It’s been a tough week, and not just the heat. Anti-Palestinianism continues to be a respectable prejudice in the United States.
Donna Edwards was defeated in her effort to regain her seat in Maryland by an unexperienced rival for the Democratic nomination who the rightwing Israel lobby group AIPAC spent $6 million on. Afterward, AIPAC’s spinoff, the Democratic Majority for Israel, bragged about all the “candidates of color” they are helping to elect to stop “anti-Israel” candidates in the Democratic Party.
What was Donna Edwards’s crime? AIPAC said she is a “radical”. Evidently: she visited Gaza after an Israeli onslaught and expressed sympathy with the Palestinian plight. “She voted ‘present’ on a resolution recognizing Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ and ‘present’ on a bill to enhance security cooperation between Israel and the United States,” Michael Arria reported.
Joe Biden has of course worked to maintain the anti-Palestinian creed inside the Democratic Party. The entire purpose of his recent visit to Israel was signing on to the Trump-Netanyahu initiative to normalize relations with Arab monarchies and crush Palestinian aspirations for any sort of political rights. Biden won’t even reopen the Jerusalem consulate Trump closed, in deference to the Israeli government.
Biden did roll out “long overdue” 4G connectivity for Palestinians under occupation. Doaa Alremeili wrote sarcastically about that offering from Gaza:
Mr. President, the 4G sounds terrific. It will allow me to see Jerusalem in full HD, and I’ll be able to watch more livestreams and download more pictures from places I’ll never go to. Maybe Palestinian mothers calling their kids in prison can now switch to video chat.
The Democratic establishment’s great fear is that BDS will catch on for progressive politicians as the necessary response to apartheid. The party leaders are fighting a war for Israel’s legitimacy, even as Israel itself does all it can to show that it is not a democracy.
This week the country’s Supreme Court said it was legal to revoke the citizenship of individuals charged with “breach of loyalty” to the state. This law will be directed only at Palestinian citizens of the state, of course. The court “acknowledged in the ruling that no such law exists in any other country in the world,” as Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said.
“Remember when the Supreme Court stripped Tim McVeigh of citizenship?” our publisher Scott Roth wrote acidly in reference to the Oklahoma City bomber. “Didn’t think so.”
And Mariam Barghouti continues to follow the case of the 20-year-old Palestinian prisoner Ahmad Manasra held in solitary confinement in Israel despite the fact that his mental health is deteriorating. Manasra has been imprisoned for nearly seven years since he was accused of participating in an attempted attack in an Israeli settlement. According to Amnesty International, Manasra has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, suffers from psychotic delusions, and is “severely depressed with suicidal thoughts.”
The pity is that so many Americans continue to believe that Israel is a miraculous democracy. That is the line that the Israel lobby was holding in Maryland this week. And yes, my people, Jews, play a special role in the promotion of Zionism as a liberation movement. Read Liz Rose’s savage essay on her own teenage indoctrination, the replacement of her actual home country, “Russia Ukraine,” with the dream of moving to Israel.
