It is good news that the New York Times Magazine printed a long article titled “The Unraveling of American Zionism,” by Marc Tracy, about a letter signed by 93 rabbinical students last May during the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. That letter said Israel maintains “apartheid” in the occupied territories and called on American Jews who have taken on structural racism in the U.S. to oppose “racist violence” in Israel.
Tracy interviewed a few of the signers and gives them a platform to explain their alienation from Israel. He knows he’s causing trouble. He says “the letter may as well have been engineered to stir up longstanding anxieties” in the Jewish community, chiefly something we write about here: the definition of Jewish identity since the 1967 war to include staunch support of Israel.
Like a flying buttress, Israel has held up the American Jewish community from the outside: a living instantiation of thriving Jewish peoplehood that can be utilized to strengthen the world’s largest Diaspora community, whose synagogues sometimes hang an Israeli flag alongside the American one and many of whose seminaries require students to spend time studying in Israel.
So the letter has driven a lot of establishment Jews crazy. We reported Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s pronouncement at Yom Kippur that she would not hire any of the signers. Tracy says many other Jewish officials are angry that these comfortable young Jews who ought to be supporting Israelis when they are taking up arms were abandoning that job.
Now the New York Times taking the students’ six-month-old letter seriously is driving officials crazy too. Jonathan Tobin writes that the “anti-Israel” article must be taken on in the battle for “Jewish opinion.” Daniel Gordis says that the article is really about “the unraveling of seeing the Jews as a people”.
All that is very good. To publicize the fractures inside Jewish communal life. My objection to the article is just that, it’s inside Jewish communal life. The article feels claustrophobic. It’s about highly-identified Jews, high-church Jews in the Peter Beinart and IfNotNow mode– Tracy writes that his prototypical Jew “attended an AIPAC convention, perhaps through his Hillel,” and cares that “both the Torah and Israel’s declaration of independence deem [Jerusalem] the place for ‘the ingathering of the exiles.’”
I don’t think most American Jews care about all that stuff– the ingathering of the exiles and AIPAC. More than half of American Jews are unaffiliated and secular and/or indifferent to Israel. When they were asked about Israel last summer, 38 percent of young Jews say it is practicing “apartheid” and half of them say Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state. Tracy doesn’t include that survey because those are not his Jews. But they are the Jews of Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports BDS, the nonviolent boycott campaign targeting Israel.
Tracy also doesn’t include Palestinian voices in his article on the same basis– well, that’s not who I’m writing about. But when he mentions the Nakba in his article, and quotes the rabbinical students’ letter urging their community to talk about the “messy truth” of Israel’s founding, it would be helpful to quote a Palestinian who has actually experienced all that messiness…
No, the framing of the piece is conservative and respectful. That goes to the nature of the Jewish establishment. It is conservative and traditional and when it comes to Israel, reactionary. And it is very powerful. It has governed U.S. policymaking in the Middle East, by channeling the pro-Israel orthodoxy of the older Jewish community.
So it is a really good thing that the New York Times is willing to take that establishment on, just as it’s a good thing that Peter Beinart and IfNotNow are taking on the Jewish establishment. But it can’t stop there.
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Six Human Rights Groups Shuttered and Still the Bell Tolls for Israel—An Analysis (9 November 2021) by Prof. Lawrence Davidson http://www.tothepointanalyses.com
EXCERPTS:
Part I—Six Human Rights Groups Shuttered
“On 19 October 2021, the Israeli Defense Ministry officially labeled six well known Palestinian human rights associations as “terrorist organizations.” Israel uses a definition of “terrorism” that is unreasonably broad. Just about any criticism as well as non-violent resistance to its evolving apartheid regime can and often is deemed “terrorism.” As this instance shows, this arrangement allows Israeli authorities to themselves terrorize groups that most sane people would recognize as having nothing to do with terrorism.
“The six organizational victims of this strategy are Addameer, al-Haq, Defense for Children Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees. Applying the terrorist tag “authorizes Israeli authorities to close their offices, seize their assets and arrest and jail their staff members, and it prohibits funding or even publicly expressing support for their activities.”
“There are only two classes of people who would fall for this deceit: (1) those embedded in the Zionist thought collective—the world of Israel “über alles” (my use of this specific term is explained below); and (2) those politicians and bureaucrats so firmly tied (financially or otherwise) to the various Zionist lobbies that they would be compelled to forgo reason and agree to anything the Zionists say. Much of the Washington power structure falls into this category.
“Beyond those categories, people capable of independent thought and in knowledgable positions condemned the Israeli action:
” The Israeli news magazine +972, which has obtained copies of the classified testimony providing “evidence” against the six groups, has characterized the charges as unproven. +972 describes it as a “political attack under the guise of security.” In their estimate the entire case is a hodgepodge of innuendo and assumption, some of it obtained by Israel’s security service, Shin Bet, by threatening witnesses and their families. (cont’d)
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Human Rights Watch & Amnesty International, both of which have long interacted with many of the charged groups, condemned the Israeli action in harsh terms:
“This appalling & unjust decision is an attack by the Israeli government on the international human rights movement. For decades, Israeli authorities have systematically sought to muzzle human rights monitoring & punish those who criticize its repressive rule over Palestinians. … Palestinian human rights defenders have always borne the brunt of the repression. … The decades-long failure of the international community to challenge grave Israeli human rights abuses & impose meaningful consequences for them has emboldened Israeli authorities to act in this brazen manner.”
““The government’s declaration of civil society organizations in the West Bank as terrorist organizations is a destructive folly that tarnishes all of the parties in the coalition & the state itself. The outlawing of human rights groups & persecution of humanitarian activists are quintessential characteristics of military regimes, in which democracy in its deepest sense is a dead letter.”
“Besides its habitual & often sadistic persecution of Palestinians, Israel had immediate reasons to silence these six organizations. An analysis given by Open Democracy noted that on 5 February 2021 the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled that the ICC had jurisdiction over events occurring in Israel’s Occupied Territories. Then, on 3 March the court opened up a criminal investigation into Israeli practices & policies in this area. Open Democracy then explained: “All six banned organizations have for decades been critically involved in the documentation & monitoring of alleged Israeli human rights violations, war crimes & Apartheid in the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories]. … All of this work has been a major evidential basis for the demand to open criminal investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC).”
“In other words, Israel’s “terrorist” canard is, at least in part, the Zionists seeking to obstruct justice. Like most organized groups of law-breakers they prioritize their own interests above those of the community—in this case the international community. In doing so they undermine inter-community standards of ethics & values enshrined in international law.” (read the article)
“Israel has held up the American Jewish community from the outside” – And vice versa!
I have read part of the NYT article – couldn’t get access to the rest. Philip Weiss complains that it’s only about establishment Jews, that it should have included the ones who unaffiliated and secular. (1) You can’t write about everything and everyone in a short article. (2) I think it’s extraordinary, and very important, that affiliated, religious Jews – future rabbis! – now feel empowered to speak out against Israel. This is “dog bites man.”
Far and away, the largest and most active terrorist group in I/P is the IDF. Why do major world democratic leaders still provide cover for them?
Every Jewish, especially U.S. Jewish, loss of support for Israel and Zionism (as currently defined) is comparable to half a dozen non-Jewish defections. Jews in the U.S.vote, contribute and otherwise participate in politics in numbers far out of proportion to our percentage in the population. If the U.S. Jewish population or a large part of it is effectively de-Zionized, where are the Israelis going to turn? To Franklin Graham?