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February 20, 2007
I see that The Guardian has given over a week of space for different, diverse and independent Jewish voices to express their views. These alternative diasporic Jewish expressions are a welcome break from the strident nationalist voices that fills the media flows and which make honest discussions about Israel and Palestine so very difficult to conduct of late.
There is a lot of circling the wagons by the right-wing Israel Lobby and various attempts by pro-Likud Israeli's to muzzle criticism of Zionism and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The diversity of diasporic Jewish opinion is a welcome development, since as Lenin's Tomb says:
'Israel makes a concerted effort to manufacture a Jewish consensus, and devotes hard currency to this, because the entire moral basis for its existence as a Jewish State is threatened by the perception that there are serious divisions as opposed to a few 'renegade Jews' as Elie Weisel might call them.
Richard Silverstein says, in one of the many interesting op-eds in The Guardian that things are now changing. The walls of the hawkish, conservative Israel Lobby are cracking, especially after the Alvin H. Rosenfeld paper entitled Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism published by the American Jewish Committee in the US that targeted liberal Jews for their criticisms of Zionism and Israeli Government policies.
I've looked at the Rosenfeld paper over at philosophy.com
With different Jewish voices increasingly being heard in the public sphere, we may get a better debate about the Middle East. Similar moves are happening in Australia.
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Thanks for that kind link to my Guardian essay about cracks in the wall of Jewish opinion about Israel.
I have a new Comment is Free piece up since Monday on Barack Obama & the Jewish vote & whether a presidential candidate can have an independent view of the Israeli Palestinian conflict considering the power of AIPAC.