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.
As several liberal Democratic politicians finally object to Israel’s shooting of unarmed Palestinians at the Gaza fence, a report in al-Monitor suggests that Israel targeted Palestinian journalists last week because it was concerned by the international criticism of its actions.
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.
The killing by an Israeli sniper of Palestinian journalist Yaser Murtaja on April 7 at the Gaza fence is drawing mounting international outrage. The New York Times editorialized sternly about Murtaja’s killing, the General Federation of Arab Journalists wants the case prosecuted at the International Criminal Court, and Michael Moore calls on documentary filmmakers around the world to speak out against the crime.
“Nobody wants a big war,” says Amb. Ryan Crocker, but the old foreign policy duopoly of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists certainly wants some kind of war with Iran in Syria. In tones reminiscent of the Iraq war runup, liberals call for bombing in the NYT op-ed page, while neocons call for joint operations with Israel that would bring “hellish consequences” to Syria’s Assad, as well as to Russia and Iran.
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.
Democratic Congresspeople Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff and 9 others met with Israeli leaders even as Israel announced it was sending “dozens of snipers” to Gaza border. Four days later they shot hundreds of Palestinians, killing 17. Pelosi and Schiff and the others have issued no criticism of the shootings. Did they give Netanyahu the OK?
Another datapoint in the discourse’s march to the left. On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera says that the Israel Palestine conflict is the “original sin” of the United States, from which “a lot of our problems stem”. And his big regret is that he did not back the oppressed Palestinians during the Second Intifada.
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.
A New York Times editorial expresses unconscious racist privilege and prissy, selective moral outrage when it says the West “should unite in fury” against Russia’s alleged targeting of individuals in a “peaceful English town”– when such concern is never conveyed for the targets of US drone attacks and Israeli snipers in peaceful Muslim villages.