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.

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*

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."

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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?

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So, This Is J Street?

Is this a perceptive analysis of today's J Street? (thanks to LM for the idea and GD for reminding me):-

It should be borne in mind that Israeli foreign policy is the policy of a democratically elected government, representing what the majority of Israelis believe to be in their best interest. Since this belief is backed by their willingness to die, or to serve great stretches of army service, in its defense, it ought to be treated by their unthreatened American Jewish friends with respect, if not awe. Members of J Street have been accusing the “rightist establishment” of various indelicacies. Surely there has been nothing quite so indelicate in American Jewish life of recent years as this widespread assumption on the part of our new political philanthropists that “we know better than you what is in your best interest.”

But if J Street has been insensitive, it has lately also grown dangerous. Like the Russian maskilim (“enlighteners”) of the 19th century, who went to the Czar with a list of reforms to be foisted on their less enlightened Jewish brethren—because they knew what was in the Jewish interest even if the Jewish majority did not—so J Street now approaches the American government to convince Americans that they must bring pressure to bear on an Israel that does not know what is in its best interest. And like the maskilim, members of J Street are convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority in taking this treacherous step. But we know, as the enlighteners ought to have known, that the Czar worked in his interest, not in the interest of the Jews, and used whatever Jewish support he could get neatly to camouflage his ends. The decision of a Jewish group to appeal to the powers-that-be against the perceived self-interest of Israel (and the Jewish body politic) now, when as Mr. Shattan rightly says, “the political fortunes of the state of Israel have reached perhaps an all-time low,” is dangerous, to use the mildest available term.

American Jews, acting as Jews, can only protect Israel’s right to self-determination. When they begin to subvert that right, the constituted community has not only the right but the duty to expose their actions and to condemn them. In so doing it is not being “Mc-Carthyite” or even vengeful, just minimally responsible.

No.

But it sounds very familiar, right?

Here is the original in Commentary, June 1977:

It should be borne in mind that Israeli foreign policy is the policy of a democratically elected government, representing what the majority of Israelis believe to be in their best interest. Since this belief is backed by their willingness to die, or to serve great stretches of army service, in its defense, it ought to be treated by their unthreatened American Jewish friends with respect, if not awe. Members of Breira have been accusing the “rightist establishment” of various indelicacies. Surely there has been nothing quite so indelicate in American Jewish life of recent years as this widespread assumption on the part of our new political philanthropists that “we know better than you what is in your best interest.”

But if Breira has been insensitive, it has lately also grown dangerous. Like the Russian maskilim (“enlighteners”) of the 19th century, who went to the Czar with a list of reforms to be foisted on their less enlightened Jewish brethren—because they knew what was in the Jewish interest even if the Jewish majority did not—so Breira now approaches the American government to convince Americans that they must bring pressure to bear on an Israel that does not know what is in its best interest. And like the maskilim, members of Breira are convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority in taking this treacherous step. But we know, as the enlighteners ought to have known, that the Czar worked in his interest, not in the interest of the Jews, and used whatever Jewish support he could get neatly to camouflage his ends. The decision of a Jewish group to appeal to the powers-that-be against the perceived self-interest of Israel (and the Jewish body politic) now, when as Mr. Shattan rightly says, “the political fortunes of the state of Israel have reached perhaps an all-time low,” is dangerous, to use the mildest available term.

American Jews, acting as Jews, can only protect Israel’s right to self-determination. When they begin to subvert that right, the constituted community has not only the right but the duty to expose their actions and to condemn them. In so doing it is not being “Mc-Carthyite” or even vengeful, just minimally responsible.

Ruth R. Wisse
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec

And from Ben Halperin there:

...Ambivalence, in one mix or another and in varying proportional intensities, is the common element in the Jewish involvement in Breira: the radical student Zionists, the Hillel rabbis and the Sh’ma coterie, and the veteran mavericks long dedicated to upholding alienation in dispersion as a way of life especially designated for the Jews. What they have in common is a shared detachment and disenchantment vis-à-vis the so-called Jewish establishment...

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