Adas Israel LA

 I am more than discomfited by people blocking access to a synagogue. I hate the menacing, macing, cursing, and physically attacking the people entering, or anybody around wearing a kippah. I am sickened by self-styled allies of Palestine who enter a subway car - masked! -  and demand that any Zionists present raise their hands. All that shit is simply indefensible. 

But I am also deeply shamed by friends who are quick to denounce these things and imply that their adversaries who do not also denounce them are hypocritical when they themselves are silent about the demolition of the Great Omari Mosque, the Khalid bin al Waleed Mosque, the Church of St. Porphyria’s, etc. by the IDF. They are all quick to say that Hamas combatants use the churches and mosques of Gaza without knowing anything whatever in particular about the individual case.

Welcoming real estate pimps who are selling condos on land that has yet to even be transferred by colonial courts may not be as bad as hiding the perpetrators of the atrocities of October 7. But then again, the antisemitic hoods in LA didn’t raze Adas Israel to the ground.

Last month we learned of a committee of billionaires who offered to purchase Mayor Adams’s police action to break up student protest camps at Columbia and NYU. Today Reuters reports on largely-secret influence operations by the government of Israel inside the US Congress and elsewhere. But when people call attention to these things they are accused of employing old antisemitic tropes. This reminds me of the definition of chutzpah: murdering your parents and asking for the mercy of the court as an orphan. We live in a bizarro universe in which Marjorie Taylor Greene(!), who traffics regularly in antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jewish space lasers?)  feels free to denounce the “disgusting antisemitism” of the Democratic Party. I am at a loss.

On Dealing with Immensely Powerful Gangsters

I have been watching with dismay as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which used to pretend that it didn't try to affect elections, has poured $15 million+ into a Democratic Congressional primary - not general - election to defeat my former representative, Jamaal Bowman. Interestingly, most of their flyers and ads and robocalls aren't even focusing on his call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Instead they lie that he opposes President Biden's agenda, which he does not, and which his opponent supports only lukewarmly. But the reason isn't really his call for that ceasefire, nor even his support for the human rights of Palestinian people.

No, AIPAC is moving against Jamaal because he refused to tone down those positions when they advised him to do so. Moreover, they are making an example of him because they think he is vulnerable as representative of a district with a large proportion of Jewish voters. But the money they are spending to overwhelm Representative Bowman's grassroots campaign is not about getting one congressman out of office. It is meant as a message to other politicians who don't follow AIPAC's advice: what we did to him, we can do to you.

This is what happens when people who have money and power choose to act as gangsters. It brought to mind an old story about the US and Nicaragua:

In 1979, the dictatorial dynasty of the Somoza family in Nicaragua was brought down by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. The United States had supported the Somoza dictatorship for decades after installing it with the armed support of the US Marine Corp in 1933. (See the book War is a Racket by two-time Medal of Honor winner Major General Medley Butler.) As soon as the Somozas were ousted, the CIA began funding anti-government Contra rebels in Nicaragua to harass and - they hoped - bring down the new government to replace it with a more friendly one. Even after Congress explicitly barred aid to the Contras, the Reagan Administration found ways to illegally get weapons to them. That was one part of the Iran-Contra Affair for which Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was granted immunity from prosecution. It was complicated, but the gist of it was that the Administration was illegally selling arms to Iran and using some of Iran's payments to fund arms for the Contras, also illegally.

Novelist Salman Rushdie visited Nicaragua during this period and published The Jaguar Smile about his observations. He spoke at great length with the Sandinista's foreign minister, Father Miguel d'Escoto who was attempting to negotiate with the US government to end the CIA's intervention. In his book, Rushdie repeated this story that Father Miguel told him:

D’Escoto described the visit to Managua of a White House emissary - whom I’ll call ‘Rocky. During their talks, he told us, he himself had repeatedly emphasized that, given good will on both sides, he was convinced that the difficulties between the US and Nicaragua could fairly straightforwardly be resolved. ‘’We understand,” I said, “that you have certain security requirements in this region. That’s fin. We can discuss all those. We are pragmatic people, and we want a working deal with the United States.”’

Eventually (d’Escoto continued), Rocky took up the gauntlet. If they were hypothetically to suppose that this hypothetical good will might hypothetically exist, on what basis did the padre think that negotiations might begin?

‘Well,’ d’Escoto said, ‘suppose we both agreed to abide by international law? That would be a fairly objective basis.’

‘That’s your problem, Father,’ Rocky told him. ‘You’re a philosopher. You won’t concentrate on the facts.’

And what were the facts? D’Escoto, an excellent raconteur, performed Rocky’s reply. ‘These contras on your frontier, Padre. They give you lots of trouble, don’t they?’ Yes, d’Escoto had replied, but they wouldn’t if you stopped funding them. ‘There you go again,’ Rocky said. ‘More philosophy. You’re hopeless, Father. The reality is that these people have been funded, are being funded and will continue to be funded. And they give you trouble. Those are facts.’ He then said he thought Father Miguel looked pretty intelligent. ‘And intelligent men don’t want trouble. And you’ve got trouble.’

So what did he suggest, d’Escoto asked. ‘It’s easy, came the reply. ‘Just do as we say. Just do as we say, and you’ll see how this trouble you’ve got will disappear. Overnight. As if by magic. It just won’t be there anymore. You’ll be astonished. Just do as we say.’

 This is what AIPAC is telling the other members of Congress who call for ceasefire, who call for an end to illegal occupation, who call for human rights for Palestinians. They are not asking for a particular position, a specific vote, a one-time compromise. They are saying: "Just do as we say."

What is the existential threat to the Jewish people?

 We were taught:

“Three signs mark this people: their capacity for mercy, for shame, and for kindness.”

• Yebamot 79a

“What is hateful to you; do not to another. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”

• Shabbat 31a

“You have been told, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you; only to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk in humility with your God”

• Micah 6:8

And we were taught the consequences of our failure:

“When you lift up your hands I will turn my eyes away from you. Though you pray at length I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime; wash yourselves clean. Put your evil doings away from My sight.”

• Isaiah 1:15-16

If the beating heart of our identity devolves into stoking the memory of the fires of the Shoah, then we are worshipping Moloch. Centering Jewish victimhood to the exclusion of all else is a threat to our survival as a people.

If we worship the power of the IDF - its Merkava tanks, its intelligence services, its Jericho ballistic missiles - then that, too, is a threat to our survival as a people. Weapons are false idols;  they are sacrifices to Baal.

If we come to believe that our existence as a people requires the obliteration of our neighbors, then we have discarded what it means to be a Jew. We will have transformed ourselves into Laban the Aramean: a moral and physical threat to the legacy that 1500 generations of our grandparents and great-grandparents gifted us.