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When We Talk About an ‘American’ Interest That Distances Us From Israel, Are We Channeling Lindbergh and Coughlin? (No, We’re Looking Forward)

Here is a horrifying portrait of Gaza as an animal pen, in the Middle East Report.

Cargo at [Gazan entry points] Kerem Shalom and
                Sufa is offloaded from trucks and then left on pallets in the
                open for Palestinians to come and pick up when they are allowed
                to approach. The contrast with Karni’s elaborate security procedures
                and regimented distribution system is striking. “At least in
                prison, and I’ve been in prison, there are rules,” Gazan human
                rights lawyer Raji Sourani told the New York Times. “But
                now we live in a kind of animal farm. We live in a pen, and they
                dump in food and medicine.”…

Half of the people
                between the Mediterranean and the Jordan live under a state that
                excludes them from the community of political subjects, denies
                them true equality and thus discriminates against them in varying
                domains of rights.


Note the author: a Harvard anthropology doctoral student named Darryl Li. Li is also a Yale Law School student. A giant winner, in other words. Here’s his picture, on the website for Paul and Daisy Soros fellowships for new Americans. Li is
the son of Chinese immigrants, is in his late 20s and has been to hot zones from Rwanda to Pakistan to New Delhi. And he’s worked for B’tselem, the great human rights organization in Israel.

And where is this impressive, attractive Asian-American aiming his intelligence? At the treatment of Arabs in historical Palestine.

When supporters of Israel express the fear that the new movement criticizing Israel will end up persecuting Jews as "un-American," they invoke an America of Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh and the State Department that didn’t do enough before the Holocaust. Remember that Jeffrey Goldberg compared Walt and Mearsheimer to the antisemite Coughlin in the New Republic, while Dana Milbank in the Washington Post said they were Teutonic and blue-eyed–Nazis. But here is the truth: the America that is rethinking its policy toward Israel is the idealist forward-thinking America of multiculturalism and human rights, an America that would treat Arabs as human beings… Young Jews are gettin on board!

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