The Capitol riot is a liability to Israel’s Trump lovers. “Netanyahu’s complete identification with Trump will return like a boomerang,” says Ahmad Tibi. But Netanyahu hasn’t woken to the new reality and apparently plans to take on Joe Biden from Day 1.
Here is what the Democratic Party’s Israel lobby sees as Israel/Palestine policy under a Biden administration.
An Israel lobby group associated with the Democratic Party allows rightwing Israeli Yossi Klein Halevi to tell US Jews to marshal opposition to Biden on the Iran deal. “Many Israelis still harbor deep resentment toward the American Jewish community for not opposing more vigorously the Iran deal in 2015… Will the Jewish community take an active role in trying to convey to Biden that returning to the 2015 deal even with cosmetic changes would be seen by Israelis as a betrayal?”
When Israeli soldiers killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy for protesting Jewish settlers taking his land, it ought to have been a George Floyd moment for liberal Jews. But Americans for Peace Now chatters about John Lennon not Ali Abu Alia, and dreams about a two-state solution that will never happen. It is time for Zionism to experience a crisis, and Jews must support the only hope for change in Palestine, BDS.
In a shot across Biden’s bow, former Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor warns the incoming president not to restore funding to Palestinian refugee agency and not to reverse Trump’s decisions to leave UNESCO and U.N. Human Rights Council.
The incoming Biden administration has found the one Trump policy it wants to continue — normalization deals with Israel.
Joe Biden will get out from Obama’s shadow by showing he can handle Netanyahu– whom the Democratic establishment hates– and using a foreign policy team loaded with putative Zionists, Biden will let Israel know the party’s over and it’s time to get rid of Netanyahu.
Phil Weiss interviews Susan Abulhawa about her new novel Against the Loveless World. “My exile and the destruction of my family and the destruction of everything, of our whole world, has defined my whole life in so many ways and in very personal ways,” says Abulhawa.
Biden’s nomination to OMB of Neera Tanden, a political operator who fawned over Netanyahu in the weeks after he tried to destroy the Iran deal in 2015, and censored Israel critics after they were smeared as antisemitic in 2012, shows how ensconced the Israel lobby is in the Democratic Party.