And Speaking of "the Crazy"...

Can't hardly wait for this Beit Zatoun event next week:

After the CJC:
Palestine, Canadian Jewish Politics, and 'This immense mess' 

An important part of the world Jewish population, the Israeli Jewish colony, thus finds itself committed to a dead-end course, driven to a policy of preventive aggression abroad and discriminatory legislation at home, the entire situation encouraging a racist and chauvinist mentality that impels society down the road of social regression. This immense mess could not be limited to Palestine, nor even to the Arab world. -- Maxime Rodinson, 1968

In 1968 Maxime Rodinson, then perhaps the most prominent Jewish intellectual critic of Zionism and its association with Western imperial power, reflected upon the course of Jewish communal politics. Catastrophic wartime defeat in Europe and the subsequent rise of the Israeli state had produced a dangerous trajectory. Rodinson wrote: "The Jews might allow themselves to be drawn by this evolution into taking positions against the ideals and aspirations of the Third World, which by the very force of circumstance are shared by the Arabs." Arguing that "Jews are driven by the process set in motion by Zionism towards options that are reactionary in the fullest sense of the word," Rodinson urged resistance to this trend.

The trend has certainly been contested. But at the level of Jewish communal organization and leadership in the West, this struggle has in some cases simply been lost. This is dramatically the case in Canada. In 2011, this longstanding defeat was capped off by the dissolution of the historic centrepiece of Canadian politics politics (sic), the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), by its budgetary leadership. The way is now clear for complete domination of Canada’s organized Jewish communal mainstream by a corporate advocacy system formally associated with Israeli state structures. With even veteran Canadian Zionists alienated by the new leadership's contempt for internal democratic process, one thing is certain: this leadership and the organizations under its direction are set to oppose any anti-imperialist forces within this country that seriously engage with the politics of the Middle East.

This talk will review the deterioration of Canadian Jewish politics and implications for leftist strategy. It will also outline the broader politics of Western Zionism and identify the relationship between the Palestine question and the rise of budgetary authorities within communal leadership structures.

Speaker
Dan Freeman-Maloy is an activist and writer, currently pursuing a PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter. As an undergraduate student activist in 2006, he wrote a lengthy polemic about Canadian Jewish politics, "AIPAC North: 'Israel advocacy' in Canada." A recent collection of his writing on Western imperial politics and Palestine (2012) is available in full.

Sounds like a hoot and a half. Who wants to come with me?