But is today really Israel’s 63rd Birthday? On the streets of one of LA’s most Jewish neighborhoods, Pico-Robertson, I could not tell that it was really Israeli Independence day. Perhaps in Encino, aka Little Tel Aviv, things are off-the hook Israel? Maybe the pizza stores are selling blue and white pizzas? I don’t think so.

In the many temples and synagogues last night and this morning, you could enjoy special yom-tov services, Hallel and all. The Modern Orthodox and Community Jewish day schools undoubtedly had special Israel themed assemblies. The Consulate is throwing a huge party — I’ll be with the Govenator, Arnold Schwartenager, and hundreds others at the official Israel Celebration put on by the Israeli Consulate. (Arnold, why didn’t you call me for marriage advice?) But this celebration is not exactly open to the public— it included background checks on each attendee by the Shin Bet. Jewlicious is holding a Hip Hop Salute to Israel on Saturday night.

There are other events scattered throughout the week, a pool-party here, a disco-party there. The FIDF, one of LA’s largest pro-Israel groups, is sponsoring a Yom Ha’atzmaut Fashion Celebration. However, the largest pro-Israel event in the city, the Israeli Festival, was cancelled this year because of lack of funds. It also suffered from lack of vision and community buy in. Major Jewish groups including the Federation would not provide life-support and they folded. In fact, they are in minus. Gone is the LA Israel Parade that once blocked off streets and filled Rancho park. And now gone is the Israeli Festival that hosted tens of thousands just a few years ago. Where is the Zionist Mojo LA?

Is it that American Jews have become complacent, even callous, with political Israel? Are Israeli Jews too busy being Americans? Is there a feeling that we better keep a low profile so as not to inflame claims of dual-loyalty? There is no black and white answer, there are many factors that have contributed to the private nature of the celebrations this year for Yom Haatzmaut in LA for sure. But I cannot help but feel that we contributed to the anonymity of the celebrations by so closely aligning our pro-Israel stance with the political State of Israel, and not the spiritual promise of Yisrael. When Israel is a stock (or bond), which can be up or down depending on the complicated intersection of politics, national interests, and box-office success than it figures that it will have fair weather friends and investors who will stand by it depending on the level of commitment and buy in they have. Even if they believe that the stock will go up, they won’t hold it in their portfolio.

In Hollywood, no one wants to be seen even having coffee for a while with someone whose $200 million dollar film just burned and crashed at the box office. Well, when your State is getting pummeled in the ratings, and your loyal fans like Bible thumping evangelicals are the main ticket buyers, perhaps Jewish Hollywood, and maybe even Jewish America, tell you, “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

The return of the Jewish people en mass to Israel is beyond politics and stock options. The indigenous Jewish inhabitants of the land are joined today by 6 million Jews. Zionism is a modern fulfillment of the words of the prophets. You know those prophets that we read for our Bar and Bat mitzvahs. Those words of the prophets are part of the heart and soul of the Jewish nation, and our return to Zion, a chance to plow the holy earth, reap the fruits, is the actualization of our ancestors dreams and prayers. Israel is a precious and sacred vision that has been the light at the end of the tunnel during 2000 years of genocides, pogroms, forced-conversions, second-class citizen, Jews are the devil-incarnate years. It is the hope, the promise. Our love of Israel cannot be dependent on whether so and so is a good or bad politicians, whether we love how she behaves or don’t. Our love of Israel is eternal.

Can you imagine if you were married to someone and you ask them, hey, don’t wear that wedding ring, I don’t want people to know we’re married.

Hey LA, Israel is part of our soul. We need to celebrate and show off our love for her, and not be intimidated by the box-office ratings just this once.

In April, I’ll be finishing up my journalism program in Toronto, Canada. In the past two years of J-School, I’ve learned how to at least try and see both sides of an issue by abandoning any opinion I ever had…on anything…ever. Suffice it to say, I still have a few of those left, and in an environment like Jewlicious I’m more than happy to share.

I’ve managed to leave the GA with less of an understanding of Zionism than I came with, and have misplaced any grasp I once had of the concept of aliyah. Why? I’m a journalist. That’s what brought me to the GA in the first place. This means I look at the world a little differently, and I ask the questions other people may not be asking. When I’m surrounded by answers, I start asking even more questions.

