The Israel lobby gained “superabundant” powers through what George Washington warned was a constitutional flaw, “passionate attachment” to another country. And it has “killed” US politicians who wanted to be realistic or national interest-oriented, Ian Lustick explains.

The Israeli Jewish right wants to keep 620,000 settlers in West Bank– and the left wants to keep 585,000 there, says legislator Yair Golan. So there is no real opposition to the settlement project, or the one-state reality, even though it threatens “the Zionist dream.”

Israeli Greens Party leader Stav Shaffir describes the demoralization of the Jewish left in Israel. It has lost “foundations of democratic infrastructure,” media and parliament, and so is afraid to talk about its issues and seeks to flatter the right wing settler government.  

Liberal Zionists who now call on Democrats to stop Israeli annexation should have applied sanctions pressure years ago. But they feared the left’s call for democracy and sided with rightwing Israel supporters on lavishing aid to the Israeli occupation. No wonder Israeli leaders have always ignored liberal Zionists.

American liberal Zionists are panicked over the possibility of annexation of the West Bank under a governing agreement between Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu. Please Nancy Pelosi call Benny Gantz on the phone, Tal Shalev urges the Blue White leader on a J Street phone call.

“Some of the most evil name-calling and epithet-slinging [against Israel] that takes place is sadly within our own Jewish community,” Laura Shaw Frank of the American Jewish Committee says. Her accusation echoes charges the AJC has made against Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, but “evil” sure ups the ante.

The American Jewish Committee decided that it must support Israel over President Bush in 1991 over settlements, even though many of its officials privately supported Bush, because the AJC had a “primary responsibility” to back the “collective will” of the Jewish people, which Israel represents, Steve Bayme, an AJC official says in a Zoom webinar.

The imperative of fighting coronavirus with aggressive public health measures presents Israel with a choice — let Palestine go to hell, or take full control over the health system — and thereby exposes the political truth of Israeli governance. There is one apartheid state, with a legally privileged racial group and a second- and third-class subject population.

Palestinians are players in Israeli politics in a new way, Yael Patir of J Street says. Three-fourths of Israeli Jewish centrist voters supported a possible government that would have had Palestinian political backing, and that is “huge,” she says, seeing a silver lining in the collapse of the effort to remove Netanyahu.

Mondoweiss community, we have some bittersweet organizational news to share — Tova Perlmutter, our wonderful Executive Director, will be moving on later this spring. Tova has been central in our development over the past five years, helping to move Mondoweiss from a fledgling news operation of four staff people into a mature, stable organization with a core staff of ten. As we prepare for her exit at the end of June we are launching a search for a Director of Development to continue our impressive growth.