Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Am I anti-Semitic?... [update]

... because I disagree with the current Israeli government's policies???
Netanyahu defends aid ships raid, regrets loss of life
The Likud/Shas coalition includes folks who would happily disenfranchise Israeli Arabs, strip them of citizenship... and deport 'em.

It supports the "Settlement" movement, which is quickly denying West Bank Palestinians the right to live... anywhere.

In the name of "national security" it has completely ghetto-ized the Gaza Strip.

What, exactly, does this government hope to attain by these draconian measures?
Palestinians - faced with absolutely NO HOPE for a better tomorrow - are unlikely to decide, under such repression - to go to their graves smiling.

Israel's right-wing, and many in the traditional American Jewish political community (e.g., AIPAC), will construe my misgivings regarding the current Israeli government as a sure sign of anti-Semitism.
So be it.

update: From an article in The New York Review of Books:
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
by Peter Beinart
12 May 2010
...
Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”

[emphasis added]
Indeed.

2 comments:

  1. No Russ -you're just normal. We need change in this relationship but that will never happen.

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  2. One of the unanticipated consequences of the break up of the Soviet Union was the mass immigration of Russian Jews to Israel, and for some reason they are the ones now promoting this ghettoisation. Seems they have a totalitarian leaning even after having been victims of it in Russia

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