This is how I tend to feel when I’m surrounded by thousands of people proclaiming with fervent ovations that the answer is aliyah. It’s how I’ve felt when I’m in a room of 40 people who make the same claim, but at 4,000, you can pretty much do the math. In moments like these, I stop and do a quick mental head count. In an audience of thousands of people claiming that aliyah is at the pinnacle of Zionism, how many of these people are actually going to take the plunge, so to speak?

I imagine the Jewish Agency has the numbers, but I’d say under five per cent is being more than generous. So the real question then here is how is 95 per cent of an audience purporting that the answer to their troubles is a move they themselves will probably never make. How can so many people stand so passionately behind something that reality dictates just isn’t in the cards?

Now don’t get me wrong; Israel is a beautiful country, and if it’s where you feel you can live at 110 per cent then go for it. As for me, I’m staying put. There’s no question I’ll be back to Israel, and hope
to someday take my children and grandchildren. But I can assure you it’s for visits only. This isn’t about me though, it’s about the thousands of other Zionists who will always call ‘Columbus’ medineh’ as they say in Yiddish, home.

I don’t know the answer. The more that I think about it, I can’t really fathom how so many people can claim to stand behind something they know deep down is probably never going to happen. Wait a minute, this is starting to sound like a bit of a familiar theme here.

Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?

I don’t want to sound glib, but it’s hard to ignore that feeling that fighting for something that you know deep down isn’t going to work sounds like something we’ve seen before. Is there some sort of correlation here? Are the same people who are vowing to move to a land they won’t move to the ones championing a peace they might never see?

It’s a grim projection, but I worry it might not be that far fetched.

I don’t know the answer, I really don’t. I invite you to respond to this with your own thoughts, maybe even after you’ve had the 48 hours to ponder it that I had. Before when I’d hear people waxing poetic about aliyah, I’d shake my head and tune right out of the conversation. Now, after the GA, I’ve realized that my words aren’t of much use when they stay silent.

Shaun Bernstein is a 23 year old journalism student in Toronto. When he’s not asking questions online, he’s usually busy pestering people in person.

Engaging Israel: Beyond Advocacy By Donniel Hartman(09/03/2010)

Since Operation Cast Lead and the subsequent Goldstone Report, there has been an increasing sense that anti-Israeli opinion has moved beyond criticism of some of Israel’s actions and policies to the delegitimization of the Zionist project as a whole. ….

In Israel and throughout the Jewish world there has been a marshalling of forces to develop materials, programs, and new advocates to make the case for Israel. The aim of these programs is to combat distortions and present Israel’s side of the facts. However important and valuable these efforts are, they often fail to achieve their end. When the case for Israel is grounded only on a factual narrative it is often unconvincing to those who hold a counter factual perception. In general, positions are rarely formed purely around facts, but rather by ideological, moral, and psychological propensities which then construct factual narratives to reinforce the preexisting commitment.

The concentration on the above form of Israel advocacy, while valuable in educating the completely uninformed, overlooks an audience which in my mind needs to be a major focus of our efforts, and for whom current Israel advocacy either is unnecessary or ineffective. I am referring to the mainstream Jewish community itself, which has been raised to care about Israel and is now finding that the foundations of its connection is being undermined.

The reality is that the majority of committed Jews, for the most part, lack a language to understand or articulate their feelings about Israel and their desire to continue to support it. This leaves them vulnerable and exposed by the campaign of delegitimization, for they do not possess a framework from which to combat it.

The reason for this predicament is the fact that since its inception the standard arguments for support of Israel amongst world Jewry no longer resonate with most Jews, especially those 50 years and younger. These arguments can be divided into three. We must support Israel either because:

1.
Israel is necessary as a safe haven in the event of a new Holocaust;
2.
The survival of the State of Israel is in danger;
3.
Israel is a central ally in the West’s war against the “Axis of Evil.”

Besides being mutually contradictory, a common feature of all three as stated is that are increasingly irrelevant. Most Jews in North America feel increasingly at home in their societies and do not feel called to combat the urgency of the threat of a potential Holocaust. Secondly, their political consciousness regarding Israel was not formed by the angst preceding the Six Day War, or by the precariousness of Israel’s existence exposed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Their first war as adults was the war in Lebanon in 1982 and then there was the Intifada. They were raised on the story of Israel’s power and military might. Protecting Israel from its “stronger” neighbors is not a meaningful or persuasive argument. Finally, as voting patterns in the Jewish community in North America have revealed, most do not see the war against the “Axis of Evil” as either central or compelling to their lives and an enterprise to which they want to contribute.

