Gaza: The End of the Jewish Joy Ride?

You almost want to feel sorry for Israel’s professional apologists in mainstream media these days. Their job, a fetid one at best, has been especially trying lately.

First they assure us that Israel has no intention of committing a genocide – and right away they’re refuted by Israel’s own prime minister, who loudly demands the extermination of every man, woman and child in Gaza, not to mention its president’s equally public insistence that Palestinian civilians are legitimate military targets.

Then they struggle to excuse Israel’s bloody attack on one Gaza hospital, only to end up watching Israel’s killing machine obliterate literally all of them. (Not to mention making a mockery of the excuses by providing no evidence that there was ever a “Hamas command center” under al-Shifa, the first of those destroyed hospitals, to begin with.)

Then they try to divert attention from Israeli atrocities by yelping about “mass rape” supposedly committed by the Palestinian fighters who burst from the Gaza concentration camp on October 7. But the ink is hardly dry on their indignant op-eds before their masters in the Chosen State confess that they have no victim testimonies, no forensic evidence and no reliable witnesses to back up any of the claims.

What’s an apologist to do?

Well, if you’re a staff writer at the Atlantic – where rationalizing Israeli crime is a specialty of the house – you can fall back on the lamest canard of all: that the public disgust stirred by Israel’s worst-yet mass murder campaign against Palestinians is really a product of rising “anti-Semitism.”

And sure enough, Atlantic’s April number sports a feature story to that effect by one Franklin Foer with the lachrymose title “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” – because, don’t you see, Americans couldn’t possibly have a respectable motive for getting worked up over a genocide.

Mind you, it takes some high-octane chutzpah to pretend that today’s Big Story is the end of an era for American Jews, at the very moment when American-made bombs and artillery shells are pulverizing Gaza and exterminating its population (half of which consists of children), to the applause of virtually every Jewish communal organization the world over, including inside the US.

But Foer doesn’t lack chutzpah. He’s not only prepared to claim victimhood for Jewish genocide supporters on the grounds that their sachems haven’t been able to stifle all public dissent. He also wants you to believe that the decline of American Jewish power isn’t due to public backlash against bullying by Jewish organizations (think AIPAC, or the sadly misnamed Anti-Defamation League); nor to the exposure of illegal spending sprees with government funds by various Hasidic institutions; nor even to the racist blood lust expressed by almost every prominent Orthodox rabbi in the US since Israel’s genocidal campaign began last October.

No, according to Foer, the real trouble is what he calls “anti-Semitism on the right and the left” – which I guess means “everywhere,” in the US at least. And he’s even prepared to insist that this “anti-Semitism” is not only bad for the Jews; it threatens the American republic, too.

“Over the course of the 20^th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism,” Foer claims. But now, “that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements – MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other – would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish.” Ah, the unaccountable ingratitude of those goyim! I mean – what’s a little genocide between friends?

Setting to one side Foer’s self-righteous reading of American political history, any claim that today’s United States is awash in anti-Semitism is obviously silly. Quite apart from opinion polls – which tell a tale very different from Foer’s – popular culture is a convenient point of reference in such matters, and it’s hard to see how a society permeated with Jew-hatred would have showered no fewer than twenty Oscar nominations last year on films that celebrate already-famous American Jews. And then there’s the large number of American Jews who have participated in the anti-genocide protests that so trouble Foer – a datum that, standing alone, suffices to refute his imputation of anti-Jewish bigotry to the protesters.

But Foer is right about one thing. A privileged chapter in diaspora Jewish history is coming to an end – though not for the reason he gives. The simple truth (though Foer cannot admit it) is that the American public is getting tired of being bullied by a greedy and hypersensitive Jewish elite that, like a spoiled child, has insisted on having its way for years in everything from Mideast policy to the distribution of government benefits, and is now finally overplaying its hand.

And if that Jewish “leadership” really has squandered its measure of imperially-funded impunity by embracing a genocide – at a moment when the fabric of US politics is too strained for an ultra-divisive issue and too cash-poor to give away the extra billions that Israel is demanding to finance its crimes – it is quite possible that Foer has stumbled onto another truth as well: that the wreckage from the fall of the Jewish elite will doom whatever is left of American democracy.

