From: Allan Brownfeld
Date: Tue, Jan 10, 2023
As Israel moves to the far-right, more and more outspoken Zionists are separating themselves from it. These include Abraham Foxman, for more than fifty years head of the Anti-Defamation League, and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.
Consider the case of Hillel Halkin, an author and translator who moved to Israel from the U.S. in 1970. He is the author of “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic” which won a National Book Award in 1978. In the book, he urges American Jews to emigrate to Israel. I wrote a highly critical column about this book when it appeared.
Now, Halkin, 83, admits that he was wrong. Writing in the Jewish Review of Books, he declares that critics of Zionism were correct.
Today, he writes, “We’’re over the cliff and falling. Nothing will save it (Israel) from the abyss of messianic right-wing politics.” Israel, he laments, avoided the central issue of Palestinian rights. To an anti -Zionist friend, with whom he argued over the years, he wrote, “You’ve won the argument. For years now, Israel has seemed to me like a man sleepwalking toward a cliff. Now, we’ve fallen from it. Sadly, he notes, “racism has come to dominate Israeli politics and, as a result, Israel is headed for disaster.”
Jewish critics of Zionism such as the American Council for Judaism (
www.ACJNA.org) will increasingly come to be seen as prophetic.
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