If this is our future

[shira]

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None of this is to suggest that Israel is blameless in the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, or that the present government has a plan for ending it. Those are entirely different matters. The point is that even if these students hold Israel partially (or even largely) accountable for the intractable conflict with the Palestinians, even if one believes that it should have conducted Operation Cast Lead differently, or even if one disapproves of its policies in the West Bank, for example, it is a devastatingly sad day for world Jewry when those issues are the only ones that one associates with Israel, when mere mention of the Jewish state evokes not the least bit of pride from students graduating from a prestigious institution long associated with the very best of American Jewish life.

WHAT WOULD have happened had Brandeis invited President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address? Obama is, after all, not exactly a non-divisive figure. He is president of a country at war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, places in which (a small number of) American troops have committed their share of atrocities, a country in which civil rights issues are still far from resolved, in which the bounty of America is still far beyond the reach of millions of its citizens.

One suspects that the students would have been thrilled to hear Obama, despite the fact that many do not agree with his policies. They would have been honored to host him despite the fact that some must be disappointed that he has not lived up to his campaign promise to call the Turkish treatment of the Armenians a “genocide,” despite the fact that he is intent on pursuing the war in Afghanistan, to which many of the students must certainly be opposed. They would have been delighted by Obama’s presence because even if they disagree with some of his views or some of America’s actions, they understand that the US is more than Obama, and more than this war or that policy. And they are, quite rightly, enormously proud of what America stands for and what it has accomplished.

But that kind of instinctive pride in the Jewish state is, sadly, a vestige of days gone by, even for many American Jews.

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http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=174863