Evangelical pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the US’ largest pro-Israel organization and the most powerful group in the Christian Zionist movement, has adamantly insisted that Christian Zionism is anti-Semitic.
In the past month much has been written about two incidents of anti-Semitism at University of California campuses. According to the NY Times and the Los Angeles Times, they represent a national trend of revived campus anti-Semitism. Jeff Warner and Dick Platkin think an even cursory look at these two incidents reveals a different story, with some surprising revelations about them and the new role of Israel itself as the cause of a new anti-Semitism.
The Adelson primary is afoot! The race among Republican presidential hopefuls to get money from the leading backer of Republican candidates, Sheldon Adelson. Jeb Bush says Obama is anonymously insulting Israeli leaders. “This is no way to treat an ally.”
Israeli PM Netanyahu’s dismissal of the two-state solution in the last days of the election campaign in Israel is having a huge and beneficial effect on the discussion of the conflict inside the United States. President Obama has taken Netanyahu at his word and says there will be no two-state solution for “several years.” He seems to be doing what many on the US left are doing: preparing Americans to think about what one state looks like.
“We’re not going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem this morning,” WNYC public radio host Brian Lehrer told listeners Monday at the close of his all-Jewish discussion with NY Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren and Time columnist Joe Klein about the Netanyahu victory aftermath. They might have come a little closer if his guests had included a Palestinian instead of two Zionists. Klein called Netanyahu’s race-baiting Election Day speech “beyond tragic. It is shameful and embarrassing.” Unknowingly, he nails it. For liberal Zionists, it’s not the tragedy of generations of Palestinians exiled, slaughtered or marginalized because powerful outsiders claim their land—it’s the shame and embarrassment of those who have to reconcile their support for all of that with their liberal self-image.
Rightwing Jewish supporters of Israel came out for a Ted Cruz fundraiser last night in NY, helping him to raise $500,000 on the day he announced for the presidency. Cruz takes an “unapologetic” stance in support of Israel.
In 1967, American Jews fell in love with Israel and made a solemn promise to protect the country through thick and thin. Nearly fifty years later the same community is reconsidering that vow. What we are seeing is a transfer of power from the Israeli Jewish community to the Diaspora Jewish community that Benjamin Netanyahu failed to anticipate even as he precipitated it.
Jodi Rudoren’s recent piece from Jerusalem titled “Rebukes From White House Risk Buoying Netanyahu” is a full-on assault on President Obama for taking on Netanyahu over his repudiation of the two-state solution and his election day racism, and it is disingenuous from start to finish, beginning with the headline. The aim of the piece is to buoy Netanyahu and submarine Obama. Phil Weiss writes he has never seen anything like this before: the top space of the newspaper turned over to a war- and fear-mongering foreign leader to undermine the US president.
In a review of Israeli S. Yizhar’s novel Khirbet Khizeh in the NYT, Dexter Filkins uses words like herded, roundup, evacuate, left, fled, deport, leave, to describe the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. These words wash over the devastating reality of the Nakba.
Big Jewish donors who support the settlement project in Israel have influenced the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton and major Jewish organizations– surprisingly frank comments by the New York Times and young leaders at J Street’s conference.