I last visited Israel in 2018 just before it passed the constitutional law declaring the country the nation state of the Jews, and in those four years it has become a narrower place. The signs of religious nationalism are everywhere today, even near Tel Aviv. The settlers have now taken over the army (Yossi Gurvitz tells me), and when activists visit hotspots in the South Hebron Hills settlers smash their car windows with rocks as soldiers do nothing. The young bartender at the King David Hotel tells me there is no occupation, those are Jewish places not the West Bank.
When I was young, my girlfriend came back from Israel and said, “It’s hard there, they are tougher than we are,” as a form of praise. American Jews admired those Jews for being tough. Now it’s different. The ugliness of Israel is inescapable. The guns everywhere. The hatred of Palestinians. The complete acceptance of apartheid.
The importance of Tom Friedman’s article saying the Israel we knew is gone is not about Palestinians. No, the Israel Palestinians know is the same. It is about American Jews. They are finally catching a clue. That is the importance of last week’s election, the Itamar Ben-Gvir election, in which his fascistic Religious Zionism party took 14 seats, and hard right wing parties took 74 (per Dahlia Scheindlin). The new ugly Israel will alienate American Jews, as Israel lobbyists Dennis Ross and David Makovsky openly fretted in an Op-Ed.
Tom Friedman is following in the footsteps of Peter Beinart and Jeffrey Goldberg: Zionist journalists who stood up for Israel again and again in the public square then had enough. Beinart is the bravest, he has come out for one state. Goldberg completely disappeared when he saw that the occupation was devouring Israel five years ago. Now Friedman is pivoting, and liberal Zionists are in complete meltdown; J Street wants to change the subject to AIPAC and the U.S. elections.
Zionism—the ideology Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu embody, one of Jewish supremacy in the Jewish land– is at last becoming problematic for American Jews.
The disarray is a good thing. Zionism—the ideology Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu embody, one of Jewish supremacy in the Jewish land– is at last becoming problematic for American Jews. They are up to their chins in a discriminatory ideology, and so we begin a war over Zionism that will bring down the Israel lobby in the next ten years. Because Zionism destroys everything in its path.
It took decades for Zionism to win in America. Herzl was an embarrassment to Jewish leadership till Brandeis converted to Zionism in 1916. It took the rise of Nazism in the 30s to swing the Jewish establishment over to Zionism as a program in 1942; and by 1967 of course, the ravishment was complete. Tom Friedman was giving chalktalks on the Israeli military movements to his high school classmates, and later saw his job at the New York Times as making Israel’s case in America. “Israel had me at hello,” he confessed at the 92d Street Y a couple of years ago.
Maybe the biggest lie the Israel lobby purveyed was that the United States had to hug Israel in order for it to make progress with the Palestinians. America hugging Israel and granting it impunity in international forums is what gave us the Jewish Nation State law in 2018, the shutdown of leading Palestinian human rights organizations in 2021, the murder of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, and the rise of Ben-Gvir. Hugging Israel has encouraged its mass psychosis: the belief that militant apartheid is the only response to the political problem of millions of Palestinians without any rights.
Hugging Israel is what kept Israel from responding in good faith to the one true miracle of its history—the fact that Palestinian leadership accepted its existence on the ’67 lines back in 1988.
No doubt Ben-Gvir, a convicted terrorist, is in the DNA of religious Zionism. Zionism’s first step toward sovereignty in 1948 was the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians so that there would be a “strong Jewish majority” on far more land than the U.N. had granted the Jewish state. The Nakba has never ended; it was lately affirmed by the Nation State law that gives Jews the “exclusive right of self determination” in the land– apartheid under law.
Palestinian resistance to this regime is what gave Ben-Gvir his 14 seats. He ran on the claim that Defense Minister Benny Gantz – who bragged of bombing Gaza into the Stone Age in 2014 – was too soft on Palestinians. So killing nearly 200 Palestinians so far this year is soft. Oh yes, those Israelis are tough. Tough like Nazis were tough.
Zionism has caused nightmares and heartache and misery for Palestinians for decades, but as the media consultant, and Mondoweiss contributor, Ghousoon Bisharat said to me in Haifa, Ben-Gvir is not our problem, he is the Jews’ problem.
Finally American Jews will see what Zionism has done to us, corrupted almost every Jewish institution with racism, turned Jewish leaders into apologists for persecution and massacres.
And now he is the American Jews’ problem. Finally American Jews will see what Zionism has done to us, corrupted almost every Jewish institution with racism, turned Jewish leaders into apologists for persecution and massacres. “You must explain to me how the most accomplished most highly educated most liberal group in America has embraced apartheid,” John Mearsheimer said to me years ago.
That accounting is finally upon us. It won’t be easy. Those Jewish groups are still committed to apartheid. The AJC and ADL have lately doubled down with new hack CEOs to carry out the Zionist project in the U.S. David Makovsky rationalizes apartheid by praising Zionism’s “institutions” on a Democratic Majority for Israel briefing. I guess he meant Qalandiya checkpoint. Where Palestinians have their faces rubbed in humiliation.
Makovsky and Ross and DMFI and ADL and the liberal Zionists too are terrified of anti-Zionists. They are terrified of how Ben-Gvir will put the wind in our sails, terrified that groups they consider marginal, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, will spring to the leadership of the young. They are right to be terrified. The war over Zionism inside American Jewish life has begun.
Philip Weiss
Philip Weiss is senior editor of Mondoweiss.net and founded the site in 2005-06.
