I mostly understand your point, even if I disagree. I think that the hatred of Jews is integral to a lot of people, so I'm always wary of any movement, left or right.
I will push back on you saying you can't see any reason why a civilian should have a semi automatic. Did October 7 not show you why people might need ready access to firearms? Is the fact that so many "westerners" are totally on board with those actions not enough to show a reason why a person might decide to arm themselves? (even if you personally think that it's unlikely to occur wherever you are, and that you don't need a gun yourself). If I was a Jew living in Dearborn, I would be very very nervous, and I don't think I would trust the response time of the cops (if I would even trust them).
Yeah, I actually do get that. One of my closest friends, who is a Jewish father of three, just took a gun course, which a couple of years ago would have weirded me out but now ... totally get it. But, umm, automatic or semi-auto?
All “semi automatic” means is one trigger pull for each bullet. The fact of the magazine is neither here nor there. I prefer revolvers but that’s just my preference for simplicity.
Thank you for clarification. Will read all four articles. At this point, I envision the political spectrum as a horseshoe, with the radical left and the radical right practically merging in too little respect for the individual and family and an excessive amount of governmental control. My reaction to your posts was that somebody so clear thinking on Israel cannot be a “progressive” or “leftist” as I define these terms. I see “democratic” socialism as an oxymoron. Perhaps your views are more classically liberal than leftist. I usually look for rational thought within a reasonable degree of the center.
The consensus seems to be that I am a classical liberal -- whatever words I use to define myself. LOL. I absolutely subscribe to the horseshoe theory, too, though. The extreme left and the extreme right are poisons of the same variety.
I donate a lot of money to the Democratic Party every election cycle. Since January 2024 I’ve been unsubscribing every solicitation email with a similar statement “Until you cut your ties with the academic left and stop shilling for Hamas, I’m done with you”. I doubt progressives in the party can stop themselves from taking the dumbest academic left trends and dumping them on the American public. And I doubt the Democratic Party can purge itself of its progressive wing, so… here comes removing myself from being a registered voter of the party.
I feel the similarly to you, though I probably have less money to give to Dems.
I just wanted to beg you for a second to not turn over the Democratic Party to fringe extremists. If you or we do that, we will be left with TWO parties of extremists who are unable to engage in civil discourse and no middle.
And Trump is a fascist. Electing a fascist will never end well for the Jews.
If you don’t want to give to the Dems, start hammering your electeds relentlessly with letters, emails, and phone calls.
I get what you're saying, and I'm still a registered Democrat so I can vote against progressives in primary elections in a blue state (California). I've redirected all the money I would have used against Republicans in the elections, and instead directed them against progressives in primaries. There's no better use for that money, especially if the party wants to win elections. Any time a progressive runs against a Republican (and not another Democrat), they have a higher chance of losing that seat, because they appeal to 10% of the electorate, at most. Electing a far leftist never ends well for the Jews either.
Trump is a mentally unstable geriatric person in bad health, so that's a given that I am unlikely to vote for anyone like that. However, if the GOP ran a sane candidate I would have very likely voted for that person over any progressive. It's simply not acceptable for me to promote the people carrying the torch for the lunatic fringe of the far left.
You seem very wise -- using the primary system to make change. And may we live to see a time when there are two reasonable parties in the United States. (I'm in Canada, BTW, so ...)
I totally agree except that I’m trying to take back the word progressive to mean more of what it meant what that movement started: I refuse to call Tlaib, Bush, or Bowman progressives. By definition, no anti-Semite or supporter of regressive, repressive religions or governments can be progressive to me. So I now call them fringe or extremists. Or both. Those are just names, though. I’m from CA, too.
Thanks for your reply. I’m terrified of the fringe causing large numbers of Jews to leave the Democratic Party and I panicked. Neither party feels great to me now, but one is both anti-woman and notoriously anti-Semitic and hates poor people and the other is just dealing with a growing anti-Semitic fringe.
