Israel Anti-Apartheid “Week”

Returning from a two-month hiatus with a firm commitment to maintain this blog, starting with this:

For the active duty military, this may or may not be relevant, since as Jews in the American military, our lives likely do not revolve around either Israel or life on university campus.

For some in the reserves currently enrolled in school, this may be more omnipresent.

March 1st through March 14th is Israel Anti-apartheid Week, and though the organizers are apparently too daft to recognize the difference between 7 days and a fortnight, their message will be crystal clear – “free thinkers” of the world will continue to fallaciously dog Israel and single it out for “crimes” that no sane or discerning individual would.

I do not fall into the “cult of Israel” paradigm. I do not think it necessarily admirable when a youth who spends his life immured in gilded Americana decides to go throw his lot in with the Israeli military, no matter how noble the concept. As long as the United States and Israel are allied, there are plenty of opportunities to serve here, in the land that has equally given us so much, with ostensibly more freedom of religious movement than we might enjoy in Israel (see marriages and conversions). A strong Jewish presence in allied Diaspora military, as we’ve documented with former Guard Bureau chief General Blum’s visit to Israel, does more for maintaining Jewish credibility in the US than kids enlisting overseas.

For my part, too, as much as I love Israel, my spiritual home is in a minyan, or teaching our faith to my children, or our home when we bask in the glow of Shabbos candles on our dining room table.

I also like big snow storms, especially with the recent two foot dump the Mid-Atlantic just enjoyed.

I only say this to lay the groundwork that one need not indulge a knee-jerk support of Israel in order to recognize just how damaging is this Western opinion shift towards Israel, for both Jews in Israel and Diaspora.

We, especially those of us in the military, cannot forget that how we fare in Diaspora is a bell-weather for what’s in store for the Jewish people.

I don’t know why it is buried in the news, but the sad fact is, one of the continually growing “hate crime” sectors in the U.S. are crimes committed against Jews. Many of these are taking place on college campuses, where antisemitism thinly disguised as “legitimate criticism of Israel” manifests in events such as this “anti-apartheid week.” See the ridiculous outbursts at Ambassador Oren, for instance, in California.

Take it apart: Mel Gibson, “Kick a Jew Week” on Facebook, which enjoyed significantly less press than a similar persecution of redheads, and even local students in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, describing that “Jew” is being bandied about as an insult amongst peers in their schools.

It’s not a “left” or “right” issue. See the dude that shot up the Holocaust museum for a scary manifestation of an antisemitic fringe right. Read the comment section on the Huffington Post attached to ANY article regarding Israel, and many about other countries in the Middle East, and you’ll see where the self-flagellating losers like former President Carter have taken us. “We have seen the enemy, and it is us” nonsense, rinse, repeat. People are quoting Israel as the cause du juor for demonizing Jews and bring forth the age old canards, which read like they’re still using the Protocols as a play book.

As campus youth embrace their sophomoric, ill-informed, existential angst and rail against Israel, we hear all the reasons why they’re not antisemitic. They claim legitimacy for their argument, and this is even tenuous at best, is that Israel is some last bastion of Western colonization in a benighted land, all the while templating Israel according to Western sensibility. Adding to the quagmire of the reason, if one dare ascribe it such a term, behind anti-Israel vitriol is the bland refusal to subsequently judge Arab or Muslim neighbors by the same Western template, even though these nations want to enjoy the same Western indulgences, particularly the kind of air-land war machinery that the West has perfected, medical technology. Only because despotic regimes relegate large swaths of their population to ignorance and poverty, we allow that “they don’t know any better, but Israel does.”

It’s dodgy logic at best.

It’s just terrifically depressing that Western nations are gradually turning against Israel, and on our campuses, where our kids are ostensibly aspiring to render large contributions to global progress, are intellectually and emotionally vulnerable to so many influences. More appalling is Jewish participation, including more than a few Hillel houses (and hopefully no more), in Israel-bashing.

