Can you imagine what would happen if any American, let alone a member of Congress, wrote the following:
My generation, born in the ’50s, grew up with the deep, almost religious belief that the two countries shared basic values and principles. Back then, Americans and Israelis talked about democracy, human rights, respect for other nations and human solidarity. It was an age of dreamers and builders who sought to create a new world, one without prejudice, racism or discrimination.
Listening to today’s political discourse, one can’t help but notice the radical change in tone. My children have watched their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, kowtow to a fundamentalist coalition in Israel. They are convinced that what ties Israel and America today is not a covenant of humanistic values but rather a new set of mutual interests: war, bombs, threats, fear and trauma. How did this happen? Where is that righteous America? Whatever happened to the good old Israel?
Mr. Netanyahu’s great political “achievement” has been to make Israel a partisan issue and push American Jews into a corner. He has forced them to make political decisions based on calculations that go against what they perceive to be American interests. The emotional extortion compels Jews to pressure the Obama administration, a government with which they actually share values and worldviews, when those who love Israel should be doing the opposite: helping the American government to intervene and save Israel from itself.
***The winds of isolation and narrowness are blowing through Israel. Rude and arrogant power brokers, some of whom hold senior positions in government, exclude non-Jews from Israeli public spaces. Graffiti in the streets demonstrates their hidden dreams: a pure Israel with “no Arabs” and “no gentiles.” They do not notice what their exclusionary ideas are doing to Israel, to Judaism and to Jews in the diaspora. In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.
If this trend continues, all vestiges of democracy will one day disappear, and Israel will become just another Middle Eastern theocracy. It will not be possible to define Israel as a democracy when a Jewish minority rules over a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — controlling millions of people without political rights or basic legal standing.
This Israel would be much more Jewish in the narrowest sense of the word, but such a nondemocratic Israel, hostile to its neighbors and isolated from the free world, wouldn’t be able to survive for long.
That was Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset. I’m sure right now someone at Commentary or the Weekly Standard is coming up with a way to call him a self-loathing Jew.
wrb
Burg, the epitome of the self-loathing Jew
there are lots more
Edit This essay already merited this headline in The Jerusalem Post
Corner Stone
Mmmm…Turkey women’s indoor volleyball team…
cathyx
Peaceful existence. No war. What a concept.
JPL
According to a friend there is a real feeling that Obama is not doing enough to help the Jews. She can’t figure out why they would think that and I asked if they watched fox news. Actually all of MSM is responsible for that thinking.
c u n d gulag
How will our Dominionist Evangelical Christians ever get swept up, totally nekkid, towards Heaven to sit at Christ’s side, unless the Jews in Israel serve as willing cannon fodder?
We really need to rethink supporting Apartheid Israel.
Mitt will do whatever the neocons tell him.
The only hope for Israel, is if Obama in his second term, tries to do what Jimmy Carted did – instead, this time, with the Israeli’s and the Palestinians.
And, I can hear the neocon’s wailing, gnashing of teeth, and tearing at their hair and garments, as I wrote that.
I’m sure that John Bolton’s, Bill Kristol’s, and Jennifer Rubin’s heads just exploded at the thought that that’s what Obama might decide to do.
FlipYrWhig
@JPL: I think that’s like worrying that the US government doesn’t do enough to help Walmart. When you’re a dominant, cocksure presence on the scene, how much “help” do you really need? Israel is not an underdog, it’s an “overdog.”
beltane
@JPL: Help the Jews to do what? Maybe it’s because I’m only 1/2 Jewish but I really don’t understand why I can’t criticize the right-wing government of Israel for racist behavior in the same exact way we can all criticize the right-wing government of Hungary for racist and anti-Semitic behavior.
General Stuck
I fully agree with Mr. Burg
Dennis SGMM
@JPL:
Well, he hasn’t (yet) attacked Iran and he hasn’t sicced the 101st Airborne on the West Bank. Would the Israelis be mollified if he provided the settlers with Home Depot gift cards?