Gave your article a “like” because you are wisely pro-Israel and anti- Hamas, even though I disagree with your mischaracterization of progressivism as being somehow progressive.
The distinctions you blur are actually important, because there is a meaningful and substantive difference between classical liberalism and leftism. The former, like most moderates and center-right conservatives, mostly respect the oft-maligned values of God, family and country, while the latter is communistic or socialistic at best. Both communism and socialism are evil ideologies that have proven murderously unworkable in government, to the extent that a person cares about not being murdered for voicing an opinion that contravenes authority. Don’t mean to lecture. Thank you for a thoughtful, well written article.
Thanks for your message. We cannot lump democratic leftists in today's West any more than we can lump conservatives with Hitler and Mussolini. I agree I may be blurring important distinctions, but you do as well, here. My point (in my last four pieces) is that self-declared "progressives" are not progressive. Just as self-declared "pro-Palestinians" aren't. So my argument is to reclaim the progressive left from these unprogressive, totalitarian thugs.
Your defense of Israel and Zionism is admirable, but your adherence to progressivism is not, and that is what gets you into your quandary. You should leave what you call the progressive movement, mainly because the analysis on which it rests is intellectually inaccurate as well as being morally bankrupt. Most of the things you believe in in your long paragraph where you list them are not intellectually sound even if they sound morally correct to your ears. Let me give some examples. Corporations should pay more taxes. The disadvantages should be helped. The government should do more to help them and so many others. Not clear why this should be so. Some people think taxation is an instrument to right historic wrongs and solve poverty. Others think it should be used to stimulate economic growth. I personally think taxes should be used to fund what governments do and what they do should be limited because the government should not be given a blank check to assume unbridled power and also because the government does not do much effectively. Nor does it know what to do when it has to. Look at the way they mismanaged Covid completely. But the main reason why progressivism fails is because it is based on a faulty understanding of how modern society works. The latter is not organized according to rank but according to function. Each social sphere operates according to its own logic, which leads to a lot of freedom and difference. We all enjoy that not because governments are good but because the logic of modern society requires it. Equality before the law is built into our legal system and our social mores. Of course there are all kinds of economic and other differences in society, which you can call inequalities only to the extent that some people have more than others of what is socially prized. But modern society thrives on difference and the good thing about it is that differences are distributed along a normal curve such that more and more people can enjoy what they value in life. Morality belongs to individuals, not to social systems; and the attempt to make society responsible for individual choices winds up in a nightmare. Indeed, one can say that one of the chief dilemmas of modern society is how to deal with responsibility. What is an individual's and what is society's and what can we do about any given issue understanding that? The search for perfect equality winds up in totalitarianism because there are always more differences than policies to address them. Only progressives turn this into an overriding issue with one cause and one explanation and try to fit that into a procrustean bed. But capitalism, for example, or income inequality, does not explain suicicde rates, gender choices, socioeconomic disparities or antisemitism. Nor does it explain loneliness, divorce, modern love quandaries. But if everything is explained by disparities in power, or critical race theory, little wonder that your erstwhile colleagues on the left have to exclude Israel from the causes worthy of championing. So the answer is simply to ditch your progressive ideology, and stop worrying that such a move will not make you a good person. You are obviously good and intelligent, but allow yourself the freedom to think about each issue that bothers you outside the box or prison of souped up marxism, critical theory, or any of the other shibboleths which govern the insane mobs on today's university campuses and their mentors in the hallways of academia.
Right. I get it. We disagree fundamentally. Yet it seems the core premise of the piece was lost on you. Whether you are a conservative and I am a progressive is irrelevant to the discussion. That long para was to explain why I come at Zionism from where I do. The point of the piece, though, was that EVERYONE should be a Zionist (because it's good for Jews AND Palestinians). Your point (I summarize) is that NOT everyone should be a Zionist. So we have a fundamental disagreement.