I call upon anyone reading this to contact your representatives, your senators, but above all else, start putting conditions on where you contribute your money. Here’s some suggested courses of action:

1. Petition and tell Hillel that you will withhold contributions unless they revoke charters of Hillel Houses that participate, host, or contribute to anti-Israeli events. If these events are part of a reasonable dialog, fine, but there are some very extreme events going on out there. For instance, in my backyard, we should be diligently working to revoke Penn Hillel of University of Pennsylvania’s charter, regardless of Director Jeremy Brochin’s mamby-pamby statement that classifies hosting a group with a negative position on Israel as “enrichment.” Consider this – is the NAACP obliged to rent space and provide a forum for the Klan in the name of objective enrichment? Hillel International’s statement is quite clear, and so, Penn alumni, consider reallocating your contributions to Chabad’s campus outreach there. You can be sure they won’t host J Street.

2. Petition and tell the JCCA you will withhold contributions unless they revoke membership of community centers that participate, host or contribute to anti-Israeli events.

3. Petition your religious movements to sanction rabbis, cantors, or organized laity who join forces with anti-Israeli. Withhold contributions and membership dues until the Board replaces such a rabbi.

4. Petition the JWV and NMAJM to put and strongly advertise a clause in academic scholarships (Rotberg, Silvey, JWV, and Friedman grants) that not only include participation in the Jewish community, but preclude participation in anti-Israeli organizations or events.

5. Any Jewish-affiliated academic scholarships should preclude participation in anti-Israeli organizations.

Many of these things are odious to my own sensibilities, but the situation can and will only deteriorate as time marches forward. It may be against our subculture’s predilection for free choice and free will to impose these kinds of constraints, but it’s time to start thinking about this in extremely serious terms.

Maybe the person to the left to you isn’t demonizing Jews when he or she criticizes Israel. But the person next to him, statistically speaking, may have posted something negative on a blog or even shouted something overtly antisemitic at a rally. Is that really what a Jew should be associating with? In David Mamet’s recent treatment of this topic, Wicked Son, I believe he stopped just shy of calling the self-hating prototype “race traitors.”

I believe we live in dark times. It is now socially reprehensible to enjoy or recognize cultural triumph, unless it is victimhood or adversity. I believe one pundit posed that we should advertise Israel’s great successes, to win over those hedging in the middle.

Yes, extol the virtues of being Jewish and affiliation with Israel. It’s a double-edged blade, however, extolling an Israel as phoenix triumphant rising from the literal ashes of Europe, because it plays into the hands of Ahmedinijad’s asinine commentary, which President Obama blandly walked into with his Cairo speech. Israel is the legitimate nation for the Jewish people not because of the Holocaust, but because of a strong historic connection to the land with evidence that is irrefutable and extra-Biblical. However, with a cultural zeitgeist that seems to have a permanent and unwavering affinity for the perceived underdog, triumphalism is also a fail. Money, sadly, is the great equalizer.

It could be, too, that there is no successful way to combat this, that yet another catastrophe awaits the global Jewish body lurks in the near future.

In the offing, start thinking very, very hard about penalizing and stigmatizing our own that stand with anti-Semites against us. Historically, there is far stronger evidence in support of shaming the undecided into your camp, and there is much for a Jew affiliating with anti-Israeli/anti-Zionist groups to be ashamed of.

Jewish military members have considerable power that we can and should leverage. One, we operate from the position of strength in that people are extremely reluctant to be seen saying a service member (or group thereof) is wrong. This climate is changing gradually under the current administration and will eventually approach the nadir in public support we enjoyed during the Clinton administration. Two, because of our engagements in the Middle East, we lack the naivete that is prevalent amongst college students, and most of us engaged in this issue have one, or likely many, trips to Israel under our belt. I don’t have statistics to back up an additional premise, but that would be that to the enlisted level (with even a large swath of our noncoms holding graduate degrees), we still maintain a high-level of academic credentials, on par with our civilian counterparts, so those in academia would be foolish to discount us as knuckle-draggers. To be quite frank, we have far more skin in the game than most of our soft-bellied American co-religionists, and its high time we start letting them know that.

Personally, I would like to see this become the centerpiece of the Jewish War Veterans work in the Jewish community. The Jewish War Veterans have worked hard alongside other groups to bring about better education and health benefits, but out of all those groups, the JWV is best positioned to make a real difference on this matter. We are not producing new members, for good or for ill, on the scale of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Perhaps it’s time to consider that, yes, we can work with the bigger organizations for benefits, but our real focus should be on influencing the direction of the American Jewish community on these very important issues.

Just some food for thought.