I frequently criticize the Washington Post editorial page here for providing a night refuge (as Herzl said of Uganda) for the neoconservatives as they flee the progressive pogroms. Well yesterday the Post distinguished itself head-and-shoulders with a superb op-ed by Israeli filmmaker Ronit Avni blaming Americans for their support of the colonialist program in Palestine. Sorry, the settlements. Avni singles out the Hebron Fund and Irving Moskowitz (a backer of the American Enterprise Institute, neocon cave), also lays the usual blame at the feet of the usual suspect, the Christian Zionists, who I don’t think do all that much here.
And she also mentions Glenn Kessler’s wonderful reporting in the Post on the long/suppressed U.S. official opposition to the settlement program:
Thirty years ago, a U.S. State Department legal adviser issued an opinion that called the settlements “inconsistent” with the Fourth Geneva Convention.
These are important points that need to be teed up at the center of Obama’s effort here. Hail the Post!
A few things need to be added to Avni’s great piece. The Central Fund of Israel, which this site has reported on, needs to be mentioned too. Operates out of a fabric store on Sixth Avenue. Draws on big Jews. Milken et al, to fund the settler movement’s “urgent security needs.”
Avni is right to blame American Jews. But we know American Jews; and the Post should blame the Israel lobby, too. The actual funding of settlements is less significant than the nullification of U.S. policy in the West Bank; and that achievement belongs to the rightwing Jewish leadership that went after any politician who attacked the settlements, all thru the 90s.
Michael Walzer has lately written that we need to defeat the settler movement (to save Israel). John Mearsheimer, who also wants to save Israel, has long said the same thing. The Post Op-Ed page would do well to try to join Zionists like Walzer with realists like Mearsheimer on this point. If you really want to end settlements, you need a new political combination. You are up against strong forces. You need political imagination (just as Lincoln dreamed up new political combinations in the 1850s to end slavery). The Post would provide leadership by bringing together these forces on its influential pages. (Thanks to Andy Whitmore for tip.)
