Recent events in Israel have left many American Jews despairing about their community’s adherence to Zionism. The wanton killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh… the mobs of Jewish youths crying “Death to Arabs” in Jerusalem… Jewish government officials threatening Palestinians with “another Nakba” and spouting hateful replacement theory about Arabs…
And still, American Jewish leaders tell us that to be Jewish is to be Zionist, and anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And our mainstream press is respectful of this position and does not promote anti-Zionist views.
What a shock then to open ‘Haaretz’ yesterday and today and see two articles attacking Israeli Zionism, and urging the world to take action. The words the authors use about Israel’s unending shifts to the right are scathing. Contemporary Zionism is a “Jewish mutation,” Amira Hass writes in despair. Zionism was a “naive mistake,” writes B. Michael, and it has created a “small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation.”
The tragedy is that these moral appeals don’t appear in the American press, to galvanize peace-loving Americans including many Jews. Imagine trying to get “Jewish mutation” into an American paper– you couldn’t.
Hass’s piece today is titled, “Will Someone Finally Say Israel Has Lost It?” She says that the messianic side of Israelis society, nurtured for decades as a violent expansionist tool by the secularist founders of Israel, has now taken over and it’s just a matter of time before they are the majority in the Israeli parliament.
We saw this in the terrifying flag dance in Jerusalem on Sunday. Today, they are 50,000 wearing white shirts who marched in the heart of Palestinian Jerusalem. Yesterday they marched in Hebron and fulfilled there the vision of emptying it of Palestinians. Tomorrow they will be 100,000.
The violent outposts of the shepherds are also a registered patent of this holy white aesthetic. And as was confirmed by their patron, Ze’ev Hever from the colonizing movement Amana, these outposts have taken over a Palestinian space twice as large as the area of the lands the built-up settlements stole. How much will they succeed in stealing tomorrow?…
Today it is 2,600 dancing, pious Jews who went up on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. They have managed to expropriate almost completely the Ibrahim Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs from the Palestinian public. Tomorrow they will be 7,000. How many of them will sign a petition to build the Third Temple? And when will they have a democratic majority in the Knesset?
Hass calls on the world to act– against the “Jewish mutation” of Israel, in which all Israel’s Jewish citizens are complicit.
Is there now in all the world’s countries a single responsible adult who will say openly: “The hell with it, this Jewish mutation that is developing there in the Middle East – in other words, the State of Israel – has lost it. Freaked out, lost its mind, gone crazy. Because of its military, nuclear and high-tech power, combined with all the religious fervor, because of its alliance with the United States, this needs to worry us. Very much so.
Yesterday’s article by B. Michael, “It’s time for us Jews to go back into exile,” is even more anti-Zionist. It says that Jews should not be the majority in a nation and seek to rule others, but resume our traditional role as a minority.
We’re really terrible at being a “nation.” We very quickly become as stupid, violent and greedy as most of the other nations of the world, and within a short time we brought destruction and exile on ourselves. Only there, in exile, do we regain the sense we lost and resume being a people that survives.
Apparently, being a majority doesn’t suit us – ruling, running an army and a state. We’re good at being a minority.
Michael’s piece is reminiscent of Sylvain Cypel’s 2021 book on the moral and civilizational cost to Jews worldwide of supporting the “thug nation.” Michael:
[The Jewish nation is] the growth of another shoot from the Jewish tree that does harm to everyone around it. A rotten, poisonous brother of the Zealots, the Sicarii, Rabbi Akiva’s blind students and Simon bar Kochba’s foolish disciples. They ought to be called Jew-oids. They’re like Jews who took the trivial and wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.
Imagine trying to get that phrase into an American newspaper: Israeli “Jew-oids” have taken the “wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.”
Or calling Israel “a small, arrogant, violent, wicked ‘nation.'”
And that’s how we got to where we are – a small, arrogant, violent, wicked “nation.” A little fish in a little pond and an ally to pariahs. The visionary whose efforts led to the state’s creation, were he to rise from his grave and see the results of his vision, would jump back in his coffin and demand that his bones be taken back to Vienna.
