A shotgun wedding is an artificial construct that is designed to cover for a fleeting moment of passion that would turn into a scandal should it prove that the passion was loveless and temporary.
Shotgun marriages may no longer take place in
the secular liberal democracies, but they do in other places, including those
that think of themselves as spiritual liberal democracies.
If we think of a love story that develops
normally between a boy and a girl, and lasts long enough till they grow up and get
married, have children and age together—as being the
natural course of a relationship—we must think
of the shotgun wedding as being the artificial development of a relationship,
and expect it to end in rancor and divorce shortly thereafter.
“Natural” implies a holistic, organic
development that takes the time it needs to flourish while nourishing every part
of the growing construct. By contrast, “artificial” implies the hurried assembly
of parts that may fit together at first, but will remain together for only a
fleeting moment as would a loveless affair.
Well, if we consider that the idea of coming
together in matrimony—known
as marriage—is used in most languages as an allegory to describe other forms of
coming together, such as a business partnership for example, we can also think
of the coming together in politics or diplomacy as an act that can be natural
and organic, or can be artificial, incomplete and temporary.
This brings us to an article that came under
the title: “Bipartisan Support for Israel Is Broken—Here’s how to Fix It,” and
the subtitle: “The United States and Israel need a reality check on the
alliance and a better understanding of the politics and culture in both
Jerusalem and Washington.” It was written by Asaf Romirowsky, and published on
September 30, 2021 in The National Interest.
The following is a montage of the pertinent
passages representing Romirowsky’s view concerning the relationship between
America and Israel:
“The US-Israeli bond is a
wide bridge. Lanes permit a variety of exchanges in both directions. At the
most general are shared cultural and moral concerns; more narrowly there are
security and economic issues. Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister has called for a
long-term fix in Israel’s ties with the Democratic Party, stating, ‘Long-term
developments in the US are changing the Democratic Party and strengthening the
progressive and anti-Israel axis.’ What many have not understood is the shift
in American politics that has seen the rise of the far Left, which is
represented in the Congress by the Squad and dozens of other ideologically
aligned representatives. The Democratic generation gap is palpable; old-timers
are pro-Israel, while the young guard is not. Indeed, they may exemplify the
new Democratic Party more than anything, where far-left identity politics meets
obsessive hatred of Israel. The fact is that the Israeli political arena leans
much more to the Right whereas the loudest voices in US politics currently lean
Left, means extra efforts are necessary to explain positions to one another”.
What you see here is the rant of someone that
has no idea how a natural relationship—sometimes referred to as
bonding—develops between people. Neither Asaf Romirowsky the writer of the
article, nor Israel’s Diaspora Minister recoiled at the use of the expression,
“long-term fix in Israel’s ties with the Democratic Party.” They don’t realize
that you can only fix something that is artificial because what is natural
heals itself when broken. In addition, when something is artificial, you don’t
talk about it long-term because no matter the longevity of the artificial, it
is but a fleeting moment compared to the lifespan of the natural.
In short, what these two people are saying,
and what they are trying to do, is fix a wedding that was of the shotgun
variety to begin with. The relation between the Democrats and the Jewish
Establishment, has since gone sour to the extreme, and has initiated the process
of divorce. Oblivious of all this, those two gentlemen dream of repairing the
lost relationship. But whereas they say this is their aim, they are not giving
as little as a faint hint, how they propose to go about doing the repair.
And so, we must ask, what are the chances that
Asaf Romirowsky and Israel’s Diaspora Minister will succeed in reviving the
relationship that used to exist between the Democratic Party of the United States
on one side, and Israel as well as the Jewish Establishment in America on the
other side? Put differently, this is the question: Can a shotgun wedding that
lasted a short period of time and got broken, be repaired to look like a love
affair that developed naturally, and has led to a solid wedding?
To answer this question, we can study a piece
that may shed some light on the subject. The piece is an article that came
under the title: “A cautionary tale about Arab-Israeli normalization,” written
by Jonathan S. Tobin, and published on September 30, 2021 in the online Jewish
publication, Jewish News Syndicate. The following is what constitutes the
preamble of Tobin’s article. It is here presented in condensed form:
“An influential tribal leader from Iraq spoke
of his attendance at a conference in which he and 300 other notables publicly
supported normalization between their country and the state of Israel. The
blowback about this development has provided a sobering counterpoint to
optimism about peace between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. By intimidating
those who attended the conference into recanting their positions, Iran and its
powerful allies inside Iraq have shown that while it is possible to fight
Jew-hatred in the Muslim world, no one should underestimate the difficulties of
that struggle. That’s true so long as the Biden administration isn’t fully
supportive of such efforts, as proved to be the case in Iraq”.
This is an example of what has been the classic approach to a shotgun wedding between the Jews and others. Examples abound in Canada, the US and other places where the Jewish Establishment begged the government to impose the Jews on their populations. It seemed to work at first, but then the blowback happened to let these people know they went too far already, and they ain’t goin’ any further.