It's as if the average non-Jewish American has no right or business expressing concerns for the affairs of Israel, despite human rights charters and billions of American taxpayer dollars being religiously delivered to the State yearly. And the number of settlers from America furnishing their new nests on the West Bank.
In Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel, by Eli Valley, the author gives the lie to the notion that what goes on in Israel stays in Israel and that American Jews have an obligation to support the Jewish state no matter what policies it adopts. But in releasing American Jews from their natural born obligation, Valley also frees other observers (you, me) to respond to the doings in Israel/Palestine, and in the divisive politics of Jewish assimilation in American mainstream culture. Valley accomplishes this in comics that are outrageously funny, acerbic, insightful -- and refreshing in their honesty about the hypocrisy embedded in the motivations behind Israeli policies toward Palestinians and the often-cowed American media response to its actions. As with Allen, topics no goyim who wanted to work another day would broach, are deftly and intelligently handled by one of their own -- "a self-loathing Jew," aka, Diaspora Boy.
Valley's comic strikes are a welcome new angle from which to view what he calls a "crisis" for Jewry in America and Israel, and an on-going pressure point for the rest of the world, as it observes and grows evermore anxious over the doings in Palestine and Israel. The comics are also a nice complement to the recent films of Dror Moreh -- The Gatekeepers (2012), which explores the malignant influence of extreme Zionism on contemporary Israeli politics; and, The Human Factor (2021) which gives an account of the 30-year effort of Americans to conjure up peace in the Middle East. As in America, there are Israeli dissidents -- citizens born into freedom -- who don't always like the policies of their government and mean to express it, even at risk to their livelihoods and "reputations".
As Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, writes in the introduction to the book,
...The language of the mainstream American Jewish community is liberal. America's most prominent Jewish organizations speak incessantly about their commitment to democracy, freedom of expression, human rights, and equality under the law. Yet this year [2016] marks the fiftieth anniversary of Israeli control over millions of West Bank Palestinians who live as non-citizens, without free movement, under military law, and without the right to vote for the government that controls their lives.
To make this hypocrisy justifiable, he continues, American Jews have to conjure up a fantasy of continuing victimhood to go with the leitmotif of Never Again. He critically observes,
Thus, 2016 becomes 1938. Israel is no longer a regional superpower with nuclear weapons. American Jews are no longer a highly assimilated, economically privileged, overwhelmingly white community living in almost total freedom in the most powerful nation on earth. Instead, Jews remain a weak, menaced, and reviled people, oppressed by Palestinians and their global sympathizers, who are Nazis in modern guise.
It is just such posturing that Eli Valley's comics send up as the uproarious lies that they are, says Beinart.
There are more than 60 comics in the collection, each tackling a mythologization or absurd leap-of-logic promulgated by neo-fascist leadership that at times could be mistaken for seeming to suffer from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome or pathological introjection in Israel and America. (Valley, at one point, notes how early Israeli fitness regimes were modeled on, of all things, Teutons.) The comics have titles such as "Jewish Perfidy 101," "Israel Man and Diaspora Boy," "The 1-in-5 Majority," "Choose Your Own Apocalypse," "The Hater In The Sky." "A Brief History Of Hawking's Hypocrisy," "The Netanyahu Victory," "The Hero We Need: A Tribute To Adam West," and "Google Glass For The Gaza Gaze." This last entry on Google Glass has a real-life story that is just as bizarre as the comic block that Valley inked. Back in 2014 The Times of Israel ran a piece titled, "Google Glass gets Gaza rocket siren update app: Wearers of the advanced 'Internet in the eye' device can get automatic real-time Red Color warnings." In a +972 magazine piece, Valley responded with the following visual snark:
Here, an American Jew need only put Google's glasses on, choose Jews torqued at the Inquisition, and their continued viewing of Palestinian suffering disappears. Ouch!
These contradictions and absurdities, writes Valley, abound not only in Israel's treatment of Palestinian civilians, but also in how, as the image suggests, American Jews view even live devastation through the historical lens of victimhood; the MSM, under pressure from Jewish lobbyists, reinforces the memes and tropes of this tortured mythology. Valley has been drawing these conclusions on the wall for decades in American and Israeli progressive Jewish publications, as well as the Times, etc.
The complicity of the MSM in kow-towing to radical Zionist implicit threats is sometimes more evident than others -- usually, we settle for the MSM describing what just happened in Gaza as "a war," as if fish spitting up water from the barrel into the face of the rifleman were a war. When Sderot was bombed a few years ago the Guardian ran a photo of Israelis sitting on a couch overlooking the carnage, complete with a of Star of David flag, and seeming to be entertained by the bombing. In Australia, an artist extended the absurdity of the photo by adding a remote control in the hand of one of the viewers and got chased off the newspaper. (They are still getting chased off the scent by Israeli pressure.) Here's the photo and the political cartoon side-by-side:
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