Nice. Have followed Kaufman's name for a while but not read him closely. Hope he fights this tooth and nail. In the afterword to the paperback release of Matches, he graciously points out that Palestinians endanger their own chances to achieve peace and progress. Maybe this will teach him a bitter but strong lesson....

Looks like we've got a new name for San Francisco. I've been calling it "the Anbar Province of American politics." Now it's Palestinian-occupied territory.

maybe it's time to reclaim the term 'Zionism' from the Arab and biased liberal 'no-fly' list

(not just 'time',
but 'ages-long-overdue' actually)

a start would be by defining Zionism to be the longing of Jews to live in their Biblical Jewish homeland,
which existed long before Mohammed and his attempt to re-write history and religion,
and which Jews settled in with great sacrifice,
while it was neglected wasteland when it was under Arab political rule

this should be followed up,
by an insistence of the Israeli government,
for the Palestinians to formally accept this definition of Zionism, and agree to it as part and parcel of agreeing to Israel's right to exist, as a first non-negotiable condition for peace,
and have the American peacebrokers back it up

(this should take care of any insane land-for-peace agreements,
as Hamas and the PA will probably never agree to this first step)

If even the Israeli government will refuse to formally defend Zionism,
then they have some serious self-searching questions to ask themselves ...

May G-D help us all ...

Judging by PT's review, Kaufman is airing a lot of dirty laundry in public, without much positive material to offset it. I can't muster much sympathy for him.

Jeremiah:

Though I happen to like Kaufman's book. I disagree with his notion that the Arabs are endangering their own chances for peace and progress.

Kaufman and almost all westerners mistakenly believe that the Islamic world wants peace with israel. They do not. They want to turn israel into Muslim territory. A Jewish state is an affrfont to Islam. Not to radical islam but to normative Islam.

As for progress, well, the early Zionists from the First Aliyah were idealistic Russian Socialists/Communists, made the same mistake. They thought the downtrodden Arab "workers" would welcome then with open arms.

It did not happen.

There were, instead, pogroms.

It's not about economic progress. Never was, never will be.

It's about restoring the dominance of Islam.

Even today, most Israelis don't have a clue about Islam and its uncompromising face.

Exdemexlib:

No Arab entity will ever accept a Jewish state in the middle east.

It's that simple.

Israel is seen as a cancer in the Muslim world, a cancer that must be eradicated, either through warfare or through a slower one-state solution.

In any case, the political isolation of Israel by the Islamic states has not been an accident. It's been a well considered strategy whose end game is the annihilation of the Jewish state.

Kishke:

I empathize.

However, you may not like Kaufman's art, but the next Jewish artist may create art you admire and when he uses the word Zionism, well...

His name is Asher Lev....

I don't think he's airing dirty laundry in public. Clearly his Zionism means a lot to him, and he doesn't see why he should hide it. This is about principle. I think he's being very brave.

Joanne, when I said he's airing dirty laundry, I wasn't referring to his Zionism. Acc. to P-Toddler, the first third or so of the book details at length the inhumaneness of the Israeli soldier. That's what I was talking about.

I don't know if I would characterize it as "inhumaneness" so much as "dehumanization". There's a difference.

It's easy to be a humanist soldier when all you're doing is drilling at a fort somewhere in the US.

It's another story when your daily routine consists of going house to house among people who wish nothing other than for you and your people to die.

STATEMENT

Zionism is the Civil Rights Movement of the Jewish People. It is the answered prayer to two thousand years of ceaseless persecution at the hands of unpredictable host nations and of religions that at times abandoned their own highest moral precepts in the pursuit of dubious political objectives at the expense of Jewish life and limb.

For an individual or institution to claim to respect and tolerate Jews and yet deny a Jew, any Jew, the right to proclaim Zionism as a personal spiritual, cutural and political raison d'etre, is like telling a Black person that you regard him as your equal and friend but please, do not mention the March on Birmingham; please, don’t talk about Martin Luther King; please, don’t bring up Rosa Parks to me.

Zionism is the March on Birmingham, the Martin Luther King, the Rosa Parks of our people, the Jewish People. It is our march on the death camp at Auschwitz; it is our fight for an equal place on the bus of human history.

And the State of Israel is our Promised Land of freedom and equality on earth.

How the term Zionism, and all that it so powerfully represents to our people after the Holocaust; how this term Zionism, this vision of redemption, this philosophy of empowerment, this bright candle held up to the night and which lead back home the displaced and tortured remnants, the dreamers and idealists, the Jews who came from all corners of the earth with a vision of self-determination and cultural, spiritual and political renewal; how this miracle of an idea was brought to fruition through the sacrifice and struggle of the brave Israeli people, is one of the great miracles of human history.

And how this same Zionism, distorted and vilified by one of the most sordid disinformation campaigns in history, became the bete noire of the present day, a refugee of a word, a pariah of an idea, is one of the most sordid instances in the long, cruel campaign to marginalize and, ultimately, to destroy the Jewish People.

Let us, then, be perfectly frank about one thing. To vilify, marginalize, suppress or outlaw Zionism politically, socially or culturally, for any reason whatever, is to wish no less then murderous extinction upon every Jewish man, woman and child in the world today. It is to refute our history entire, to deny us the memory of our long march out of bondage into equality and dignity. It is to assert ghettoization and ostracization, exile and massacre as the only fate befitting a Jew.

If ignorance of the law does not exempt one from the law, then equally, ignorance, pretended or real, of the unthinkable consequences to Jews of a world without Israel does not exempt one from the certain knowledge that no less then genocide awaits our people should the campaign against Zionism succeed.

We affirm our right --moral, spiritual, cultural and political -- to proclaim our Zionism in any manner that we choose, without hinderence or proscription, and further, we condemn, forcefully and completely the stance of anti-Zionism for what so blatently it is: a human rights violation and euphemistic mask behind which lurks the age-old nightmare of anti-Semitism.

Signed,
Alan Kaufman