Chuck Schumer once called for Gaza to be “strangled.” Now the NY senator is silent as progressive Democrats decry Israeli onslaught and Schumer’s potential adversary in 2022, AOC, brands Israel an “apartheid state.” The other leading pro-Israel Democratic senator, Robert Menendez, has called for accountability for Israeli attacks on civilian targets and media outlets in Gaza. Even Paris Hilton is calling Israeli attack a “genocide.”
An Israel lobby group associated with the Democratic Party allows rightwing Israeli Yossi Klein Halevi to tell US Jews to marshal opposition to Biden on the Iran deal. “Many Israelis still harbor deep resentment toward the American Jewish community for not opposing more vigorously the Iran deal in 2015… Will the Jewish community take an active role in trying to convey to Biden that returning to the 2015 deal even with cosmetic changes would be seen by Israelis as a betrayal?”
Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen, two Republican neoconservatives, endorse Joe Biden saying he will foster bipartisan support for Israel. And don’t worry about the Iran deal. Biden can’t easily return to the deal, Edelman assures a “Jews for Biden” event, because Trump has now set the terms and Dem leaders including Schumer and Menendez don’t like the deal.
Columbia undergraduates voted by 61 to 27 percent to divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid, and school president Lee Bollinger dismissed the vote as no guide for investment. Bollinger’s statement reminds Rashid Khalidi of what Trump said during the first debate, when he refused to say that he would respect the result of a democratic vote on November 3, thereby confirming his contempt for the democratic process.
Trump’s decision to assassinate a leading Iranian official in Iraq yesterday has contributed to the split inside the Israel lobby in the United States. Republican Israel supporters celebrate the killing, and see it as destroying the last hope of saving the Iran deal. Many Democratic supporters of Israel are critical of the decision.
Conservative donors have skewed the American Jewish establishment to support the occupation, said many speakers at the J Street conference. The liberal Zionist organization is mounting a power struggle inside the Jewish community. But those efforts do not include sanctions in opposition to the occupation.
Donald Trump’s decision to abandon former Kurdish allies in Syria has been a shock to Israel and its US lobby. Israel thought it had a very special place in Trump’s worldview, but the withdrawal appears to gives Iran far more leeway. We are on our own against Iran, several Israeli officials and Israel supporters conclude fearfully. War is more likely than ever, one expert concludes.
A liberal Zionist group promotes the view of Israeli professor Jonathan Rynhold that progressive Democrats will support Israel once Netanyahu is gone. His argument would be more persuasive if he even mentioned the human rights violations and Gaza massacres that are at the heart of progressive disaffection with Israel.
Trump’s claim that Jews who vote Democratic are “disloyal” is ugly and dangerous, but he is only echoing Zionist indoctrination: that American Jews must give unconditional support to Israel. New York Times columnist Bari Weiss praises the idea that “Jews should be loyal to Israel,” while Trump aide Elliott Abrams says Jews, except in Israel, “must stand apart from the nation in which they live.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is scheduled to announce his support for a new resolution that targets the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement today. “I have long believed that the BDS effort is a profoundly biased campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel, and I look forward to Congress passing the resolution with overwhelming bipartisan support,” Schumer told the online publication Jewish Insider.