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Saturday Night Geschrei
Happy Purim, everyone! At the end of a week where the Associated Press reported that Israel faced international criticism for excluding Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza from its successful covid-19 vaccination campaign while Israeli legislators argued that availability for the vaccine should be exploited for leverage against Gaza’s Hamas rulers, Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update anchorperson Michael Che joked, “Israel is reporting that they’ve vaccinated half of their population. I’m going to guess it’s the Jewish half.”
The joke was roundly condemned as “antisemitic” by the alphabet soup of American Jewish establishment organizations, most notably the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith (ADL), even though it is obvious that the butt of the joke is not Jews as Jews but rather the history of Israeli policies of human rights abuses upon people under military occupation for the sake of settlement, annexation and inequality under Israeli civil law.
But it was not so long ago when the former US Ambassador to Israel for the Trump administration David Friedman wrote in an Israeli right wing Arutz Sheva op-ed column published in May, 2016, while he was the Trump campaign’s Israel advisor, that American Jews who support the Oslo Accords and the 2-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “are far worse than…