A quarter of Jewish voters polled by the Jewish Electorate Institute said they believed Israel is an apartheid state. This number rises to 38% for voters under 40.
Right-wing Israel supporters booed Biden deputy assistant Erika Moritsugu as she addressed the “No Fear Rally,” an event billed as a stand against antisemitism but seemed largely focused on defending Israel.
Liberal Zionist groups ran away from a rally in DC equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism– as even an organizer admits that Israel is just too “divisive” an issue in the Jewish community these days. The event had a rightwing religious feeling. The Washington Post said “hundreds” attended the affair.
Zionism has not yet murdered Judaism but it has undermined its moral and historical integrity. Just as Israel must de-Zionize in order to finally find its place in the Middle East, so, too, must Jews abroad de-Zionize in order to reclaim their own traditions, experiences and communal validity.
In his recently published diary, the Conservative politician and former Minister Sir Alan Duncan, denounces in forthright terms his own Government’s acquiescence in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians with the active influence of the conservative Israel lobby. “[T]he rules of propriety, and all the morality and principle that goes with it, are discarded and rewritten to accommodate this exceptional pro-Israel infiltration into the very centre of our public life,” Duncan asserts.
While an uptick in antisemitic incidents were well documented in May during an escalation between Israel and Gaza, attacks on Palestinians in Canada also increased although with much less attention.
After the Cornell President, Martha Pollack, issued a statement about rising antisemitism “amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East,” evidently at the urging of pro-Israel students who feel “unsafe” in the light of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Palestinian students and others sympathetic to the Palestinian cause were angry and demoralized, as she exhibited a lack of recognition for Palestinian suffering and grief in the Gaza attack.
Israel’s new president Isaac Herzog has said that left wing critics of Israel are responsible for murderous attacks on Jews. And when asked about growing American Jewish criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, Herzog says it is because “American Jews have no clue about” what life is like for Israelis and have only a “superficial” and “short-sighted” understanding of the conflict.
A leading U.S. Israel lobby group honors Netanyahu in a morning meeting then throws him under the bus in the afternoon– its CEO saying that a Naftali Bennett government would make it easier to sell Israel to the Democratic Party.
Jews are in danger. From what, is the question. Are we as a people (if we exist as a people) a Light unto the Nations, or is our narrative a self-intoxication that every ethnic group indulges in? Abba Solomon asks of Jewish identity in the aftermath of the latest Gaza slaughter.