Seth Freedman writes in the Guardian about the myopic British Jewish community and their blind obedience to the state of Israel. These issues are equally relevant in Australia, where a communal leadership tries to stifle alternative voices but has only achieved pushing more Jews away from the establishment:
The latest figures on antisemitic hate crimes are indisputably unpalatable, yet those releasing the statistics play their own part in ensuring that the Venn diagrams of anti-Israeli and antisemitic sentiment overlap again and again, thanks to their own interlinking of Jewish and Israeli interests.
The CST thought nothing about protecting one of the most insensitively timed and insensitively inspired communal gatherings of recent years, in which the Board of Deputies of British Jews held a mass solidarity rally for Israel right in the midst of the Gaza onslaught. CST acknowledges that the upswing in antisemitic incidents this year is linked to Operation Cast Lead, yet point-blank refuses to see that British Jewry’s harnessing itself to the Israel-right-or-wrong bandwagon in the heat of battle gives a green light to any racist looking to label all Jews as supporters of Israeli brutality.