I think one of the things that infuriates my critics is that I refuse to let them define Judaism for me. - Eli Valley

What’s happening in Israel and what we’ve been ignoring and normalizing for the past ten years has now suddenly hit our own shores.

in general brainwashing begets brainwashing. In terms of liberal Jews who check their progressive values at the door when it comes to Israel, it’s fear and guilt: If we object to Israel’s policies, then we must hate ourselves, and we don’t want to be considered self-hating. For those with an emotional connection to Israel, they might do a cost-benefit analysis. They say, if it‘s my people or the Palestinian people, then someone’s gonna have to lose out, and it’s gonna be them. That’s even further then a lot of people ever get with this. For a lot of people it’s just an emotional level based on educational experiences they’ve had since they were children. When some people start admitting that this is not the ideal they’ve been taught, they rationalize it by saying, the Palestinians are to blame.

They’ve been defining authenticity for so long, but they’re outside the sphere of mainstream political opinion. My fantasy is to flip the script. Why don’t we start admitting the obvious? That we are the authentic Jews. We embody the Jewish values of the past several hundred years of post-enlightenment Jewish history. These neo-cons are the aberration. They should stop speaking for us, but maybe it’s time to stop including them in the community. There’s so much focus in the Jewish world on Klal Yisrael, which basically means peoplehood. Under the guise of Klal Yisrael, we‘ve been conversing endlessly with each other in the spirit of inclusion, all while apartheid was being codified in the West Bank. Over how many years, decades, or centuries are we supposed to be in dialogue with people who not only refuse to acknowledge our authenticity but who are all-in in a project of ethnic-cleansing?