Goosebumps material. Or goosesteps. Last night somebody sent me a scary piece against Obama in the Jerusalem Post by Orthodox rabbi Jonathan Rosenblum. I think he emigrated there from the U.S. Rosenblum is adamantly against an Obama effort to revive the two-state solution. He says giving up the West Bank is giving a new front to Iran. He describes the '67 borders as "Auschwitz borders" (as Alan Dershowitz did not long ago; they're both citing Abba Eban, as Dersh explained to me). Then Rosenblum cites the Kelman/Cohen study of young American Jews and their alienation from Israel that I often cite here, but in the most savage terms:
not view the destruction of the State of Israel as a personal tragedy.
The death and/or expulsion of millions of fellow Jews is something they
can live with. By those standards, they probably would not see the
Holocaust as a personal tragedy either.
The savagery of this column suggests the extremes that Israel's militant policies have fostered. They have really gotten themselves into a corner. With even leading novelists talking openly about "transfer" of Palestinians. And you'd think that Israelis need Americans' imagination right now. The post-Obama imagination. To help them think about these things in a better way. And this nutso column is today linked favorably by the Republican Jewish Coalition:
"…an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would almost surely result
in a third Iranian-armed and financed adversary confronting Israel…So an Obama presidency would likely result in an Israel living within
indefensible borders and in the crosshairs of a nuclear Iran."
Just in case you wondered what's at stake here. Not that it will come up in any of the coverage.
