American Jews and Israel: A divorce in the making?
In a very interesting piece on his web site (Mondoweiss) Philip Weiss has speculated that the day is coming when American Jews will divorce Israel.
If it really happens the president of the day will be free to use the leverage America has to cause or try to cause Israel to end its defiance of international law and denial of justice for Palestinians. And if an American president gave that lead European governments would follow him or her.
According to Weiss an important “sociological trend” is underway.
“American Jews, even mainstream ones indoctrinated to love Israel, are breaking more and more publicly with the Jewish state. The Netanyahu government is proving to be embarrassing to American Jews; they do not want to be associated with rightwing apartheid policies… The divorce that we have long predicted on this site is now on the horizon; and in years to come this separation will yield an even bigger reward: mainstream American Jews will declare themselves anti-Zionist.”
In support of his speculation Weiss quoted Gary Rosenblat. He’s a hard-core supporter of Israel and the editor and publisher of The Jewish Week. In an article for it and as summed up by Weiss he revealed that Jewish leaders are saying that it’s getting impossible to sell Israel to young Jews.
“American Jewish leaders confide that generating support for the Jewish state is becoming increasingly difficult these days – even within the Jewish community, and especially among younger people.
“The hard fact is that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans, including many Jews, who want to see greater efforts to resolve the Palestinian conflict and who put the onus for the impasse on Jerusalem. It is not only President Obama who feels that way… Whether or not it is fair, the strong perception today is that the Israeli government is moving further right, and intransigent, at a time when the rest of the world is fed up with the Israel-Palestinian impasse.”
A related point made in Weiss’s article was that when the present generation of major Jewish funders passes raising substantial dollars for Israel will be much harder.
Weiss concluded with this prediction.
“This crisis will not end until American Jews declare Zionism is racism. And one day they will.”
Serious consideration of whether Weiss is guilty of wishful thinking and being naively optimistic or could be proved right by events to come requires the asking and answering of this question.
Why, really, have the overwhelming majority of the Jews of the world, American Jews especially, supported Israel (the Zionist not Jewish state) right or wrong and/or remained silent even when they were deeply troubled by its policies and actions?
It’s worth recalling for starters that prior to the Nazi holocaust, and as I document in detail in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, most Jews of the world did not support Zionism and many were opposed to it. Those who voiced their opposition believed the Zionist enterprise was morally wrong. They also believed it would lead to unending conflict. But most of all they feared that if Zionism was allowed by the major powers to have its way it would one day provoke anti-Semitism.
Though it was Britain that gave Zionism a spurious degree of legitimacy with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, if there had been no Nazi holocaust it is most likely that there would have been no Israel because without Adolf Hitler as its best recruiting sergeant Zionism would probably have failed to command enough financial and political support to impose its will on the Palestinians.
Also to be recalled is that from the creation of Israel mainly by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing in 1948 until the Six days War of 1967 most Jews of the world were not much interested in Israel. At an early point in its life Prime Minister Ben-Gurion was very concerned that not enough Jews were coming in to start a new life there and give Israel the manpower needed for territorial expansion. One consequence of Ben-Gurion’s concern was that Mossad agents posed as Arab terrorists and bombed Jews out of Iraq and into Israel.
It was the 1967 war that dramatically changed how most Jews of the world thought about Israel and that was because they believed without question the big, fat lie Zionism told in the countdown to the war.
The lie was that the Arabs were intending to attack and that Israel was in real danger of being annihilated.
The truth was that despite some stupid Arab rhetoric to the contrary which played into Zionism’s hands, the Arabs were NOT intending to attack. It was a war of Israeli aggression not self-defense.
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