Americans Muslims for Palestine is calling on Keith Ellison to drop out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin. “We do not understand Mr. Ellison’s rationale to be speaking at an event that’s honoring a war criminal,” says AMP Regional Director Shakeel Syed.
Michael Arria is on vacation this week, and Phil Weiss is filling in on trendspotting.…
Bari Weiss says antisemites convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to back out of a Rabin memorial. AOC actually was concerned with Rabin’s human rights record. But she and her supporters now join the “three-headed dragon of modern anti-Semitism” living in Bari Weiss’s imagination. And in Weiss’s perspective of sacred Jewish victimhood, defamation and dishonesty are no vice when fighting the enemies of the Jews.
The lack of moral consistency from pro-Israel groups is hardly surprising, but you rarely see such a nice distillation within the span of just a few days.
Even now, 25 years after the assassination, the majority of the Israeli center and left cannot divest itself of the Oslo Accords and of the chimera of a two-states solution. They are, after all, sacred. They are what Oseh Shalom Bimromaiv planned. Any attempts to deviate from it is denying scripture. And so the devotees of Oslo and Rabin become the equivalent of monks, dead to the world and singing the sacred hymns. The divine plan has long lost any connection to reality, but anyone challenging it quickly becomes anathema.
A landmark event in the politics of Palestine has just taken place: Congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York withdrew from a scheduled memorial to Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who was slain in 1995 by a rightwing extremist, after critics pointed out Rabin’s human rights record. Americans for Peace Now is sponsoring the Oct. event, with host Mandy Patinkin saying, “We would have peace today had he been with us all this time, I am absolutely certain of that.”
Rep. Betty McCollum has introduced legislation that condemns the Israeli government’s proposed annexation of the West Bank and blocks any U.S. aid that would potentially be used to fund it. The Israeli Annexation Non-Recognition Act is endorsed by over 30 progressive organizations and is cosponsored by six other Democratic House members.
Everything still looks solid for the Israel lobby at the top of the Democratic Party this year. But if we view the party as a pyramid, with its apex being the presidential ticket, its middle layer being its elected officials, and its bottom layer being its base, then the foundations of the Israel lobby’s hold on the party is quite evidently crumbling.
The beltway consensus on military aid to Israel is finally beginning to face a legitimate political challenge. There’s obviously still a long way to go, but it’s telling that so many Democrats now feel they can safely challenge aid without facing disastrous political consequences.
1000 alumni of J Street U fault the parent org’s efforts to stop Israeli expansion as toothless. “Time and again, J Street has organized letters of condemnation, Jewish communal pressure, and congressional measures that fall short of creating material consequences for Israel’s actions.”