“At least we can always go to Israel if there’s more anti-Semitism,” Liz Rose’s mother used to say, but as an anti-Zionist wrestling with the Pittsburgh massacre, she does not feel that way herself and is disturbed by the fact that she represents to other Jews what she is herself afraid of, more anti-Semitism.
Liz Rose says Matti Friedman’s New York Times Op-Ed on the new Tel Aviv to Jerusalem train line does nothing but recycle Zionist blind spots. “He doesn’t say anything new, and the New York Times loves it,” Rose writes. “Friedman’s commitment, above all else, is to preserving a myth, rewriting history, and then mystifying the whole experience until it becomes nothing but sentiment for a mythologized past.”
In 1986, at age 16, standing near Ben Yehuda’s pedestrian mall, I swayed to Naomi…
It’s no coincidence that the New York Times real estate section featured a $4.8 million house in Israel — “Luxury on the Mediterranean Coast of Tel-Aviv” — the same week the Israeli parliament passed a law making Israel the “nation-state of the Jewish people.”
Tom Friedman once gave me permission to believe in Israel and believe it wanted peace with Palestinians. That liberal Zionist world is over, and Friedman needs to grapple with the fact that liberalism stands not just against Trump but for Palestinian human rights, Liz Rose writes.
Tom Friedman of the Times says that Palestinians in Gaza are responsible for their own suffering because they have not marched to demand a two-state solution that preserves the Jewish state. He’s been giving Palestinians that advice for 7 years and ignoring their suffering under blockade.
James Loeffler’s essay, “The Zionist Founders of the Human Rights Movement,” published in the New York Times on the day the U.S. Embassy moved to Jerusalem–the same day Israel killed 60 Palestinian protesters–argues that Zionism and human rights are historically intertwined. Liz Rose writes, “The only way that Loeffler can justify the compatibility of Zionism and human rights is to ignore Palestine completely.”
Pro-Israel groups are working to save the Hebrew program at Evanston Township High School, north of Chicago, where enrollment has slipped in recent years to only 34 students. “The message of these Hebrew programs are clear: If you’re going to learn Hebrew, you’re going to learn to love Israel. No room exists for students to master the language while disagreeing with Israel’s policies”–writes Liz Rose, former Hebrew teacher in a Chicago area public school, who lost her job when she attempted to show students the Palestinian side of the story.
From 1992 to 2014, writers Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon were hesitant to get involved in the question of Israel/Palestine. “We didn’t want to write or even think, in any kind of sustained way, about Israel and Palestine, about the nature and meaning of occupation,” they write in the introduction to their 2017 collection of essays, “Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.” Everything changed for them in 2014. Waldman, who was born in Jerusalem, visited Israel in 2014 for the first time in 22 years. She went to Hebron on that trip, and her experience made her feel that she bore some responsibility for what Israel was doing in her name. After the 2014 visit, she and Chabon did think about it; they wrote about it, too, and invited others to, as well. “Storytelling itself–bearing witness, in vivid and clear language, to things personally seen and incidents encountered,” they write, “has the power to engage the attention of people who, like us, have long since given up paying attention.”
Rabbi Brant Rosen’s 2012 book, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi’s Path to Palestinian Solidarity, is out in a second edition, detailing his decision to leave an Evanston, Ill., congregation over Israel issues. His friend Liz Rose– who once came into his office and announced, “I’m losing my fucking mind” over Israel — says the book is a powerful guide for Jews setting out on the journey away from Zionism.