The largest Jewish denomination in the US, Reform Jewry, showcased a leader of the dispossession of Palestinian lands at its biennial last week: the head of the Jewish National Fund. So the Union for Reform Jewry has embraced the violence inherent in Zionism. Shouldn’t Jews debate this?
A professor visits two of her Palestinian students in Ramallah and together they sneak into Jerusalem for a joyride to Jaffa: “Our car never stopped but took a pause, then zoomed forth. Malak announced, ‘I would like to notify you that we’re in Jerusalem right now.’ The two of them suddenly yelled with sheer elation, ‘We made it! We’re going to Yaffa!’ I had seen Malak on celebratory highs before, having seen him accomplish truly amazing things as an undergrad. But I had never witnessed the degree of outpouring of elation I was seeing from him now. I knew what Yaffa meant to him, as he had written about it and spoken about it on more than one occasion. He loved the sea, and he loved Yaffa. It had been taken from him. It was his home, his family’s home. At 22 years old, he had only seen the sea from Yaffa a handful of times – he had never swum there.”
Hanna is a “17-year-old American girl” who grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. Because her father is a U.S. citizen born in Morocco, and she was traveling with a notebook that had one page of Arabic writing in it, she was subjected to an interrogation and strip search when leaving Israel’s Ben Gurion airport.
Brandishing their typical black and yellow flags and Hebrew signs boasting “Kahane was Right” and “There is no co-existence with cancer,” hundreds of right-wing activists took to the streets of Jerusalem Thursday night in a growing phenomenon of public demonstrations led by the country’s leading fascist groups such as Lahava and La Familia. The march and the Israeli extremists willingness to resort to violence against their state’s security forces testify to the impact that incitement is having on Jewish youth throughout the country, and portends an ever-growing threat of entrenching the current spiral of bloodshed.
Prime Minister elect Benjamin Netanyahu recently issued an apology to “Israeli Arabs” for his outlandishly racist Election Day remarks that “Arabs voters are going to the polls en masse.” Netanyahu chose to render his apology to a crowd of elderly men rather than the 12 recently elected Palestinian Arabs from the Joint List that actually represent the majority of the country’s Arabic speaking population. His message? Palestinians seeking genuine representation and influence in the body politic are not welcome.
Furthering his ceaseless campaign to leave no Jewish victim of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy unexploited, Benjamin Netanyahu recently said “Israel is the only place you can proudly proclaim ‘I am a Jew.’” Scott Ratner writes, “Israel is actually the one place that any Jew with a social consciousness should feel more ashamed of his or her identity than any other country in the world. After all, in no other country besides Israel is Judaism the perennial justification for a decade’s long quest to suppress and uproot the culture and presence of millions of non-Jews.”
This weekend, UC-Berkeley honors its graduates and Bill Maher’s Anti-Muslimism, together. According to Maher the entire spectrum of American Muslims are at fault for matters outside of their control, involving people that they’ve never met. For actions that they don’t condone, by subcultures that are different from their own. For mentalities that they don’t share, by groups whose names they can’t even pronounce. All because they happen to fall under the same category of religious identity. Congratulations UC-Berkeley, this Saturday, December 20, you’ll be on the wrong side of history.
The decades-long “peace process” has clearly shown attempting to work through bilateral or even multilaterals tracks where Israel is assumed to be acting in good faith is utterly futile as long as the Israeli government exerts absolute control over the situation on the ground. Scott Ratner says only the international arena offers a venue where Palestinian national aspirations are not encumbered by Israeli desiderata or obstacles that will forever prevent the materialization of a Palestinian state.
“Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted, Through anger, losses,…