This is truly crazy. The Biden administration says it is committed to the two state solution and opposed to Israeli settlements. Then late Friday night, vice president Kamala Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, bragged about celebrating Passover “with our hardworking staff by holding a Seder at the Vice President’s Residence,” and he tweeted a photo that showed– settlement wine, from the illegal settlement of Psagot near Ramallah.
You can see the bottle from the Psagot vineyard right in front of the vice president in the photo. What a joke.
Folks on twitter began sharing the image widely, and the senior adviser for communications to the vice president, Herbie Ziskend tweeted last night:
The wine served at the Seder was in no way intended to be an expression of policy.
I.e., our policy in the Middle East means nothing to our officials, we just support Israel no matter what it does. And all the claims that we can’t push the Israeli government because there is such a fragile centrist coalition — are all bullshit, because the real policy is, We never push the government because there is a powerful Israel lobby in the United States.
Put another way, who is on Kamala Harris’s staff that is buying wine from the occupied territories? Who even knows to go buy Israeli wine? Someone has that job!
And meanwhile, the liberal Zionists tell us that they are urging the Biden administration to take steps to preserve the two-state solution, but they’re not going to pressure the Biden administration or the Israeli government– no, you just keep giving them $4 billion a year and buy wine from apartheid settlements and claim you’re taking little steps to just keep hope alive for the occupied Palestinians, who’ve had no rights for 74 years of the Zionist miracle.
Scott Roth writes of the picture, “Best BDS advert in a long time.” True. Nothing will change the Israeli government and nothing will change the American government short of an activist human rights movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
Speaking of wine, Zionism defined:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-farm-terror-palestinian-vineyard-annihilated-with-chainsaws-1.6115888?utm_term=20180524-18%3A53&utm_campaign=Gideon+Levy&utm_medium=email&writerAlerts=true&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_content=www.haaretz.com%2Fisrael-news%2F1.6115888
“A Palestinian Vineyard Annihilated With Chainsaws, With a Chilling Message in Hebrew. Vandals slashed hundreds of mature grape plants near Hebron, & the odds that the culprits will be caught are slim.” By Gideon Levy & Alex Levac. May 24/18 – Haaretz.
EXCERPT:
“The grapes are shriveled. The vineyard is dead. Reduced to a large, dried-out, yellowing stain in the heart of the verdant region along Highway 60 where the road runs past the town of Halhoul, north of Hebron. The ‘yellow wind’ that David Grossman wrote about 30 years ago is a dying vineyard here. Two plots of land, with hundreds of vines that were slashed, their stems & shoots sawed off – and within a week everything here had withered & died.
“This is a particularly horrible sight because all the damage was wrought by the hand of man. A wicked, loathsome hand that hates not only Arabs but despises the land itself. In fact, we can assume that it wasn’t just one individual who raided & destroyed this vineyard late Tuesday night last week. To saw off that many plants in such a short time requires a few pairs of nasty hands. And someone also had to smear the threatening words in Hebrew on a rock: ‘We will reach everywhere.’ All before first light illuminated the dark deed.
“When dawn broke, the owner of the vineyard, Dr. Haitham Jahshan, a hematologist, arrived & couldn’t believe his eyes. His vines had been ravaged. First he saw one sawed trunk, then another & another – a sea of butchered vines, whose grapes were grown to be eaten, not for wine – until the full scale of the calamity hit home.”
And “Psagot” is not just any wine producer based in the settlements. It is a producer with a very right-wing ideological commitment and close to associations like NGO Monitor. Psagot named a wine production “Pompeo” in honour of the American Secretary of State who recognised the legality of the settlements. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-maker-of-west-bank-pompeo-wine-emphasizing-products-legitimacy-is-key/
“The wine served at the Seder was in no way intended to be an expression of policy.” Tough to walk back. Actions speak louder than words.
At at a time that the U.S. economy is suffering, at a time when America’s Jews are under attack from the twin terrors of anti-Semitism and assimilation, and at a time when the sensitivity of black-Indian- Americans toward Israel’s murderous apartheid practices has waned and must be heightened, the appearance of Settlement wine on a Vice President’s seder table is a shonda!
And at a time when Manischewitz Concord Grape (never forget that its name honors and memorializes the most important shot ever heard ’round the world!) needs a committed public-private partnership to protect and strengthen the endurance of that brand, we must condemn this anti-American/pro-apartheid act and demand a Congressional investigation (by both Houses!) to ensure that the morons behind this desecration are named and punished.
What’s the problem? They sent someone to buy kosher wine and he came back with wine made “in Israel” (per the Psagot website). Israel has long given up the distinction between the West Bank and the Green Line; it’s all “Israel.” And the Harris-Emhoff house fell victim to this false labelling by the Psagot winery and the kosher section at their local supermarket. The Harris-Emhoff household messed up; they won’t make the same mistake again.