MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

For many young American Jews, the only association they have with Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel is the country that oppresses Palestinians, and nothing more.
No longer is Israel the country that managed to forge a future for the Jewish people when it was left in tatters after the Holocaust. Israel is not, in their minds, the country that gave refuge to hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from North Africa when they had nowhere else to go, granting them all citizenship…
For many young American Jews, it is only the country of roadblocks and genocide, of a relentless war waged against the Palestinians for no apparent reason….
Jeremy Sherer, president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, wrote to [the school paper] The Justice, “I am… bothered [by the invitation to Oren] because I disagree with his politics.” That’s what education is now producing – people who want to hear only those with whom they agree? “I’m not exactly thrilled,” Sherer wrote, “that a representative of the current right-wing Israeli government will be delivering the keynote address at my commencement.”
…The president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, who writes that he’s of “Israeli heritage” (whatever that means), did not see fit to say a single positive word about Israel. Not one. One wonders what the “pro-Israel” part of J-Street’s “pro-Israel, pro-Peace” tag line means to Sherer….
Ironically, though, some of the attempts to defend the invitation to Oren were no less distressing. A student representative to the Board of Trustees writes in a disappointingly anemic piece to the The Justice that Oren “is being invited for his academic achievements, not his political ones,” and then launches into a recitation of Oren’s many academic accomplishments.
Here, too, however, not a single positive word about Israel… That sort of pride appears nowhere in The Justice’s editorial, the J-Street representative’s piece or the op-ed defending the invitation. For too many American Jewish undergraduates, it’s simply no longer part of their vocabulary.

The two-state solution is the best of these alternatives, but most Israelis are opposed to making the sacrifices that would be necessary to create a viable Palestinian state. There are about 480,000 settlers in the occupied territories and an extensive infrastructure of connector and bypass roads, not to mention the settlements themselves….Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is committed to expanding the settlements throughout the occupied territories.
Of course, there are prominent Israelis like former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who do favor a two-state solution. But that does not mean that they would be willing or able to make the concessions necessary to create a legitimate Palestinian state. Olmert did not do so when he was prime minister, and it is unlikely that he or Livni could get enough of their fellow citizens to back a genuine two-state solution.
The political center of gravity in Israel has shifted sharply to the right over the past decade, and there is no sizable pro-peace political party or movement they could turn to for help.
Some advocates of a two-state solution believe the Obama administration can compel Israel to accept a two-state outcome. The United States, after all, is the most powerful country in the world and should have great leverage over Israel, because it gives the Jewish state so much diplomatic and material support.
But no American president can pressure Israel to change its policies toward the Palestinians. The main reason is the Israel lobby, a powerful coalition of American Jews and Christian evangelicals that has a profound influence on U.S. Middle East policy. Alan Dershowitz was spot on when he said, “My generation of Jews … became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fundraising effort in the history of democracy.”
Consider that every American president since 1967 has opposed settlement building, yet none has been able to get Israel to stop building them. There is little evidence that Obama is different from his predecessors. Shortly after taking office, he demanded that Israel stop all settlement building in the occupied territories. Netanyahu refused and Obama caved in to him…
Olmert said that if the two-state solution collapses, Israel will face a “South African-style struggle.” He went so far as to argue, “as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”
Olmert is correct. A Jewish apartheid state is not sustainable over the long term. The discrimination and repression that underpin apartheid are antithetical to core Western values. How could anyone make a moral case for it in the United States, where democracy is venerated and segregation and racism are routinely condemned?
It is equally hard to imagine the United States having a “special relationship” with an apartheid state. It is much easier to imagine Americans strongly opposing that racist state’s political system and working hard to change it. An apartheid Israel would also be a strategic liability for the United States.
This is why, in the end, Greater Israel will become a democratic binational state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. This will mean the end of the Zionist dream.
What is truly remarkable about this situation is that the lobby is effectively helping Israel destroy its own future as a Jewish state. On top of that, there is an alternative outcome that would be relatively easy to achieve and is clearly in Israel’s best interests: the two-state solution. It is hard to understand why Israel and its American supporters are not working overtime to create a viable Palestinian state and why instead they are moving full-speed ahead to build an apartheid state. It makes no sense from either a moral or a strategic perspective.

[Julius] is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
Endless boycotts of Israel are urged by this establishment, and might yet have produced a counter­boycott of British universities by many American academics, whether Jewish or not. However, under British law the projected boycotts may be illegal. The fierce relevance of Julius’s book is provoked by this currently prevalent anti-Semitism…
To protest the policies of the Israeli government actually can be regarded as true philo-Semitism, but to disallow the existence of the Jewish state is another matter. Of the nearly 200 recognized nation-states in the world today, something like at least half are more reprehensible than even the worst aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. A curious blindness informs the shifting standards of current English anti-Zionism.
I admire Julius for the level tone with which he discusses this sanctimonious intelligentsia, who really will not rest until Israel is destroyed.
I end by wondering at the extraordinary moral strength of Anthony Julius. He concludes by observing: “Anti-Semitism is a sewer.” As he has shown, the genteel and self-righteous “new anti-Semitism” of so many English academic and literary contemporaries emanates from that immemorial stench.

Oh anti-Semitism is so important that the Times devotes four pieces to it, including this review by Francine Prose of the works and life of a fourth-rate author, Irene Nemirovsky, who did not come to terms with her own anti-Semitism (that we know of, anyway; a little grace) before she died in Auschwitz. If she’s so bad, why is the Times giving her space?

As a criminal attorney Dershowitz is remembered as the defense lawyer for boxer Mike Tyson and former football player O. J. Simpson. It is hard to avoid the thought that not merely his views, but also his two trials and defendants indicate his ability to represent Israel as well…

Alan Dershowitz is not the first talented Jew summoned from the diaspora to save Israel. Already back in Biblical times, the Jewish-Persian Jew Nehemiah immigrated to Israel to run the matter of building the wall of Jerusalem, something that the poor Jews in the Land of Israel were unable to do on their own.
In the modern era too, there are examples, beginning with lobbyists and envoys like Elie Wiesel and Ron Lauder, to military men like Col. David Marcus who was recruited in the US during the War of Independence. …
Like Einstein at the time, Dershowitz also refused the offer. I understand him completely but hope that his refusal will not stop Netanyahu and Lieberman from continuing the trend of asking capable Jews of stature to move to Israel to fill positions — a welcome trend… My suggestion is that Lieberman ask Dershowitz to be Israel’s foreign minister and that Netanyahu ask him to be prime minister in his place.
But on second thought — for these two positions you don’t need stars of the magnitude of Dershowitz. There are enough Jewish grocery store owners, teachers, doctors, engineers and cab drivers in the diaspora, and many of them would be a better prime minister and foreign minister than the two currently serving in the Israeli government.