Weekly Briefing: Biden is out-Israel-ing Trump for good political reasons

The news from Washington is that Joe Biden outdid Donald Trump’s pro-Israel moves by giving Benjamin Netanyahu “a massive PR win” and waiving the visa requirement for Israelis traveling to this country.

Biden overrode Democratic and progressive pressure not to give Netanyahu that prize. “Even the Trump administration thought Israel’s policies were too draconian to warrant a waiver,” Michael Arria wrote for us. “The mainstream media often frames Biden’s relationship with the Israeli Prime Minister as frayed, but what else could he ask for?”

Yes, and why did Biden bend over backwards? Because Biden is nothing if not a student of U.S. politics, and he knows that being critical of Israel helped Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush out of the White House after just one term; so Biden is determined not to be out-Israel’d by Republicans.

Note what Mitchell Plitnick did this week about the Israel lobby’s financial support for oft-embattled Senator Bob Menendez. The last time he got indicted, the New Jersey Democrat got big help from “Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Haim Saban, Mortimer Zuckerman and Seth Klarman, all major pro-Israel donors, but, crucially, representative of donors to both Democrats and Republicans.” Emphasis mine.

Exactly — Biden knows that Klarman and Saban represent many other pro-Israel donors who will go either way so long as the candidate is saying the right thing about Israel; and he sure doesn’t want the Democratic Party to lose those donors, because they’re crucial to Democratic hopes in 2024.

Some things really are about the money. I’m grateful to Anna Rajagopal, a Jewish organizer who has been fired twice by Zionist institutions, lately Hebrew Union College, for telling our readers that pro-Israel donors are the hidden stakeholders at these outfits:

The reality of Jewish institutional life is a sad one—it is a world heavily monitored by Zionist stakeholders… These interests are usually financial, and they’re usually quiet, except when the occasional decision is made public. In such a case, Jewish institutional life answers to the people giving them money. As they did when I was fired.

Zionism is deeply rooted inside the American Jewish community, and so I’m grateful to Mohammed El-Kurd for his essay about the “discursive crisis” facing anyone who dares to criticize the Jewish state as Jewish.

The oppressors of Palestinians openly identify themselves, over and over, as Jews acting Jewishly. But El-Kurd is not allowed to say so lest he get labeled antisemitic. Here’s some of his essay:

We lived under the rule of the self-proclaimed “Jewish State.”… The army declared itself a Jewish army and marched under what it has called a Jewish flag… [But] We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision…. As Palestinians, we understand from a young age that the semantic violence we practice with our words dwarfs the decades of systemic and material violence enacted against us by the self-proclaimed Jewish State. A drone is one thing, but a trope—a trope is unacceptable.

Brilliant. We face a similar discursive crisis here. So much of the Israel lobby’s work is Jewish organizations and individuals acting out of what they describe as Jewish values. And they are effectively controlling Democratic Party policy on Israel and Palestine. But identify that influential group as Jewish and you’re in hot water. So I declare: The lobby is a Jewish institution, though many Jews are fighting back.

Thanks for reading,

Phil Weiss