The rightwing Israel supporters have redefined anti-Semitism to be criticism of Israel. Now an accused anti-Semite, Steve Bannon, is set to enter the White House as a Trump adviser and many Israel supporters have nothing to say, and the New York Times downplays the appointment, because Trump has said that he is pro-Israel. The Israel lobby is swallowing its own medicine.
Please tell us your reaction to Donald Trump’s election victory and your suggestions for how Palestinian justice work in general, and Mondoweiss’s journalism in particular, should regroup and move forward. Even though the implications for US foreign policy are not yet clear, the immediate outpouring of racist and Islamophobic rage across the country would seem to confirm our worst fears. Here at Mondoweiss we are starting to understand what this will mean for our work and how we must change accordingly. As always our focus will be on documenting, analyzing and challenging the ongoing Israeli dispossession of the Palestinian people. But one immediate change following the election is that we plan to expand our coverage of the racism and violence here in the U.S. that is finding political expression and power through the Trump victory.
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Stephen Bannon to be his chief strategist has brought to the surface the antisemitic undercurrent of Trump’s reactionary populism. How we go about explaining the phenomenon goes some way towards guiding us as to how to mobilize against it. Max Ajl says it’s essential to understand that “Trumpism” is the product of a US social and political order that was neither reformable nor defensible, and it offers an opportunity to join a more inclusive movement – “one big enough for all of us, except for those who insist that others pay the price for their safety.”
In a triumph of navel-gazing and moral idiocy, NYT op-ed writer Shmuel Rosner says the bad thing about Trump is not what he threatens to America but that Israeli love for him will expose to American Jews the rightwing racism of their Middle East counterparts and they will distance themselves from Israel.
According to a recent survey, Muslims are the least politically engaged religious group in the U.S. (among Jews and Christians and themselves), though the level of political engagement is likely to change after this election. As Imam Zaid Shakir in Austin, TX says, “We are in the battle of ideas – not a physical battle – but one of fighting racism and discrimination. This is our battle.”
Over the weekend Interim Democratic boss Donna Brazile, attended a conference organized by the David Horowitz’s Islamophobic think tank Freedom Center. It featured rightwing intolerants, Mike Huckabee, Steve Bannon, Robert Spencer and Caroline Glick, the Israeli who denies the Nakba and the existence of Palestinian refugees. Brazile may think that she can hold the party together with Islamophobic elements, but the party is moving on. Sen. Chuck Schumer has endorsed Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim, to fill the position Brazile holds in a nod to the party’s left wing.
Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, which President Obama pursued, will likely not recur under President Trump, according to a leaked document produced by Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs.
Palestinians in Lebanon sympathize with Americans weeping over Donald Trump. The new president of Lebanon also is hostile to refugees.
Before Trump surprised Clinton in Michigan, Bernie Sanders led a revolution that included some of the same political materials but had a universalist, non-racist message. That revolution is more alive than ever, and in the next generation’s hands.
If Newt Gingrich is being bandied as Secretary of State under Trump, it’s surely because billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who funded the Trump campaign, share’s Gingrich’s outlook. “I happen to believe what our friend Newt Gingrich said is true,” Adelson says. Palestinians are “a made up people.”