I am not a conservative nor a progressive. I am a sociologist who understands that modern society cannot be understood in the categories of right and left. I am a Zionist because I am Jewish and consider Zionism the national liberation movement of the Jewish people expressed as the return to our ancestral homeland. I do not expect most people who don't have that deep attachment to the land to be Zionists but appreciate those who do and agree with you that all people should be sympathetic to the Zionist enterprise and especially to the state of Israel given that it is a vibrant modern democracy. What would be good for the Palestinians would be for them to ditch their crazed genocidal blood lust against Jews and against the state of Israel and concentrate on setting their own house in order. By now they have forfeited any "right" to a state and any possibility of one. They could help by supporting democratic reform in the countries where they reside, but so far they have no inclination it seems to do so. But one thing is for sure: the so-called Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be analyzed using categories of left and right.
I would say you are a traditional liberal not a progressive in any sense of the word. Progressive, or to be of the Left today (as opposed to the historical progressive of the T. Roosevelt era), is antisemitic, antiamerican, antiwest, and basically comes out of the soviet propaganda playbook. The Left is now a cult. By being proIsrael, they will excommunicate you eventually if they haven't already.
Personally I have been politically homeless for decades. I vote for the person if I like them and think they will do a good job in representing my interests, but I refuse to vote for someone merely because they are identified with a party. And I refuse to be pigeonholed into being a part of any political "ideology." Give me a topic and I will discuss how I feel about it. Sometimes I fall to the left of center, sometimes to the right of center and sometime just center.
A main point of my piece was that equating everyone on the left (me) with the most extremes of the left is like equating everyone on the right (you sometimes, sometimes not, as you explain) with David Duke et al. It is not helpful or elucidating. Instead of dismissing the left as a cult, I think it will be more constructive to help my friends understand how to get deprogrammed.
I am afraid people can only be deprogrammed if they want. It's like asking someone from Westboro Baptist Church to suddenly stop believing the way they do. It will only happen if they want and then when they do they leave the cult. A cult does not change. People change and then they move on.
And the reason I do not belong to any particular group is because I do not want to be associated with the most extreme elements of that grouping. It's why I am an independent.
Whether we like it or not, when we associate with a particular group we are held responsible for the actions of that entire group.
We are known by the company we keep, yes. And, as I said in one my pieces this week, if you march with bigots you endorse bigotry (or something; I paraphrase myself). But trying to correct the wrongs in one's own home is an effort to counter and correct the actions of that particular group. And if change doesn't come from within, where will it come from?
The individual person may be worthwhile to save. Someone you love. But sometimes we need to realize that our endeavors are useless to change a group and there comes a time we need to simply cut bait.
The extreme Left is not going to change who they are. They are bound up in the Marxist philosophy. Their entire mantra of decolonization, oppressor, oppressed comes straight out of Soviet propaganda and yes, some from Fanon, who was a communist. To change their philosophy is to stop being who they are. Like I said, as an example just like the westboro baptist church. You can’t change the church, all you can do is change yourself and leave.
I can’t tell you what to do on that extent. If there are people you love and want to fight for them, fight for them. I just think that you are in for a world of hurt if you think you are going to change the extreme Left when it comes to Israel. They have always been this way.
A semi automatic weapon just means that you can pull the trigger and a bullet fires, and it uses the recoil to load the next bullet. Almost all hand guns are semi automatic. (I mean, revolvers technically aren't, but they functionally are). Rifles, you can have bolt action or pump action not being semi automatic, so there are more choices there, but I'm not sure why that's where you're drawing the line.
As for fully automatic, there is very little point in having one. Those are the ones where you squeeze the trigger and it fires until empty or until you let go. Even in the military those aren't used often (if at all).
If the conversation has turned to automatic v. semiautomatic, revolver v. whatever, haven’t we already lost the plot?
I’m a SF liberal Jew (now displaced from SF, sadly, probably forever) and confronting, everywhere I look, the worst anti-semitism of my half century of life.