Ohmmade
NRO will coin a new phrase today: JINO
wrb
No chance without a change in Israel’s government. Bibi doesn’t want peace. He just wants to go slowly enough at taking the West Bank that he gets away with it.
Woodrowfan
and the US is following right behind on the same path….
kdaug
I care deeply about Tasmania and the Maldives.
Occasionally Reykjavík.
Lahru
We need Isreal to be just another country comprised of those that live there be those Palestinians, Jewish, and whoever they attract by regionality or those that seek what Isreal has to offer.
America the same, I don’t know why some people must subjigate certain nationalities to make their patriotism more meaningful than someone with a differnet language or skin color.
I guess the be scared narrative is part of it.
Personally I am willing to embrace anyone who does me no harm and is willing to make eye contact and converse.
eldorado
at this point i’m totally up for occupation of the west bank.
by u.n. or u.s.a forces.
Bizono
@Corner Stone: Excellent suggestion.
FlipYrWhig
@beltane: Like you, I have one parent whose family was Jewish (though never especially observant), and I have similar feelings. I’m 40. I can’t remember a time when Israel wasn’t swaggering and bellicose to some degree. I take it that people older than I am have a persistent view that Israel is a plucky little enclave surrounded by hostile forces it must heroically oppose with every ounce of strength. It hasn’t been like that for years and years and years, but I suppose some impressions stick fast.
Martin
‘Some way’? The Weekly Standard will just straight up call him a self-loathing Jew.
muddy
They don’t reminisce much about stuff like blowing up the Brits in the King David hotel and whatnot.
scav
Scuse the OT minirant, better here than in the last thread. We are now essentially baking fish in streams in the Midweat. For a second, I nearly thought we were actually boiling them because I was reading it in the Guard and so converted 100 degrees to Celcius, but that is just silly. Nevertheless. Tens of thousands.
I’ve learned to be really tired of Israel and knee-jerk supporters thereof. Bibi gets it in his head that that the USA is his immediate problem, fires on a few USN ships and no doubt there will be a few columnists saying we should have sent in the Marines to support his efforts.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@muddy: Well now let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who. I suspect it’s kinda like that.
Todd
@Corner Stone:
Earlier this week, it was fortuitous that womens beach volleyball was on at lunch. We’ve got big screen TVs in several places.
muddy
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): LOL, I heard it with the accent in my head, thanks!
JPL
@Dennis SGMM: and others..
My friend doesn’t agree and neither do her relatives and friends. She can’t figure out why there is that feeling among the Jewish community when he has. She just read a book I recommended called The Lemon Tree and is going to pass it on.
Jennifer
I’m an American, and I wrote something very similar here a couple of years ago, which prompted no outraged accusations of “antisemitism” mostly because no one reads my shitty little blog – except maybe the guy who wrote this piece, since he sounds like he’s channeling me from two years ago.
liberal
@wrb:
Not to pick on you in particular, since the sentiment that “It’s Bibi and the Right’s fault” is prevalent in many comments above.
But the fact is that this attitude and policy was embraced long ago by most of the Israeli political spectrum, definitely including the Labor Party.
Sure, Bibi et al. are worse, but the others weren’t all that great either.
Tom Levenson
Saw this. Was enormously relieved (while simultaneous saddened at the necessity of the thought) to realize that not all Israelis have signed on to what seems to me to be an obvious suicide-murder-suicide pact w. the extremes of Palestinian politics.
I do not see how any long term stability for Israel or anyone else results from an attempt to recreate either the Balkans or South Africa on the eastern Med.
Elizabelle
@Jennifer:
Terrific blogpost.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@muddy: I typed it with the accent, so I’m glad it worked!
