Engaging the Millennial Disengagement

Despite warnings to myself from within and a few from without, I think I'll ignore the advice of self-proclaimed Jewish millennial voices (there's a sardonic hint in there) to us outsiders, age-wise and community-standing-wise, to "try shutting up and sitting down" but rather actually discuss and address points put forward by David A.M. Wilensky and Gabriel T. Erbs who composed "A Taxonomy of Stupid Shit the Jewish Establishment Says to Millenials", published in the Spring 2017 issue of Jewish Currents (and I'm old enough to remember that that organ, now referred to as a "progressive Jewish media", was basically rooted in communism, only sliding into some sort of socialism just before the 1960s).

Now, to be clear.  I actually have hopes, or at least intentions, to convince some of these classified-as-millennial Jewish younger generation types to reconsider their positions: the political ones, the cultural ones, the social ones, the religious ones and even the psychological ones within which they prefer, currently (no pun intended), to encapsulate themselves. That, of course, requires mean to assume that they still do possess the capability to intelligently look-from-without at what they are doing and thinking.  Self-introspection is a classic Jewish life-fundamental and here is Moshe Chaim Luzatto's phrasing: "...man's coming to see clearly and to recognize as a truth the nature of his duty in the world and the 
end towards which he should direct his vision and his aspiration in all of his labors all the days of his life".

I know this task can be, well, daunting.  I read there that

Synagogues are inherently spiritual enterprises. They are religious communities. But they are often so spiritually empty that if they can manage to entice any millennials inside, we can see that there’s nothing real there for us. 

I wondered what the opposite of "empty" and "real" is for such people and discovered that, besides davening the Amidah in the dark (did the Shabbat clock kick in?),

at the oneg, there was an honest-to-God keg of beer

and, like I'm thinking to myself, they don't drink schnapps anymore?

Fortified, I proceed to make comments on their writing.

*     *     *

We really don’t understand how any thinking person believes an intra-communal breeding program will be a convincing appeal to young people. Jewish millennials chafe against this pearl-clutching because we embrace, overwhelmingly, progressive values about gender, sexuality, and marriage. To us, baby-boomer chatter on intermarriage sounds alarmingly like what a lot of “polite society” said at the advent of racial intermarriage.

"Racial"?  That is a bit extreme. Being Jewish is not being a race.

Instead, most attempts to empower Jewish millennials keep us on a very tight leash...They not only fail to place Jewish millennials in key decision-making roles (read: appropriations), they represent a tremendous hubris on the part of institutional program leaders...Instead, young Jews are relegated to young-professional outreach groups or feckless “student cabinets” (in the case of Hillel International).

Would you guys give project money to people right-of-center?

Israel, like most countries, is not really cool...even without the settlements, the occupation, and the Nakba, Israel is not hip. Young people don’t really think entire countries are cool...No number of slimy, oversexed advertising campaigns will change that. Yet millions of dollars are spent every year pitching a sexy, Disneyland [v]ersion of Zionism and Israel to Jewish millennials

America is?  England?  Syria?

Would undersexed be okay?

The Conference of Presidents and Michael Oren, not exactly known for being relatable to millennials, know that they need us. But people like that just can’t bring themselves to believe us when we tell them how we see the world. The vast majority of us believe that there is such a thing as the Occupation, that Palestinians are people too, and all manner of heresies.

So, if there really is no illegal occupation or if the so-called Palestinians are really Southern Syrians, we still have to permit you your fantasies - which, by the way, harm Israel's security and the lives of its citizens?

And now, the get, er, serious:

WHAT CAN YOU take away from all of this?
Be an ally...Put us in the driver’s seat. Put us on the board. And when you think of something disparaging to say about millennials, try shutting up and sitting down instead. When you hear one of your peers saying some stupid shit about us, shut them down and sell them a copy of this issue of Jewish Currents. 

Sorry David (an editor of jweekly.com and a former editor of New Voices magazine (once known as the Jewish Student Press Service) and Gabriel Erbs (a labor union organizer in Portland, Oregon, and a former board member of J Street U, the student arm of J Street), with that crap above, the last thing we need, ‏‏עס פֿעלט מיר ווי אַ לאָך אין קאָפּ (Es felt mir vi a lokh in kop = I need it like a hole in the head), is to allow your kind of thinking and behavior to control anything to do with Judaism and Zionism. You'd end up as the Last Genertion.

Let me be stark: no matter how you feel, the political truth at the moment is that anti-Semitism masquerades as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism and playing around with non-Zionism or with a 'why Israel?' stance is asking for trouble for a lot of people and fueling a movement you cannot control.

^

IfNotNow's Historical Roots - A Note

From "Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism" by Yfaat Weiss published in Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 93-117:

and

Sound familiar?

^

The Arab of Palestine Transformed into A Jew

I have become convinced that rational and logical political thought and discourse is nigh useless when engaging the new generation of non- or anti-Zionists who disguise their discomfort and uneasiness at being too overly identified with Israel, Jewish particularism even of a secular cultural character and the responsibilities the Jewish state must assume in order to protect its existence and preserve the security of its citizens which means, foremost of all, the use of power and deadly force, if required.

