“Affirmation of Israel’s Jewishness… is the very foundation of peace, its DNA,” claims Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
Well, if that’s really true then one can only conclude that Israel will never exist in peace — not because it will fail in getting the affirmation it demands from its Palestinian neighbors but because Jews themselves can’t agree on the nature of Israel’s Jewishness. And if Jews can’t agree on this, what business does Israel have in demanding such recognition from anyone else?
AssociatedPress reports:
When Hillary Rubin immigrated from the U.S. to Israel, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and descendant of a famed Zionist visionary felt that she had finally arrived in her true home.
But now that religious authorities are questioning the 29-year-old Michigan native’s Jewish pedigree and refusing to recognize her marriage, she’s having second thoughts.
Rubin is at the center of a deepening rift between the world’s two biggest Jewish communities – the American and Israeli. Religious life in Israel is dominated by the strict ultra-Orthodox establishment, which has growing political power and has become increasingly resistant to any inroads by the more liberal movements that predominate among American Jews.
Many Americans – whose faith is seen by the ultra-Orthodox as blurred by intermarriage and fading adherence to tradition – are feeling rejected and unwelcome.
“I feel like I am caught in the middle of these two worlds,” said Rubin, who was raised in a liberal Jewish home in a Detroit suburb. “On the one hand I’m far too traditional for American society. On the flip side, I am not religious enough for the rabbinate in Israel.”
It’s a far cry from the days when American Jews looked to Israel as a source of pride and inspiration and Israel could rely on America’s Jews as a source of unconditional moral support and fundraising. With ultra-Orthodox Jews the fastest growing sector in Israel, often holding the balance of power in coalition governments, open strains between the communities are now far more common.
Over the summer, a proposed law that would have consecrated the Orthodox monopoly over conversion in Israel caused an uproar among Diaspora Jews. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to shelve the bill in hopes of finding a compromise.
Last week, American and Israeli Jewish leaders held a conference in Jerusalem aiming at ironing out their differences. But the closed-door sessions were tense and all sides stuck to their positions, said one participant, American Rabbi Jerome Epstein, of the Conservative movement.
He warned that the conflict could “tear the people apart” if no compromise is found.
“There are a lot of Americans who normally would not get involved in Israeli politics but who are saying, ‘What you are doing is delegitimizing me. It is not enough to want my support and want my money, you have to be willing to recognize me as a human being and as a Jew,’ and they feel that is not happening,” he said.
But an Israeli state that delegitimizes Palestinians who can prove their ancestral and property claims and that depends on tax dollars paid by non-Jewish Americans — that’s OK?
As the pendulum swings, it appears that Israel will indeed destroy itself from within, sooner than anyone expected.
Every day there is an article in this column that shows how Israel is going to destroy itself from within.
The process is under way. How long will it take?
Israel always searched desperately for a Jewish émigré group with no place else to go. Most olims enjoyed the early years of free this and free that at US taxpayers expense, but when the taxes for this and that started to be sucked through the pores in their skin they ran back to the West.
The only group that didn’t fit in the West because it is such a weird ad-mix of its real XIVth Century Central European roots– known in Israel as Haredi (many of whom don’t even recognize Israel’s legitimacy!!!)– imposing on Jews unbearable anachronisms and inbred diseases, was most responsive to the ENDLESS WELFARE deal Israel offered them exclusively, of course, at US taxpayers’ expense. It seemed right that there should be a place where these parasites could live multiplying like happy locusts, unencumbered by reality and its costs; for as God’s chosen of the chosen, wherever they relieve themselves it is holy ground. For now Israel’s totally secular Zionists who think the only thing they have in common is an archeological myth of RACE– NOT a religion for they are mostly secular– desperately need a breeding stock because in their decadence they discovered the condom, diaphragm, morning after pill, and homosexuality as ideal sterile perpetuators of a one generation’s hedonia unencumbered by screaming kids, faithfulness demands and sharing salaries with families instead of “Ecstasy” dealers. Such folks are not much help in a demographic competition with Palestinians for whom growing family is everything. And so, the only Jews– real bloodline Jews to fit the racial thesis of Zionism– who massively reproduce like rabbits (when not praying) are the Haredi. So far, they populate a mere 25% of “settlements,” the rest are empty waiting the next racially pure generation inbred. But better the locusts that are purer than the World Jewry that can’t help losing their hearts to shiksas (non-Jews), producing Zionist resoluteness as impure as their race. The Haredi can be settled to procreate like rabbits at US taxpayers expense, all their output certified of “pure” maternal stock.
Psycho Abe Foxman of ADL recently begged forgiveness from the Zionist institutions meeting in Jerusalem for not pressing their cause labeling as “sons of Hitler” whomsoever questions Zionism’s legitimacy as he was busy saving Judaism, the race, from “assimilation” (his word) into goy society. An abject failure at combating against prejudice while demanding exclusion he now changed his philosophy and screams at critics of Israel “anti-Semite” while his rotund frame perspires profusely.
And what does this mass infusion of American tax dollars do for the Zionist thesis that all Jews must drop everything and move to THE ONLY land where Jews can live, Greater Israel? Answer: it created a social decline devoid of the moral underpinnings such as the JEWISH ETHIC. In Israel cash talks– even if you’re Haredi– and all the parties needing that Haredi 10% of the vote to take control of the government. So, Zionist racism is finally reinforced in its war of fecundity by Haredi throwing rocks at non-observants from above the belt and sperms fecundating their fertile certified Jewish women from below. This is Zionism’s answer to the Arabs it displaced.
But meanwhile, to real Jews raised on Western values and culturally anti-racist, Israel is an insanity, a rigged game that funnels US tax dollars into the pockets of “real Israelis” like Israel’s Ambassador to the US who enjoys American citizenship so he can come back to his New Jersey home with full privileges and protections should he find his Haredi racial paradise unbearable.
Meanwhile, most Diaspora Jews deem Israel nice place to visit, not to live, unlike Haredi who can’t seem to get such big fat welfare checks elsewhere as they get in Israel at US taxpayers’ expense. We Americans sure pay a lot that we wouldn’t pay anymore for our black citizens for that 10% of Israelis that puts this or that party in power in Israel. Most Jews I know only whisper this in private: thank God I’m not stuck in that mad house like my uncle Leo who went to retired there and came back broke in two years. Do you now see why OUR Jews are OURS, educating OUR kids, caring for OUR health and building OUR cyclotrons? Here they can be all they can be, not just soldiers beating Palestinians on behalf of the ten-percenters that keep the current regime’s shysters in power?
The sooner American jews divorce themselves from the racist tribalism of Israel the better. Nothing is more discordant with the principles of American democracy and one wonders how they can live in America with the hypocrisy of supporting crimes against humanity elsewhere.