The Israel Lobby: Nowhere to Hide
Mondoweiss excerpted a talk by a rabbi, Melissa Weintraub, on strategies used by the Jewish community for dealing with Israel. The difficulty that Jews have is that they are the vanguard of the liberal, pro-immigration/multicultural anti-White left in the U.S., while at the same time their favorite country, Israel, is energetically engaged in apartheid and ethnic cleansing. This leads to cognitive dissonance and intense politicking in the Jewish community. But it’s clear that the most common strategy is simply avoidance (two versions).
Israel has become the most volatile wedge issue in American Jewish life, by most observers, journalists, rabbis, people who are immersed in this field. We’ve got 3 prevailing avenues for Israel engagement, currently.
One is avoidance. Nearly every American Jewish social justice organization– I was recently in a room with all the luminaries of the Jewish social justice movement and veritably every one of them has an organizational policy to avoid Israel. The rabbis of every denomination and from across the political spectrum talk about what actually a local rabbi Scott Perlo who’s at 6th and I calls the “the death by Israel sermon”, which means we can talk about anything but Israel. We can talk about health care or guns or other controversial issues, but say anything about Israel and we could be fired. It seems every day I hear of another organization that’s banned Israel from its listserve….
So that’s avoidance, the first pattern… The first pattern is really reacting to the second pattern, but I stated avoidance first because it’s become most ubiquitous…
The Second pattern is more overt antagonism; vilification, demonization; attacks and counter attacks on op ed pages, funding threats, boards and executive directors in utter terror, paralyzed, because they are in damned if you do and damned if you don’t situations on a regular basis. A lot of this is outside of public view, but I can tell you as someone who works in this field that I hear dozens of institutions facing these kinds of dilemmas every month.
And you know equally as damaging: reckless caricatures of each other’s positions, distortions, quoting each other out of context, impugning each other’s motives, antagonism.
The third pattern I call avoidance 2.0. And that is congregating with, conferencing with those who agree with our own politics, and dismissing everybody else as loony, or malicious, or dangerous. Taking pride in the numbers of those who are with us, categorically, one dimensionally dismissing everyone else. And that is becoming increasingly common as well.
So whatever happens with the current campaign for war with Iran, don’t expect American Jews to change their status as the backbone of the anti-White left. They may avoid the issue or do a lot of screaming at each other, but it won’t affect their attitudes on the core issues facing White America.
The rabbi’s remarks indicate an uptick in anxiety about Israel among American Jews. For one thing, the BDS movement, and in particular the recent anti-Israel resolutions by the American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association, indicates a shift in elite opinion where non-Jewish liberals feel the need to act on their principles. Israel as a pariah state is increasingly obvious to everyone.
Secondly, and more immediately, there is the push for war with Iran which, as everyone who is not living under a rock knows, is a project of Israel and its fifth column in the U.S. Indeed, although the New York Times failed to mention the Lobby in a recent article on the Kirk-Menendez-Schumer Iran war bill in the Senate, the role of the Israel Lobby is obvious. The Economist gets it:
The subject of Jewish attitudes to military service, particularly in the diaspora, has been a key interest of mine for some time. Since ancient times, military service has been regarded as the touchstone of true citizenship and patriotism and, to me at least, it seemed the perfect backdrop against which Jewish identity and its hierarchy of loyalties might be seen more clearly. Though never given truly comprehensive scholarly attention, there are countless brief references to Jewish attitudes and actions in taking up arms in works ranging from flagrant Jewish apologetic, to the productions of the racialist right. Most of these references pertain to accusations that Jews historically have shirked military service and often resorted to the most elaborate, and often ridiculous, methods in order to avoid doing “their share” in the defence of the nation-state.
