As a child from the staunchly liberal Upper West Side of Manhattan, I went for several years to New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade. I would take the bus across Central Park with an animated young modern Orthodox woman—my Hebrew teacher—and we would stand together in the spring warmth behind police barricades and watch the marchers slowly process up Fifth Avenue. Students from Orthodox day schools followed Reform rabbis and Boy Scouts. Military veterans walked with Jewish Americans for peace. Floats for banks, Jewish-owned businesses and political parties competed for our attention with black velvet kippot and hats, shofarot and a sea of American and Israeli flags. As they flowed north, broad smiles on display, those strange bedfellows felt to me like they belonged together: It seemed, somehow, not only reasonable but inevitable that they were there as one.
The sensation of that half-forgotten scene returned to mind as I tried to make sense for myself of the Israeli election. The process had left me with a tearing sensation in the gut. I was especially troubled by the short video that Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud’s standard-bearer, posted on his Facebook page during the last hours of the vote. Leaning in to the camera intimately, with his body nearly filling the frame, he declared that his right-wing government was in “danger” because Israeli Arabs were voting in unprecedented numbers. He called on his supporters to rush to the polls to ensure that there would still be a “Jewish government” to “watch over the State of Israel.” I was far from the only person to be startled by his comments: Major bodies of Reform and Conservative Jewry issued statements denouncing the comments as “racist,” as did President Barack Obama. By invoking the specter of Arab domination at the ballot box in order to draw Jewish voters to the polls, Netanyahu trod close to racial and religious incitement.
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From Tablet Magazine
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