Mondoweiss just published the piece “New Israeli law is shock to U.S. Zionists, who fear break with American Jews.”
ABBA SOLOMON, abbasolomon@gmail.comSolomon is author of two books on Zionism, The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel and The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech “The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews.”
Solomon writes about the “Twin crises of Israel: The crisis of a right-wing authoritarian takeover of Israel’s government is parallel to the permanent crisis of Israel’s Jewish supremacist rule over Palestine.“So far, the mass Israeli Jewish movement to protect democracy does not overlap with the Palestinian movement for democracy in Israel/Palestine.“Outside observers feel the causes must converge to recognize what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from a Birmingham jail called ‘a single garment of destiny. … Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. … This is the inter-related structure of reality.’
“The Israeli ‘pro-democracy’ movement’s sea of Israeli flags, exclusion of Palestinian flags, and the threat of Israeli Defense Forces reservists — key to continuing IDF raids and attacks on Gaza and West Bank communities — to refuse deployment until the judicial overhaul is scrapped, illustrates that the cause is to return to Zionist rule as usual.
“A common criticism of Israel has been that the ‘Jewish and democratic’ state is democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs. This pro-democracy movement in Israel may force the contradictions in Israel/Palestine to a point of clarity.”
