Liberal Zionists’ moral problem is that they are so wed to “the right of the Jewish people to a state” they seek to discredit any real program to pressure Israel for Palestinian rights. Liberal Zionists could maintain this contradiction when fighting Trump seemed more important to Americans than fighting rightwing Israel; but they have now lost this figleaf, and there is an urgent need for real action, not lip service, on Palestinian rightslessness.
The shots that killed Yitzhak Rabin were not the opening shots of a civil war – they merely exposed the hidden war that had existed within Zionism since the beginning.
Americans Muslims for Palestine is calling on Keith Ellison to drop out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin. “We do not understand Mr. Ellison’s rationale to be speaking at an event that’s honoring a war criminal,” says AMP Regional Director Shakeel Syed.
Yitzhak Rabin never evolved from warrior to peacemaker. Until the very end, he retained his “warrior” attitude by openly resorting to the mass killing of civilians to serve his political aims. This includes Operation Accountability, a week-long bombing campaign against the residents of south Lebanon in 1993, that took place as the Oslo Accords were being negotiated.
Michael Arria is on vacation this week, and Phil Weiss is filling in on trendspotting.…
Bari Weiss says antisemites convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to back out of a Rabin memorial. AOC actually was concerned with Rabin’s human rights record. But she and her supporters now join the “three-headed dragon of modern anti-Semitism” living in Bari Weiss’s imagination. And in Weiss’s perspective of sacred Jewish victimhood, defamation and dishonesty are no vice when fighting the enemies of the Jews.
The lack of moral consistency from pro-Israel groups is hardly surprising, but you rarely see such a nice distillation within the span of just a few days.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s withdrawal last Friday from an October memorial to Yitzhak Rabin is an act of irreverence for an Israeli leader we’ve not seen before at her political level; and the drama has roiled the pro-Israel community. Even the Biden campaign spoke up, an aide saying that AOC’s decision was “problematic” for the Democratic Party.
Even now, 25 years after the assassination, the majority of the Israeli center and left cannot divest itself of the Oslo Accords and of the chimera of a two-states solution. They are, after all, sacred. They are what Oseh Shalom Bimromaiv planned. Any attempts to deviate from it is denying scripture. And so the devotees of Oslo and Rabin become the equivalent of monks, dead to the world and singing the sacred hymns. The divine plan has long lost any connection to reality, but anyone challenging it quickly becomes anathema.
Peter Beinart is so important in Jewish culture because he insists on humanizing Palestinians, and refuses to use the Holocaust lens of perpetual victimhood when considering Palestinian resistance. Palestinians are not driven by Jew hatred, as so many pro-Israel leaders argue, but by a natural response to dispossession and occupation.