A very thought-provoking analysis with a timeline and observations that are most helpful for most of us – those less knowledgeable than Philip Weiss and his colleagues at Mondoweiss.
Now all of us (collectively) need to go to work and try to bring sanity and much greater kindness to that part of the world.
Hate is a disease that destroys everyone and everything in its path.
Thanks for this Phil. Here’s my letter to the NYT, understated to give it a chance of being published:
Tom Friedman warning (“The Israel We Knew is Gone,” November 4th) that Israel’s recent election could presage Donald Trump’s second administration is chilling and rings true. But he’s only half right about Israel. The title reveals Friedman’s longstanding blindness to the essential nature of the state from its beginnings, a project founded on the idea of “a land without people for a people without a land.” The Israel Friedman thought he knew — democratic, egalitarian, progressive — was a lie sold to the world, and to the early settlers, who built the country and fought its wars unaware that they had been recruited to carry out a crime of dispossession. This ongoing crime is on full display in the recent election.
I agree with Friedman that our democracy is on the ropes. Our blindness to the colonial underpinnings of our own country has led us to this pass. It’s time to wake up — and opening our eyes about “the only democracy in the Middle East” would be a good start.
“Tom Friedman is following in the footsteps of Peter Beinart and Jeffrey Goldberg…”
Beinart just posted a piece on the Israeli elections in Jewish Currents. and it’s worth reading:
https://jewishcurrents.org/israels-ascendant-far-right-cant-be-understood-by-analogy
In other countries, the right clashes with the center over the basic nature of the state—but Israel’s Itamar Ben-Gvir and his rivals are on the same page about ethnocracy….In France, the US, Italy, and India, right-wing leaders are seeking—to varying degrees—to create ethnocracies, states that define themselves as belonging to a dominant ethnic, religious, or racial group. Their centrist opponents—to varying degrees—support legal equality for all citizens. .. But Israel is not deeply ideologically polarized. It’s already an ethnocracy and no major political party wants to change that. That’s what sets Ben-Gvir apart from figures like Trump and Le Pen: His rivalry with his centrist foes may be politically fierce, but it’s not a contest over the basic definition of the state…The right wanted to hold all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; the center wanted to leave most of the occupied territories and thus divest itself of a Palestinian population that threatened Israel’s Jewish majority. But even that division has faded. For Lapid and Israel’s other leading centrist politician, Benny Gantz, support for a Palestinian state is now almost entirely theoretical. It’s freighted with prerequisites that ensure such a “state” would constitute little more than a glorified version of the status quo, in which the Palestinian Authority performs administrative tasks while the Israeli army retains ultimate control. This means that, functionally, they support a Jewish state from the river to the sea.
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Israel: On the Road to International Isolation with the Rise of domestic Fascist Parties (juancole.com)
“Israel: On the Road to International Isolation with the Rise of domestic Fascist Parties” Middle East Monitor, 11/08/2022, by Adnan Amer”As Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the Likud party that won the Israeli elections, rushes to form his new government, unprecedented international & US warnings have been made calling for right-wing Knesset members not to participate. These include Itamar Ben-Gvir & Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist party, as their participation would harm the shared values between Israel & the US.
“The US, the West & some Arabs fear that the participation of extremist ministers in the next government could lead Israel to become hostile to the Western regime. The post-elections stage may witness the formation of a complex conservative military alliance that depends on extreme members who publicly pledge to change the political system through arbitrary measures. If the next government takes such measures, Israel may move away from its identity & its association with Western countries & quickly become one of the hostile countries, such as Russia & China. This would put a stumbling block in front of the interests of the great Western countries in the region. Israel will appear to challenge the international regime created by the US, thanks to which it has acquired security, social & economic modernisation in recent decades.
“The US, in particular, & Western countries, in general, are not accustomed to publicly interfering in Israeli elections, especially by mentioning certain ministry candidates’ names. However, Washington & Europe have noticed a change in Israel’s external relations towards the Ukraine war. They fear a coup could occur if the extreme Israeli right-wing comes into office due to Netanyahu’s strong relationship with Putin, his coldness towards US President Joe Biden & his reconciliation with the European right wing.(cont’d)
Mr. Weiss nailed it. Tom Freidman nailed it. Jonathan Cook nailed it. Gideon Levy nailed it. And for the second time, I post this call to action:
As Founder, Leader, and thus far the sole Member of the International Campaign to Sever Zionists from the Family of Abrahamic Faiths (ICSZFAF), Mondoschwartz wields sledge and wedge to blast open a Great Schism between Judaism and Zionism. He calls for the sadly diminishing Community of Surviving Jews to ingather in the Diaspora before it’s too late and to proclaim loudly that one cannot be a Jew and a Zionist at the same time!
Mondoschwartz demands that Surviving Jews unite to eject from our midst all lapsed Jews who have abandoned a 2,000 year heritage of goodness and virtue in favor of following and to submitting to the false messiahs who have elevated Zionism as the one true faith.
As Surviving Jews, it is our responsibility to condemn Zionist’s Godless message; its bigoted racist hate; and its embrace of the incessant begging lying and stealing used to enrich the marauders by stripping all who are weak of their property, their livelihood, their freedom, and their lives.
The time for the Great Schism is long past, but it is not too late to advance its noble cause: a mission to save and preserve the Jewish heritage.
We pray that all Diaspora Jews understand that Zionism has brought us to the precipice of the Second Holocaust—one that threatens to end Jewishness forever, and we mourn for the handful of Israel’s Surviving Jews (now, barely more than a minyan), who have rejected Zionism as their savior.