The frustration at discovering that they do not know history or historical development, the simple facts nor do they care that how those are manipulated and misrepresented is confounding.  They publicize themselves as cerebral and intellectual but it appears they know they cannot truly argue the issues and mostly ignore interaction with opposing viewpoints.

Or, they go off on weird tangents, like baking a Vegan Anti-Zionist Sweet Potato Challah together with a statement of how one is to educate children:

JVP's September 2017 manifesto is quite clear:

As young Jews, we recognize that Israel is not our birthright. 

One could be forgiven for thinking, well, maybe Israel is not their birthright because their Judaism is lacking all its many levels of culture, history, religion and national identity.  Redefine Judaism and it can become anything.  Ask the Bundists, the American Council for Judaism, Satmar or the pre-1930s Reform Movement or the pre-1950s American Jewish Committee.

And so, to free themselves from these encumbrances, to become fashionably "liberated", these youth reverse and twist reality and create the "Arab Palestinian-cum-Jew".

They point an accusing finger at Israel, removing themselves from the matrix, distancing themselves from being seen as an "Israeli" or "Israeli supporter", and apply to the Arabs referred to as "Palestinians" the framework of being the "Jew". Awkwardly, they then can promote themselves as pro-Semites.

Israel is the "Jew-hater". Israel aligns itself with anti-Semites (Hungary; Trump).

It is as simple as it is simplistic.

^

Dealing with IfNotNow's "Facts"

I decided to take a closer look at IfNotNow's new Stay-After-Birthright campaign with its "Ask Us" theme:

So, I looked for their facts:

But now, I'll ask them a few questions before I get back to responding to their sheet. After all, fair is fair.  First, some general ones.

This "occupation" to which you keep referring, would that be the occupation by Arabs of the territory of the Jewish national home by any chance?  You do know that Arabs conquered and occupied the Land of Israel in 638CE, yes?

The Arabs who engaged in an ethnic cleansing operation between 1920-1948, expelling the Jews that survived the pogroms and murderous riots in Hebron, Gaza, Shchem (aka Nablus), Gush Etzion, Jerusalem's Old City, Neveh Yaakov, Atarot, Nahlat Shimon, Shimon HaTzaddik, Shiloach and other areas?

Arabs who called themselves Southern Syrians, not "Palestinians", into the 1920s and later and also demanded the Mandate be united with a Greater Syria?

Whose leaders aligned with Hitler in WW II? Who refused a territorial compromise suggested by the Peel Commission in 1937 (not to mention that of 1922 which separated Transjordan from the Jewish National Home) and again in 1947, that of the UN Partition? 

The same Arabs who went to war to eradicate the state of Israel? Who founded the PLO in 1964, three years before the Six Days War and prior to any "settlement" being constructed?

Why would retreating from territory work? Did it as a result of the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza?

I see you do not want to "allow [y]ourselves to be manipulated by right-wing donors".  Do you not realize that you are being both manipulative of Jewish youth and being manipulated by Israel's enemies? Or do you not care?

You call Israeli army’s use of violence against Palestinian protesters in Gaza as "unconscionable".  Why? Have you protested incendiary kites yet?

You demand "a chance at seeing the full picture" on Birthright tours.  Can I join one of yours and get a chance to have the real full picture seen?

And by the way, do you really think saying Kaddish for Hamas terrorists was a good idea?

Now, relating to you fact sheet:

1. You claim 3 million Arabs are in the West Bank and nearly 2 million in Gaza. All are under direct or indirect Israeli military control.

That's not at all factual. There are perhaps 2-2.2 million in Judea and Samaria. And Israeli's "indirect control of Gaza seems not to be able to prevent terror tunnels being built or rockets and mortars being fired.  Maybe there should be more control?

And if you are intimating a demographic problem, rest assure, Jews are already some 20% of the total population in that territory.

2. Israel has uprooted 800,000 Palestinian olive trees you claim as a fact.

That is just a number thrown into the wind.  In cases I have investigated, the police have indicated wildly exaggerated claims, by 100% at times, are made.

And by the way, you sources are quite unreliable in most cases.

3.  315 Palestinian children were being held in Israeli prison you write? Did they perhaps commit a crime? How old are those "children"?

Those children report physical and psychological distress you assert. Are those reports true?

4. 99% of all trials in military court result in conviction. And what does that imply? That Israel only arrests the guilty?

5.  Palestinians in Gaza only receive 8-12 hours of electricity per day and whose fault is that?  Perhaps Abbas? Perhaps Hamas? 

6.  Next is "250 settlements in Area C of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law."

Maybe 150 communities actually. And quite not in contravention of international law.

