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The Judaism of Self-Congratulation—and Finger-Pointing

Oct. 13 2014

During the Rosh Hashanah ritual of tashlikh, Jews traditionally gather by a river or stream and symbolically cast the previous year’s sins into the water. This year, a group of students and faculty at the University of Illinois used the ritual to condemn others: namely, supporters of Israel and the university itself, which withheld tenure from Steven Salaita over his public expressions of anti-Semitism. Among the collective sins being ostentatiously enumerated, Jonathan Marks writes, were “allowing violence against Palestinians to be committed in our name as Jews and as Americans” and “not speaking out against anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.” Marks adds:

To be sure, all this is now part of the playbook of Jewish Voice for Peace, a group for whom the sum and substance of Judaism is criticism of Israel and the United States insofar as it refuses to cast Israel off. But the loathsomeness of this particular activity, because it turns even the High Holy Days into an opportunity for activists to hit Israel with one hand and pat themselves on the back with the other, remains fresh.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Idiocy, Jewish Voice for Peace, Steven Salaita, Tashlikh

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic