Everything that Trump is doing in Israel/Palestine, from moving the embassy to telling Palestinians to accept Jordanian sovereignty, is in line with the agenda of his biggest backer, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who thinks Palestinians don’t exist and they should never have a state. The pattern is clear. But the press ignores the story.
Support for the Israeli government no matter what still defines the official American Jewish community. Just look at this long list of rabbis celebrating AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, from their altars, despite AIPAC’s support for the Iraq war and fierce opposition to the Iran deal. AIPAC might as well be a Jewish holiday!
In his memoir The World As It Is, Ben Rhodes documents that Netanyahu and his American friends had access to President Obama at every turn. Rahm Emanuel nicknamed Rhodes “Hamas” for advocating for Palestinians, and after Netanyahu humiliated Obama in the Oval Office lecture of 2011, Rhodes had to call “leading Jewish donors” to assure them Obama still supported Israel.
This April, the Durham, NC City Council unanimously passed a policy that made it the first city to bar its police from engaging in international military-style training. This past Sunday, the Jewish Federation of Durham-Chapel Hill hosted an event called “Durham City Council Statement Singling out Israel: Jewish Community Responses” which ignored Jewish support for the policy and when Esther Mack and Abby Weaver tried to share their perspective they were removed by police. Mack and Weaver write, “Cops may have removed us from the Jewish Community Center, but we cannot be removed from the Jewish community. Whether our community leaders are ready to acknowledge and accept us is up to them.”
Ilene Cohen defines ‘Ziosplaining’ as “the efforts of Zionists of so-called moderate stripe, who are endlessly pained by reality, to explain to Palestinians (and the world) that they have no choice but to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine.” She says the latest effort in the genre is Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. “That neighbor, by the way, is the author’s imaginary neighbor—the only one possible for such an exercise, because few and far between would be the Palestinians who wouldn’t gag at this patronizing effort to have their situation ‘explained’ to them,” Cohen writes.
In May the benign-sounding Anti-Semitism Awareness Act appeared before the U.S Congress “to provide for consideration a definition of anti-Semitism for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities.” Sheldon Richman writes that if the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act passes and is signed into law, it would threaten free speech in the academy and beyond.
A long New Yorker profile of Paul Singer, Trump’s big donor, plays down the fact that Singer’s major political interest is Israel, and leaves out the word “neoconservative,” though Singer has funded countless thinktanks that favor regime change in the Middle East and pushed that policy in Iraq.
The official Jewish community has stated that all Jews are welcome, but not if you support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. A group of 15 synagogues nationally is resisting this policy by opening their doors to all regardless of their political beliefs for the High Holydays, in September. Rabbi Michael Davis of one of those synagogues, Makom Shalom in Chicago, explains.
After history teachers Joel Doerfler and Shawn Redden condemned the Gaza slaughter this spring, they were soon both gone from the Riverdale Country School. A HuffPo investigation documents that school officials deferred to a small group of Zionist donors, who held a meeting with the pro-Israel group the American Jewish Committee and smeared the teachers as anti-Semitic.
In an interview by Robert Cohen on his latest book, “Finding Our Voice,” Marc H. Ellis explains there is only one question for Jews today, after the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and the occupation of Palestine — What side are you on?