Gaslighting Australian Jews

Larry Stillman, Australia, Jan 22, 2025

This article is really offensive. It’s gaslighting Australian Jews.

The writer offer little understanding of the diversity and debate within the Jewish community, seemingly reducing those who oppose what is going on to a few thousand people, and then making claims about what we are supposed to believe or be.  The phraseology used is awful.

The writer asserts that there is  “[No] identity between Jews (and those of Jewish origin) and the Israeli state. By attacking the former, goes the argument, you are attacking the latter. But there is no such identity”.

What right does the writer have to make any claims about Jewish identity with the Israeli state in part, or whole?  He’s gaslighting.

He could say that identity with ethno-nationalist  Zionism is wrong ( and I agree)  but to deny any identity is plain wrong. The denial  displays deep ignorance of the course of modern Jewish life from at least the mid-19th century onwards, and the history of the state as a point of refuge in the past when other states – including this country- restricted Jewish flight from persecution. Israel is the great cultural and religious centre of Jewish life, politics aside.  This fact has to be accepted, along with the fact that in establishing a state, Israel’s founders also did great wrong to the Palestinian people, the appalling consequences of which we live with today and struggle against.   Progressive Jews struggle to help change the situation, connected as the vast majority of Jews are, to the contested situation inside Israel , and the Occupied Territories. The idea of an Israel -free life is pretty much a minority fantasy, even for this post-Zionist. Jews are a global community and Israelis Jews, like it or not, are 50% of that.

And what is “Jewish origins” referred to by the writer? Are we going for racial classification here?

And then this.

“In the absence of anyone claiming responsibility, we can assume that both these incidents of vandalism (sorry, ‘terrorism’) were misguided attempts to protest against the Israeli genocide against Palestine.”

Given what is apparently emerging via arrests, I suggest this comment is way out of line and improper.

At least Rashid Khalidi the great Palestinian intellectual had better insight:

“there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people’s extermination or expulsion by the other.”

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