Today's an important day, I can feel it. Our side is winning; I've gotten a number of signals about this already today.
Something politically-huge is happening: the split between the conservative American Jewish leadership and the once-liberal "Jewish street" is finally taking place. Gaza was the first blow, now Avigdor Lieberman's ascension is the next one. The National has got it right: Lieberman is causing concerns that the special relationship will come to an end. Even Morton Klein of ZOA thinks it might be a bad idea if Lieberman is given ministerial responsibility because that could shatter the Israel lobby in the U.S.
Which is just what Josh Tenenbaum and Dennis Gaitsgory evidence in their important petition drive: American Jews say No to Lieberman! And yes to the idea of democracy in Israel.
MJ Rosenberg has been predicting this schism for a while. And lately he predicted that a Netanyahu government would give Obama room to put pressure on Israel, because so much of American Jewry would not want to give a blank check to Netanyahu.
That now seems to be happening. The Dan Fleshler crowd, the progressive Zionists, are so appalled by what Israeli society is revealing about itself that they are turning at last to the leftwing for support. There are a great number of American Jews, many of them Zionists, who feel a need to say No to apartheid; and I believe they will join forces with others, including Arabs, gentiles, and anti-Zionist Jews, to counteract the maximalist Josh Ballabons of the world.
So this is a huge moment for the people who want peace and justice who are on this site. We are going to be heard at last. The question, What do Palestinians want? will be asked at last in the age of Obama. We should get ready for our closeup–and practice reason, not passion.
I feel this in a very personal way. I've been alienated from the discourse for a while. Haven't been able to make money off my primary intellectual concern: Middle East foreign policy and American Jewish identity. That's changing. This website is slowly monetizing, albeit a dribble right now, and I've been getting a lot of welcoming signals from all over in the last few days.
The personal issue for me is about Alienation. I feel as if the crap in the comments section of this site, which drove off all but the strongest, was my shadow. I let it be there because I felt so alienated from/censored by the mainstream that I wasn't going to start driving off heterodox voices on my site. But that's changed. It's not just my site; we have social/political responsibility, and we're going to clean that up.
One of the big signals that we're winning was "Slumdog." On top of Obama, Slumdog's domination of the Oscar stage was a huge sign that when Jeff Ballabon, a powerful, rightwing American Jew, writes that Palestinians aren't "ready" to represent themselves politically, and when rightwing American-Israeli Jew Caroline Glick says that Palestinians "cannot be trusted with sovereignty," they are expressing racist ideas and hurling themselves into the dustbin of history. Let them go there. Last night at the global Oscars, Slumdog composer AR Rahman said we all get to choose love or hate. Let's go with the love.
