Two Israeli writers explain the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh as the price of Israel’s clamping down on terrorism originating in the West Bank, with no consideration of the Palestinian experience under an apartheid army. Yet these talking points are echoed by Biden administration officials. Even as the Lapid government moves forward on more Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, colonies that the Netanyahu government didn’t approve.
The Gaza attack has heightened Israel’s rightwing political tilt as it approaches its next election. “The only place where you can see real energy is on the far right among young people,” Chemi Shalev says of the surprising support among the young for the fascistic racist Religious Zionism party.
‘NYT’ article about rabbinical students’ letter saying Israel practices apartheid stays safely in a traditional frame of the Jewish establishment, and not the true apostates, represented by Jewish Voice for Peace which supports the nonviolent campaign for equal rights, BDS.
Mike Pompeo is issuing alarmist claims about Iran as he considers a run for the presidency. His views are not very different from those of Yossi Alpher, who says the U.S. should have killed Khomeini in 1979 and Israel should be propping up dictatorship thru the Middle East by spying on dissidents. And a liberal Zionist organization, Americans for Peace Now, gives a platform to Alpher’s amorality.
The American Jewish community should make Peter Beinart a “pariah” just like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar; because like a Holocaust denier, he has questioned a “fundament of Jewish history,” the fact that 2000 years show Jews can’t be safe unless they have sovereignty and control their own destiny. So says Israeli author Daniel Gordis.
Tom Friedman’s double standard: Israel has a right to shoot demonstrators because that’s how Arab nations behave; but Iran doesn’t. Human rights groups have said Israel deliberately targeted civilians with live fire on the Gaza border though they posed no threat; but Friedman says it’s an “easy” call to defend those shootings.
American Jews who condemned Israel’s slaughter of Gaza protesters don’t understand that Judaism is now the Jewish state and it won’t survive if Palestinian refugees are allowed to return, which is why no Israeli Jews questioned the slaughter, Daniel Gordis writes, urging American Jews to stick by Israel to stay Jewish.
Palestinians in Israel are far more liberal than Jews. Nearly 90 percent say they would support a Palestinian party being part of the government, while Israeli Jews reject that idea overwhelmingly. So the one group that doesn’t buy into Zionism is the only hope to save Israel from its rightwing intolerance; and it is time that American Jews understand that reality.
The New York Times publishes Israel advocate Matti Friedman’s false claim that the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada are a repressed memory, but that’s why the left is no account. The Second Intifada as a political crossroads is a standard talking point of Israel supporters. What is repressed is the Palestinian death toll, which Friedman leaves out of his op-ed completely.