The answer simply cannot be to arm myself.
Pat, your articles, taken together, are the most hopeful thing I’ve seen in months. Until I realize that they’re not being read by the young people who will build the world they want to live or the slightly older people who are starting to take the reins of power. How do I know that? The ceasefire resolutions being passed by city councils and signed by mayors all across America in the cities I once felt most comfortable.
Leaving liberalism, progressivism, or whatever the fuck anyone wants to call it, isn’t an option for me either. But I’m walking away from friends almost daily, it seems, over Israel.
Most recently, I was accused of being a racist by two IRL friends because I said it was an impossibility Israel simply could not allow the Palestinians to be absorbed into the state of Israel because it would be death through demography. They compared this statement to the nasty anti-immigrant rhetoric currently popular among the American right. I know you know why there’s no comparison, so I won’t bore you. But when did a one-state solution become the solution of choice for non-fringe lefties?
Where will Jews be able to go and be safe and not have to justify our right to be safe?
Ask those kind ‘friends’ if Ukraine should open itself to 50 million Russians. What does immigration and anti-immigration have to do with two native people fighting over the same land. Their Pals are genocidal maniacs and have been for a hundred years. Nobody is forcing seven countries that emerged out of a nasty but far shorter Yugoslavian civil war to re-form into a failed multi-ethnic state. The Croatian’s want their country, as do the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Kosovars and the rest. The reason ‘progressives’ insist that Israel must become a single multi-ethnic country dominated by Islamists is because they align with Hamas on the goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing for 7.2 million Jews. These people want war, genocide and expulsion because the country is majority Jewish. The reason they are not against the existence of any other country but are anti-Israel is because they’re anti-Jewish racists.
I mostly understand your point, even if I disagree. I think that the hatred of Jews is integral to a lot of people, so I'm always wary of any movement, left or right.
I will push back on you saying you can't see any reason why a civilian should have a semi automatic. Did October 7 not show you why people might need ready access to firearms? Is the fact that so many "westerners" are totally on board with those actions not enough to show a reason why a person might decide to arm themselves? (even if you personally think that it's unlikely to occur wherever you are, and that you don't need a gun yourself). If I was a Jew living in Dearborn, I would be very very nervous, and I don't think I would trust the response time of the cops (if I would even trust them).
Yeah, I actually do get that. One of my closest friends, who is a Jewish father of three, just took a gun course, which a couple of years ago would have weirded me out but now ... totally get it. But, umm, automatic or semi-auto?
All “semi automatic” means is one trigger pull for each bullet. The fact of the magazine is neither here nor there. I prefer revolvers but that’s just my preference for simplicity.
I believe automatics are illegal for purchase by civilians.
Thank you for clarification. Will read all four articles. At this point, I envision the political spectrum as a horseshoe, with the radical left and the radical right practically merging in too little respect for the individual and family and an excessive amount of governmental control. My reaction to your posts was that somebody so clear thinking on Israel cannot be a “progressive” or “leftist” as I define these terms. I see “democratic” socialism as an oxymoron. Perhaps your views are more classically liberal than leftist. I usually look for rational thought within a reasonable degree of the center.
The consensus seems to be that I am a classical liberal -- whatever words I use to define myself. LOL. I absolutely subscribe to the horseshoe theory, too, though. The extreme left and the extreme right are poisons of the same variety.
I donate a lot of money to the Democratic Party every election cycle. Since January 2024 I’ve been unsubscribing every solicitation email with a similar statement “Until you cut your ties with the academic left and stop shilling for Hamas, I’m done with you”. I doubt progressives in the party can stop themselves from taking the dumbest academic left trends and dumping them on the American public. And I doubt the Democratic Party can purge itself of its progressive wing, so… here comes removing myself from being a registered voter of the party.
I feel the similarly to you, though I probably have less money to give to Dems.
I just wanted to beg you for a second to not turn over the Democratic Party to fringe extremists. If you or we do that, we will be left with TWO parties of extremists who are unable to engage in civil discourse and no middle.
