A wrenching image of a wounded Gaza protester being carried away by a horse-drawn cart is one of four commemorating the day of the massacre last May in Time Magazine’s list of the top 100 photos of the year.
Trump tore up the Iran deal for Sheldon Adelson and moved the embassy to Jerusalem. But the megadonor’s millions in the midterm elections had none of the magic they did in 2016, as even Republicans in his home state of Nevada were crushed. And the transactional president is expressing his displeasure by taking some key moves against Israel’s interests.
Three young Jews were reportedly kicked off their free trip to Israel sponsored by the pro-Israel Birthright program today because they asked questions about the separation wall Israel has erected on occupied Palestinian territory.
Trump’s decision to pull troops from Syria is “foreign policy malpractice,” says Michele Flournoy, Hillary Clinton’s would-be defense secretary, echoing the D.C. establishment’s horror at Trump’s fulfillment of a campaign promise. Sadly, the realists and leftwingers who have an alternative vision for US foreign policy in the wake of the Iraq disaster and the Syrian civil war have been exiled by the media.
Donald Johnson punctures the melodrama over the latest report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Nothing the Russians did even comes remotely close to the lies and misinformation and deceptive reporting that Americans inflict on each other. The Russians aren’t the ones who persuaded many Americans that global warming is a hoax. The Russians aren’t dividing our society.
Israel had its worst week in a long time in the US discourse. The two-state consensus is now in a complete shambles, with many Americans on both right and left beginning to advocate for one democratic state in Israel and Palestine, which of course would mean the end of what Benjamin Netanyahu calls “the one and only Jewish state.”
Israeli officials asked Trump to intervene on the UN Security Council vote against settlements during the transition in 2016, and Mike Flynn did it, and is now criminally charged in that connection. But the New York Times leaves Israel out when it opines about Flynn’s guilt in the Russian influence scandal.
In 1991 the late George H.W. Bush took on Israel and its lobby over settlement construction, famously saying “I’m one lonely little guy” against 1000 lobbyists. Some say the stance made him a one-term president, and paved the way for his son to out-Israel his father, with disastrous results.
Rashida Tlaib likens the Israeli occupation to the Jim Crow south. Both Jimmy Carter and Condoleezza Rice made the same analogy, to the south of their youths, and both suffered politically for it.
Robert Herbst responds to CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill: “Hill’s provocative call for freedom for Palestinians in the whole of historic Palestine (or Greater Israel), in a single state guaranteeing rights for both peoples, did not mention Jews or Israelis, leaving him vulnerable to the false attack that he was advocating eliminating Jews from the Holy Land.”