The greatest threat to the Israel lobby is on this excerpt of the Laura Flanders Showat 2:00 or so. You will see a Jewish academic couple participating in the Jews Say No demonstration that happened last Thursday outside the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency. This couple are the traditional Height of prestige in the Jewish community: they are bookish people, both wearing glasses, both very thoughtful, both softspoken. The guy has a big head. I grew up around these types of people. They say that they took an academic sabbatical two years ago and worked at Haifa University and the scales fell from their eyes.
Maybe they are ringers– i.e., I bet they were always on the left– but they loved Israel enough to go there. The woman says something very beautiful in discussing Israeli "theocracy": "You can't have a Jewish state if 20 percent of your people aren't Jewish. It ends up creating a perversely two-tiered system even within Israel, much less what's going on in the occupied territories, and Gaza." She talks about access to health care and employment, for Palestinians within Israel. After Gaza, she says, it became important for her to step forward "and not retreat."
The husband then says that "No one" in Israel denies that there's apartheid. But they say it's necessary. "And that was very very sobering to us."
When I see this couple, I see the end of American Zionism. These are people of supreme intelligence, not very emotional, who understand quite simply that a legal preference for Jews is insupportable in the age of minority freedom; and that this ideology licensed the Gaza slaughter. This is what Dana said lately on this site. It's what Scott McConnell has touched on. It's what Adam Horowitz has been emphasizing lately too. With Obama's election, I don't see how this issue can be stopped.
(Phil Weiss)
