TomDispatch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:08:01 -0400
From: "TomDispatch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [TD] Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews
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Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews I often think
of the letters that come into the Tomdispatch email box as the university of my
later life -- messages from around the world, offering commentary, criticism,
encouragement, but mainly teaching me about lives (and versions of life) I
would otherwise know little or nothing about. Then again, the Internet has a
way of releasing inhibitions and, from time to time, the Tomdispatch email box
is also a sobering reminder of the mindless hate in our world -- of every sort,
but sometimes of a strikingly anti-Semitic sort, letters that are wildly angry
and eager, above all, to shut down or shut up commentary or debate of any sort.
It's ironic, then, that the threat of sparking such "anti-Semitism," as well
as charges of being functionally anti-Semitic, have been used for a long time
in this country as a kind of club to enforce, within the Jewish community, an
exceedingly narrow range of correct opinion on Israel and its behavior in the
world. In recent months, such attacks from within the Jewish establishment
seem to have escalated whenever any professor or critic steps even slightly out
of line, and the recent controversial book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt has caused a little storm of
consternation. Tony Karon, who runs the always provocative Rootless
Cosmopolitan website, suggests that these attacks may not be what they seem,
that the need to turn back every deviation from Jewish orthodoxy may actually
reflect a loosening of co! ntrol within the political world of American Jews,
and a new opening, a Jewish glasnost. Tom
Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America? Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are
Questioning Israel
By Tony Karon
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help
loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist
followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list --
that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T.
list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I
get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael
Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot,
counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on
their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents --
those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to
that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow
exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as
"self-haters"is not unfamilia! r to me.
In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service
organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of
Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions.
The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty
shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to
be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on
Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa,
which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in
my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East --
and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid
regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN
arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black
people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West
Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South
African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state
that denied them the rights of citizenship.
Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old
kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many
times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear
to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize
Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in
order to warn others off expressing similar views.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
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