Zionism continues to be the problem

It’s been a difficult two-and-a-half years for the Israelis, and for those who are sympathetic to them. First, they were compelled to perpetrate a genocide in Palestine, and have incurred costs as a result. Die Zeit, a German paper explains, under the cover of “Trauma in Israel” that “It is not normal for 19 year olds to kill 20 people a day.” The perspectives of those twenty people cannot be heard, I presume, because they are dead.

CNN too, cast much-needed attention on the urgency of “trauma” and suicide among Israeli soldiers. In the CNN story a former soldier testifies “that on many occasions, soldiers [in tanks] had to ‘run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.’”

“Everything squirts out,” he said.

The memories are so difficult that the Israeli who ran over “terrorists,” dead and alive, “says he can no longer eat meat.”

Still, the real hardship has been borne by Israel’s domestic friends. Groups like AIPAC have seen decades of investment in American politicians begin to wither—the association with a genocide-forward policy has had that effect. If the Twitter account Track AIPAC has succeeded in making the malign impact of Israeli interests in this country apparent, it’s because “A lobby is like a night flower; it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun,” as a former AIPAC staffer observed.

Now, many Americans are calling for AIPAC agents to register under and comply with the stipulations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a different kind of sunlight. Things are going so badly for the organization that it’s been forced to conceal its lobbying efforts, often clumsily. Often, it runs ads on issues unrelated to Israel to try to undermine opposition candidates—which is a novel degree of deception.

But AIPAC is far from the only member of the Israel lobby that deserves to see its reputation diminished. JStreet, whose motto is “pro-Israel, pro-Peace and pro-democracy” has been an important contributor to Israel Lobby efforts since 2007, when the lawyer Jeremy Ben-Ami founded the organization. Now that AIPAC is toxic in America, some Zionist voices have coalesced around JStreet as an alternative avenue for their political activities. Their efforts recall the smoker who trades Marlboro Reds for Marlboro Lights. There’s logic there—but it’s not very good logic, especially since Israel itself is toxic in America.

Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer—the authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy—have been diligent over the years in defining the Israel lobby as a loose coalition of groups that are devoted to Israel. That means Christian Zionists, like Mike Huckabee and Pat Hagee, who founded Christians United for Israel. But also rightwing groups like AIPAC, and “liberal” Zionist groups, like JStreet.

These organizations don’t always see things in the same way—Christian Zionists hope to convert all Jews to Christianity, which AIPAC and JStreet do not seem to desire, and JStreet is less enthusiastic about Israel’s current Likud government than AIPAC is—but these groups are united by a desire to consolidate American support for Israel, and to maintain that support no matter what Israel does. Practically, for JStreet, that means an perpetual commitment to the status quo, one which has seen Israeli apartheid entrenched and a genocide perpetrated. One that values Jewish lives in Palestine, and no one else’s.

Today, JStreet’s positions are indefensible. The group opposes the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a non-violent boycott effort which seeks to extract an economic and social expense for Israel’s genocide and apartheid in Palestine; really, an effort to non-violently affect change. Ben-Ami, in an interview with Peter Beinart went so far as to say “I don’t feel like the BDS movement… is actually fulfilling the principles that underlie non-violent resistance,” an uninformed mischaracterization, in the most generous interpretation of the remark.

Beyond the inability to support non-violent Palestinian efforts at ending the occupation, JStreet endlessly recapitulates the zombie language of two-states, a way of allowing politicians and others to do nothing as Israel pursues its dual campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and Jerusalem and the West Bank.

But if JStreet’s policy positions are bad, it’s because the group’s issues go deeper, to questions of identity and ethics. JStreet continues to identify as Zionist, which is Jewish supremacy in Palestine, the basis for the apartheid regime there. The belief in Jewish supremacy requires the JStreet leadership to adhere to a mythical vision of Israel—one that has never existed—as a Jewish democracy. In reality, Israel has been, since inception, “a democracy for Jews and Jewish for everyone else,” as Ahmad Tibi, a rare Palestinian member of Israel’s legislature once said. Describing Israel as a democracy today, one that is worth preserving, is like describing the United States as a democracy in 1830. Yes, white men with property could vote… and sometimes that property was Black people.