The Israel lobby seems to losing power before our eyes. Trump aide Steve Bannon blew off the Zionist Organization of America despite its patron Sheldon Adelson giving $25 million to the Trump campaign; and Alan Dershowitz warned that if Jewish supporters of Israel divide and allow an American election to become a referendum on Israel, “we could lose.”
Details have been unclear on Donald Trump’s ever-shifting call for a discriminatory ‘Muslim registry’ in the United States. Some proposals target Muslim-Americans, others focus on Muslim immigrants entering the United States. Nevertheless, the prospects are certainly terrifying, regardless of what Muslim community will be at the mercy of the state’s surveillance apparatus. Sana Saeed, a journalist based in San Francisco, tells Mondoweiss that the fear she is seeing in her community “is real and devastating.”
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) gives a platform to Steve Bannon and Stephen Adelson at its annual gala this Sunday night, November 20th in New York City. The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network says that for anyone familiar with Zionist history and current alliances, this should not come as a surprise but a confirmation. Zionism remains a reactionary and racist ideology and movement — embracing Trump and Bannon is no exception.
Jewish Americans passed a big test by voting overwhelmingly against Trump. But a major question is yet to be answered: Will Trump’s aggressively Zionist agenda sway their opinion during his administration?
“I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel,” said James Mattis, the retired Marine general Donald Trump has suggested will be his Defense Secretary.
Phil Weiss says that Jewish status is changing with the Trump election, but comparisons to the Holocaust are overblown and self-involved: “I can’t diminish that reaction, but no one with any influence is talking about a registry for Jewish names, as they are for Muslims. Or restrictions on Jewish emigration, as they do for Muslims. Or talking about the problems in the Jewish religion– as the new national security adviser and top strategist Bannon do. We misread history if we think that is coming to the US. Other dangers are much closer.”
Palestinian medical sources have reported that Mohammad Sa’id Abu Sa’da, 26, was killed on Friday evening, and three others injured, after Israeli soldiers stationed across the border fence opened fire on Palestinian protesters in central Gaza.
The day after the election Wikileaks published an email from Stu Eizenstat, an ambassador to the Jewish community, to Clinton’s foreign policy wunderkind Jake Sullivan scrutinizing activism in favor of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) at Princeton. Why did top figures in the Clinton campaign spend energy looking into how the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was engaging this “sleepy campus?” Because it was trying to please donors in 2015, rather than wrestling with progressive causes.
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team announced today that Senator Jeff Sessions, a right-wing hardliner on immigration, will be his attorney general, and that Michael Flynn, the anti-Muslim former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, will be his national security adviser. The moves signal that Trump is rewarding those who remained loyal to him during his tumultuous presidential campaign–and that he has no intention of backing down from his hardline positions on Muslims and immigrants.
One of Bernie Sanders’s greatest foes in the presidential primary was hasbara culture, an aggressive and proselytizing construction of reality from a minority of the Jewish community that Sanders threatened with statements that changed the political discourse on Israel. Hasbara culture helped to undermine the insurgent senator.