Amazing news from Israel. Richard Silverstein passes on the information that the novelist A.B. Yehoshua has called on the Bush Administration to remove our ambassador till the Israelis begin to dismantle the settlements. And, notes JTA, Yehoshua lashed out at the lobby here:
Yehoshua further described all West Bank settlements as illegal and
described the "Jewish lobby" as having "become a powerful tool of
influence on Israel’s behalf within the U.S. administration."
JTA then notes that Yehoshua is a leftwinger who has "flouted convention" for decades. Trying to delegitimize him. He is actually mainstream.
Alas this is the moral idiocy that has enveloped almost all American Jewry. They do not see the existential crisis Israel finds itself in–of its own devising. They denounce any American as an antisemite who addresses the power of the Israel lobby. And so it is, once again, brave Israelis calling for sanctions against Israel for its criminal behavior and acknowledging the plain truth of the lobby, while a lame American president says mildly that the settlements "ought to go," and American Jewry sleeps. And leading American Jewish liberals like J.J. Goldberg smear Walt and Mearsheimer as "bigoted." Some day children will study this disgrace of my proud people as they study other moral collapses in which the intelligent argued vehemently that black is white: Stalin’s intellectual defenders and the apologists for segregation.
