Israel’s new Education Minister Rafi Peretz caused international uproar recently by supporting gay conversion therapy and suggesting that intermarriage is like a “2nd Holocaust”. Though the uproar over intermarriage was mostly outside Israel, for good reason – similar views about intermarriage have been expressed historically by the Israeli left.
Joe Biden has praised racist Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Golda Meir on many occasions, but don’t expect Kamala Harris to score points off him for it, as she did over his fondness for southern racists. She has had a warm meeting with Netanyahu, refused to criticize Israel’s human rights record, and told the rightwing pro-Israel group AIPAC that she raised money for Israel as a girl and Israel’s story reminds her of the civil rights struggle in the U.S.
The ethos of Zionism from its inception was to create a new kind of Jew, disconnected from the Jew’s former alleged diasporic weakness. Jonathan Ofir contends that this basic notion represents the weakness of Zionism, which Zionists need to relinquish in order to move Israeli society toward any kind of peaceful coexistence with Arabs.
“After the Holocaust, Jews are allowed to do anything”. In these “chilling words” Golda Meir,…