By Daniel Sieradski | 14 February 2017
JEW SCHOOL — Two years ago, in these very pages, I told you this would happen. I said Israel was moving towards an apartheid, one-state reality and that the American Jewish community was going to go along for the ride. My predictions were haughtily dismissed by a spokesman for the American Jewish Committee and deemed “highly improbable” by then-JCPA executive director Steve Gutow. Since then, the GOP has removed support for the two-state solution from its platform, AIPAC disappeared the two-state solution from its website’s talking points, and now the cherry on top: The President of the United States has announced he will not hold Israel to the two-state solution.
For the last decade, all-out war has been declared on anti-occupation Jews in the U.S. by the organized Jewish establishment. Everyone from J Street leftwards has been shunted aside — quite forcibly pushed out of the Jewish communal tent for violating the so-called “communal consensus” on Israel. Restrictions were put in place at Federations and Jewish Communal Funds, progressive Israel groups had events canceled for fear of reprisals, Jewish Voice for Peace was listed as an antisemitic organization by the Simon Wiesenthal Center — all of this to silence Jews who did not adhere to policy prescriptions handed down from on high in Jerusalem and dictated to American Jewry by the organs of Jewish communal life.
Largely, this ostracizing has focused on Jewish supporters of BDS, purportedly because BDS supports a one-state solution to the conflict (though it doesn’t explicitly) and therefore ultimately the dissolution of Israel. However, for years there has been a double standard in play, where Jewish supporters of one state in which Arab citizens have limited human and civil rights do not have their loyalty to Israel nor the Jewish community thrown into doubt, but rather are treated as legitimate voices in our discourse.
Hence, this meme I made five years ago calling the Jewish establishment out for its hypocrisy:
If a one-state solution delegitimizes Israel, certainly members of Israel’s ruling party who have called for such should be regarded as outside the communal consensus. But that’s not what’s happened. Since that time, nearly everyone in that image is now a senior member of the Israeli government who has been feted by the American Jewish establishment and has since moved their vision of one state from the fringes into the mainstream. […]
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