To make sense of these claims, a short summary of recent history is in order. It is well known that since the end of World War II Jews in the West have come to enjoy a degree of freedom, prosperity and political influence that is without precedent in the Jewish diaspora.

Unsurprisingly, American Jews have generally welcomed this development. And given the horrors that preceded it, culminating in the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the 1940s, it’s not hard to understand why Jewish elites in the US focused at first on securing their hard-won position in any way they could, taking advantage of new opportunities and assimilating themselves to preexisting power structures.

But after 1967, as Israel settled into a new role as one of Washington’s key client states, what had been prudence morphed into braggadocio. Norman Podhoretz set the tone, vowing that henceforth American Jews would “resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm” – a boast that meant in practice (to quote the superb scholar Norman Finkelstein) that “American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying.”

Less privileged constituencies may be forgiven for not seeing that period as a “golden age,” as Foer does, but you can reject his twisted perspective and still agree that the postwar joy ride of Jewish “leadership” is probably coming to an end.

After all, why shouldn’t it?

Today’s United States is not the United States of 1945, nor even the United States of 1967. The American public now is as deeply divided as in the last decades of the 18^th century, when armed rebellions and secession plots were recurring realities. The presidential election scheduled for this November – assuming it happens at all (the Democratic Party seems to be trying to convert the balloting system into a prearranged election-by-lawfare) – is likely to exacerbate differences rather than resolve them, with potentially disastrous results. Worse, given the massive attack on civil rights that was launched four years ago on the pretext of a COVID-19 “medical emergency” – an attack that included the deliberate undermining of the electoral process in many states – it is not even clear whether the necessary conditions for democracy exist any longer in the US.

Meanwhile, consumer prices have skyrocketed, workers are suffering massive layoffs, and the small business economy, crippled by the COVID coup, has been unable to compensate for the damage.

Why should a citizenry in such straits continue to give preferential treatment to an overbearing Jewish elite that 1) clearly doesn’t need it, and 2) flaunts its allegiance to a foreign power even as it demands favors from American institutions at every opportunity? (Anyone who needs an introduction to the fraudulent practices this elite will resort to, and the extent to which it has entangled US government in its chicanery, need only read Norman Finkelstein’s copiously documented The Holocaust Industry for some useful details.) By any standard, American Jews have enjoyed an extraordinary run over the last fifty years; it’s about time we were treated just like everybody else – no worse, but no better either.

The (mis)behavior of Jewish “leadership” is exacerbating the problem. Instead of absorbing the message of the writing on the wall and prudently lowering its profile, it is going for broke, intensifying its financial and political demands in support of Israel’s genocidal slaughter – the worst possible issue seized at the worst possible moment. Not even warning growls from old allies like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have had any noticeable effect. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Jewish “leaders” seem intent on plunging ahead toward their own inevitable destruction.

And I fear that they will not fall alone. Gaza is far from being Joe Biden’s only problem this year. But as the Palestinian death toll soars, and the pictures of shredded or starving children become ever more numerous and intolerable, the Gaza genocide could end up being the last straw that breaks the back of Biden’s reelection propaganda.

Genocide Joe’s problem with Gaza is that there is no real escape from it: Biden cannot ignore the issue but also cannot afford to resolve it. If he grows an embryonic conscience and finally brings Israel to heel (at least temporarily), he will pay a heavy price with Jewish voting blocs in November. If he doesn’t, a regional Mideast war could be in the offing, and I doubt that any American administration could survive the fallout from such a debacle.

I am not about to shed any tears for Joe Biden or for the Democratic Party. But if the current government collapses, what will replace it? An ad hoc coalition around the former Narcissist-in-Chief? A caretaker administration effectively under the sway of US intelligence agencies? A COVID coup-inspired government by executive fiat? The prospects are not encouraging.