7. And as for "Over 400 kilometers of West Bank roads are prohibited for Palestinian use and are exclusively for settlers". The only reason there is any prohibition, and most usually for fairly short periods, is the security situation, aka Arab terror. How many kilometers of roads are prohibited to Jews? And how come there is a claim of "apartheid roads" when Jews keep getting shot in drive-by shootings? Isn't that a contradiction of terms?

8.  "As of 2016, there were 96 permanent checkpoints". That's two years ago. How many today? Oh, and this from June 22 you read:

Border Police in Hebron defuse 2 bombs planted near Tomb of the PatriarchsDevices discovered near security checkpoints; 

and this from April 2

 Palestinian shot rushing West Bank checkpoint

9.    "212,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem"? Except for the 19 years of illegal Jordanian occupation and the annexation of Jerusalem's eastern area 1948-1967, the city was never divided for over three thousand years.

I didn't touch on every claim but I think my message is clear: you really have no idea of what you are talking or promoting.

You people are the real danger to the Jewish community ion the United States.

P.S.

Previous blog posts on IfNotNow:

here

here

here

here


^

Memo to IfNotNow

Dear IfNotNowOrg:

If you cannot take a stance on Zionism or the question of Jewish statehood, you cannot take one on the "Palestinians freedom and dignity...[and the] depriving them of civil, political and economic rights".

Zionists demand equality and right to self-liberation.

Arabs-called-Palestinians rejected partition plans in 1937 and 1947 while violently seeking the prevention of any Jewish political entity in any territory the international community guaranteed would be reconstituted as the Jewish national home based on the Jewish people's historic connection with same.

They continued that rejectionist position through the first 19 years of Jewish statehood and continued to do so as expressed in the Covenant of the PLO and that of the Hamas, at the September 1967 Khartoum Conference until the Oslo Accords.

These Accords went unfulfilled despite Israeli physical concessions. A further disengagement still did not satisfy Arab demands and they continue, until this day, to refuse to engage in meaningful negotiations even after a 10-month period of a construction moratorium.

A one-sided diplomatic game while terror and incitement continues is unacceptable and Jewish support for such delegitimizes any interference by groups such as IfNotNow.

^

They're Back to 1948

J Street tweeted a throwback to the 1948 "occupation":

The article referenced highlights the December 4, 1948 letter in the New York Times that infamously, responding to the Deir Yassin battle, blacklisted Menachem Begin as a "fascist" and which sought to upset his successful New York tour.

The author of the piece, published, with J Street approval, is David Granberg of IfNotNow. That letter, signed by "27 American Jewish leaders", condemned Begin

as the “latest manifestation of fascism,” [and] the letter cites the Irgun’s open and boastful involvement in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre of over 100 Arab men, women and children as exemplary of the party’s dangerous and reactionary character. The letter called for Americans to unequivocally denounce Begin and his party, which also terrorized left-wing Jews 

and Granberg adds:

Less than four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jewish leaders recognized that Israeli violence against Palestinians was morally abhorrent, dangerous and absolutely unrepresentative of Jews or Judaism. 

That letter actually described Herut, Begin's political party, of which J St. founder's father was a member, as

closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties

And some are aghast at the terms some call IfNotNowers. 

Perhaps some Israeli violence was problematic. For sure. Especially that of the Palmach. But this throwback to 1948 is in line with the ideological line adopted now that justifies Arab violence, specifically the Return March antics at the Gaza border, while condemning the IDF's defensive measure against a terrorist organization.  And while IfNotNowers are saying Kaddish for Arabs killed there at the Gaza fence, they have never recited Kaddish for any Jewish victim of Arab violence (I have tweeted them repeatedly to counter my assertion but no denial).

Make no mistake: IfNotNow, JVP and now JSt. are pursuing an anti-Zionist cause.

^

Magnes, and the State Department, Continued

I have detailed the nefarious scheme to thwart Israel's independence in 1948 which involved Judah Leib Magnes coming to America in May 1948 and meeting Secretary of State George Marshall and President Harry Truman, in that order. And see the documents here.

I see now that Efraim Karsh has added more information:

the State Department, sensing an opportunity to reap some domestic political benefit, leapt into the fray. “We should abandon our present defensive attitude and take the offensive in a confident and courageous manner,” Loy Henderson, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and African Affairs, wrote to Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett on April 22

So

Henderson lost no time in transporting to Washington. There he met Marshall on May 4, dutifully assuring the secretary that the administration had needlessly been “too apologetic” in pushing its trusteeship proposals. Instead, Magnes urged, U.S. sanctions were called for: these would stop “the Jewish war machine in Palestine” dead in its tracks and disabuse the country’s “artificial” Jewish community of its dreams of statehood. Impressed by “the most straightforward account on Palestine” he had yet heard, the secretary arranged for his guest to be seen by President Truman.

But what has special interest to me, on the background of the activity of the IfNotNow group saying Kaddish for Gaza Arabs killed as they seek to invade Israel, is this thinking of Henderson:

We must persuade the more moderate Jews in this country to break the hold which a minority of extreme American Zionists now has on American Jewry so that Jewish leaders in this country, instead of continuing to push Palestine Jews into an extremely nationalistic position, will endeavor to impress upon them the importance of assuming a reasonable and moderate attitude with the Arabs.