Mr Stagger Lee
@Todd: I bet you guys weren’t watching the women’s weightlifting heavyweight division, on TV
you male chauvinst pigs you, mmmm Turkish Women’s Volleyball team!(good thing I’m writing this in NE Ohio with a large Greek population)
General Stuck
Oh, and great post!!
Citizen_X
@scav:
“Why does the US Navy hate the troops?”
Gator90
@Jennifer: Jennifer, your post was powerfully written and makes a fine companion piece to Burg’s article, except that he was smart enough to avoid the reflexive and brainless “apartheid” epithet, and you were not.
Also, #%#& Helen Thomas.
pseudonymous in nc
The slow decline of Labor Zionism is a genuine issue in Israeli politics and civic life. American Jews are, for the most part, connected to an political tradition that is fading away in Israel because of demographic changes, not least the growth of ex-Soviet immigrants and ultra-orthodox and settler blocs that dictate the direction of the nation.
Redshift
@wrb:
As a former Israeli cabinet official put it a couple of years ago (don’t remember who; he was being interviewed on the radio), the problem is that to succeed, “the Palestinian leadership needs peace, Netanyahu needs a peace process.”
Professor
@wrb: Did you know that the Jerusalem Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp?
Cacti
Israel is a democracy in the sense that the former confederate states were a democracy from 1866 to 1963.
Egypt Steve
@liberal: I agree. Personally, I blame Shimon Peres. He could have cut a deal with Arafat right after the assassination of Rabin. But he lost his nerve, and all momentum was gone forever.
Corner Stone
@Egypt Steve: Arafat wanted nothing to do with a peace plan either.
It reminds me of the saying where a leader of a doomed political party is warned that if he continues down the path his party will be destroyed. And he responds, “As long as I’m in charge as it goes down, that’s fine.”
Jennifer
@Egypt Steve: Corner Stone is right. It was Arafat who deep-sixed the best chance for peace that has yet come along.
vestigial
@beltane: I’m a quarter-jew and I find myself exactly half as enthusiastic about a jewish state than you.
Corner Stone
@Mr Stagger Lee: Mmmm…Slukova…
MattMinus
@Gator90:
Not sure if serious.
jwb
OT, NPR is trying to find Romney’s salvation in Asian voters. Really, NPR has become utterly useless.
Gex
It is very strange having a Jewish acquaintance who I find utterly delightful except for his maniacal hatred of Palestinians and inability to see that the Jews are on the dominant side of the ethnic strife now.
But what the fuck does he care? They aren’t really people. Not like Jews are. Why these assholes are never mad a the Germans or the British or any of the people who created this mess is beyond me. No, we/they kick people out of their homes AND get pissed off at them for finding that unfair.
Gator90
@MattMinus: Yes, serious.
beltane
@vestigial: And both of us have more of a legal right to live in Israel than the people whose ancestors have lived there for tens of generations.
Gex
@MattMinus: Just because it looks like, sounds like, walks like, and has a genetic signature of a duck does not mean you can conclude it is a duck.
Todd
@Corner Stone:
Wish I was 25 years younger, just to have a chance to approach her so she could guffaw and shut me down…
El Cid
@Jennifer: Flat out disagree. Arafat was presented with an absurd proposal which he couldn’t have enforced among Palestinians had he agreed to it. Oslo was a shitty offer, but then, what else is new? Propose whatever, call it a ‘peace’ plan and a ‘great deal’, and bang, ball’s in the Palestinians’ court. Throw out a number like “95%” of “the West Bank,” and, gosh, sounds like a great deal.
Just like real estate, until you see which parts of the land located where the local company is willing to grant you, such as the space under one side of a local overpass connected by a tunnel to the walkway around the sewage treatment plant. But it’s 100 acres!
Go look back at the characteristics of the laughable ‘state’ which would have come out of that ‘peace process,’ and tell yourself how an independent nation might possibly have survived from such a joke of a collection of isolated mini-cantons.
