post bris mondoweiss

It is a shame that Israel's liberalism is "limited" to its gender policies (not only homosexual rights, but women's rights as well), while many general rights of the Palestinian minority and the rule of law are indeed under attack or backsliding rather than progressing. Insofar as this advantage over the Palestinian culture is used in the propaganda wars to prove that Israel is western, it is certainly insufficient to make up for other more important lacks and erosion of rights in Israel and the occupied territories. But certainly the "backwardness" of Palestinian society in regards to homosexual rights and women's rights is apt to raise the question of what kind of society would result from the one state that some antiZionists advocate. To pretend that the resultant one state will be some sort of utopia is either blindness, willful or otherwise, and certainly not an honest assessment of what the dangers of such a one state truly will contain.

Meanwhile back on the ranch, as Dickerson points out, the demographics of Jewish society in Israel are tilting the future in the direction of the Haredi, whose unmodern views towards women and homosexuality cannot be ignored. Such antimodern views threaten secular Israelis by present tense acts of violence and neighborhood coercion and the threat to Israel's future both social and economic.

A personal note: my brother, though raised modern Orthodox left the path of modernity and opted for the antimodern ultra Orthodox community and yesterday celebrated the foreskin removal from another of his grandsons. I attended and had occasion to converse with one of my Haredi nephews.

He is nonZionist, asserting that the declaration of a state by the Zionists in 48 was unnecessary and a British mandate here would have been better than the current dangerous situation. After getting him to admit that the pressure for a state before World War II was "necessary" insofar as a Jewish state before the genocide in Europe might have saved millions of lives, I conceded that the declaration of a state was not "necessary" but was an act by those who wanted a state. (Although now in retrospect, one could not have known in 1948 that the post war world would be friendly to its Jews.)

But back to my nephew. Despite his nonZionist stance his distrust of the Palestinian or to be more accurate his trust of their intentions to toss the Jews out of Palestine once they gain control is rather complete and thus (if he represents his community) he is both nonZionist and distrustful of the Palestinians and thus unwilling to view the peace process as anything but a trick, for neither a two state or a one state solution takes into account the inimical attitudes of the Palestinians.

(My point: the inability of the pro Palestinian movement to convince even the nonZionist Haredi community of their peaceful intentions proves that the antiZionists have not accomplished much in terms of proving that the future they envision will be friendly to Jews, no matter what the attitude of those Jews towards Zionism.)