Nothing has changed in the past 70 years, just has nothing had altered prior to 1948, in 1919, when hundreds of assimilationists, Reform Rabbis and anti-Zionists published their anti-Balfour Declaration in the New York Times, attempting to influence President Woodrow Wilson, a "tradition" carried on throughout the 1930s and 1940s. And it continued and continues: Breira, Open Zion, Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street, etc.

^

Never

In response to Israel's efforts to prevent a mass breakthrough of it border along the Gaza Strip, an area from which it disengaged in 2005, removing every bit of its former presence including destroying homes and expelling over 8,000 Jews, conducted in a violent fashion with firebombs hurled, shots fired and attempts to cut and/or damage the security fence, an American Jewish group of college-age people, IfNotNow, has been demonstrating in several places, marching and even blocking entrances of establishment Jewish organizations and institutions.

In at least two places, Manhattan and Twin Cities, (add Boston and Los Angeles as of April 11) the demonstrators have recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer said for the dead, on behalf of Arabs killed by the IDF to prevent them from illegally entering the state of Israel and harming its citizens and property.

How many times, and on which occasions, have members of IfNotNow recited Kaddish for Jews murdered - shot, stabbed, car-rammed - by Arabs since they were founded?

^

Why Shouldn't Peter Beinart Be Discomforted?

Peter Beinart is a professor at CUNY's Graduate Center located at 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Or an Associate Professor.  His best course seems to be Opinion Writing.

He is not an unfamiliar person to my readers (although as he banned me from his Twitter account, I lost track of some of his output).

In any case, according to IfNotNow back in early 2015, they understood a piece he wrote as being an

Important piece...encouraging the Jewish community to welcome discomfort

That piece from January 5 was headlined

 the Palestinians won't gain freedom on their knees.

and it contained this final paragraph:

It would be wonderful if Palestinians could win those freedoms without causing Jews discomfort. But it hasn't happened that way because it never happens that way. People are not given freedom; they take it. What matters is not what the goyim say, said David Ben-Gurion, but what the Jews do. Mahmoud Abbas is finally taking that maxim to heart. Hes tired of relying on the benevolence of Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama. He's doing it the Zionist way.

Let's be clear: the Arabs-called-Palestinians were given an all-Arab country in 1922, TransJordan, in which Jewish settlement was prohibited (and the British stemmed any attempt by Jews to purchase land there even when the Emir Abdallah wished to sell it, as some of his countrymen managed to do, surreptisiously).

That was not enough.  They rejected, from the start, Jewish national rights. No Jewish People, not immigration rights, no settlement rights and not a Jewish Homeland.

As a result of Arabs-called-Palestinian's terror in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936, and during the intervening years as well, and following hundreds of Jewish dead, thousands injured and raped and maimed with property loss and ethnic cleansing from their homes in several locations, the British suggested a Partition Plan in 1937.

The Arabs refused it.

The 1939 White Paper, an illegal policy action, did away with the idea of a Jewish National Home as enshrined in the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference decision and that of the League of Nations and set out that

The objective of His Majesty's Government is the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State...with a view to the termination of the Mandate...[that] independent State should be one in which Arabs and Jews share government

And they rejected the 1947 UN Partition recommendation.

Despite no "occupation" of Judea, Samaria and Gaza between 1948-1967 and not one Jewish settlement constructed there at the time (it was occupied by Jordan and Egypt), the Arab terror continued in the form of the fedayeen and from 1964, the PLO/Fatah.

Given all this, I find his penultimate paragraph there subversive if not irrational and surely immoral as well as deliberately, I think, justifying violence:

As a liberal, I want the Palestinians to demand nonviolently. As a Zionist and a pragmatist, I want them to demand a state alongside Israel, not in its place. But as a Jew who this week begins reading the Book of Exodus – which calls us to remember the heart of the stranger – I cannot deny the Palestinians right to demand the same freedoms that we demand for ourselves. And I cannot ask them to wait.

That was three years ago.  In 2017, even the +972 radical progressive site was disturbed by Beinart's thinking.  Extremist Tom Pessah wrote:

In a well intentioned column in The Forward this week, titled “IfNotNow Is The Jewish Black Lives Matter,” Jewish American journalist Peter Beinart is creating divisions precisely where alliances are needed. Not principled divisions, but divisions resulting from a lack of sensitivity and awareness of his own privilege. (IfNotNow issued a response to the piece, and INN’s Philadelphia chapter put out a statement of their own.)

In the article, Beinart, who deserves credit for compellingly broadening the conversation about Israel within the Jewish American community, sets out to highlight activist groups pressuring the Jewish establishment to end its complacency with the occupation. 

In IfNotNow's response noted, they quite forthrightly declared

IfNotNow is a movement to end the American Jewish community’s support for the occupation.

