.
>
>There are plenty of bad things to say about Israel as a state without
>jumping to link it to Jews in American society. Even the issue of the
>"Jewish lobby" is pretty irrelevant-- most of the support for Israel comes
>from military hawks and Christian fundamentalists. Jews just don't have
>either the votes or the money to outbid oil interests who could easily go
>the other way if other concerns didn't exist.
I bridle when people start talking about "the Jews" in aws that are redolent of other ways that we have been discussed in other times and plavces. At the same time, I can't agree with you about the power and significance of the Israel lobby. It's full-funded, well-organized, and extremely effective, and has the support of almost all of organzed, and I emphasize _organized_ American Jewry--the poll data show that the majority of AMerican Jews are several steps to the left of the institutional community they support.
But Nathan, you are a sociologist. You know that votes count, but organization decides, as we say in Chicago. My rabbi at my atheist humanist congregation here hasd a lot more weight when he gets up and gives a talk at the oulput about how we support Israel while it is murdering Palestinean children and bulldozing Palestinian houses, etc., than I do when I walk out. Last time I did that was when my parents' rabbi, an Auschwitz survivor, gavea rousing sermon in favor of the invasion of Lebanon.
The American Jewish community is a problem. It may not have the power to beat big oil, if big oil decidedto put its weight behing peace, but that aint likely. It has the power to harden the discussion and make it hard for any politician to stand up for decency. Who was that Arab-American Congressman whom they destroyed? James Something, began with an A. Other Congressmen remember that.
Now, I think the American Jewish community is our problem, that is, the problem of progressive Jews, just as it's the black community's problem to deal with Farrakhan and pervasive anti-Semitism among blacks. Non-Jews should be sensitive to how it sounds and who can talk, I agree. But there's no point in pretending there's no problem to deal with.
>Raving anti-semetic diatribes are posted by Bobby Fischer and it's mostly
>treated as a cutebizarro Harpers item, maybe analyzed as propaganda, but
>not
>treated on its own terms as a henious piece of racist hate mail.
Well, it's not cute, but it is bizarre,a nd what would you suggest by way of serious analysis? I mean. the man's a fruitcake, everyone has known that for years, he's not likely to influence anyone with that crap.
>
>And what "silence" of the left on Israel? Almost every major left
>organization condems Israel's policies. The National Lawyers Guild, the
>major left legal organization of which a number of folks on this list are
>members (who disagree on a hell of a lot), has been consistenty and rather
>harshly anti-Israel for many years, at some membership cost due to its
>principled position.
>
It's not like the Guild is representative of a wide spectrum of opinion. DSA is pretty wishy-washy at best on this.
jks
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