It is time for us to recognize that the Jewish community in general and Israel in particular have failed to develop a new Jewish narrative for the Jewish people around the world on which to base their relationship with Israel. Jewish organizations and Israel have held steadfast to the three arguments above for they were successful in creating a crisis-centered relationship with Israel which was effective in raising money. These actions, however, have mortgaged our future on the altar of immediate and short-term institutional needs. Repayment is now due, and the resources are lacking.

The Jewish community is not in need of an Israel advocacy campaign of facts and figures alone, but also of a new Jewish narrative based on Jewish ideas and values for engaging Israel in a way that will help integrate Israel into a modern Jewish identity. Jews today need to be able to address crucial questions for which they currently do not know the answer. For example: What is the role of “peoplehood” in modern Jewish identity? What is the meaning and purpose of Jewish sovereignty connected to territory rooted in the land of Israel to modern Jewish life? What are the requirements of morality of war, and how can Israel use its power in a way that is consistent with the highest standards of Jewish morality and values? How does Israel balance its legitimate right of self defense with the rights of others? Can a Jewish state be reconciled with the values of Jewish pluralism and freedom? Does the aspiration for a Jewish state automatically define Israel as a racist, apartheid state?

These are just some of the questions that need to be addressed and answered by this new Jewish narrative of Israel and Zionism. If one cannot answer them, there is neither a foundation for connecting to Israel nor the ability to sustain a viable and meaningful relationship. We need to educate and empower the Jewish community to engage Israel in a meaningful way before we can even think about asking them to advocate on its behalf.

Israel has been formed under almost impossible conditions and is still a young and deeply imperfect democracy. Not only are we not beyond criticism, we are in dire need of committed voices within our community who will lovingly challenge Israel to not accept the status quo and to continue to strive higher. If engaging Israel will be successful it will be so only because we will find a way to integrate commitment to Israel within a larger Jewish value conversation and invite people of all political and religious sensibilities to be engaged and participate in thinking about and shaping the unfinished experiment which is modern Israel.

Last Wednesday night, delivering the keynote address at the Herzliya Conference, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, gave a surprisingly brilliant speech. He spoke of security, saying that Israel “must continue and strengthen its military might,” elaborating that the “weak do not survive in this region [the Middle East], and the weak do not make peace.” Yet, he noted that defending against terrorism is costly. Every state need (including security, health care, education, etc.) requires a strong economy. Israel has a strong economy, with a GDP per capita of around $30,000 a year. But to allow the economy to continue growing, Netanyahu stated that economic impediments must be removed. Israel, he expressed, should become a leading technological power. Mostly, he spoke of education. Education, he said, “is the melting pot for national resilience.” He discussed the need for greater Jewish and Zionist education in Israel, and the opening of two new national trails; one to be the historic Jewish trail of Israel and the second to be the historical Zionist trail of Israel.

I will admit, as I stood there listening to his speech, I was in shock. How could he have wasted this opportunity to address the international community? Yet, upon reflection, I came to see that his speech was ingenious. He was not merely addressing Israel, saying that our youth must be more connected to their Jewish and Zionist past. Rather, he addressed the world. To the international community, he subtly said, enough is enough. Enough with attacking the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel. Enough with disparaging the Jewish connection to the land. The land of Israel has been ours from time immemorial; from Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva, Tzfat to Tel Lachish, Tzipori to Massada. Enough with the narrative that the existence of Israel is only the result of the Holocaust. The Zionist enterprise is behind the modern State of Israel; the pioneers and waves of aliyah who built the kibbutzim, raised the modern city in Tel Aviv, established a de facto government in the Yishuv, protected their settlements through organizations such as the Shomer HaTzair and the Hagannah, garnered international aid and support, such as through the World Zionist Congress, and fought a war of independence against five invading armies. Netanyahu said that “the survival of the Jewish people is tied to the State of Israel.” Yet this is no new fact. Judaism has always inherently been tied to the land, and the land is a part of the people and culture. Enough, said Netanyahu. And I say, kudos.

Beit She’arim Menorah – you know, just a little like the one we light 2000 years later because of our vivid imaginations

Some of you may recall our celebration of French journalistic standards which permitted “The Invention of the Jewish People,” a sad, ideologically bent book by Shlomo Sand to win the Aujourd’hui Award, “given to the best non-fiction political or historical work from French journalists.”

