the USA, Israel, and national interest

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

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

i like democracy, the rule of law, etc., but getting down to it, this covers every country out there. you don't consent in a meaningful way, you make the best of it.

2. to be ruled by people other than yourself without your consent is always intolerable, no matter who you or they are

this really does cover every country out there -- of course you will be ruled by people other than yourself. it is tolerable.

3. neither ruling over others, nor being ruled by others, is an ennobling experience, usually the opposite.

not even sure what you're trying to say here

4. a long-term conflict tend to warp all things around it, up to and including culture, sometimes permanently.

israel has always been in conflict, i guess this is a way of saying it's so warped it's... i don't know. this cuts both ways.

think yr kind of deliberately misreading what he's saying there...

or being overly literal perhaps

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

his imagined retort is really silly, then. a) should ppl stop trying to move to the USA then? b) Israel is still a democracy and plenty of Israeli citizens disagree w/ Israeli government policy. you can live somewhere, or even move somewhere, and not agree w/ the current government positions.

she clearly makes her husband sound like an ass. whether that's the fault of reality (he is an ass) or the fault of the author (maybe he didn't actually harangue his hosts + relatives-in-law quite as dramatically) idk. it's a problem for me tho as a reader...

x-post re comment about attractiveness-- for some reason she made the following observations

She said she was cute at one point and then later says I am no longer considered cute

I agree!

2. to be ruled by people other than yourself without your consent is always intolerable, no matter who you or they are

I read this as more 'a ppl' than just 'ppl' in general.

She said she was cute at one point and then later says I am no longer considered cute

― curmudgeon, Monday, June 20, 2011 6:08 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay but the whole thing is narrated in the present tense, so i took the not-cuteness to be temporary. anyway the point is more that to read her entire relationship to Israel and Zionism as a function of how badly dudes want to fuck her seems to evince a...worldview.

which part? i guess they are meant to be specially relevant to israel but given the way things are in the middle east right now it is sort of funny -- not that funny and im not trying to belittle the palestinian cause but -- it's sort of funny to say that the big problem with israel is, ruling over people without their consent is the worst. it sure is. but i still don't get the 'people other than yourself' part. the nation-state is a pretty unusual phenomenon. it hasn't proven intolerable to live outside one, empirically speaking.

xpost

ah, 'a ppl'. applies better to assad's syria than israel, doesn't it?

Meaning the Alawites?

i think the article mentioned above btw was Beinart's NY Review of Books piece a bit ago that you can read here:

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

I have my issues w/ that piece as well but it stands up much better imo. He's a much more critical thinker w/ a more nuanced take. This article was cute "my experience in Israel changed me" etc type of thing which if you read a certain kind of writer (look at places like New Voices or Birthright responses) is not courageous and more a trope at this point. But good for her being published in a nice big venue. For a sorta counter point that's better written / also personal voice / in pictures! check out http://www.amazon.com/How-Understand-Israel-Days-Less/dp/1401222331 which I thought was legitimately good tho suffered from a lot of same flaws as this article ("if you're not with the one who convinced you, be convinced by the one you're with!").

ah, 'a ppl'. applies better to assad's syria than israel, doesn't it?

there's a scale, difference of degrees etc

yeah that's it Mordy - thx

He's a much more critical thinker w/ a more nuanced take. This article was cute "my experience in Israel changed me" etc type of thing which if you read a certain kind of writer (look at places like New Voices or Birthright responses) is not courageous and more a trope at this point. But good for her being published in a nice big venue.

tbf i think her piece was not intended as a thinkpiece exactly...more of a this is what ambivalence feels like piece. also you sound kind of patronizing :/

i swear i've read like a hundred personal narratives about "my experience w/ the political situation in Israel" since college. every time it's called courageous i have to wonder at what point this thing stops being courageous and starts being a position/opinion a lot of ppl seem to be expressing!

xp yes, i am patronizing her, i think it's a silly piece. is that a priori bad?

i think if she'd taken a little more time to make it clear that she loves john, that she's in love with john, etc., it might make the relationship function a little better in the piece as another example of the way loyalty works even in the presence of objective assholism. i.e., to ask "why is she with this asshole" kind of misses the larger point about the way we form attachment and relatiosnhips. dunno, just riffing here. but parts of this resonated w/ me, the being attached to persons and ideas and institutions and positions that are "objectively" "bad" or "wrong" or "jerks" but being unable to change my allegiances. or allowing my allegiances to change only in the context of my relationships with other people.

heh, who called benedikt's piece "courageous"?

xp yes, i am patronizing her, i think it's a silly piece. is that a priori bad?

― Mordy, Monday, June 20, 2011 6:20 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i just prefer calling it "silly" to calling it "cute" and saying "good for her"

oh, no one on this thread apparently but i've seen it elsewhere. here's one place:

Allison Benedikt did us all a courageous favor by willingly weathering the inevitable accusations of stupidity, shallowness, disloyalty and self-hatred that comes with being conflicted about Israel. I salute her and hope so many others will also tell their elders to shut up, sit down and listen for once. Their control of the Jewish community is waning and they can listen now, or they can listen when we’re in charge.

http://jewschool.com/2011/06/17/26374/why-allison-benedikt-is-right/

Of course, Jewschool has been hammering this point for so long this article was a gift to their echo chamber.