Mondoweiss is a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.
It has four principal aims:
1)To publish important developments touching on Israel/Palestine, the American Jewish community and the shifting debate over US foreign policy in a timely fashion.
2)To publish a diversity of voices to promote dialogue on these important issues.
3)To foster the movement for greater fairness and justice for Palestinians in American foreign policy.
4)To offer alternatives to pro-Zionist ideology as a basis for American Jewish identity.
I got this article today from skip schiel:
We Wouldn't Eat Their Sandwiches! An Interview with Lillian Rosengarten
Lillian Rosengarten was the only American on the Jewish boat to Gaza that was intercepted by the Israeli military on September 28th..."I saw the side of the Jewish experience that will do anything to preserve the myth of Israel."
I asked her what it means that she fled Nazi Germany as a young Jew and now she has been kicked out of Israel as an older one.
Rosengarten lowered her head and cried.
“That’s exactly what I’m feeling, behind all these words. Because Israel always did exist in my mind as an ideal. My image of Israel was this place of return, a refuge for all the Jews, a place where Jews are good to one another, a country where they can be free and safe.
“Now I think, what was it all about? That this country, that’s supposed to be a haven to Jews, where Jews are going to be safe, can act like this. Not just to us, but the way it treats the Palestinians, their land, their water. And this issue of deportation, it is absolutely horrendous. I thought that all Jews have a right to be in Israel. To be cared for. To be safe. But as soon as we voice a dissent against the actions of a government that is brutal, that dominates another people, that commits collective punishment, when we cry out, No that’s not right, we’re deported.
“I'm weeping because-- you know, I think about my mentor Hans. He is 91. I can’t ever go to visit him. I can’t go there if he dies. And my Palestinian friends, I can’t see them again either.”
"So you are feeling grief?”
“Oh I’m feeling tremendous grief, but mostly it’s grief about Israel. The road that it’s taken.”
