Bari Weiss’s book argues that if you embrace Zionism you will suffer ostracism and career reputational damage. But the last week she’s gotten treatment other authors only dream about, from cable networks to the 92d Street Y to a big-media party where everyone bewailed social media (because the leftwing dares to advocate for Palestinian human rights).
Should Zionism be protected from criticism because many Jews take Zionist doctrine to be essential to their own self-conception. No, Joseph Levine says, because it is reasonable in considering the history of the Zionist project to argue that it is unjust, without being written out of the discourse as a bigot.
Zionism is Judaism, and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic, New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss argues in her new book on anti-Semitism. “Whereas Jews once had to convert to Christianity, now they have to convert to anti-Zionism.”
Israel’s defenders explain to Rashida Tlaib that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, so long as you say it’s a vibrant democracy. So the oppression of millions of Palestinians is a golden opportunity for Israelis to show off their country. The bigotry is the same as justifying slavery by the fact that Lincoln and Douglas debated it, and Frederick Douglass was able to get in one word edgewise.
Robert Cohen debates Melanie Phillips on BBC radio. “The Jews are the only people for whom the Land of Israel was ever their national kingdom,” she says. He says, “That’s a muddle” of Zionism and Judaism.
Larry Wolf, a New York musician, got involved in Palestinian solidarity for the first time in his late 60s when he heard high school classmates justify the 2014 Israeli onslaught on Gaza because Palestinians were terrorists and monsters. Now he is an activist. “Palestinians need equal rights– that’s the whole purpose of my getting involved– and there’s still a strong feeling that Judaism is at risk of losing itself, if it hasn’t already,” he says.
Liz Rose meets two Jewish teens who feel no angst about coming out as anti-Zionist in articles in their Evanston high school newspaper. They have the support of their parents. But when Rose was becoming an anti-Zionist, her community was opposed. “Judaism and Zionism are totally synonymous!” my mother told her many times, when she tried to talk about the shift she was going through.
At a Christian Zionist conference in Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declares that Trump is an “immovable friend of Israel,” and “anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism.” And National Security Adviser John Bolton referred to the “so-called state of Palestine.”
Israel’s threat of annexation is a crisis for liberal Zionists because it makes them confront a reality: There is not going to be a two-state solution. Yesterday Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street warned supporters: “Members of the Trump administration are opening the door to a one-state scenario where Palestinians will live as second-class citizens.” But that scenario exists right now, and liberal Zionists have done precious little to oppose it.
When J Street advocates for “Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish homeland,” it is supporting a concept that has been a contradiction-in-terms since Israel’s establishment. Abba Solomon argues that J Street and Bernie Sanders too cannot face the fact that political Zionism means perpetual Jewish domination, or at best custody, of Palestinian lives.