B. Michael is as desperate about the political future as Amira Hass is.
There is no longer any escape from this morass. Seventy-five years of racism and violence have thoroughly corrupted the Israeli electorate. No sane government will be elected here anymore. Consequently, there’s no choice but to admit that Zionism was a naïve mistake and to go into exile again to regain our strength and refresh our values.
“No sane government will be elected here anymore.” Yes, ask your liberal Zionist friends what hope they have for the Israeli political future when even their best hope is spouting racist ideology. If you are Jewish, let B. Michael and Amira Hass inspire you with the moral legacy of our tradition, and give you freedom to say what you see before your eyes.
h/t Robert Herbst.
You can almost sense the despair in writers like Amira Hass. She is symbolic of how many decent and informed people feel, those who care about human rights, and want justice for these people who are victims of a very brutal right wing apartheid nation. A country that has been able to keep the truth away from the American people about their occupation, their brutality towards unarmed civilians, the killing of young kids, and the wiping out of entire families. All through the US media they have been able to control and silence.
They call all Palestinians terrorists, but it is THEY who terrorize, kill unarmed civilians, and bomb homes, hospitals, media buildings, UN shelters, electrical power plants, and do every thing they can think of to make all Palestinians suffer. This is evil, sadistic, and inhumane.
These poor Palestinian people have endured so much, and have suffered tremendously. The recent brutality the world witnessed when American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was gunned down deliberately by uniformed thugs, and the thugs attacking those who carried her casket, was just a glimpse of what these poor people suffer on a daily basis. They have marched before, they have chanted before, they have called for the deaths of Arabs before, and they have taunted, and attacked Palestinians, and spit on them. Nothing has changed, but it has got even more vicious, evil, and mean. They kicked old ladies, they attacked unarmed Palestinians, they taunted them by poking them with their flags, the Israeli flag that has now come to symbolize right wing supremacy, and brutality. It was clearly seen on their faces that they have extreme hatred for their victims.
One day the world will look back and regret that no one did anything constructive to stop the lunatics in Israel.
Just like they do now when they look back at Nazi Germany. It will be too late.
We should lay blame where it is deserved. Those who have been complicit in the all the above crimes, those who keep giving billions of dollars in aid, weapons that are used to kill children, and those who protect this rogue nation from world condemnation, boycotts, and sanctions.
That would be the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, UNITED KINGDOM, AND THE EUROPEAN UNION.
“Hass’s piece today is titled, “Will Someone Finally Say Israel Has Lost It?” She says that the messianic side of Israelis society, nurtured for decades as a violent expansionist tool by the secularist founders of Israel, has now taken over and it’s just a matter of time before they are the majority in the Israeli parliament.”
There’s a quote from one of the characters in one of Grace Paley’s novels I keep thinking about:
( the paragraph above the section “Writing about Jewish and Female identity”):
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/paley-grace#pid-14064
Paley was one of the founders in 1987 of the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and was an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. … In her fiction, she created characters who speak eloquently on behalf of the diaspora. One of the most explicit and often-cited examples of such views can be found in “The Used-Boy Raisers,” written in the 1950s, when Israel was barely a decade old. In this story, Faith, the central character of a cycle of short stories that span Paley’s writing career, reflects on her relationship to her two husbands and to Jewish concerns. Denying any knowledge of the significance of the Kaddish (mourner’s prayer), Faith rejects Israel “on technical grounds” as well. “I believe in the Diaspora,” she tells her former and present husbands, insisting that once Jews are “huddled in one little corner of a desert, they’re like anyone else…. Jews have one hope only—to remain a remnant in the basement of world affairs … a splinter in the toe of civilizations, a victim to aggravate the conscience,” a function Paley herself certainly served in her political life.
1 of 2
RGB Media – Responsive Email Template (972mag.com)
“On the Temple Mount, Jewish fundamentalists are winning the day” by Natasha Roth-Roland, The Landline, May 31/22
“A few years ago, while conducting research on Jewish far-right movements, I toured the headquarters of the Temple Institute in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Most of the site is taken up by a museum dedicated to the Temple, the holiest site in Judaism; on display to visitors are priestly garments, ancient dyes, silver trumpets, vessels, & other ritual objects to be used in the ‘renewed Temple service,’ all meticulously adhering to biblical specifications.
