Divisions over Israel will bring “disaster and disunity” for Jews in the U.S., Abraham Riesman writes in New York magazine in an article about his grandfather, an Israel lobbyist who helped cover up war crimes. Young Riesman says the massacres and imprisonment of Palestinians today makes Jews unsafe.
The author Rob Nixon uses the phrase “slow violence” to refer to “the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many…crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today.” Slow violence is the defining condition of living as Palestinians: in between the sharp escalations of protracted conflict, the ongoing trauma of an existence under apartheid is typically not viewed as violence at all. When we demand freedom for Palestine we are not just demanding an end to military assaults on Gaza, we are demanding Palestinians to have a right to life, dignity, and freedom.
Several articles by Israel supporters bewail a “surge in anti-Zionism” among Jews because of the latest Gaza attack. They want to remind American Jews of their Jewish identity: that Being Jewish means supporting Israel. That’s an important argument to have.
A bracing interview with former JVP deputy director Alissa Wise shows, When you are Jewish and come out as an anti-Zionist, you get excommunicated. That is how the Jewish community works to support Israel. If you persist in supporting Palestinians, forget about your community, because Jewish life as we know it is committed to supporting Israel, the miraculous achievement of the Jewish people in the 20th century in the wake of the extermination.
According to the new Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, hostility to Israel “…could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience at the hands of the State.” This, the sole appearance of the word “emotion” in the entire document, is applied exclusively to the direct victims of Israeli crimes, the very people who have the most fact-based, lived-experience for entirely rational “hostility” to the state. Categorizing the Palestinian response as emotional is to deny Palestinians the dignity to simply demand to be free of their shackles.
Human rights activists launched a campaign this week to stop social media giant Facebook from adjusting its hate speech policy to classify the word ‘Zionist’ as a protected category, a move that would make any criticism of Zionism a violation of Facebook’s Community Standards and hate speech policy.
Gov. Cuomo tries to deflect criticism of his coronavirus restrictions on the Orthodox by bragging on his pro-Israel bona fides. “Nobody has traveled more to Israel. Two of my brothers-in-law are Jewish. Nobody’s fought anti-Semitism more aggressively than I have. First Governor in the nation to do BDS.”
A coalition of anti-Zionist organizations in San Diego raise concerns over progressive candidate Georgette Gómez who is running for Congress.
Park Avenue Synagogue inserts the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikva, into its Yom Kippur liturgy, as Rabbi Neil Zuckerman praises his son for overcoming exile in New York and going “home” to Israel and joining Israel’s army. “There is no mistaking it: Zionism is the synagogue’s core value that takes over at a key moment in the Yom Kippur service,” says one observer.
Laura Whitehorn writes that San Francisco State University President Lynn Mahoney’s championing of Zionism is shocking and runs directly counter to embracing a “diversity of opinions”—something the university claims to uphold.