Sheldon Adelson’s fellow oligarch, Chaim Saban, said Israel needed to support a Palestinian state if it wanted to remain a Jewish democracy. Adelson replied, “I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy. I think God didn’t say anything about democracy. God talked about all the good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state, otherwise Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state — so what?” When the American Jewish establishment defends Israel, it doesn’t talk much about God because while theological language plays well among conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, it tends to alienate secular liberals. Especially the secular liberals of American Jewish organizations. America’s mainstream Jewish groups tend to justify Israeli policy not on religion but on America’s civil religion—democracy—a creed that enjoys unquestioned reverence across the political spectrum. Claiming democracy doesn’t matter, Adelson was sabotaging the case for Israel that the American Jewish establishment has been making for decades. Abe Foxman declared that, “the founders of Israel got it exactly right when they emphasized the country being both a Jewish and democratic state. Any initiatives that move Israel away from either value would ill-serve the state and people of Israel.” Israel has been pursuing that claim over about a half-century now. Since 1967, it has established dominion over millions of West Bank Palestinians who lack citizenship or the right to vote in the state that controls their lives. Far from apologizing for that control, or seeking to undo it, Israel’s current regime is making it permanent. And the Israeli leaders most committed to the settlement project freely acknowledge that for them, democracy is not the highest value. Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset proclaimed, “The State of Israel was created for the Jewish people, and its democracy is supposed to serve the Jewish people. If this state acts against the interests of the Jewish people, there is no longer any point in its existence, be it democratic or not.” Thats the exceptionalism that the Balfour Declaration and the UN General Assembly partition resolution 181 prohibited. Adelson is showing that the Jewish liberals selling the idea of Israel as a democratic oasis in the Middle East is a fraud, and the veil is being parted. American politics has been growing more and more ideologically polarized. For years, the American Jewish center has tried to uphold the fiction that you can both support the two state solution and support Israel’s right to destroy it. Now the contradiction between those polar opposites is fracturing American Jewish institutional life. The result is an intra-Jewish debate that is fiercer, more divisive and more honest. haaretz/opinion/.premium-1.626074#
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:54:20 +0000
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