Bernie's Suspended Jewish Outreach Aide

Simone [Zimmerman] was suspended from her job in the Sanders campaign, ostensibly for a Facebook post last year in which she called [Benjamin] Netanyahu “an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative asshole. He is the embodiment of the ugliest national hubris and tone-deafness towards the international community. F**k you.” (A few hours later, she erased the profanity).

Perhaps Simone chose the wrong words. Perhaps she should have called Netanyahu “one of the most obnoxious individuals you’re going to come into - just a liar and a cheat,” as former Clinton administration press secretary Joe Lockhart did. Or she could have simply called him a “liar,” like former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Or she could have used the term popular in the British foreign office: “armored-plated bullshitter.” Or she could have called him a “corrupt individual, a contentious liar who is ruining everything that is good about our society.” Those words came from Leah Rabin. 

After Simone’s words came to light, the Sanders campaign came under what the New York Times called “concerted and ultimately overwhelming pressure from American Jewish leaders” to fire her.

[...]

Simone Zimmerman cares about Israel. She cares about the Jewish people. She even cares about American Jewish organizations. And she believes there should be a space in those organizations for moral opposition to Israeli policies, the kind of moral opposition once offered by communal leaders like Nahum Goldmann, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and Rabbi Arthur Schindler. Treat people like her as the enemy and you make enemies of the best of the younger American Jewish generation.

[...]

[Simone is like other Millenial American Jews: they fell a strong] allegiance to the Jewish people. They care more about the organized American Jewish community because they were raised in more affiliated, more traditional Jewish homes. Simone, for instance, is the product of Jewish day school, Jewish camp and Conservative Judaism’s youth movement, United Synagogue Youth.

[...]

Simone came to Berkeley expecting to do AIPAC-style Israel advocacy. But at a certain point, the tension between her liberalism and the American Jewish establishment’s Zionism snapped. For many of the Jewish Millennials [...] , that rupture came as the result of interactions with Palestinians: interactions that made them confront the human consequences of holding millions of people as non-citizens, without free movement, under military law, for almost fifty years.

[...]

I’m not worried about Simone Zimmerman. She’ll do fine. I’m worried about a community that punishes its children for challenging its lies.

  Haaretz: Peter Beinart

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Two of a Kind

Israel and the US.

This article is written by Israel’s former internal security service chief Yuval Diskin. It is as much a picture of the US as it is of Israel.

Religious Zionism still isn’t the majority in Israel, but as a very significant elite it has succeeded in making an ugly contribution toward the de facto establishment of the State of Judea, and it’s on its way to try and take over (democratically) the State of Israel.

[...]

It gave birth to extreme religious nationalism, which in turn gave birth to its own right-wing competitor of extreme Jewish messianism, which itself gave birth to the Hilltop Youth, who are anti-authoritarian, violent, and extreme and who support the “revolutionary” values of Jewish supremacy (yes, Jewish supremacy) as well as a halakhic state, terrorism, hatred toward the other, and racism.

[...]

As far as I’m concerned, the main problem is that religious Zionism has given birth to the value of the sanctity of the land and has placed it practically before the sanctity and unity of the people, and without unity we cannot exist.

[...]

[N]othing could be more dangerous for the survival of the people of Israel than extremism, sectarianism, and hate.

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This is a slow but persistent process, taking place every day. It’s very hard to notice this process until it builds up a critical mass, but when it does it irreversibly changes reality.

  Tablet

We can hope that his vision of what can be done does not have to be the reality, but I'm a pessimist, and I've been saying for the last few election cycles that things here have to get even worse before they can get better, and hope it's not too late when we wake up.  I had hoped that would be the result of Bush 2's re-election, but apparently, that didn't make things bad enough.

What can we do? My conclusion is to wait for it to get worse so that it might get better. Because in order to change the course of things we must recruit the people, and the people, sadly, only start to see things clearly when things are very bad indeed. Therefore, we can only wait for things to get worse, and only then maybe we’ll start realizing that we must save this mighty Zionist enterprise called the State of Israel and that is growing further and further from the vision of our Founding Fathers. And I’m almost certain this will succeed, and that it will really get much worse.

Would it get better thereafter? It’s up to us. Only if we realize that “where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint,” and that we got here because of a lack of leadership and a lack of vision, and that those leading us have a fundamentally wrong set of priorities, maybe only then will things begin to change for the better.

Also...

The appointment four months ago of Dani Dayan, a former head of the Jewish settlement movement, did not go down well with Brazil’s left-leaning government, which has supported Palestinian statehood in recent years.

Most world powers deem the Jewish settlements illegal.

  Guardian

And as we all know, most don't count.

“The State of Israel will leave the level of diplomatic relations with Brazil at the secondary level if the appointment of Dani Dayan is not confirmed,” Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely told Israel’s Channel 10 TV, saying Dayan would remain the sole nominee.

[...]

Tensions rose last year when an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman called Brazil a “diplomatic dwarf” after Brasilia recalled its ambassador from Israel to protest a military offensive in Gaza.

[...]

Brazilian government officials declined to comment on whether Rousseff will accept the nomination of the Argentine-born Dayan. But one senior Foreign Ministry official told Reuters: “I do not see that happening.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Not Up for Discussion

The Israeli government on Tuesday retroactively legalized three Jewish settlement outposts in the West Bank, and moved to delay the scheduled evacuation of a fourth, in a provocative move that some critics said marked the first establishment of new settlements in two decades.

[...]

[A] spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that it was simply a matter of resolving technical problems such as improper permits and mistakenly building on the wrong hill.

  NYT

A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream—the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals—may die.

In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it.

  Amazon.com

The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.

But it’s only right to say something on behalf of Beinart, who has predictably run into that buzzsaw. As I said, a brave man, and he deserves better.

  Paul Krugman