If I were an American Jew, I would be proud that young Jews were very prominent in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. And I would recall the words of Nelson Mandela, who said: “I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.” Nor would I forget that several of the leaders in the struggle for freedom and democracy in communist Poland were Jews, among them Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who said about the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo: “That’s how it was with the Jews in the ghetto. That’s how it is now in Kosovo. If you kill only a thousand people because they are Muslim, that’s a Holocaust too.” If I were an American Jew, I would conclude that this was a time of emergency. It’s not the Iranian threat that endangers Israel’s survival, it’s the moral and ethical collapse of its society. And I would recall March 1933, about two months after Hitler came to power, when in an emergency meeting, Jewish leaders in the United States decided to call for a boycott of German goods. That was a hard decision. There was a fear that the Jews would be accused of hurting their country’s economy, which would exacerbate the anti-Semitic atmosphere. The person who led the decision was Rabbi Stephen Wise, a founder of the American Jewish Congress and later the president of the Zionist Organization of America. Wise said: “The time for prudence and caution is past. We must speak up like men …. What is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked. It is not the German Jews who are being attacked. It is the Jews.” Such a sense of emergency does not exist today among the millions of Jews worldwide. Amid the awareness that Israel is sliding toward an apartheid regime, their silence is deafening. They don’t dare break with the consensus and take action against the injustices being perpetrated in Israel. This is a traditional policy of Diaspora Jews, who since the establishment of Israel have set a basic rule: We are not citizens of the Jewish state and therefore we have no right to intervene in deciding its future. But if the vision of an open, egalitarian and peace-loving Israel is important to Jews around the world, they can’t leave the chances of fulfilling it in the hands of the Israelis alone. The racist cancer, after 47 years of occupation and domination of another people, has spread deep into Israeli society.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 02:35:57 +0000
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