And Trump is a fascist. Electing a fascist will never end well for the Jews.
If you don’t want to give to the Dems, start hammering your electeds relentlessly with letters, emails, and phone calls.
I get what you're saying, and I'm still a registered Democrat so I can vote against progressives in primary elections in a blue state (California). I've redirected all the money I would have used against Republicans in the elections, and instead directed them against progressives in primaries. There's no better use for that money, especially if the party wants to win elections. Any time a progressive runs against a Republican (and not another Democrat), they have a higher chance of losing that seat, because they appeal to 10% of the electorate, at most. Electing a far leftist never ends well for the Jews either.
Trump is a mentally unstable geriatric person in bad health, so that's a given that I am unlikely to vote for anyone like that. However, if the GOP ran a sane candidate I would have very likely voted for that person over any progressive. It's simply not acceptable for me to promote the people carrying the torch for the lunatic fringe of the far left.
You seem very wise -- using the primary system to make change. And may we live to see a time when there are two reasonable parties in the United States. (I'm in Canada, BTW, so ...)
I totally agree except that I’m trying to take back the word progressive to mean more of what it meant what that movement started: I refuse to call Tlaib, Bush, or Bowman progressives. By definition, no anti-Semite or supporter of regressive, repressive religions or governments can be progressive to me. So I now call them fringe or extremists. Or both. Those are just names, though. I’m from CA, too.
Thanks for your reply. I’m terrified of the fringe causing large numbers of Jews to leave the Democratic Party and I panicked. Neither party feels great to me now, but one is both anti-woman and notoriously anti-Semitic and hates poor people and the other is just dealing with a growing anti-Semitic fringe.
This is PERFECT!!
Hahaha. I don't know about PERFECT but I do my best. And I LIKE you!
✊ 💙
Gave your article a “like” because you are wisely pro-Israel and anti- Hamas, even though I disagree with your mischaracterization of progressivism as being somehow progressive.
The distinctions you blur are actually important, because there is a meaningful and substantive difference between classical liberalism and leftism. The former, like most moderates and center-right conservatives, mostly respect the oft-maligned values of God, family and country, while the latter is communistic or socialistic at best. Both communism and socialism are evil ideologies that have proven murderously unworkable in government, to the extent that a person cares about not being murdered for voicing an opinion that contravenes authority. Don’t mean to lecture. Thank you for a thoughtful, well written article.
Thanks for your message. We cannot lump democratic leftists in today's West any more than we can lump conservatives with Hitler and Mussolini. I agree I may be blurring important distinctions, but you do as well, here. My point (in my last four pieces) is that self-declared "progressives" are not progressive. Just as self-declared "pro-Palestinians" aren't. So my argument is to reclaim the progressive left from these unprogressive, totalitarian thugs.
A good series. Keep it up, if you have the time and energy.
I've got the energy! Thanks for reading!
