JEWISH QUESTIONS

MoA—Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had promised that his organization would take revenge for each of its soldiers killed in Israeli attacks in Syria. Knowing that some hit will come the Israeli army was put on high alert and additional forces were moved towards the border area. But the long nervous guarding of the border while waiting for Hezbollah’s hit must have induced some hallucinations.

ALAN MACLEOD—With a host of celebrity advocates, including Tobey Maguire, Emily Deschanel and Zac Efron, veganism is growing exponentially across the West. Noting that a quarter of 25-34 year old Americans are vegetarian or stricter, The Economist labeled 2019 the “year of the vegan.” Yet uncritical regurgitation of IDF press releases subtly presents the Middle East region as liberal, forward-thinking Israelis vs. backward, close-minded Arab Muslims.

This framing is particularly misleading for a number of reasons. Firstly, much of the most commonly celebrated Israeli vegan food (falafel, hummus, baba ghanoush, stuffed vine leaves) is simply the appropriated cuisine of the local peoples Israel displaced during its creation. Secondly, the great irony is that the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development statistics show that Israelis actually consume the most poultry per capita in the world, with 80% of the population eating it every day. As a whole, Israelis eat over 200 pounds of meat every year, more than even the famously carnivorous Americans.

JOSH RUEBNER—Based on the former vice president’s current campaign pledges, and past statements made during the Obama administration and throughout his lengthy tenure in the Senate, a Biden administration would not be likely to content itself with reverting to Obama era policies of providing lip service toward Palestinian rights while nevertheless reinforcing US diplomatic and military support for Israel.

EDWARD SAID—Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook.

It’s hard to effectively express dissent when your very presence at an organization would be portrayed as an endorsement of their positions. The fact is, we’re at a critical moment in the history of the US-Israel relationship. As Israel contemplates full annexation of the West Bank without extending voting rights to the Palestinian people living there, making the apartheid comparisons impossible to ignore, AIPAC continues to blend anodyne calls for “bipartisanship” with support for far-right plans for the region.