the USA, Israel, and national interest

You know what they say: two Jews, three opinions.

they'd be manufacturing internal conflicts over doctrinal minutiae in six minutes flat.

I tend to agree. They are so blatantly using each other as means.

I mean when your group identity is one of oppression and victimhood, and I'm not speaking for the settlers here as much as the American/Religious Right (from experience), the wind really goes out of your sails when you can't claim that anymore. You'd think people would be happy to get what they said they wanted, but that's never the case, is it.

yep Laurel OTM

You know what they say: two Jews, three opinions.

never heard this aphorism before but LOL

What?! C'mon, there's also the one about the Lutheran who was stranded on a desert island -- when the rescuers came several years later, he gave them a tour: "This is the first church I built, right after I washed up here...and over there is the church I built after the schism from the first one."

hahahahahaaa

What would happen if the neo-cons, the Christian-right and the Shas/settlers all got their druthers and all of historic Israel was judaized?

I have seen some mainstream Israeli (or pro-Israel) commentators saying "I don't know if this is such a good idea" wrt the alliance with the US Christian Right. I understand that the Christian rightwingers want a Jewish state in all of EI/MP to fulfill some Biblical prophesy, the next stage of which is that said Israeli Jews are meant to convert to Christianity en masse. I suspect that this is not likely to happen, which might make the Christian rightwingers a bit annoyed.

As an aside, someone I know once pretended to be an Irish Christian Zionist to travel along with some Israeli right wingers taking part in a protest against the Gaza evacuation. When asked about how things went with the Irish Christian Zionists he answered truthfully that they were not particularly strong.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/

that article is fantastic, really speaks to how I feel about Israel. I didn't realize it was Beinart until the end, and I wouldn't have thought he had it in him.

yeah seriously

rip american jewish establishment

He had me up until

"Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age."

I'm not entirely convinced by this reasoning - no one has explained to me how "liberal Zionism" is supposed to change the endgame that seems to be built into zionism itself.

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/05/17/zionism-as-liberalism-not-tribalism/

yeah I feel totally alienated from Israel as an American Jew. honestly think the world would be better off without this failed experiment of a "Jewish state".

damn elvis http://www.elviscostello.com/news/it-is-after-cosiderable-contemplation/44

they should get Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett to take his place

10 dead as Israeli forces storm Gaza aid convoy

To get back to the original topic, do you reckon the USA will veto any Security Council resolution on this?

i dunno if it'll be on the security council's radar

i mean, the security council hasn't said peep about north korea fucking torpedoing a south korean warship [via china being on the security council]

This calls for a sternly worded letter. USA, please put one in the envelope with your next contribution to Israel's budget.

Emergency session of the UN, so one can only imagine what geopolitical shifting events will come from that. On the other hand, Israel is actually 'sorry' about something, so who knows what might happen.

So is J Street about to fall apart?

Why, would you like it to?

I really like J Street, but there's like a whole funding controversy underway. This is one piece of it: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/sep/24/soros-funder-liberal-jewish-american-lobby/

But there's also a bunch of other weird stuff.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/09/j-streets-half-truths-and-non-truths-about-its-funding/63541/

soros! crazy

The funding "controversy" is such a non-issue imo. People are unsurprisingly looking for ways to smear J-Street. I don't have any problem with Soros, and those who do would make hay about this either way -- if they were "open" about it it would be bad that they took his money, if they weren't open about it it's bad that they're "not open" about it. What "other weird stuff"?

Apparently a big funder is a professional horse-better from Pittsburgh and an associate of his, a woman named Consolacion Ediscul from Hong Kong. No one has any idea who either of these people are.

also -- i don't have a horse in it but it's weird that they lied about not taking his money. full stop.

So somehow this amounts to a sincere concern on your part that J Street is about to collapse?!

lol, I was being a little hyperbolic. i'm sure they're not going to collapse. tho i do think considering the line they're trying to maintain (pro Israel "sensible" lobbying) this is gonna be a huge PR disaster for them.

(ok, and a little sincere concern since i have friends who work there and i only want the best for them -- fyi, they haven't been working since before this news broke because of the holiday, so i'm sure they haven't had to deal with it at all.)

http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/life-after-zionist-summer-camp

i liked this piece a lot, the commenters and jeffrey goldberg... not so much

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/giving-up-on-the-zionist-dream/240471/

Very meh on the article. I thought goldbergs objections were pretty otm.

i don't think the writer of the article is really uncurious, and i don't know if i'd call its style "faux-naive" like goldberg does, but it does elide what the author actually believes about Israel. maybe that's kind of the point. her husband does come off like an asshole in her account, though.

