Thirty years ago, Prince Charles said that U.S. support for Israel is a cause of terrorism and that the “Jewish lobby” tied an American president’s ability to address the issue. He wrote in a 1986 letter: “I know there are so many complex issues, but how can there ever be an end to terrorism unless the causes are eliminated? Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in US? I must be naive, I suppose!”
Tzipi Hotovely, deputy Israeli foreign minister, says American Jews are threatening the existence of Jewry with “80 percent” rate of assimilation, and criticism of Israel, which is all that holds Jews together. Then she challenges Labor parliamentarian Merav Michaeli, “When’s the last time you went to the Kotel [the western wall], can you possibly tell me?”
Women of the social action committee at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Marblehead MA refuse to bend to organized Jewish community’s pressure to shut down a screening on Sunday Nov. 5 of “The Occupation of the American Mind”– which depicts the limits on discussion of the Palestinian human rights issue in the U.S. Protesters describe the film as anti-Semitic, though it includes Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, and Rula Jebreal and is endorsed by Doug Rushkoff and Medea Benjamin.
The Balfour Declaration was a wartime play by the British government to win international Jewry to its side. This meant the Russian masses in the U.S., and banker Jacob Schiff, who were against American entry into the war. The British may have exaggerated Jewish power, but Zionists lobbied successfully for the declaration by citing such power, marking the entry of the Israel lobby on the world stage.
After Alan Dershowitz spoke at the University of California on “The Liberal Case for Israel,” a cartoon by Joel Mayorga appeared in the Daily Californian, savaging Dershowitz’s claim by showing his hand dripping blood from a corpse. The school’s chancellor said the cartoon was anti-Semitic and the newspaper retracted the image. Does any of this really matter?
Writer Mark Oppenheimer’s effort to portray Harvey Weinstein’s victims as “shiksas” failed because the cultural divide, and prejudice, that term reflects was over a generation ago. Privileged Jews and Christians get along fine today. The country has moved on to definitions of Otherness that are far more meaningful.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency says its briefs editor, Marcy Oster, moved to Israel in 2000. It airbrushes the uncomfortable truth: Oster lives in an illegal settlement deep in the occupied West Bank, Karnei Shomron, and has often acted as an advocate for that community, raising money for young Jews to buy mobile homes there.
Citing the separate laws and roads for Palestinians and Jews in occupied territories, CBC columnist Neil Macdonald says “Israel is already an apartheid state.” It’s about time liberal Zionists in the U.S. admitted what’s going on over there. But they can’t, they’re the firewall on the political mainstream, and U.S. support for apartheid Israel. Still, the list of apartheid-namers is growing.
Organized American Jewry has a tough job. It has to raise endless money for Israel and protect the country against all human-rights-abuse accusations and denounce Israel’s accusers. To be Israel’s vassal, in short. But the new anti-BDS legislation across the country will make some Jews reexamine the deal. They are being asked to sell out our country’s civil rights for Israel’s sake. And there’s sure to be a backlash against the Jewish organizations.
Retired Gen. Amnon Reshef told a NY synagogue that the two-state solution is a dream that is years away and the only way to sell it to Jewish Israelis is: “They support separation. They don’t want to be a part of one state. They want to be separated. It’s a Zionist dream. They don’t care about the Palestinians.” Isn’t that apartheid by another name?