The Trump peace plan was brought to you by the Jewish community. Over the last 20 years, vigorous opposition to the pro-Israel right inside the US Jewish community has been quashed, and liberal Zionists have enforced that line by refusing to organize as equals with the community Israel is oppressing: Palestinians.
The assault on BDS in the US and the rise of Democratic Party organizations to support Israel are evidence of the progress on the Palestine issue in the U.S. in the last decade. At last the matter is politicized. Some Democratic pols openly support Palestinian rights. This is where the struggle really needs to be, in Washington; and we can thank Benjamin Netanyahu and Bari Weiss for the damage they’ve done to their own cause.
Bret Stephens’s controversial and self-satisfied column about Jewish genius is of course about Israel. His ideas of cultural supremacy justify Palestinian oppression. When he says that the Jewish gift for original and highminded thinking has fostered…. anti-Zionism!
Bernie Sanders is being painted as an antisemite by some pro-Israel idelogues because he has taken strong positions in support of Palestinian human rights. Progressive defenders of Palestinian rights need to mobilize to oppose the campaign against Sanders, even if they don’t support Sanders’s presidential ambitions.
Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg derides American political culture as ignorant and ahistorical and says he is a “misanthrope”, while extolling Zionism. “All of Judaism is Zionism because we are a universal religion focused on a very particular place.” Anti-Zionism is essentially murderous, he said, aimed at the “soul” of the Jewish people.
Hannah Gurman reviews Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism: “Ultimately, Weiss and other neoconservative analysts of contemporary anti-semitism force Jews into a cynical politics that pits Jewish survival against other movements for social justice. Progressives have a more compelling vision to offer in which a politics of solidarity addresses threats against Jewish communities not at the expense of other “others,” but alongside them.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of the Forward, issues extraordinary claims: 97 percent of Jews are Zionists, anti-Zionists in the Jewish community are as anomalous as Trump supporters who are black; she is the “number one publisher of Palestinian voices in America”; and intellectuals who cheered demonstrators at a pro-Israel panel bear responsibility for the spike in anti-semitism and even synagogue murders.
Bari Weiss has been everywhere lately promoting her book that says that anti-Zionism is dangerous anti-Semitism, and oh by the way, white nationalism is also a threat to Jews. She says anti-Zionist Jews are just trying to blend in with the “cool group,” when they should be celebrating Jewish specialness, and our “radical ideas” that still “drive people crazy.”
Bari Weiss has written a book about how to fight anti-Semitism, but during an interview with Bill Maher where he was telling anti-Semitic jokes non-stop she just laughed. Jonathan Ofir says this is because they agree on Israel and Zionism.
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).