Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin says that Trump is especially threatening to Jews with his “blood and soil” ethno-nationalism. He reminds her of Hitler. “The Germans thought that they could use Hitler as well. We’ll control him. He’ll get us what we want. The other stuff he’s not serious about.”
The Senate is about to consider President Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus. He is unfit for the job, given his extensive history of targeting constitutionally protected speech, of hostility towards affirmative action and civil rights, of anti-LGBTQ positions, and of lobbying for discrimination in university funding based on political viewpoints.
In a sign of growing establishment distrust of the Israel lobby group AIPAC, several writers liken it to the NRA, and the Washington Post publishes an important article by Doug Rossinow saying that the lobby originated in American Jews rallying to promote Israeli “lies” about “awful knowledge”: the massacre of more than 60 Palestinians in Qibya in the West Bank in 1953.
Pro-Israel activism gave journalist Bari Weiss quite a career. As a youth she bagged one Zionist fellowship after another, leading to opinion editing at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in her early 30s. Which is no surprise, given the Times’s employment of several pro-Israel columnists.
The nomination of Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State means that Donald Trump has adopted an interventionist foreign policy and may kill the Iran deal. Neoconservatives are exulting. While Joe Cirincione of Ploughshares, who pushed the deal, says, “It’s almost as if someone is paying Trump to do it.” That would be Trump’s biggest backer, Sheldon Adelson, who also got the embassy.
It used to be that Jews were cosmopolitan, people of the world. But now the organized community is as provincial as can be, focused on the Jewish nation of Israel. This is the deepest divide in Jewish life, between the Schumers and the Feinsteins, those who think what is good for the Jews and those who think of what is good for the world.
California Senator Kamala Harris spoke at AIPAC this year for the second year running, in an indication that she intends to cultivate elites and alienate the leftwing base for political ambition. She bragged to the Israel lobby about helping to build forests on Palestinian lands. “As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies, I went around with a [Jewish National Fund] box collecting funds to plant trees in Israel.”
Gideon Levy says that Israeli idealists dreamed of the day when Israeli soldiers would tell their society about the occupation. Then Breaking the Silence came forward, and it was crushed, with the media’s help. Israelis live in denial. “No question marks.” Only outside pressure will force them to end the tyranny over half the population, the Palestinians.
Former dean of Columbia’s school of international affairs Lisa Anderson left her position in 2008 after 12 years on the job in part because of a campaign by pro-Israel rabble rouser Bari Weiss, then a Columbia student, to hold her accountable for inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the school, says a tweeter identifying himself as Anderson’s son. Weiss is now a free speech advocate at the New York Times.
Israeli leftwing legislator Stav Shaffir’s appeals for the two-state solution at AIPAC sounded a lot like rightwing nationalist appeals. She said a Palestinian majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is a “danger” to Israel, that Trump made all Israelis happy by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, and that young American progressives are mistakenly falling for the “Palestinian narrative.”