It’s a pure and simple ideological myth and leading example of lazy, obedient “journalism” that this is continually repeated, that peace was at hand had only Arafat not walked away, etc.
Look — there will not be “peace” until every single desired square inch (and no, not every square inch is desired, you’ve got to squeeze those Palestinians into somewhere) of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and then once this is done, Palestinians will be free to take their Gaza Strippified tattered jigsaw puzzle remainder of the West Bank and their criss-crossings by highways and walls and “gates” and whatever, and their lack of control of borders or airspace or transit or shipment, and we can crow about how ‘peace’ has finally been achieved as whatever sad crew signs the agreement and we all break our arms patting ourselves on the back for having done this great thing.
J
Great piece! and the achievement isn’t diminished by the fact that in a way everything Burg says is perfectly obvious. His attention is directed to matters of war and peace, international relations and the like; but we he says goes for issues of fairness and social justice within national boundaries just as well. The idealism which (along with other things to be sure) was such a prominent part of our self-understanding has been replaced by Randian claptrap and crackpot religiosity. The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Valdivia
@pseudonymous in nc:
excellent point. A lot of people don’t take this into account.
JPL
@El Cid: And yet we have a presidential candidate who thinks it was the culture of Israel that allowed their wealth. The US MSM supports this idea also.
Sick, sick, sick…
greenergood
In the 1990s, I copy-edited some books by Israeli Holocaust survivor and physicist Israel Shahak (‘Jewish History, Jewish Religion’, ‘Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies’, the foreword to which was written by Christopher Hitchens, before he went all pro-Iraq War, and ‘Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel’ – all Pluto Press). Attacked by Zionists, and praised by neo-Nazis, it was bound to be dismissed – both parties tried to co-opt the book for their own devices, whereas he was on a personal mission to explain and exhort. Shahak’s book opened my eyes wide (middle-class, Westchester County, NY-er, raised Catholic). But what I remember most was speaking with Mr Shahak, in the early 1990s, when the Intertubes were still pretty primitive. I needed to ask him about some stuff about his manuscript, and spoke with him over a really bad phone connection – and he was just so effusive and grateful that someone like me (I’d explained to him my background) UNDERSTOOD what he was writing about. People like him in Israel, and in the US, are more numerous than we are allowed to see by a media that is in thrall to the US and Israeli MSM. I am not anti-Semitic, Jew-hating, self-hating (well, except for other reasons), but so frustrated that there is a groundswell of people in the US and Israel (and elsewhere, like the UK) who see that the folly of the Israeli military industrial complex’s relationship with the US’s MIC is just the fulfillment of the crazy Rapturers’ dreams.
Jennifer
@El Cid: I didn’t say it was the best plan; I said it was the best chance for peace that has YET come along. I felt at the time and still do that the Palestinian situation today, at this moment, would be better than it is had Arafat accepted and the Palestinians had used concessions already gained to continue to push for the whole ball of wax. Though it’s likely that under the rightwing leadership of Israel over the last decade, pushing for further concessions would probably have led to continued Israeli brutality against Palestinians and continued economic strangling of the Palestinian state.
Still, Arafat made a mistake by not at least countering the proposal, which allowed the “see? We can’t do anything to pacify them!” meme to flourish.
Jennifer
@El Cid: I didn’t say it was the best plan; I said it was the best chance for peace that has YET come along. I felt at the time and still do that the Palestinian situation today, at this moment, would be better than it is had Arafat accepted and the Palestinians had used concessions already gained to continue to push for the whole ball of wax. Though it’s likely that under the rightwing leadership of Israel over the last decade, pushing for further concessions would probably have led to continued Israeli brutality against Palestinians and continued economic strangling of the Palestinian state.
Still, Arafat made a mistake by not at least countering the proposal, which allowed the “see? We can’t do anything to pacify them!” meme to flourish.
Cacti
@jwb:
Doesn’t NPR stand for Nice Polite Republicans?
