From a friend who attended the anti-J Street-fest last night with Alan Dershowitz getting booed for being an anti-Semite: The following is kind of inside Israel/Palestine baseball; skip it if youre not interested in these things. Had a surreal experience tonight at a film screening and panel discussion sponsored by Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. The film was a slickly produced right-wing attack on the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, mostly from the perspective of Greater Israel one-staters. The large auditorium was packed and the median age must have been 60. The MC opened by giving a special thanks to the students for coming. Everyone searched his/her vicinity for the students, at which point I sensed dozens of people staring at me. I was the only student in sight. (And remember, this is taking place on a college campus. Later I saw there was a small gaggle of college-aged kids sitting in the back, no more than 20 in an audience of maybe 200.) The film was standard right-wing fare with some interesting adaptations to changing narratives that I wont go into. The surreal part was the panel Q&A, featuring Alan Dershowitz and the films producer, a guy named Charles Jacobs. It illustrated just how topsy-turvy things have become in the conversation about Israel being conducted by the decrepit mainstream Jewish institutions. At the mic, two kids from the Penn student wing of AIPAC suggested that the message of the film was out of touch with Jewish youth; they wanted more pluralism in Hillel and supported a two-state solution. Jacobs sharply rebuffed them to loud applause, and when Dershowitz spoke in favor of the two-state solution, the audience turned against him, too. Speaker after speaker lambasted Dershowitz for referring to the West Bank instead of Judea and Samaria, for his anti-Jewish stance on settlements, and of course for his failure to comprehend the savage, homicidal nature of Islam. Again, all to frenzied cheers from the audience. This is what right-wing donor control of the major Jewish institutions hath wrought: Alan Dershowitz and young AIPACers now constitute the despised far left wing of the official Jewish conversation about Israel.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 15:38:49 +0000
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