Jewish thinkers have long warned that Israel’s dependence on western Jews’ political support to gain impunity for its human rights abuses could contribute to antisemitism in the U.S. and even make Jews’ lives “precarious.”
Thomas Friedman’s condemnation of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul is based on the false premise that the Israeli judicial system protects democracy. It never has for the millions of Palestinians under colonial rule.
Ken Roth was attacked by Israel supporters because he said that Israel’s conduct fosters antisemitism in the west. But he joins a long list of distinguished writers who have said the same, including Hannah Arendt, Nathan Glazer, and Eric Alterman. Glazer warned long ago that Israel’s political dependence on American Jews for immunity over violations of international law could make other Americans “hostile” to American Jews.
Israeli leaders are going crazy over the display of Palestinian flags– of course, because Israel is a Jewish state not a democracy. And an intellectual leader of the Israel lobby, Michael Koplow, admits the failure of Zionism in the reaction. “If waving a flag threatens Israel’s existence, then not only is Israel in far bigger trouble than anyone understands, but Zionism itself has failed.”
Today the idea of a hopeful, humane Zionism is obsolete. For more than 100 years Jews wrestled with Zionism’s darkness. Daphna Levit profiles those thinkers, who range from enshrined heavyweights like Buber, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, through more specialized contemporary scholars, journalists, activists, and lawyers. All of them once believed in a hopeful Zionism; all resisted its darkness; not all of them went all the way to renounce it completely.
Palestinians today find themselves in an analogous position to the condition of stateless Jews Hannah Arendt originally wrote about in the 1950s in the aftermath of World War II.
Hannah Arendt wrote in 1944 that by proceeding with contempt for their Arab neighbors, the founders of the Jewish state were setting up a situation in which Israel would be utterly dependent on Jews in the United States to maintain the superpower’s support for the state, thereby exposing American Jews to the charge of “double loyalty.” When Ilhan Omar questions the allegiance of some Israel advocates, she brings up a legitimate criticism of Zionism.