“Operated as it is by a messianic group dedicated to building the Third Temple on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif — in place of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque — this museum is not an archive, but a blueprint. The institute is part of the Temple Mount Movement, which has poured decades of work into reconstituting the ritual objects & practices that were abandoned 2,000 years ago with the destruction of the Second Temple. This project has been lavishly supported by a procession of American-Jewish &, more recently, Christian-Zionist donors, along with Israeli government funding.
“This past Sunday, Jerusalem Day, as the customary, government-sanctioned anti Palestinian violence unfolded in the streets of the Old City & beyond, we witnessed the enactment of another aspect of this Temple project: the entrance of a record number of Jews — over 2,500 — to the Temple Mount, accompanied by the Kahanist MK Itamar Ben-Gvir. One viral photo showed a number of men lying prostrate on the ground, unencumbered by the police, performing a ritual action associated with Temple worship.
“For anyone who was inclined to take the Israeli government at its word when, just a few days ago, it recommitted itself to the ‘status quo’ on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif — wherein the compound is overseen by the Islamic Waqf & Jews are permitted to visit so long as they do not engage in religious practices — the photos that emerged on Sunday may seem aberrant, the result of a security lapse, or even, to the particularly fanciful hasbarista, evidence of some kind of ‘restraint’ by the Israeli security forces (who nonetheless arrested dozens of Palestinian worshippers in the compound). (cont’d)
2 of 2
EXCERPT:
“The truth, however, is that Sunday’s events revealed just how little relation the ‘status quo’ on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif bears to the reality of how the Israeli state, & Jewish worshippers, conduct themselves in the compound. Israeli forces have staged numerous raids of Al-Aqsa Mosque over the past decade. Temple Mount activists of various stripes — whether formally affiliated with the Temple Mount Movement or not — have been praying on the compound for years, increasingly with police protection & coordination. Some of those prayer visits have included the prostration seen yesterday; in previous years, worshippers were arrested for lying on the ground during prayer, but more recently, that has not been a foregone conclusion.
“Moreover, the numbers of Jews ascending to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif have soared under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s government (albeit with an assist from the coalition of his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu), which advertised itself as a cordon sanitaire against the extreme right but which largely — with obvious exceptions — subscribes to many of its racist, expulsionist, & segregationist tendencies. Temple Mount activists are also riding a wave of increasing leniency from the security forces, religious authorities, & even the courts. In 2020, the UAE-Israel accord contained a finely-worded clause that effectively provided for Jewish worship on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, & a growing number of Israeli Jews support Jewish prayer in the compound, even if only to assert Israeli ‘sovereignty’ over the site.
“All of this makes it difficult to pin down the moment when the ‘status quo’ ends, while underlining the need to accept that the actual status quo is one in which the Israeli religious right enjoys increasing latitude at the site, backed — in deed, if not in word — by the state.
“And indeed, the ‘status quo’ on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif has not prevented it from being the site that triggered, among other conflagrations, the 1990 unrest in which Israeli security forces killed 17 Palestinians & wounded over 150 more, after the Temple Mount Faithful attempted to lay the foundation stone of the Temple; the Second Intifada, after then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited along with several other Likud politicians…”
Not sure wether to laugh…..that:
a) Phil is ‘shocked!’. Shocked that Haaretz would publish this screed. No Israelis were surprised and I doubt that many American Jews
b) Amira Haas. Again, hardly a surprise. Haas and Levy are the poster children for the angry renegade Israeli reporters. They are both allied with Israel’s implacable enemies along with their other pursuits of reporting how horrid Israel is.
c) the bds and general interest in the PLO, PA Hamas and Hezbollahs quest to eradicate Israel has waned. Small breaks in Putin’s genocide of Ukrainians and the displacement of 3million allow the P.A. leadership to stir up trouble to attract the waning press coverage. The Palestinians are more desperate for another war with Israel then Israel is. Flag Day? What a joke. Arabs on the mount have flag day every day. Poor phil