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
This. The founders of Israel spent years before the creation of their nation conducting what was by any definition terrorism against the British Empire and the local Arabs; and the entire push for the creation of Israel came from European Jews responding to European problems. People can reminisce about an age when Israel was about something other than racism, colonialism and making another people pay for the crimes of Europe, if they want – IMO, there’s never been such an age.
The only difference is that the Jews who created the original Israel were mostly modern, secularized and left-wing Jews, as opposed to the Dark Ages nostalgists who seem to be running the place more and more today. Maybe if the old guard had been left in charge, Israel would be sensible enough by now to stop expanding and try to negotiate in good faith.
But then again, maybe not. My own theory is that growing Israeli intransigence has less to do with their own internal politics than it does with the invulnerability-by-association that their alliance with America grants them (more and more and more as time goes by) – thanks to the U.S. alliance, they have no incentive to stop pushing, because no matter how many egregious crimes they continue to commit, there’s no one to hold them responsible. Power corrupts, and all that…
Atticus Dogsbody
Whatever happened to the good old Israel?
Is that the one with long desert walks, neighbours with hemorroids and baby-spattered rocks?
Patricia Kayden
According to the last poll I saw, only 25% of Jews support Romney. I don’t think most American Jews support apartheid-like tactics — not in South Africa, not in the US South, and not in Israel.
Palestianians need to accept Israel as a legitimate country, and Israel needs to accept a two-state solution. The US should be an impartial broker between the two states.
vestigial
@beltane: Thankfully for the Palestinians, I prefer blueberries to olives or I’d go take their land to grow my snacks.
priscianusjr
@greenergood:
mrmike
@kdaug:
I care deeply about Tasmania and the Maldives.
I’m a big supporter of Tasmania
lucslawyer
I have been rooting for the destruction of israel ever since the USS Liberty…..
Porlock Junior
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, I’m older, by a whole generation. And it was a whole generation ago that I finally started to catch on, courtesy of the government of Israel. It was trivial: they flatly denied a scurrilous rumor, and then proceeded within days to show that the story was true.
Hey, so what? They’re a government! They lie! And I’m not even a Libertarian!! But at last I had seen that maybe that country was not deserving unquestioning credence.
The incident was the planned invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon, which Dr. Fathy Arafat (Yasser’s brother) had been warning of, the lying Arab bastard, in spite of Israel’s sincere and repeated denials, which continued IIRC till they actually launched the invasion.
Oh, BTW, that was 3 months before Sabra and Shatila.
For all that, I see I was slow on the uptake, to have taken even that long to catch on.
Jamey
@Corner Stone: I know, right!?! mmmm
Porlock Junior
@muddy:
Umm, who don’t? This is not snark.
The 60th anniversary of that victory for the heroic resistance forces of Menahem Begin and his friends was celebrated in Israel just a few years ago. And no, I did not mean “commemorated”. The celebrations were widespread, though AFAIK not official.
Funny thing, I don’t recall any such from the 50th anniversary, or the 40th, 30th, or 20th. Or the 10th, even though I remember the news of Brown v Board of education, 2 years before that. Must add this OT:
http://books.google.com/books?id=GlMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
(Scroll down to Herman Talmadge. I loved that.)
Back on topic: A self-hating Jew, or a pro-semitic goy like me, might wonder if this difference is due to a change in Israeli politics.
liberal
@Jennifer:
Uh, I thought one of the terms was that the settlement was to be final and there would be no changes allowed in the future, precisely negating your proposed course of action.
lacp
Look, Israel is going to either exterminate or expel all Palestinians from the West Bank. Why is that so hard to understand?
Jennifer
@liberal: Final is only final if no one challenges it.
As I said, given the leadership of Israel over the past decade, even if the settlement had been accepted, any efforts to improve upon it probably would have been met with economic strangulation and brute force on the part of the Israelis. But Arafat still made a mistake by not countering.