That version of Sand’s book, published originally in Hebrew, was the French language version. Unfortunately, the English speaking world is now in possession of this ode to hatred of the Jewish people and it is on sale in England and the US. It’s actually ranked in the mid-2000s on Amazon, which means books are selling.

What kind of person is Shlomo Sand? He is the kind of person who compares Israel in an interview to a child born of a rape.

“Most Israeli Jews believe in a historical right. If there is no such right, what justifies our existence here? Arabs also ask me, after writing this book, how can I justify the existence of Israel. I say to them that even the son of a rape has the right to live. It was a kind of rape in 1947 and ’48 and the Palestinian tragedy continues. But you can say the same about the USA and Australia.”

…“I think Israel belongs to the Israelis, not the Jews. We have a language, a culture, a theatre, a literature, our jokes our football and our politics. We are a people but we are not just a Jewish people. I want to change the borders and definition of the state. I want to make it a more civil nation — to separate religion from its existence, to normalise and democratise Israel. I think that Israel has to belong to all its citizens, not just the Jewish ones. People call me radical but from a democratic perspective this is not so radical.”

Therefore, we glean that he’s a scholar working at an Israeli university which affords him the freedom to attack his country and society viciously and then have his ideas travel the world with him so he can call the country subsidizing his salary, the child of a rape.

And you can imagine he has serious support from the anti-Israel crowd, Jewish especially.

In our previous post, we brought in some scholarly attacks that decimate his book, but my favorite new critique of his book is by prolific and popular historian, Simon Schama, definitely not an intellectual slouch.

Schama writes:

Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.

…

But, he argues, there actually was no mass forced “exile” so there can be no legitimate “return”. This is the take-away headline that makes this book so contentious. It is undoubtedly right to say that a popular version of this idea of the exile survives in most fundamentalist accounts of Jewish history. It may well be the image that many Jewish children still have. But it is a long time since any serious historian argued that following the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans emptied Judea. But what the Romans did do, following the Jewish revolt of AD66-70 and even more exhaustively after a second rebellion in AD135, was every bit as traumatic: an act of cultural and social annihilation – mass slaughter and widespread enslavement. But there was also the mass extirpation of everything that constituted Jewish religion and culture; the renaming of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, the obliteration of the Temple, the prohibition on rituals and prayers. Sand asserts, correctly, that an unknowable number of Jews remained in what the Romans called Palestina. The multitudes of Jews in Rome had already gone there, not as a response to disaster but because they wanted to and were busy proselytising.

All this is true and has been acknowledged. But Sand appears not to notice that it undercuts his argument about the non-connection of Jews with the land of Palestine rather than supporting it. Put together, the possibility of leading a Jewish religious life outside Palestine, with the continued endurance of Jews in the country itself and you have the makings of that group yearning – the Israel-fixation, which Sand dismisses as imaginary. What the Romans did to the defeated Jews was dispossession, the severity of which was enough to account for the homeland-longing by both the population still there and those abroad. That yearning first appears, not in Zionist history, but in the writings of medieval Jewish teachers, and never goes away.

There are many such twists of historical logic and strategic evasions of modern research in this book. To list them all would try your patience.

…

His assumption that the Jewish state is an oxymoron built on illusions of homogeneity is belied by the country’s striking heterogeneity. How else to explain the acceptance of the Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews or the Bene Israel Indians as Israeli Jews? Certainly that acceptance has never been without obstacles, and egregious discrimination has been shown by those who think they know what “real jews” should look like. Sand is right in believing that a more inclusive and elastic version of entry and exit points into the Jewish experience should encourage a debate in Israel of who is and who is not a “true” Jew. I could hardly agree more, and for precisely the reason that Sand seems not to himself embrace: namely that the legitimacy of Israel both within and without the country depends not on some spurious notion of religious much less racial purity, but on the case made by a community of suffering, not just during the Holocaust but over centuries of expulsions and persecutions. Unlike the Roman deportations, these were not mythical.

Sand would counter that such a refuge for the victims could have been in China, or on the moon, for all that Palestine had to do with the Jews. But since his book fails to sever the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience ever since, it seems a bit much to ask Jews to do their bit for the sorely needed peace of the region by replacing an ethnic mythology with an act of equally arbitrary cultural oblivion.

Be sure to read the entire article in the Financial Times.

