The New York Times just ran an article in which an Israeli documentary filmmaker asserts that “Evangelicals are the only significant power outside Israel that is openly supporting the settlements. No one else does.”
This is simply not true. The Times reporter, David Halbfinger, accepts the assertion from filmmaker Maya Zinshtein even though he served as Jerusalem bureau chief when two very powerful Jewish supporters of the settlements were all over our politics: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Mideast envoy; and David Friedman, Donald Trump’s personal attorney and then-ambassador to Israel. Kushner’s family foundation backed settlements. Friedman embraced settlements fulsomely. Their “vision” was the Trump “peace plan” that called for Israel to annex large portions of the West Bank.
The Times gave a full page to a promotion of Zinshtein’s documentary, “’Til Kingdom Come,” in which the paper repeatedly describes Christian evangelicals as the basis of rightwing American and Israeli policies. “Zinshtein [shows] how the settlers reap enormous political support and raise money from evangelicals, who, she argues, directly and indirectly subsidize the settlers’ steady takeover of the West Bank, which the Palestinians want for a future state.”
Even Israelis are unwitting dupes of the evangelicals. “[N]obody asked, what did this support actually mean?” Zinshtein says. “It’s not ‘support of Israel.’ It’s support of a right-wing agenda that many people here wouldn’t agree with.” Yes and somehow Israelis keep electing rightwing governments that are utterly supportive of the settlements; and rightwing parties get 60 percent of the Israeli Jewish vote. Those Israelis have agency!
Halbfinger goes so far as to say that the film will teach American Jews “how American politics really work.”
This is damage control for the Israel lobby. There is no question that Christian evangelicals have provided political support to settlements, on the Republican side, alongside the Kushners and Friedmans; but most of the last 30 years Democrats have been in the White House, and evangelicals are not in the Democratic base, and both the Clinton and Obama administrations did nothing to stop settlements because they were dependent on Jewish American political support in the form of the Israel lobby. Clinton ran to George H.W. Bush’s right on settlements following Bush’s confrontation with Israel and the lobby in ’91; AIPAC’s president said Bush’s stance was unforgiveable and “we have” a dozen people working in the Clinton campaign, and some (including Tom Friedman) attributed Bush’s one-term status to his opposition to settlements. Obama’s aide Ben Rhodes detailed the Democratic Jewish lobby pressure in his memoir: When Obama said in 2011 that a two-state solution should be based on the ’67 lines, the Israeli prime minister lectured the president about settlements in the Oval Office, and the Israel lobby took Netanyahu’s side, and Rhodes “was given a list of leading Jewish donors to call to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.” No Christian evangelicals in sight.
And of course the New York Times has never given this sort of coverage to the Jewish organizations in the Israel lobby.
So, it seems that the Jewish Zionists in the lobby are throwing the Christian Zionists under the bus in Zinshtein’s book and Halbfinger’s article. This is encouraging, since an internecine battle between Jewish and Christian Zionists can only serve to weaken both sides. As they say, there’s no honor among thieves!
I’d like to see what CUFI and the rest of the Christian Zionists have to say about this.
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How the Media Cracks Down on Critics of Israel ❧ Current Affairs
The Guardian, “How the Media Cracks down on critics of Israel” By Nathan J. Robinson, Feb. 10/21
EXCERPT:
“It is widely recognized that critics of Israel, no matter how well-founded the criticism, are routinely punished by both public & private institutions for their speech. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has documented a pattern by which ‘those who seek to protest, boycott, or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced,’ a trend that ‘manifests on college campuses, in state contracts, & even in bills to change federal criminal law’ & ‘suppress[es] the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate.’ The Center for Constitutional Rights has shown that ‘Israel advocacy organizations, universities, government actors, & other institutions’ have targeted pro-Palestinian activists with a number of tactics ‘including event cancellations, baseless legal complaints, administrative disciplinary actions, firings, & false & inflammatory accusations of terrorism & antisemitism’ & concludes that there is a ‘Palestine exception to free speech.’
“The effort to keep critics of Israel quiet sometimes takes the form of explicit government action—there is an open campaign to criminalize speech critical of Israel & some states even require oaths from government employees promising not to boycott Israel. But as Israeli journalist Gideon Levy notes in the Middle East Eye, it often comes in the form of baseless (& offensive) accusations that criticisms of Israel are definitionally anti-Semitic. In the United States, academic critics of Israel have had job offers rescinded or been otherwise kept from teaching, & CNN fired academic Marc Lamont Hill over his call for a free Palestine. In Britain, there has been a years-long absurd campaign to tar former Labour leader (& critic of Israeli government policy) Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Human Rights Watch notes that the United States government has wielded unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism against it & against other human rights groups like Amnesty and Oxfam that have exposed Israel’s shoddy human rights record. (cont’d)
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Within Israel itself, the free speech rights of Palestinians are brutally suppressed, & even Jews supportive of Palestinian rights are regularly harassed by the state. Abeer Alnajjar of Open Democracy wrote last year about how ‘major, mainstream news media outlets are sensitized against any reference to Palestinian rights or international law, and any criticism of Israel or its policies.’”
Thirsty for knowledge of the end times, I checked out The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews: https://www.ifcj.org/
Then I entered “Palestinians” into the search engine and got this page: https://www.ifcj.org/?s=palestinians Then I clicked on “Hamas Calls on Palestinians To Slaughter Jews”:
https://www.ifcj.org/news/stand-for-israel/hamas-calls-on-palestinians-to-slaughter-jews/
Then I clicked on the first link in the article:
https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/07/15/hamas-official-calls-on-palestinians-across-the-globe-to-slaughter-jews/
“Hamas rejects official’s call to ‘slaughter Jews’Fathi Hammad’s speech urging Palestinians to kill Jews worldwide if Israel does not lift blockade on Gaza “does not represent movement’s official position,” Hamas statement reads.”
Nothing like balanced reporting.
The NY Times has lost all credibility when the word Israel appears within its folds. They’re desperately trying to ignore the recent accusations of apartheid from multiple organisations this year. They are desperately trying to sweep the latest ICC investigations under the rug. They’ve been ignoring the months and months of anti-Netanyahu protests. And are now focusing attention away from these calamitous stories by boasting about Israel “miraculously” vaccinating 4 million people, like the US isn’t doing this every four days at the moment. Not to mention running gushing opinion pieces by the likes of Thomas Friedman about the amazing “peace and prosperity” Israel is now realising with the UAE, as if this was some kind of golden era of peace in the Middle East and not the dirty backroom deal hatched by Kushner and Co to secure business deals and bank loans, while paying off the Emiraties with F35s and Israel with even better weapons and political favours, while Israel gets to openly sell its invasive surveillance tech to one of the most repressive regimes in the region.