The strategy was, and is, identical; tactics could differ as they clarified there:

Beinart’s writing is and has been a source of inspiration and insight for many of us. We write about the ways his piece missed the mark in the spirit of intellectual inquiry and public challenging of our community to do better

He has been pushing IfNotNow constantly as in this July 2017 example:

what gives me hope that the American Jewish community will one day defend freedom and justice for Israelis and Palestinians, rather than defending Benjamin Netanyahu, I answer: “If Not Now.” A Millennial-powered movement, speaking in an authentically Jewish idiom, which challenges American Jewish leaders to meet the moral responsibilities of power, is exactly what American Jewry needs

Today, IfNotNowers were in Manhattan, saying Kaddish for Arabs-called-Palestinians, 80% of them Hamas members, shot and killed by the IDF as they attempted to crash through Israel's post-disengagement border opposite Gaza and otherwise commit violence of various sorts.  The day before they shut down briefly the Israel Consulate in Boston.

I don't mind anti-Jewish establishment demos.  Been there, done that.

But what irks and bothers me, and yes, even disappoints me, is that these youngsters cannot think (one of them really has a hard time reciting the Kaddish), do not know history and have been corrupted as to what is Zionism on the one hand, and, on the other, what is Palestinianism, by people like Beinart.  He let the genie out of the bottle. He is not alone but he takes the credit.

I think Beinart should feel some discomfort.  He's discomforted Jews in Hebron, after all.  Non-violent discomfort. The discomfort he pushes but not the "Palestinian way".

___________

Reminder of non-success of non/anti-Zionists.


^

From Dissent to Degradation

I hope this won't be too deep an observation and I will not make it long (extended references and details are in the embedded links).

Far left forces, mainly but not exclusively American,  consider Israel's military government regime in the territories liberated from Jordanian occupation as immoral, illegal and un-Jewish.  They began and continually attempt to affect a tectonic change in Diaspora Jewry's mutually important relationship with Israel by declaring that military government to be an illegal occupation in the face of major evidence to the contrary 

That "occupation", I think, despite all sorts of outlandish claims, is fair and just in the conditions in comparison to that existed which before 1967, when that administration was applied to regions of the historic Land of Israel as well as today, under the despotic Palestinian Authority rule.  

These forces, in one apparition or another, in one manifestation or another, have always been with us. They fought Herzl. They struggled against the Balfour Declaration. They denied Jewish nationalism. They were either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. They waged campaigns against President Woodrow Wilson approving the idea of a Mandate that would reconstitute the Jewish National Home. They insisted, despite all past and current evidence, that there should not be a Jewish state, or something quite less than a political entity.

They were called the Bund. The Reform Movment until 1937.  Neturei Karta. The American Council for Judaism. Jewish Fellowship in England. Palestine Communist Party (who actively supported Arab terror in the 1920s and 1930s* and see: Budeiri, Musa. The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jews in the Struggle for Internationalism)

Brit Shalom. Ihud. Breira. Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow. Open Zion. V15's interference in Israel's democratic process. NIF's previous assistance to subversive groups.  Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, Lord Montagu, Peter Beinart. Michael Chyabon & Ayelet Waldman, Tony Judt. The "tragic mockery" of Leon Trotsky. IJAN. Haaretz. Jews supporting Boycott. Breaking the Silence. Mondoweiss. Richard Falk. Ken Roth. George Soros. Noam Chomsky. Norman Finkelstein. Gideon Levy. Amira Hass and Haaretz's owner, Amos Schocken. They, among others, are ideological opponents, and less than pragmatic critics.

And they lost because their thinking was wrong, because their observance of events was incorrect, because their understanding of political, economic, military and cultural elements was in error and worse, they have not learned from their mistakes in the past.

Now, more than ever, the trend of their promotions is leading not to a singular criticism of a specific policy, of an approach, or lack thereof, of a party or a person.  It is directing anger, frustration and self-impotence against Israel as a whole.

Israel, it is claimed, is an "apartheid" state. It has always been a project of settler colonialism is the assertion. It is "racist". And worse. Now, Nazi memes are employed a la Rogel Alpher.

Basically, what has developed, is that the very idea of Israel is to be rejected and it is being pushed forcefully and prominently.  To be generous, it is difficult to think of these op-ed columnists and bloggers and 'intellectuals' and such as truly intelligent, for any claim that that language and contextualization they employ is not what they intend, although many quite openly do, cannot they see what they are creating?

They present an "Israel situation" that is, in the end, a la Judt** and Mick Davis, bad for the Jews.  As Daniel Gordis phrased it, "It’s not about what Israel does. It’s about what, to their minds, Israel is."  Israel is less important than Diaspora Jews and the existence of a Diaspora. Babylon is better than Jerusalem.  That was done in the 1930s by socialists, non-nationalists and ultra-Orthodox and we know that in a few years, they were all proven wrong.  Shalom Asch declared in 1938 that “what Jabotinsky is now doing in Poland [his evacuation plan] goes beyond all limits…Heaven help a people with such leaders.” Asch eventually declared at a press conference in Jerusalem in 1952: “I deeply regret that I fought against Jabotinsky’s evacuation plan”. 

