It was a terrible week in the occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli soldiers cut down Palestinian youths day after day in an effort to suppress Palestinian resistance, and Palestinians continued to fight back, lately killing an Israeli occupying soldier.
It’s important to reflect that this is political violence. The Lapid government is fighting for its life right now, with an election two weeks away. The Israeli violence is part of the government’s effort to convince Israeli Jewish voters that Lapid can be as tough as Netanyahu, even though Lapid was just a journalist when he was in uniform.
And the Palestinian violence is also political: “the continuation of Palestinian resistance to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the illegal military occupation of Palestinian land,” as Mariam Barghouti explained at our site this week.
Palestinians recognize a political reality that the world refuses to acknowledge: that 30 years of the Oslo process have been a charade, there has never been a real plan to grant Palestinians sovereignty over even a square inch of occupied “Judea and Samaria,” Israel has had a free hand to take more land and push Palestinians off it. And if the Israeli government ever took real steps towards creating a Palestinian state, it would lose crucial portions of the Jewish parliament in an instant (as the Israel Policy Forum podcast says). No, the only movement in Israeli political life is on the far right, a surging racist party now welcome in kibbutzes.
Of course the more important political question is, What is the United States doing? And this was a dreary week indeed. The Biden administration continues to refuse to put any pressure on the Israeli government over human rights atrocities in the West Bank, surely because it is afraid to alienate any portion of the Israel lobby because that could harm the Democratic Party’s effort to hold Congress. It’s not like the liberal Zionist lobby is threatening the consensus. No, it would be a “disaster” if the issue actually became politicized in the Congress, pro-Israel Democrats say. So they celebrated the fig leaf that Lapid gave them at the U.N., he is for two states.
Readers know I’m optimistic, and I take hope from the fact that there is now an active debate in America over the dangers of Zionism. This is what frightens the Israel lobby more than anything. Joe Biden keeps declaring himself a Zionist, but progressives, including many Jews, are daring to come out as anti-Zionist because they see the consequences to Palestinians of 70 years of policies of Jewish supremacy in that land. And at this website, we are doing our utmost to show Americans the daily trauma so many experience under military occupation.
The Israel lobby can’t deal with those facts. Their answer is fantasy. Jonathan Greenblatt said recently that Palestinians should be Zionists too. “Zionism isn’t just a light for the Jewish people, it’s a liberation movement for all people…. we should find inspiration in it, and we should share it with the world.”
That is the sound of desperation. That is the sound of anti-Palestinianism. And some day the facts are going to break in on that fantasy.
