COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
What's Wrong with
Liberal Jews?
" ... somehow
shooting simulated Arabs [Jerry Seinfeld] and grinning while doing so does not
appear to bother him one bit."
"What's Wrong
with Liberal Jews?"
Simple, there are none left.
The liberal Jews I grew up with - I lived in two
neighborhoods, as a boy and as a young man, which had large Jewish populations
- have virtually disappeared.
The attitudes evinced by many Jews in America today are
greatly different than what I knew.
Israel’s founding involved the thinking of some very extreme
Zionists like Ze'ev Jabotinsky who famously wrote in the 1920s of the need for
“an iron wall” in the future Israel. Indeed, Russians should know that what he
wrote was in Russian.
The concept of an iron wall certainly became unofficial
Israeli policy. We see it in many, many behaviors. It is an iron wall towards
all of Israel’s neighbors, and especially towards the Palestinians they
continue to abuse and take things from.
Support for the bizarre behavior of Israel requires may
compromises of conscience.
And it is an old and well-known phenomenon that for many
people, as they move from youth to senior years, they become far more
conservative anyway.
Further, the word "liberal" in Israel is almost a
dirty word. Israeli fanatics, the people who always control the balance of
power in divided Israeli elections, hate liberals because the essence of being
a true liberal is opposing tyrannies of all kinds and respecting human and
democratic rights.
Yes, Israel claims to be the Mideast’s only democracy, but
that is only a heroic-sounding slogan meant to influence American thinking and
comfort American supporters.
No state which accepts only one kind of people can possibly
be called a democracy, and no state which keeps millions of people under
endless occupation can possibly be called a democracy, and certainly no state
that just periodically seizes the homes and farms of others can be called a
democracy.
But if you highly qualify that word “democracy,” so that it
just describes a political process in which only a select group of people from
a society may partake, then you may call Israel a democracy, but then so was
Nationalist South Africa a democracy by the same skewed definition. And so was
the American Confederacy by exactly the same definition. And the world has had
many other such “democracies.”
Surely, calling Israel a democracy is a kind of elaborate
charade, but it is easy to see that in order to keep the charade going, you
cannot have a lot of people questioning and doubting – which are the very
activities genuine liberals always do. So, Israel has virtually no space for
liberals, even less than in the imperial mother country, America, where small
numbers are found huddled in country stores in places like Vermont or parts of
Oregon.
The liberal way of looking at things does not sit well in
Israel, it almost goes without saying. Even organizations like Israeli Labor
Party do not reflect truly left or liberal views. The truth is that you cannot
really be an Israeli without being, implicitly at least, a rather severe
imperialist.
Were it otherwise, Israel could not continue keeping
millions of people effectively under police-state government, the young men who
make the IDF's ugly excesses possible would not want to continue their day-in,
day-out job of suppressing a hostile population and of occupying land they know
is not theirs. Israel’s gigantic security services - gigantic, certainly,
relative to the size of the country - wouldn't be able to continue their
years-long campaign of terror. A just-published book, for example, describes
Israel's 2700 assassinations, but assassination is just one of the dark
practices employed as a matter of course by Mossad and Shin Bet.
For all these reasons and more, Israel is accurately
described as a garrison state, much like an old Crusader fortresses of the
Middle Ages. It effectively provides an American colony in the region, too,
such an arrangement being seen as beneficial by both sides - by Israelis who
want the greatest possible security and by the Pentagon-CIA Axis which wants
dominance everywhere. It is convenient, too, for American Jews (the largest
Jewish population outside Israel) who are allowed dual-citizenship and to
freely move back and forth, almost as though Israel were a 51st
state.
Those kinds of arrangements do not leave a lot of room for
truly liberal sentiments, either on the part of residents or on the part of
supporters abroad.
"Liberal," through long effort on the part of
government and media is dirty word in Israel, even more extremely so than it
has become through much of America itself. After all, America’s post-WWII
imperialism and constant colonial wars leave little room for liberalism to
flourish and it has indeed been dying for many decades in America, today’s
Democratic Party being pretty much a War Party with slightly different domestic
views than the Republicans.
Americans supporting Israel are affected by all these
political currents and can hardly assume a different posture without being
subject to ridicule or contempt. There are few individuals anywhere who stand
up to the prevailing views in a country, no matter how negative they may be.
Just making a living is hard enough without taking on a full-time cause, one
bringing down on your head many hostilities.
