JEWISH QUESTIONS

PHILIP WEISS—The Washington Post said “hundreds” were at the rally. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency says “thousands” were at the rally, but the screenshot above doesn’t support that claim. MJ Rosenberg said there were more people at his bar mitzvah.

Ron Kampeas reported last week that while leading Jewish groups sponsored the rally– including the Jewish Federations of North America, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the leading Jewish Republican and Democratic committees– liberal Zionist groups wanted nothing to do with it.

PHILIP GIRALDI—Yes, the United States has an office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism and it is always headed by a Jew, as has been also the office in the Justice Department that continues to be dedicated to rooting out 90 year old Nazis. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, most particularly in its Trump version, is so close to Israel that it might reasonably be regarded as part of the Israel Lobby. And the Democrats are not much better, though there has been some dissent from progressives, which has led to the creation of a Zionist pressure group within the party called the Democratic Majority for Israel. It exists to defend Israel against any and all criticism while also protecting the billions of dollars and other benefits that the Jewish state receives from the US Treasury and government annually.

After the ceasefire on recent violence that dominated the world’s attention in May, following evictions and attacks in the zone of the Jerusalem Al Aqsa Mosque, signs of rising tensions have flared up again: Israeli nationalists announce a coming “flag march” in Jerusalem, while Hamas leaders vow to defend holy sites. What can the watching world do, to change the face of Israeli-Palestinian permanent-seeming conflict? Reaching beyond headlines and hashtags to explore these and other questions, we bring on distinguished guests – forensic scholar and political scientist Norman Finkelstein, and his sometimes co-author, Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of the Arab studies platform Jadaliyya.com. How can a movement like DiEM25 in Europe, interpret this conflict towards real change?

JONATHAN OFIR—So his person —Bennett—is a kind of modern combination of religious fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism, mixed with a kind of secular, ‘Western’, ‘startup’ nature that Israelis like to identify with. Bennett lives in Ra’anana, a city north of Tel-Aviv, so he does not live in one of the West Bank settlements as one might expect (unlike Avigdor Liberman, the new Finance Minister, who is avowedly secular and hateful of ultra-orthodox religious Jews). Nonetheless, as leader of a religious-settler movement, Bennett is an ideological settler-leader. He leads the war criminals and cheers the war crimes, from Ra’anana, and now from the highest post in Israel.

YASHA LEVINE—Born in Moscow in 1960, Avigdor Eskin escaped to Israel as a teenager and drifted toward Arab-bashing extremists like Meir Kahane. After a string of brushes with the law as a young man, Eskin emerged as a prominent far-right wacko in his own right. In 1995, enraged by Yitzkak Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Yassir Arafat, Eskin made a public show of laying a kabalistic curse on the Prime Minister. He led a ceremony in front of the prime minister’s house, and intoned a curse: “Angels of destruction will hit him. He is damned wherever he goes. His soul will instantly leave his body … A disaster he has never experienced will beget him and all curses known in the Torah will apply to him. I deliver to you, the angels of wrath and ire, Yitzhak, the son of Rosa Rabin, that you may smother him. Put to death the cursed Yitzhak. May he be damned, damned, damned!”