Israel lobbyists have opened a new front in their effort to characterize Palestinian solidarity as “antisemitic.” Now that two House members and leading human rights groups have said Israel practices “apartheid,” Israel’s friends want to shut down the discussion. It’s a good battle to have, as even mainstream groups say the shoe fits Israel.
Now Trump is gone. Liberal Zionists can no longer comfortably argue that injustice in Israel/Palestine is mainly caused by Benjamin Netanyahu and Jewish settlers. Nathan Thrall showed calmly and persuasively that the liberal Zionists and the Peace Processors have been running a long con game for decades, insisting that Israel will agree to a 2-state solution only if you don’t criticize and give them whatever they want.
Several recent findings that Israel is an apartheid state reflect a mounting international recognition. But the indifference to them in the U.S. is also in a long tradition: ignoring apartheid pronouncements about Israel in the U.S. To accept the finding would create a crisis in the Democratic Party and require support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and the Israel lobby including its liberal branch insists that BDS is antisemitic.
Joe Biden has bent over backwards to tell the Jewish community he can work with Netanyahu and won’t sanction Israel if it annexes West Bank lands. He cannot afford to alienate the largest source of Democratic campaign funding, from pro-Israel Jews, a source Trump is making a play for.
Rep. Nita Lowey tells an Israel lobby group that she chose to chair a House subcommittee controlling foreign aid over a subcommittee controlling much larger funds for health care and education and child care because she went with her heart. Imagine a Congressperson saying they chose a committee because of love for Russia, what the fallout would be.
Liberal Zionists have set out rules for how to criticize the Israel lobby without offending them. They are trying to obscure a 70 year pattern of Zionists influencing U.S. policy, from the recognition of Israel’s establishment by Truman, who depended on Zionist donors, to Trump trashing the Iran deal in deference to Sheldon Adelson.
Jimmy Carter said he’d ‘commit suicide’ before he abandoned Israel, but American Jewish leaders did not trust him because of his parallel commitment to a “Palestinian homeland” and opposition to Israeli settlements, Stuart Eizenstat writes in a detailed memoir. Carter always underestimated the power of the Israel lobby. He came to believe that it helped cost him a second term, a lesson politicians have heeded ever since.
Jimmy Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” in the title of his new book has generated a lot of controversy—the Washington Post reporting that a Middle East scholar has angrily resigned his affiliation with the Carter Center over Carter’s book….