Israeli society is fracturing over the extremist government’s move to compromise the independence of the High Court, and the drama has spilled over to the pro-Israel community here. They see Israel’s claims to be a democracy falling apart, and they are openly anguished.
So we are getting to witness the ordeals of the entitled.
Like Susie Gelman of the Israel Policy Forum deploring the Israeli government’s use of skunkwater on Jewish demonstrators. “Awful.” But Israel has been using skunkwater on Palestinians for many years without complaints from the Israel lobby.
And Gelman hastens to add, “What American Jews… must do is not walk away from Israel.”
Or there’s the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group of the Zionist lobby, putting out a statement after Netanyahu’s government kneecapped the High Court, proclaiming that the debate was a “tribute” to Israeli democracy– and finally — a liberal Zionist organization resigned from the powerful Conference because it had had enough. After stomaching the Conference’s support for illegal settlements for decades.
And what class– William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference, said, They’re behind $15,000 in dues!
The Israel lobby is a farce of power and indulgence.
Which brings us to the other side of this story. After a repulsive group of religious settlers forced their way into the El-Kurd family’s house in Jerusalem — with the support of the Conference of Presidents — young Mohammed El-Kurd, a poet, gained an international reputation for his activism and resistance-through-words.
This week Mohammed came on to our staff as culture editor, and I reread Steven Salaita’s report on a controversy Mohammed set off in the States last year.
Someone in the audience at Duke asked an agonized question. When you say, Palestine must be free from the river to the sea, what does that mean for Israeli Jews?
“I don’t care, I truly, sincerely don’t give a f—-” Mohammed was quoted as saying.
That’s the way I feel about the crisis of the Israel lobby. They have power, and they use it to enforce U.S. complicity in human rights abuses. The Conference of Presidents stands up for the settlers who stole the El-Kurds’ house out from under them. Susie Gelman gets audiences with Joe Biden because she gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats. And it’s no coincidence that the Democratic leader in the House is going to Israel for the second time this year.
And I’m supposed to care about their agonies for Israel’s future? Cry me a river…
““I don’t care, I truly, sincerely don’t give a f—-” Mohammed was quoted as saying.”
al-ḥamdu l-illāhi rabbi l-ʿālamīn,
“With Such People I Want No Peace”
Acuera (Timucua, c. 1540)
Others of your accursed race have, in years past, poisoned our peaceful shores. They have taught me what you are. What is your employment? To wander about like vagabonds from land to land, to rob the poor, to betray the confiding, to murder in cold blood the defenceless. No! with such a people I want no peace—no friendship. War, never—ending war, exterminating war, is all the boon I ask.
You boast yourselves valiant, and so you may be; but my faithful warriors are not less brave, and this too you shall one day prove; for I have sworn to maintain an unsparing conflict while one white man remains in my borders—not only in battle, though even thus we fear not to meet you, but by stratagem, ambush, and midnight surprisal.
I am king in my own land, and will never become the vassal of a mortal like myself. Vile and pusillanimous is he who will submit to the yoke of another when he may be free. As for me and my people, we choose death—yes! a hundred deaths—before the loss of our liberty and the subjugation of our country.
Keep on, robbers and traitors: in Acuera and Apalachee we will treat you as you deserve. Every captive will we quarter and hang up to the highest tree along the road.
SOURCE: Francis S. Drake. The Indian Tribes of the United States. Volume 2. Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott and Co., 1884. 34.
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/acuerawithsuchpeople.html
Those in the thralls of the Jewish supremacy delusion may feel their anguish for a long time. Some Southerners after the Civil War never stopped believing the South would rise again. Israel is built upon a foundation of legends, fictions, and lies, and hence will inevitably collapse.
I suggest Susie Gelman have a public discussion / debate with Max Blumenthal. Here is Max’s brief recent interview by Jimmy Dore.
“RFK Jr. Agrees (Again) To Interview w/ Max Blumenthal About Israel!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKokf_2BlTw
I’m sure Jimmy Dore would be willing to host the debate. Or Kim Iversen. Or Tucker Carlson. Or Consortium News. Or Mondoweiss. Or George Galloway. etc.
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However, what can safely be said is that as far as the American discourse on Palestine/Israel is concerned, the genie is out of the bottle. Furthermore, Susie Gelman’s admonition that: “What American Jews… must do is not walk away from Israel” is being dismissed out of hand even by Israelis if Haaretz’s reporting on the “staggering” number of Israelis practicing yerida – emigrating from Israel permanently – are to be believed.
Israel may be on the cusp of finding out that many, maybe most, Americans feel exactly the same way Mohammed Al Kurd does.
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to suggest that Americans have been culturally groomed to self-censor on the subjects of Israel/Zionism and that they have a right, indeed a national duty, to assert their opinions openly and regularly?
View here 388 Palestine posters on the subject of aliyah
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MAD respect, Phil!
The Judicial Coup is allowing, indeed forcing, Zionists of all stripes to say the heretofore quiet parts out loud. Frequently. Think Friedman. Think Stephens. Think Foxman.
It is also allowing previously taboo words such as apartheid, and terms such as “end aid to Israel”, to move rapidly towards legitimacy.
Moreover, the Coup and its aftershocks as felt in the United States reveal the amoral nature of political Zionism, long denied by professional Zionists and almost always conflated by them with IHRA antisemitism. This is a most unwelcome development, I would imagine, within Zionist political circles because it carries the potential to weaken critical, structural taboos and, worse, may grant permission to the general American public to shed its previous training in self-censorship on the subjects of Israel and Zionism.
The present crisis overwhelming Israel is perhaps best backlit by the late historian Shelby Foote’s explanation for why the American Civil War erupted. He prefaced his comment by saying that the United States had from its earliest days seen the major political parties and economic interests come together regularly in Congress and hammer out a series of “great compromises” – the Compromise of 1790, the Missouri Compromise (1820), Compromise of 1850, to resolve persistent political frictions.
The Civil War erupted when it did, in 1861, he said: “because the American people failed to do the thing they really have a genius for, which is compromise.”
The Northern parties, having elected Lincoln, signaled that they had lost their stomach for compromising with the Slave Power. When the South reached for the gun at Fort Sumter any talk of further compromise came to be seen as treason, on both sides.
Israel may now be at a similar inflection point in its history.
The tensions and resentments that have developed between the ultra-orthodox coalitions on the one hand and the solid half of Israelis who identify as secular – those people carrying out the largest demonstrations in Israeli history on the streets outside the Knesset – are at the very least congruent with the tensions and resentments that existed between Northern Abolitionists and anti-slavery tendencies on the one hand and the Slave Power on the other.
Only a fool would claim to know what is going to happen in Israel as a result of the Judicial Coup: the denouement is yet to be revealed.
(Cont.)