Very soon, expect to hear on campuses, in news programs on the radio and occasionally in TV programs that the Jewish people are a myth. This stuff used to be said by the neo-Nazi loonies who inhabit this world, but now we have a Jewish, son of Holocaust survivors, professor from an Israeli university, ideologue whose ideology so blinds him to the basic identity of the Jewish people that he has put this lie into the mainstream.

The problem with his argument is that HE’S the one who is touting the biological issue. It is clear to most Jews that their identity stems from our thousands of years of common heritage and that heritage is directly linked to our past in Judea and Israel. It isn’t material whether my genes are directly connected to those of some Jerusalemite from 2000 years ago – although they might well be – it’s that their ideas, beliefs, practices and lives have filtered down to our time and resonate with our identity. They define who we are, and not because of a couple of 19th Century historians, but precisely because our traditions, our shared histories, our literature and even the enduring hatred we’ve suffered, are a part of every Jew. If a prayer was being said 2000 years ago, and then 1000 years later a Jew who descends from a convert says the same prayer and teaches it to his children, and that prayer is repeated 500 years later and again a thousand years later by Jews, even if they are descended from converts to Judaism, that does not lessen their connection to the place where that prayer, language and culture originated. It does not change the fact that they faced Jerusalem when praying and wished that they could visit it and even live there upon the messiah’s arrival.

Whether Sand approves or not, these ideas that form us exist because our ancestors – and here I may mean biological and I could mean ancestry in terms of ideas, faith and religious practice – lived in Jerusalem and Hebron and Shechem and Judea and Samaria.

If his problem is that Israel, a state defining itself as a Jewish state, exist on disputed land that the Palestinians claim as theirs, then that’s an entirely different issue and question. Trying to use questionable history to address this complex situation is reprehensible.

If Walt & Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby” wins TheMiddle’s “21st Century Protocols of the Elders of Zion” Award, Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” wins the “Temple was Never Here, It Was in Nablus” Upside Down History Prize, which I dedicate to Yasser Arafat.

(photo is from this article about the Beit She’arim site)

UPDATE: Shlomo Sand responded to Schama in an interview. We covered his comments in the post Shlomo Sand is Angry at His Critics.

Dear California Secretary of Education Thomas,

The “UC Intifada” at UCI – is raging and Chancellor Drake and the University seem unable or unwilling to act in an effective way to protect the best interests of the student body, and keep intimidation, racism, and anti-Semitism off campus.

I have been the campus rabbi at UCI for almost 5 years, under the auspices of an independent Jewish campus ministry. I also serve as the only Rabbi of the UCI Interfaith Center. My concerns are based on long-term, grassroots involvement, which has brought me into contact with thousands of UCI students – Jewish and Gentile.

It is a well established, and sadly, an accepted part of student life at UCI, that Israel and Jews are being singled out, vilified, and targeted for intimidation. It is the same nightmare of previous year’s except much worse and much longer.

Check out a video circulated by the Muslim Student Union on YouTube, which promotes their upcoming “Israel: The Politics of Genocide” nearly-month long campaign.

While some have pointed to the Olive Tree Initiative as the solution, even according to the participants it is irrelevant. It will do little to change the institutionalized commitment for the destruction of Israel held by the hard-line mainstream Muslim group on the campus, and their support for radical anti-Western, racist, anti-Semitic speakers. The OTI is not capable of solving this entrenched problem now, or in the future, even though they have admirable goals and ambition. In addition, the OTI has excluded religious Jews because they hold their major programs on the Jewish Sabbath.

What started as a week of intimidation called Anti-Zionism week, now encompasses nearly the whole month of May and accuses Israel of Genocide. In recent year’s they called the program “Holocaust in the Holy Land”. These outright lies, seem to conflict with the same groups willingness to abide by campus policies.

In 2006, I coined that phrase UC Intifada to describe what I saw.

In 2007, the Muslim Students used that phrase on their t-shirts to describe what they were doing.

The spiritual leader of the UCI chapter of the MSU, Malik Ali, has declared a “Jihad of the Tongue” against Jews, Israel and the West to be waged from here. Malik Ali has spoken many times praising suicide bombers, Hamas and Hizbollah. He is a nationally known racist, inciting hatred against the Jews. Videos of his diatribes are all over YouTube, and many were shot at UCI.

