The struggle we are engaged in has never been clearer. There’s a battle inside American institutions over the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The left is now fully aware that it’s apartheid and that the issue demands attention. But the establishment is fighting to keep that truth at bay.
We saw it again and again this week.
As when Joe Biden laid down the law inside the Democratic Party. We love Israel because we share democratic values; Tom Friedman says so; and every Democrat in sight must go over there on summer vacation– at the behest of the right-wing lobby group AIPAC.
Or at Princeton, where Israel and its lobby are seeking to bar a professor from teaching a book about Israel’s military policies toward Palestinians as slanderous. Yet as Tareq Hajjaj documented from Gaza, that book, called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, merely relates the Palestinian experience, as when hundreds were maimed in protests in 2018 by Israeli snipers using such innovations as “butterfly” bullets that leave no choice but amputation.
Or when Israel’s police minister openly declared apartheid in the West Bank on Israeli TV – “Sorry Muhammad,” but my family has greater rights to drive around the West Bank than you—and even Abe Foxman demanded Netanyahu fire the minister. Because the mask slips when Israeli officials state the truth, and that sets back the claim that the U.S. and Israel have shared values.
But of course, Netanyahu doesn’t fire the minister, he just lies about Jews and Palestinians having equal freedom of movement.
And Israel’s image gets laundered, as it has been year after year, atrocity after atrocity. Because the left must never be allowed to catch a clue.
So Helen Mirren stars in a Golda Meir biopic that leaves out all the ethnic cleansing. So NPR covers Israel’s “battle for its own democracy” and quotes one Jewish Israeli after another and leaves out the word apartheid.
It’s a struggle. Struggles don’t end in a day or a year. They go on for decades. Because powerful forces of civilization are opposed – the historical drive for a Jewish state in a settler-colonial model, versus a more evolved understanding of political communities that demands equal rights regardless of ethnicity or religion or wealth.
Progressives are now firmly on the side of Palestinian equal rights– including many Jews. And we all know that the progressives will win in the end. So do Joe Biden and Abe Foxman and Tom Friedman. The truth is terrifying them.
Thanks for reading us!
Phil Weiss
The more the mask slips, the clearer the battle becomes.
The “liberal” Zionists hate when Israel’s mask slips because their mask slips too. They dread being boxed into defending the core of Zionism, ethnic “cleansing”, with a legend from 30 centuries ago. That might fly in Israel, but in civilized countries they will look insane.