anti-Zionism

The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Marissa Brostoff has a piece – again in Tablet, which might be the best Jewish magazine out there – on the…well, you read the title of this post, right?

So they are a network, they are Jewish and they are left-wing. What else? Shot by both sides, apparently.

Brostoff reports:

Their elders on the radical left didn’t know what to do with them either. They were too Jewish.

“Folks like us get it from both sides,” said a 27-year-old Jewish religious professional at the conference who requested anonymity because, she said, she feared repercussions if her views became known. “We’re not loyal enough to the Jews and we’re not pure enough for the anti-Zionists.”

Loyalty versus purity? I’m not even going to comment. And genug with the anonymity. If you want to lend an air of clandestine profundity to your cause, just pretend they’re out to get you. Better, read Hans Fallada if you want to know what it’s like to live in perpetual terror of having opinions. Or talk to a few Iranian dissidents. But don’t go blabbing about being “silenced” by the Israel lobby, trying to turn yourself into a martyr for free speech.

Or was he referring the purists on the hard left?

Lee Smith on anti-Zionist trolls

Lee Smith has a provocative little piece in Tablet on anti-Zionism (I’m not allowed to mention anti-Semitism because it’s no longer supposed to exist) in the blogosphere:

What is notable about such comments is not that they are original or unusual, but that there are hundreds and thousands of them, each sicker and crazier than the next, appended like a mile-long oil slick to nearly any mainstream news story or opinion piece that mentions Israel.

I know this because the few comments my own blog receives are largely tacked on to my posts about Israel.

Note to commenters: it’s ok to comment on the literary stuff and the atheism, too. It’s encouraged!

Oy, Saramago

While the literary world and the world of far left European politics are mourning Jose Saramago’s death, others are unearthing things about the great novelist they don’t like much. I don’t have time now, but David Frum wrote a summary of Saramago’s visceral dislike of Jews and Israel. It makes for uncomfortable reading.

Saramago won his prize in 1998. He put his new global fame to the service of a new cause: denunciations of Israel. But unlike other European anti-Zionists, Saramago explicitly connected his dislike of Israel to his feelings about Jews.

In a speech in Brazil on Oct. 13, 2003, Saramago reportedly unburdened himself of this thought about the world’s Jews: “Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn’t learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents.”

That last phrase is so myopic I have to keep reading it to believe he really said it. These things, too, must be remembered.