*grin* Stan, don’t be too impressed, I can only rattle this stuff off ad hoc because I’ve been thinking about it for 20 years — since most of my elective family/community is Jewish American feminists — most of them either deeply conflicted or in some kind of cognitive limbo about Israeli apartheid. the “Boer” analogy I have to admit is from my brilliant buddy J Burke. hat tip.
Norm Finkelstein is for my money one of the leading American Jewish critics of Zionism — his running firefight with the Abominable Dershowitz shows his stamina and courage, even if you take issue with him on details. I haven’t read Beyond Chutzpah yet but I am sure it will be worth the effort when I get around to it. His book on the Holocaust Industry was an eye opener and a ground breaker for me personally, particularly when I was “warned against it” by liberal Jewish friends who had never read it and had no idea what was in it, except that it was “antisemitic” and that he was “a self hating Jew.” Which shows that the ADL’s fatwas travel even into the progressive community, with the speed of gossip.
A few years back I started assembling some reading material on the Question of Israel as I was wrestling with it myself… It is somewhat dated now as I have not been maintaining it actively, but there are two essays I have never forgotten: Dworkin’s “Whose Country is it Anyway” and Ellis’s “On the Future of Judaism and Jewish Life” in which he reflects on the creation of “Constantinian Judaism,” i.e. Judaism as a State Religion.
A distinction must be made, I think, between the personal practise of religion and its adoption or ossification as an organ of the State. I take issue with what I see as a simplistic assertion, above, that religion has nothing to do with Israeli imperialism (or wtte) — I think it has a great deal to do with the case, but we have to understand “religion” in the sense that Ellis analyses it, as a tool of statecraft. Currently we see Constantinian Christianity re-emerging in the Bush regime’s public embrace of the radical far-right in American theology (if one can call the crude literalism of the bible-thumpers by so honourable a name), in the far right of Hindu nationalism, and of course in the theocratic impulse playing out in various Islamic states. I agree with Ellis that Judaism has gone from being an “outsider religion” with all that this implies, to being a State religion ditto. Israel is a schizophrenic demi-theocracy, its jurisprudence uneasily divided between rabbinical and secular law… as, de facto, is the US.
Daniel Boyarin is another radical American Jewish scholar to watch — (bibliography)— he has written extensively on gender, race, and Israeli male identity. I have not read as much of his stuff as I would like, since it often appears in obscure papyrus venues 
but he offers intriguing titles like “The Colonial Drag: Gender, Zionism, and Mimicry” or “Mauschel and Monotheism: The Jew as Off-White Male”. He is a Talmudic scholar. I imagine he is high on Dershowitz’ purge list (which I imagine Dershowitz keeping by his bedside and updating in fits of insomniac rage at 0300, but I have a vivid and unscholarly personal dislike for the man).
I’m rambling again, sorry…
As to the Zionists consorting with the fascists, I think that’s classic Schadenfreude politics of the sort occasionally practised by radicals and hopeless outsiders of all stripes: things are gonna have to get really really bad and Then You’ll Be Sorry and Then You’ll Listen to Us and See How Right We Are. Like those “vanguardistas” who believe that the working class should be ground down into poverty as fast as possible so that revolutionary consciousness will magically develop, so hey, IMF and WB, bring it on! There’s something in all of us, I think, that longs to be vindicated even by dreadful events. Even green and fuzzy environmentalists sometimes wish that monster storms would wreck the entire SE coast of the US, “just to teach those idiots in DC (and my clueless neighbour who owns two SUVs) a lesson.” I have a feeling that the Zionist collaborators were Schadenfreudians [sorry] of a high order and believed that only by burning down the house could they get their “stupid” Jewish brothers and sisters to run outside and seek their “real” home. The early Zionists were hard men: the history of the Stern gang alone tells us that Israel, like most nation states, was founded by terrorists.
Did I say I was rambling? sorry, gonna go burble quietly to myself now instead of taking up blog space. why isn’t there a Preview feature on this blog anyway?
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