The Trump peace plan was brought to you by the Jewish community. Over the last 20 years, vigorous opposition to the pro-Israel right inside the US Jewish community has been quashed, and liberal Zionists have enforced that line by refusing to organize as equals with the community Israel is oppressing: Palestinians.
Liberal and centrist American Zionists regard Trump’s plan as an existential threat to “the Jewish democracy.” These Israel supporters say the plan will move Israel toward annexing much of the West Bank, thereby ending any possibility of a two-state solution and leading to a binational state in which Palestinians will demand equal rights.
Benny Gantz support for annexing the Jordan Valley shows that the left is completely feckless in Israeli politics, and the only liberal hope is in Palestinian politicians. American liberal Zionists should accept that the two state solution is dead, and they should abandon the ideology that created apartheid: Zionism.
Yossi Beilin, a leader of the co-called Israeli peace camp, has ideas for how Israel can dodge the recent ICC decision to investigate Israeli war crimes.
The assault on BDS in the US and the rise of Democratic Party organizations to support Israel are evidence of the progress on the Palestine issue in the U.S. in the last decade. At last the matter is politicized. Some Democratic pols openly support Palestinian rights. This is where the struggle really needs to be, in Washington; and we can thank Benjamin Netanyahu and Bari Weiss for the damage they’ve done to their own cause.
Benny Gantz was unable to form a “minority” governing coalition in Israel because members of his own party refused to work with Palestinian legislators. This racism ought to be widely known and denounced in American liberal Zionist circles, where Gantz is a hero. But it’s not. Israeli racism is sanitized once again.
The New York Times gives Paul Wolfowitz a platform to criticize Trump on the withdrawal from Syria, and the fight against ISIS, without saying a word about the roots of ISIS in the destruction that his project of invading Iraq wrought throughout the region. Wolfowitz should be on trial for major war crimes, Helena Cobban writes, not featured in the New York Times.
The Trump administration’s declaration supporting Israeli settlements has elicited some progressive outrage, but not in Israel. Liberal Zionists should take note.
Dan Shapiro and Michael Koplow say the U.S. made a “moral commitment” to Israel as a democracy against countless threats 71 years ago and the U.S. has a strategic interest in preserving Israel as a democracy, or the morality of the relationship will be undermined. The possibility that we should distance ourselves from Israel because it’s persecuting Palestinians is simply off the table for these liberal Zionists. Though progressive Democrats increasingly feel that way.
Bernie Sanders’s call for reciprocity for Palestinians and Israelis in understanding the others’ narrative actually erases the Palestinian experience of Zionism and imposes a Zionist frame on the history of the conflict, Joseph Levine writes. Sanders’s concern for the “just claims” of Israeli Jews turns the moral and historical facts of the case upside down and show the incompatibility of his democratic Socialism and his Zionism.