Loyalty
JVL Introduction
“I’ve been thinking about Jewish disloyalty recently because I’ve been accused of it,” writes Peter Beinart, author last July of an oped piece in the New York Times headed I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.
Recently he agreed to appear on a platform which included Rep Rashida Tlaib and Professor Marc Lamont Hill – and the floodgates of criticism opened.
Here he explains why he did so, and discusses “the perverse way in which charges of anti-Semitism often function in the contemporary American debate over Israel. Frequently, they serve not to combat bigotry but to excuse it…”
Peter Beinart’s thoughts on loyalty below are reprinted from his newsletter, which you can sign up to here.
This article was originally published by Peter Beinart's newsletter on Mon 14 Dec 2020. Read the original here.
Loyalty
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Great article – this is the only way forward.
A great article and thank you JVL.
I wouldn’t call you disloyal Peter but probably well meaning although your views are naive and and divorced from the realities of the ME and somewhat forgetful of Jewish history. I doubt that you would be willing to risk your life and those of your family by living in this implausible secular ME state, in fact I don’t know of any Jews who would volunteer, but many posters on JVL are happy to suggest this for nearly 7 million Jews in Israel. The aim of most of those who propose a so-called secular democratic state, including those with whom you shared a platform, is to deny Jewish self-determination, ie it’s antisemitism.
Nothing wrong with any of us having self-determination ……………
…………. as long as it doesn’t deny self-determination to others.
Deny that self-determination to others and you are repudiating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which sprang from, amongst other considerations, a determination that nothing like the Holocaust should ever happen again.
Jaye. How can the struggle for equal treatment of the Palestinians in a single secular state be described as antisemitic? The status quo is simply untenable unless you support Jewish supremacy over the Palestinians. Supporting the self determination of one religious/ethnic group at the expense of another can never be justified!