I think there's a kind of young liberal Jewish American "drift" from Israel. I think a lot of this is a combination of (1) frustration with the lack of progress (and arguably even regression), (2) intense pressure from family members and other community members -- people who make you feel like you're betraying yourself by being too critical of Israel (3) on the other side, a lot of people you really don't want to feel like you're in bed with -- paranoid conspiracy theorists, antisemites, people who think launching rockets at civilian settlements and blowing up public buses is justifiable or at least "understandable" under the circumstances. Meanwhile, you're three or four generations American, and you feel like "Wait, why do I have to be so invested in this at all? I'm an American." If not clear, I'm sort of describing myself here. The first branch of my family came here in 1865, and no one in my family was in Europe during the holocaust. I have only a couple of distant cousins in Israel, although I am married to an Israeli whose family moved here and that obviously changes the picture.

I openly say I'm opposed to the occupation, against the current administration and disturbed by the extremist trend in Israeli politics. I have a hard time supporting a one-state solution because it seems so utopian and out of touch with the reality, but at the same time entrenchment in "the reality" seems to mean things getting worse. I secretly sometimes wonder about the whole zionist project being worthwhile at all but I don't generally talk about it, especially since as it stand you have a 60+ year old nation on the ground with people living there and it would be pretty unprecedented to just dismantle it. I'm mildly suspicious of people's motivations when they talk about Israel as though it were some kind of puppet-master of US politics, because it feels too much like the same old paranoid theories about Jews. I also wonder about people like the writer's husband who declare it "morally bankrupt" to even live somewhere. Is there another country on the planet where it's actually "morally bankrupt" to live? I guess that about sums it up.

Is there another country on the planet where it's actually "morally bankrupt" to live?

Acc to Chomsky, the USA, which really sums up my objections with her husband's particular line of argument.

i imagine his retort would be along the lines of "well i didn't ~choose~ to live in the USA, it's just where i happen to live" whereas for some ppl israel is still a place to move to

I can relate to being shocked out of gentle indoctrination though -- for me it started at a summer program as a teenager where I became good friends with a Palestinian-American kid (yeah, I know, this sounds like a college app essay). I had some vague ideas about questioning the occupation before that but I really had never heard things from the other side. It was sort of like growing up loving your parents and thinking they're perfectly great and then discovering that you have this long-lost brother who felt betrayed and abused by them.

I think there's a kind of young liberal Jewish American "drift" from Israel.

there was some article awhile back noting this exact trend - younger generation of American Jews is becoming more alienated from Judaism in general and Israel in particular, while younger generation of Israeli Jews is becoming more hard-line/more right-wing.

I didn't read the original Awl article but I find those last few questions in Goldberg's really insulting.

my simple 4-part response to all questions israeli (and a bunch of other countries too, including ours)

1. to rule over other people without their consent is always a dirty business, no matter the reasons
2. to be ruled by people other than yourself without your consent is always intolerable, no matter who you or they are
3. neither ruling over others, nor being ruled by others, is an ennobling experience, usually the opposite.
4. a long-term conflict tend to warp all things around it, up to and including culture, sometimes permanently.

i don't think the writer of the article is really uncurious, and i don't know if i'd call its style "faux-naive" like goldberg does, but it does elide what the author actually believes about Israel. maybe that's kind of the point. her husband does come off like an asshole in her account, though.

― horseshoe, Monday, June 20, 2011 3:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, i think what i like about it is that it's pointedly _not_ a "here is how was enlightened about israel"; its a "naive" account of the way the relationships in her life shaped her feelings about israel. (& i think goldberg kind of misses this). and i like that because it seems like a more... truthful way of approaching the subject.

i do think it fails is where she writes about her husband (i work with him! hes not an asshole!), since it's easy to come away with a "nice jewish girl abandons israel over her jerkoff husband" vibe if youre already suspicious

cute comment:

Second, based on the admittedly limited info provided in the essay, it seems as if there's a fairly good chance that her husband is an anti-semite. He's neither a Jew nor an Arab but he's so rabidly anti-Israel that he can't stomach the thought of visiting the country and upbraids Benedikt's relatives upon meeting them just because they live there. Perhaps her husband is a judgmental creep and castigates everyone he meets who doesn't live up to his world view. In that he case, he's not an anti-semite. But if Israel is the sole focus of his vitriol, then we know what the husband is really all about.

rmde

oh wait heh i copied the wrong one

i meant to copy the paragraph after that:

Benedikt suggests that she isn't all physically attractive, so one possible explanation for her transformation is that she settled for the first guy who would take her and rather than admit to herself that she married an anti-semite, she herself renounces Zionism. Granted, there isn't enough evidence in the essay to firmly draw this conclusion, but I'd be willing to wager that such a situation explains much of what's going on here.

yeah that was my favorite comment

also, she...never posted that she was unattractive.

She has a winning smile in her little icon picture