Thread by @JewhadiTM

Us and Them

Simply put, there are only two sides now: the Zionists and the anti-Zionists. tabletmag.com/sections/israe…

“Given the events of this past week, it is incumbent upon every person who wants to have any effect on the future, Jew and non-Jew alike, to understand how and why this is—and to pick a side, and soon.

Once upon a time not too long ago, the Jewish tent was open wide. It contained, from the very birth of the Zionist movement, hardened soldiers & starry-eyed poets, Marxists who fantasized about tilling the fields & rabbis who yearned to redeem the resting places of the Patriarchs

For over a half-century, you could be a Jew who believed anything: You could feel happy that Israel existed but not particularly want to think about it much. You could be a Zionist who supported a two-state solution.

You could see yourself as a Zionist who believed Jewish self-determination was a right best exercised in a binational democracy shared with Arab neighbors. You could be an anti-Zionist who still felt kinship with the Jews living in Israel and wished them well.

All of those distinctions are now moot.

The Zionist camp includes everyone who, when pushed to imagine a future they’d want, can’t imagine one in which a Jewish state doesn’t exist.

These are people watching their social media feeds fill up with one-sided hashtags, wondering when and how Hamas got laundered from a terrorist organization into an Instagram-ready social justice movement...

... or how the word “genocide” could be so casually applied to a war in which the total deaths on both sides amount to less than a third of the number of people killed in Chicago last year.

They are people who are shocked by how Israel is somehow portrayed as a singularly evil human rights violator when the Syrian civil war has claimed 400K lives in 10 years—300K more than the total number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict, starting in 1860.

These people are starting to suspect that “it’s not that attacks on Jews in the West are the unfortunate consequence of the persistent demonization of Israel, but rather the demonization of the Jewish state is undertaken so as to re-legitimize attacks on Jews in the West.”

In the United States, the Jewish Zionist camp includes traditional political right-wingers and the Orthodox, joined by majorities in the ethnic and recent immigrant communities of former Soviet Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Persian Jews, as well as a cohort of stunned college kids.

The second group, the anti-Zionists, is home to people who move, and want to remain, in a different set of social circles—those in which Israel has become a totem for everything sinister about the West, from colonialism to white supremacy to police brutality.

These people find themselves moved by the arguments of those who see Israel as uniquely criminal, and who feel impelled to distinguish themselves from their parents or communities.

This group now includes celebrities, pop star politicians who specialize in Twitter activism, and anyone who wants to be considered one of the cool kids in the arts and academia...

as well as a generation of younger Americans Jews, who are—by positioning their views on Israel-Palestine inside vogue intersectionality—helping to change the coverage at former legacy brands in American journalism.

Many of these people imagine or publicly present themselves as still believing in or supporting a Jewish state, just one that is somehow more righteous or fair. To the extent that it’s still true today, it won’t be for much longer.

The trajectory of this group is most clearly illustrated by tweets like this one*, from the leftist Jewish group @IfNotNowOrg Founded in 2014 with a stated mission to work to end the Israeli ‘occupation,’ their public pronouncements now talk about doing away with Israel itself:

Zionism is and always has been defined by Jews, while anti-Zionism is determined by non-Jews.

The difference is absolute. One side is rooted in the idea that Jews can and should decide their own fate—indeed, that submitting to rule by others can and often has been critically dangerous for Jews.

On the other side, control over the biggest decisions in the lives of Jews is willingly given to others who often—as revelations of rampant antisemitism in the @womensmarch movement suggested—do not have our best interests at heart.

This Great Divide is no cause for joy. It is the end of the mosaic of differing and diverse opinions that, when allowed to sparkle, made America a great and good nation—one whose loss I mourn.

But I also refuse to indulge in fantasy when clear and present dangers come knocking and demand a swift adjustment of attitude for the sake of survival. This cleaving isn’t a passing fad.

It isn’t a pendulum about to swing, or an inflammation about to subside, or any other metaphor you may choose to conjure a soothing image of something temporary and manageable. It’s the beginning of a new and grim age, one in which only these two very distinct sides will matter.”