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Netanyahu’s speech and the American Jewish condition
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/03/netanyahus-speech-israelIt is my belief that much of the Jewish establishment’s view of the world is a trauma-induced delusion. Because we don’t need to be hidden. Others do, including many Palestinians from Jews. The actual Jewish condition in Israel is: they are occupiers. The abused has become the abuser, as the recovery movement explains. But still: the fear is there.
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The lobby’s power is waning because the post-traumatic period is coming to an end and Jews are no longer monolithic on Israel. Ideas of Jewish nationalism and separation are as discredited by the Israeli experiment as Communism was by the Soviet one. Young Jews are bridling, David Remnick is bridling, Benjamin Wittes is bridling. David Rothkopf is bridling. We are going to see a jailbreak from the idea of the necessity of a Jewish state inside the establishment, and Netanyahu has fostered that, god bless him.
Who are we and what is our role in the world in 2015? We were a ghettoized elite in western societies, subject to the worst forms of persecution in Europe. Now out of trauma we are licensing some of the most glaring forms of persecution in the the world.
Norman Finkelstein’s mother, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, told him that the lesson of the Holocaust was that this should happen to no people. Her experience was a human experience, and its lessons must be extended to all humans. And today there is only one test of Jewish social and political values: Where do you stand on Palestinian human rights? The Palestinians are the people whom our collective helped to dispossess, slaughter and put behind checkpoints out of an inevitable but in the end self-involved concern with our own history. We victimized them because of our own victimization, and the test of our future is when we come to recognize this responsibility and how we act on it. Many Jews will rise to that challenge. Just wait and see.
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The lobby’s power is waning because the post-traumatic period is coming to an end and Jews are no longer monolithic on Israel. Ideas of Jewish nationalism and separation are as discredited by the Israeli experiment as Communism was by the Soviet one. Young Jews are bridling, David Remnick is bridling, Benjamin Wittes is bridling. David Rothkopf is bridling. We are going to see a jailbreak from the idea of the necessity of a Jewish state inside the establishment, and Netanyahu has fostered that, god bless him.
Who are we and what is our role in the world in 2015? We were a ghettoized elite in western societies, subject to the worst forms of persecution in Europe. Now out of trauma we are licensing some of the most glaring forms of persecution in the the world.
Norman Finkelstein’s mother, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, told him that the lesson of the Holocaust was that this should happen to no people. Her experience was a human experience, and its lessons must be extended to all humans. And today there is only one test of Jewish social and political values: Where do you stand on Palestinian human rights? The Palestinians are the people whom our collective helped to dispossess, slaughter and put behind checkpoints out of an inevitable but in the end self-involved concern with our own history. We victimized them because of our own victimization, and the test of our future is when we come to recognize this responsibility and how we act on it. Many Jews will rise to that challenge. Just wait and see.
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