Timothy Egan, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, has a column today defending the…

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.”

The Birmingham Holocaust Education Center has trampled on the credo, Never Again, by objecting to Angela Davis’s humanitarian award because she supports Palestinian rights. Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh calls on the Education Center to apologize for the damage it has done to Palestinian human rights.

The Senate bill punishing support for BDS against Israel failed again yesterday. Israel has never been so openly politicized before, and many Democratic supporters are expressing the fear that the issue is going to divide the party leading up to the 2020 election.

The decision by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to withdraw an award to Angela Davis because of her support for BDS has become a giant embarrassment to the Institute and the Jewish groups that put pressure on it to reconsider. Both the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center and the Birmingham Jewish Federations have tried to walk back statements critical of the award.

Amos Oz was a great storyteller, and the last vibrant connection to the Shoah generation. In his work, he sought to ennoble Israel’s creation by using his parents’ story of fleeing Europe to show how unsafe Jews are in the west. He was an Israeli provincial, and his death is a great blow to Zionism, which has few idealistic lights left to uphold.