Your defense of Israel and Zionism is admirable, but your adherence to progressivism is not, and that is what gets you into your quandary. You should leave what you call the progressive movement, mainly because the analysis on which it rests is intellectually inaccurate as well as being morally bankrupt. Most of the things you believe in in your long paragraph where you list them are not intellectually sound even if they sound morally correct to your ears. Let me give some examples. Corporations should pay more taxes. The disadvantages should be helped. The government should do more to help them and so many others. Not clear why this should be so. Some people think taxation is an instrument to right historic wrongs and solve poverty. Others think it should be used to stimulate economic growth. I personally think taxes should be used to fund what governments do and what they do should be limited because the government should not be given a blank check to assume unbridled power and also because the government does not do much effectively. Nor does it know what to do when it has to. Look at the way they mismanaged Covid completely. But the main reason why progressivism fails is because it is based on a faulty understanding of how modern society works. The latter is not organized according to rank but according to function. Each social sphere operates according to its own logic, which leads to a lot of freedom and difference. We all enjoy that not because governments are good but because the logic of modern society requires it. Equality before the law is built into our legal system and our social mores. Of course there are all kinds of economic and other differences in society, which you can call inequalities only to the extent that some people have more than others of what is socially prized. But modern society thrives on difference and the good thing about it is that differences are distributed along a normal curve such that more and more people can enjoy what they value in life. Morality belongs to individuals, not to social systems; and the attempt to make society responsible for individual choices winds up in a nightmare. Indeed, one can say that one of the chief dilemmas of modern society is how to deal with responsibility. What is an individual's and what is society's and what can we do about any given issue understanding that? The search for perfect equality winds up in totalitarianism because there are always more differences than policies to address them. Only progressives turn this into an overriding issue with one cause and one explanation and try to fit that into a procrustean bed. But capitalism, for example, or income inequality, does not explain suicicde rates, gender choices, socioeconomic disparities or antisemitism. Nor does it explain loneliness, divorce, modern love quandaries. But if everything is explained by disparities in power, or critical race theory, little wonder that your erstwhile colleagues on the left have to exclude Israel from the causes worthy of championing. So the answer is simply to ditch your progressive ideology, and stop worrying that such a move will not make you a good person. You are obviously good and intelligent, but allow yourself the freedom to think about each issue that bothers you outside the box or prison of souped up marxism, critical theory, or any of the other shibboleths which govern the insane mobs on today's university campuses and their mentors in the hallways of academia.
Right. I get it. We disagree fundamentally. Yet it seems the core premise of the piece was lost on you. Whether you are a conservative and I am a progressive is irrelevant to the discussion. That long para was to explain why I come at Zionism from where I do. The point of the piece, though, was that EVERYONE should be a Zionist (because it's good for Jews AND Palestinians). Your point (I summarize) is that NOT everyone should be a Zionist. So we have a fundamental disagreement.
I am not a conservative nor a progressive. I am a sociologist who understands that modern society cannot be understood in the categories of right and left. I am a Zionist because I am Jewish and consider Zionism the national liberation movement of the Jewish people expressed as the return to our ancestral homeland. I do not expect most people who don't have that deep attachment to the land to be Zionists but appreciate those who do and agree with you that all people should be sympathetic to the Zionist enterprise and especially to the state of Israel given that it is a vibrant modern democracy. What would be good for the Palestinians would be for them to ditch their crazed genocidal blood lust against Jews and against the state of Israel and concentrate on setting their own house in order. By now they have forfeited any "right" to a state and any possibility of one. They could help by supporting democratic reform in the countries where they reside, but so far they have no inclination it seems to do so. But one thing is for sure: the so-called Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be analyzed using categories of left and right.
Fair. I don't know if you saw my piece on why there is no State of Palestine. https://pat604johnson.substack.com/p/its-simple-no-peace-no-palestine
Well said. Shelby Steele should be read. Stands critical race theory on its head.
I would say you are a traditional liberal not a progressive in any sense of the word. Progressive, or to be of the Left today (as opposed to the historical progressive of the T. Roosevelt era), is antisemitic, antiamerican, antiwest, and basically comes out of the soviet propaganda playbook. The Left is now a cult. By being proIsrael, they will excommunicate you eventually if they haven't already.
Personally I have been politically homeless for decades. I vote for the person if I like them and think they will do a good job in representing my interests, but I refuse to vote for someone merely because they are identified with a party. And I refuse to be pigeonholed into being a part of any political "ideology." Give me a topic and I will discuss how I feel about it. Sometimes I fall to the left of center, sometimes to the right of center and sometime just center.
A main point of my piece was that equating everyone on the left (me) with the most extremes of the left is like equating everyone on the right (you sometimes, sometimes not, as you explain) with David Duke et al. It is not helpful or elucidating. Instead of dismissing the left as a cult, I think it will be more constructive to help my friends understand how to get deprogrammed.
