Israel skader verdens jøder

I hvert fald de amerikanske, skriver Philip Weiss – med sin uretfærdige og brutale besættelse, sit krigsmageri og ikke mindst den tåkrummende racisme blandt ekstreme zionister. Israel har efterhånden forvandlet sig til alt, hvad amerikanske jøder ikke ønsker at være, skriver han:

A feeling has taken root deep in the American Jewish community that Israel is hurting us, hurting our standing in the world and our future. The restrictions on democracy, the curbs on women, the intransigence vis-a-vis the Palestinians when Obama has demanded movement, the indifference to the Arab Spring– Israel is a society we no longer recognize as Jewish like we’re Jewish, and worst of all, its militarism is exposing American Jews to the accusation that we are dually loyal. And we don’t like that: We’re Americans.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was clearly the oafish ad campaign that targeted Christmas and intermarriage– the ad campaign that Netanyahu cancelled. Even rightwing Israel lobbyists were stunned by how clueless the ad campaign was. But it was an expression of genuine Israeli attitudes. And that is what’s so scary: American Jews are waking up to the fact that Israeli society is nothing like ours.

We are integrators. We live in America because we want to be Jews in a diverse society. That is the spirit of American Jewish life by and large. And now these Zionists–separatists whom we never completely trusted when we were arguing with them in Eastern Europe–are quietly understood to have hijacked Jewishness and taken it to a dark ugly place. And their cake is cooked; Israel has produced “apartheid on steroids,” as a Jewish leader in the Nation wrote this fall; he wanted no part of it.

Israeli values are incompatible with American Jewish values. Even Jeffrey Goldberg says the occupation is a “moral disaster.” Well guess what, it’s been going on for 44 years! In its segregated buses and roads, in its ad campaigns that targets intermarriage and Christmas, in the refusal to end the occupation– Israel is a different society than ours.

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