I received a very interesting email from a staunchly Zionist Reform rabbi:I'm living in the twilight zone. Arik Ascherman of "Rabbis for Human Rights" is having issues with Presbyterian Church USA's vote, publicly asking why PCUSA didn't at least propose positive investment as an alternative. The J Street contingent almost seems beside themselves in bewilderment. John Rosove, J Street's Rabbi Mouthpiece, of all people, wrote a pretty good article about PCUSA talking about a friend stabbing a friend in the back.I would add that strange things can also happen in the non-Jewish world when people who claim to represent Judaism all but abandon the Jewish state, publicly and repeatedly. Say what you want about Muslims but the number of Islamic leaders who publicly criticize Arab countries are tiny, because they understand the importance of a public united front.
This resolution was unfair, biased, shameful, ignorant, and a misguided slander of the Jewish people and state of Israel, pure and simple....True friends of the Jewish people would not have passed such a resolution. True friends would have come to Israel to learn first-hand about the reality in which Israelis live. True friends would have toured other countries in the region to understand context. True friends would not have permitted the publication of that propagandist anti-Israel and anti-Semitic screed and would remove it immediately from its website. True friends would have joined with the American Jewish community to support efforts to help Israel and the Palestinians resolve their conflict. True friends do not stab each other in the back.
That is what the Presbyterian Church (USA) did, all disclaimers aside – and it hurts!
Meanwhile my movement's rabbis are having a conniption all of a sudden about Zionism Unsettled. I'm not sure that Rick Jacobs wasn't channeling Bibi on the URJ's conference call about the vote Thursday and said that Zionism Unsettled was anti-Jewish and the worst thing he'd seen since the infamous Zionism=Racism UN resolution in the 1970s. Add to that the numerous Reform rabbis quoting Bibi, actually quoting Bibi, about Christians in other nations in the region. I've seen this quoted a half dozen times by very left leaning Reform Rabbis in the past couple of days alone, "Let them come and visit Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, the only country where Christianity is growing and see for themselves what is going on. Then let them take a bus tour to Libya, or Syria. I have two suggests for them, 1) make sure the bus is armored plated and 2) don't tell them you are Christians."
Strange things happen when friends stab you in the back, I guess.
Jew-haters laughably claim that Jews have an all-knowing, highly cohesive secret conspiracy that works behind the scenes to undermine everyone else, but the opposite is the case - and the Jewish "leaders" who publicly berate Israel are a large part of the reason that the world can criticize Israel so breezily. They give those criticisms a veneer of respectability, and haters like the leaders of PCUSA are very happy to quote so-called "rabbis" to justify their own antisemitism.
PCUSA's antisemitic moves come in no small part because they are exploiting the divisions in the Jewish world about Israel.