On Christmas, Robert Herbst calls on Christians to intervene with the Jewish community over Israel. “Speak truth to our power. Talk to us critically about what we are doing to the Palestinians. Not once, not twice, but over and over again.”
Jonathan Ofir is a tourist in Portugal, contemplating how colonialism can become the past– and how it’s still a present-day reality in Israel.
US writers in intellectual journals bash Zionism. “It is anathema to say so,” Nathan Goldman writes in the Baffler, but Zionism is ethnonationalism, which is the opposite of liberal democracy; while Molly Crabapple writes in the New York Review of Books, “Jewish ethno-nationalism is a poison like all ethno-nationalisms.”
Avigail Abarbanel calls on liberal Zionists such as Rabbi Daniel Zemel to stop pretending to be nice and say clearly and unequivocally that they believe that the Jewish people have more right to survive than the Palestinian people, that Zionist forces were justified to kick 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes to create Israel.
Isaac Herzog’s belief that intermarriage is a “plague” reflects Zionism’s inability to imagine a Judaism apart from Orthodoxy. Palestinians have already paid the price for Zionism. Israeli women are likely to be next. If Israelis want a way out of this labyrinth, they would have to dismantle the Zionist state.
Zionism’s adherents see the ideology as a kind of ‘essence of life’, essential to the survival of Jews. Therefore the person who breaks with the ideology has betrayed a social contract, and by citing liberal values, has offended Zionists and made them feel lesser, Jonathan Ofir explains. No wonder the person who breaks often is socially ostracized or regarded with great mistrust.
A ban by Israel on herding black goats – on the pretext they cause environmental damage – is to be repealed after nearly seven decades of enforcement that has decimated the pastoral traditions of Palestinian communities. The Israeli government appears to have finally conceded that, in an age of climate change, the threat of forest fires to Israeli communities is rapidly growing in the goats’ absence. Jonathan Cooks writes that the story of the lowly black goat, which has been almost eliminated from Israel, is not simply one of unintended consequences. It serves as a parable for the delusions and self-destructiveness of a Zionism bent on erasing Palestinians and creating a slice of Europe in the Middle East.
The discussion over the essential racism of Zionism is in the open. Israeli Justice minister Ayelet Shaked made it clear, and Israeli journalist Gideon Levy thanks her for her candidness. Levy published a column in Haaretz yesterday that all but says Zionism is racism. He calls it a movement that “contradicts human rights, and is thus indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps even racist movement, as proponents of justice worldwide maintain”.
Last Monday, Senate minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is also a major supporter of the anti-BDS legislation, diverted from his Senate speech on health care, to address anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and BDS. He equated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions with anti-Semitism.
The UN-commissioned report on Israeli Apartheid that was shelved last week (two days after it appeared) is no doubt explosive. The very idea that Israel is guilty of the crime of Apartheid is one that should give everyone pause. But there is another explosion in the report. Israel and its supporters have desperately sought to shelve a discussion about Zionism as a racist ideology. The Apartheid report brings it back to the forefront.