A new report from Americans for Justice in Palestine Action documents that the “rightwing Zionist” lobby spent $70 million in 2022 to knock off critics of Israel, and warn politicians “to not object to Israel’s crimes.” That big money explains why Joe Biden and Kirsten Gillibrand gush over Benjamin Netanyahu in the runup to 2024 reelection campaigns.
The news from Palestine grows more worrying by the day, and liberal Zionists are in crisis. The bitter fruits of “Jewish democracy” are plainer than ever. The challenge is to recognize that there will never be safety until all people in the land feel secure.
Danny Ayalon, a vigorous advocate for Israel and former ambassador to the U.S., says he is worried about the growth of Jewish anti-Zionism in the United States.
One positive result of Israel’s rightward shift is that the U.S. discourse of the two-state solution appears to be cracking at last.
Just when you thought U.S. policy toward Palestinians could go no lower, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the region last week and offered “meaningless and empty gestures” about the violence being delivered to Palestinians while expressing great concern over the Netanyahu government’s plans to gut the powers of the Israeli judiciary.
Steve Inskeep of NPR today described Neve Yaakov, the scene of an attack last week, as being in Israel. While Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street called it a Jerusalem “neighborhood.” It is in fact an exclusively Jewish settlement in occupied Jerusalem, built on confiscated Palestinian lands, and a source of affliction for Palestinians.
Violence is erupting in Palestine now, and the bias with which it is being described in the west is as predictable as it is enraging.
When Israel killed ten Palestinians in Jenin in what is being called a “massacre,” those deaths were not a major story in the American press. But a day later, when a Palestinian gunman killed six Israeli settlers and a Ukrainian national in the illegal settlement of Neve Yaakov in occupied East Jerusalem, that was big news in the west– with outlets saying a terrorist had targeted a synagogue as if this is a religious conflict, and not militant apartheid.
Yesterday in a shocking exchange at the State Department, the spokesman for Biden’s foreign policy team refused to describe Palestinians in Jenin and other areas of the West Bank as living under military occupation by Israel.
The use of the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians just keeps growing. David Rothkopf, the former editor of Foreign Policy, baldly states that Israel is an apartheid state in a piece published by Haaretz last weekend.
The “demise” of the two state solution has made it untenable not to talk about Israeli apartheid, even inside the Washington establishment.
Ken Roth insisted on bearing witness to Palestinian human rights abuses, and his rejection and reinstatement at Harvard represent a watershed moment in the politics of Israel in the United States.