So the centrist lost to the right wing racist reactionary under criminal indictment in the third Israeli national election in less than a year. The centrist refused to even speak to the members of the Arab List, whose leader, Odeh, after the second election, said was not interested in exercising any power for itself, but asked Israel's president to support the centrist's desire to form a government. Had the centrist just acknowledged the Joint Arab List and supported their vote to allow for the creation of a governing coalition, the centrist could have formed a government opposed to Netanyahu and the right wing and religious forces backing Netanyhau's Likud Party. For those who are so confident Bernie Sanders' nomination spells doom and a sure fire loss to Trump, and only a "centrist" can defeat Trump, the centrists' loss in Israel to Netanyahu should be a wake up moment.
Meanwhile, The Daughter is at the AIPAC conference in DC, which conference ends today. The Daughter has been honestly trying to sort out her own views about the topic of Israel, and may now be willing to speak frankly about Israel with The Dad, after years of largely tuning out The Dad on the topic. From what she has indicated, I think she has had quite a lesson over the past several days. I think she is learning AIPAC may still try to promote itself as a non-partisan or bi-partisan organization, but it is highly partisan, and, worse, will support any Israeli government that promotes land-grabbing and Arab hating. It is hard for most American Jews to recall how much the former Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin hated AIPAC, and vice versa, in the period of 1992-1995. See here for the initial dispute, where Rabin felt AIPAC had pushed too hard for $10 billion in loan guarantees, and had wrongly followed then former right wing Prime Minister Shamir's hard line. Then, see this detailed article in The New Yorker where the brilliant writer, Connie Bruck, wrote an informal oral history about AIPAC. Her section about AIPAC's relationship with the now martyred, but still overrated, Yitzhak Rabin, and how AIPAC did not really like the Oslo Accords, despite public statements to the contrary, is devastating. Bruck wrote--and I recall this back room scene in real time, so that one need not rely merely on Bruck's reporting:
In September, 1993, Rabin and Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, which were aimed at building a formal peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization. AIPAC officially endorsed the agreement, and still does. But many members were uncomfortable with it, according to Keith Weissman, a former analyst for the lobby. “AIPAC couldn’t act like they were rejecting what the government of Israel did, but the outcry in the organization about Oslo was so great that they found ways to sabotage it,” he said. (In 2005, Weissman was indicted, along with Steven Rosen, for conspiring to pass national-defense information to a reporter and an Israeli government agent, and AIPAC fired them. The charges were ultimately dropped.) As part of the agreement, the U.S. was to make funds available to the Palestinians, Weissman said. “The Israelis wanted the money to go to Arafat, for what they called ‘walking-around money.’ But AIPAC supported a bill in Congress to make sure that the money was never given directly to Arafat and his people, and to monitor closely what was done with it. And, because I knew Arabic, they had me following all of Arafat’s speeches. Was he saying one thing here, and another thing there? Our department became P.L.O. compliance-watchers. The idea was to cripple Oslo.”
In 1995, AIPAC encouraged Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, to support bipartisan legislation to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This put Rabin in a political corner. On one hand, he knew that such a move would infuriate the Arab world and endanger the Oslo process. On the other, as Yossi Beilin, then an official in the Labor government, pointed out, “You are the Prime Minister of Israel and you are telling American Jews, ‘Don’t ask for recognition of Jerusalem as our capital’? Nobody can do that!” At a dinner with AIPAC leaders, Rabin told them that he did not support the bill; they continued to promote it nonetheless. In October, the bill passed in Congress, by an overwhelming majority. President Bill Clinton invoked a national-security waiver to prevent its enactment, and so has every President since.*
And the evidence Bruck puts together gets worse and worse.
Rabin's assassination in 1995 put a lid on the split of liberal Zionists from AIPAC for a decade, but eventually that split burst open with the formation of J Street in 2007. It will be interesting to speak with The Daughter as to whether she now thinks I may be onto something when I say the majority of Israeli Jews do not speak for American Jews, and, worse, no longer share our basic values. Their version of Judaism has now completed a return to a land-based religion, complete with racist nationalism (I realize that phrase "racist nationalism" could be redundant, but let's take a step back from that for the moment). My sense of Judaism remains universalist, and remains formed by rabbinic scholarship and philosophy mostly from the fallout of the destruction of the two Temples and the Diaspora in the wars after Jesus' crucifixion.
As for what happens next after this third-Israeli-election-in-less-than-a-year, I am expecting the Avigor Lieberman party, which opposes the Haredim religious fanatics, but hates Arabs as a matter of policy, will join Netanyahu this time to allow Netanyahu to form a government, and prevent a fourth election. But sure, let's worry about whether Bernie is insufficiently pro-Israel, with his belief in a two-state solution long jettisoned by Netanyahu and the majority of Israeli voters. I feel so badly for the dwindling liberal and left Zionists in Israel and sadly wonder about what has happened to the Zionist project. The majority of Israeli citizens who voted for Netanyahu and his coalition, and some who voted for the so-called "centrist" party, clearly have a Masada complex, and want to conquer as much land as they can--and remove the Palestinian residents in the land. Those voters' Masada complex always plays out as hawkish, meaning, in political parlance "strong." However, as with most hawks everywhere on our planet, what actually drives the hawkish position is fear. For the Masdada complex people in Israel, led mostly these days by Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett, and Avigor Lieberman, they admit what drives them is fear of ending up on the mountain top if they don't continue to oppress Arabs. But what they dream about is that, if they fail in their land grabbing and continued repression, they will get to go out in a blaze of religious-tinged glory as the Zealots did in their suicide atop that ancient mountain.
As I mourn the continuing destruction of the Zionist project,** I will be drowning my present sorrow by returning to completing the late Amos Oz's novels and the novels of AB Yehoshua--just as soon as I finish May Sarton's extraordinarily life-affirming novel, A Reckoning (1978).
* That is, until Trump, who is not playing to please American Jews, but his Christian Evangelical supporters who root for Israel to engage in the final battle against Satan.
** I should note I am not unaware that the Zionist project, from the start, was tainted with racist and colonialist assumptions. I have written before about how my support for Zionism is historically situated and subject to twists and turns in how I would have viewed Zionism, depending upon when and where I was born. It is not enough to argue for or against the still largely odious proposition that Zionism is somehow racist in fact. One must always temper one's feelings, pro or con, about the Zionist movement, the founding of Israel, and the events before and since then, in the context that Zionism would have never sprung up but for European largely Christian anti-Semitism, which anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust. European Jews did not migrate to the so-called "Promised Land" the way the French colonized Vietnam or the British colonized India. European Jews who supported Zionism went to Palestine to primarily escape European anti-Semitism. And anyone of monotheistic faith of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism knows God supposedly gave the land to the Jews, so that there is some basis (however archaic and arguably superstitious) for the "return," which cannot be said at all about Vietnam for the French or India for the Brits. That the prevailing political Zionists (Ben Gurion and Weizmann), in the second decade of the 20th Century, began to move to complete the Zionist dream in ways that eventually mimicked settler-colonialist narratives is part of the tragedy. That Ahad Ha'am's cultural Zionist vision, and Herzl's late in life dream of a bi-national state, were rejected looks more tragic with each passing year.
