An end to US aid for Israel? Why, the very idea of this!

[Note: An earlier version of this post was submitted under the title “An end to US aid for Israel is in sight! Apartheid’s days are numbered!” This got edited to “US aid for Israel is in sight! Apartheid’s days are numbered!” Automated corporate censorship can be comical, indeed.

A servile apology to a censorious (humanly intelligent) editorial apparatus might be:
Indeed, I was overhasty. It might not happen. (Though it might).
As for the good people of that country, who can doubt but that we all wish them well?
That is not in question.

I once worked for people where such ‘diplomacy’ might have made sense, but of course I’m not in that situation now. I realized this more fully as I wondered:

Could the site’s machine editing program have been programmed to not mind any opinion about Israel/Palestine but be keen on practical messaging? After all, votes and other instant behaviors are often driven less by (tedious?) arguments than sound bytes. At an imaginary magazine employing writers like myself or their editors, perhaps the boss’s ‘heads up’ rallying speech to the rowing sailors of the crew would be something like: “Team, whatever else we might want to say, let’s not be calling for a change in funding priorities (of those in governance here and the stakeholders to whom they are responsible), for of course the American people could never be expected to not support aid for Israel. Indeed, let’s call for more Congressional authorization of spending, or word such that, while retaining deniability on our part, it can be so understood by the audience. Let’s put that in the clear message to action and leave the detailed blather of what bloggers say for those few who care to read him. Maybe he will eventually return to just writing film reviews instead [admittedly, perhaps a very good idea]. The blogger’s sound of alarm may be apt, even correct, but what should we think, and want readers to understand, even if that were true?”

However, I do not write as an activist issuing calls to action, something the corporate world (including many organizations in its non-profit sector) often is able to manage well enough with. (On another kind of activism, see below). Thus, I do not exactly follow (some over-hasty misreadings of?) Marx’s famous eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (philosophers, and writers who study what in our corporate university world was called ‘theory’) have explained the world, what matters, at least today, is to ‘change’ it — which is perhaps as easily done as said). As a matter of fact, I think the best activists are often way ahead of people like me, while I write not only in the hope of persuading others but also to clarify my own thinking. For some people I have discussed such matters with, further clarity is in order. (To bypass that and read my original post, it follows these remarks. I intended the original post more for readers who share my general political orientation, while these preceding ones are to those people in the Jewish world, and their many friends, who do not, exactly).

When faced with a situation, a theorist might ask, what is the matter?
Meaning, how should this situation be figured?
Before one starts talking about what it is to be done, one must configure the problem.

One way to do this might be by asking;

Of what is Israel’s Gaza war a symptom?
Is the problem or matter, when properly understood, so easily contained?
What should American Jews be asking themselves?

I suggest this question:
What does the repudiation of Jewish nationalism mean for Jewish identity?
Is it worth maintaining anymore?
If so, in what sense, if any?
I mean this as a question.
I do not have the answer.
The question is necessitated by the condition that Jewish nationalism must now be repudiated.

(That there were good things about it is not what is now at issue.
The anti-Israel left could concede this, as I think they should.
Something quite similar can also be said of some other political formations emergent around that time).

We must leave it behind, we can, and we should want to.
We must because the price is unacceptable.
The price of freedom, peace, and security is unacceptable if it means you must collaborate in, or tolerate, the murder of your neighbors. (And there is no condition that one can place on a neighbor’s being acceptable as such. The legitimate neighbor is the neighbor. The one who should be entitled to equal liberty and protection of the laws is everyone in the territory.)
We can because we can live without it.
And we should want to because we can live better (safer, happier, with more liberty) without it.
Thus,
It is no longer possible to make any good sense of there being a Jewish state.

(It is important to understand and make clear not only why this is but what in fact it is reasonable to want).

The idea of a Palestine free ‘from the river to the sea’ would make no good sense to most Jews I know for reasons I understand, but something like this quite easily misleading (in the way it is understood) statement would make sense in eyes of many on the Jewish left if it merely clarified that a future state, in fact, cannot possibly be that ‘Jew-free Palestine’ that the extremist imaginary among Zionists fears (and some on the other side quite understandably want). The recipe for war is to when Jews and Palestinians both say “the land is ours, not yours.” I am an American to whom such thinking is both anathema and nonsense. Is it not? It is very relevant to say this in a contemporary American context, because our own national government’s domestic policies are also xenophobic, and quite violently so. See, a land can only ‘belong to’ its residents. Any other idea of ‘who’ are the ‘proper’ citizens of a territory can only lead to fascism and war.

Below is my original post:

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All US aid for Israel could be ended. This was actually voted on in the United States House of Representatives. The measure lost, but the issue will return. The end is in sight.

The United States could end its support for the Israeli military state. This could be the beginning of the end of the Apartheid Israeli state.

There is a model for this.

In Spring 1985 a set of campus protests took place in which university students, including at my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, demanded their institution divest itself of funds in South Africa in order to press for the end of Apartheid. Over the course of the movement, hundreds were arrested as protesters built shantytowns and organized boycotts. In July, Berkeley's governing board voted to divest; Columbia did so in October of that year. A movement that started in 1976 (Hampshire College) led to divestment by the governing boards of 155 colleges and universities in the United States.

The divestment movement culminated when it was taken up by the United States Congress.
On October 2, 1986, overriding President Reagan's veto, it ended support for South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Negotiations to end the regime began in 1990.

South Africa remains and its European residents remain citizens. Most did not leave. Despite the country's problems.

No two situations are alike. But the parallels are enough to warrant the claim: The end of a Jewish state and its replacement by a democratic state belonging legally and fully to all of its residents, with the question of managing claims of a right of return to residents of this territory displaced by the Jewish state to be negotiated and determined in the only way proper, which is by all parties concerned - this is within sight.

There is no other acceptable solution.

Without American support, Israel may be pressured to negotiate a peace, instead of continuing its project of mass murder. We cannot know what the result will look like exactly, but, all things, and persons affected, considered, it cannot be worse than the situation we have. I am sure there will remain a Jewish presence in this land. I also do not believe that was ever the stake in this war. The Zionists wanted a national state based on an inclusivity that necessitates its complementary term, exclusion. We have come to see what that means. Their nationalist model, a nineteenth century one that triumphed in the early to middle part of the last, has lost whatever credibility, and tenability, it may once have seemed to have. Admit it: that dream is over.