Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 30, 2024

How do you wrap your head around genocide? As one numb week follows another, our leaders blind themselves to massacre and famine.

Joe Biden can see no compelling alternative to how Israel [wages] a war in these circumstances without doing grievous harm to civilians, Aaron David Miller writes in the New York Times, excusing the presidents support for genocide. So, Israel isnt being deliberately cruel and sadistic. The Times coverage would just have you believe they just have no choice as Donald Johnson wrote in a letter to the paper. There is no middle ground between what Israel is doing and Gandhian pacifism: They just had to use 2000 lb bombs in urban settings. They have to torture captives and cut off food.

Miller and other liberal Zionists have adopted that stance, but they are having little influence on Democrats. Polls show that the American people favor giving humanitarian aid to Gaza in far greater numbers than they do giving military aid to Israel, and the progressive base of the Democratic Party has started a political firestorm over U.S. support for genocide. The Zionist group J Street postponed its 2024 conference, surely because its own rank and file are enraged by Israel.

James Carville said onMSNBC this week that if Biden loses, its Israels fault, because the catastrophe in Gaza is an issue all across the country.

This Gaza stuff, this is not just a problem with some snot-nosed Ivy League peopleThis is a problem all across the country. And I hope the president and Blinken can get this thing calmed down because if it doesnt get calmed down before the Democratic convention, its going to be a very ugly time in Chicago. I promise you that. No matter what happens, I know its a huge problem.

Last week, Brad Sherman, the Israel-loving Congress member from Los Angeles, fought back, accusing anti-Israel forces of an attempt to penetrate and muddy our national discourse.

But a week later, Sherman was running through the Capitol as protesters from the antiwar group Code Pink held up bloodied hands before him.

Sherman accused them of antisemitism. Theres blood on your hands for the genocideyoure trying to kill every Jew.

That is the chief refuge for Democrats who excuse Israels actions. To say that critics of genocide are motivated by antisemitism.

But even liberal media are giving a platform to progressive critics. The United States is complicit in genocide, Mehdi Hasan said this week on New York public radio, and when the host pushed back and said Hasan was not blaming Hamas, Hasan said of course he denounces Hamas, but his tax dollars are not going to support Hamas. He also pointed out the inevitable consequences of military occupation. The oppressed will always rise against the oppressor.

And in wonderful media news this week, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg withdrew from a speaking engagement in Kentucky after students questioned his record in the Israeli military nearly 40 years ago.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the University of Kentucky (UK) Wednesday, citing a last-minute schedule change, amidst concerns from students about his past as a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) prison guard and his views on Zionism. We were informed that students expressed concern as to why a former IDF prison guard would be speaking on democracy and journalism at an event celebrating the integration of UK. Students were told he withdrew to not cause harm on campus, the representative [of a Palestinian solidarity group] stated.

The event was billed as The Future of Journalism and the Health of Our Democracy. Thats a little bit of accountability. The editor of the Atlantic is finally being called out for his service for Israel. The writer Yakov Hirsch repeatedly explained on our site that Netanyahu could not have maintained his faultless reputation in the U.S. mainstream without Goldberg fostering hasbara culture.

And bear in mind, that Goldberg used to brag about his military service. He wrote a whole memoir about it. Now, times are changing. And other editors who carried water for Israel will surely be called on to defend that work.

This process is just beginning. Zionists still have esteem in the U.S. discourse. The view that Israel supporters promote bigotry against Palestinians is still off-limits. Even as mainstream Jewish organizations assert that those who support Palestinian rights are bigoted against Jews.

Israel supporters should be seen as on the same moral level as supporters of Bull Connor, but in the U.S. and Western mainstream you can only point to antisemitism you can never point to anti-Palestinian racism on the Israel side, Donald Johnson has written on our site.

We cannot make progress on this issue if the extreme racism of the pro-genocide side is never discussed. People have to be able to say that any group, whether white southerners or South Africans or Nation of Islam members or Christian evangelical Zionists or Germans or, yes, Jewish supporters of Israel, can be racists. They can make racism central to their ideology. ButZionist racism is still a taboo subject, automatically branded as antisemitic, because fundamentally Palestinians are seen as lesser.

Progressives are actively taking on that discrimination. Please join that effort!

Thanks for reading,

Phil Weiss

Read the original here:
Weekly Briefing: Zionism will never be viewed the same after the Gaza genocide - Mondoweiss

Category: Zionism
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