The Israel Policy Forum, an Israel lobby group, hosted Israeli reserve Colonel Michael Milshtein, a former expert on Palestinians in Israeli Military Intelligence, to spout anti-Palestinian comments.

The State Department swiftly changed the subject from Israel’s storming of Muslim holy sites to rocket attacks on Israel. “We recognize that Israel has the legitimate right to defend itself against all forms of aggression.”

“In Israeli terms, very, very soft gloves were used on the protesters,” Israeli commenter Neri Zilber says. That’s because the protesters look like the security forces — unlike Palestinians.

Brace yourself — the next Israeli government will be even more rightwing. That’s because the high tech sector in Tel Aviv, which leads the current protest movement, is a small minority of Jewish Israel.

Israeli PM Yair Lapid’s unprovoked attack on Gaza that killed 17 children was part of a “good debut” for him with Israeli voters in his race against Netanyahu, says Tal Shalev of Walla News. Lapid faces the “hatred” of rightwing media, who echo Netanyahu’s racist talking point, Lapid can only form the next government with Palestinian parties. Lapid plays along by calling the Palestinian parties “extremist”.

Anti-Palestinian racism remains the norm in the Israel lobby and in Washington too. The Israel Policy Forum aired an hour-long assessment of Israel’s attacks on Gaza this month and repeatedly praised the operation for leaving no Israelis dead, and never mentioned the scores of Palestinian civilians killed and injured. In his one indirect reference to the Palestinian deaths, Amos Harel of Haaretz said that Israel had demonstrated that it was “very good” at avoiding killing Palestinian civilians.

Mainstream voices say the Trump-Biden policy of normalizing relations between Israel and Arab monarchies so as to crush Palestinian hopes is working. “If you talk to the UAE leaders or Saudi Arabia leaders or even Egyptian leaders, they don’t want to hear now about the Palestinian issue, they don’t want to stick their fingers into this mess. Let Israel deal with it,” says Ehud Yaari an advocate for Israel at the Washington Institute.

Even as several U.S. senators press Joe Biden to address Israel’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May on his trip to Israel, experts at an Israel lobby organization say the matter is a “domestic issue” in the United States and not an issue for Israel. While Neri Zilber, an Israeli journalist, laments that Palestinians will hold up photos of Abu Akleh in demonstrations– “not a terribly helpful visual.”

More than 2000 Israeli Jews in the settler movement prayed on the Haram al-Sharif in recent weeks in violation of international agreements, and the government turned a blind eye. Because it is beholden to the right wing. And Labor and Meretz members of the coalition will stomach it all because they are finally in power and when Netanyahu disappears, they will be “in the desert again for God knows how long,” Michael Koplow says.

American media and politicians underplay how rightwing Israel is in order to salute it as a robust democracy. The reality is that Israeli politicians are under “brutal” pressure from the right– and legislator Idit Silman stepped down from the coalition government this month because she was getting physically attacked and threatened on the street for her participation in a government that wasn’t vocal enough in its support for “Judea and Samaria,” biblical terms for the West Bank.