I am afraid people can only be deprogrammed if they want. It's like asking someone from Westboro Baptist Church to suddenly stop believing the way they do. It will only happen if they want and then when they do they leave the cult. A cult does not change. People change and then they move on.
And the reason I do not belong to any particular group is because I do not want to be associated with the most extreme elements of that grouping. It's why I am an independent.
Whether we like it or not, when we associate with a particular group we are held responsible for the actions of that entire group.
You are known by the company you keep....
We are known by the company we keep, yes. And, as I said in one my pieces this week, if you march with bigots you endorse bigotry (or something; I paraphrase myself). But trying to correct the wrongs in one's own home is an effort to counter and correct the actions of that particular group. And if change doesn't come from within, where will it come from?
The individual person may be worthwhile to save. Someone you love. But sometimes we need to realize that our endeavors are useless to change a group and there comes a time we need to simply cut bait.
The extreme Left is not going to change who they are. They are bound up in the Marxist philosophy. Their entire mantra of decolonization, oppressor, oppressed comes straight out of Soviet propaganda and yes, some from Fanon, who was a communist. To change their philosophy is to stop being who they are. Like I said, as an example just like the westboro baptist church. You can’t change the church, all you can do is change yourself and leave.
So I should give up?
I can’t tell you what to do on that extent. If there are people you love and want to fight for them, fight for them. I just think that you are in for a world of hurt if you think you are going to change the extreme Left when it comes to Israel. They have always been this way.
A semi automatic weapon just means that you can pull the trigger and a bullet fires, and it uses the recoil to load the next bullet. Almost all hand guns are semi automatic. (I mean, revolvers technically aren't, but they functionally are). Rifles, you can have bolt action or pump action not being semi automatic, so there are more choices there, but I'm not sure why that's where you're drawing the line.
As for fully automatic, there is very little point in having one. Those are the ones where you squeeze the trigger and it fires until empty or until you let go. Even in the military those aren't used often (if at all).
OK.
If the conversation has turned to automatic v. semiautomatic, revolver v. whatever, haven’t we already lost the plot?
I’m a SF liberal Jew (now displaced from SF, sadly, probably forever) and confronting, everywhere I look, the worst anti-semitism of my half century of life.
The answer simply cannot be to arm myself.
Pat, your articles, taken together, are the most hopeful thing I’ve seen in months. Until I realize that they’re not being read by the young people who will build the world they want to live or the slightly older people who are starting to take the reins of power. How do I know that? The ceasefire resolutions being passed by city councils and signed by mayors all across America in the cities I once felt most comfortable.
Leaving liberalism, progressivism, or whatever the fuck anyone wants to call it, isn’t an option for me either. But I’m walking away from friends almost daily, it seems, over Israel.
Most recently, I was accused of being a racist by two IRL friends because I said it was an impossibility Israel simply could not allow the Palestinians to be absorbed into the state of Israel because it would be death through demography. They compared this statement to the nasty anti-immigrant rhetoric currently popular among the American right. I know you know why there’s no comparison, so I won’t bore you. But when did a one-state solution become the solution of choice for non-fringe lefties?
Where will Jews be able to go and be safe and not have to justify our right to be safe?
Ask those kind ‘friends’ if Ukraine should open itself to 50 million Russians. What does immigration and anti-immigration have to do with two native people fighting over the same land. Their Pals are genocidal maniacs and have been for a hundred years. Nobody is forcing seven countries that emerged out of a nasty but far shorter Yugoslavian civil war to re-form into a failed multi-ethnic state. The Croatian’s want their country, as do the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Kosovars and the rest. The reason ‘progressives’ insist that Israel must become a single multi-ethnic country dominated by Islamists is because they align with Hamas on the goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing for 7.2 million Jews. These people want war, genocide and expulsion because the country is majority Jewish. The reason they are not against the existence of any other country but are anti-Israel is because they’re anti-Jewish racists.
I appreciate your words. THanks for your message!