After thousands of years of struggle to maintain a Jewish homeland and to return to it, the Jewish people have no choice but to abandon their country because of Richard Gere.
That's right, The star of American Gigolo and renowned friend of gerbils everywhere appeared in a movie sliming Israel and Jews, that no one had otherwise heard of, and then reluctantly agreed to come to Israel, even though he really hates it.
Over the course of a full month, Gere says he debated whether “it would be a good thing” for him to make the trip. With Israel swerving even further to the right in the Trump era, and an increasing tendency by the progressive left to embrace the tactic of boycott to protest Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, many of Gere’s friends and colleagues in both the Israeli and U.S. human-rights communities told him they feared a movie star’s presence in Israel “would be co-opted by a dark government.”
I'm not sure how one would go about co-opting a guy who was last famous in the 80s. But sure why not.
“I had people on all sides – those who have been close friends and people I barely knew – telling me not to come,” he recounts.
Sadly Gere didn't listen to them. And now Israeli gerbils have been forced to live in fear. But he did meet with the anti-Israel hate group, Breaking the Silence. It's unclear if they provided the gerbils.
The demonization of the group by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others on the right appalled him, he said, as have the condemnations of J Street by the Trump administration’s new ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.
“It is all so counter to what I know of Jewish culture,” Gere says. “Questioning authority makes you a kapo? To question authority makes you a traitor?"
Everything Richard Gere knows about Jewish culture can fit on his right frontal lobe or the inside of a Chinese fortune cookie.
And J Street is "authority". That's why Gere and his powerful lefty friends support it.
In an interview with Chanel 2, Gere said that Israelis should pressure Netanyahu to sit at the negotiating table.
“Demand that he makes peace," Gere asserted. "Demand that he sits down with the Palestinians.”
Netanyahu repeatedly attempted to do so. It was Abbas who didn't want to do it. But Richard Gere doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. Beyond hating Israel.
It is important, he says, for artists and other high-profile figures to speak out against Trump and his policies – but not only celebrities:
Not only celebrities? What is the world coming to.
“We have to be vigilant,” he says. “We have to make sure we are involved with elections [so] that we don’t allow someone like Trump to be elected again."
Yes, we must start actually voting in elections. Or we could tell people they're not allowed to vote for anyone Gere doesn't like.