Thursday, July 21, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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By Rafael Shimunov, Jews For Racial and Economic Justice
Brooklyn, July 21 - The familiar, cynical tactic of taking an unrepresentative slice of a group and holding them up as representative of the larger demographic features in the hasbara efforts of Zionist propagandists. They would have you believe that most of the non-Jewish population of Israel, who accept the Jewish State and hope for integration with the majority, somehow represent the entire corpus of that population. We progressives, however, understand and call out the dishonesty of that rhetorical move. We also tout the approximately one-twentieth of American Jewry who oppose Israel, as the only position worth adopting as truly representative of American Jewry.
The Nazis had their token Jews; the Southern plantation owners had their token Negros; radical Republicans have their token homosexuals; and Zionists have their token Arabs. The goal is the same: pretend that tiny minority of the minority represents the much larger group that in reality feels very differently about the system, the majority, and what path to choose in the larger society. At JFREJ, as at If Not Now in my previous capacity, we work to raise awareness and bring to the decision-making table the Jews who find they lack influence among Jews and Jewish organizations because ninety-five percent of American Jews are Zionist, leaving the remaining five percent on the fringes, where we must struggle to impose our will on the other nineteen twentieths. Because we're the real Jews- just ask the Neturei Karta!
A small percentage of Arabs with Israeli citizenship identify as "Palestinian" - and we will also insist on calling all Israeli Arabs "Palestinian," because, as with our own position among American Jews and Jewish organizations, we know better than the benighted - or perhaps intimidated! - majority. *We* speak the authentic truth that the so-called mainstream fails or refuses to acknowledge because it makes them uncomfortable. Palestinian-Israelis speak the authentic truth that the so-called mainstream refuses to acknowledge because the majority has coopted or deceived them. How dare anyone tokenize a minority of a minority to represent the majority of that minority!
So stop tokenizing. In democratic societies, with democratic sensibilities, the majority has to matter. Also, the majority of American Jews are complicit in Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, genocide, Islamophobia, racism, and probably a few other crimes, but we're the good ones! We're the true Jews, the ones who would never assert sovereignty, the ones who will always behave as the majority culture wants. because we know not to oppress minorities.
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