My Great Good Friends,
As I wrote in the gloaming of the previous administration; America facilitating the unanimous passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 was the seminal event in the world wide opposition to Israeli oppression of individuals in the occupied territories and the apartheid treatment of their own non-Jewish citizens.
An acquaintance has just returned from Israeli where he interviewed Jews and Gentiles including members of the Knesset. His on the ground observations confirm my opinion (from reading the Israeli press) that the discussion there is both more nuanced and broader than here. And so again my curiosity is piqued: Why are we only exposed to the Likud version propaganda?
Certainly the traditional left liberal prospective of American Jewry would be expected to rage against statist oppression, institutionalized violence, civil rights predicated on professions of religious belief and communal punishment, if it were practiced by any other theocracy.
Paradoxically, while my acquaintance was there, laws were enacted to bar entrance to the country based upon an individuals beliefs versus actions. Orwell’s nightmare of INGSOC thought police made real.
And a pitiful paradox at that. As Ms Mairav Zonszein wrote in The Nation:
“The law passed last week by Israel’s Knesset makes clear that being pro-Israel has nothing to do with being Jewish, or liberal, or supporting democratic values, human rights or critical thinking. By trying to fend off criticism of it’s democratic infractions, the Israeli government has doubled down on it’s anti-democratic policies, declaring war on American liberals, and as regarding the Jewish community, turning Israel’s greatest allies into it’s greatest nemeses.”
I remember with disgust the damning silence in 1982 from my liberal friends when the massacres at Sabra and Chatila were exposed as murdering as many as 3,500 innocent women, children and elderly men. Even then their painful cognitive dissonance, of knowing that they had witnessed a crime but they could not bring themselves to criticize the criminals, was a foreshadowing.
A foreshadowing of the hegemonic veil of American Jewry’s support for Israel being ‘rent in twain from top to bottom’ (KJV) thirty five years later. It’s been a long time, but from death camps to J Street was a long way to travel.
For a profound exposition on the subject I commend to your attention Peter Beinart’s essay “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” published in the New York Review of Books. Beinart is a 40 year old Orthodox Jew, professed Zionist and former editor of The New Republic. His attack on the AIPAC establishment for supporting Israeli apartheid at the cost of the community’s ethos is scathing.
Beinart in part; “For several decades the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now – to their horror – they are finding many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”
Finally, to Likud Israeli apartheid policies destroying cultural diaspora as well as the inhabitants of the occupied territories; Professor Stephen M. Cohen, Director of the Jewish policy archive at NYU.
Cohen in part: “Jews are torn between two instincts, they want to protect Israel but they see Israel’s actions as undermining their basic values as Jews, as Americans and as human beings. Israeli policy seems to them to be xenophobic, chauvinistic, ultra-religious, non-pluralistic and discriminatory towards foreigners.”
And so, to the extent the old Zionist’s diversion defense of accusing anyone who objects to Israeli policy of being an anti-Semite is not going to work anymore, this brings us back to UN SCR 2334.
I confess to being light years removed from the fear and suffering imposed by each side on the other in the Palestinian / Israeli conflict. My concern, my only concern, is for America – and I hate anyone who uses the freedom America grants them to hurt her.
As I predicted (A Big Tent, 01-16-17, SPQR.Today) the impact of the UN Resolution will be to cast light on the fact that it is only the United States which enables Israeli apartheid. And we do so to our own strategic disadvantage only because their fifth column in government and the media shape public perception whereby our blood and treasure can be squandered for their interests.
- A UN report written by two Americans (available in its entirety at electronicintifada.net) and unanimously approved condemns Israel as an “Apartheid State”. Which in international law is the penultimate condemnation, second only to “Genocidal State”.
- Ambassador Nikki Haley demands, under threat of US funding, the report be withdrawn.
- The Head of the UN Commission which published the report publicly resigns.
- And another million Americans realize we are alone as the only country naive (I would say magnanimous) enough to permit these genocidal fucks to infiltrate our policy formulation with individuals more loyal to Israel than America.
These are great days for freedom,
-ATN
