Most of the big Democratic donors featured in a NYT article on presidential hopefuls raising money in NY are pro-Israel. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren need $30 million for a campaign war chest, so they are unlikely to say anything critical of Israel. Both progressives have demonstrated as much during the Gaza massacre.
“There is no Judaism without Zionism,” Yossi Klein Halevi states flatly in his new book; and Jewish Voice for Peace and anti-Zionists are not part of the Jewish community. This intolerance has not stopped many liberal Zionists from embracing him, including J Street, Jodi Rudoren, David Gregory and Cokie Roberts.
Netanyahu’s famous lecture to President Obama in 2011, warning him not to have “illusions” about making peace, worked. It galvanized the leadership of the American Jewish community against the president, former Obama aide Ben Rhodes says in his new book. After the lecture, Rhodes was “given a list of leading Jewish donors to call, to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.”’
“I am an Islamophobe,” former Israeli government official Daniel Seaman confesses on I24 news. Seaman is considered a prominent and respected guest in Israeli mainstream media, despite his racist, bullying, bigoted conduct – or is it because of it?
Comedian Roseanne Barr lost her show for racism in a tweet this week, but she has a long history of hateful speech about Palestinians and Muslims, and of likening supporters of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to Nazis. In one case she impersonated Adolf Hitler in a photo meant as a joke, putting human-shaped cookies in an oven, and said the victims were Palestinians. She did not suffer career-wise for those comments.
Trump once laughed at the efforts of the Republican Jewish Coalition, rightwing supporters of the Netanyahu government, to “control” politicians. But 2-and-1/2 years later the group has emerged as a hub for fundraising for Trump and for setting his foreign policy agenda on Middle East issues. A former board member, Elliott Broidy, shows up in the Mueller probe, working with Israel lobby groups and the UAE to punish Hamas.
Tom Friedman of the Times says that Palestinians in Gaza are responsible for their own suffering because they have not marched to demand a two-state solution that preserves the Jewish state. He’s been giving Palestinians that advice for 7 years and ignoring their suffering under blockade.
A new documentary film, “Israelism,” nearing completion and scheduled for release over the next year, chronicles the changing attitudes among young American Jews toward Israel, in which they at last engage their liberal values with an intolerant country.
The NYT has no one to the left of Michelle Goldberg on Israel and meantime it publishes Shmuel Rosner saying that Israel’s shooting of civilians at the Gaza border was good for Palestinians, because the killings make Israel feel more secure. You really would have to publish a defense of suicide bombing to balance this. Rosner should just wear a sheet over his head and burn crosses.