Weekly Briefing: Zionists are at each other’s throats over meaning of ‘Jewish democracy’

What a week! It felt like we were watching Zionism crumble before our eyes! Yes I’m super-optimistic, but just try and get your mind around what happened–

Joe Biden actually took on Benjamin Netanyahu, and made Netanyahu back down on his judicial revolution. Biden did it because he had the major Jewish groups on his side and against Israel for once: the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents, the ADL, the Federations all told Netanyahu the right-wing changes are a bridge too far for “shared values,” and Biden had the temerity to say, “I hope he walks away from it.”

For sure, the problem between the countries has nothing to do with Israel’s real problem, its treatment of Palestinians. The hundreds of thousands of secular Jewish demonstrators in the Tel Aviv streets are outraged about the messianic Jews who’ve taken over the government. Some of them want us to boycott Israel!

No, they’re not supporting BDS. Still, it was exciting to see Zionists at one another’s throats over the future of the Jewish state, and it exposed the faulty foundations of “the Jewish democracy.” Israel created an apartheid regime between the river and the sea– in an era when apartheid is not legitimate. And the Israeli anxiety about delegitimization is so profound that half the society simply blinds itself in a high-tech bubble, while the other half is invested in biblical promises and wants to annex “Judea and Samaria”– the West Bank– and ethnically cleanse more Palestinians. This is a civil war that it is hard to imagine Netanyahu or any other political magicians being able to wave away in coming months.

I’m proud of two pieces we ran this week that make sense of Israel’s crisis. In “The Judaization of Zionism,” Haim Bresheeth-Zabner explains that the messianic Jews are trying to transform Jewish identity in the name of conquest:

[A]fter 75 years of denying its own agency in the terrible catastrophe it inflicted upon the Palestinians, the Israeli regime is now embracing its Zionist origins…

While Yumna Patel interviewed Yara Hawari, who explained that the protesters are trying to put a liberal figleaf back on that apartheid system (you can listen to our podcast episode with the full interview here).

Lastly, my favorite moment this week. We made a lot of a hair-raising speech by one of Netanyahu’s Likud party members in the Knesset, selling the judicial overhaul as a way to keep Palestinians subjugated. When we tweeted the speech, we used an image not of Tali Gottlieb, the Knesset member, but of actor Liat Har Lev who portrays Tali Gottlieb on a satirical program in Israel. We didn’t know! Kind of like mixing up Tina Fey and Sarah Palin!

And when Israeli commenters jumped all over us, we duly apologized— but put the knife in– “Gottlieb’s speech at the Jerusalem rally, however, is not satire, but rather further proof of Israel’s dangerous political trajectory.”

It was one of those trivial mistakes that journalists make– swiftly corrected– and only called more attention to the social catastrophe of religious nationalism.