Israel is holding its fifth election in three years and there’s a growing fear among…
PBS News Hour irresponsibly suggests that Rep. Ilhan Omar is antisemitic for her criticism of pro-Israel campaign spending by the Israel lobby. And the same broadcast covers “dark money” in this year’s campaign without mentioning $27 million AIPAC just dropped in the latest cycle. Go figure.
Ted Deutch debuted as CEO of the American Jewish Committee in a 45-minute video that erased Palestine. The former Congressman repeatedly praised the “miracle” of “our state of Israel” but did not once refer to Palestine or Palestinians. The cheerful CEO epitomized anti-Palestinianism in the Jewish leadership. He was eager to talk about any place and people but Palestinians: Uzbekistan, Russia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus, Haiti, Buenos Aires, Paris, the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf countries, Europe, Boca Raton, the African American, Hispanic and Asian American communities. All got name-checked by Ted Deutch. Never Palestinians.
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Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League is calling for a battle inside Jewish religious denominations against anti-Zionist Jews. Greenblatt spoke to the World Zionist Organization conference in August in Basel, Switzerland, and said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, but even some Jews “traffic” in it and that “threat” must be taken on by religious groups and the Democratic Party too.
A new Trump book by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times is frank about a story the paper was afraid to tell, Trump sold his policy on Israel to his biggest donor the late Sheldon Adelson, whose only concern was Israel. Trump moved the embassy and ended the Iran deal “for Israel,” as Adelson put it, but that corruption was never a scandal for the mainstream press.
Last week the U.S. State Department called for an investigation into the death of a 7-year-old Palestinian boy after an Israeli raid in his village. This week State walked the demand back, in its effort to demand zero accountability from Israel for the deaths of dozens of Palestinian children in the occupied territories this year.
Hosam Salem, a Palestinian photographer who freelanced for the New York Times for four years in Gaza, reports that the newspaper dismissed him after a pro-Israel organization alerted the paper to Facebook posts in which he had expressed support for Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation.
Yom Kippur begins tonight and I reflect that the most prominent moral voice in the extended American Jewish community is today Rashida Tlaib. Young Jews look to her for the appropriate response to apartheid. She inspires us. At a time when virtually every establishment Jewish organization has abandoned any pretense to universal moral values, Tlaib has led the way.