Liberal pro-Israel conference in DC featured hawkish statements on Syria. Susan Rice said Trump should have been “demonstrably unpredictable” with Assad to gain advantage. “For all our handwringing about President Trump’s temperament, he could have played those concerns to our advantage.” While Nancy Soderberg, a Clinton security aide running for Congress, said Trump had handed Syria to Iran “on a silver platter.”
The shame of the Jewish establishment: Rep. Jan Schakowsky says she never used the word “occupation” before last year, while Jeremy Burton of a leading Boston Jewish organization brags of a policy of refusing to debate Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), even with other Jews. These people have their heads in the sand (or worse) and young Jews want none of it.
Alan Dershowitz has become an advocate for Donald Trump on the airwaves at a time when the president has few legal chums. And Israel’s interests are close behind. Dersh is a conduit to Israeli PM Netanyahu, and the EPA set up a research agreement with an Israeli water company of which Dersh is a board member– at the prodding of Trump donor Sheldon Adelson.
Liberal Zionist Michael Koplow has condemned Israeli actions at the Gaza fence but called on the left for “balance” in acknowledging the terrorist threat to Israel in the protests. Robert Herbst says the power differential is so unbalanced in Palestine that it is unfair to state “that 30,000 unarmed protesters cannot march and expect to return home alive and uninjured unless they are prepared to take on the impossible task of identifying and removing the few ‘troublemakers’ who may also show up.”
I got into Gaza six months after the big massacre of 2008-2009, with Code Pink.…
The silence of Jeffrey Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin over Israel’s indefensible slaughter of Palestinian protesters on March 30, and the outspokenness against the atrocity of Bernie Sanders, David Rothkopf, Ayman Mohyeldin, and Chris Hayes, shows that the center has at last shifted in US discourse. American Jews have had it holding the bag for Israeli massacres.
Learning of 18 Palestinians killed over the Passover holiday gutted Robert Herbst. He felt shame. But when he looked around, he could only find a scant few voices also condemning the shooting of the demonstrators at the border with Gaza. The indifference struct him as an act that could be worse than pulling the trigger on one of those sniper guns.
The battle over Israel that has roiled the Labour Party in Britain is going to come to the Democratic Party here before long. And Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss of the New York Times are all set for it, smearing critics of Israel as anti-Semites. Stephens goes after John Mearsheimer, Weiss after Jean-Luc Melenchon. The Times is a vital political ally for Israel.
Adam Bulmash sees modern day Pharaohs all around him. In ICE deportations, contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, the coming border wall with Mexico and even the White House. But it’s not all bleak, there are sign of Moses huddling people for their liberation from the DREAMers to Standing Rock.
Chuck Schumer, Ron Lauder, and David Harris all seem terrified of what young non-Zionist Jews will do to undermine the work of the Israel lobby. They characterize the young as an existential threat to Israel. These young Jews are exercising the same generational power as the high school gun-control movement and #MeToo movement against sexual harassment.