Weekly Briefing: Leaders hang on to ‘two-state solution’ to blind themselves to ‘unceasing Israeli oppression’

The 2024 presidential plot thickened this week, and the politics of Israel just gets more tricky.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced this week on Twitter. He’s running to Trump’s right on Israel. Ron DeSantis has a foreign policy portfolio of one country– according to Haaretz!

“DeSantis visited Israel three times as a member of Congress and once as governor (the sum total of his official foreign visits, as reported by The New York Times).”

On his last trip to the land of Jewish supremacy, just a month ago, DeSantis had dinner with Miriam Adelson, a shot across the bow of Trump, who relied on the Adelson war chests to win his victory in 2016– following which he made one gift after another to Israel.

Pushing Israel is a two-cushion shot for DeSantis. Democrats are under pressure from their own base to back away from Israel, and the governor wants to speed that process so as to peel off pro-Israel donors and voters.

The progressive base of the Democratic Party is souring on Israel for good reasons — the neverending government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the neverending atrocities against Palestinians. And the base wants to know when the politicians will stand up for Palestine. It’s “Time to turn U.S. Democrats’ affinity for Palestine into policy,” Ramzy Baroud writes at the Eurasia Review. He’s hopeful: “The Democratic Party as a whole has shifted allegiances from Israel to Palestine” in a generational manner, and even Joe Biden notices.

Indeed, numerous organizations and countless individuals are working on a daily basis to create a link between affinity and policy.

One of the most influential of those organizations is Human Rights Watch, which two years ago applied the “apartheid” label to Israel. That decision was highly intentional, Omar Shakir said in an interview on our site this week: “We… felt that it could help to normalize and advance the conversation.”

Now everyone knows it’s apartheid. “Many just didn’t feel it was okay to say it. Our report was in some ways a permission slip of a sort for people who were worried about the reaction.”

Just what Rashida Tlaib says when she uses the word apartheid at the Capitol– Human Rights Watch says so!

Shakir’s former boss Ken Roth did his part to pressure Democrats in an article in Deutsche Welle this week urging leaders to stop blinding themselves to apartheid with talk of a two-state solution. There is no peace process, there is just one state, Roth said.

Indeed, the main people still invoking the two-state solution seem to be Western officials desperately trying to avoid coming to terms with the unceasing nature of Israeli oppression.

So DeSantis doubles down on dream castle Israel, as the Democratic Party faces growing calls on it to cut the funding. The center is the Israel lobby, and it’s still holding but getting more desperate by the second.

Will the center hold through 2024? Sadly, I report, Yes.