Until recently, American Jews willing to speak out against Israel knew that by doing so they were stepping outside the mainstream. They needed sufficient conviction to withstand the frowns of their relatives. But something different is happening now. Liberal Jews who still see themselves as pro-Israel are finding it increasingly difficult to witness what Israel is doing. Ezra Klein, for instance, writes: “I haven’t become less pro-Israel. But I’ve become much more pessimistic about its prospects, and more confused and occasionally horrified by its policies.”
Tom Gara, referring to Klein’s essay, makes this prediction:
I suspect these kind of essays are the leading edge of an Iraq war style mea culpa process in the media. http://t.co/BglCklowz7
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) July 31, 2014
Some may want to hold on to their pro-Israel sentiment by differentiating between Israel and Netanyahu, but when 50% of Israelis think that Netanyahu has been too soft on Gaza, it’s increasingly hard to see that this is a differentiation worth making. The ugly truth may be that Netanyahu is an all too faithful representation of the nation he leads.
When around 85% of Israelis polled by their own government believe there shouldn’t be a ceasefire, and around 70% say they should annex the rest of Palestine, I’d say that Netanyahu is only the head of a very large snake. There’s a reason that American people of Jewish faith are distancing themselves. It’s because they’ve lived in an *actual* Democracy where equal rights are ingrained into the majority of our minds from birth, where racism and “separate but equal” are increasingly seen as archaic institutions best left in the past. Unlike Israel, a religious, apartheid state that masquerades as progressive in their media propaganda and then creates laws and policies that clearly violate the very humanity of minorities, including “absentee property laws” which allow them to confiscate the land and homes of refugees they’ve created by occupying their country, or the deceitful sterilization of Jewish Ethiopian immigrants by misleading them into believing they were receiving vaccines then sent to “Placement Camps” before they were denied entry for being of “inferior generic quality.”
Hopefully the people of Jewish faith in the world are finally opening their eyes to crimes of Israel since 1948 that so eerily resemble the horrific crimes that they themselves had so recently fled.
And hopefully the world sees that the US has been just as complicit in attempting to establish a tyranny in the Middle East, all in the name of cheap oil and defense contracts.
So, there’s a coterie of Jewish Americans who have decided to copy the Jewish weak-knees brigade we have here in the UK, probably in the mistaken belief that this will gain them the goodwill and respect of their gentile colleagues and acquaintances!
Every line, every phrase of John’s (why doesn’t he give his full name!) tirade reveals his deep anti-Jewish prejudice.
Oh and by the way, his reference to “the people of Jewish faith in the world” is a favourite “anti-Zionist” trick of trying to deny us our nationhood and historic right to our homeland, the Land of Israel. The correct name of the “faith” is “Judaism”, which is the religion of the Jewish nation.