Sheldon Adelson says that assimilation has stopped Jewish greatness. “We should have been equal to Catholicism, to Islamists– we should have been a billion and a half people.” While his wife Miriam says her mission is to protect Israel because it makes Jews around the world safe.
Just when anti-Zionism is becoming mainstream, Bari Weiss reads the pro-Israel hasbara playbook and says that all anti-Zionists are anti-Semitic, because they demonize the Jewish desire for a homeland and apply a double standard to 6 million Jews as opposed to the other 7 billion people on the planet. But the New York Times columnist is powerful and important.
Perceiving Michelle Alexander’s opinion piece on Palestine and Martin Luther King in the New York Times as a huge blow to Israel’s reputation among elites, and to the traditional alliance of blacks and Jews, Israel’s cheerleaders leaped to denounce Alexander. Michael Oren says the article is a “strategic threat” to Israel, David Harris says MLK would be “appalled” that Alexander “hijacked” his legacy!
For more than a generation, Palestinian voices have been suppressed at the New York Times. But under the new publisher A.G. Sulzberger, 38, the paper is serving notice that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans who want open debate. This explains Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking piece saying it’s time to end the progressive silence over Palestinian rights.
Ilana Cruger-Zaken says non-Zionist Jews are deeply alienated from the mainstream Jewish community because Zionism is what currently constitutes the shared principles of the community. “Believing in Palestinian human rights is a threat,” Cruger-Zaken writes, “the question is, a threat to whom?”
The 2009 Goldstone Report accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza when it killed more than 300 children, but the only trial Israeli generals had was a meeting with an American State Department official under Obama who pressed them to counter the p.r. damage of the report by telling the “Israeli story” better and announcing “lessons learned.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Bret Stephens and the other American Bibi-ists went from All Netanyahu all the time to No Netanyahu ever, Yakov Hirsch explains. Because they can’t be leading the moral charge against Trump’s “evil plan to crush the press,” while offering obfuscation about Netanyahu’s actual evil plan to crush the press, as they once did, when they were empowering the now-run-amok prime minister.
Marc Ellis writes that the rescinding by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute of an award to Angela Davis raises issues about the Black-Jewish alliance and the ability of Jews to set parameters for African Americans to speak on Jewish questions, including Israel. There is a war over that question. The Jewish establishment sees Angela Davis as an enemy. Jews of Conscience see her as an ally.
Zionism was founded on the Romantic nationalist idea that Jews really are a people apart from other peoples and that’s why we deserve a homeland, Joseph Levine writes; and liberal Jews who rejected the idea worried that Zionists would undermine their status in western countries. So dual loyalty was an issue long before US Rep. Rashida Tlaib was accused by Marco Rubio of raising an anti-Semitic “canard.”