What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
Woke Jews of the US and Israel have been trying for the last couple of years to ‘convert’ the Israeli government
The Israel and Palestine issue has already been quite complicated over the last century when – like Kashmir – it was thrust upon the region by the fading British Empire. The passage of time has witnessed one political agenda after another adding to the mix, and as a result, this has become so thorny that to try and just think about it in 2023, using the 7/10 Hamas attacks as a backdrop needs multiple articles – preferably one each for all the different subtopics that come to the mind.
This is my second article on the recent terror attacks. The first one tried to explore a few points that appeared inconsistent to me. Two weeks into the conflict, there are many questions around delayed Israeli response to the terrorists attack, for instance, or the free access that the terrorists enjoyed, or the absolute zero intel available to Israel, still remain unanswered.
However, I would move away from these and try to bring to light another larger and emergent thought: how the US and European Jews are probably detrimental to the idea of the nation-state of Israel.
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‘Woke’ Israel?
There is a rapid coagulation of belief that takes place as you read this piece – that Israel is fast becoming identity-confused and soft; it is losing the edge that is a prerequisite for existing in a region that still carries a fair amount of baggage against the Jews. I am not fully convinced with this line of thought (as I have explained in my last article: a few years of wokeism among a few cultural Marxists of Tel Aviv is not enough to fundamentally alter the genetics of a set of people as ruthless as modern-day Israeli citizens).
But this is also a fact that leftist woke Jews – specifically those aligned with the Democratic lobby in the USA have become a major influence and a deciding factor in what Israel should or should not do, especially with respect to Palestine. Israeli Minister of Diaspora Amichai Chikli recently had a taste of woke American Jews during his June 2023 visit to the US. Chikli is a quintessential Israeli – the kind it takes to survive in that neighbourhood. Naturally, his opinions about the LGBT parade in Tel Aviv, or his reservations against George Soros and the recent anti-government protests in Israel have remained on the conservative side of the aisle. So the woke Jews of America made it very clear to him that he was crossing a line that he wasn’t supposed to.
Where did woke Jews come from?
If we look into the immediate past, wokeism among American Jews came under the spotlight during the early 2000s. It was the decade when many Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network were formed to denounce Israel’s behaviour in the Middle East; there was a rise in the support of the Palestinians; and the Jewish vote began tilting towards the Democrats. 71 per cent of the Jews, for instance, voted for Democrats in 2016 US elections. As per assessments, 76-80% of the Jew votes during the last decade has gone to the Democrats.
Boomerang effect?
The irony doesn’t get lost. Relativism, social constructionism etc – the ancestors of Wokeism – have historically had heavy Jewish influence. Few random names and their works that come to the mind are: Theodore Adorno and his The Authoritarian Personality, Franz Boas and his idea of Racial Equality, Thomas Kuhn and his Relativism, or Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann and their Social Constructivism, or Susan Sontag and her ‘White men should all commit suicide’ views – all of them were/are Jewish. All these books and ideas happen to be some of the most crucial works that have influenced millions of people in Europe and America post 1945 – in academia, media, social activism, and politics. And now, after influencing almost everything about the West (including the recent immigration crisis in the EU), it seems wokeism has begun to focus on the only Western state in the Middle East – Israel.
This kind of social engineering has this strange habit: it always finds a way back home. Think of the American lobotomization of the EU during the Cold War era, or Pakistan and its love affair with Islamic terrorism. Though Relativism (including most of its subsets) is not an intellectual product of Israel, it has Jewish signature all over it. Therefore, perhaps it is only natural for the latest version of it to try and get back home to Israel.
Naftali Bennett led leftist coalition winning national elections, an increase in the number of university-educated Israeli exhibiting indifference to the cause of their country, the spurt in the number of rainbow parades and LGBT groups, or their bureaucracy going soft to include more and more ‘diversity and equity’ seekers – these were all tell-tale signs of Israel’s rendezvous with destiny: of Jewish intellectuals’ attempt at social engineering coming home.
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Way forward?
It is difficult to say at this point. Wokeism has mutated to become the backbone of the Western academia-media-socio-political landscape. It has even touched faraway Japan and South Korea. Poland, and Israel – with Netanyahu back in power, are the only ones that still stand. Given the way the Democrat Jews and perhaps Soros (a Jew himself) have been trying for the last couple of years to ‘convert’ the Israeli government, it is important to understand that the idea of Israel does not mean much to them.
At the same time, a few of the Jewish oligarchs – those who have been pumping millions into the woke-incubator Harvard – have decided to turn off the tap following their recent discovery of Harvard’s loyalty towards Hamas. There is a hope that this behaviour causes a cascading effect among other Jewish billionaires around the world and they replicate the same.
The way things stand as of now, Binyamin Netanyahu is sure to find more common grounds not with his conventional Western ‘allies’, but strangely, with Russia, or Poland – as far as preservation of the idea of the nation-state of Israel is concerned.
(Arindam Mukherjee is a geopolitical analyst and the author of JourneyDog Tales, The Puppeteer, and A Matter of Greed.)
