When I was in Jerusalem 3 years ago, a Palestinian shopowner said angrily to me, "Muslim people are sleeping. But when George Bush used the word ‘crusade,’ Muslim people open one eye."
I wonder whether the failure of Obama’s Cairo commitment is causing American Establishment types to open one eye on the conditions that we chronicle on this site. Last night I went to a party at a friend’s house. Everyone there was American-privileged, including me. There were a couple of Jews. I had h’ors d’oeuvres with a landowner/intellectual friend who has sympathy for Zionism but keeps up on the news. He said, "Tell me what this ‘unprecedented’ statement means, from Hillary. Don’t you see what is happening? They are setting up apartheid, with an international battle by the Palestinians. And now there are 50 percent Jews. But there will be fewer and fewer in years to come, as they find ways to leave." I told him that Ehud Olmert warned about this two years ago, when the two-state-idea was dying.
Later I was sitting next to my hostess. Fiercely intelligent. She told me about a Republican Washington friend who has recently visited Israel and Palestine and came back appalled at the conditions for Palestinians. My friend was upset. She reflected on the reasons that privileged non-Jewish Americans so supported Israel:
"I believed it all. When the Life Magazine cover came out after the 1967 war, with the Israelis on the tank, I thought, This is really a miracle. The people who were almost wiped out in the Holocaust have been reborn. They’re so goodlooking, and they have kibbutzes, they’re on the land, and they won’t be defeated. I never thought that it involved displacing other people. I’ve come to think that I was brainwashed."
It upset me to hear all that, but I had a tribal feeling, and I said, "Jews were brainwashed too."
