“Equating Israel with all Jews and Israel’s future with theirs is an effort to sanctify Israel and shield it from criticism by brandishing the charge of antisemitism,” Norman Solomon wrote in The Guardian this week. He added: “By insisting that it is the embodiment of Jews all over the world, the state of Israel seeks to associate Jews everywhere with its systematic war crimes and genocide in Gaza along with deadly ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. …
“The crux of pro-Israel messaging is to promote a set of false equations: Israel = Jews. Support for Israel = support for Jews. Denunciations of Israel = antisemitism. And a functional subtext of those equations is this one: Israeli government = impunity.” (Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.)
After David Mandel grew up in the Chicago area, where he attended a Reform synagogue, he lived on an Israeli kibbutz in the late 1960s. He went on to work as a journalist in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from 1974 to 1985 before graduating from Hebrew University Law School. A Sacramento resident since 1985, Mandel spent nine years as an editor at the Sacramento Bee, then 17 years as manager of a legal aid program for California seniors.
Mandel said today: “U.S. Jews generally think, act and vote to the left of other Americans, embracing what most of us identify as Jewish values like human rights, equality, democracy, justice, peace and the enhanced system of international law that grew from the trauma of the Nazi Holocaust. Finally, however, applying these values in real life has run into cognitive dissonance as widespread support for Israel, the self-proclaimed Jewish state that also claims to represent us, crumbles in the broader public. Just as younger Americans generally are seeing through and rejecting the myths of our country’s founding, recognizing instead the racism and genocide at its heart and the ever more domineering imperialism characterizing it ever since, so have increasing numbers of Jews, especially the young, undergone a dramatic change in outlook.”
DAVID MANDEL
Mandel is currently involved with Jewish Voice for Peace and other progressive organizations. He has volunteered with Palestine Legal to defend faculty and students under fire for engaging in support for Palestinian rights, submitted amicus briefs on behalf of Jewish studies scholars challenging definitions of antisemitism that conflate it with criticism of Israel, and worked on state and federal legislative battles on the subject.
Mandel said: “Much of our Jewish community, lukewarm and even hostile to Zionism in its early years, eventually came to embrace Israelism as a cultural and political lodestone, fed by our own set of self-justifying myths: that Palestine really was an empty land; that Palestinians, if they existed as such at all, had no particular attachment to that land and could just as easily move elsewhere; and more recently, that Israel truly sought peace, only to be rejected and subjected to ‘terrorism.’ No more.
“Neither the long oppression of Jews in Europe nor the Nazi Holocaust could ever justify stealing the country from the prior inhabitants, the mission the dominant Zionist parties undertook a century ago. Finally, the realities of harsh apartheid and horrific genocide have created a schism in the community, with increasing numbers joining the majority of our fellow Americans in demanding that our government end its complicity and instead lead the international community to finally act for a free Palestine. Only that can bring justice and safety for all — and a U.S. Jewish community that could help transform U.S. society in keeping with the values we were taught.”