The Democratic establishment and Israel lobby are seeking to destroy the political career of Rep. Jamaal Bowman because he dared to criticize the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. And many liberals are joining right in.
Israel suffered a P.R. disaster in the last Gaza attack: western media for once openly questioned the reasoning and morality behind yet another murderous onslaught on an imprisoned population, the fifth in the last 12 years. Even the NYT runs an op-ed saying that “legitimate resistance” to violence is a Palestinian right. Pro-Israel voices in the media are pushing back by saying sharp criticism of Israel is antisemitism.
Liberals want leftwing votes, but they dismiss leftwing goals. Michelle Goldberg says Democrats must “court” nihilistic leftists, but what does courtship mean? Supporting a warmonger, Hillary Clinton, because she’s a foreign policy genius. And the same on health care and the climate crisis: we are supposed to settle for policies that are at best inadequate and at worst catastrophic. Who are the nihilists here?
The media can’t talk about Sheldon Adelson when discussing the US confrontation with Iran over nukes, though he’s only Trump’s biggest donor, and John Bolton’s protector, and he was at White House officials’ side when they took part in a settlers’ bash in occupied Jerusalem.
Longtime pro-Israel journalist Ira Stoll follows up a lot of “whispered speculation” to unearth NYT editorial page editor James Bennet’s religious background, as “crucial context” for understanding the paper’s bias on Israel. It turns out that Bennet’s Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust was married in a church, and he was too. And BTW, she likens Israelis to Nazis.
“Israel has a right to exist” is a rationalization of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. “Israel has a right to defend itself” is a rationalization of slaughtering Palestinians. The mainstream is filled with dehumanizing anti-Palestinian tropes, and it has never occurred to any of the mainstream liberal critics of Ilhan Omar to write about them. They need to get out of their bubble and see how America looks from the Middle East.
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.”