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Israelis Pull Offensive Ad Campaign

One of James Michener’s few non-American historical novels was The Source - the history of the Holy Land from pre-history to the 1948 War, told through the story of an archeological dig. The dig story, the wrap-around, included debates about the nature of Judaism in America, with Israeli sabras dismissing American Jews as having been seduced by the stainless steel “whore of Babylon.” American Reform Judaism has long been at loggerheads with purists in Israel who want to impose the same strict interpretations of Talmudic Law that Americans oppose in the imposition of Sharia Law.

It seems the Israeli government still believes that being Jewish in America means not really being Jewish. They were running a series of ads urging Israelis who are living in America to return before they lost their Jewish identity. The ads showed a young man mistaking the candles and music of Yom Hazikaron, Israeli’s memorial day – for a romantic date. They showed a boy trying to call his father “daddy” instead of the Hebrew “abba” and a young woman talking with her grandparents in Israel and saying that she is celebrating Christmas instead of Hanukkah. Having seen the lengths that American Jews went to in order to celebrate Hanukkah in the anti-Semitic climate of America in the 1950s, even I find that last one offensive and I’m nominally a Christian. American Jews have fought to honor their heritage and preserve their culture for centuries. The new extreme right wing in America is as virulently anti-Semitic as our society has been at any time in its history. The same right wingnuts who accuse President Obama of being a secret Muslim say his administration is full of Jews – go figure that one out.

However, the Netanyahu government may have a point. Jon Stewart is Jewish, proudly so, but he does not support the right wing Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians. Support for the repression and oppression of Palestinians is fading among Americans, who for some crazy reason believe that no one should be treated as a second class citizen or denied their legal rights. Urging Israelis to return to their homes is perfectly logical if the government doesn’t want them tainted by such radical ideas as freedom and fairness.

The Iraq War, the ongoing Afghan War have hopefully taught Americans that occupying a country does not work well for the occupiers. Many of us have come to understand that any people, when faced with a foreign occupation, will fight the occupiers. Many of us understand the real cause of the so-called insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan – they don’t like occupation. It’s really hard to convince an occupied people that you are fighting for democracy when you control their country. For good or for bad, a people need to evolve their own way into democracy. It may be messy, it may take generations, it may not be a form of democracy we recognize, but eventually they will get there. Frankly, when a people do not fight for their own rights and freedoms, they don’t appreciate them or embrace them.

That’s what the Netanyahu government does not want Israelis to understand…that occupation only leads to conflict. They don’t want Israelis to see that a sense of being occupied by foreigners has been at the root of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948. They want to maintain the idea that Jews have a God-given right to a scrap of land, even though most of the Jews who have made Israel a country are descendants of Europeans, not the Semitic and Hamitic tribes that occupied that land during Biblical times. No one in the revisionist Zionist movement wants a single Jew to question the ideology against the real anthropology and archeology of the region. Their vision is based on Maimonides’ interpretation of Talmudic law, an interpretation that includes the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, even though the Canaanites had been wiped out two thousand years before Maimonides was born. And let’s just forget that the only reason Maimonides was able to create his body of philosophical work was because he had found refuge from Christian persecution in a Muslim country.

Education and freedom of thought are and always have been the enemies of religious fanaticism. That is why every religion, in its fundamentalist form, opposes education and the free exchange of ideas.

Faced with outrage from the American Jewish community, Israel is pulling its ads. Insulting the very people the country counts on to keep up the pressure on our government to support theirs was just stupid. This conflict has been simmering for decades – the perception in Israel that American Jews are not really Jewish has been kept very low-key since the 1960s. Previous Israeli administrations have understood that there is a values problem for Americans on the issue of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Netanyahu administration’s excessive reactions to smallish provocations, their aggressive settlement policy, their insistence that any Palestinian state be nothing but Swiss cheese holes between contiguous Jewish settlements, their policy of seizing and keeping Palestinian taxes thus denying the Palestinian people money they need for their own schools and infrastructure, the fact that Israel gets $3 billion a year from us in foreign aid and has built one of the world’s foremost tech schools, sucking off 100,000 high-tech jobs from America – all of this is being questioned in America by non-Jews and those questions are filtering through the 60-year devotion to Israel that has characterized the Jewish community in America. Telling Israelis living in America that they are losing their “Jewish identity” was just one step too far by a government that is already treading on thin ice with Americans.

 

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