Someone from the UC system needs to provide supervision and protection. The UC System needs to send a message loud and clear that it will not tolerate racist groups from using campus groups to pursue their larger racist, agendas. In addition, it is the students that suffer the most. Theses programs cause anxiety and fear. It disrupts class and homework schedules.

I tried to reach Chancellor Drake, but he is traveling. Funny, they said that last year when we tried to find him during Hate Week.

Please help the students, cancel the events this week, and kick the MSU off campus.

Rabbi Yonah Bookstein
UCI Interfaith Center Associate Rabbi

Cross posted from What Would Phoebe Do?

Methodical annihilation of Palestine and the Palestinians, eh? I tried to understand how this made sense given the recent news regarding Palestinian population numbers. It seems that while this methodical annihilation was taking place, the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem grew by about 30 percent in the last decade, an increase of about 1 million people, according to a recent population survey.

This can only mean one thing. The Zionists are really, really, REALLY bad at Genocide. I mean, they totally suck! Hitler needed what? Less than 5 years to kill 6 million Jews (assuming you believe that of course)? Even the Rwandan Genocide was able to kill as many as 1 million people in under 100 days – and that was with spears and machetes and stuff! And the Zionist entity? Significant population growth despite active Genocide? Sheesh. Go figure…

Ariel, of course, brings up a significant issue although he does so gently and without true reproach despite the fact that often these same “progressive” “new Jews” are actually offering support to enemies of Israel. They certainly do so with their political activism (die-in anyone?), and in particular by using their very heritage and relationship with other Jews to present themselves to the world as having authority to speak knowledgeably and morally as a different and “better” Jewish person.

Ariel doesn’t explore in any length why these Jews act as they do. If you ask them they will speak nobly of believing in peace, brotherhood among all people, the Jewish imperative to act in certain ways, their true understanding of the nature of things while the “old school” is blinded by their historic allegiances, etc. However, this is pish posh, what is driving them is personal insecurity and a desire not to be perceived negatively by the larger society that surrounds them. They have no greater claim over justice or peace than those with whom they disagree.

Ariel Beery, in his Jerusalem Post op-ed, mentions Daniel Sieradsky who runs Jewschool and Orthodox Anarchist as an example of someone who belongs in this “new Jew” camp and notes that Sieradsky, also known as Mobius, recently exemplified the confused allegiances of the “new Jews” when he decided to hold an event to raise funds for Lebanese victims as well as Israeli victims. Apparently many people don’t support this idea at a time when the war had just concluded and Israel’s north lies in ruins and desperately needs funds and support to rebuild. This is hard for Israel since it will not be receiving the billion dollars from the international community and who knows how much from Iran that Lebanon is in line to receive. Also, Israel will now have to rebuild its arsenal and bring in new defensive anti-rocket, anti-anti-tank, other systems and revamp its intelligence abilities because of possible future wars against the same forces that supplied and try to supply Hizbullah.

Mobius took great umbrage at not receiving support for his project, instead of understanding that people aren’t evil but simply have different priorities at this time, including to those whom they consider part of their nation or co-religionists. He wrote a lengthy rant on Orthodox Anarchist.

Several months ago, Mobius went into a large and successful website and in order to gain votes for the oh-so-important Jewish blog awards, falsely and unjustly attacked Israel for committing war crimes. He was speaking, of course, as the voice of Jewish authority on a website where it seemed many of the visitors were non-Jews.

Ariel Beery’s post linked to the long post by Mobius on his personal Orthodox Anarchist site where he wrote angrily that he is opposed to the Zionist state in its current form and that those who support it turn the world and justice upside down to meet their own horrific objectives of support for this illegitimate Zionist entity. He goes as far as to talk up his own Orthodox credentials to show that he’s a “good” Jew before concluding that halachically (according to Jewish law), Israel has no right to exist in its present form.

No, I’m not a Zionist. I’m a Jew. I’m not going to whitewash this despicable desecration of our inheritance and paint it as awesomely wonderful because of its scientific breakthroughs or its false appearance of democracy.

