Israelis live in fear of Palestinians, and speak of a hundred years war. These conditions have produced a militaristic majoritarian culture where everyone admires Trump and even leftwingers dismiss Palestinian human rights concerns. “They have plenty to eat.” Phil Weiss’s observations from a tour on the 50th anniversary of occupation.
Memoirs by American Jews reveal that the 1967 war revolutionized Jewish life: even leftwingers like Joel Kovel were initially swept up in the fear for Israel and excitement over its victory, but those fears helped produce the most powerful force in American Jewish life since: the neoconservatives who, inflamed by memories of the Holocaust, vowed to support Israel in the face of an indifferent world.
“We had both written plays about Israel and Palestine that were deemed too political, biased, left wing, angry, anti-Israel, and even anti-Semitic. Artistic directors said they would lose half their boards if they produced our shows and to be fair they probably would.” –Ismail Khalidi and David Zellnik announce a new project for theater pieces on Palestine.
At Shavuot celebration at Tzedek in Chicago, Marc Ellis says Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust thinker who believed that Israel was the path to bring Jews out of suffering and towards redemption. Unfortunately there was no room for Palestinian suffering in that worldview. So relates Liz Rose, who used to write adoring letters to Wiesel, and planted a tree in Israel in his name.
Tony Judt’s disillusionment with Israel as an “anachronism” began when he volunteered during the Six Day War: “For the first time I met Israelis who were chauvinistic in every meaning of the word: anti-Arab in a sense bordering upon racism; quite undisturbed at the prospect of killing Arabs wherever possible, frequently regretting that they had not been allowed to fight their way through to Damascus and beat down the Arabs for good and all.”
Israel needs to enforce laws against polygamy because Palestinians are overpopulating the Negev, Jerusalem, and the Galilee, says Michael Oren, former ambassador to the US. Oh and by the way, US liberal Jewish support for Israel is in “radical… implosion” because they see Israel as oppressive, Oren says. Maybe they have good reason?
Phil Weiss shares a photo essay from when Donald Trump visited Jerusalem and the Old City. Israeli security wrapped sites he was visiting with white sheets ala Christo, to keep anyone from seeing him, or disrupting events. There were armed checkpoints for Jewish Israelis, and a surveillance balloon in the sky.
When Israeli soldiers carried her novel in one hand and a gun in the other into Gaza in 2014, trying to kill “bad guys,” that was all that a writer could ask for her work, Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan says in New York, in a tour sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
A leading New York rabbi says that Jewish Voice for Peace has “hearts of stone, Jewishly cold, lifeless and emptied of Jewish feeling,” and says the group’s statements on terrorism “would make Osama bin Laden blush,” and that they also seem to approve Bashar al-Assad. The April 7 sermon by an excited Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a sign of how rocked the Jewish community is today by the threat of anti-Zionism and the boycott movement, BDS.
Jared Kushner is related by marriage to Hart Hasten, a Holocaust survivor and kingmaker in Indiana. The Hasten-Kushner clan is the Jewish connection Trump and Pence shared before they became political partners.