In the past, these ideas led those that held them to betray Judaism, assimilate, join revolutionary movements, assist the detractors of Jews or be eliminated by anti-Semites.

For these new critics of Zion, these new dissenters, the line of their opposition to certain or any specifics has moved to that of generalities and soon, the line to a totality of rejection will be crossed. And they were learn the lessons of those who trod this path before them, while Israel and Zionism continues to triumph.

_____________________________________________________________

*

For example, as described here:  "A squad led by Daniel Abramovich scattered nails on the roads for a few nights, to harass Jewish transportation, and also cut down electricity poles. Two bombs were thrown in Haifa, one of them at the building of the Labor Council. There was also a plan to attack the new dock that was then under construction in Tel Aviv, but it was too well guarded, so the activists set fire instead to a pavilion of the Orient Fair.  Dothan maintains that [Simcha] Tzabari, who was then the only Jew on the Central Committee (Meir Slonim was in prison), bore responsibility for the terrorist policy...Dothan quotes a leaflet written by Tzabari in July 1936 [but not distributed], which explained that by “destroying the economy of the Zionist occupiers through acts of sabotage and partisan attacks, the Arab liberation movement seeks to make the continuation of Zionist colonization impossible.” 

**

"Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel’s own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."

^

Can I Lecture?

In previous posts, I highlighted what I saw as the futility as well as the repetitiveness of such contemporary groups as JVP and IfNotNow.  All they target, all their claims and, most importantly, all their failures, were experienced by the Bund, the Palestine Communist Party, Brit Shalom, Ihud, Progressive Party, American Council for Judaism, Breirah, and on and on.

Zionism and the state of Israel not only bested them but all these negative ideologies, most Diaspora-focused, all failed whether through religious and political assimilation or the Holocaust.

All their claims, in essence, have been made consistently and constantly over the past century and a quarter against Zionism, Jewish nationalism and Israel.  But they have been overtaken by time and their inability to deal with Arab animosity and rejectionism, usually via terror, a staple response since 1920 and before.

And here is another example proving my point - a study of political movements that challenged Zionism including the bi-nationalist movement of the British Mandate period; the Palestinian Communist Party of the same period and the anti-Zionist Matzpen group from the 1960s to the 1980s.

And now we have this campaign of "You Never Told Me":-

Our Open Letter to Fellow Alumni

To our friends and fellow alumni of Jewish camps, schools, and youth movements across the country:

...We, your friends in IfNotNow, are compelled to compassionately call in these institutions to reflect with us and to change their Israel education to include an honest understanding of the Occupation and Palestinian narratives.

We are alumni of different institutions... [and] Across denominations and organizations, we have had formative experiences at camps, day schools, and youth groups. And yet, universally, we were never told the honest truth about the Occupation.

We can no longer accept an educational approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is at worst silence and at best nuanced. We can no longer accept a communal norm that will force another generation to only learn about the occupation only once they leave these institutions. We can no longer sit idly by while the institutions we care so deeply about lose moral legitimacy.

...After 50 years of Occupation, we say that enough is enough.  We invite you -- alumni and supporters from across the country -- to join us in asking our institutions to reimagine Israel education in a way that engages directly with the realities of the Occupation and reflects the ethics our institutions aim to teach.

I have but one question: can I teach and lecture in such a course on Israel's administration of Judea and Samaria and on its legal, ethical, moral and historical rights to these lands?

^

IfNotNow is NotReallyNew

The Peter Beinart-spawned IfNotNow's demo * on Jerusalem Day (here, too)

reminded me of Joseph Berger-Barzilai of which this source records.

JBB (original name Joseph Isaac Zilsnik, other form Zeliaznik) was a founding member and secretary of the Communist Party of Palestine.  He later was a victim of Stalin’s purges.

Born in Cracow, Poland in 1904, he grew up in Vienna and was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. In 1919 he emigrated to Palestine. There he worked first on road construction and then as a translator in an enginering firm.  Originally a member of the leftist Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair, he became soon a communist, took part in the founding of the Palestine Communist Party. The party had to operate under illegal conditions since the British Mandate Authority had outlawed all communist activities in 1921 as a result of the Arab riots, partially initiated by a May Day fight between various leftist groups.

