In the last several decades chauvinist Jews have succeeded in making support of Israel an aspect of Jewish identity. They have conflated Zionism with Judaism. 

Eleven years ago my wife Debby and I took our friend Len Weinglass to Montefiore hospital in the Bronx where he never checked out, where he died.

Len was from a small town in New Jersey with a substantial and coherent Jewish population. His grandfather was a leader of the congregation. Len became one of the great movement lawyers in the country. He was the key lawyer along with Leonard Boudin in the Pentagon Papers case. He was the legal strategist and attorney for Abby Hoffman in the Chicago Seven case which he tried with William Kunstler.

We checked in through the emergency room. The admitting person with the questionnaire asked the routine question, “Your religion?” 

Len thought about it for a while and then answered, “Put none.”

Israel’s crimes in oppressing the Palestinians were such that Len did not want to be associated with that country or its government. Right-wing chauvinist Jews were dominant in America. Their  ideology prevailed. People like Len were marginalized. Their understanding that Zionism‘s project of setting up a colonial settler state in someone else’s country was marginalized. They were called “self-hating Jews.”

Not so much anymore. The many and continuing manifestations of solidarity with Palestinians organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and others and joined in by tens of thousands of young people of varying identities beginning with the shutting down of Grand Central Station and the huge demonstration across the Brooklyn Bridge the day after and many many others across the nation since then has changed things. Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza backed by the United States has not gone unchallenged. The dominant narrative is fading, permanently.

Questions are now being asked. Is there a new paradigm in the Middle East? Is there a redeemable liberal Zionism? Is the two-state solution still a talking point? Is the idea that there is a single standard for human rights within the international order or that the American government can ever again lecture about the rule of law still valid? Are international law and the United Nations compromised beyond repair? Has all this been destroyed in Gaza — where 16,000 people have already been killed, around 70% of them women and children? Where around 6,500 people are missing under the rubble?

The eminent socialist scholar of Jewish origin, Isaac Deutscher, wrote in the wake  of the 1967 war, “I hope that together with other nations, the Jews will ultimately become aware — or regain awareness – of the inadequacy of the nation state, and that they will find their way back to the moral and political heritage that the genius of the Jews who have gone beyond Jewry (Spinoza, Marx, Luxembourg, Heine, Freud, Einstein, Trotsky) has left us — the message of universal human emancipation.” 

Genocide is not a Jewish value.

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