The spate of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, culminating last week in killings of older men that drew the attention of MSNBC and the New York Times, a settler attack on activists planting saplings, and the nighttime eviction of Palestinians from a Jerusalem home Israel then demolished, is clearly undermining U.S. public support for Israel, including among Jews. And today there are cracks in the firewall that the Israel lobby maintains against any political criticism of Israel here.
Seven establishment Jewish groups today sent a letter to Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett saying Enough’s enough, take action against settler violence; you are “undermining Israel’s image and relations with the U.S. government.” I.e., we can’t do our job of selling Israel in the U.S. with this sort of publicity. The “major Jewish organizations” include the Anti-Defamation League and Israel Policy Forum and National Council of Jewish Women and Union for Reform Judaism, but not liberal Zionist groups. Excerpt:
attacks by Israelis have been steadily increasing and intensifying over the past year, and as pro-Israel Jewish organizations, we are deeply concerned by these trends and request that you address them. These attacks serve as an affront to Israel’s rule of law, to Israeli democracy, and to Jewish values, while undermining Israel’s image and relations with the United States government, American people, and American Jewry. They make it more difficult to appreciate Israel’s legitimate and ongoing security needs and efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The letter is being covered by the Israeli press but not by the American press, which avoids covering the Israel lobby. The Times of Israel notes that the letter respectfully avoids “using the word ‘settler'” while speaking of “Jewish Israeli extremists.” I think that is so as to gain more traction with the Israeli government. After an Israeli government minister discussed settler violence with an American diplomat last month, Bennett distanced himself from the minister and he needed 24-hour security from threats.
The ADL/Israel Policy Forum letter is of a piece with a Saturday twitter “rant” from Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, about a “horrific week in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”
Ben-Ami wrote “to honor the memory” of two elderly Palestinian protesters killed by Israel and cited the MSNBC report on one of those killings. He also wrote “in the name of” the Salhiya family evicted from that Jerusalem home and “in the name of” Palestinian schoolchildren subject to harassment and raids on a continual basis.
J Street knows that progressive Democrats are alarmed by these stories, and it needs to look like it is doing something besides supporting $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. “The occupation… threatens the legitimacy and place of the state of Israel.” Though all Ben-Ami has to offer is, It’s time for the U.S. to take steps to establish a Palestinian state. (Spoiler alert: nothing will happen.)
J Street and Israel Policy Forum represent different chambers of the Israel lobby. IPF is center-liberal, J Steet is liberal. Still, these are significant statements because the Democratic Party Israel lobby understands that its own rank and file, American Jews, are growing impatient with the scenes of never-ending violent expansion of the Jewish state.
In his “rant”, Jeremy Ben-Ami repeatedly rejected the Palestinian answer to atrocities — BDS — and signed off with a tweet that suggested that the problem is How American Zionists feel, and not what is happening to a persecuted population: “Whew. OK, so the occasional rant on Twitter does feel good. And now I can sign off again for many months, I hope.” As if Israeli atrocities will stop for those many months.
Israel is not going to change a thing. These are their front line terrorists, who will do what their IDF cannot legally do – harass, intimidate, threaten, attack, injure, and kill unarmed Palestinians, burn their homes, kill their babies, all to take over their homes, lands, farms, and get rid of the Arabs like their leaders wanted them to. If that apartheid nation really wanted to do something, they would have controlled, and reined in their terrorists, but instead they give them weapons, and send the IDF as their security, to commit these disgusting crimes.
So the ADL and other pro Israel groups in the US, are simply wringing their hands in vain. They are guilty of complicity, and encouraging Israel’s crimes by giving them the necessary cover, and protection in the US. A group of hypocrites, who should be ashamed to call themselves “Americans”.
“ADL and other Jewish groups complain to Israeli PM that settler violence is undermining Israel’s image in U.S.”
Not to worry! Israel is funding a new project to improve its image:
https://www.972mag.com/hasbara-funding-foreign-agents/
Losing the war for public opinion abroad, Israel is relaunching a heavily-funded plan to disguise its own propaganda behind the façade of ‘foreign agents.’…The Israeli cabinet approved on Sunday a project that could inject up to NIS 100 million toward covertly funding government propaganda in the United States and other Western countries.
Palestinian Academic Suspended by UK University Following Israeli Lobby Pressure – Palestine Chronicle
“Palestinian Academic Suspended by UK University Following Israeli Lobby Pressure” The Palestine Chronicle, Jan. 24/22″British University Sheffield Hallam has suspended a Palestinian Ph.D. student from teaching, following a smear campaign by the Israeli lobby, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
“Shahd Abusalama, a Palestinian activist, writer & artist from Gaza, announced on her social media that she was suspended from a teaching position at her department following an intense online campaign by pro-Israel supporters who accused her of ‘antisemitism’.
“Abusalama, who moved to the UK from the besieged Gaza Strip in 2014, following a deadly Israeli war on the Strip, is an active Palestinian rights campaigner & was already targeted by Israeli lobby groups & publications in the past.
“The Electronic Intifada reported that the last wave of cyberbullying against Abusalama began in December, ‘when Jewish News and the Israel lobby group Campaign Against Antisemitism accused her of fostering hostility towards Jews.’
“Abusalama’s story is reminiscent of what happened last year to David Miller, a professor at Bristol University. Miller was fired from his job despite the fact that he was cleared of all accusations following two independent investigations commissioned by his university.
“’The Israel lobby appears to be readying for a campaign to root out left-wing academics in the UK critical of Israel’s continuing oppression of the Palestinian people – echoing its efforts against the previous leader of Britain’s Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn,’ British journalist Jonathan Cook wrote in a recent article.
“’With their new war on academia – assisted by a right-wing government – they may be able to inflict as much damage on academic support for Palestinians as they did political support,’ Cook wrote.”
Mind you, the sin itself isn’t the problem – just the bad PR it generates.
As usual the ADL and its ilk ignore the elephant in the room. They care only about the image of Israel and not the sickening systemic rot that has taken hold of the bell nitre Apartheid nation.
Daily violations or human rights en masse and violations of law, the complete moral bankruptcy, murder, ethnic cleansing, land theft, resource theft, financial malpractices, dispossession, assassinations, evictions, demolitions, poisoned wells, destroyed farms, brutal interrogations, torture, midnight raids, arrests and deliberate maiming of children, indefinite detentions without charge, etc. etc.
They care nothing for the victims or these heinous acts of state sponsored terror on a daily basis targeting one and only one ethnic group under full Israeli control. They care nothing of the horror being carried out in the name of the state of Israel and by extension the Jews. No. They care only about Israel’s image and how it plays in the US media, which already does a spectacular jobs of ignoring it, sweeping it under the rug, filtering out the pitifully few stories that do eventually make it through, and whitewash everything else.