I need to register my belief that something huge is taking place right now in American Jewish life; and the lobby, the special relationship, and the alleged two-state solution will never be the same. I feel it; and I know it. The evidence is Marty Peretz’s flight to Israel and David Remnick’s apostasy in the Israeli press and Jeffrey Goldberg’s confession at his site that he likes a multicultural Jerusalem and that Israel is in danger of stopping being a democracy. The evidence are all the thank-you’s I’ve gotten from Jewish donors to this site, a site that was once beyond the pale in mainstream Jewish life; I feel less guilty than I ever have about my work. The evidence are the amazing submissions from Jews who just want to be part of a bigger diverse gang in our Mondo awards contest. The evidence is the Which-side-are-you-on depth charge that Netanyahu’s intransigence has brought to the Jewish presence in the U.S. and the realization by the sane led by Henry Siegman and Roger Cohen that that society is off the rails, the evidence is the incredible emotion around Jewish Voice for Peace and the landmark heckling of Netanyahu, the evidence is the man from the Jewish org who confides in me Zionism is not a brand I can sell, the evidence is Rabbi Brian Walt at the Rabbis for Human Rights conference sitting in a corner with an old rabbi friend explaining why It is like South Africa, the evidence is Max Blumenthal’s unapologetic analyses of Israel and support for BDS that he has staked out as mainstream American positions. The evidence is 972 website’s desperate desperate call to American Jewry to help Israelis to reimagine their future and the inspiring echo it’s creating. The evidence is the reembrace of Goldstone.
I could go on and on, but it is breaking. I have long said that the most disputed territory is the space between Jews’ ears, and we are winning that territory with a simple message of human equality in the face of tyranny. Obama’s election made Israeli Jim Crow even more unsupportable, and the lessons are sinking home for young Jews. I wonder what Remnick and Goldberg have heard from their own children.
As Brian Klug says in his important new book on Judaism and Zionism, Zionism has a religious component, it is a messianic mass passion. It overtook the Jewish community as the Shabbatai Zvi overtook it in the 1600s. And that passion is ending. It is ending. And in the new year we are going to see a rush to the exits, and the angry transgressive journalism that Adam and I have published here in the name of human equality will seem conventional. I promise you.
