Weekly Briefing: The pro-genocide lobby is on the defensive

As Israel presses on its persecution of civilians in Gaza, the good news is that a strong movement has emerged in the United States against the genocide, and this movement is gaining respect in the American discourse.

Student protesters are the vehicle. Courageous and uncompromising young people who are calling a jaded society to its ideals and to end its support for massacring children are the most important political actors in the U.S. today. They are channeling the global outrage against Israel’s actions, even as our mainstream media rationalizes 34,000 deaths and man-made famine as the cost of global business.

The students deserve the credit for the fact that Biden cut off 2000-pound bombs for Israel’s onslaught this week, allowing that Israel was killing too many civilians.

Biden’s decision was promptly denounced by the Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party. “Tension between friends must not become an opening for enemies,” Rep. Jake Auchincloss warned in a statement.

Democratic megadonor Haim Saban sent an outraged email to Biden aides, that was reported in the mainstream: It’s a “bad…bad…bad decision on all levels. Pls reconsider.”

Saban warned Biden of the Jewish politics– Jews support Israel’s actions. “Let’s not forget that there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel, than Muslims [sic] voters that care about Hamas.”

The ADL said that Biden’s move “undermines our ally,” and Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s CEO, claimed there was a Jewish interest in continuing the slaughter.

“We are not the Jews of trembling knees. We will not flee, we will fight, we will press on and we will win, because we have no other choice,” Greenblatt said.

The outcry shows what a crisis Gaza is causing inside the Democratic Party. The ideological battle over Jewish nationalism and its victims is coming to the place that supports Israel the most, and the Israel lobby is on the defensive.

Auchincloss —who says he is from a “heavily Jewish” district and whose biggest backer is AIPAC– went on MSNBC to attack the students in the most puerile terms: “under-informed, over-privileged kids on elite campuses.” (He went to Harvard himself.)

While Greenblatt traveled to the Harvard campus to meet with the interim Harvard president to get him to do more against the “vicious hate coming out of anti-Israel protests on college campuses.” Greenblatt passed a pro-Palestinian encampment to do so.

Two weeks ago Rep. Ilhan Omar got in trouble for saying there were anti-genocide and pro-genocide voices in the Jewish community, but she was right. The Jewish establishment is the main supporter of the Israeli slaughter in the Democratic Party. While leftwing Jewish groups play a prominent part in the demonstrations against the butchers.

As Greenblatt would surely agree, critics of Israel now dominate the progressive discourse. Two schools canceled commencement speeches by Linda Thomas Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the UN. Harvard and Princeton progressive alumni are calling for divestment.

NPR’s show On the Media respectfully covered the demonstrators’ organizing skills this week, while an NPR reporter in Boston also credited the protesters for their sophistication. “MIT students were unwavering in their demand for MIT to cut ties with Israel’s Defense Ministry, which has provided the school with over $11 million in research funding since 2015, with $4m spent, according to financial data published by students + faculty.”

The New York Times did a big story this week exposing the fact that a pro-Israel foundation that has given $86 million to Columbia University paused its donations over pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The article directly linked the school’s intolerant shutting down of the pro-Palestinian groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace with the foundation’s demands to the Columbia president — “a step that heartened foundation officials.”

The Times article named other university funders who support the slaughter of Palestinians.

[O]ther leading donors have warned universities that future gifts are at risk. Last week, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht eviscerated Brown University for pledging to consider divestment from Israel, and suspended donations to the school. Marc Rowan, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, led a donor uprising at the University of Pennsylvania last year, and Robert K. Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots, recently put future contributions to Columbia on hold.

The Times is all but identifying the Israel lobby, the rightwing Jewish community, so active inside the Democratic Party. This is why Biden became genocide Joe, after all; he doesn’t want to lose Haim Saban and Jonathan Greenblatt.

We must take this discussion further. We must highlight the anti-Palestinian racism in the mainstream. “Your paper regularly prints racist stereotypes and even genocidal comments about guilty Gazan children And you act like these attitudes aren’t there, as if they don’t permeate the pro-Israel side,” our commenter Donald Johnson wrote to the New York Times this week.  

“Anti-Palestinian racism is the dominant form of bigotry on this issue,” Johnson goes on. “It determines our policy. All mainstream discussions are tainted by an unconscious assumption that Jewish feelings in the US matter more than Palestinian feelings and for that matter, Jewish feelings matter more than Palestinian lives.”  

The left is no longer preaching to the choir.

“If we want to persuade people not deeply involved, the bias has to be spelled out,” Johnson says. “Otherwise people naturally absorb the constant drumbeat in the press which is that only antisemitism exists, there is no other bigotry that matters and we all have to be super careful in every criticism we make of Israel, but any statement whatsoever can be made about Palestinians and Palestinians are called on to endorse their own ethnic cleansing if they wish to escape the antisemitism label.”