedman’s piece in the forward was not quite as vacuous as Phil Weiss depicts it. Freedman mentions the book by Chabon and Waldman. This is not advocacy as Weiss would prefer, rather reportage, but it alludes to attitudes that are not empty regarding the Palestinians.

PHIL- “Freedman’s two positions are incompatible.”

They are hypocritical but not incompatible. A beleaguered Israel at war with Arab hordes is an essential component of the Zionist ideology which unifies organized Jews into kinship solidarity. Kinship solidarity is an important component in the multicultural US. Israel needs American Diaspora Jewish support to achieve its Middle East objectives and American Diaspora Jews benefit from seeking power to provide support for Israel. Two additional comments. The so-called Jewish love affair with Israel didn’t begin in earnest until after the 1967 war. The other is that if American Jews were the overwhelming majority in the US, then the lofty, multicultural, liberal rhetoric would likely disappear. Fast. The rhetoric adapts to the situation.