In one clip from the IDF's latest release of transparently doctored footage from the Mavi Marmara, I saw a circle drawn around something a passenger was brandishing, along with the helpful graphic: "slingshot." My morning's coffee blasted out my nose. To my knowledge, no one has commented on the twisted biblical symbology inherent in that image, summing up everything that's wrong with Israel circa 2010.
David has become Goliath and a flotilla of food, medicine and toys has somehow been transformed through the Israeli spin machine (and the Hasbarists who defend them all over the internet) into a shipment of enough rockets and Zyklon B to start another Holocaust, while the aid workers and peaceniks aboard are somehow a threat on par with the Spanish aboard the Armada. WTF?
My background is orthodox Jewish and my parents escaped the Nazis. The fact that I have to put this credential/disclaimer high up (and that it will hardly blunt the Hasbara hate this diary will receive anyway) is just another sign of how downhill things have gone with the Zionist experiment.
Although everyone I grew up with pretty much unflinchingly supports Israel, my attitude toward the nation has always been at best apathetic. Having visited in my youth, like all good Jewish boys do, I was disappointed that its supposed holiness that had been drummed into my head since birth was nowhere in evidence among the tacky houses and malls. Although I couldn't articulate it back then, Israel basically looked like a cheap version of an American suburb. In what way, I began to wonder, were the Israelis treating this land as if it were, indeed, holy?
Still, the whole issue is inherently inflammatory and mostly I did my best to avoid voicing my opinion about it -- to the point of not having one. But it was visiting some years ago as an adult and shuttling back and forth between Israel proper and the West Bank, between settlements and Palestinian villages, that a sense of revulsion started creeping in. This was not only wrong, I began thinking, it was, in the words of a recent White House statement, "unsustainable."
"But the Jewish people have to support Israel", goes the refrain.
Why? I ask. Why doesn't Israel support us? Why does Israel cynically expect we Jews to go out and defend the increasingly indefensible -- while providing the shoddiest, most tissue-thin "evidence" as back up? I don't get to vote for Israel's leaders and they don't have to accommodate my opinion. Netanyahu is a leader of a government. He is not the chief rabbi/collective conscious of all the Jews (as if anyone can presume to speak for all the Jews). Where, I ask, does the Torah command the faithful to support an Israeli state? How did a group of dime store political charlatans come to define what our deepest obligations should be?
Looking ahead, for Israel to maintain the path it's on, they will have to resort to escalating amounts of brutality and international lawlessness. It will be for the Israelis -- all of whom must serve in the military and thus, be the actual people who must implement the actual gun-blazing and headbashing - to decide if they want themselves and their parents and children to participate in this increasingly inhuman behavior. There are signs that more and more are refusing to do so. It will also be for Israel's rabbis to decide whether Jewish halachic law really allows the people who profess to follow Judaism to continue what they're doing. But that is an internal Israeli issue.
My 2 cents comes in when they assume/demand that the Diaspora go out and defend this. We are supposed to accuse our neighbors and friends of anti-semitism (for an excellent and unexpected account of the current state of world anti-semitism, I highly recommend Yoav Shamir's eye-opening documentary, Defamation -- http://www.youtube.com/... ), while reminding them of Hamas rockets, the benevolent treatment of gays and lesbians in Israel vs. the rest of the Middle East and to keep the whining chorus going about the fate of one Gilad Shalit. As if this grants anyone license to lock 1.5 million people in a cage and burn them alive with phosphorus bombs.
And of course, we must always obey Godwin's Law and invoke the Holocaust, even though whatever perpetrators are not already dead are drooling in an Alzheimers haze in some nursing home in South America.
Enough is enough. It's been clear for a long time how Israel thinks they're supposed to treat the Palestinians. Now it's clear how they treat the Jews. We are their propaganda tools - expected to turn off our minds, donate our money, and parrot their talking points. Nothing more.
The Satmar Hassidim - whose presence in the recent protests might have come as a surprise to many people not familiar with ideological divisions within Judaism, and particularly within orthodox Judaism - have consistently maintained this one argument: You can have Judaism or you can have Zionism. But you can't have both.
It's time for the rest of the Jews to start thinking about which one they want to preserve.