His family, that included a son, Joseph, lived in the Arab village, Beit Safafa, then on Jerusalem's outskirts, under false identity.  In the spring of 1929, he was again called to Moscow. There he had a five-hour meeting with Stalin on May 5 and received the order to severe the ties with the Arab Executive Committee and other parts of the Arab nationalist movement. He returned to Palestine to take command of the party after the August 1929  riots in Palestine. In a statement the party had characterized the troubles as a result of colonialism: that Britain, afraid of the unity of Arab and Jewish workers, had instigated racial hatred to divide the communities, and this was aided by Arab effendis and Zionist leaders. According to Moscow’s instruction, Berger had to change this line as an Arab anti-imperialist rebellion against Britain and the Zionists and demanded unconditional support of the party for the “revolutionary Arab toilers,” notwithstanding their nationalist and religious slogans and their subordination under the violent anti-Jewish policy of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini. Following the ECCI directive, Berger helped to reorganize the party to include an
Arab leadership. See, too, here. And here:

Within the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, the party devoted itself to a continuous fight against Zionism. This was the main concern of the party, as Berger frequently explained in his meetings with Comintern officials in Moscow or elsewhere. Karl Radek told him that the slogan “The success of the party depends on its becoming an Arab mass party” should become the guiding principle of political action. It was soon called “Arabisation”. Berger, the liaison between the ECCI and the Palestine Communist Party, was told frequently that “the center of gravity of the PCP’s activity must be among the Arab toiling masses.”

In a statement of Berger, on behalf of the party after the riots, it was

claimed that the riots originated from the protest of expropriated and exploited Arab toiling masses against their deteriorating social conditions. It also stated that it was the British mandate administration that was able to succeed in transforming what was originally a radical anti-colonial movement into an anti-Jewish pogrom. Jewish and Arab reactionary leaders had contributed their share to what turned out to be a religious struggle by turning the Western Wall into a symbol of power.

He was then ordered to arrange the appointment of a Central Committee that would constitute an Arab majority.

He later was arrested as a Trotskyite and spent some 20 years in the Soviet Gulag.

The lesson of Berger-Barzilai (p. 10) vis-a-vis IfNotNow?

Arrival in Palestine for some leftist Jews brought the realization that the Zionist project was in fact colonialist rather than socialist. When seeing that the land was not empty, as they had been told, but in fact was very much inhabited and cultivated by Arabs deeply opposed to their “project,” many Jewish communists and socialists left.

In the next phase of the anti-Zionist struggle of 1936-39,

The Comintern continued to support the Arab Revolt with relative consistency until early 1939, when the fascist threat against the Soviet Union began to overshadow other considerations. When the momentum of the revolt was fading and the AHC leaders adopted more “terrorist” methods, the Comintern denounced them as “traitors.” The new policy was declared in January 1939 in the Communist International, the central organ of the Comintern, which wrote: “Eli Chusein [Haj Amin al-Husayni] and his mysterious men . . . are wreckers and traitors to the true national movement of the Arabian people.”

IfNotNow is basically following in the the footsteps of those on the far left of over 80 years ago.

Only now, the Arab terror is not that much a problem, it would appear.



* Update: According to Leanne Gale, the spokeswoman for the protest, three organizations took part: IfNotNow, its Israeli counterpart All That’s Left, and Free Jerusalem, which describes itself as a solidarity group of Jewish Israelis working with Palestinian partners to combat the occupation in East Jerusalem.

^

Anything Really New With JVP, IfNotNow, Yachad, Etc.?

I started to write this before I saw Zehava's FB post on the theme of betrayal from within the Jewish family so:

When segments of my own people willingly shun their own country, their history and their legacy, when they repudiate their people’s rights and their heritage, and when they negate their own nation’s plight and align themselves with those who butcher us, it crosses all lines and hurts like no other hurt.
It is the vilest perfidy. It not only pierces the heart, it slashes it into fragments and rips your gut.

Peter Beinart, a self-confessed "a fan of IfNotNow" has a new one up on the theme of millenials and their protest of

American Jewish complicity in Palestinian repression

But this perverted phenomenon is not new.  What Jews do not quite realize, I think, is that this type of behavior is very much unique to Jews.

Different peoples have ideological, political and cultural arguments and differences as to what policies should be promoted by the governments of the day and how and when and to what extent.  But to utterly deny one's national identity?  

You want to assimilate?  Fine.

You do not want to be a Zionist?  Okay.

But why take front and center stage and demonstarte your animosity, your rejection of identity, your refusal to take part in this great process and returning Jews to their homeland and all that that entails, no less than any other country.

Herzl was opposed.  The Reform movement rejected Zion. The Aguda and Admorim fought Zionism.

The Balfour Declaration was almost sabotaged from within the cabinet by Montagu and cousins.

In America, 299 Rabbis signed a letter in 1919 trying the prevent President Wilson from supporting the Balfour Declaration.

There followed Brit Shalom and Ihud during the Mandate Palestine years.

The American Council for Judaism.

In going over an article on Richard Storrs' later anti-Zionism, I came across the name of a Rabbi Mattuck.

Seems he headed the anti-Zionst Jewish Fellowship (Chap. 4 in this book) in England in the mid-1940s, a Reform Rabbi from New York.  

And there was a Daniel Lipson who is termed the most vociferous and outspoken Jewish anti-Zionist in parliament (see page 707 in this book and more in this book).

Here's a succinct summary of what was going on in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century:

There was Breirah after 1967.

But how bad are today's versions of anti-Zionists from within?

