Yesterday, Palestinian sources tweeted out a video of Israeli security forces cheering as they blew…
David Halbfinger’s report on a J Street tour for young Jews that spent a day in Palestine offered horrifying glimpses of conditions in occupied Susiya and Hebron that caused two on the tour to question the idea of a Jewish state. The New York Times report represents a giant step forward, and a real sign of things to come. There’s no way to prettify apartheid,
Joe Biden has praised racist Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Golda Meir on many occasions, but don’t expect Kamala Harris to score points off him for it, as she did over his fondness for southern racists. She has had a warm meeting with Netanyahu, refused to criticize Israel’s human rights record, and told the rightwing pro-Israel group AIPAC that she raised money for Israel as a girl and Israel’s story reminds her of the civil rights struggle in the U.S.
Israel and its rightwing supporters wanted an attack on Iran and they did not get it, this week anyway. Though of course the media did not identify the Israel lobby and Netanyahu as cheerleaders for war American people don’t want.
As Trump escalates the confrontation with Iran, we must remember the Vietnam war was based on a lie, so was the Iraq war, Bernie Sanders says, joining a wide array of voices from Rand Paul to Elizabeth Warren to J Street that are trying to stave off a calamity in the Middle East.
Israel’s threat of annexation is a crisis for liberal Zionists because it makes them confront a reality: There is not going to be a two-state solution. Yesterday Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street warned supporters: “Members of the Trump administration are opening the door to a one-state scenario where Palestinians will live as second-class citizens.” But that scenario exists right now, and liberal Zionists have done precious little to oppose it.
When J Street advocates for “Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish homeland,” it is supporting a concept that has been a contradiction-in-terms since Israel’s establishment. Abba Solomon argues that J Street and Bernie Sanders too cannot face the fact that political Zionism means perpetual Jewish domination, or at best custody, of Palestinian lives.
If there’s any consensus from the political chaos in Israel, it’s that the Trump peace plan will get kicked down the road again for months, right into the U.S. election season, so it may disappear entirely. Several Israel observers say the plan is over. They warn that Trump will be even more of a presence in Netanyahu’s next campaign, but the prime minister is badly wounded by his failure to make a government.
Peter Beinart takes another brave step inside the Zionist community by endorsing conditions on US aid supporting Israeli atrocities, but he continues to count on US Jewish community to change US policy when the track record is miserable. Progressives have more diverse coalitions, and respect the fact that BDS originates from members of the oppressed group.
As a US carrier steams toward Iran, Trump risks another disastrous neoconservative war in the Middle East. The pundits and pols who supported the Iraq war, from Joe Biden to Jeffrey Goldberg to Roger Cohen, still have not accounted for that tragic error; and they could clear their account nobly today by coming out against any war with Iran based on sad experience.