Meanwhile, the 1,000 American troops now being sent to Israel/Palestine – ostensibly to build a “humanitarian port” for Gaza – may end up, for all I know, as a striking force behind a coup designed to oust Netanyahu and to put the US directly in control of a client state gone rogue. No one familiar with the CIA’s record can rule out such a possibility. But how will an American working class that already resents the billions of dollars annually thrown away on “aid” to Israel (while average American families can’t pay the rent and the heating bill at the same time) react to the idea of turning the Jewish State into an expensive US protectorate? What if those American troops start dying in new wars in Lebanon or Iran? How much can Americans be expected to pay for Israel’s rapaciousness?

I certainly do not know where any of this will lead. But I’m finding it very hard to imagine a happy ending to the story. I’ve already mentioned my doubts about whether the presuppositions required of a democracy exist in today’s United States. One of those presuppositions is the assumption of shared goals (Lessing, following Aristotle, went so far as to describe this as “friendship”) between the members of differing political factions. But can I really acknowledge any sort of common cause with a supporter of genocide? To be honest, I’m still not sure I can use a word like “friendship” to describe my relationship to someone who, just a few years ago, denied my right of movement, my right to be governed by democratic processes, my right to speak my mind without being censored, my right not to be a human guinea pig, and even my right to breathe freely. And I can’t forget that there were many, many such people.

What I’m finding really ominous is that so many enemies of American freedom over the last four years are now quietly cozying up to Israel’s genocide lest they upset the Democratic Party applecart – and are demanding that the American public do the same. Rebecca Solnit, one of those “progressive feminists” who helped to publicize every democracy-destroying lie of the COVID coup, from masks to coerced human medical experimentation, doesn’t mince words about the dangers of Republican politicians: according to her, they have “abandoned all ethics and standards, and will happily violate the oaths they took to uphold the constitution”; in fact, she claims that “[v]iral Trumpism has already merged with conspiracy theories such as QAnon, with anti-vaccine cults, with white supremacists and neo-fascists.” But the prolific Ms. Solnit has gone strangely tongue-tied about the slaughter-plus-systematic-starvation of more than a million children in Gaza.

Gloria Steinem, another “progressive” who bailed on the “my body, my choice” principle as soon as a Democratic Party administration demanded the injection of federal employees with untested drugs, was quick to denounce Palestinians over charges of sexual violence that were probably fabricated. But she too has been practically silent about the slaughter in Gaza, not to mention the well-documented sexual violence committed by Israelis against female Palestinian prisoners. And so on, and so on, and so on.

I mention these examples because I think they expose, like a lantern in a shadowy room, the cruel emptiness belied by all the liberal gesturing. The tragic truth is that the Democratic Party and its mouthpieces are not offering us an alternative to Donald Trump. They are using Trump’s name as hunters use beaters, to induce frightened prey to stampede into their nets. They are not, as some critics believe, political ideologues; they are really more like political parasites, forced to feed on the vital energies and principles of others because they have none themselves.

That is where Democratic Party apologists meet the crime-rationalizing rhetoricians of American Jewish “leadership.” Even genocide, the most heinous of all crimes against humanity, doesn’t move such people, because where they should have hearts capable of empathy with suffering or of anger at injustice, all they’ve really got is a craving for power and a dread of losing it.

And so it turns out that the Jewish elites who are hell-bent on maintaining their undeserved privileges – so much so that they’ll embrace Nazi crimes to do it – are forcing the pitiful hollowness of America’s political elites into public view. That is the real disaster that Franklin Foer, who wants to keep both elites in power, cannot see. His pastiche of anodyne falsehoods is intended to divert public attention from the horror of Israel’s intensifying crimes in occupied Palestine. But he is really laying the groundwork for the radical disillusionment of the American public – a disillusionment that could bring down the entire political process when a generation of its victims realizes how recklessly and how cynically it has been deceived.

Yes, the American Jewish joy ride is probably about to end – and with a bang, not a whimper. The real questions are all about what happens next. How many Americans (and others) are going to be hurt in the crash? How many will get out of the way in time? How many will be ready with aid for the victims when the debris finally settles?

And what will be left – after so much cruel and needless damage – of what we used to call “the land of the free, the home of the brave”?

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.