Rabbi Michael Davis writes to Rabbi David Stern, a leader of Reform rabbis in America: A year has passed since you returned “shaken” from a visit to the “prison” of the West Bank. I have a collegial challenge. Invite a Palestinian to speak from the same Dallas pulpit from which you gave a sermon that has been widely circulated. And call on your congregants to oppose Congressional legislation that would punish advocacy for BDS.
Something that has never happened before is about to happen in the U.S. Senate: there’s going to be a wide-open battle over Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), as part of efforts to end the government shutdown, no less! The Senate is due to debate S.1, the first Senate bill of the new session, and Marco Rubio claims that a “significant” number of Democrats support BDS.
Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, dares to say that the two-state solution looks like “a cruel joke,” that some Jews regard equality in one state as a possible solution, and that BDS is gaining traction in the U.S. His article on the schism between US and Israeli Jews goes along with Michelle Goldberg’s column saying anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
“Israel should not be the main thing that you rally around in your conversation with the African-American community,” former Israeli diplomat Ido Aharoni advises American Jewish groups. Because for American blacks, Israel is “defined by its problem” — its treatment of Palestinians. So — change the subject!
Rabbi Wendi Geffen, senior rabbi of one of Chicago’s leading Reform temples, says she does not invite pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions speakers to her temple because they support physical “violence,” equivalent to rightwingers who say Palestinians should die for opposing Israel. The issue is dividing her temple, Geffen acknowledges.
Being intermarried and assimilated, Phil Weiss wonders at Christmas what makes him Jewish; and he embraces the Birthright walkout and the great spiritual challenge his tribe faces today, to free itself from Zionism and the evils that ideology has generated in Israel and Palestine.
Three young Jews were reportedly kicked off their free trip to Israel sponsored by the pro-Israel Birthright program today because they asked questions about the separation wall Israel has erected on occupied Palestinian territory.
Israel had its worst week in a long time in the US discourse. The two-state consensus is now in a complete shambles, with many Americans on both right and left beginning to advocate for one democratic state in Israel and Palestine, which of course would mean the end of what Benjamin Netanyahu calls “the one and only Jewish state.”
A coalition of Jewish organizations’s lead by the American Jewish World Service and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, invited “concerned Jews across the U.S. to unite in solidarity against the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people of Burma” by dedicating the 6th candle on the 6th night of Chanukah to the Rohingya people. Howard Horowitz asks when will these organizations also call on American Jews to honor Palestinians in a similar way.
In 1991 the late George H.W. Bush took on Israel and its lobby over settlement construction, famously saying “I’m one lonely little guy” against 1000 lobbyists. Some say the stance made him a one-term president, and paved the way for his son to out-Israel his father, with disastrous results.