When Peter Beinart said that Republicans like Israel because it’s an “ethnic democracy,” ADL Deputy Director Ken Jacobson pounced, saying that he was delegitimizing Israel as a “racist state,” and fostering the victimization of Jews. Beinart responded that Israel isn’t racist. Jonathan Ofir urges him to acknowledge the reality of what Israel has become.
Democrats voted 209-16 for a resolution that characterizes the nonviolent BDS campaign that targets Israel as bigoted. The Dems made the Israel lobby group AIPAC grateful for bipartisan support, and fought off Trump’s efforts to characterize Dems as “anti-Israel.” The vote demonstrates the importance of the Israel lobby for the 2020 presidential race, but if you call out the lobby the NYT will say you’re anti-semitic.
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.
Yesterday, Palestinian sources tweeted out a video of Israeli security forces cheering as they blew…
David Halbfinger’s report on a J Street tour for young Jews that spent a day in Palestine offered horrifying glimpses of conditions in occupied Susiya and Hebron that caused two on the tour to question the idea of a Jewish state. The New York Times report represents a giant step forward, and a real sign of things to come. There’s no way to prettify apartheid,
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.
If there’s any consensus from the political chaos in Israel, it’s that the Trump peace plan will get kicked down the road again for months, right into the U.S. election season, so it may disappear entirely. Several Israel observers say the plan is over. They warn that Trump will be even more of a presence in Netanyahu’s next campaign, but the prime minister is badly wounded by his failure to make a government.
Peter Beinart takes another brave step inside the Zionist community by endorsing conditions on US aid supporting Israeli atrocities, but he continues to count on US Jewish community to change US policy when the track record is miserable. Progressives have more diverse coalitions, and respect the fact that BDS originates from members of the oppressed group.
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.