Image: Israeli protesters hold flags and signs during a protest against judicial reforms outside the Knesset in Jerusalem, February 20, 2023. (Photo: Ilia Yefimovich/dpa via ZUMA Press/APA images)
Dear luisa,
As we all know, Israel is experiencing massive protests over the
scheme by its most right-wing government ever to kneecap the independent
judiciary. Police had to use water cannons to disperse pro-democracy
protesters who flooded a Tel Aviv highway, while the high tech businesses that have helped give Israelis a high standard of living are threatening to leave the country because of Netanyahu’s plans.
American Zionists have thrown themselves into solidarity with the
protesters. Endangering Israel’s “shared values” with the United States
will “imperil the future of the Jewish homeland,” Mike Bloomberg warns
Netanyahu in the New York Times. While centrist and liberal
Zionist groups separately urge the Biden administration to keep
Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich from visiting the U.S. because he made genocidal statements about a Palestinian village that has resisted occupation.
These American protesters assert their love of Israel. We are
“American Jews committed to Israel’s future as a secure, Jewish, and
democratic state,” say the centrist Zionists who want Smotrich to go away.
“We will not let the hope of a peaceful and democratic homeland for the
Jewish people be engulfed in the flames of extremists like Smotrich,”
say the liberal American Zionists who want Smotrich to go away.
But that’s the problem. So long as Israel is a “Jewish democratic
state,” half the population will be disenfranchised and/or excluded from
governing coalitions, and they will inevitably resist.
So long as Israel is a “Jewish democracy,” Smotrich and his like will
never go away. Because fascistic right-wingers will be needed to enforce
systematic racial privilege in this day and age—in fact, over 80
percent of Israeli Jewish parliament members are rightwing occupation
supporters, and young privileged Jews turned to Smotrich to crush the
Palestinian resistance to their rightslessness.
Apartheid is the fruit of Zionism, and the Israeli “left” will never
be able to save their democracy nor the country’s international
reputation until they overturn the fundamental inequality of their
society and build a coalition with the natural base of the left,
Palestinians who are poor and oppressed.
Americans will never be able to save Israel from its crisis until
they recognize the problem. “The occupied territories is worse than
apartheid. I’ve never called it apartheid because it’s worse than
apartheid,” the luminary leader Noam Chomsky said this week.
Zionists still can’t hear that. Tom Friedman couldn’t even mention apartheid in a long discussion of the crisis this week with Americans for Peace Now.
We keep awaiting the American awakening.
Thanks for reading, |