My friend Hannah Mermelstein has filed this piece from Palestine saying that the "civil war" between Israel and the settlers masks the true source of the conflict, a landgrab that goes back 60 years. The settlers say, What's the difference between the villages we took in '48 and the ones we took in '67? Good point. Both are just facts on the ground. The real issue is the treatment of Palestinians. If Israel became a nation of its citizens rather than the state of the Jews, and provided full rights to minorities, in all the areas it controls, it wouldn't be facing an international campaign of delegitimization.
It used to give me a frisson when I met Jewish anti-Zionists, or Jewish critics of Israel. It was for much the same reason that the American Jewish Committee put out its report two years ago singling out Jewish critics of Israel as being anti-semites, smearing great people like Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner in the process. Because the AJC understood the power of these pioneers.
Now that thrill is gone. I realized this last week when I learned from Steve Lendman–another Jewish critic of Israel–that Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur who was expelled lately from Israel because of his humanitarian stance on Gaza, is Jewish. Wikipedia says so too. I'd been hearing from Falk for months and never heard about his religion. It goes to show What the brave forerunner Jews achieved: they normalized criticism of Israel. They've splintered the monolith, the identification, and shown that you can be a balanced Jewish person and still be harshly critical of the state of Israel. They've opened up room for a lot of non-Jewish critics, and in the process, broken down the special connection between Israel and American Jews. It's sort of the opposite of 1967. 1967 made Israel the pet cause of every American Jew. The occupation, the apartheid wall, the invasions of Lebanon, the breaking of hands–all these events have severed the connection. I think Phyllis Bennis tried to explain this to me years ago, and I didn't get it. It doesn't matter that I'm Jewish, she said. Now I agree…