Here are some remarks from Liz Rose (an alias), a teacher from Chicago, who attended the JVP bash, i.e., National Member Meeting, this year

I was making connections in my own life to an increased awareness of “the wreck of Zionism.” I have felt so much shame in having been a Zionist. When I first joined JVP years ago, I went to meetings and actions and feigned a false comfort in pretending that I had always been an anti-Zionist against the occupation. Other Jews seemed so much more comfortable than me talking about Palestine. Now, with language, I’m able to understand that I was simply at the beginning of the process of undoing my Zionism. At the time, I even faked it, yelling, “Free Palestine!” with others as we protested. My face would get red and hot as I mouthed the words “Palestine” around others, as though I had committed some sort of transgression.

...When I stayed with Palestinians in Jenin years ago, I remember looking out the window of my host’s home. Palestinian homes dotted the landscape with giant olive trees. The apartheid wall was out of vision. I could see, for the first time, finally, in the dusky twilight, the land of Palestine as it was meant to be for Palestinians. This is not Israel, I thought. Israel has colonized this indigenous land. It’s all Palestine. The West Bank, Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, all of it, I thought. This understanding has come in stages, in an undoing of the Zionist layers of propaganda that were deep in my unconscious...

...what opened inside of me was a permission to stop shaming myself for having believed the mythology of Israel and to acknowledge the importance of my own narrative as I work to untangle my own layers of denial– alongside Palestinians’ stories–that I haven’t fully given myself before. Being part of the oppressing group, I have noticed wanting to silence my embarrassment and shame at having been a Zionist–and my subsequent, privileged epiphany that Israel is actually all Palestine–to move my voice out of the way to make room for the oppressed voices...I was intrigued when I saw Osato’s “Self-Loving Anti-Zionist” as one of them. Even then, though, I felt a twinge of shame as I texted my husband, joking, “Maybe I’d go if it was called ‘Self-Loathing Anti-Zionist.’”

She has provided additional testimony about herself which provides insight into the workings of her psyche:

I learned that most of what I had learned growing up, what had been taught to me, was propaganda. I wasn’t special for loving Jerusalem so much; I had simply bought into what others had fed me–remarkably convincing propaganda backed by lobbyists and money to colonize and “Judaize” Palestine.

I’m not writing this to claim victim space. I know that I am not alone as a Jew who has the epiphany of Palestine–the Jew who realizes, slowly and painfully, that everything I had been taught about the mythology that is Israel needed to be deconstructed and rebuilt, that friendships would need to be lost and new ones found, that entering the “other side”–the side I was taught was the “dark side”–actually meant to enter into a commitment to justice and empathy.

And here is a letter from a good friend that contains some important insights:

One would do well to juxtapose Gil Troy’s Pollyannaish “What can your country do for you?” (Center Field, April 5), his thoughts on “how Israelis can bridge the gap with the Diaspora,” and Hal Ostrow’s cri de couer “Union for Reform Judaism practices intolerance in pursuit of social justice” (Comment & Opinion, April 5).
As Ostrow makes abundantly clear, liberal Judaism is willfully detaching itself both practically and emotionally from Israel’s needs and reality in order to maintain Democratic/progressive/ liberal bona fides that might keep an evaporating congregation from falling off the roster entirely. To the extent that this works at all, it does not work as a factor in fostering or maintaining a Diaspora commitment to Israel.
If anything, the opposite is true: The near-term survival of Reform Judaism and its dying ability to attract or maintain members requires it to move ever deeper into an anti-Zionist posture.
Troy’s outdated stereotype of the “aliya guilt trip,” whereby heavily-accented, pot-bellied Israeli war veterans insult Diaspora Jews, reveals the extent to which he is detached from reality.
The fact is no one, not even the start-up nation, can build a bridge when the other shore keeps receding.
Liberal Jews have made it abundantly clear where their values and priorities lie – and these are not under the wedding canopy, in the synagogue pew or in the maternity ward, and certainly not in anything to do with Israel, Zionism or Jewish continuity.
Thank God there is an Israel and that over half the world’s Jews live in this Jewish state. The Diaspora is self-liquidating and there isn’t a damned thing Israel can do about it.
Yes, there is a Jewish future, but only here. That’s why we exist.
J.J. GROSSJerusalem

All those who opposed Zionism as the Yishuv was flourishing and as the state of Israel developed and continued to fulfill the genuine process of returning to and returning Jews to the Land of Israel either became Zionists eventually, assimilated and disappeared or were murdered victims of anti-Semitism left behind in the lands of the Exile.

It is so obvious that Zionism is has been proven successful, true and correct as a solution for the classic "Jewish Question" and that the Arab behavior and character is so undeserving of denying the Jews our rightful place in this world. But, Jews are never satisfied.

I would also suggest that without Israel, these Jews have no identity as they have little to fill their Jewishness (and what they have they twist its real meaning or make things up) and furthermore, without Israel they have no real security.

Such a psychotic existence.

___________

Another take. ^