SRAEL DIDN’T TURN ITS BACK ONZIONISM, AMERICAN JEWISH LEFTIES DID by Daniel Greenfield

Sep 25, 2018 Amnon Peery Opinions 0

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In the spirit of always accusing others of your sins, Dana Milbank at the Washington Post starts off with a rant accusing Israel of having abandoned Zionism by seizing land to being an apartheid state.

And alienating people like him.

“Netanyahu, for his part, is dissolving America’s bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in favor of an unstable alliance of end-times Christians, orthodox Jews and wealthy conservatives such as Sheldon Adelson,” Milbank shrieks.

That would be the bipartisan consensus which forced Israel into making a deal with terrorists, that signed off on Iran’s nuclear program, that saw Israeli buses blown up, entire families massacred, or forced to huddle in bomb shelters?

“For 70 years, Israel survived in no small part because of American Jews’ support. Now we watch in horror as Netanyahu, with President Trump’s encouragement, leads Israel on a path to estrangement and destruction,” Milbank writes.

Milbank defines American Jews, his “We” as excluding Orthodox Jews. And any other pro-Israel Jews.

His “we” is really the “me” of a lefty chattering class that was never Zionist. And justifies its betrayal by claiming that Israel isn’t Zionist.

“My rabbi, Danny Zemel, comes from Zionist royalty: His grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, led the Zionist Organization of America in the late 1930s, and presided over the World Zionist Convention in Zurich in 1939. So Zemel’s words carried weight when he told his flock this week on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the Jewish year, that “the current government of Israel has turned its back on Zionism.”

In Milbank and Zemel’s Orwellian world, defending Israeli sovereignty is turning your back on Zionism.

But what is Zionism if it isn’t the safety, security and survival of Israel?

Just as Milbank and his “we’s” have redefined Judaism to mean anything and everything except the continuity of the Jewish people, its traditions and beliefs, they’ve redefined Zionism to mean anything and everything except the survival and continuity of Israel.

These intellectual convolutions may help them sleep at night, but it’s a lie that every Israeli, and every Jewish person committed to his faith and people can easily see through.

The people calling Israel an “apartheid state” were never Zionists. They might occasionally visit Israel. They vaguely liked the idea of there being an Israel. As long as it didn’t clash with their leftist politics.

Now that it has, they insist that Israel’s survival is anti-Zionist. But while they play their Orwellian word games, the actual Zionism of Jewish families settling, working and loving the land thrives.

Zionism is dead in the Washington Post. It’s dead among the ranks of Dana Milbank, his Rabbi and his fellow chatterers, but it thrives in Israel.

 

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