The more venom you spew in my direction [nobody had spewed venom or even bile], the more I realize it’s true — that Zionists don’t really believe in Torah. Because Zionism is assur by the Torah. Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It is a Jewish nationalist movement. Judaism and Zionism are not one and the same.

and

So you can take all the photos of “hot chicks” at the Kotel on Tisha B’Av you want [an attack on one of our posters, apparently that he isn't a good Jew]. And you can write all the op-eds in the Jerusalem Post you like [attack on Beery whose article he hadn't yet seen and which was quite gentle in fact], publicly shaming your fellow Jew for not being a blind cheerleader in the Zionist army. And you can celebrate your depravity and curse those [ed. italics mine] who genuinely seek to connect to and serve G-d all you like. Piss on my head and tell me its raining. Stand the definition of justice on its head and smile as you stuff a shit sandwich down my throat.

But as you inch this world ever closer towards apocalypse, just know that I would rather be on the side of G-d and justice than a member of your club. If you want to make me out to be a pariah — if you want to put me in cherem because I actually believe G-d when He says redemption comes “Not through arms nor through strength, but through My spirit” — go right ahead.

Toss me out on my ass if you must. But know that you are throwing aside one of the most devout, committed, whole-hearted, loving Jewish people in the world today. And not because I’m not a good Jew. But because I don’t support the infinitely corrupt and halakhically illegitimate state that will be the undoing of our people.

Mobi commands a large audience on both of his sites and, in my opinion, causes unwarranted harm not only to Israel but to those of us who support it. While he feels comfortable wielding his Machete of Superior Morality ™, in fact it is those of us who do not fit his egregious and heinous descriptions Of Israel and its supporters who are tainted by his constant criticism and calls for a different state of things.

Since he has an audience and he not only attacked a friend but also attacked those of us who support Israel, I decided to respond to his comments. Unsurprisingly, he did not post my comment. Well, just so it won’t be lost in Mobi’s selective filter, I report my (undeniably harsh) response here for your pleasure, dear Jewlicious reader.

I rarely visit this site [Orthodox Anarchist] and now I know why.

The laughable part of this, which really proves the shallowness of your opinions on the topic, is your belief that everyone who supports Israel supports it uncritically or supports the neo-Cons and their position on the Mid-East. Your simplistic, childish view on this issue as about as, well, simplistic and childish as your view on attacking Israel about its struggle to survive in an incredibly hostile environment. You would not be able to live as you do without the “Zionist army,” the “Zionist state” or what they need to do to survive. Sure, you could live in New Jersey as a Jew but if that was what you wanted, presumably that’s where you’d be. Instead, you live off the sacrifice of others even as you criticize them.

You write:
publicly shaming your fellow Jew for not being a blind cheerleader in the Zionist army. And you can celebrate your depravity and curse those who genuinely seek to connect to and serve G-d all you like. Piss on my head and tell me its raining. Stand the definition of justice on its head and smile as you stuff a shit sandwich down my throat.

You don’t have the capacity to determine what is justice and what is injustice. You have no tools to judge what is deprived and what is not deprived. You have no idea what God wants although you have the hubris to tell others what he wants. You’re a spoiled anglo tourist in Israel who feels comfortable taking from the “Zionist state” has to offer while vilifying it in terms that service its enemies. Let’s call it shitting where you’re eating – usually a sign of poor manners although in your case it’s also called service to the enemy.

But as you inch this world ever closer towards apocalypse,

Wait, you’re talking to Zionists about this? Zionists?! Are you so blinded by your own rhetoric and “progressive” friends that you don’t understand the society in which you live to this degree? The people inching the world closer to the apocalypse are certainly not those living in the “Zionist entity.” How incredible that you would say this.

just know that I would rather be on the side of G-d and justice than a member of your club.

Um, you’ve spoken to God about this and he told you what he wanted? Funny thing cuz there is a leader in Iran, another in Lebanon and another in Afghanistan who have also had this very same consultation with God. You’re on the same team: “the Zionist entity is a criminal enterprise that must be destroyed.” I guess you must really know what he wants.

And not because I’m not a good Jew. But because I don’t support the infinitely corrupt and halakhically illegitimate state that will be the undoing of our people.

Pay close attention.

Right now there are plenty of very fine Jews who disagree with you both about whether it is a halachically legitimate state, whether it is infinitely corrupt, whether it deserves to exist and in what form, and how it needs to fight for its survival. Some of them, tzaddikim far greater than you, even died in the past several weeks defending their beliefs and their state. It is their memory and upon their surviving family members – parents who have lost their sons; wives who have lost their husbands; children who have been orphaned; friends and family who will never recover – that you continually piss on with your hypocritical views, especially since you broadcast those views loudly and publicly.

Next time I’m in Israel I will say this to your face.