Weekly Briefing: Blinken tries to kick the crisis down the road

As someone who tries to see hope on the horizon, the best thing I could say this week is that the political discussion of Israel/Palestine seems headed for a crisis in our country.

Over there, Palestinian conditions are getting worse by the day. The Israeli military shoots a two-year-old boy in the head, in occupied Nabi Saleh; Mohammed al-Tamimi dies after four days of inexpressible agony for him and the entire community; and there is, as usual, zero accountability.

The EU helps Israel sweep the murder of Mohammed under the rug. And an EU delegation merely visits a family in the Old City who is being forced out of their house to make way for Jews. (“Can we come over for a cup of tea and a photo op?” Ali Abunimah writes, perfectly, on Twitter).

Israeli army house demolitions go on by the 100s so as to terrorize a subject people. A Palestinian man finishes his 37-year sentence in an Israeli prison on political charges of terrorism (during which time he has published novels and plays, and developed bone cancer), and his prison sentence is arbitrarily extended because a Palestinian politician smuggled a cell phone to him, and the politician is then also thrown in prison! All for being Palestinian.

Then consider the American political establishment’s response to all of this. Liberal Zionists issue a perfunctory statement of outrage on Mohammed al Tamimi’s murder— “devastating and awful…No parents should have to grieve for their child.”

And then it’s right back to promoting the fantasy of a two-state solution and the insult of the Abraham Accords.

That and celebrating a great victory: expat Israeli “pro-democracy protesters” got a Netanyahu government minister to be shunned by the Jewish Federations in Washington in protest of the Netanyahu government’s judicial plans.

The victory came after the minister, Amichai Chikli, had made a gesture toward the pro-democracy demonstrators at the Celebrate Israel parade in New York last week that people interpreted as obscene.

As if that really matters. As if the minister’s obscenity and ostracization make any difference to the lives of the Tamimis in Nabi Saleh or the Ghaith-Sub Lahan family of Jerusalem.

It’s only worse among centrist Zionists. They gang up on Fatima Mohammed for daring to speak of the ongoing Nakba against Palestinians at her CUNY Law School graduation last month. She is threatening Jewish students with “hate speech,” as Rep. Josh Gottheimer put it.

This discourse is so far removed from reality — a reality that is documented with greater force every day by our site and many others — that it just can’t last. Even the Secretary of State acknowledges it. “We are genuinely living through an inflection point, a point that comes around every six or seven generations,” Antony Blinken said this week.

Blinken was speaking at the right-wing Zionist group AIPAC. The Biden administration is kissing up to the Israel lobby now when it needs it most, in anticipation of the 2024 election. Trying to paper over the differences for one more election cycle.

So the government doesn’t care that Mohammed al-Tamimi is dead. But the people do. We are sharing Mohammed’s story and portraits, we are mourning his death, we are doing the hard work of facing the political conditions that produced his murder. And even the Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Policy cannot blind themselves to the nullity of the two-state solution.

The official discourse and the people’s discourse could not be further apart, inside the Democratic Party in the United States. So let us have that crisis!